Niklas Heer

This book is thought provoking and provides different ideas how to live. I food it to be very useful.
The only thing which I don't like as much is that it feels increasingly like a long list to do.
I can recommend this book seeking ideas how to live.

This book is excellent because it provides neurological background to habits, why some parts of the brain work against being disciplined and how to overcome it.
I think this, together with the book “atomic habits”, could be the ultimate introduction to creating habits and becoming more disciplined.
Thus, I can recommend the book to everyone.

Das Buch hat mir klargemacht, was manche besonderen Menschen alles tun, um die Erde und ihr Vermächtnis zu schützen. Das ist inspirierend und verpackt in spannende Geschichten. Für mich neu war die katastrophale Situation, in der sich die Unterwasserwelt befindet und wir erst es bei vielen Arten wird.
Ich glaube, wenn ich die Nachricht des Buches zusammenfassen müsste, wäre das: ja, die Situation der Erde ist scheiße, aber es hilft ja nichts. Wir müssen sie trotzdem retten!
Ich finde das Buch toll und kann es jedem empfehlen.

I enjoyed the book, and some messages hit home for me. At times I found it a bit repetitive if you already know about the stoics, but it is a great new perspective on stoicism and was helpful for me.
I recommend this book to everyone seeking to be more courageous or interested in reading about stoic virtues.

This is an interesting take on the Stoic philosophy. The author puts stoicism into a modern context, but also explains it from scratch. While it is a good book to pick up stoicism, I think the main claim of the book to be a guide wasn't done in the way I expected it to be done. I would have liked a more condense part to refer to and act as a kind of cheat sheet what to do to life a modern Stoic life. While the advice is there, it is scattered throughout the book.
Personal preference: It could also have been a bit shorter with less emphasis on the historic view on the stoics, but for people unfamiliar with the matter this might be just what is needed.
Overall, I can recommend this book to everyone searching for a personal philosophy and/or interest in stoicism.

It is an exciting framework, but due to the book's length, it was hard for me to get completely through. In my opinion, reducing it to half and only keeping the essentials would have made the experience better.
That said, the framework is very helpful, thoughtful and easy to understand.

You get exactly what the title promises: a plain and simple explanation of the financial market.
The author achieves this by using good examples and analogies.
I can recommend this book to everyone seeking to understand the financial market better.

The book “Hell Yeah or No” by Derek Sivers is genuinely thought-provoking and fun to read or listen to.
The book's philosophy goes like this: when you have the opportunity to do something, anything, with your time, it needs to be a ‘hell yes' or a ‘no' — nothing in between. The reasoning is this: if you say yes to the things that are not that important, you won't have time for the hell yeah stuff in your life. The more you say no to something, the more time, energy, and focus you will have for the things that will excite you.

I can especially recommend the audio version of the book. At first, I thought the audio effects were a bit much, but the more I listen, the more I found them enjoyable.
I can recommend this book to everyone; it is a fun and thoughtful book.

Ich hatte befürchtet, dass dieses Buch relativ trocken Fakten aufzählt und wurde positiv überrascht. Es führt durch die interessante Geschichte des Impfens zur heutigen Impftechnik und hat dabei kurze Impulse von Eckart von Hirschhausen.
Ich habe die Audioversion gehört und kann diese sehr empfehlen, es ist ein kurzes und impformatives Buch.

In the book “The Righteous Mind”, Jonathan Haidt expands on his elephant and rider analogy from “The Happiness Hypothesis”. The book's main idea is that moral judgments don't arise from rational reflection, but from instinctive feelings buried deep in our subconscious minds. The divisions we see in the world (e.g. political ideologies, religion) are because different people have different internal moral foundations, which come in 6 different flavours.
These flavours are:
- Care/Harm
- Fairness/Cheating
- Loyalty/Betrayal
- Authority/Subversion
- Sanctity/Degradation
- Liberty/Oppression
Further, Haidt's research suggests that while liberals tend to concentrate on the care/harm, fairness/cheating, and liberty oppression foundations, conservatives view all six of these different foundations as essential.

