What Else I'm Reading (#4)
Mini book reviews from the past year
Here's another series of mini book reviews (see previously here, here, and here). These are most of the books I've read in the past year (September 2023 - September 2024. This post was likewise written a half hour at a time over the past year or so).
This is a pretty long post. Feel free to skim it or skip it. I write these for myself as much as I write them for anyone else.
I suppose I should highlight a few of the books I've found most interesting lately. For nonfiction: How Far the Light Reaches, The Puzzler (if you're into puzzles & games), Hidden Potential, Every Moment Matters (if you're coaching), The Book of Eels, and Atomic Habits. For fiction: Venomous Lumpsucker; Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow; and the Kingkiller Chronicle series (if you don't mind a fantasy series that may never be finished).
Nonfiction
What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, by Michael Sandel
I wasn't enthralled by this book but I slowly plugged away at it over the course of a few months, in between reading books I enjoyed more. Which is not to say it's a bad book, exactly. It just didn't have any ideas mind-bending enough to leave me wanting more, and in general it's a topic I've done a good amount of reading & thinking about. But if the subject is especially interesting to you, there are lots of good examples in the book.
Anyways, let's quickly look at a few examples discussed in the book. One chapter discusses the morals of queueing. Should we be able to pay people to stand in lines for us? (think: Shakespeare in the Park tickets; or more importantly, lobbyists pay people to stand in line for Congressional hearings that have limited seating room.) I like the way Sandel puts it in this quote:
[some people argue] queuing “discriminates in favor of people who have the most free time.” That’s true, but only in the same sense that markets “discriminate” in favor of people who have the most money.
This exemplifies the argument he makes throughout the book against letting everything become a market. There are, he says, two common arguments against markets. First, the fairness argument, which looks something like this:
willingness to pay for a good does not show who values it most highly. This is because market prices reflect the ability as well as the willingness to pay.
Some fairness examples work in the other direction, as well—people selling something because they're poor that they wouldn't sell if they were richer (e.g. a person who sold the right to get an advertisement tattooed on their forehead to help pay for medical bills).
The other common argument against markets are their corrupting influence. In other words, the benefit of 'efficient allocation of goods' needs to be weighed against how our society might become worse when markets are involved. For example:
In 2011, a Colorado school district sold advertising space on report cards.
Is that really the type of world we want to live in? Is the money worth the lesson we teach our kids about how everything in life is about buying and consuming? Other examples included:
Companies buying life insurance policies from individual people, giving those companies an interest in that person dying sooner rather than later.
The invention of skyboxes and luxury seats at sports stadiums removed one of the few places where rich people and poor people mingled together.
Here's one more section early in the book that I liked. The author asks whether ethical behavior is something that gets easily "used up", and should be conserved, or something that grows stronger with use like a muscle. Some economists argue for the first theory:
“Like many economists,” Arrow writes, “I do not want to rely too heavily on substituting ethics for self-interest. I think it best on the whole that the requirement of ethical behavior be confined to those circumstances where the price system breaks down … We do not wish to use up recklessly the scarce resources of altruistic motivation.”
The author, of course, argues against Mr. Arrow — we should ask people to behave the "right way". In doing so, their ability to do the right thing will grow stronger, and we'll build a better society.
How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures, by Sabrina Imbler
It is unnerving to see a worm that is longer than a man. But this is how long the marine worm Eunice aphroditois, also called the sand striker, can grow.
I knew about this book because I read the author online, but it also made it on a number of "Best Books of 2022" lists. Those high ratings are well-deserved, in my opinion. The book is short, there's lots of cool science and it's honestly very impressive how well Sabrina Imbler is able to connect the lives of sea creatures to their own life. I don't think I've ever read a book exactly like this one—which isn't to say that it's the best book I've ever read, just that it has its own unique niche. (I liked this book a lot. The review is just short b/c it's not the kind of book I feel compelled to write a long review about.)
The Personal MBA: A World-class Business Education in a Single Volume, by Josh Kaufman
I liked The Personal MBA, but I didn't learn much that was completely new to me. I'd seen most of the ideas before in various books and online essays.
The great thing about this book is how Kaufman explains everything in simple terms—starting with "business" itself:
Most business books (and business schools) assume that the student already knows what businesses are, what they do, and how they work...Here’s how I define a business:
Every successful business (1) creates or provides something of value that (2) other people want or need (3) at a price they’re willing to pay, in a way that (4) satisfies the purchaser’s needs and expectations and (5) provides the business sufficient revenue to make it worthwhile for the owners to continue operation.
