Borsalino Test #8: Books I read in 2020
Readers,
I collected below a mosaic of scattered quotes, insights and learnings from my readings in 2020. As it’s customary with lists, please have at it - it’s your own non-fiction buffet. Hopefully you’ll find some good inspiration for your next read.
Here the complete selection of books in an easy to read format. I am also working on my 2021 reading list in these very days - so don’t be shy and hit me up if you’d like some additional recommendations.
As always, you can read my essays here.
Michele
Books I read in 2020
Slices and Lumps: Division and Aggregation in Law and Life by Lee Anne Fennell
Spare a moment to think through things that might bring you more benefit if they sliced up differently. Perhaps you would prefer a job that involves a third less work and a third less pay, or a home that is half its size except when you are entertaining.
Focus on things that arrive in fragments but hold almost no value to you if not assembled. Votes to create political results. The bits of extra space between parallel-parked cars that you wish you could aggregate together to create a space large enough for your car. Getting part of the way there doesn’t always get you a proportionate share of the total benefit. Configuration is power.
The subtle art of not giving a fuck by Mark Manson
Most of us struggle throughout our lives by giving too many fucks in situations where fucks do not deserve to be given. We give a fuck about the rude gas station attendant who gave us too many nickels. We give a fuck when our coworkers don’t bother asking us about our awesome weekend. We give a fuck when it’s raining and we were supposed to go jogging in the morning.
Fucks given everywhere. Strewn about like seeds in mother-fucking spring time. And for what purpose? For what reason? Convenience? Easy comforts? A pat on the fucking back maybe?
When we give too many fucks, when we choose to give a fuck about everything, we feel as though we are perpetually entitled to feel comfortable and happy at all times. That’s when life fucks us.
Aware: The Science and Practice of Presence by Daniel J. Siegel
We are often led to believe that we are each alone. This not only causes suffering, but also is inaccurate. We are inherently social creatures and are deeply connected to one another. Our compassionate connections with others powerfully shape our mind and identity. When we share ourselves with others we all benefit. Laughter among friends, for example, helps us be in the present moment, be open to learning, and mitigates suffering.
Experiences of trauma, especially in early life, can shape how people behave and the ways in which regions of their brain communicate. Working to heal the effects of trauma and finding meaning in life gives the individual renewed personal strength and also can move the brain to become more integrated. Releasing the brain from its typical conscious experiences, thinking more freely, and striving for integration within ourselves and with other people can be incredibly therapeutic.
Guns Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
Some environments provide more starting materials and more favorable conditions for utilizing inventions and building societies than other environments. This is particularly notable in the rise of European peoples, which occurred because of environmental factors and not because of biological differences. There are four primary reasons Europeans rose to power and conquered the natives of North and South America, and not the other way around:
The continental differences in the plants and animals available for domestication, which led to more food and larger populations in Europe and Asia
The rate of diffusion of agriculture, technology and innovation due to the geographic orientation of Europe and Asia (east-west) compared to the Americas (north-south)
The ease of intercontinental diffusion between Europe, Asia, and Africa
The differences in continental size, which led to differences in total population size and technology diffusion
Metahuman: Unleashing your infinite potential by Deepak Chopra
Human constructs are very necessary to have, but we forget that they are constructs, that money is a construct, latitude and longitude is a construct, that nation-states are human constructs. These constructs should not wholly define our experience in this world. Going beyond is how a person decides if life is meaningful enough. When you want more than your life is giving you, it’s not your brain that craves more meaning, nor is it the everyday person going about the routine business of life.
Start with a very simple contemplative meditation practice whether it’s mindfulness, body awareness, awareness of perceptual experience or awareness of your mental space. Also, a little bit of contemplative inquiry: “Who am I?” “What do I want from my life?” “What is my purpose?” “What am I grateful for?” When people start a journey of self-inquiry, it automatically leads to deeper insight.