This idea of intrinsic moral foundations has shifted my view on politics and religion.
I can recommend this book to everyone seeking to understand humanity better.

Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport is a book about the implications of modern technology and how you should focus on a few carefully selected activities that support the things you value instead of getting sucked into an endless attention-grabbing media feed.
The ideas about high-value leisure are very intriguing for me. It shifted my perspective on how I think about leisure time.
The idea of a thirty-day Digital Declutter is excellent! It reminded me of an idea from the Minimalist movement where you have a packing party, pack up all your stuff in boxes, and for thirty days you get the things back out of the boxes if you need them; everything which is left in the boxes after that you can safely give away.

These are the five big ideas in summary:
1. Digital Minimalism: “A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.”
2. Digital Declutter: A practice in which you define your technology rules, take a thirty-day break, and reintroduce technology.
3. Solitude Deprivation: A state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your thoughts and free from input from other minds.
4. The Social Media Paradox: Social media makes you feel both connected and lonely, happy and sad.
5. The Bennett Principle: A practice in which you prioritize demanding activity over passive consumption, use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world, and seek activities that require real-world, structured social interactions.

Overall, I can highly recommend this book to everyone who feels that they could use a little less of the modern, attention-grabbing technologies like Facebook or YouTube in their lives.

I found this book to be kind of strange. I think the author wanted it to be a motivational piece for artists and entrepreneurs. But for me, it was too much about the authors view of the universe and spiritual view, which didn't resonate with me.
Some of the stories and facts or quotes are somewhat interesting, but the book didn't contain any new insights for me.

Maybe if you are an artist with a more spiritual view on the world this could be for you, but I wouldn't recommend it.
For motivation, I would recommend reading “Discipline Equals Freedom” by Jocko Willink, or if you want to overcome procrastination, I would recommend “Stop Procrastinating” by Nils Salzgeber.

The book's central premise is that procrastination is not a time management issue, but an emotion management problem.
When I first came across this premise, it made so much sense to me. Suppose you can have the best scheduled day in the world. Your instant gratification monkey (Tim Urban) will still try to overcome the negative feelings of doing something hard by doing something more pleasant. That means, if you can't regulate your emotions, the monkey will lead you to procrastinate.
This is a compelling way to think about the topic.
The book goes more into depth about overcoming these emotions by building willpower and exercising self-compassion.

Overall, I think this book combines many powerful ideas and methods into one.
I can recommend this book to anyone struggling with procrastination.

(PS: The Audible version seems not cleanly edited since there are some repetitions in it, but it is not that bad.)

I don't quite know how I feel about this book. Some aphorisms are thought-provoking. However, the logic behind what the author claims to be desirable isn't always clear, which leaves me feeling odd about some statements made in the book.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want the author to explain the aphorisms, but I would like a primer on the mindset and worldview portrayed in the book.

I only would recommend reading this book if you already know the author's worldview and are interested in philosophical aphorisms.

This book contains everything you ever wanted to know about coffee. It talks about everything from the plants to processing techniques, how to brew it and where coffee is grown with what characteristics.
At times it feels like an extensive list being recited because it is precisely that, but I think it is valuable.
I think everyone who is into coffee should read this book, maybe especially the audiobook version once. That way, you roughly know about most things, and then you can look them up if you want to know about a coffee you bought or something you want to explore.

This book dives into the topic of team and organization design for IT organizations. It goes over the implications of Dunbar's number and Conway's law for a functioning organization.

Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. (150 people)

Conway's law states: “Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.”

The main idea is the split into four team types:

- Stream-aligned team: aligned to a flow of work from (usually) a segment of the business domain
- Enabling team: helps a Stream-aligned team to overcome obstacles. It also detects missing capabilities.
- Complicated Subsystem team: where significant mathematics/calculation/technical expertise is needed.
- Platform team: a grouping of other team types that provide a compelling internal product to accelerate delivery by Stream-aligned teams

- Collaboration: working together for a defined period of time to discover new things (APIs, practices, technologies, etc.)
- X-as-a-Service: one team provides and one team consumes something “as a Service”
- Facilitation: one team helps and mentors another team

This book is a summary of great ideas.
While most of the ideas weren't new, I got something out of how the author presented them here.
I've listened to the Audible version, and I was not too fond of how the narrator articulated the quotes. But, of course, this might be my taste.
Overall I thought several times: “This is a great way to put it, very clear!”

