18 books that altered my reality
must-read books for curious generalists, systems thinkers and restless minds
"Your writing on "taste" made me stop and reflect quite a number of times. Thanks for the great writing." — S, a paying member
There are books you enjoy, and then there are books that actually reconfigure the way you see the world. The ones that shake a stuck perspective loose, hand you a metaphor you’ll never forget, or show up exactly when you needed them. These are those for me. The list is accessible to everyone, but I go into greater detail and share my notes and favorite anecdotes below the paywall.
What books do I need to add to my library? I don’t read much fiction so am severely lacking in that department. Please send recs!
18 books that altered my reality—
I used to think books were just containers of ideas. Something you consume, annotate, maybe reference later. But looking back at the ones that made the biggest impressions on me, I can see they did more than just inform me—they rewired me. Each of these books altered my perception of reality, and not just in isolated ways. Together, they form a kind of hidden syllabus. A map of how systems—biological, psychological, cultural, cosmic—actually work, and how we can move within them.
That’s the common thread here. Whether the subject is physics or psychology, spirituality or sports analytics, every one of these authors is pointing at the same thing: we are shaped by invisible systems, but we are also capable of stepping outside of them, sometimes even reimagining them altogether.
This isn’t a “favorites” list, per se. It’s more like a record of the shifts that genuinely left me seeing the world differently.
1. Spontaneous Evolution — Bruce Lipton & Steve Bhaerman
While this list isn’t in any particular order, I’m listing this one first because it’s my most-annotated book to date and the one I’ve revisited the most. This book made me feel like biology was less a rigid machine and more a living conversation. Lipton’s claim that our beliefs can literally shape our biology made me rethink the whole “you are your DNA” narrative I had absorbed in college. He uses the metaphor of a cell as a little antenna, constantly receiving signals from the environment. That image stuck with me—the idea that we aren’t sealed systems, but porous ones. It made me less fatalistic about “who I am” and more curious about the feedback loops I’m participating in.
2. A Universe from Nothing — Lawrence Krauss
Like many of my books, I found this one on a random thrifting adventure. It turned out being the book that opened my eyes up to quantum physics and started an obsession with the cosmos and the universe as a whole. This book turned the concept of “nothing” into something staggering. The takeaway for me was simple but profound: nothingness is unstable. The universe didn’t need a push; existence itself is the default state. It’s not that it killed God—it’s that it dethroned the idea that “nothing” is actually empty. Since reading it, whenever I feel nihilistic, I remember Krauss describing particles popping in and out of existence like champagne fizz. Even the void can’t sit still.
3. Awaken Your Genius — Ozan Varol
This is one of my most annotated books (probably second to Spontaneous Evolution). There are sticky notes and page tabs littered everywhere because it’s loaded with relatable anecdotes. Varol (a literal rocket scientist) dismantles the myth of originality by pointing out that most breakthroughs come from remixing what’s already here. One anecdote I loved was about Galileo—how his telescope wasn’t original technology, but a child’s toy he adapted. That shift from asking “what’s mine to create?” to “what can I reimagine from what already exists?” gave me permission to stop waiting for lightning-strike genius.
But the part that really stayed with me was his idea of “the magic of Teflon”—that extraordinary people operate unconstrained by other people’s opinions, or even their own past identities. He asks: what would it look like to act from imagination instead of programming? That question has been rattling around in my head ever since.
Ozan Varol has a newsletter btw—one of the only newsletters I subscribe to and actually read regularly. You can subscribe here, if you’d like.
4. Collective Illusions — Todd Rose
I chose to read this book because I was at a political crossroads. I felt like I’d always pretty much straddled the center, but the extremes on both sides were starting to look even crazier than before. I majored in “women’s studies” in college and learned quite a bit about different ideologies, so I was interested in reading about the illusions that tend to make them up. Rose describes surveys where the majority of people secretly disagreed with a social norm but pretended to agree, convinced everyone else was on board. That image of a whole society nodding in unison while silently dissenting has haunted me. It reframed cancel culture and groupthink in my mind—not as “people being stupid,” but as humans trapped in perception loops. The biggest lesson: when I feel like an outlier, I may actually be in the silent majority. This gave me courage to trust private instinct over public consensus.
