There isn’t much in my life that I’ve ever been consistent with. I wanted a lot of things, sure. But I rarely put in the effort, at least consistent effort, to watch myself achieve most goals. A lot of that has changed in the latter half of this decade since I stared a business.
And one of the things that has changed is that I now consider myself an avid reader. Like, legit, people say things to me like, “you read a lot of books”, or, “hey, I have a book you might like since I know you read all the time.”
That would have never been the case at the start of this decade, nor the decades prior. So here I am at the end of 2019 continuing another trend I started three years ago: listing the books I read in the calendar year and what little nuggets of wisdom I combed from their pages.
You can check out the first three years here if you so desire.
My pace has stayed the same over the last three years, on average I read 3 books a month. And this year I did just that crushing 36 glorious tomes that cover an array of genres and subjects.
So, here’s a rundown of what I’ve read over the last year with a brief sentence or two about what I learned from each book. I highly suggest picking any of these up for 2020. Which, you can do by clicking the image of the cover of the book.
*Note: some of what I learned are sentences directly taken from said books because the author said it better than I could summarize. These will marked with parenthesis. Everything else will just be italicized*
Looky Looky, Some Booky Booky Goodness
Psychedelics may be more beneficial than we ever thought. Too bad people in the 60s freak the hell out and outlawed substances that may actually help those with depression or other mental illness.
“Mastery actually means you’re a master of what you know an apprentice of what you don’t.”
“The wisdom of crowds can quickly turn to folly.”
“Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own thoughts, unguarded. But once mastered, no one can help you as much, not even your father or mother.”
“I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled.
We’re all gonna die.
Virtual reality might actually stick this time.
We live in one of the safest and most prosperous times the human race has ever seen. But it sure always feels like the end is always near. Now stop reading this and go subscribe to the Hardcore History podcast.
No two relationships are the same; but whether those relationships are healthy or not depend on how well you and your partner communicate about the most difficult things. I highly encourage anyone who is single, in a monogamous, polyamorous, or open relationship to read this book.
We’re probably all gonna be living and working at Amazon in the near future.
Don’t fuck with Peter Thiel. But don’t also operate a media company that’s salacious for the sake of being shocking and getting views.
“We must remind ourselves again that history is usually written is quite different from history as usually lived: the historian records the exceptional because it is interesting – because it is exceptional.”
“Every time you confront something painful, you’re at a potentially important juncture in your life — you have the opportunity to choose healthy and painful truth or unhealthy but comfortable delusion.
Whatever circumstances life brings you, you will be more likely to succeed and find happiness if you take responsibility for making your decisions well instead of complaining about things being beyond your control. Psychologist called this having an “internal locus of control,” and studies consistently show that people who have it out perform those who don’t. So don’t worry about whether you like your situation or not. Life doesn’t give a damn about what you like. It’s up to you to connect what you want and what you need to do to get it and then find the courage to carry it through.”
Much of what we learn about eating comes from the way our parents feed us. But we can re-learn and change those habits taught in our early years.
Find more solitude and more silence in your life.
“The world is a narrow bridge and the most important thing is not to be afraid”
No matter what you do, even if it’s $5 a week or month, invest that money, automatically. You don’t need to make thousands to invest, everyone can do it.
“Over the decades I have learned that having faith in the outcome is quite different from being attached to the outcome.”
Best part of this was reading an author so good at his job that you could clearly tell the difference between narration and the internal ramblings of the characters mind.
My man crush of Klostermann is still alive and well.
While Europe fell into The Dark Ages, it was the Islamic world that expanded what Ancient Greece and Rome had written about in regards to all aspects of science and philosophy; and the roads that knowledge took to be reintroduced back into Europe that spawned the Renaissance is truly remarkable.
“Most of us are stuck with a completely outdated idea about the rest of the world.”
“When it comes to the process, just persist, persist, persist.”
“Much of what you do creatively will not land in the middle of a receptive audience.”
“For every hour you spend doing something, spend at least a few minutes doing something unrelated.”
And then there’s this quote from a poet Questlove really connected with: When you realize your insignificant, you can start feeling two things: passion and pain. Passion is the way you fight meaninglessness. If you were significant, you wouldn’t necessarily need passion at all. You could just sit back and experience things as they came. And pain is the acceptance of the truth of that insignificance.
Train less and rest more for better gains
“When you start something the middle is always the toughest. Part of that is due to human beings being terrible managers of their expectations.”
“There is no such thing as change without pain, no growth without discomfort.”
“If sexual equality is to be a meaningful goal, it has to be about more than equality of victimhood. Arguments over who is the most oppressed serve only to pitch man and women into battle against each other in a competition of grievances.”
Humans likely see color because our ancestors began to eat more glucose rich fruits. And thus allowed us to better see snakes and stay alive long enough to reproduce.
Work hard and always be willing to give more to those who work with rather than taking more.
Words are like a mother’s love. They can leave you filled with warmth and worth. They can draw the breath from your lungs leaving you hallow and hard. They can ignite a blaze that consumes everything in the blink of an eye. And they can soothe your soul, quenching any raging fire inside. These are but a few examples of the power Rothfuss imbues in every word he writes. No author has left me breathless or written sentences so powerful that once they slammed into my mind I had to put the book down to catch my breath.
“A great man is great not because his personal qualities give individual teachers to great historical events, but because he possessed is quality is which make him is capable of serving the great social needs of his time, needs which arose as a result of general in particular causes.”
“We care more about looking good than about truly being good.”
Science is cool.
Social media has changed how a business can grow and market itself.
More and more research on sex is changing everything we know about men and women, especially about why those in monogamous relationships may step outside of those relationships.
Put your damn phone down.
