Category: Reviews

Thoughts on: Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker

~ poorbjorn ~ Leave a comment

It’s 4:36 AM when writing this. I’m wide awake after a night fu*ked up sleep. What better time to write about Why We Sleep?

This book is extremely comprehensive and will give you the full run down of how sleep is generated (absolutely fascinating!), dreams, why modernity promotes bad sleep and the terrible outcome of not getting enough sleep and, of course, the benefits of adequate shuteye.

📝 “The shorter your sleep the shorter your life span.”

📝 Lack of sleep makes you a baby: I don’t take myself serious when I’m sleepy. Feelings go haywire, I worries unnecessary, my food choices sucks. I’ve learned to observe when this happen and try to get some sleep. I also avoid making any important decisions in this state.

📝 Most people don’t know how long it takes to overcome a single dose of caffeine. Therefore a lot of people fail to link bad sleep with the cup of coffee they had 9 hours earlier. ☕️

📝 “If you don’t sleep the very first night after learning you lose the chance to consolidate those memories; even if you get a lot of catch-up sleep thereafter.”

Sleep for memory consolidation is an all-or-nothing event!

⏰ Reasons for 8h Sleep:

– Live longer.

– Enhances memory.

– Makes you more creative.

– Makes you look more attractive.

– Keeps you slim and lowers food cravings.

– It protects you from cancer and dementia.

– It walls of colds & the flue.

– It lowers your risk of heart attacks and stroke and diabetes.

– You’ll feel happier and less depressed and less anxious.

🥊 MY ACTIONS:

  • No coffee after 1 PM. ☕️
  • Increasing my daily sleep from 7h to at least 7.5h (8h would be ideal but I’m not sure it’s feasible for me atm.)
  • Adjust time for mediation to early afternoon to avoid nodding off. Then the Circadian rythm is at its peak and Sleep Pressure should be low.

⚖️ VERDICT:

This book is not a fun reading per se. It can get quite technical and i it’s quite terrifying; but it’s close to impossible not to change you lifestyle after reading it.

I don’t think I have said this since reading Influence by Chaldini: This should be mandatory reading!

Score: 5/5

How many hours of sleep do you get on average? ⁉️

Photo: @cristelleg

FOR MORE GREAT READS CHECK OUT MY READING LISTS.

Thoughts on: ‘Grinding it Out’ by Ray Croc

~ poorbjorn ~ Leave a comment

Ray Croc was a 52 year when he first met the McDonald brothers in San Bernardino, California. He was impressed with the operation they got going; and the French fries in particular. Ray had seen his fair share of restaurants in his days as a multimixer salesman, but this one was special. The limited menu, the affordable prices, the cleanliness. It was love! ❤️

Ray wondered why the brothers didn’t expand their concept, but the McDonald brothers where not men of such ambition. So Ray took on the expansion himself—and the rest is history.

📝 Ray Croc biggest contribution was the McDonalds franchise system.

📝 “Persistence and determination alone is omnipotent.”

📝 Surprisingly little drama. I feel the rise of McDonald’s has been a pretty smooth ride compared to other business stories I’ve read.

📝 They started to build restaurants after what they called a “monotony index”. The higher the degree of monotony in a town the higher the likelihood that a McDonald’s Restaurants success. Why? Less alternatives to spending the evening at the MD.

🍟 My best combo at the Golden Arches these days is to get a Spring Sallad and a McVegan burger. Wicked combo! 👌🏻

⭐️ TAKEAWAY:

Ray didn’t see his ideas as a grand designs but worked ‘from the part to the whole’. Perfecting every fundamental before moving on to the large scale idea. I wonder if this mindset could be helpful for those of us who are in the process of building Instagram accounts? Would it be beneficial to focus on perfecting one element at the time; pictures, captions, hashtags, timings etc..?

I’m thankful for this little memoir of the first 40 years of McDonald. Love it or hate it, MD is a company we have a some kind of relationship with.

3/5

What your favorite business memoir? 🤔

I think mine are ‘Shoe Dog’ and maybe..’Jack Ma’?!

Photo: @pedagogyofthefresh

Check out Reading Lists for more great reads!

