Max Ogles
Building a new product. I tweet about product psychology, tech, and marketing. Published in @Entrepreneur, @TechCrunch, etc. Oxford MBA.
10+ Book Recommendations by Max Ogles
Talking to Strangers
Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Revisionist History and #1 bestselling author of The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, David and Goliath, and What the Dog Saw, offers a powerful examination of our interactions with strangers---and why they often go wrong. How did Fidel Castro fool the CIA for a generation? Why did Neville Chamberlain think he could trust Adolf Hitler? Why are campus sexual assaults on the rise? Do television sitcoms teach us something about the way we relate to each other that isn't true? Talking to Strangers is a classically Gladwellian intellectual adventure, a challenging and controversial excursion through history, psychology, and scandals taken straight from the news. He revisits the deceptions of Bernie Madoff, the trial of Amanda Knox, the suicide of Sylvia Plath, the Jerry Sandusky pedophilia scandal at Penn State University, and the death of Sandra Bland---throwing our understanding of these and other stories into doubt. Something is very wrong, Gladwell argues, with the tools and strategies we use to make sense of people we don't know. And because we don't know how to talk to strangers, we are inviting conflict and misunderstanding in ways that have a profound effect on our lives and our world. In his first book since his #1 bestseller, David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell has written a gripping guidebook for troubled times.White Fragility
Robin DiAngelo
Explores counterproductive reactions white people have when discussing racism that serve to protect their positions and maintain racial inequality.Anything You Want
Derek Sivers
Best known for creating CD Baby, the most popular music site for independent artists, founder Derek Sivers chronicles his "accidental" success and failures into this concise and inspiring book on how to create a multimillion-dollar company by following your passion. Sivers details his journey and the lessons learned along the way of creating and building a business close to his heart. In 1997, Sivers was a musician who taught himself to code a Buy Now button onto his band's website. Shortly thereafter he began selling his friends' CDs on his website. As CD Baby grew, Sivers faced numerous obstacles on his way to success. Within six years he had been publicly criticized by Steve Jobs and had to pay his father $3.3 million to buy back 90 percent of his company, but he had also built a company of more than 50 employees and had profited $10 million. Anything You Want is must reading for every person who is an entrepreneur, wants to be one, wants to understand one, or cares even a little about what it means to be human.When Breath Becomes Air
Paul Kalanithi
A cloth bag containing eight copies of the title.Measure What Matters
John Doerr
Lost Connections
Johann Hari
The New York Times bestseller from the author of Chasing the Scream, offering a radical new way of thinking about depression and anxiety. There was a mystery haunting award-winning investigative journalist Johann Hari. He was thirty-nine years old, and almost every year he had been alive, depression and anxiety had increased in Britain and across the Western world. Why? He had a very personal reason to ask this question. When he was a teenager, he had gone to his doctor and explained that he felt like pain was leaking out of him, and he couldn't control it or understand it. Some of the solutions his doctor offered had given him some relief-but he remained in deep pain. So, as an adult, he went on a forty-thousand-mile journey across the world to interview the leading experts about what causes depression and anxiety, and what solves them. He learned there is scientific evidence for nine different causes of depression and anxiety-and that this knowledge leads to a very different set of solutions: ones that offer real hope.Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman
A psychologist draws on years of research to introduce his "machinery of the mind" model on human decision making to reveal the faults and capabilities of intuitive versus logical thinking.The Undoing Project
Michael Lewis
Forty years ago, Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky wrote a series of breathtakingly original studies undoing our assumptions about the decision-making process. Their papers showed the ways in which the human mind erred, systematically, when forced to make judgments in uncertain situations. Their work created the field of behavioral economics, revolutionized Big Data studies, advanced evidence-based medicine, led to a new approach to government regulation, and made much of Michael Lewis's own work possible. Kahneman and Tversky are more responsible than anybody for the powerful trend to mistrust human intuition and defer to algorithms. The Undoing Project is about a compelling collaboration between two men who have the dimensions of great literary figures. They became heroes in the university and on the battlefield--both had important careers in the Israeli military--and their research was deeply linked to their extraordinary life experiences. Amos Tversky was a brilliant, self-confident warrior and extrovert, the center of rapt attention in any room; Kahneman, a fugitive from the Nazis in his childhood, was an introvert whose questing self-doubt was the seedbed of his ideas. They became one of the greatest partnerships in the history of science, working together so closely that they couldn't remember whose brain originated which ideas, or who should claim credit. They flipped a coin to decide the lead authorship on the first paper they wrote, and simply alternated thereafter. This story about the workings of the human mind is explored through the personalities of two fascinating individuals so fundamentally different from each other that they seem unlikely friends or colleagues. In the process they may well have changed, for good, mankind's view of its own mind.Boost
Max Ogles
"One of the most accessible and useful books about habits that I have read." - Amazon Reviewer In Boost, a tech entrepreneur teaches you how to create good habits using psychology and technology. You'll read dozens of fascinating stories, from the 13-year-old girl who landed a clothing line at Nordstrom to the little-known origins of the 20th century's most famous Paul McCartney melody. Along the way, take a look at compelling psychological research to learn why charitable people live longer, why you're likely to fail when your willpower is strongest, and much more. The book is simple, direct, and contains valuable insights about creating habits. Each section ends with actionable tasks you can do to apply the principles from the book. Become familiar with the latest habit-forming technology and the psychological principles behind it, on your way to achieving your own good habits.David and Goliath
Malcolm Gladwell
Never Eat Alone
Keith Ferrazzi
An updated and expanded edition of the runaway bestseller Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi Proven advice on networking for success: over 400,000 copies sold. As Keith Ferrazzi discovered early in life, what distinguishes highly successful people from everyone else is the way they use the power of relationships - so that everyone wins. His form of connecting to the world around him is based on generosity and he distinguishes genuine relationship-building from the crude, desperate glad-handling usually associated with 'networking'. In Never Eat Alone, Ferrazzi lays out the specific steps - and inner mindset - he uses to reach out to connect with the thousands of colleagues, friends, and associates on his Rolodex, people he has helped and who have helped him. He then distills his system of reaching out to people into practical, proven principles. Keith Ferrazzi is founder and CEO of Ferrazzi Greenlight, a marketing and sales consulting company. He is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Who's Got Your Back and has been a contributor to Inc., the Wall Street Journal, and Harvard Business Review. Previously, he was CMO of Deloitte Consulting and at Starwood Hotels & Resorts, and CEO of YaYa media. He lives in Los Angeles and New York.