likes / book
“And I love Designing Your Life, by Bill Burnett.”
Evidence index / named items
Books, apps, and tools people actually name.
Compare how many distinct people recommended, used, liked, owned, built, or avoided the same item—then inspect every transcript excerpt behind the count.
1named items
3evidence rows on this page
Explicitquote verified; attribution disclosed
book / evidence rows
Designing Your Life
3 distinct people
recommends / book
“I really love A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. That book to me is so interesting because I'm a bit of a nerd around science, I used to read a lot of fiction growing up too. And I think weirdly enough, Bill tells this story of the history of science really and how we know the things that we know, and he kind of tells it from the perspective of learning about the scientists that discovered these things. So for instance, you learn that Newton was kind of an asshole to the co-workers he had, or Darwin wasn't maybe perceived as such an amazing scientist at the time. And a lot of these scientists, their discoveries don't become famous. It's almost like being an artist, where you realize the relevance of a scientist's discovery years later at times. And people don't get credit for things that they discovered. So to me, it was really interesting to one, read more about the scale of the universe and how long we've been here. And I think it just puts a lot of things into perspective of our time here, how we spend it. And even the age we're living in now with AI, it's such a blip in the cosmic scale. And then you also get these really fun anecdotes from scientists along the way. So that one I recommend to almost everyone, because it's a pretty easy read as well. And then I think another one, which is maybe a little bit more in the career lens, is this book called Designing Your Life, which is written by actually one of the founders of IDEO, and these folks are Stanford professors in the Design Lab. And what's really powerful about this for me is it's actually pretty practical. So it comes with exercises that I remember I did myself as well when I wasn't sure which direction to go in my career, that helped me really figure out, the most powerful exercise and take away from this book for me was basically in the first or second chapter I think, you write out one page on the meaning of work to you and what does work mean? Is it a way for me to make money? Is it a way for me to feel fulfilled with what I do or how I spend my time? And then you write out one page on the meaning of life. And what's really powerful is it's really, really hard to do those two things, and then you have to find the overlap between the two. And I think that exercise is so clarifying and I recommend it to anyone when they feel stuck in their career, because it can at least, coming back to the energy point, can give you a direction to go even if you're not sure how to get there just yet. And so I love both of those books because they're really shifting from a perspective standpoint.”
recommends / book
“We actually had the perfect segue because the book I've recommended absolutely the most is called Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt. Another one is Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Abbott... Dave Evans. And the last one is probably Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card. No comment right now on some of his political commentary, but I used to have extra copies in my office when I was a professor and I would just hand it out to my students. It's a fun, just easy nonsense read, but...”