Mini Review – Our Oriental Heritage by Will Durant (Part 4) – The Far East

~ poorbjorn ~ Leave a comment

My longest book to date has reached its end, and this is just the 1st volume (out of 11) in the The Story of Civilization series by Will Durant. This last part focused on ancient China and Japan.

Was it worth it? We are talking about a 50 hour audiobook. Yes, I think so! Does the #sunkcostfallacy play a role in this answer? It probably does! I’ve suffered through a lot of dry talk about pottery and poetry to reach this point.

📝 The feet of girls at age 7 where compressed with tight bandages to prevent their further growth, so that the mature lady might walk with a mincing step erotically pleasing to the men.

In the prescence of a lady the word shoe was taboo.🦶 👠

📝 To know the ‘Dao’ is to surpress ones knowledge. “We have to forget our theories and feel the facts.”

📝 Confucianism: “Only in Christianity and in Buddhism can we find again so heroic an effort to transmute into decency the natural brutality of men.”

📝 Chinese civilization in 2 words: Philosophy and Porcelain.

📝 “Beards where small and always shaved, but seldom of the owner thereof.” oh, I cannot but LOVE Will Durants prose and elegant summaries of the smallest aspects of civilization. 😂

📝 Chinese writing: “The same character is read as different sounds and words in different localities.” I remember seeing Chinese and Japanese students, who where unable to communicate verbally, communicate through written messages when I studied in Japan. 🤯

📝 When the revolution raged they forgot the old sages words. “He who thinks the old embankments useless and destroys them is sure to suffer from the desolation caused by overflowing water.”

⭐️ TAKEAWAY:

“The accumulation of wealth in the hands of the minority is no doubt a universal and apparently unfailing concomitant of civilization.” We see this play out over and over again.

I’m still green but now I at least have a slight understanding of Confucianism and rudimentary understanding of the Chinese and Japanese culture and history.

3/5

Which books is the longest book you read? 🤔

Check out my READING LISTS for more great reads!

Thoughts on: “The Kybalion” by Three Initiates

~ poorbjorn ~ Leave a comment

I read this years ago and thought to myself: “There is something important here, but I’m not able to grasp it fullly yet.

3 YEARS LATER: Reading it again. Maybe the fault wasn’t with me after all? The 7 principles are solid and worthwhile, but the writing is piss poor and the pretense of being written by the mystical “Three initiates”, while in fact it’s very likely written by attorney and New Thought author W. Atkinson, doesn’t really fly for me.

It’s sparked an interest for Hermetism, but the book could have been a pamphlet. The repetition is awful and all the interesting angles are left unexplained with reasoning that it’s beyond the scope of the book or available only “to the ears of understanding.”

Here are some neat notes though 😊:

📝 The “I” observes the “me” that generates thoughts, ideas and images.

📝 The books touches the subject of creativity and how the “I” can WILL the “me” to work on a problem in a certain direction. I personally use this “trick” to delegate creative problems to my subconscious minds. I.e. coming up with a title for a speech, ideas for a posts or find solutions in areas I get stuck. Works like a charm (most of the time).

📝 The higher we rise in the vibrational scale the more obvious the illusionary nature of finite things become.

📝“The possession of Knowledge, unless accompanied by a manifestation and expression in Action, is like hoarding of precious metals—a vain and foolish thing.” We should keep this in mind as we learn. 👩‍🎓 👨‍🎓

⚖️ VERDICT:

Great and timeless concepts are shrouded in what feels like a forced veil of magic and secrecy with the intention to heighten the reading experience—the result is making confused writing even more confused.

💭 THOUGHTS:

I’m weird with New Age/wo wo-books. I dislike the Kybalion; I can’t muster up the energy to finish Power vs. Force—but still praise Dodsons “Level of Energy” and was blown away by learning about Spiral Dynamics. I don’t know what this says about me.

2/5

Which one of the 7 Principle do you resonate with? 🤔

What book do you want to re-read? 🤔

For more books just waiting to be read check out my Reading Lists.

Thoughts on: “Don’t Sleep There are Snakes” by Daniel L. Everett

~ poorbjorn ~ Leave a comment

Daniel, linguist and Christian missionary, spent decades in the amazon jungle trying to learn the curious language oh the Piranhã in order to do a Bible translation.

