My 2022 Reading Journey

The year of déjà vu.

Just like the global economy and stock market, 2022 was a year of ups and downs. Filled with lots of personal challenges and returns, looking back, this year went quicker than tickets for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour.

The turn of the new year marked the 7th month anniversary of camping out in the homestead awaiting a new visa for returning to the US. I can confirm Macklemore’s words in Otherside: “trust me it’s not dope to be 25
and move back to your parent’s basement”, however, it certainly wasn’t all doom and gloom despite the gloomy titles of my first two book choices. “See Saw” and the “Undoing Project” got me through the dark months, but could equally describe the challenge of trying to maintain a social side while everyone else was plagued with Covid following the Christmas period.

As each day towards June gets progressively longer and brighter, with the prospects of a visa confirmed, each turn of the sun brought another batch of memorable moments to savor before it would be time to set sail again. While getting Starlink (shoutout Elon) brought an end to everything buffering in a digital sense, one thing that certainly isn’t lagging around Moycullen is the sense of community. It would be the first item on my list of things I’d love to have more of within the US. From getting involved with coaching the U8 basketball team, togging out for the Parish League to finally getting the chance to line out on the same Junior C team as my brother, despite the referee’s best efforts, it was a blazing few months. On reflection, it’s some privilege to see young lads at the start of their long careers while playing alongside the auld lads that have the drive to keep competing for the love of the sport.

2022 will belong to the lads in the center of that spectrum from Moycullen who led NUIG to their first Sigursen title in almost 20 years in tornado-style conditions at IT Carlow. Taking down David Clifford in about the only game he’s lost all year likely aided in the successful drive for that same core to lead Cumann Peile Mhaigh Cuilinn to County and Provincial titles. Those were games I’d catch between getting up at 6am and on my phone while traversing Illinois to an event of some kind.

Success was few and far between for Moycullen growing up, but there was a distinct tinge of déjà vu across the rest of the year for me. “The Signal and the Noise” helped in seeing and appreciating reality from the nostalgia that was re-unfolding before my eyes. St. Patrick’s Day on the Chicago River, getting sun-burned on the Architecture tour, and getting back to Notre Dame for the Stanford tailgate was like re-runs of a favorite TV show. Doubling down on the déjà vu, “Flash Boys” which I finished before a trip to the Pabst Mansion, was certainly not what we called ourselves in college when we used to keep our PBRs chilled outside the front door in Winter. However, they taste even just as good within the company of the Miltown Gaels, that adopted me as their new recruit to balance out the Culchie vs. Jackeen quota.

Shaking off the nostalgia provided the opportunity to deep-dive into all things crypto. While keeping my powder dry (for the most part), there were lots of whitepapers, a16z, and other materials that were pieced through, with “Bitcoins and Blockchains” and “The Infinite Machine” being the standout long-form pieces that I dived into. Pages in my ideas notebook got some ink with potential ways to leverage these developing technologies, but the biggest takeaway I had (all pre-FTX fallout) was that Web3 is a no-man’s land right now filled with landmines, cowboys, and VCs who are holding on Jean-Claude Van Damme style to keep the whole thing afloat. I’m confident that ChatGPT could write better whitepapers given one-liner prompts compared to some of those that got millions in diligence-free funding over the last 2 years.

While crypto burned bright and fast, quite the opposite was my goal during the Beer Mile and 5K races where maintaining a quick pace and fighting through the discomfort were key. Moreover, avoiding burn-out was tough in the latter part of the year with a change in roles at work, that brought more responsibility, teammates across global timezones, and a plethora of new challenges. Travel in September brought some well-needed respite and the chance to upskill and seek counsel for the new role from some lindy books.

In between the waves of Cape Cod and the dazzling lights of NYC, “What You Do Is Who You Are”, “The Making of a Manager” and “Good to Great” provided a solid and steely core of business material representing the tried and tested methods that we’ll all need to get back to over the next couple quarters. While I personally feel that LinkedIn and Twitter often segment and throw me into echo chambers, books are fixed and non-partisan machine-learning models. The first principles of business and people don’t change: you need the right people on the bus, solving the problems that interest them that can deliver value, and because everyone is unique, the methods and processes for getting the best out of everyone need continual iteration. The above books reiterate those same points but they could equally be found amongst all the information on Ellis Island, behind the countless enterprises those millions of immigrants built that helped establish the US into what it is today.

