Books I’ve written:

The first book that I published is called FRIENDLY AMBITIOUS NERD.

The second book that I’m currently working on is called INTROSPECT. Introspect is about inner narrative troubleshooting. It’s about hitting Inspect Element on the story of your life. A skilled introspector achieves internal narrative clarity and resonance.

Books I’ve spoken about:

• Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! I was pretty late to learning about Richard Feynman – I think I was maybe in my late teens when a friend mentioned him to me. I was later still to reading his book and watching bits of his interviews and lectures on YouTube. [youtube review] [twitter thread]
• Antifragile, by Nassim Taleb. I remember Antifragile blowing my mind several times when I first read it. It didn’t exactly have anything dramatically new to say that I hadn’t heard before in some way, but it brought together things in a way that I found compelling. It made me rethink and reevaluate a lot of my life and gave me a useful frame for making sense of things with. [youtube review]
• Confessions of an Advertising Man, by David Ogilvy.
• When I was a teenager I used to skip school to go to the library to “catch up on my homework”. I’d end up just reading a bunch of magazines, and I found myself wanting to write for a magazine – as a columnist, or maybe as a copywriter. I can’t remember when exactly I started looking into David Ogilvy – or where I got this book, probably from a secondhand bookstore somewhere – but once I started reading it I couldn’t put it down. Ogilvy had such a great personality. Very spirited, opinionated guy with a great sense of occasion. [youtube review] [twitter thread]
• Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud: I believe I first saw this book being recommended highly by Bret Victor aka worrydream. I think I then encountered a few screenshots of it on the Internet that made me really like it. It’s very worth reading even if you don’t really care all that much about comics. It’s about visual language in general, and it has applications to all sorts of art and media and storytelling. [youtube review]
• Masters of Doom: Video games were a big part of my life growing up. I was really excited when a friend sent me this book, because it gets right into the details of the history and production of these games that meant so much to me. I found myself particularly compelled to learn more about the Shareware model – where you give away some content for free, and people who want to pay for extra content are free to do so. This fits very much with my model of the world, and how I want to be. [youtube review] See also: Amanda Palmer’s Art of Asking
• A Sideways Look At Time, by Jay Griffiths. I believe I got my copy from one of Singapore’s National Library Book Sales, wonderful annual events (hm, I haven’t been to one in a few years) where you can buy books for just $2 a pop. I would bring my army duffel bag to these things and just load up the whole bag with 70+ books, spending almost my entire monthly allowance on it. I have some notes and quotes from this book in my archives. [youtube review]
• High Output Management, by Andy Grove. My ex-boss Dinesh, who was phenomenal for my personal development in my early 20s, recommended this book. Andy Grove was the CEO at Intel and it seems like he widely respected by everyone around him for being great at what he did, and for being an all-around wonderful person. [youtube review]
• The Nasty Bits, by Anthony Bourdain. I read this book not too long before Anthony Bourdain died. I remember really enjoying his voice, his style, his sense of flair. [youtube reviews]
• Predatory Thinking, by Dave Trott. I found this book in a bookshop at some point and I found it really compelling. It includes a story about neutrinos that I love. I’m probably due for a re-read because I don’t really remember much else about it off the top of my head. Oh – there’s also a great bit about a prank involving a wet book. [youtube review]
• The Dispossessed, by Ursula Le Guin. I remember reading a bit of The Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin when I was a student. At the time it seemed kind of bland and boring. I think I’m due for a re-read, because what I couldn’t appreciate at the time was that there was an elegance to Le Guin’s spartan austerity. [youtube review]
• Dune, by Frank Hebert. I was really late to reading Dune – I think lots of people pick it up as teenagers or in their early 20s, and I only read it when I was just about to turn 30. It’s a very ambitious book. It can be a little hard to get into at the start because there are so many names – Frank Herbert really didn’t seem to care whether you could understand what was going on or not, which in retrospect seems like a remarkable level of conviction that probably wouldn’t fly today, mostly. I haven’t read the sequels but I might eventually. The book is worth reading for its own sake, and it’s particularly worth reading (in my opinion) to get a sense of how it has impacted so much of sci-fi and pop culture. [youtube review]