The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Genes are the basic unit of hereditary information. They are the language that nature uses to build, maintain, and repair organisms. Genes encode chemical messages to build proteins that ultimately enable form and function. Physical characteristics of an organism are determined by both its genetics and its environment.
Genes influence form, function, and fate, but these influences typically do not occur in a one-to-one manner. Most human attributes are the consequence of more than one gene; many are the result of collaborations between genes, environments, and chance
One of the beautiful mysteries of nature is that genes produce variants and mutants in each generation. This leads to genetic diversity and enables the evolution of species over time. Mutations are not “abnormal” — they are just statistical variations.
The hard thing about hard things by Ben Horowitz
The hard thing isn’t setting a big, hairy, audacious goal. The hard thing is laying people off when you miss the big goal. The hard thing isn’t hiring great people. The hard thing is when those “great people” develop a sense of entitlement and start demanding unreasonable things. The hard thing isn’t setting up an organizational chart. The hard thing is getting people to communicate within the organization that you just designed. The hard thing isn’t dreaming big. The hard thing is waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat when the dream turns into a nightmare.
How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler
The goal of reading determines how you read. Reading the latest Danielle Steel novel is not the same as reading Plato. If you’re reading for entertainment or information, you’re going to read a lot differently (and likely different material) than reading to increase understanding. While many people are proficient in reading for information and entertainment, few improve their ability to read for knowledge. Reading is all about asking the right questions in the right order and seeking answers. There are four main questions you need to ask of every book:
What is this book about?
What is being said in detail, and how?
Is this book true in whole or in part?
What of it?
Stillness is the key by Ryan Holiday
The single biggest problem of senior leadership in the Information Age it’s lack of reflection. Solitude allows you to reflect while others are reacting. Bill Gates schedules “think weeks” where he goes off by himself and just reads and thinks. Randall Stutman, who for decades has been the behind-the-scenes advisor for many of the biggest CEOs and leaders on Wall Street, once studied how several hundred senior executives of major corporations recharged in their downtime. The answers were things like swimming, sailing, long-distance cycling, listening quietly to classical music, scuba diving, riding motorcycles, and fly fishing. All these activities, he noticed, had one thing in common: an absence of voices. If you’re surrounded by others constantly, you’re likely to think and act as they do. To be original, you have to spend time alone. To have peace, you need solitude too.
Angel: How to Invest in Technology Startups by Jason Calacanis
The best angels in the world have four qualities giving them the ability to:
Money — write a check
Time — jam out with the founders about important issues
Network — provide customer and investor introductions
Expertise — give actionable advice that saves the founders time and money — or keeps them from making mistakes
The job as an angel investor is to block out the haters, doubters, and small thinkers, because if you think small you’ll be small. It’s better for founders to fail at a big goal than succeed at a small one.
Everything Is Workable: A Zen Approach to Conflict Resolution by Diane Musho Hamilton
Few people would say they like conflict. Most of us try like heck to avoid it. If we take up meditation practice, we often expect that to make conflict go away. But it never does. We still disagree with each other, argue, get hurt, say things we didn’t mean to say. It’s at the very least inconvenient. It’s often also destructive. We’re stuck with conflict as long as we’re human beings with jobs, relationships, or dry cleaning to be picked up.
Meditation practice enables us to touch the inner source of clarity, understanding, compassion, and peace–yet the equanimity that we cultivate on the cushion does not always translate into skillfulness in the way we handle conflict in our personal lives.
Astrophysics for people in a hurry by Neil DeGrasse Tyson
Ordinary matter is what we are all made of. It has gravity and interacts with light. Dark matter is a mysterious substance that has gravity but does not interact with light in any known way. Dark energy is a mysterious pressure in the vacuum of space that acts in the opposite direction of gravity, forcing the universe to expand faster than it otherwise would.