Signing off the year would feel partially unfulfilled without squeezing some selfishness in there too. Bookended by finally seeing LeBron in the flesh and ringing in the New Year, I stuffed the last few weeks of the year like the filling in a State Fair Cream Puff. Some books that have been on my booklist for years finally got checked off: “The Almanac of Naval Ravikant”, “The Alchemist” and “Atomic Habits”. These are books that you’d love to leave on the countertop or on the coffee table, but unfortunately, thanks or no thanks to the Kindle, it’s a little harder to keep them literally in your face. However, where 2021 was the year of the Kindle for me, 2022 was the year of Readwise.io.

Providing a daily (or whatever frequency you like) prompt, it aggregates all my kindle highlights, notes, and starred Tweets and provides a chunk of them daily for me to review. It helps solve one of my initial annoyances with the Kindle where my highlights were sort of locked away and not as obvious as the streaks of yellow highlighter in a physical copy. I cannot say that I’ve been perfect at getting through it every day, but I’m striving to be better again in 2023.

Shoutout to my friends and other more distant LinkedIn connections for getting me on the Readwise train following last year’s edition and for more book recommendations that I’m hoping will make it onto my list over the next 12 months. Shoutout to Emily too for accommodating my “Eoin time” when it comes to getting through all of these plus more reading throughout the year.

Thanks for reading this far and I hope you enjoy my collection below. I can’t wait to do it all again next year with a little help from my friends!

Now onto the books themselves

The year began with a stuttering start when it came to completing the first book. “See-Saw” piqued my interest following an interview with the author on my favorite sports show “Off the Ball”. I was sold based on their conversations about the sports and leadership overlap, which in earnest made up 10% of the book. Trudging through a book expecting one thing and getting another landed me in quicksand for a couple of weeks. However, Drury has such vast experience across both leading and infamous Irish businesses (RTE, PaddyPower, Hostelworld, Anglo Irish, GAA, FAI) that there were tidbits of insight on every page. Those insights read more so as deep, honest admissions of personal regret following long reflection rather than off-the-cuff tooting of the horn.

The shortest, yet most interesting chapter in my opinion focused on Drury’s charitable work with GOAL across Sudan and Greece. What followed was an interesting comparison of the treatment of migrants on our own doorstep in Ireland versus our expectations of treatment for our own emigrants across the globe. Asylum seekers in Ireland are often placed in Direct Provision which could be closely compared to being left to rot with little food and the ineligibility to work for months on end. Having been in the midst of some visa/immigration stuff myself, it drove home the harsh truth that I was still in a privileged position while others were literally fleeing their home countries in search of safety and solace, or as the war in Ukraine was starting, staying and fighting to improve conditions for their brethren.

“It is the leader or leadership group who set the culture in any organisation. They constantly influence how it is shaped, but without the close attention of senior colleagues, especially non-executive directors, their personal ambitions may assume precedence so their actions start to undermine certain fundamentals of the culture they should be protecting. The erosion of corporate culture can long go unnoticed until a point is reached where the edifice gives way with often dire consequences.”

“Wherever humans are involved, others need to be smart and imagine the unimaginable because that’s the best hope of not being surprised or caught off guard.”

“As a people, our treatment of migrants reflects poorly on our claim to be a modern progressive nation and is deeply hypocritical. There seems to be no embarrassment when we press US legislators to protect the interests of Irish immigrants there, including those who are undocumented. Indeed the use of the term ‘undocumented’ instead of ’illegal’ contrasts with how refugees and migrants in Ireland are seen. What’s certain is that, at any point over the last 20 years, if the US authorities rounded up those Irish who entered the country illegally and housed them in Direct Provision-type accommodation, there would have been outrage in Ireland, and rightly so. And while there will be hardship cases among the illegal Irish in the US, few of them could really claim to be fleeing the mouth of the shark.
A state that believes it’s within its rights to manage immigrants in a way it would consider inappropriate for others to deploy with its citizens is, by definition, racist.”

