Category: Books

I’ve written fondly about wisdom literature, however I’m not fond of books that just focus on the idea of “wisdom”.

These two books are more poetic than the Wisdom of Solomon, but all three are thin paeans to the concept of wisdom.

The Chinese books sell wisdom for the sake of a well ordered empire and emphasize balance and relationships.

This sales pitch is more appetizing than Solomon’s heavy handed appeal to a monotheistic god presenting naive choices between right and wrong.

But it’s all thin gruel.

Gotcha.

Wisdom good.

Where do go from here?

䷾䷛

Even so, a book that has survived the test of time to enter the canon of a great empire is most likely worth a download and quick read. Maybe you’ll catch something I missed.

In 2020, I started a system for my personal reading. I took five books to become my current reading list, put them next to the bed, and stashed the rest out sight.

Each of the five books satisfied a category:

1. Non-Fiction
2. Fiction
3. Spirituality
4. Self Help
5. Art

When I wrote the first draft of this post, the books on deck were:

• Mythologies, Roland Barthes
• Farewell My Lovely, Raymond Chandler
• Collected Writings of Epicurus
• Zen of Seeing by Fredrick Franck
• Jazz, Henri Matisse

The only book I haven’t completed is Epicurus.

In a world where there is so much information, it is important to simplify what is immediately available. Once resolved, you are free to just read within the preselected menu. If I lose interest in a book, I can either throw it off out of the favored circle (as I did with Epicurus) which frees you up to read other books within the category (I’ve read quite a few wisdom texts over the past couple months. Alternately, I can let a book marinate while I dive into other topics. If so, at least I’m avoiding other books within the same genre, which makes it easier to return to the lagging book.

This system makes it evident if I’ve been heavily pursuing one category over the others. I may or may not counteract against such a trend, but either way, it is good to be clear what is top of one’s mental interests.

This system has turned out to be a well rounded way to wrangle all the good books around me – unread, re-read, library loans, and newly purchased. I’d recommend giving it a shot if your “to read” pile has become intimidatingly tall.

I bought this book so long ago, I checked the copyright to see if I had bought it before leaving California. From the date, it was published a couple years after my wife and I had started dating, so it seems that my memory of buying it in a comic shop in Texas might be accurate.

Last week, I noticed it in the garage on top of my big row of boxed up books, waiting for a permanent home with bookshelves. My daughter saw me flipping through it and wanted to read it.

It was time. I wrapped it up and gave it to her as a birthday present last week.

The girl went so quickly from being a concept, through infancy and toddlerhood, and is now blasting through books and graphic novels with abandon.

It goes fast. Even her prehistory can’t keep up with her.

Last night I had a dream. I led some folks around on a wild foot chase around the neighborhood and then snuck into the office, pretending nothing had happened. To my chagrin, a police officer walked in soon after. Even though I didn’t hurt anyone, someone had slipped and broke their ribs during the run around.

For goodness sake, what’s a more certain sign of aging than having your subconscious punish you for second order effects from your dream-state actions? Maybe its a budding sign of a grown up wisdom?

The book itself is a pretty easy read. It’s a more or less heartwarming collection of stories. Even though your start isn’t as important as it may seem, there are definitely good and bad outcomes at the end.

The main takeaways are to avoid alcohol and smoking, practice good mental acceptance techniques, and create a good network around you. Honestly, this isn’t much different from what everyone tells their kids. Even so, it’s nice to have a few longitudinal studies to lend common sense the authority of science.

Other Takeaways

There were three other key takeaways that I think are worth lifting straight out of the book.

George Valliant identifies six adult life tasks:

1. Identity: Finding a sense of one’s self, values, etc., separate from your parents.
2. Intimacy: Finding a life partner.
3. Career Consolidation: More than a job, this is one’s work.
4. Generativity: Guiding the next generation, community building.
5. Keeper of Meaning: Conservation and preservation of the culture and institution, beyond individuals.
6. Integrity: Facing death and life at the end.

Valliant also lists key “adaptive coping mechanisms” that will help you navigate the vagaries of life. Maladaptive ones are projection, passive aggression, dissociation, acting out and fantasy. There are also mature defenses:

Such virtues include doing as one would be done by (altruism); artistic creation to resolve conflict and spinning straw into gold (sublimation); a stiff upper lip (suppression); and the ability not to take oneself too seriously (humor).

page 64

And finally, Valliant closes his book with a quote from E. B. White, via a valedictory address by Timothy Coggeshall.

Be a true friend.

Do the right thing.

Enjoy the glory of everything.

page 325

I was originally introduced to Borges via his short stories while in college. Twenty years later I finally got around to reading the essays and parables.

Wow. Just as with his stories, these pieces are tight, dense, and well worth reading. Then again, that was pretty obvious – all the adulation that could be written has already been written. Hell, I couldn’t write a collection of hosannas more effusive than the introduction at the start of this anthology.

So let’s talk about the librarian and the Librarian.

One is lionized as a god from South America, the blind protagonist in the rose. And the other is a teacher who makes my daughter excited to live with books. In this time of distance learning in pandemic, where I am an ever present spectator of my girl’s education, I now know why my daughter loves her school librarian.

Ms. Douglas brings the heat. She can control a room even over a video call, with an infectious generous energy every Friday afternoon wrangling first graders for an hour. It is a mundane display of exceptional skill.

As in my profession, there are the great and the Great.