Aided by modern detectors, and modern theories, we have probed our cosmic countryside and revealed all manner of hard-to-detect things: dwarf galaxies, runaway stars, runaway stars that explode, million-degree X-ray-emitting gas, dark matter, faint blue galaxies, ubiquitous gas clouds, super-duper high-energy charged particles, and the mysterious quantum vacuum energy.
The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life by David Brooks
Nietzsche noted that he who has a “why” to live can endure any “how.” In a world of radical individuality, it is more than idealistic to expect that all people will be able to find a “why”. It is, in fact, irrational and impossible: if two “whys” contradict each other, either one person will end up without it, or a conflict will inevitably erupt, the very thing we tried to axiomatically stop from the beginning.
Nobody quite knows where they stand with one another. Everybody is pretty sure that other people are doing life better. Comparison is the robber of joy. Instead of living the committed purpose-driven life of togetherness, most of us are living the unfulfilling and detached Instagram life of loneliness.
Tools of Titans: Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Tim Ferris
17 Questions to Change Your Life
What if I did the opposite for 48 hours
What do I spend a silly amount of money on? Can I scratch my own itch?
What would I do/have/be if I had $10m? What’s my real TMI?
What are the worst things that could happen? Could I get back here?
If I could only work 2 hours per week on my business, what would I do?
What if I let them make decisions up to $100, $500, $1,000?
What’s the least crowded channel?
What if I couldn’t pitch my product directly?
What if I created my own real world MBA?
Do I need to make it back the way I lost it?
What if I could only subtract to solve the problem?
What could I put in place to go off the grid for 4+ weeks?
Am I hunting antelope or field mice?
Could it be that everything is fine and complete as it is?
What would this look like if it were easy?
How can I throw money at the problem? How can I waste money to improve my life?
No hurry, no pause
The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph by Ryan Holiday
Perception is how we see and understand what occurs around us—and what we decide those events will mean. Our perceptions can be a source of strength or of great weakness. If we are emotional, subjective and shortsighted, we only add to our troubles. To prevent becoming overwhelmed by the world around us, we must, as the ancients practiced, learn how to limit our passions and their control over our lives.
It takes skill and discipline to bat away the pests of bad perceptions, to separate reliable signals from deceptive ones, to filter out prejudice, expectation, and fear. But it’s worth it, for what’s left is truth. While others are excited or afraid, we will remain calm and imperturbable. We will see things simply and straightforwardly, as they truly are—neither good nor bad. This will be an incredible advantage for us in the fight against obstacles.
The Science of Trust: Emotional Attunement for Couples by John M. Gottman
Our brains are curious places. One curious thing is that unresolved issues – things that we don’t fully process – are given more attention and have more magnitude of thought than our resolved issues. This is called the “Zeigarnik effect”. The problem is that this can sometimes draw couples into a stream of negative conversations because all relationships have issues that cannot be resolved. Instead issues must be managed and dialogued to prevent the accidental development of gridlock.
Gridlock is that state much like a Chinese finger trap where both fingers are stuck and it’s very hard to get free. The more that you pull the fingers back the more challenging it becomes to break free. Couples in gridlock vilify one another. Instead of accepting that we’re both good people with different perspectives, fundamental attribution error creeps in and we believe the worst of our partner.
The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance by Josh Waitzkin
When nothing exciting is going on, we might get bored, distracted, separated from the moment. So we look for new entertainment, surf channels, flip through magazines. If caught in these rhythms, we are like tiny current-bound surface fish, floating along a two-dimensional world without any sense for the gorgeous abyss below. When these societally induced tendencies translate into the learning process, they have devastating effects.
The secret is that everything is always on the line. The more present we are at practice, the more present we will be in competition, in the boardroom, at the exam, the operating table, the big stage. If we have any hope of attaining excellence, let alone of showing what we’ve got under pressure, we have to be prepared by a lifestyle of reinforcement. Presence must be like breathing.