— Fintan Drury, See-Saw: A perspective on success, leadership and corporate culture

Michael Lewis has quickly become my favorite author over the last couple of years. My thought process is pretty simple in that if I’m stuck in a rut where I haven’t picked up a book in a while, I reach for one of his that I am yet to read. I went back-to-back with two of his books that describe almost directly contrasting personalities.

“The Undoing Project” deals with the close partnership of Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, whose work together epitomizes the saying “If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together”. Their work on heuristics in judgment and decision-making demonstrated common errors of the human psyche, and Lewis tells the story of their work and eventual undoing in a beautiful fashion where the last couple of pages require some willpower to hold back the tears. Elements of the 21st century are cleverly interweaved like an interview with Daryl Morey of the 76ers whose daily efforts stand upon the body of work this pair of psychologists help form. If you are a fan of “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman, or are interested in the subject of decision-making but want a lighter, more narrative-driven read, this is the book for you. It marries a good dose of scientific findings and memorable personal stories with a dollop of useful bayesian statistics.

“When someone says something, don’t ask yourself if it is true. Ask what it might be true of.” That was his intellectual instinct, his natural first step to the mental hoop: to take whatever someone had just said to him and try not to tear it down but to make sense of it.”

“Amos willed himself to be optimistic, because he had decided pessimism was stupid. When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice, Amos liked to say. Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens.”

“In these and many other uncertain situations, the mind did not naturally calculate the correct odds. So what did it do? The answer they now offered: It replaced the laws of chance with rules of thumb. These rules of thumb Danny and Amos called ‘heuristics.’ And the first heuristic they wanted to explore they called ‘representativeness.’”

“But if you presented people with situations in which the evidence they needed to judge them accurately was hard for them to retrieve from their memories, and misleading evidence came easily to mind, they made mistakes. “Consequently,” Amos and Danny wrote, “the use of the availability heuristic leads to systematic biases.” Human judgment was distorted by . . . the memorable.”

“When they made decisions, people did not seek to maximize utility. They sought to minimize regret.”

— Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project

Where “The Undoing Project” told the story of two working-class men toiling over years to understand the complexities of the brain, “Flash Boys” tells the story of Wall Street hotshots who battle over microseconds around the early establishment of high-frequency trading in the US financial market. Collecting the first-hand experiences from both the enabling side and the groups trying to expose the fraud, as per usual there is Irishman caught up in it all. Stock exchanges, banks, and high-frequency traders all played a role in advancing these technologies and practices such that the front-running of orders placed by investors was possible. These unethical trading practices, many of which went undetected due to lack of reporting and their covert operation within ‘dark pools’, transformed the U.S. stock market from “the world’s most public, most democratic, financial market” into a “rigged” market. Lewis has the book come full circle with a hinting at new methods these same parties are looking to leverage to break the latest iterations of the rules, but it begs the question of whether we’’ ever avoid something being skimmed off the top of our financial transactions by those who know a little more than each of us.

“Some of them, as Brennan Carley put it, “would sell their grandmothers for a microsecond.” (A microsecond is one millionth of a second.) Exactly why speed was so important to them was not clear; what was clear was that they felt threatened by this faster new line.”

“Dark pools were another rogue spawn of the new financial marketplace. Private stock exchanges, run by the big brokers, they were not required to reveal to the public what happened inside them. They reported any trade they executed, but they did so with sufficient delay that it was impossible to know exactly what was happening in the broader market at the moment the trade occurred.”

“There was no rule against high-frequency traders setting up computers inside the exchanges and building their own, much faster, better cared for version of the SIP. That’s exactly what they’d done, so well that there were times when the gap between the high-frequency traders’ view of the market and that of ordinary investors could be twenty-five milliseconds, or twice the time it now took to travel from New York to Chicago and back again.”

