Ankur Yadav

bookshelf

Prince of Persia

Jordan Mechner

Currently Reading

Kafka on the Shore

Haruki Murakami

"And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about"

The Alchemist

Paulo Coehlo

"What is the world's greatest lie?" the little boy asks.
The old man replies, "It's this: that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what's happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That's the world's greatest lie”

The Fountainhead

Ayn Rand

“I hate incompetence. I think it’s probably the only thing I do hate. But it didn’t make me want to rule people. Nor to teach them anything. It made me want to do my own work in my own way and let myself be torn to pieces if necessary.”

To kill a Mockingbird

Harper Lee

"There are just some kind of men who—who’re so busy worrying about the next world they’ve never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results"

Moth Smoke

Mohsin Hamid

"Many boys, probably most boys, have a first love before they fall in love with a woman. It begins the moment two boys realize they'd die for one another, that each cares more for the other than he does for himself, and it lasts usually until a second love comes on the scene, because most hearts aren't big enough to love more than one person like that."

Homo Sapiens

Yuval Noah Harari

"Happiness does not really depend on objective conditions of either wealth, health or even community. Rather, it depends on the correlation between objective conditions and subjective expectations"

Homo Deus

Yuval Noah Harari

"Every day millions of people decide to grant their smartphone a bit more control over their lives or try a new and more effective antidepressant drug. In pursuit of health, happiness and power, humans will gradually change first one of their features and then another, and another, until they will no longer be human"

The Kite Runner

Khalid Hosseini

"With me as the glaring exception, my father molded the world around him to his liking. The problem, of course, was that Baba saw the world in black and white. And he got to decide what was black and what was white. You can’t love a person who lives that way without fearing him too. Maybe even hating him a little"

Creative Selection

Ken Kocienda

"Over time, I came to the conclusion that designing an excellent user experience was as much about preventing negative experiences as facilitating positive ones. It couldn’t be an even trade-off either. Great products make people happy almost all the time and do the opposite rarely, if at all"

Exit West

Mohsin Hamid

"It might seem odd that in cities teetering at the edge of the abyss young people still go to class. In this case, an evening class on corporate identity and product branding but that is the way of things, with cities as with life, for one moment we are pottering about our errands as usual, and the next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does"

My Turn

Johan Cruyff

"I learned to think about how to turn a disadvantage into an advantage"

Steal like an artist

Austin Kleon

Don’t throw any of yourself away. Don’t worry about a grand scheme or unified vision for your work. Don’t worry about unity, what unifies your work is the fact that you made it. One day, you’ll look back and it will all make sense

Show your work

Austin Kleon

"Human beings want to know where things come from, how they were made, and who made them. The stories you tell about the work you do have a huge effect on how people feel and what they understand about your work, and how people feel and what they understand about your work affects how they value it"

Steve Jobs

Walter Isaacson

"If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there's room to hear more subtle things - that's when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before. It's a discipline; you have to practice it.”