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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
- Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable by Patrick Lencioni
- The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less by Barry Schwartz
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
ToSummarise.com
I summarise non-fiction books with more detail and critical analysis than you'll find elsewhere. Join my newsletter to get new summaries delivered straight to your inbox!
Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen is a true classic in productivity circles. For that reason, I'd put off reading it for ages, figuring I would've already heard its best ideas through other authors who've been influenced by it. To my pleasant surprise, I still found it useful to read about Allen's original system and picked up a few "good tricks" along the way! As usual, the key takeaways are below, and you can find the full summary by clicking the link...
It's been a while since my last post as I've been taking some time off. But I'm back now with a new summary for Scarcity: The True Cost of Not Having Enough by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir. As usual, the key takeaways are below, and you can find the full summary by clicking the link above. KEY TAKEAWAYS What is scarcity? Scarcity is when we have less than we feel we need. While the book mainly discusses money and time scarcity, it can also apply to things like counting calories or...
I've just published a summary for Tim Marshall's Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps that Explain Everything About the World. It's a useful primer on geopolitics and made me examine maps far more closely than I've ever done before! As usual, the key takeaways are below, and you can find the full summary by clicking the link above. KEY TAKEAWAYS Geography explains many differences between countries and significantly affects geopolitics. Countries’ borders often depend on natural geographical...