11 books that completely changed my life

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🏷️ Categories: Literature, Behavior, Attention, Zettelkasten, Minimalism.

Congratulations!

If you haven’t read any of the books I’m going to mention to you today, you’re in luck, because I would pay all my money to be able to experience again the revelation it was to read their pages for the first time. Reviewing my Zettelkasten a few days ago, I asked myself… What books have been the most revealing of all the ones I’ve read?

Here’s the answer.

This is the list of the 11 books that completely reconfigured my mind.

They changed the way I think, decide, act, and relate to the world. The revelations they provoked in me were decisive, there was no going back. When you know it, you can’t stop knowing it. When you see it, you can’t stop seeing it. It is the fortune (or misfortune) of wisdom.

They are not ordered by how good they are.

They are ordered by the role they played in building who I am now.

Let’s get to the books already…

This book has nothing special about it.

This book changed my life like no other.

How can both statements be true?

If you ask me today what The Sand Castle is about, I’d have to think about it, but if you ask me what it made me feel when I closed it, I can tell you without hesitation: for the first time, the idea of “someday I want to write” stopped being a fantasy and became a decision with a date: “Today.”

This is something that perhaps no one considers when looking for books to read.

The modern obsession is to read the books everyone recommends because they only evaluate the quality of their content. In reality, a book of “mediocre” quality that you see secondhand in a dusty shop can be the book of your life.

This happened to me with The Sand Castle.

I had spent months with the noise in my mind. I wanted to be a writer. Seicho Matsumoto made me enjoy his book, but what it did most in me was make me realize that postponing a goal was the cruelest way of betraying myself. If he had been able to write that work and libraries are full of books, why couldn’t I be capable? Am I not up to it? I doubt it.

That day I decided it: I’m going to be a writer, and I’m going to do whatever it takes to achieve it.

I didn’t yet know what “whatever it takes” meant.

I would learn that with the next ten books on the list…

A book that fell into my hands by absolute coincidence, as usually happens to me.

On an internet page about books I clicked the cursed button: “Random.”

The Forest Unseen — David G. Haskell

That’s how the message appeared on screen. I now had a mission: to read it.

David Haskell sits for a year in front of the same square meter of forest and observes. Just that. The end. In that patient observation, something is revealed that changed my mind: the labels we use to separate the world — “biology,” “physics,” “psychology,” “economics” — are not real boundaries. They are only human tools, maps of convenience that we trace over a territory that in reality doesn’t have those lines.

In that square meter of forest, chemistry, physics, biology, economics, history and much more happen simultaneously, all mixed together. Fungi, beetles, and deer don’t care about your university departments of “Chemistry,” “Economics,” or “Biology.” When analyzing these animals, you can see everything related at once.

• A mushroom speaks to us of gastronomy when you cook it.

• A mushroom speaks to us of chemistry when talking about its nutrition.

• A mushroom speaks to us of economics when you put it in a supermarket.

• A mushroom speaks to us of geography when we analyze the terrain.

I could go on infinitely with the mushroom example. Now imagine it for every element of the forest, or of the world. And then imagine the combinations between the different elements. Knowledge is an ecosystem, where everything relates. From there was born the idea of treating my learning as a mental garden.

This book talks to you about nature and about what learning really means.

How to Take Smart Notes explains the Zettelkasten method.

The linked-notes system that sociologist Niklas Luhmann used to produce, on his own, more than seventy books and hundreds of academic articles throughout his life. This is where Haskell’s book connected without me expecting it.

• In The Forest Unseen I learned that labels are human tools of convenience. Knowledge is mixed and connected.

• Ahrens gave me the practical tool to live that idea every day.

Traditional education trains you to see knowledge by folders: here go my psychology notes, here the history ones, here the marketing ones. Each folder closed off. The Zettelkasten completely inverts that logic. Every note you take is not archived by topic. It is linked with other notes by relationship of ideas, regardless of what discipline each one comes from. A note about Skinner’s behavioral reinforcement can end up connected to a note about marketing.