5. Flow — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
If you’re not familiar with flow state, I cannot recommend this book enough. Csikszentmihalyi describes the feeling of what it’s like to be so absorbed in an activity that time dilates. His metaphor of flow as a “channel” between anxiety and boredom landed deeply. Reading it, I realized my most fulfilling work wasn’t the “productive” grind but the moments where self-consciousness dissolved completely. Flow state became less about chasing productivity and more about chasing aliveness. You can find flow pretty much anywhere: on a walk, while cooking, playing fetch with the dogs, writing, reading, a conversation with someone who stimulates you intellectually—pretty much anything where you allow yourself to be fully present. It’s one of the best feelings in the world imo.
6. Mental Immunity — Andy Norman
Norman compares bad ideas to viruses that hijack cognitive systems, and this metaphor hit hard in an age of memes, propaganda, and ideological contagion. The book gave me language for something I’d felt but couldn’t articulate: thoughts can be parasitic. His example of conspiracy theories spreading like malware made me double-check the “mental firewalls” I’d built for myself. After this, I started asking not just “is this idea true?” but “what kind of ecosystem does this idea create if it spreads?” It shifted me from passive consumer of ideas to active gatekeeper of what I allow into my own head. Our thoughts shape our reality, after all.
7. The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life — Boyd Varty
Short and sweet but not lacking in profundity. This is basically a poem disguised as a field manual. Varty writes about following lion tracks without knowing where they’ll lead, and the metaphor is obvious but beautiful: life is trackless until you follow the next sign. I read it during a period when I wanted certainty, and his reminder—“I don’t know where I’m going, but I know exactly how to get there”—felt like a slap to the face (in a good way! the kind that really wakes you up). That paradox has become a personal mantra.
8. The Origins of You — Vienna Pharaon
I’m not really into the self-helpy type books, but I LOVE this one. I’ve actually talked about it quite a bit—it’s one of the core books that I used to help me develop my DAILY 5 journaling framework. This book blends longitudinal data with personal stories, showing how childhood experiences shape trajectories without fully determining them. Everything becomes about pattern recognition, awareness, and actually naming the things that are happening in your life. Once you do that, you can begin to disrupt the feedback loops and become a conscious co-creator of your own journey.
9. The Undoing Project — Michael Lewis
Lewis tells the story of Kahneman and Tversky, two psychologists who mapped the architecture of human irrationality. But what stayed with me wasn’t just their discoveries, it was their friendship. The image of two men walking together, arguing every day, creating ideas bigger than either could alone, made me rethink collaboration. It made me wonder, what kind of thinking is only possible when two people decide to collide relentlessly? And what would the world look like if they never would have collaborated? The book showed me irrationality is predictable, but it also showed me love—for ideas, for each other—can undo entire paradigms. I get into this more below, but this book also nurtured my relationship with data. The only story is about how Daryl Morey revolutionized the NBA simply by bringing in his own data and frameworks. He didn’t ask permission, he just implemented—and then everyone else followed. This is when I really began brushing up against the idea of “you can just do things.”
10. The Untethered Soul — Michael Singer
Before you cringe, I will admit, this one is a bit hokey. It feels like something people read after they just did their first round of Burning Man. But during the pandemic, being locked inside for long periods of time, I started to read things that I would have overlooked before (and I’m so glad I read this one!) Singer talks about the voice in your head like a roommate, and that metaphor alone reframed my relationship with thought. Once you see your inner chatter as a separate character—nagging, neurotic, occasionally hilarious—you stop treating it like gospel. It taught me detachment not as coldness, but as space: space between me and the version of me that lives in my mind.
