Author: edwinsetiadi

“Limitless: Upgrade your brain, learn anything faster, and unlock your exceptional life” by Jim Kwik

This book is like the greatest hits of the brilliant Kwik Brain podcast episodes. It provides so many practical tools from various well-known experts, combined with Jim Kwik’s own teaching method that perfectly underlines the premise that everything is indeed trainable.

It covers Naveen Jain’s exponential thinking, Cal Newport’s digital minimalism, and Edward de Bono’s six thinking hats. It analyses Carol Dweck’s fixed vs growth mindset, Simon Sinek’s purpose behind every action, Marshall Goldsmith’s environmental triggers, and referenced some of the best minds on habits such as Charles Duhigg, BJ Fogg, and James Clear.

The book also explores the depth and range of human capabilities, from Steven Kotler’s findings on limitless human physical capabilities to Joshua Foer’s incredible discovery on the power of memory, while at the same time dismantles the limiting beliefs, habits, and myths that have been installed in our brain since we were little.

All of that, and I haven’t even mentioned the gems of the book yet: the practical tools to help us focus (such as the podomoro technique), learning how to speed read, and how to train ourselves a mnemonic technique to remember everything easily.

All in all, after reading the book you will fully understand that 1. Intelligence is not fixed 2. We don’t only use 10% of our brain’s capacity 3. Mistakes are not failures 4. Knowledge is POTENTIAL power 5. Learning new things is actually not that difficult 6. The criticism of other people doesn’t matter that much 7. Genius is not born, but it’s trainable.

In short, if you ever going to read just one book on personal-development, this is definitely the go-to book.

“Religion for Atheists: a non-believer’s guide to the uses of religion” by Alain de Botton

Reading Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto doesn’t make me a socialist. Likewise, reading a book on atheism doesn’t instantly turn me into an atheist. In fact, by reading Marxism I learned to understand their worldview and how they think, while simultaneously saw their many flaws that prompted me to be grateful that I am not living in a socialist country.

Now, while I understand atheism and respect their private views, I do not tolerate anti-theism, the extremist idea that all religion are rotten to the core, have no use for humanity, only bring pain and destructions, and thus they all need to be destroyed. This hardliner view are no different than religious fundamentalists who want to destroy everyone else who doesn’t subscribe to their particular narrow view. Richard Dawkins is a prominent extremist example, alongside the ever hypocritical Sam Harris.

But alternatively, for every Spanish inquisition there’s Mother Teresa. For every extreme wahhabi there’s a modern Syafi’i. For every Wirathu, there’s Dalai Lama. And for every Richard Dawkins? There’s Alain de Botton.

De Botton is a contemporary philosopher who champions the concept of atheism 2.0, an idea that believe religion are man made but they were created for a good reason. It is a believe that all the myths, the principles, and the rituals in religion serve as fundamental pillars of humanity. And with this thesis in mind atheism 2.0 is asking one simple question: if religion is man made but still very important for humans and our societies, what can we learn from them?

The answer is this brilliant book, a thorough anatomy of what constrict as a religion. As de Botton points out, religion is excellent in ensuring the good values and principles in their respective holy books to be read and reread, through scheduled reviews, through regular masses, through songs, poetry, reenactment, through the way we eat, drink tea, do walking meditation, etc.

The book also covers what the true purpose of certain rituals were (and are) really for. It explains the psychological objectives of traditions, including plenty of past religious rituals that I didn’t know exists, such as the bizarre Feast of Fools. And when you get angry, or sad, or anxious, or broken? Religion have some mechanism for coping with those emotions, which de Botton argues can be immensely useful tools for seculars.

In the end, with all of these wealth of information on religion, this book could easily have a different title: the best lessons from religion. It’s funny how I can learn so much about various different religions from an atheist book.

Di tengah-tengah Black Lives Matter, tiba-tiba muncul Papua Lives Matter. Ok fair enough, karena ini emang masalah serius.

Tapi kenapa nggak ada NTT Lives Matter, Ambon Lives Matter yang juga sering kena rasisme? Kenapa bukan Minoritas Agama Lives Matter atau LGBT Indonesia Lives Matter yang juga sering kena diskriminasi?

