What I’ve been reading lately:
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1) Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You.
Interesting insights from researcher Sam Gosling. Won’t turn you into Sherlock Holmes but does offer some interesting insights like:
- Yes, the music you like says a lot about your values.
- People who enjoy jazz are more mellow.
- People can tell how sociable you are by the exterior of your home.
More humor than anything else, it’s also an interesting comic-Machiavellian complement to the human behavior studies I often post. Unveils intriguing strategies that could prove useful in the flame wars of forum trench warfare but sadly does not dive very deep. Reveals clever status/power tricks and focuses on “playing the man, not the ball” in order to appear to come out on top even when, as the title says, you don’t know what you’re talking about.
3) Sacred Bull: The Inner Obstacles That Hold You Back at Work and How to Overcome Them.
Another wonderful book by Albert Bernstein. To understand the modern workplace I recommend this plus his other book Dinosaur Brains: Dealing with All THOSE Impossible People at Work as well as Cynthia Shapiro’s Corporate Confidential: 50 Secrets Your Company Doesn’t Want You to Know—and What to Do About Them. Required reading.
4) Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think.
Brian Wansink’s brilliant research on our behaviors around food is both mind-blowing as well as quite practical. If you’re trying to lose weight, eat healthier or just looking for an eye-opening read, give it a look. For a taste (pun intended) check out the excerpts from an interview with Wansink that I posted here.
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