2020'de okuduğum kitaplar

Her ay en az bir - iki güzel kitap okumaya çalışıyorum. 2020'de 14 kitabı bitirmişim, 7 kitapsa yarım kalmış. Aşağıda bu kitapları ve içlerinde beni etkileyen kısımları paylaştım. Hepsi de tavsiye edeceğim, gerçekten güzel kitaplardı:

1. Siyah Kuğu – Nassim Nicholas Taleb

İnsan ırkının bilgi konusundaki kibrinin ağırlığını iliklerimde hissediyordum.

Hayalinizde yeryüzünden bir milyar kat büyük bir gezegenin yanında bir toz zerresi canlandırın. Toz zerresi dünyaya gelme olasılığınızı, devasa gezegen ise gelmeme olasılığınızı simgeler. Bu yüzden ufak tefek meseleler için endişelenmeyi bırakın. Kendisine hediye edilen şatonun banyosunda küf var diye tasalanan nankör gibi olmayın. Hediyede kusur aramayı bırakın. Bir Siyah Kuğu olduğunuzu unutmayın.

2. The Zero Marginal Cost Society - Jeremy Rifkin

Defterime bu kitaptan bir söz yazmamışım. Ama Jeremy Rifkin'in bu videosu, aslında kitaptaki epey düşünceyi açıklıyor ve bana ilham veriyor.

3. Joy on Demand – Chade-Meng Tan

At every step of your growth, expect failure. Lots of failure. When you are learning to juggle three balls, you expect to drop the balls all the time until you keep three balls in the air. Once you juggle three balls and you want to learn to juggle four, what happens? Failure, failure, failure...
When you are growing, it often feels like you are failing all the time, but I encourage you to look back at your journey every now and then to see how far you have come.

4. Steve Jobs - Walter Isaacson

…He attributed his ability to focus and his love of simplicity to his Zen training. It honed his appreciation for intuition, showed him how to filter out anything that was distracting or unnecessary, and nurtured in him an aesthetic based on minimalism.

5. Why Nations Fail – Daron Acemoğlu & James Robinson

You can’t engineer prosperity… Attempting to engineer prosperity without confronting the root cause of the problems – extractive institutions and the politics that keeps them in place – is unlikely to bear fruit.

6. Linchpin – Seth Godin

The reason the resistance persists in slowing you down and prevents you from putting your heart and soul and art into your work is simple: you might fail… You become a winner because you are good at loving.

7. The Prosperity Paradox – Clayton Christensen

I have always felt that the creation of a job is far more important for a society than the simple calculation of economic value. Jobs give people dignity and build self-esteem. Jobs enable people to provide for themselves and their families.

8. Honest Signals – Alex Pentland

For simple tasks, people acting consciously make better decisions, but for more complex problems, acting on unconscious instinct was far more effective… For complex problems, the best decision making strategy is to focus on information discovery and then let your unconscious mind “recognize” the best alternative.

9. Rework – Jason Fried

The more massive an object, the more energy required to change its direction. It’s as true in the business world as it is in the physical world.
Mass in increased by…
Long term contracts, excess staff, permanent decisions, meetings, thick process, inventory, hardware, software, tech lock-ins, long term roadmaps, office politics.
Avoid these things whenever you can.

10. The Bookseller of Kabul - Åsne Seierstad

11. Man on Wire – Philippe Petit

I know it’s impossible. But I know I’ll do it.

12. Great by Choice - Jim Collins

Seven days a week, usually until 8 or 9 o-clock at night… Then he’d settle down before bed to make progress on reading thousands of books scattered aroud his home…

Of all the luck we get, people luck – the luck of finding the right mentor, partner, teammate, leader, friend – is one of the most important.

13. Trillion Dollar Coach – Eric Schmidt

Loyalty and commitment are easy when you are winning and much harder when you are losing… So, when you are losing, recommit to the cause. Lead.

14. Masumlar – Burhan Sönmez

İnsan bir şeyin içindeyken tümünü kavrayamaz. Bütünü görmek için dışına çıkmak gerek.

Yarım kalanlar:

1. Good to Great – Jim Collins

No company can grow revenues consistently faster than its ability to get enough of the right people to implement that growth and still become a great company. If your growth rate in revenues consistently outpace your growth rate in people, you simply will not – indeed cannot – build a great company.

2. The Dip – Seth Godin

Is it possible that you are just not good enough? That you (or your team) just don’t have enough talent to be the best in the world? Sure it’s possible. In fact, if your chosen area is the cello, or speed skating, then I might even say it’s probable. But in just about every relevant area I can think of, no, it is not likely. You are good enough. The question is, will you take the shortcut you need to get really good at this?

3. Lila: An Inquiry into Morals – Robert Pirsig

Cost-free morals. Full of great ways for others to improve without any expense to themselves. There’s an ego in there, too. They use morals to make someone else look inferior and that way look better themselves. It doesn’t matter what the moral code is – religious morals, political morals, racist morals, capitalist morals, feminist morals, hippie morals – they’re all the same. The moral codes change but the meanness and the egotism stay the same.

4. Startup Nation – Dan Senor & Saul Singer

International migration researchers are increasingly noting a phenomenon they call “brain calculation”, whereby talented people leave, settle down abroad, and then return to their home countries, and yet are not fully “lost” to either place. As Richard Devane writes… “China, India, and Isreal enjoyed investment and technology booms over the past decade, and these booms are linked… by expatriate leadership in all three countries.”

5. Huzur – Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar

Mümtaz hiçbir şey düşünmemeye karar vermiş insanların haliyle hızlı hızlı yürüyordu.

6. Essentialism – Greg McKeown

If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will.

7. The Book of Disquiet – Fernando Pessoa

I’m like a being from another existence who passes, endlessly curious, through this existence to which I am in every way alien. A sheet of glass stands between it and me. I always try to keep that glass as clean as possible so that I can examine this other existence without smudges or smears distorting my view; but I choose to keep that glass between us.