“High-frequency traders went home every night with no position in the stock market. They traded in the market the way card counters in a casino played blackjack: They played only when they had an edge. That’s why they were able to trade for five years without losing money on a single day.”

— Michael Lewis, Flash Boys

Buried in the middle of the rest of the books this year, likely my overall favorite, “The Signal and the Noise” by Nate Silver marries the hard mathematical facts with general life principles when it comes to forecasting which can be applied in any domain. Sometimes I find myself getting too drawn into the weeds on details and data and this book has helped me to step back in those moments to see the wood for trees. Moreover, the need to constantly refresh and review our own assumptions and mental models is something that requires dedicated time and effort. Without that practice, we waste years to save hours.

“…if The Signal and the Noise could be condensed to a bumper sticker, it would read THINK PROBABILISTICALLY. To that I’d add now add a second one: SLOW DOWN AND BE SKEPTICAL.”

“This property — group forecasts beat individual ones — has been found to be true in almost every field in which it has been studied.”

“One property of Bayes’s theorem, in fact, is that our beliefs should converge toward one another — and toward the truth — as we are presented with more evidence over time.”

“I pay quite a bit of attention to what the consensus view is — what a market like Intrade is saying — when I make a forecast. It is never an absolute constraint. But the further I move away from that consensus, the stronger my evidence has to be before I come to the view that I have things right and everyone else has it wrong. This attitude, I think, will serve you very well most of the time. It implies that although you might occasionally be able to beat markets, it is not something you should count on doing every day; that is a sure sign of overconfidence.”

“We have big brains, but we live in an incomprehensibly large universe. The virtue in thinking probabilistically is that you will force yourself to stop and smell the data — slow down, and consider the imperfections in your thinking. Over time, you should find that this makes your decision making better.”

— Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise

Given the current Crypto winter, the next two books likely aren’t the worst to pick up. Comparable to a dictionary or an encyclopedia, “The Basics of Bitcoins and Blockchains” reads like a college textbook in terms of providing detail on the first principle elements that serve as the building blocks for the complex systems we see whitewashed across Twitter and Superbowl ads today. I will say that it’s not completely devoid of opinion, however, yet it is unmarked by and honest in avoiding the hype. While it’s not exactly an enthralling page-turner, it will equip you with the acronyms and a better fundamental understanding when it comes to evaluating the other crypto information out there in whitepapers and beyond. Additionally, it will give you an appreciation for the history of money and its movement. It shows how far we’ve come from valuing the instrumental to the intrinsic, progressing from trading livestock to digital assets, with the latter offering more opportunity for our eyes to be deceived again, and again and again……

“Stockholms Banco issued Europe’s first banknotes but got carried away and issued more than could be redeemed, a money creation technique known as fractional reserve banking.”

“According to the Bitcoin Obituary website,16 Bitcoin has been declared dead over 300 times! But it lives on…”

— Anthony Lewis, The Basics of Bitcoins and Blockchains: An Introduction to Cryptocurrencies and the Technology that Powers Them

“The Infinite Machine” has hints of a Michael Lewis narrative to it but tells the true story behind the rise of Ethereum with the murmurings of all other things crypto in the background. It reads similar to fiction, with the tales of Vitalik Buterin cleverly weaved amongst the eclectic background stories of the other people around for the birth of Ethereum. Russo balances the ridiculous and the sublime with her stories. Contrasting families in Argentina for whom digital assets have helped them combat inflation and the devaluation of their native currency, versus money-grab or parody ICOs including the scathingly honest “Useless Ethereum Token,” which touted itself as “the world’s first 100% honest Ethereum ICO,” saying it “transparently offers investors no value” for which people still contributed almost $75k to it’s offering. This book reads similar to an episode of “Reeling in the Years” where at some points you see the planting of a seed that’ll sprout in the long run, and in others, you’ll shake your head at the downright foolishness.

“John McAfee, mostly known for creating the antivirus software that carries his name, and, since 2017, for relentlessly shilling ICOs. He said, ‘Those of you in the old school who believe this is a bubble simply have not understood the new mathematics of the Blockchain, or you did not care enough to try. Bubbles are mathematically impossible in this new paradigm. So are corrections and all else.’”