I also bought the hardcover version, and I intend to come back to the book and read parts of it when I need a refresher.

I can recommend this book to everyone seeking to improve themselves, especially for people who want to get started with self-improvement.

This book didn't provide a completely new idea for me but provided a much closer look at what it means to have an open mind.
The author goes through the things which are preventing people from having an open mind and provides pointers to being able to reflect and challenge their beliefs.
This book is valuable, and we need more people to be open to reevaluating their beliefs more often. That's why I can recommend this book to everyone. Just don't expect something life-changing. It's more like a shift in perspective and tools to be more open-minded.

This book opened my eyes to the importance of product management.
It contains many interesting insights about what it means to move from an output-based company to a product lead company.
I think the ideas in the book builds on the views from the book “The Lean Startup”, but I don't believe you have to read it beforehand.
I recommend this book to everyone wanting to learn how to build good products.

The book introduces two main concepts of hyperfocus and scatterfocus, which are opposing sides of the same coin but can improve the productivity to accomplish something you want to do.
In essence, the book is a plea for a more intentional approach.
In the book, there are various techniques, studies and stories to get an idea of how to approach a life with more intention.
While the concepts in this book are not groundbreaking, I liked the clarity of thoughts and the keywords the author gave those two modes to be in.

Overall, I can recommend this book to everyone who wants to achieve more and live a life with more intention.

This audiobook  contained some useful ideas for me, but overall, it felt like a giant list of thoughts loosely connected.
I think this audiobook is a lot more insightful if you are and an artist, and you haven't read a lot about productivity or philosophy before.
Since for me, neither is true it felt repetitive. 
The author also mentions that this collection of books evolved from Tweets and yes, that is exactly what it feels like. 
Thought bits thrown at you, bit by bit.

I can recommend this audiobook only if you are starting out to read about productivity or if you are an artist.

Dieses Buch lädt zum wissenschaftlichen Denken ein. Die Autorin führt durch öffentliche Debatten aus der Sicht der Wissenschaft, um Fehlschlüsse offenzulegen und zu einer faktenbasierten Sicht auf die Wirklichkeit anzuregen. Dabei erklärt sie wissenschaftliche Begriffe und Konzepte sehr verständlich und anschaulich.
Ich habe einige neue Begriffe gelernt und fühle mich von jetzt an in der Lage wissenschaftliche Studien anhand verschiedener Kriterien besser einordnen zu können. (wie z. B. ob die Studie vorher angemeldet war oder nicht)

Ich empfehle jedem dieses Buch, denn wir brauchen dringend eine kleinste gemeinsame Wirklichkeit um die großen gesellschaftlichen Probleme bewältigen zu können.

This book is one of the most insightful books I've read so far. I knew that sleep is important, but I didn't know how much sleep humans actually need and what the difference between actual sleep and sleep opportunity is. Everyone needs between 7 and 9 hours of sleep opportunity to fulfil basic human needs. Sleep helps us to be healthy, get less sick, remember things and learn.
It shifted my perspective on sleep. It is not only important; it should be seen as the foundation of everything else.
Sleep should be everyone's number one priority every day.
The book itself is packed with scientific studies and stories. I especially like the recommendation it gives at the end of the book.
I recommend everyone to read this book.

This book packs a lot of knowledge about the Objective and Key Result (OKR) system into a short book.
I liked that it started with a captivating story about a young startup.
The last third of the books are filled with useful tips to use OKRs.
I recommend this book to everyone interested in OKRs and all leaders.

This book gave me many insights based on psychology, philosophy, and historical wisdom throughout cultures.
The only critique I could give is that the first half of the book felt a lot shaper and dense with insights than the other half.
I recommend the book to everyone seeking to understand human nature.