Since I started my professional career, one of the advice that I got from seniors and people whom I admire, was to read books. During my school days, most of my friends were reading fiction books and taking inspiration from them I started reading fiction books but I could hardly complete those. Fast forward to professional life where I got introduced to amazing people with various backgrounds and cultural biases, non-fictional genre caught my attention. With the vast resources available at various firms where I offered my services, I started reading about everything that I could find from entrepreneurship, human psychology to evolution theory.
Recently I read Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari and it had profound impact on me. It is a book about human history and evolution. It tries to answer some of the astute questions that is there today. What are the effects of all the four revolution? Can we free ourselves from our cultural biases ? Are we really happy today compared to our ancestors? For person like me who have little knowledge of history, this book is a masterpiece for me. It really changed the way I think about people from other culture, region and ideology, the way I think about my family & friends and most importantly the way I think about myself. Some of my favorite quotes from the book.
History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.
Money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.
We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine.
Having understood(maybe partial) the human history and what shaped current generations, can we use this knowledge to build or at least shape better future for coming generations? Strongly recommended for everyone who would like to understand how history has shaped us in who we are today.