“…his team discussed what the right word for them would be and settled on “non-fungible tokens,” meaning each was unique, not interchangeable like ether, bitcoin, or ERC20 tokens sold in ICOs. Beyond collectible digital cats, the broader vision was that tokens under this new standard, called ERC721, could be linked to scarce, high-value items like artwork and luxury goods; other collectibles, like baseball cards; and items used and traded inside video games, like virtual weapons.”

— Camila Russo, The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto Hackers Is Building the Next Internet with Ethereum

Up there with one of my favorite reads of all time. This is one book where a Blinkist recap would not do it justice. This is one of those books where you’ll be delighted you dug into the meat and potatoes of it.

“What You Do Is Who You Are” was my most highlighted book of 2022. Following on from reading his other book “THTAHT” last year, this one was another page-turner for me. The book takes you through a history of culture, pulling you through some of the wildest examples imaginable, all in an attempt to answer the question: How do you create and sustain the culture you want? Rather than harp on about GE, Apple, and other companies we hear about all the time, Horowitz pulls from all corners of the globe to reinforce the vital principles that can be taken into the enterprise: Haiti’s Toussaint Louverture, who was the leader of the only successful slave revolt in history; the Samurai, who ruled Japan for seven hundred years and shaped modern Japanese culture; Genghis Khan, who built the world’s largest empire; and Shaka Senghor, an American ex-con who created the most formidable prison gang in the yard and ultimately transformed prison culture.

This book reminds me of the computer science term, “Garbage in, garbage out” yet in the opposite, and positive manner. Just like exercise, a healthy diet, and good sleep sets you up for daily success, Horowitz outlines a couple of key principles that go into setting a company up for the best chances of success. As we head into a period of uncertainty over the next year or so, surviving is the precursor to success. Therefore, having the right culture instilled and reinforced will help boost those chances of survival. This book gets right into the building blocks and cement that are needed to get through those rough moments where the stability of everything gets rocked. As the saying goes, “When the pressure is on, you don’t rise to the occasion — you fall to your highest level of preparation”.

[This list could be a mile long]

“Begin each day pondering death as its climax. Each morning, with a calm mind, conjure images in your head of your last moments. See yourself being pierced by bow and arrow, gun, sword, or spear, or being swept away by a giant wave, vaulting into a fiery inferno, taking a lightning strike, being shaken to death in a great earthquake, falling hundreds of feet from a high cliff top, succumbing to a terminal illness, or just dropping dead unexpectedly. Every morning, be sure to meditate yourself into a trance of death.”

“If you have a crisis situation and you need the team to execute, meet with them every day and even twice a day if necessary. That will show them this is a top priority. At the beginning of each meeting you say, ‘Where’s my money?’”

“‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast.’ It is a great line and I love it, but I disagree with it. I love it, because it is marvelously anti-elitist: Screw what the executive suite says, what matters is what the people are doing. That’s totally correct. I also love that Drucker’s observation elevates culture to a high-order consideration. But the truth is that culture and strategy do not compete. Neither eats the other. Indeed, for either to be effective, they must cohere.”

“He said that when he was recruiting he looked for people who were smart, humble, hardworking, and collaborative. That’s what we needed. Those four are especially valuable in combination, because if you have just two of the four it can be a disaster.”

— Ben Horowitz, What You Do Is Who You Are

Managing people is tough. 2022 marked a pretty drastic change in responsibility for me at work and with some further changes a couple of weeks into the new role, my number of direct reports had near 10x over the course of ~60 days. Everyone is unique, with their own personality and skill set that you need to take time to learn. With a background in engineering, I can certainly say people are not binary, it’s not a matter of switching out a round peg for a square one to fit in the hole, it’s exponentially more difficult that that. Finding the right balance of my own personal involvement on projects is still something I struggle with where I too often lean on the side of getting too into the weeds instead of entrusting others. Therefore, between the above and below books, I reached for this one, to add some extra tools to the toolkit.

