New Series: Mutual Improvement Club

I've been reading a number of books in the general field of "mutual improvement" lately.  A few of them include: Influence, Introduction to Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Dianetics, Strangers to Ourselves, How To Solve It, The Art of Living, What We Believe But Cannot Prove, The Millionaire Course, etc.  My coworkers at the Robot Co-op have been reading a different subset of books on the same topics.  From math to psychology to cults to Buddhism to science, they span across a number of ideas and topics, but I can't help but believe that there's a strong common thread between them all.

I'm going to attempt to announce a new book or movie or documentary or hero every month that is in some way related to the ambiguous thesis of this blog: that by combining ideas from different fields we can make progress towards a richer understanding of ourselves, our peers, our culture, and the world, with the ultimate goal of using that understanding (whether logical or emotional) to engage with live more richly.  It's difficult to talk about these things without sounding really cheesy, so another one of my goals is to keep the tone and vocabulary of these discussions as unpretentious and concrete as possible.  Staying grounded in the real and tangible is something I'm going to have to remind myself to do often.

Anyone that wants to read or tag along is welcome.  I'll announce the first book in this series tomorrow.

Comments

[Frankie Roberto]

I'm interested in whether you take the idea of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) seriously. As someone who studied linguistics as an accepted scientific and academic pursuit of understanding, NLP seems to me to be a little cranky. But is this my own academic bias?

[Erik Benson]

Hey Frankie, I've only read part of one book on NLP (Intro to NLP), so your understanding of it is probably more advanced than my own, but from what I've read so far I do think NLP has some interesting insights. I'll try to be more articulate about at some point soon.

Just curiously, what do you find cranky about it? As far as I can tell, it seems to be somewhat academic as well.