My Favorite Books: Non-Fiction

Below, I have written about some of my favorite non-fiction books that I read over the last couple of months. Enjoy :)

🙉 Man’s search for meaning:

Man’s search for meaning is a personal narrative of Dr. Viktor Frankl. He had a close relationship with suffering as he was a prisoner at the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. The main theme of this book is choice. Dr. Frankl believed that everything could be taken from a person, but one thing: the ability to choose your attitude at any given moment.

“Between the stimulus and response, there is a space. And in that space lies our freedom and power to choose our responses. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

—Viktor Frankl

This is the true definition of Freedom. We are extremely quick to resort to negative emotions like anger. Social media algorithms are designed to optimize maximum involvement and humans love to get involved when we are angry, just spend 5 minutes on the internet and you'll know. Succumbing to our emotions is not freedom, isn’t it actually the opposite? Dr. Frankl thought that true freedom is to choose what we are willing to suffer for.

There is suffering in life either way, so why not suffer for something that brings you fulfillment? Suffering without a cause is a synonym for hell. We search for meaning in the process of finding something that we will suffer for. Dr. Frankl presents three ways to find meaning; 1) By accomplishment, 2) By loving someone fully, and 3) By suffering for a just cause.

💼 Deep Work:

Deep Work is defined as work that is done with complete attention and no distractions. It is challenging and engaging, but hard to duplicate. Coding a tough concept is an example of deep work. Shallow Work is the work that we can do while distracted and it is easy to replicate. Sending emails, and buying groceries are examples of shallow work.

Deep work has quickly become rare in the world today. Due to that reason, it is even more valuable which makes it an extremely rewarding skill to master. Our lives are full of distractions and most of our work turns out to be shallow, but thinking about problems long and hard is extremely fulfilling. In this book, Dr. Cal Newport makes an argument about why you should schedule deep work in your day.

He also shares his experiences of dealing with the energy drains in our lives. Energy drains are things that we give our attention to without a healthy reward. An example could be social media. It is designed to hack our brain’s reward systems, so we find ourselves lost in endless scrolling not getting anything done. We can manage these energy drains so most of our brain's resources go towards doing stuff that is meaningful to us.

🌌 Cosmos:

“Until we find more intelligent beings elsewhere, we ourselves are the most spectacular of all the transformations-the remote descendants of the Big Bang, dedicated to understanding and further transforming the cosmos from which we spring.”

—Carl Sagan.

This quote sums up what Dr. Sagan’s classic entails. It is a timeless journey through the history and the current frontiers of science. Carl Sagan had a beautiful understanding of when and where scientific thought began. The origin of scientific thinking goes all the way back to ancient Ionia, where diverse ideas were born. One of the most extensive assimilations of ancient thought resided in The Great Library of Alexandria in Egypt. Unfortunately, the library was burned down and God knows how much knowledge was lost. Imagine if Newton came 1000 years earlier, we might have been out in the stars by now.

Dr. Sagan was an astronomer who had immense love for this subject. He shared how astronomy is as old as civilization itself. As the Earth moves around the sun, we look at a different night sky (region of space). The positions of constellations change with seasons. This was a way of timekeeping for early humans. By looking at the sky we could tell that winter is coming and we should gather food and rest, or spring is here so we should go out and hunt. Astronomy taught us when to sow and reap our crops. Now, thousands of years later we are making efforts to be among the stars. Humanity is beautiful.