The book(s) may be related to your profession or not at all. The thing that matters is that it caused a paradigm shift in your mental model of the world or a topic or whatever?
Mine was Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs or SICP.
Readit News
There are a lot of stories of people who hate their jobs and make a switch.
One was a lawyer who became a truck driver. A doctor who became a programmer (iirc ... I do remember she was in tears because she didn't want to disappoint their family not sure if she wanted to be a programmer or not).
This book gave me the courage to leave engineering field and become a firefighter paramedic. 1st best career decision I made at the time
Are you neutral good or chaotic good? And can you achieve a third class when you level up?
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Something about the combo helped me disconnect from the religion I had been raised in, and helped me see that there are many ways to view the world and life.
It's a little dense and a bit meandering at times, but the core idea behind it: we have a strong bias in believing that civilization comes in stages. We believe we go 'hunter/gatherer/primitive' -> agriculture -> 'real' civilization. Basically, this is totally false.
Not only is it totally false, but one of the reasons we might have this bias is because, while the native Americans were being eradicated, Western thinkers and theologians had to justify why Western civilization was 'better', despite native Americans basically giving Westerners the seeds for individual liberties and social blueprints for the Western Enlightenment...
It really uprooted my deepest beliefs about human history, civilization, and (most importantly for me) what I believe "the future" should look like. Mind-expanding for sure.
The thing that I think about from them is the 'Reverse Fermi Paradox'. We've been humans for ~200k years now. Just in the last 10k or so have we had 'civilization'. What were we doing for the other 19/20ths of our time here? Ice ages don't account for all that time and there were warm periods in them. What was going with us all that time?
I think about it a lot also in context of their reviews of different cultural models. It seems we spent a lot of time experimenting and trying out a bazillion different ways to organize and have families and be in a tribe. Since we've no record of it, I'm fascinated by how our deep ancestors lived as a culture and how different it was.
Can't resist this apocryphal Gandhi quote:
Reporter: What do you think of civilization?
Gandhi: I think it is a good idea.
https://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/simon_1031467.cfm
Herbert Simon later went on to win the Nobel Prize in Economics for his contributions on "Bounded Rationality" in decision making.
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1978/sim...
The economics anti textbook (hill and myatt).
Though this was 12 years ago, public discussion of economics has progressed a little bit since, so it may not have quite the same paradigm busting feeling it did for me back then, but it's still pretty good.
Other mind expanding non fiction...
Feynman lectures (all 3 volumes)
Design patterns (don't hate me lol. Obviously less revelatory if you've already absorbed the knowledge by other means. And for flip's sake don't overdo them! )
Not necessarily, at all. Advaita is supposed to be very rational and logical, and not require faith. Faith belongs to the path of Bhakti Yoga (faith/devotion to God), while Advaita is about the path of Jnana Yoga, the path of knowledge.
Also, the Wikipedia article about Advaita Vedanta seems to me to be somewhat poor, and factually wrong in parts, IMO, though I am not an expert on this. I may think this way because my family has some background knowledge about Advaita, Adi Shankara, Sanskrit and related subjects related to Hinduism, going back some generations, so I may have picked up some stuff by osmosis, apart from what I have read and studied and practiced myself.
It is about Advaita (Vedanta). Another good introduction to it is the Mandukya Upanishad: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandukya_Upanishad
which, in just 12 verses, shows that we are neither body or mind but the witness of both.
Thomas byrom's "The Heart of Awareness" is a popular translation for a quick read.
If you want something denser with commentaries and explanations, Swami Nityaswarupananda's translation is great. Another good translation keeping western audiences in mind is Duet of One by Ramesh Balsekar.
BTW, there is another music-related "EGB" that Hoffy missed!
The keys G, B and Eb (separated from each other by a major third) used in John Coltrane's "Giant Steps". Major-third-spaced tonality changes, particularly masked by ii-V-I cadences, became known as Coltrane Changes.
This was a long time ago, but the book was beautiful right off the shelf and it made so much immediate, intuitive sense. It also came at just the right time in my life when I needed to focus on broad outlays of information, but didn't yet realize it, or how to do it.
Later on I developed my own method but I still go back and browse the book from time to time. A few years after my first reading, I used mind mapping to help me with a very stressful job and was able to get weeks ahead of my work there, using the extra time to learn about interesting new tech.
But beyond the principles/methods themselves, the book opened my mind to the idea that one could find ways to work with additional inspiration and productivity in the ideas & concepts space, which I built on as a foundation later as a professional trainer and coach.
The author's lecturing presence and style was also pretty unique. He was a broad thinker by nature, and was able to impart the beauty of such as quite uniquely different from the deeper sort of thinking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEokHNWf-Qg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Buzan
Interesting post idea, thanks.