Blog Posts

Book Summary – Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind

The book, Sapiens: A brief history of Humankind, provides a semi-scientific and author’s perspective on the “history of humankind”. The book breaks it down into three revolutions – the cognitive revolution (70,000 years ago); the agricultural revolution (12,000 years ago) and the scientific which started 500 years ago from today and continues to shape us. Part One – The Cognitive Revolution (70,000 Years ago) Part One Summary: Cognitive revolution allowed humans to conquer the world with the power of communication

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Guide to Understand and Manage “Happiness”

Happiness — a simple yet illusive word that has been a topic of confusion and contemplation throughout my learning journey. Given that almost all of my work — blog posts or projects — indirectly (or directly?) try to pursue happiness, I wanted to deep-dive and understand it. In this post, I will attempt to articulate understanding happiness and managing it. The lessons here are inspired by The Happiness Advantage, Elephant in the Brain, Stumbling on Happiness, and personal experiences. Defining Happiness

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Book Summary of Stumbling on Happiness

Recently, I summarized ‘The Happiness Advantage’. Reading that book lead to raising some questions that I wanted to seek answers for. The question of “Why are we so bad at managing and understanding happiness?” lead me to this book – Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. In this summary, I attempt to better identify and understand the shortcomings of our brian (and ourselves) that result in us being bad at understanding managing happiness. Lesson 1 – Our minds are capable

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Actionable Book Summary of The Happiness Advantage

To better understand happiness, I picked up The Happiness Advantage — a book by Shawn Achor. To take that understanding of happiness one step further and put it into practice, I have identified the following action items or habits. The action items are for each of the seven “positive psychology principles” shared in the book. I hope to put these habits into practice via journaling or personal experiments. Principle 1 – The Happiness Advantage Success orbits around happiness, not the

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Book Summary of Pomodoro Technique Illustrated by Staffan Nöteberg

Pomodoro technique has been amongst one of my most impactful experiments to improve productivity. Today, I will be summarizing a book, Pomodoro Technique Illustrated by Staffan Nöteberg, that I read as I attempt to master the skill of Pomodoro via personal experiments. Introduction to Pomodoro The Pomodoro technique was defined by Francesco Cirillo in 1992 after the frustration of low productivity and unstructured studying. Therefore, his goal become to use Pomodoro (time) to focus and get the work done. In

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