(That's maybe not always the case in our late-stage-capitalist world, but there's still a core of truth there, hopefully. He later adds: "Some people believe that the purpose of a business is to maximize the amount of Profit generated, but that’s not the only reason businesses are created. For some people (like me), business is more of a creative endeavor—a way to explore what’s possible, help others, and support yourself at the same time.")
He says in Chapter 1: "Over the past five years, I’ve read thousands of business books..." (I'm still not sure whether to believe this!) and follows it up with: "Together, we’ll explore 226 simple concepts that help you think about business in an entirely new way. " After that, each chapter consists of short sections, each dedicated to a specfic "mental model" that will (hopefully) help you do business. Each chapter focuses on a different part of business—Value Creation, Marketing, Sales, Finance, Understanding Systems, etc.
I like how down-to-earth the book is. It's like Reddit's "explain like I'm five" community for business. Business involves interacting with other people, so there's a chapter on understanding and working with other people. He covers math-y topics (accounting, etc), but only at a conceptual level.
To give you a bit of flavor, here's what he says about the "Pricing Uncertainty Principle":
One of the most fascinating parts of Sales is what I call the Pricing Uncertainty Principle: all prices are arbitrary and malleable. Pricing is always an executive decision. If you want to try to sell a small rock for $350 million, you can. If you want to quadruple that price or reduce it to $0.10 an hour later, there’s absolutely nothing stopping you. Any price can be set to any level at any time, without limitation.
The Pricing Uncertainty Principle has an important corollary: you must be able to support your asking price before a customer will actually accept it. In general, people prefer to pay as little as possible to acquire the things they want (with some notable exceptions, which we’ll discuss later in Social Signaling). If you expect people to pay you perfectly good money to buy what you’re offering, you must be able to provide a Reason Why the offered price is worth paying.
It’s difficult to support a price of $350 million for a rock—unless that rock is the Hope Diamond, a 45.5-carat deep-blue diamond with a long and distinguished history.
As a fun side note, he mentions how bad of a business my hobby is:
(Customers who purchase razors need shaving cream and extra blades as well; buy a Frisbee, and you won’t need another unless you lose it.)
Many people in the disc sports community actually do believe this is exactly why there's so much more money in disc golf (where people are constantly losing discs in the woods/water) than in ultimate frisbee.
I'd mostly suggest the book for someone who's actually planning to "do business", but it's also a pretty good book for anyone who just likes thinking about how the world works. He shares a lot of mental models (226 of them, in fact!), and lots of them are useful in situations outside of business.
In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations That Changed the World by Ian Stewart
As you might guess from the subtitle, each chapter of the book covers a different equation from across the world of science. While reading, I thought to myself, this must be a hard book to do well. It covers so many different areas of science, and every reader will be coming to it with different amounts of background knowledge. I thought (and still think) the idea for this book is great, but the actual content left me a little disappointed. Which, again, I think is a comment on how hard this book would be to do perfectly, not a comment on the author's abilities.
There were a few topics on chapters I was already quite familiar with—calculus, imaginary numbers, the bell curve, Navier-Stokes, information theory. In these chapters, I followed along quite well but didn't learn much new. Then there were chapters on topics I wasn't too familiar with —toplogy, the wave equation, Schrodinger's equation, etc. In these, I felt like I always eventually got lost and the author wasn't quite able to make it click for me. (Not that anything else I've read about quantum mechanics has clicked for me, either.)
I would include more quotes but this is the kind of book where it takes a lot of explanation to slowly build up to the interesting concepts. You can say a lot of interesting things about calculus if you have a whole chapter to explain them; but you can't say any of them in just two sentences. The book has interesting parts, and it's worth a try if it sounds like the kind of thing you'd be interested in. But it left me wanting compared to the book I imagined it could be.
Age Proof: The New Science of Living a Longer and Healthier Life by Rose Ann Kenny
I picked this book up expecting something different, but that's my own fault. I'm still a little too young for the focus of this book, which is really aimed at the 50+ demographic (though it's never too young to start being healthier). I also picked it up expecting there to be some, like, secrets. But it was all pretty standard stuff—eat healthy, be active, sleep well, have meaning in life and meaningful connections, etc. Which is not to say it's bad advice. Lots of problems can be solved with obvious advice. The hard part is taking that advice seriously.
There are a couple exceptions to her suggestions being "standard stuff"—she's a big fan of both cold exposure and intermittent fasting.
The book frustrated me though, because she claimed to be citing only the best science, saying:
I am as clear as I can be of the strength of evidence behind the information and shy away from anything that is conjecture.
But she also says things like:
In 1800, you could expect to live to 40; 200 years later, that has more than doubled and we can expect to live to 85 and beyond.