Kalo ini emang beneran tentang universal human rights, kenapa sedikit sekali Palestine Lives Matters atau Rohingya Lives Matters yang ikutan diselipin ditengah-tengah emosi kita tentang George Floyd?

Just be careful, because when it comes to our beloved West Papua it’s never straight forward.

“God: A human history” by Reza Aslan

You know that scene at the Voice when a singer had only begun to sing few seconds and all 4 judges already pressing their button? Yeah this book is one of those rare ones that becomes instant 5 stars for me, just by reading few early paragraphs at the introduction.

The book gives a whole new understanding of pantheism, the idea that God does exist but is much bigger than us humans can ever imagine, that God is the universe and everything in it, and that God as we know it in our respective religions is nothing more than a limited creation of our imagination.

That idea of a loving God? That’s a human characteristic. A jealous God? Also a human characteristic. In fact all images of God from fatherly love to His wrath are all images of human characteristics, impulses, desires, and instincts, all of which are enhanced to our idea of a perfection. In other words, our image of God is actually a super-human reflection of us.

And the book analyses exactly that, the fascinating evolution of the image of God from a human perspective, from the birth of animism to thousands of polytheism deities to the many millennia of developments that left us with only one true God today. It is surprising to read the story about Adam and Eve, for example, only to find out that it’s Homo Sapiens version of Adam and Eve. That in the beginning there was a big bang and millions of years of evolutionary process of the Earth. That it’s not the Garden of Eden but Gobleki Tepe and the birth of farming. Yes, the book is grounded in science and heavy on archaeological findings, which makes it unique as a book about religion.

Perhaps most fascinating for me is the thesis that Moses introduced Yahweh (the supreme deity of Midian, where his father in law was a Midianite priest) to the Israelite (a worshiper of the supreme deity of El or Elohim), which in a way answers the few questions I had when reading the Exodus. “El”, according to the author Reza Aslan, is referred in the English Bible as “God”, while “Yahweh” is referred in the English Bible as “Lord.” In fact, the very word Isra-el actually means “El perseveres”. And thus that famous scene of Israelite false worshiping a statue of a golden calf? Golden calf is the primary symbol of El, which indicates that they were trying to get back to worship their original deity.

But all of this frictions came to rest when after they settled in the Promised Land the Israelite finally accepted Yahweh as one of their deities, as highlighted in Deuteronomy 32:8-9. And both deities were later merged into one as Yahweh-Elohim or Lord God in the English Bible, as first appeared in Joshua 7:19. As Aslan remarked, “[a]nd as happened in Babylon, Assyria, Egypt, and elsewhere, as the nature of the rule of men on earth changed, so, too, did the rule of the gods in heaven to match; in other words, politicomorphism.”

Politicomorphism is what prompted the Romans, the Greeks, the Egyptians, and the Mesopotamians to deifying their powerful leaders into a god-man status. It’s what escalated the Hindu god Shiva from obscurity into one of the Trimurti. It was what created many different Christian Gnostic sects before the theological debate being settled in the council of Nicea (itself another politicomorphism action by Roman Emperor Constantine).

As Aslan further remark, “[t]he role of human mediator to the gods naturally fell to the gods’ counterparts on earth—primarily kings, pharaohs, and emperors, but also priests and prophets, mystics and messiahs. We saw how this process took shape in ancient Mesopotamia, with the consolidation of power into the hands of an autocratic few who wielded the power of the divine. And, as in Mesopotamia, once the need for a human mediator is accepted, it is a short step to deifying the mediator. After all, it makes a certain amount of sense to expect the person acting as the bridge between humans and the divine to also be divine (or at least semidivine).”

This, according to the book, is what happened with the role of Jesus Christ, thanks to the curious central role of a religious scholar named Marcion of Sinope, that set up the foundations of the New Testaments and prompted the new sect of Christianity to broke off from Judaism. And the long and difficult road from the days of Marcion to the council of Nicea was nothing short of extraordinary, where disagreements between many sub-sects of Christianity (from Docetism, Ebionites, to dynamism, and adoptionism) was finally settled with the trinity of Father (Yahweh), Son (Jesus Christ), and the Holy Ghost (the divine spirit of God in the world).