11. The Creative Act — Rick Rubin
This book isn’t linear—it’s fragments, aphorisms, wide margins. It feels more like poetry. I treated it like a sketchbook, underlining whole pages, doodling beside his lines. Rubin’s reminder that art isn’t about output but about tuning—being in frequency with what wants to emerge—was liberating. He compares the artist to an antenna, which echoed Lipton’s cell metaphor from years earlier. Reading it, I realized creativity isn’t about inventing from scratch but about listening more closely while living and creating in alignment with our most authentic selves. This book also sparked most of the ideas for my piece on how taste is the new intelligence.
12. The Happiness Hypothesis — Jonathan Haidt
Haidt’s metaphor of the rider and the elephant hit me like a thunderbolt. Though, I’m assuming it hits most people this way, which explains why it’s the cover image for the book lol. The conscious mind (the rider) thinks it’s in charge, but the unconscious (the elephant) decides where we actually go. This explained years of failed self-discipline: the rider can yank the reins all day, but if the elephant is spooked, forget it. His breakdown of the four divisions of mind also helped me think of inner conflict less as failure and more as evidence that “I” is plural.
13. The Myth of Normal — Gabor Maté
Maté argues that what we call “normal” in modern society—chronic stress, disconnection, toxic workplaces—is actually pathological. Reading it reframed culture itself as sick. One anecdote about how illness spikes when people suppress authenticity hit me hard: the idea that betraying the self has physiological costs. Since then, I’ve become suspicious of the word normal. Often, it’s just shorthand for “what most people tolerate.”
14. Project Hail Mary — Andy Weir
Ok, so I admittedly don’t read much fiction, but this was recommended to me by a friend who knew I was becoming obsessed with physics a few summers ago. Needless to say, I ended up finishing it in 2 sittings. I didn’t think a sci-fi novel could gut-punch me with emotion, but Rocky (the alien) did. The way Weir built a friendship across species—two beings who can’t breathe the same air, yet find common language—was beautiful. It helped me see fiction as a lab for empathy. The book also made me geek out about problem-solving under constraint. And now I’m impatiently waiting for Ryan Gosling to play Ryland Grace in the movie (to be released in 2026, eeeeeek!!!)
15. Range — David Epstein
This was the book that let me breathe again by giving me permission I didn’t know I needed. I’d always felt scattered bc I tend to read across disciplines, or chase curiosities instead of niches, but Epstein argues generalists thrive in complex systems precisely because they cross-pollinate ideas. His Tiger Woods vs. Roger Federer analogy—specialist vs. generalist—was a turning point. Range helped me turn my perceived “lack of focus” into a feature.
16. Leap to Wholeness — Sky Nelson-Isaacs
This book introduced me to one of my favorite concepts—synchronicity—in a way that bridged Jungian psychology with modern physics. Nelson-Isaacs compares meaningful coincidences to threads of a larger tapestry, which are visible only when you step back. I read this during a period when I was newly obsessed with quantum physics, and this book gave me language for experiences that felt both irrational and deeply ordered. It planted the seed that maybe reality itself has layers of coherence we can’t fully measure.
17. Joy’s Way — W. Brugh Joy
This is another book I found while thrifting back in 2021 that looked completely “woo woo,” but I was in a weird place (as I often am) so I decided to give it a shot. It’s messy, mystical, occasionally absurd, but I think that’s what eventually cracked me open. Joy mixes energy medicine, psychology, and spirituality in a way that felt destabilizing at first. His idea that transformation requires surrender into uncertainty was both terrifying and freeing. Reading it, I realized that dismissing the “woo woo” too quickly is its own form of dogma. This book expanded my threshold for ambiguity in unexpected ways.
18. The Road Less Traveled — M. Scott Peck
This one is deceptively simple: discipline, responsibility, love as action. But Peck’s insistence that growth is painful hit differently when I first read it. He talks about love not as a feeling but as sustained attention to another’s growth. This book was originally published in 1978 so I felt like it cut through so much of the modern cultural fluff. It reframed love for me not as chemistry, but as practice.
I go into more detail on each below. The passages that hooked me, the frameworks I actually use, the metaphors I love to quote, and the ways these books actually altered my worldview. If you find value in what I share, I hope you’ll consider supporting my work by becoming a paid reader.
