7th grade - Where the Winds Sleep: Man’s Future on the Moon - a Projected History”

High School: Foundation Trilogy & Earth Abides

University - les Miserables - Victor Hugo, unabridged version & Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse.

20's - Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance & the River Why

30's - The boat who wouldn't float - Farley Mowat, , and all his other books.

40's - Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman

Only because you attribute to magic what you don't understand. We already know that memes have a life cycle of their own, so if evil begets evil (we call this force corruption) then evil is a meme and therefor a thing. No need for any supernatural beings, only a complex system.

Also the very question "is evil a thing?" is academic at best. We know Hitler was evil. We know that raping babies is evil. So while it might be very difficult or even impossible to academically define evil, it is real, and you know it when you see it.

Similar concept to the question of "what is quality?" I suggest reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, if you are interested in this line of thinking. It should also be easy to find at your local library.

For this, you need to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Then, you need to read Pirsig's second book on the subject, Lila.

Neither made much sense to me, but the first is always the answer to when people start pondering what is quality, and the second is the answer to the question about what Pirsig was talking about in the first book.

But neither book really answers the question. Coming from a QA/QC background, I consider quality to be meeting the standards you put down in the first place (QA) by rigorous testing (QC).

Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance

Yoink!

Entrepreneur Reading List

1. Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble
   
2. The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
   
3. The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It
   
4. The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything
   
5. The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win
   
6. Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers
   
7. Ikigai
   
8. Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition
   
9. Bootstrap: Lessons Learned Building a Successful Company from Scratch
   
10. The Marketing Gurus: Lessons from the Best Marketing Books of All Time
    
11. Content Rich: Writing Your Way to Wealth on the Web
    
12. The Web Startup Success Guide
    
13. The Best of Guerrilla Marketing: Guerrilla Marketing Remix
    
14. From Program to Product: Turning Your Code into a Saleable Product
    
15. This Little Program Went to Market: Create, Deploy, Distribute, Market, and Sell Software and More on the Internet at Little or No Cost to You
    
16. The Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully
    
17. The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth
    
18. Startups Open Sourced: Stories to Inspire and Educate
    
19. In Search of Stupidity: Over Twenty Years of High Tech Marketing Disasters
    
20. Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup
    
21. Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business
    
22. Maximum Achievement: Strategies and Skills That Will Unlock Your Hidden Powers to Succeed
    
23. Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days
    
24. Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant
    
25. Eric Sink on the Business of Software
    
26. Words that Sell: More than 6000 Entries to Help You Promote Your Products, Services, and Ideas
    
27. Anything You Want
    
28. Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers
    
29. The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business
    
30. Tao Te Ching
    
31. Philip & Alex's Guide to Web Publishing
    
32. The Tao of Programming
    
33. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values
    
34. The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity
    
    

    Computer Science Grad School Reading List
    

    
    

35. All the Mathematics You Missed: But Need to Know for Graduate School
    
36. Introductory Linear Algebra: An Applied First Course
    
37. Introduction to Probability
    
38. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
    
39. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society
    
40. Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery
    
41. What Is This Thing Called Science?
    
42. The Art of Computer Programming
    
43. The Little Schemer
    
44. The Seasoned Schemer
    
45. Data Structures Using C and C++
    
46. Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs
    
47. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
    
48. Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming
    
49. How to Design Programs: An Introduction to Programming and Computing
    
50. A Science of Operations: Machines, Logic and the Invention of Programming
    
51. Algorithms on Strings, Trees, and Sequences: Computer Science and Computational Biology
    
52. The Computational Beauty of Nature: Computer Explorations of Fractals, Chaos, Complex Systems, and Adaptation
    
53. The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine
    
54. Computability: An Introduction to Recursive Function Theory
    
55. How To Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method
    
56. Types and Programming Languages
    
57. Computer Algebra and Symbolic Computation: Elementary Algorithms
    
58. Computer Algebra and Symbolic Computation: Mathematical Methods
    
59. Commonsense Reasoning
    
60. Using Language
    
61. Computer Vision
    
62. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
    
63. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
    
    

    Video Game Development Reading List
    

    
    

64. Game Programming Gems - 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
    
65. AI Game Programming Wisdom - 1 2 3 4
    
66. Making Games with Python and Pygame
    
67. Invent Your Own Computer Games With Python
    
68. Bit by Bit

I strongly suggest you read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, or any book on Zen for that matter.

In Japan there are many "meaningless" looking tasks, from bonsai tree trimming to flower arrangement. They even have, to what you may observe, a ridiculous way of drinking tea in the form of a ceremony.

Read up on some Zen. Hopefully that will help you understand what benefits "dedication to such a meaningless task" can bring.

Hey glad to hear it. appreciating the little things is a great way to be happy. i bough a new bath matt a few weeks ago, its really fluffy and now im happy when ever im brushing my teeth (which is twice a day) so id say it was a good investment.

I'd recommend Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance I wont say it changed my life, but i felt different after reading it.

Yeah, probably fair enough.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values