The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness by Morgan Housel
Luck and risk are both the reality that every outcome in life is guided by forces other than individual effort. They are so similar that you can’t believe in one without equally respecting the other. They both happen because the world is too complex to allow 100% of your actions to dictate 100% of your outcomes. They are driven by the same thing: You are one person in a game with seven billion other people and infinite moving parts. The accidental impact of actions outside of your control can be more consequential than the ones you consciously take.
It’s not whether you’re right or wrong that’s important, but how much money you make when you’re right and how much you lose when you’re wrong. You can be wrong half the time and still make a fortune.
The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are by Alan Watts
Our normal sensation of self is a hoax, or, at best, a temporary role that we are playing, or have been conned into playing — with our own tacit consent, just as every hypnotized person is basically willing to be hypnotized. The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego.
To Know IT you must understand that you cannot understand it. This sounds like epistemological modesty. The universe is at root a magical illusion and a fabulous game… there is never anything to be gained —through the zest of the game is to pretend that there is. Anyone who brags about knowing this doesn’t understand it, for he is only using the theory as a trick to maintain his illusion of separateness.
The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness by Eric Jorgenson
You always have three options: you can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it. What is not a good option is to sit around wishing you would change it but not changing it, wishing you could leave it but not leaving it and not accepting it. That struggle or aversion is responsible for most of our misery.
An old definition was "freedom to." Freedom to do anything I want. Freedom to do whatever I feel like, whenever I feel like. A better freedom to look for is internal freedom. It's “freedom from." Freedom from reaction. Freedom from feeling angry. Freedom from being sad. Freedom from being forced to do things. I'm looking for "freedom from," internally and externally.
The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Tim Ferriss
Being able to quit things that don’t work is integral to being a winner. Rebuttals for the most common phobias of quitting:
Quitting is permanent. Use fear-setting to examine how you could pick up your chosen career track or start another company at a later point.
I won’t be able to pay the bills. It isn’t hard to eliminate most expenses temporarily and live on savings for a brief period.
Health insurance and retirement accounts will disappear. You can have identical medical coverage for a few hundred dollars per month. It’s easy to transfer your 401(k).
It will ruin my resume. Do something interesting and make them jealous
Answer to why you took a break or left your previous job: “I had a once-in-a-lifetime chance to do [exotic and envy-producing experience] and couldn’t turn it down. I figured that, with [20–40] years of work to go, what’s the rush?”
The Tao of Charlie Munger by David Clark
An investor is far, far better off buying business with exceptional business economics working in its favour. And then holding this business for many years. Not engaging in a lot of buying and selling trying to anticipate market trends.
The beauty of compound interest is that it puts time in the markets to work. £1 Million invested with a 4% compound growth rate would, after 20 years, grow into a sum of £2,191,123
But that same £1 Million invested with a 7% compound growth would be worth £3,869,684 after 20 years. Totally astonishing!
Hell yeah or no: what’s worth doing by Derek Sivers
In a society where we are constantly adding things (adding experiences and projects to our resume, adding possessions to our home, adding dollars to our bank accounts), it is a good reminder to think about where we can, in our lives, subtract to make us happier.
For example, the minimalist or essentialist movement and getting rid of things that you really do not use or ‘bring you joy’. Or fasting to reduce the food you eat for health benefits. Or work (delegating, eliminating) so that you are really focused on the work that truly matters or that you enjoy.
Of Anger by Seneca
Anger, for the Stoics, is not an impulsive, instinctive reaction. It is, rather, the cognitive assent that such initial reactions to the offending action or words are in fact justified. Anger, that is, is best understood as a form of judgment, either implicit or explicit, that we apply to externals and to our initial, instinctive reaction to such externals. We do not have control over our initial reaction, but we do have control over the subsequent cognitive judgment.
What anger is has been sufficiently explained. The difference between it and irascibility is evident: it is the same as that between a drunken man and a drunkard; between a frightened man and a coward. It is both possible for an angry man not to be irascible, and for an irascible man sometimes not to be angry.
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