But my understanding is that this is mostly due to early childhood mortality, not due to us understanding aging better (this source says that a 25-year-old around 1800 could expect to live to be 61). The book focuses on Blue Zones, which have also faced some scrutiny (see here, for example). She addresses the debate but I'm not sure who to believe. (There are lots of potential correllation-vs-causation issues in a book like this, too. She pointed this out once or twice, but other times glossed over it with "[x] is associated with [y]" terminology.).
This paragraph was really something, too. I find it hard to believe this would replicate:
Our research has shown that positive benefits on mood and well-being are more evident with the more visual exposure to the sea. In other words, being able ‘to see the sea’ matters. This applies to all ages and some studies show that it is particularly evident as we get older. The sea is constantly changing and it is well known that variety enhances well-being. The sea is never the same on two consecutive days or even for a couple of hours within the same day. Thus a sea view is never boring, always stimulating.
Here's another section that seemed more like horoscopes than science to me (though maybe there is solid science behind it!):
we find four sub-types of lark and owl [i.e. "early birds" and "night owls"]: dolphin, lion, bear and wolf. Overall, 10 per cent of people are dolphins, 20 per cent lions, 50 per cent bears and 20 per cent wolves.
I never knew there was more than just early birds and night owls! Overall, I found that once I wasn't sure she was sharing trustworthy science, I couldn't trust any of it. If the stuff I had read about elsewhere was wrong, then why would I trust her on the stuff I hadn't read about elsewhere?
Anyway, here were a few random science facts I enjoyed:
Did you know that vitamin D is a hormone? It’s the only vitamin classed as a hormone...
Healthy children laugh as much as 400 times per day but older adults tend to laugh only 15 times per day.
Small blood vessels in the eye originate from the same source as the small vessels that go to the brain. This shared starting point enables us to draw conclusions about brain vessels from eye vessels in adults. Changes detected in retinal photographs predict future stroke and vascular dementia.
One study demonstrated a difference of 20 years in biological ageing clocks in adults as young as 38. [She later says "The...biological age difference was due, in the main, to adverse experiences in youth."]
We share more DNA with friends than we do with other people...equivalent to a level of genetic similarity expected among fourth cousins.
She discusses the search for a "cure" for aging, but there's no magical cures yet, only intriguing examples from the natural world:
For example, rats and pigeons are pretty much the same size and have the same basal metabolic rate but pigeons live seven times longer than rats. The reason for this difference is that leakage of toxins and waste products during the creation of energy by the mitochondria is much less in pigeons, despite having the same metabolic rate as rats.
Overall, I wasn't a fan of the book. Which isn't to say her main advice (see the first paragraph above) is wrong, just that you don't need to read the whole book to appreciate it.
Write Useful Books: A Modern Approach to Designing and Refining Recommendable Nonfiction by Rob Fitzpatrick
Not quite as useful to me as I'd hoped since I write blog posts and I'm not super interested in writing books instead. It's a book about the process of making a book, not a book about how to write well. He focuses on big-picture concepts like choosing the right scope for your book, getting feedback to make your book better, and getting it in front of the right people.
The focus of the book is the second word in the title: useful. He categorizes nonfiction books into two sets: "pleasure givers" and "problem solvers"—and says his book is only about problem solvers. His suggestion is to write a book that people will find valuable. When people recognize that your book has solved a specific problem they had, they will spontaneously start recommending your book to other people with the same problem.
I wouldn't recommend this book unless you're planning to write a book yourself. That being said, here are a few parts I highlighted:
He suggests getting reader feedback on your book early and often:
A major theme of this guide is to stop writing your manuscript in secret and start exposing it to — and learning from — real readers as quickly as possible.
And for feedback to be effective, we have to be vulnerable about the fact that our work isn't perfect yet. Both when editing our own work:
Don’t read it like it’s your precious perfect baby darling. Read it like it’s your worst enemy’s magnum opus and your job is to expose its every tragic flaw.
And when getting reader feedback:
Negative feedback can feel like a real kick in the pants....But far better to hear it now — while you have a chance to fix it — than to be blindsided later by the slings and arrows of outrageous Amazon reviews...it’s never you against your readers. It’s you and your readers working together against the problems in the manuscript.
He suggests that you should never make readers work before they reach the valuable parts of your book:
The likelihood of your readers recommending your book is based on the amount of value they’ve received before either finishing or abandoning it. And they’re most likely to abandon at the start.
So if you withhold value at the start of your book — either intentionally or accidentally — then you end up frustrating your readers and decimating your word of mouth.
Nonfiction authors make this mistake all the time via the inclusion of lengthy forewords, introductions, theoretical foundations, and other speed bumps that come from a place of author ego instead of reader empathy.