This book by Julie Zhou, former VP of Design at Facebook is a solid read for managers at any level of experience. Dotted with thoughtful questions throughout, I often found myself putting the book down, reaching for some paper, and brainstorming answers to those prompts. It’s not exactly positioned as a “workbook” but I found it a useful tool for generating those prompts that I’d take away as a source for some reflection.

This book won’t solve all your problems. I don’t think any book can when it comes to managing people. Each scenario you’ll come across as a manager is unique in its own right and should be treated as such, but can probably map closely to some topic discussed in the book.

“Purpose, people, process. The why, the who, and the how. A great manager constantly asks herself how she can influence these levers to improve her team’s outcomes. As the team grows in size, it matters less and less how good she is personally at doing the work herself. What matters more is how much of a multiplier effect she has on her team.”

“If something is getting in the way of great work happening, you need to address it swiftly and directly. This may mean giving people difficult feedback or making some hard calls. The sooner you internalize that you own the outcomes of your team, the easier it becomes to have these conversations.”

“What gets in the way of good work? There are only two possibilities. The first is that people don’t know how to do good work. The second is that they know how, but they aren’t motivated.”

“Learning how to be a great leader means learning about your superpowers and flaws, learning how to navigate the obstacles in your head, and learning how to learn.”

“…as your team grows in its size and abilities, so too must you grow to keep pace as its manager. The act of constantly trying to replace yourself means that you create openings to stretch both your leaders and yourself. Right ahead is another mountain that’s bigger and scarier than the one before. Everyone keeps climbing, and everyone achieves more together.”

— Julie Zhou, The Making of a Manager

I finally checked “Good to Great” off my booklist this year. It was laying stagnant there for about 4 years before I finally blasted through it over a long, eventful trip back home to Ireland for the Christmas break. It reads like a very long case study that one would study as part of an MBA, and that’s very much the essence of its creation too. The data and “Good to Great” framework presented were the end product of many years of Jim Collins and his research team teasing out the 11 public companies that fit their strict success criteria.

Often when piecing through books on Snapchat, Uber, and the likes, these unicorns (rare sense) appear as having found the right mixture of right product, right time. It seems like magic. Sure there are the tales of avoiding ultimate disaster like a last-second buzzer-beater, but these are the 1 in a million outliers. The typical company and most of what makes up the S&P500 haven’t followed that breakthrough trajectory. While building one of these companies is by no means easy, this book tries to fit the structure of its main framework around its path to prolonged success. That comes with the caveat though of 20:20 hindsight. History is easily told when you can look back in time and fit your own narrative.

What I will say is that if one were to solely use the presented structure as your guiding principles in the development or reshaping of a business, one would undoubtedly be directionally correct (See Uber post-Travis, WeWork post-Adam as recent examples). The gist of the book can certainly be grasped in a more succinct summary, but each chapter’s structure of principle presentation -> example illustrations -> contract vs. ‘comparison’ companies, does help reinforce the meaning.

“The good-to-great companies paid scant attention to managing change, motivating people, or creating alignment. Under the right conditions, the problems of commitment, alignment, motivation, and change largely melt away.”

“First Who . . . Then What. We expected that good-to-great leaders would begin by setting a new vision and strategy. We found instead that they first got the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats — and then they figured out where to drive it.”

“There was no single defining action, no grand program, no one killer innovation, no solitary lucky break, no miracle moment. Rather, the process resembled relentlessly pushing a giant heavy flywheel in one direction, turn upon turn, building momentum until a point of breakthrough, and beyond.”

“When used right, technology becomes an accelerator of momentum, not a creator of it.”

“Much of the answer to the question of “good to great” lies in the discipline to do whatever it takes to become the best within carefully selected arenas and then to seek continual improvement from there. It’s really just that simple. And it’s really just that difficult.”

