Three books that changed the way I think

1 — Mindset by Carol Dweck

Do you think artists are born and not made? If your answer is yes, then you might have a “fixed mindset”. People with fixed mindset believe that we are born with certain talents and natural gifts. We are either smart, average or dumb — and stays that way for life. They also think of the brain as a mystery with fixed attributes. This book describes a new research in psychology that shows that brain is more like a muscle. It changes and gets stronger when you use it hard. And more importantly, if you put enough efforts, you can train your brain to develop intelligence and talents that you initially thought “natural”. A must read for anyone who wants to have a mindset of growth and learning.

2 — Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

The first part is a deep and powerful memoir of survival of the Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl in Nazi death camps during Holocaust. The second part in the book is an introduction to his theory called Logotherapy. Logotherapy is a study of the pursuit of meaning for one’s life even during the time of suffering. My favorite quote from the book:

“The one thing you can’t take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of one’s freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance.”

3 — So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport

Most people who believe in popular advice like “Follow your passion” or “do what you love” are clueless about what their true passion is. Cal Newport questions these popular beliefs in his book by showing that it’s Skills which makes you important and unique that eventually make you passionate.

A must-read for anyone who hasn’t found life’s true calling yet. My favorite quote from the book:

“If life-transforming missions could be found with just a little navel-gazing and an optimistic attitude, changing the world would be commonplace. But it’s not commonplace; it’s instead quite rare. This rareness, we now understand, is because these breakthroughs require that you first get to the cutting edge, and this is hard — the type of hardness that most of us try to avoid in our working lives.”