He was not the first person to try to convert these Amazonians. For 200 years people have traveled there to spread the good news’, but not a single Pitahã has ever taken the bait. They are just not in the marked for being saved!

It is a lovely account of immersing fully into a foreign culture, and the discoveries Daniel made had linguists pull their hair, since it crushed old assumptions about foundation of human language.

📝 Immediacy of Experience Principle: if you haven’t experienced something first hand your stories about it are irrelevant. The is the case for Pirahã.

📝 The Pirahã consumes everything they hunt and gather instantly. The don’t salt or smoke their food like other Amazonian tribes.

📝 Among the piraha the youth gets no sense of teenage angst, depression or insecurity.

📝 Piraha have no creation myth or oral history. (❗️)

📝 Left and right = “up“ and “down” river. They oriented themselves by external means, not relative to their own bodies.

📝 “Theories effect our perceptions; they are part of the cultural information that constrains the way we see the world around us.”

In the end it was Daniel that became the convert and started to doubt his own beliefs. He was turned from believing the bible was the exact word of God to go as far as challenging the value for myth in its entirety.

⭐️ TAKEAWAY:

Perception is learned. We experience the world according to our experience and expectations, “not always, perhaps never to how the world really is.”

Learning about the Pirahã culture is fantastic but the linguistic details can be quite exhausting at times.

3/5

Check out my Reading Lists for more great books!

Thoughts on: “The Denial of Death” by Ernest Becker

~ poorbjorn ~ 2 Comments

We know we are going to die someday. This is the unique problem of the conscious animal. We know it but we don’t feel it because we need to repress this truth in order to function.

So what to do? It’s really hard to accept that we are just worms in the dirt. Especially when our nature is so paradoxical; the body being so animalistic and limited yet our minds so godlike and boundless. We are gods with anuses.

What we need is a lie. A vital and grand one that we can always rely on. We need something that transcends us, some system of ideas and powers that embed us, whether it’s a flag, the proletariat, a guru or religion.

Kierkegaard, Freud, Jung, Maslow and Fromm are some of the characters you’ll get to familiarize with during this journey. I felt like each chapter demanded a following period of reflection. I was absolutely taken aback by this book.

freud meme

Some notes:

📝 “I believe that those who speculate that a full apprehension of man’s condition would drive him insane are right, quite literally right.” Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. 😨

📝 Man is beaten down by life and the world; “beaten because he fails to face up to the existential truth of his situation— the truth that he is an inner symbolic self, which signifies a certain freedom, and that he is bound by a finite body, which limits that freedom.”

📝 How much of experience do we let in?The schizophrenic allow for too much; the depressed too little.

📝 Anxiety is the possibility of freedom.

📝 Ideally man is “…fully in the world on its terms and wholly beyond the world in his trust in the invisible dimension.”

⭐️ TAKEAWAY:

If life is an insurmountable problem, and we can’t live with the truth of our situation then the question is on what level of illusion to live our lives on.

This book really checks all the boxes for me:

✅It’s complex and nuanced – yet I don’t feel totally lost (expect that fu*king castration complex.. I just do get it…🤷‍♂️ ✂️ )

✅ I started the book being one person, came out of it as another. (SWIPE for example 😉)

✅ Checked one book of my reading list – added a dozen!

Loved it!

5/5

Find more fantastic books in my Reading Lists or get this at Amazon

Thoughts on: “Martin Luther” by Eric Metaxas

~ poorbjorn ~ Leave a comment

Luther rejected the practices of the Roman Catholic Church and the practice of selling indulgences (get out-of-jail-free cards for purgatory, basically.) in particular. Thereby he started the era known to us as the Reformation.

Let’s jump right into the notes:

📝 He was about to become a law student when he got trapped in a lighting storm. Praying for his life he uttered: “Ich will ein Munk werden” (“I will become a monk”). The storm calmed and it was so.

📝 1476 the market for indulgences where expanded beyond the living. Now you could pay for the sins of the dead too!

📝 Luther heroically posting his truths on the wooden church door in Wittenberg is fiction made in hindsight. What Luther actually posted was an invitation to debate….which no one attended.

