My 2020 Reading Journey
Well what a year…
Someone with a greater literary sense will probably have a useful quote I can paste in here sometime in the future that will succinctly summarize the highs and lows of 2020. But in the typical Irish sense, to me, 2020 was grand. And not like grandiose grand, simply grand.
While we all know there was less time for traveling, fostering new relationships and in general just having typical outdoorsy/indoorsy fun, personally it was a decent time (year to be exact) to collect thoughts, reflect and to start making more conscious decisions.
Like an end of year budget surplus, time, usually my most constrained resource, was a little bit more flexible this year. Long-form reading got back as a priority on my personal agenda.
I’m sure it’s in a Tweet/Podcast by the one of the Collison’s somewhere but I recall one of them saying that they have learned to give up feeling guilty about not finishing a book, and that they will know to come back to it when the time is right. I’m still not 100% there, but having moved apartments recently, and realizing that my books, as a collective, are the heaviest items in my possession, even outweighing my furniture, I’m now a lot more selective of those that I purchase! #kindlebeginner
Back in March I decided to use quarantine to activate what I call my personal “Consumption Mode”, trying to dive deep in a couple of hand-picked domains. Like healthy food (which I still need to do better on), I tried to be very cognizant of what I was feeding my brain in 2020. Thanks to some great recommendations by friends and loved ones, with some guilt and impulse buys thrown in, I happened to find the right books to get me through a lot of the questions that were rambling around my head during this topsy-turvy year.
This years books I would say have an overarching theme (that I’ll let you figure out), but I hope you find answers to some of your questions in this list.
“Talk less — you will automatically learn more, hear more, see more-and make fewer blunders.”
— Mark McCormack, What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School
“How many young college graduates have taken demanding jobs in high-powered firms, vowing that they will work hard to earn money that will enable them to retire and pursue their real interests when they are thirty-five? But by the time they reach that age, they have large mortgages, children to school, houses in the suburbs that necessitate at least two cars per family, and a sense that life is not worth living without really good wine and expensive holidays abroad. What are they supposed to do, go back to digging up roots? No, they double their efforts and keep slaving away.”
— Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens
“…most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.”
— Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
“..caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt” (Horace)
“Those who cross the Seas change the skies above them but not their souls.”
— Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization
“A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor we will be more successful if we provide a reason. People simply like to have reasons for what they do.”
— Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
“Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete.”
— Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air
“Lateral thinking is concerned not with playing with the existing pieces but with seeking to change those very pieces. It is concerned with the perception part of thinking. This is where we organise the external world into the pieces we can then ‘process’.”
— Edward de Bono, Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step by Step
“Companies leverage two basic pulleys of human behavior to increase the likelihood of an action occuring: the ease of performing an action and the psychological motivation to do it.”
“For an infrequent action to become a habit, the user must perceive a high degree of utility, either from gaining pleasure or avoiding pain.”
— Nir Eyal, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
“Sleep is the most effective thing we can do to reset our brain and body health each day.”
“When it comes to information processing, think of the wake state principally as reception (experiencing and constantly learning the world around you), NREM sleep as reflection (storing and strengthening those raw ingredients of new facts and skills), and REM sleep as integration (interconnecting these raw ingredients with each other, with all past experiences, and, in doing so, building an ever more accurate model of how the world works, including innovative insights and problem-solving abilities).”
— Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep
“Frugality isn’t about cutting your spending on everything. Frugality is about choosing the things you love enough to spend extravagantly on — and then cutting costs mercilessly on the things you don’t love.”
— Ramit Sethi, I Will Teach You To Be Rich
“There is no perfect fit when you’re looking for the next big thing to do. You have to take opportunities and make an opportunity fit for you, rather than the other way around. The ability to learn is the most important quality a leader can have.”
“..I am true believer in bringing our whole selves to work… Instead of putting on some kind of fake ‘all-work persona,’ I think we benefit from expressing our truth, talking about personal situations, and acknowledging that professional decisions are often emotionally driven.”
“.. true leadership stems from individually that is honestly and sometimes imperfectly expressed. They believe leaders should strive for authenticity over perfection.”
“ .. long-term success at work often depends on not trying to meet every demand placed on us. The best way to make room for both life and career is to make choices deliberately — to set limits and to stick to them.”
— Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead
“On the floor was the biggest suitcase I’d ever seen anywhere. I looked in the suitcase and all that was in it was dollar bills and tickets”
— Mark Tighe & Paul Rowan, Champagne Football
