One book a week, more or less.

A world-champion poker player on making smart decisions when you do not have all the facts. Duke's core move: stop judging a choice by how it turned out and start judging it by how it was made, because a good decision can still lose and a bad one can still win. Life is poker, not chess.

Maltz was a plastic surgeon who noticed new faces didn’t fix old self-images. His 1960 case: the mind is a goal-seeking servo-mechanism steered by the self-image, so change the image and behavior follows. Willpower was never the lever.

Update 2026-08-19: I'm about halfway through the book, and a lot of it did resonate with me. Turns out, he's definitely a believer in God. What makes it unique is that he was a plastic surgeon, but he saw more than that in his patients. He saw past the modifications they wanted to the root of who they were.

Robson’s case for why smart people do stupid things: intelligence doesn’t protect against bias, it often arms it, sharp minds just build better defenses for wrong beliefs. The way out is evidence-based wisdom: intellectual humility, actively reasoning against yourself.

This was a hard read. It was intense, but it speaks to those who are deeply interested in growing their faith. The biggest lesson in this book is that you have to think critically because even very intelligent people can misguide and misinform. Well worth the read if you love reading. Shalom