The system makes you creative and makes you think globally, the way life works.

I started building my own mental garden this way. Writing stopped being the anguished moment in front of the blank page; the strength of the connections that already existed in the zettelkasten allows me to write naturally.

This book sent my learning through the roof.

With the map of wisdom more or less clear, I fell into the hole of psychology.

Four books made me say to myself: I need to know more.

The beginning of everything. The obsession started here.

The Social Animal is a classic of psychology that teaches you that human beings don’t make decisions out of nowhere. Our beliefs, prejudices, choices, and environment affect us a lot, perhaps too much. I closed it with the feeling of: I can research these topics for years and never get bored.

And here I am, years later, still getting inspired and researching more about it.

As advice: Pay attention to the moments when a topic grabs you, that disproportionate fascination is what you should follow, looking for increasingly specialized books about those aspects that were revealing.

That’s how I fell into the next book…

This book was the final fall into the obsession. My first articles are about it.

Skinner is uncomfortable. It’s uncomfortable because it takes away the pretty story you tell yourself about why you do what you do. It explains to you, obviously, that your behavior is pure consequences of reinforcements and punishments. You’re not as far from other animals, you stop telling yourself that movie of “that’s just how I am” and start telling yourself: what is reinforcing this? What pattern keeps me in these habits I detest?

This book made me rethink my life. Nothing more to say.

At this point, I already noticed that science and society go down different paths…

Much of what popular culture takes for granted about the human mind had already been disproven by science decades ago, and nobody had bothered to tell the street. People keep living in the “psychology” of 60 years ago.

Nick Chater tears down, one by one, a bunch of ideas we keep repeating as if they were truths: that we have a hidden “depth” underneath the surface, a hidden self full of hidden motivations waiting to be discovered through therapy or introspection… Chater does a review of all current psychology to make clear to you what is actually known today about the mind.

This book did me a favor that I’m grateful for every time I see a viral “psychology” video on social media…

The Mind Is Flat is the vaccine against that type of unfounded thinking.

My obsession with understanding how we reason and behave was already critical.

Ariely taught me in which predictable directions we go wrong, because this is the most curious part of all. That you are not special, nor am I. The general tendency tends to be the same and this book is the catalog of concrete and repeatable errors we make when deciding: the anchor effect, loss aversion, the way the price “free” makes us make absurd decisions, the way the options presented to us shape what we believe we want, and so on…

After reading it, you can anticipate and be skeptical about what your mind tells you.

I no longer take so seriously what my mind tells me.

After this book, I began to understand why people sometimes do absurd acts, make senseless decisions, and why, from the inside, it always seems to us the obvious decision or action. When you see it, you can’t stop seeing it…

You’ve been warned.

With the individual mind more or less understood, it’s time to raise the scale.

What happens when you put thousands, millions of those imperfect and predictably irrational minds into the same system…?

Yes, I like science fiction. Isaac Asimov is my favorite author.

There is an idea in Foundation that hasn’t left my head since I read it: psychohistory, the fictional discipline Asimov invents, in which the behavior of a large enough human mass can be predicted mathematically, even though each individual within that mass is completely unpredictable.

That is, we cannot know your individual destiny, but we can know that of your entire society.

It’s a fictional idea, but not so far-fetched… You, as an individual, can be a walking chaos, we already saw with Ariely that you are, but when you add yourself to millions of people just as chaotic, patterns begin to emerge. This has a name in real science: sociology.

This book was my gateway to thinking about sociology, about economics, about history — everything is, as a group, systems within which we live. Learning to think in systems changes everything that happens around you: why certain cultural trends appear and disappear, why platforms reward certain behaviors and punish others, why “the market” does what it does even though no individual participant is planning it that way.

It lets you start seeing the world from a bird’s-eye view.

And as you see, once again, what mattered was what it provoked in me, not so much the book itself.