Moreover, probably the most difficult thesis for me to digest is the evolution of “Allah”, which hit a little closer to home. While Muslims believe in the monotheistic manner that there are no other god than God (or Allah), in ancient polytheistic Arab “Allah” was actually seen as a material being who, like Zeus, had sired both sons and daughters. As Aslan elaborates, “[i]ndeed, Allah’s three daughters—Allat, who was associated with the Greek goddess Athena; Manat, who was likely connected with the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar; and al-Uzza, who was the Arab equivalent of Aphrodite—played a central role in ancient Arab spirituality as Allah’s intermediaries.” But then, as it always does, politicomorphism occurred through the most extraordinary story possible.

As you can probably guessed, this book is not for everyone. Nothing is more unsettling for religious devotees to see their God being dismantled into an evolving folklore. But that is not the objective of this book, as Aslan himself respectively suggest that God, in the pantheistic way, is actually a reflection of every single one of these human-made images. Hence, the book is not attempting to disprove the existence of God, but on the contrary it is showing that God lives through all of these deities.

In Kindle, the book finishes at 54% mark, with the remaining of the book largely serves as the massive bibliography and notes sections. This tells a lot about the amount of research and evidences that Aslan, the religious scholar, has gathered for this one-in-a-million book. 5 stars from the beginning to the end.

“Mindset: Changing the way you think to fulfil your potential” by Carol Dweck

If I had to assemble 10 books to serve as the manual to create a superhuman, this book would be one of them. I wasn’t aware before that how the simple concept of fixed mindset vs growth mindset could explain a lot about someone’s character and behaviour. And how relatively straight forward it is to change them, for better and for worse. An absolute vital book to read.

“Everything is F*cked: A book about hope” by Mark Manson

This book is just f*cking awesome. It’s fresh, brutally honest, a wee bit insane, but with serious points perfectly made through humor and shenanigans. It’s like learning (a lot) from South Park episodes all over again.

So what’s this book really about? It covers all the modern day problems that we now face as a global society, everything from ideological polarizations to freakin rise of Artificial Intelligence to hyper sensitive political correctness. Heck, he even teaches us how to start a religious cult. From scratch. And (of course) for a good reason.

Everything is f*cked, he says. But after I finish reading this book, holy crap this is apparently a good thing.

“The Smartest Kids in the World: And how they got that way” by Amanda Ripley

Came for yet another parenting book, only to found out that this is not that kind of book, but stayed for the comparative study of education system in different parts of the world.

It becomes very obviously clear after reading this book that why Finland has the best education in the world, why South Korean nation behave the way they behave, and why America is lagging behind.

The template and the analogies can also be applied in many other countries like why Taiwan is advancing, why many Singaporeans are burning out like in South Korea, and why the poorest countries stay poor.

And funnily enough, from all the lessons discovered from this book, I got to learn how to best teach my kids afterall.

“The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down: How to be calm in a busy world” by Haemin Sunim

There’s arguably no better book to read right now, in this age of stay at home lockdown 2020, than this book. It refreshes us of all the simple values and good principles that may have been lost in the hectic world, which could serve us as the soothing basis for our calmness and sanity in this pandemic scare. It’s very heartwarming and powerful at the same time.

“The Beggar King and the Secret of Happiness: A true story” by Joel Ben Izzy

Every once in a while there comes a book that is totally differrent from the rest. A book that will leave a profound impression on you and that can change your perspectives on life. This is one of those books.

I first heard about this book when Maria Sharapova mentions it as her most favourite. And I can immediately see why, from the moment I read the first few pages.

It is so beautifully written, with so many fascinating stories from around the globe serve as the context that fits the main narrative of the writer’s unbelievable story.

All the shock, anger, serenity, inner struggle, relationship difficulties are all very real, very human and honest, while the way he experiences lost love and how he copes with deaths, in particular, are very moving and sobering.

But the icying on the cake for me is the way he stitch up all of these stories into one exciting journey. The book is filled with so much emotional roller coasters and out-of-the-world antics, that if this is a movie it would be akin to Big Fish or Forrest Gump.

It easily becomes one of my favourites too.

“Run Fast: How to beat your best time, every time” by Hal Higdon

The best book on running that I’ve read so far. It cuts to the chase, packed with vital understanding and actionable information, and with world class training guides straight from the running legend himself. It’s not an exaggeration to say that after reading this book, I upgraded more than twice my previous running abilities. An absolute must read for every runners.