So Good They Can't Ignore You
Cal Newport
Read July 2024
This is a new favorite. Most people beat themselves up for not “following your passion” or spend their days daydreaming about it. Develop good skills instead, and you’ll find the benefits of “passion” you were looking for.
Hell Yeah or No
Derek Sivers
Read August 2024
What should you do with your life? The answer is probably less. Go all-in on what you actually care about, and let the rest go. Once you know what you care about, you’re probably already better than you think.
Sum - Forty Tales from the Afterlives
David Eagleman
Read August 2024
What happens after you die? These punchy 2-3 page chapters will evoke your imagination. Meet various gods, find out you’re part of machines, and question your concepts of time.
What Got You Here Won’t Get You There
Marshall Goldsmith
Read August 2024
This is for folks who talk to other people all day, and need help doing it better. There are lots of tips to improve your acquaintance/workplace relationships. The framing of the target audience being CEOs who want to go from millions to billions didn’t resonate with me. It read like “DO be nice to people. DON’T NOT be nice to people.” However, since reading this I have indeed had to navigate some tricky chats, so perhaps I will give this another shot one day.
Thinking in Bets
Annie Duke
Read August 2024
This book is filled with lessons to avoid the traps of thinking in 0% or 100%, and think before you congratulate yourself on successes and punish yourself for failures. I’m an intermediate poker player, so I’ve internalized a lot of these lessons already.
Steal Like an Artist
Austin Kleon
Read July 2024
Not just for artists. This is a short, easy read about stealing everything you like, then making it your own.
Show Your Work!
Austin Kleon
Read August 2024
A lovely book about self-promotion. What should you share? How often? What happens when people start paying attention to you? It’s opening ideas for me, who would naturally rather stay alone and not tell anyone what I’m doing. If I ever change, this book will teach me how.
How to Live
Derek Sivers
Read August 2024
This is every self-help book ever written, condensed to around two pages each. Its ideas contradict each other. Travel, then put down roots. Isolate, then socialize. Respect the past, and live for the present, and plan for the future. The chapters you relate to the most will also make you uncomfortable. Read it.
Mastery
George Leonard
Read September 2024
The descriptions of the Dabbler, the Obsessive, and the Hacker, not on the path to mastery, will stick with me forever. This book was about my past, how I screwed up everything, and how to actually get good at something. The idea of “staying on the plateau” being healthy instead of frustrating is life-changing.
Keep Going
Austin Kleon
Read September 2024
This is a grab-bag of tips for creatives. Read through it in an evening. Make terrible art on purpose. Make art as a gift, not for upvotes/shares/likes. The tip that struck hardest was “Stop reading the news.”
The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck
Sarah Knight
Read September 2024
A loving send-up of Marie Kondo, this book helps you curate your “fuck budget”. Don’t be an asshole, but set boundaries. Set personal policies to avoid committing to things you don’t give a fuck about. Similar to Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck and Derek Sivers’ Hell Yeah or No. Pick one, or read them all, or don’t read any of them. I don’t care.
Ignore Everybody: And 39 Other Keys to Creativity
Hugh MacLeod
Read September 2024
Each chapter is only a page or two, making this easy to pick up occasionally. Do it for yourself; nobody else cares. Separate success/money/fame from creativity; keep your day job. Bob Dylan wasn’t good at singing or guitar, but lyrics. Avoid crowds that bring you down at both your day job and creative spaces.
Several Short Sentences About Writing
Verlyn Klinkenborg
Read September 2024
This took a long time to read, not because it was complex, but because it forced me to slow down and consider the sentences in the book. When we write we think of meaning instead of prose. All writing consists of sentences. Concentrate on writing a great sentence, and the rest will follow. This is heavily writing-focused, but can be applied to everything.
The Practicing Mind
Thomas M. Sterner
Read September 2024
Process, not product. Keep a lifelong learning attitude. Stay in the present. When is a flower perfect? As a seed? In full bloom? When it returns to the earth? It is always perfect.
You Look Like a Thing and I Love You
Janelle Shane
Read October 2024
This is a “Baby’s First Guide to AI”. I needed this background as someone who was sour and cynical about companies stapling AI onto every product. This is a layman’s explanation of how AI works, how to actually build and train one, and common pitfalls. AI neurons are quite pitiful. They can’t remember much for long, don’t understand the human world, don’t understand what humans want, and reflect human biases.
The Dip
Seth Godin
Read October 2024
The Dip is about one idea. Everything has “The Dip”, the period where any experience loses its intitial shine and you have to slog through it for a while. Being aware that everything has the Dip is important, as well as when you quit (before or after, not during). Some things aren’t worth going through the Dip. This is short but powerful. Compare/contrast with “the plateau” from Mastery.
Pantsdrunk (Kalsarikanni)
Miska Rantanen
Read October 2024
This is about drinking alone, in your underwear. I happen to have mastered this art long ago, but it was nice to see a worldly view on pantsdrunk. This is an excellent way to live in the present. The book adds lots of context around Finnish history and culture. It’s quite fun, if not particularly useful. Perhaps read it if you think having a few drinks alone is “sad” instead of liberating.
The Creative Act: A Way of Being
Rick Rubin
Read October 2024
A loose, wandering collection of ideas about the creative mind and process. There are some great ideas here. It is not a “How-To” guide, but a meditative exploration. He focuses on how a creator does not create art in a vacuum. “The Art” is almost a supernatural entity, and artists work in service to it, channeling a creation from the artist’s influences and environment.
The Courage to Be Disliked
Ichiro Kishimi, Fumitake Koga
Read October 2024
I thought I knew what the title was going to mean. I was wrong. This book is a live-in-the-present self-help book, but the framing is great. Based on Adlerian Psychology and presented as a Socratic dialogue, the book starts punchy with controversal takes such as “trauma doesn’t exist” and goes on to expertly explain ideas we should already know, but are hard to practice, like “mind your own business” and “it feels good to help others”. I recommend this to everyone.
The Courage to Be Happy
Ichiro Kishimi, Fumitake Koga
Read December 2024
This book finally explained the nebulous concept of “love” to me in a way I understood. Overall, I found it less engaging than the first book (...Disliked) but a few ideas pierced through. This is for fans of the first book. You can’t achieve happiness from work alone. How do you make friends? What is love? Like many of the best self-help books, the answers are obvious and simple, but perhaps difficult to execute.
The War of Art
Stephen Pressfield
Read December 2024
Break glass in case you can’t do things. This spells out the clear, universal devil haunting all of humanity, how to arm yourself like a mercenary to fight it, and how to rally your spiritual allies to keep momentum. I overall enjoyed this, though it had a touch of era-appropriate boomerisms like “mental health is bullshit, just try harder bro”. The main ideas are powerful. The idea of creativity being an outside force, being channeled by creators, is echoed in Rubin’s The Creative Act.