The masters of our universe are revered in legend, but we ought to praise the vast cohort who have quietly mastered their craft, spreading the love to the next generation.

I’ve started reading this book a few years ago after Seth mentioned that this book was his masterpiece during the previous book tour for This is Marketing. When he repeated this claim again during promotional interviews for his newest book The Practice, I finally buckled down and finished it.

Spoiler: It is.

I’m not sure why I had difficulty pushing past the first few chapters during my initial reads, but it really picks up steam mid-book and earns the author’s own esteemed opinion of it.

I suspect Linchpin did not grab me in previous attempts because it is particularly ambitious. I’m quite fond the smaller format of his other books, such as The Dip and Purple Cow, which also have catchy premises that grab us on the first page. The argument for Linchpin is both obvious and takes a bit of unpacking.

To become indispensable, we need to be more than “good enough”, so we will have to take some risks. When trying to improve things, we have made a commitment that might not pan out. Once in a while, the proposed change might be a “big hair audacious goal”, but normally it’s just putting ourselves just a little bit past normal. It can be daunting to step out of line, and this book is all about encouraging us to dance with that fear.

If we want to be indispensable, we need to create a deliberate practice of testing improvements. However, there is no guarantee, experiments fail as often as not. Trying to be better takes initiative, and taking initiative means we own the results – both good and ill.

It sounds risky, but what’s the alternative? Staying stagnant locks us into today’s mediocrity and becoming obsolete tomorrow.

So we might as well become linchpins. Not everything will succeed, but work is a lot more more fun when we’re constantly experimenting!

I’ve always been a bit mystified by two political fields – economics and foreign affairs. The first because everything seems counter-intuitive, the latter because it always seems to be a choice between several bad options.

I haven’t found a good primer for foreign affairs, but this book helped me get a basic “macro” sense on economics.

Ultimately the basic issue is “what are the people producing”? If they are producing a lot, the macroeconomics are going to be generally quite good and the inverse if people aren’t producing a lot of value per capita.

That’s simple enough, but then everything starts to get funky once you add the two other core concepts of money and expectations, which can color the how production is calculated and create odd phenomena around the economy.

Secondary concepts of interest rates, exchange rates, and methods of accounting then fill out the picture. This is when things start to get a little counterintuitive, but nothing too crazy that can’t be handled with a little careful reading.

The counterintuitive part of economics is found in the fact that these basic concepts are affected by a myriad of factors – ultimately all the individual actions of all the players in the marketplace (as in each of us). Also once we get comfortable with a theory, something comes in and bowls us over, as the Great Recession, and people need to reassess their theories. Life tends to be messier than math.

Even though the basic concepts are pretty straightforward, when there are so many players (who aren’t perfectly rational) interacting with each other you end up a pretty complex field.

This book gave me a basic sense of how the big pieces of economics fits together. Even though I doubt I will read another dry textbook on economics and I’ve already forgotten some of key concepts just a couple months later, I sense a residue buried in my brain and these ideas should be much easier to recall when needed, kind of like riding a bike.

This book was just what I needed. For future reading, I’m going back to popular books about wacky counterintuitive quirky economic topics. Sometimes you need to read the fun stuff first to get you interested in a topic, but I find that exposing oneself to basic foundational stuff is always worth the effort, even if you ultimately go back to the candy.

I tend to plow through self help books, like my daughter just did with the 16 volume Roald Dahl box set over a week.

I read this over the holidays and I think this will likely be one of the most important books I’ve read in a while. So I’m following up the library copy with a purchase on Amazon.

We just tried his Focus Mapping technique with how to teach her Chinese and in twenty minutes it yielded some key insights in what wasn’t working. My wife still found it painful (she finds all such exercises difficult) but I think it was quite valuable.

After having gone through one of his “full” processes (in all a half hour of time), I tend to agree with his assertion that you can start habits at any time. There is no need to wait for a new year’s resolution. Just notice a problem, take a moment to look at it systematically, and start implementing a change.

Normally I try to write up some (slightly) deeper thoughts or anecdotes to go in my initial impressions. I also usually let these notes marinate for a while before publishing.

This one is just go, go, go.

Strongly Recommended.

I stumbled across this book in my garage the week after Tony passed away. It seemed fitting to reread my former client’s book so I brought it in.

It put me in a pretty deep funk for a few days.

Tony had a great story and rich ideas about company culture, and it was depressing to remind myself of what we lost after he was cursed with unimaginable wealth.

It is clear that Tony thought he had a core belief system at the time he wrote the book. The words he wrote still resonate. They evolution of his ideas are insightful and his suggestions still worth exploring for shaping an organization.

However, the removal of all limitations must be one of the most destabilizing things in one’s life. From his story, it seems that he barely survived (financially) from his first big success. Tony seemed to be a guy who enjoy pushing things to the edge, and the continued growth of Zappos and making more cash were paltry goals for his next phase in life. My guess is that he had hoped revitalizing the East Fremont district would be his next big challenge, but city building is an agonizingly slow process.

As the benefactor of all those around him, he cursed himself with the company of yes-men, and he lost one of the most valuable gifts of this world, “No.” Without limitations, how can one even start to make a decision? And so he thrashed around looking for self actualization, finding tragedy instead.

But his book remains. The story of Zappos will remain a company of legend, and his thoughts are well worth contemplating for someone who is building an organization. The story is now tinged with the sadness of the future, but maybe it’s truer that way.