THIS SELF-HELP BOOK SUPERSEDES ALL OTHER SUCH BOOKS.
Dear reader, you are undoubtedly familiar with the genre, particularly if you have spent any time looking for something to read at the airport. Multi-tasking. Better use of your productivity tools. Getting Things Done. Mark Manson's The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living A Good Life argues that implementing the traditional suggestions in the traditional self-help books lead straight into a feedback loop from Hell: now that I've gotten a little better at this, what can I do to get better still at it, and what else might I improve? But if you understand the first thing about constrained optimization, you recognize that sooner or later those constraints bind. Congratulations: you've grasped that you only have so many f*cks to give. Thus: what are the most productive things to spend those f*cks on.
Infer what you wish, dear reader, about this being Book Review No. 3 for the year, coming only eight months after the second. I read through it, as is my custom before posting any of these reviews, but made no marginal notes, flagged no pages to refer to in the flyleaf. Again, make of that what you will. Perhaps it is because my prior schooling as an economist leads me to be receptive to the central messages, that is, that you're optimizing under constraint (finite resources, i.e. f*cks to give) and you get to choose your criterion function, "some values and metrics are better than others" as they lead either to "good problems that are easily solved" whilst others "lead to bad problems," page 81. Choose carefully.
(Cross-posted to Cold Spring Shops.)
Infer what you wish, dear reader, about this being Book Review No. 3 for the year, coming only eight months after the second. I read through it, as is my custom before posting any of these reviews, but made no marginal notes, flagged no pages to refer to in the flyleaf. Again, make of that what you will. Perhaps it is because my prior schooling as an economist leads me to be receptive to the central messages, that is, that you're optimizing under constraint (finite resources, i.e. f*cks to give) and you get to choose your criterion function, "some values and metrics are better than others" as they lead either to "good problems that are easily solved" whilst others "lead to bad problems," page 81. Choose carefully.
(Cross-posted to Cold Spring Shops.)