The last 3 books are curious, because two of them have a historical relationship, the last one seems not to fit at all, but all 3 led me to the same conclusion.

There is a story within this book that I haven’t been able to forget.

It’s a book similar to Confucius’s Analects and the story in question is that of Yu Gong, the “foolish old man” who decides to move a mountain blocking his way, carrying it stone by stone, without modern tools, without haste, knowing that perhaps neither he nor his children will see the work finished and it will take centuries.

Everyone laughs at him, but there is a key fact demonstrated by science.

This fact changed the whole story. After researching, I arrived at the anterior mid-cingulate cortex (aMCC), the brain structure that current neuroscience points to as the real engine of willpower. What’s fascinating is this: this structure activates and grows when we do difficult tasks that generate mental resistance, and it shrinks, atrophies, when we stop challenging ourselves.

• When you go to train and don’t feel like it, you’re developing this area.

• When you procrastinate lying on the couch, defeated by laziness, you atrophy it.

This completely changes the relationship you have with discipline. Since I understood this, I stopped negotiating with myself. There’s no longer room for “I don’t feel like it today,” because I know, with neurological basis, that every time I give in to that negotiation I’m making it more and more complicated. And every time I do the hard thing without negotiating, I’m making it easier and easier next time.

It was a discovery that emerged from the most unexpected story.

For the third time, the content is only an excuse; what the book provokes in you is the key.

Cook Ding. My favorite story of all.

Ding is a butcher who cuts up an ox with such mastery that he seems to be dancing more than working. His knife slides through the joints without resistance, always finding the space between bone and tendon. When asked how he does it, Ding answers something that left me thinking for weeks.

It comes to him effortlessly.

He has stopped seeing a whole and complicated ox, and sees, with total clarity, the exact structure of spaces and joints through which the knife must pass.

This story forced me to ask myself an uncomfortable question: was I really concentrated when I believed I was? Or was I simply present physically, with my mind fragmented into twenty different distractions, confusing effort with real attention?

If it’s costing you effort, you’re not concentrated.

Maximum concentration takes you into a state of flow, with zero friction.

I took my level of concentration to a place I couldn’t even have imagined as possible before. And performance on any task requiring clear thinking skyrocketed. Minimum effort, maximum result.

The culmination.

Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport is, in a certain sense, the most practical book on this entire list. It asks you to reconfigure your entire life: which apps have permission to be on your phone, which notifications have permission to sound, which spaces of your time are protected, what you do with your free time…

The book kept haunting me, asking: do you do what you truly want to do?

Cal Newport doesn’t ask you for total abstinence from technology, he doesn’t want you to be a hermit, but he does remind you that the vast majority of society has completely lost control of its own attention, of its time, of its priorities. Which confirms everything psychology taught me book after book.

After applying the book seriously, I recovered an average of two hours a day.

I’m not exaggerating.

Multiply it by three hundred sixty-five days. Now imagine what can be built (a book, a business, a skill, a close relationship with those people you love…). What would you do with more than 700 hours recovered from the claws of algorithms and social media?

This is the book that closes the circle.

If you look at this list from afar, you’ll understand why I ordered it this way.

I don’t want you to read this list step by step, there are no magic formulas. I just want you to understand this: Pay attention to the books that push you, follow that disproportionate fascination when it appears, and once you understand all that, apply it in your life. Knowledge is only powerful when you apply it.

Read, then move to action.

— Álvaro

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P.S. I also offer 1:1 consulting to help you grow on Substack.

If you’re just starting out and don’t know how it works, or if you’ve been at it for a while but are stuck, this will help you. I’ll help you find your direction, position yourself as a leader in your niche, and build a system tailored to your needs for sustainable growth.

My credentials? Over 100,000 global readers in 2 years, 100% organic growth, with 300,000 monthly visits. All from scratch, writing all by myself in my spare time.

If you’re interested, email me at: jardinmental@proton.me

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