— Jim Collins, Good to Great

Good book, but has the same tinge of Chamath Palihapitiya who is often talking from his billionaire high horse. Naval Ranikant has some undoubted success stories but a lot of the information provided is much easier to implement when your week is not centered around an existing job and can dedicate the requisite time to meditation, self-reflection, and more. The source of the book was a collection of Ravikant’s tweets (and personal notes) which were posted over multiple years. In my opinion, the information is almost better consumed in that format in place of via long-form copy.

Maybe I’m being overly critical, as there is a sense of realism mixed in there too where he admits his own faults and failings, and that integrating all these into a common lifestyle is by no means easy. However, besides the benefit of being able to highlight key elements within the book, his interview with Joe Rogan touches on all the key principles. While I opted for the Kindle version, it’s also available for free in other formats on his website.

“Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep. Money is how we transfer time and wealth. Status is your place in the social hierarchy.”

“Play iterated games. All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.”

“Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow. When today is complete, in and of itself, you’re retired.”

“It’s actually really important to have empty space. If you don’t have a day or two every week in your calendar where you’re not always in meetings, and you’re not always busy, then you’re not going to be able to think. You’re not going to be able to have good ideas for your business. You’re not going to be able to make good judgments. I also encourage taking at least one day a week (preferably two, because if you budget two, you’ll end up with one) where you just have time to think.”

“Simple heuristic: If you’re evenly split on a difficult decision, take the path more painful in the short term.”

“Happiness = Health + Wealth + Good Relationships…”

“Health, love, and your mission, in that order. Nothing else matters.”

— Eric Jorgenson, The Almanac of Naval Ravikant

A Twitter hype train that would lead you to believe everyone in the world has read this book. If you’ve read “Hooked” by Nir Eyal, it’s exactly like that but more focused on the person rather than the business application.

A summary of this book would give you the main gist. I will say that some of the example applications and techniques were helpful though. The book presents the 4-step habit model which develops from trigger -> craving -> response -> reward, and looks at each from both the perspective of trying to develop good habits and breaking bad ones.

With habits though, one important element he doesn’t touch on is that reading about all this stuff is great, but you really have to be intentional about putting it all into action. As Naval Ravikant actually mentioned in his book, “Inspiration is perishable — act on it immediately.”

“The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improve it by 1 percent, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together.”

“Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits. Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits. Your clutter is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. You get what you repeat.”

“Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are about the processes that lead to those results.”

“Time magnifies the margin between success and failure. It will multiply whatever you feed it. Good habits make time your ally. Bad habits make time your enemy.”

— James Clear, Atomic Habits

A couple of years back, Macklemore was my favorite music artist and in truth, he’s still up there with my most listened to according to my Spotify unwrapped. One of my favorite songs is “Growing Up” where he collaborated with Ed Sheeran. It’s a bit of a slower pace than his records that have hit the charts but it’s written as a letter to his newborn daughter. While I wouldn’t subscribe to taking all my life advice from a rapper, (although Ben Horowitz has carved a nice niche of using rap lyrics as his chapter introductions) he does specifically call out “I recommend that you read the Alchemist,”. I was intrigued and wanted to know why this book was so important to him that he would recommend it to his child.

It’s not bad, I guess it’s just not what I expected. I’ve probably spent more time reading up on it after finishing the book than it took to actually read front-to-back. Gregory Cowles of the NYT said that it “is more self-help than literature. But that hasn’t hurt it with readers.” I can see the appeal in it to Macklemore, as an aspiring artist, a white rap artist albeit from Seattle, whose developing years were spent bouncing between the booth and a container of Lean. Following your “personal legend”, which is the most touted phrase in the book, hasn’t worked out too badly for him.

It’s a one-and-done sort of book for me, but the numbers suggest that it’s hit with others. Today, it’s sold over 65 million copies, spent more than 315 weeks on the NYT bestseller list, and holds the Guinness World Record for the most translated book by a living author. I won’t spoil it for anyone, but in a sentence, it could be summarized by: Never give up on your dreams, and don’t let fears hold you back.

That’s a positive note to end this 2022 summary on and look ahead to 2023!

“And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”

“The secret of life, though, is to fall seven times and to get up eight times.”

“Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.”

“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity.”

— Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist