September monthly round-up


Hope you all had a nice September. It's hard to believe we're three-quarters through the year, but I'm certainly ready for the holiday season to start soon. This month was a pretty good one, with two book summaries and four blog posts (three related to the books I summarised):

Book summaries

Blog posts

  • Why you have so many unnecessary or ineffective meetings. Death by Meeting got me thinking about some of the many reasons why meetings are so often ineffective (only a few of which were covered in the book).
  • Why I write criticisms of books. I kind of fell into writing criticism posts about many of the books I read because I think I'm naturally rather critical. Here I offer up an explanation of my thought process, so that hopefully my posts aren't taken the wrong way.
  • Why should you want to be a satisficer?. In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz explains that satisficing, as opposed to maximising, is correlated with stuff like happiness, optimism, self-esteem and life satisfaction. The implication is that satisficing causes all that good stuff. I question that assumption.
  • Can maximisers become satisficers? If so, how? Even if you want to be a satisficer, it's easier said than done. This post considers whether it's even possible to change our maximising/satisficing tendencies and explores how you might go about it.

October will likely be a quieter one, as I'll be travelling. But I have a summary for Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant almost done, which you can expect to see next week.

Until next time,

To Summarise

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