📝 Two things fueled the Reformation: the printing press and Luther writing in German (instead of Latin). Luther’s writing spread like wildfire which was unintentional. It was as if a hastily written email to a friend was accidentally forwarded to a major news corporation.

📝 “A simple layman armed with scripture is to be believed above a Pope or council without it.”

📝 “This life is the shithouse compared to the glories of heaven” – Luther 😎

📝 FUNNY STORY: A nobleman asked if he could buy indulgences for a future sin and a preacher named Tetzel said he could. When the peacher was about to leave town the nobleman robbed and beat him up and left with the comment: “this was the future sin I had in mind!”. 😂😂

Overall solid, VERY solid book. I enjoyed it far more than I ever thought I would. Also it felt good to fill another gap in my history education; the Reformation.

What biographies have you planned for this year? 🤔

I would like to do another political leader (a president or Churchill) or a Nietzsche bio 💪🏻

4/5

Check out my Reading Lists for more great reads!

Thoughts on: “The Power of Moments” by Chip & Dan Heath

~ poorbjorn ~ Leave a comment

The book does what it sets out to do and does it competently; It want to show how powerful moments- the moments that defines us and we remember for a long time – can change and elevate us. The Heaths breaks down why this is and how we can create more of powerful moments.

📝 The years between 15 – 30 has the most Moments. Probably due to novelty.

📝 Peak/End rule: Experiences are judged by two key moments; The peak and the end. Think about your last vacation. What do you remember from it?

📝 The Oddball Effect: Surprise stretches time. Novel moments are experiences as 36% longer than routine ones.

📝 “What did you fail at today?” A question for the family at the dinner table. Encourage to push yourself to stretch. An attempt to normalize failure.

📝 Try this! Next time you have a conversation, push intentionally beyond small talk. Make yourself vulnerable and be surprised by the results. Relationships don’t deepen naturally.

📝 Struggle together and strong bonds will be created. I just came off a challenging work project. Making RAGE2 (a video game) was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. The experience turned mere collages into brothers and sisters.

⭐️ TAKEAWAY:

I got the recipe. Now I need to create more moments and better moments for myself and others.

⚖️ VERDICT:

I did not like this book, and I think it’s my fault. I have read to much about the subjects covered in this book already which makes a lot of the conclusions feel like common sense. BUT they probably aren’t if you are new to books on positive psychology, communication, leadership.

If you’re a new reader and want to create better relationships and be a better leader than this is a good starting point!

3/5

Photo credit: @kanoilab

Are you too suffering from diminishing return when reading certain genres? 🤔

Find the best books I’ve ever read in my Reading Lists.

Thoughts on: “The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt” by Edmund Morris

~ poorbjorn ~ 2 Comments

Theodore Roosevelt was a force of nature. I have never heard of a man of such industry before. The book covers his early years, from birth to becoming President of the United States. Whether you are into politics or not, this book is truly fascinating. Building himself up from a weak, sick-looking boy with terrible asthma to a force to be reckoned with.

He had a relentless passion for learning (the guy read all the time and at insane speeds). This is a more exciting origin story than anything Marvel or DC comics ever produced.

⭐️ TAKEAWAY: My takeaway from this book is that life is long. Long enough to accomplish great things if you use your time well.

——

5/5

For more insightful read, check out my Reading Lists

Thoughts on: “The Sell” by Fredrik Eklund

~ poorbjorn ~ Leave a comment

Top ranking real estate broker Fredrik Eklund reveals all his secrets on how to sell you, your product and how to achieve success in life. Written as a guide to greatness mixed with autobiographical snippets it hooked me instantly. Mostly because of Fredrik’s colorful personality.

I truly enjoyed his personal stories and his positive outlook on life. .

The experienced reader of personal development books will recognize a lot of the concepts Fredrik writes about, but it is a great introduction for someone new to the genre.

As always, I have to pick something for immediate implementation in my own life from the books I read…because applied knowledge is power! 💪. This time it will be to find my own trademark or “gimmick”. Though, I might pick something more discrete than Fredrik “high kick” 😄👍

3/5

Find more book worth reading in my reading lists