Books

A couple years ago, my wife and I started a reading habit. Slowly but surely, we replaced watching Netflix and scanning our phones with reading before bed.

My sleep has drastically improved, especially when reading fiction. I also love it as a way to “warm up” in the mornings, getting some sunlight and peace before my morning coffee and kindergarten routine.

To share books that may help you kick-start or sustain your own reading habit, here are some brief reviews.

Current

I’m currently reading The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber.

He calls out common ways that founders unnecessarily struggle when starting a small business.

He proposes two mental models:

• Three Archetypes: the Technician, the Manager, and the Entrepreneur. Businesses & their owners suffer when we lack a balance across the archetypes.
• The Franchise Prototype: a thoughtful and explicit model for how the business should work. This is the primary output of a business owner, much more so than the work itself.

Perhaps more interestingly for me is his style. It’s more top-down than bottom-up, using metaphor and appeals to common sense rather than data and case studies to “prove” the points.

It reminded me that my style is top-down, and that makes it hit-or-miss. If the message resonates, it highlights the essential dynamics more clearly than a bunch of examples. But if the message doesn’t resonate, it reads more like idiosyncratic rambling than insightful prose.

2024

Red Notice

After hearing that I loved Shoe Dog, an old teammate recommended I read this similarly-page-turning memoir.

It’s about an American hedge fund manager’s story about investment, corruption, and persecution in post-Soviet Russia.

It delivered on its promise, and it opened my eyes to state corruption and brutality in more detail than I’d known before.

Pragmatism

This is one of the box-full of books that I’ve taken with me to every new home, in the hopes that I’ll eventually read it. Some of those books may never be read, but somehow I picked this one up this year.

It was quite serendipitous that I did. Pragmatism is a philosophy I’ve practiced for years without knowing it. Before reading the book, I’d even been working an essay which promotes evaluating our beliefs based on their usefulness to us rather than on their (often elusive) accuracy.

From Wikipedia:

Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that views language and thought as tools for prediction, problem solving, and action, rather than describing, representing, or mirroring reality. Pragmatists contend that most philosophical topics—such as the nature of knowledge, language, concepts, meaning, belief, and science—are best viewed in terms of their practical uses and successes.

I believe there is an objective reality that we’re embedded in, but I doubt my ability to know it accurately. I’m very confident in my ability to mistakenly believe the wrong thing. This applies less-so to clear domains, like physics, and more-so to opaque domains, like psychology, social dynamics, and the future.

Pragmatism was insightful, but the style was difficult. I’m motivated to find more-accessible content on Pragmatism now, but I’m not sure I’d recommend this particular book.

The Lean Startup

The Innovator’s Dilemma is captured by a few statements:

• Disruptive technologies often develop by serving small-but-promising markets.
• As their promise overtakes their smallness, these technologies put incumbents out of business and make startups into market-leaders.
• But small markets have a dearth of available information about their promise, so traditional analysis is counter-productive.
• Therefore, market leaders tend to fail at identifying disruptive technologies - not to mention all the dead-end startups who never really had a chance.

The Lean Startup is the answer to this dilemma. Rather than projecting a market’s promise through analysis, it shows us how to discover a market’s promise through experimentation, learning, and adaptation.

Whereas market leaders are best-suited for top-down strategies based on their wealth of proprietary data, startups are best-suited for the bottom-up strategy of building, talking to customers, and adapting wherever seems promising.

The Lean Startup is a framework for doing exactly that.

The Innovator’s Dilemma

Clayten Christensen basically defined the term “disruption”, the pattern of industry leaders to consistently fail to capture the new-and-growing markets. When those young markets take over the world, those leaders eventually become embarrassing followers – assuming they survive.

This book is inspiring for any aspiring entrepreneurs because it makes a robust case for why market opportunities are more abundant than they appear.

Think and Grow Rich

When I was around eighteen, I read How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, and it changed my life.

I am looking forward to reading that book again. I see it as a kind-of religious text, teaching us how to see positive-sum games out of zero-sum games.

The downside of that book is that it was written in the early 1900s, and both the title and the style are quite cringe to our modern sensibilities.

Think and Grow Rich is very similar in that sense: powerful for anyone who’s never been exposed to the perspective, but obscured behind an exteremely paternal writing style.

It’s not my favorite book, but I see a ton of overlap between it and Neurolinguistic Programming. So it can be a useful entry point into taking control of your thoughts and emotions, such that those internal forces manifest what you want externally.

Shoe Dog

Instant favorite: I never read a book so fast - 8 days!

After reading the first chapter, where Phil Knight describes the moment he decided to chase his Crazy Idea at twenty-four years old, I fell into a trance about my own Crazy Idea and went on a passionate sunrise run to embody that spirit.

I’m very grateful for that moment and can recommend the book to anyone looking to start their own business.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

I plan to write an analysis of this book down the road, so won’t go too into it.

I see it as an exploration of Cynical Hedonism in late-1800s London society. I find it extremely applicable in today’s world, where Cynical Hedonism has an even stronger pull than it did back then.

Brave New World

After a slow start to set up its dystopia, the book takes off and was a quick and fun read.

It’s a clever analysis of the purpose of human life and society. I probably haven’t laughed out loud from a book as much as this one.

The Alchemist

This year I re-read one of the most important books in my life. This book inspired me to leave a relatively comfortable life to travel the world, and it made all the difference.

I read it again in preparation for my wedding, because the book was a critical part of my relationship in the early days.

I see now how much it actually shaped my worldview, and how the current chapter of my journey is a continuation of that influence.

Antifragile

His previous books, Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan, were already instant-favorites, and Antifragile topped them both.

Taleb is the only author I’ve found who focuses on epistemology, namely probabilistic thinking and decision-making. While his previous books were more focused on the problem, in Antifragile he actually gives us a solution.

This book has been invaluable for me in life, software, and business.

2023

The Count of Monte Cristo

The perfect classic fiction book, about the hero’s journey of a young, innocent groom to-be, who is betrayed by his so-called friends in the worst way imaginable.

This book got me back into fiction, and I can highly recommend it for anyone looking for a fun read.

The only problem is that it’s like 1300 pages, so it took me all of 2023 to read. There are some slow parts, but they do a great job of setting up subsequent climaxes, so I can recommend sticking with it.