recommends / book
“The first one that comes to mind is Impro by Keith Johnstone. This is actually ... I wrote about it in that essay. It's one of the books that [inaudible 01:28:36] used to send to people. I just think it's a really interesting book. So nominally speaking, it's about improvisational theater, which I believe this guy was a pioneer of. He was a British guy, Keith Johnstone, active between the '60s and the 80s I think. And Impro is just this really interesting book about creativity and how social behavior works and basically just what he taught his improv students. It's a very weird book. It's full of these unbelievably strange ideas. There's a lot of very tactical things he tells you to do in the first chapter, for example, just to break out of your own mental frameworks, really just wild stuff. He'll tell you to walk backwards while counting down from a hundred and think about some problem that you're struggling with and there's all these kind of odd things. But the number of ideas per page I've found on that book is extremely high. The concepts about how social interaction works and how things like status and so on play into your social behavior are super important. And they made every kind of fully deployed engineer read that for the simple reason that I think it just helps you kind of read people better and interact with them better and become more conscious of how you are coming across and just modulate that.”