I’ve been reading ...

I got back from holiday. This is my first post of this new season. I want to start writing about reading books. Six years ago, I opened this blog where I write weekly and I think writing is important to organize ideas and improve writing skills. However, today, I want to write about reading books. I think it’s the best for learning new techniques, concepts, ideas. It’s the best way to get knowledge from others. Therefore, I’m going to tell you what books I’ve been reading during this summer. I’m sorry, none of them are tech books.

At the beginning of the summer, I read “Aprendiendo de los mejores” by Francisco Alcaide. It’s a book where Francisco has written sentences and comments from important people such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates or Amancio Ortega, among others. We can read their lifestyles and their thoughts to discover that the patience, persistence and discipline have been their abilities to be successful. I think, this is an excellent book for getting motivation because you can easily realise that success is built step by step and happiness is a feeling that it should be throughout the process.

I’ve also read “Thinking, fast and slow” by Daniel Kahneman this summer. This is a book to understand how the mind works. He explains that human beings have two types of minds. A mind which is fast, intuitive, and emotional. It is called system 1. This system helps us to make decisions faster based in intuition which, sometimes, could be helpful and beneficial but it could also be harmful because there are some things which should be thought slowly. We use the system 1 while we are walking, driving the car or even speaking. The system 1 is used for routine activities. On the other hand, we also have a mind which is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. It is called system 2. This system helps us to make logical decisions based in arguments which is useful often to make the right decision. However, this system is slower because it requests lots of mind efforts and human beings don’t like to make efforts by nature thus we prefer to use system 1 instead of system 2 most of the time. I’m using system 2 right now to write in English language and it’s also used for maths calculations or learning new skills.

The last book that I hope to finish this week is “Factfulness” by Hans Rosling. This is a book where we can see the progress of the world. We can see most countries are getting better. Most people around the world live better than before. Hans Rosling show lots of data sets from the United Nations (UN) where we can see that, although there are still countries which live in poverty, most countries are making progress in health, democracy and human rights.

These are the books I’ve been reading for this summer. I recommend you these books. The first one to be motivated. The second one to understand how the mind works when we make decisions. The last one to know that things are better than we think.

I really love reading. Quietly. Reading in my room. Nobody disturbs me. I think it’s the best way to get knowledge from others. I hope keep reading for a long time.

Regards my friends. I hope these books are interesting for you. Keep reading.