Another suggestion is to make it easy for your readers to predict what value they'll get from your book: "Make a clear promise and put it on the cover". When someone recommends your book, the person they recommend it to will immediately understand why.
On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction, by William Zinsser
One of the better books of writing advice, in my opinion. My only complaint is it was a bit long—which is ironic since Zinsser encourages conciseness. The middle section of the book consists of chapters on writing in all different styles (interviews, memoirs, travel writing, sportswriting, writing in business contexts, science writing, writing about art, etc). But he mostly just says the same thing over and over again, applied to the style of that chapter: be yourself, write with style, find something interesting & worth saying.
My advice: read Part I and Part II and then skim the rest if you feel so inclined.
A couple passages I highlighted:
Humor is the secret weapon of the nonfiction writer.
Be yourself and your readers will follow you anywhere. Try to commit an act of writing and your readers will jump overboard to get away.
I can’t overstate how much easier it is for readers to process a sentence if you start with “but” when you’re shifting direction. Or, conversely, how much harder it is if they must wait until the end to realize that you have shifted. Many of us were taught that no sentence should begin with “but.”
There’s not much to be said about the period except that most writers don’t reach it soon enough.
Active verbs also enable us to visualize an activity because they require a pronoun (“he”), or a noun (“the boy”), or a person (“Mrs. Scott”) to put them in motion.
I liked his comment that a good writer should argue with their editor sometimes—they should care enough about their writing (and should have written carefully enough) that they can make a coherent argument for why a phrase is good the way it is:
Most writers won’t argue with an editor because they don’t want to annoy him; they’re so grateful to be published that they agree to having their style—in other words, their personality—violated in public.
Yet to defend what you’ve written is a sign that you are alive. I’m a known crank on this issue—I fight over every semicolon. But editors put up with me because they can see that I’m serious.
Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain, by Sarah-Jayne Blakemore
Inventing Ourselves was reasonably well-written and interesting, but I just didn't feel like I learned anything that surprising. Teenagers take more risks (especially around peers), feel more embarrassment, have worse impulse control, and are just generally very focused on fitting in (it's the first time in their life that they're thinking about themselves as social creatures, as the author points out).
It matches all the standard stereotypes of teens. It's nice to know that those common beliefs in our society have been proven true by science. But there wasn't really anything that changed my understanding of adolescence.
I do think it's helpful to me to fully appreciate that these behaviors are innate. I like how she supports her story with studies done on mice—"adolescent" rodents behave in ways similar to human teenagers: teenage-equivalent mice "spend more time drinking alcohol when with their cage-mates than when alone" and rats have been shown to engage in more "novelty-seeking" when they're teenagers.
Another sort-of interesting point was that we can see on brain scans how teenagers and adults react differently in social situations:
as we get older, activity [brain activity when study participants think "about what people mean when they say certain phrases"] moves from the social brain region in the front of the brain (the dmPFC) to social brain regions towards the back of the brain (in the temporal cortex)....
For adults, who are able to scan their stored collection of social scripts, accumulated over years of experiences, the process of thinking about themselves in different social situations might be more automatic, involving little conscious awareness.
Adolescents, on the other hand, spend more time consciously thinking through each new situation.
The biggest benefit of the book was how it made me think about how I want to interact with adolescents, whether as a parent or a coach. For example, in America there's this stereotype of the dad who's always trying to embarrass his teenage children. But if teenagers are biologically susceptible to be scared of embarrassment, isn't this kind of mean-spirited? It's like surprising someone with a snake when you already know they're afraid of snakes.
Or if teenagers are going to be hyper-worried about fitting in with their group, shouldn't I be doing what I can to help them fit in? Even if it goes against my parenting philosophy? It should at least be considered as a trade-off — "I think the best way to parent is [X], but that might leave my kid marginally more socially outcast, so I owe it to them to allow a little [Y] instead."
The Puzzler: One Man's Quest to Solve the Most Baffling Puzzles Ever, from Crosswords to Jigsaws to the Meaning of Life, by A.J. Jacobs
Lately I've gotten more into crossword puzzles (not to mention other games like Wordle, Connections, and Squaredle). I was curious if there were books about crossword puzzles—searching online I found this book. Only one of the chapters is about crosswords but...close enough! I like all kinds of puzzles, too.
Even though it's nonfiction, it was more of an "easy read" for me, so I didn't make many highlights of what I learned. Two things stood out to me.
First, The New York Times, who publishes the world's most famous crossword, was originally violently opposed to crosswords:
However, one newspaper at the time did NOT print crosswords: The New York Times. The Times considered crosswords too lowbrow, too frivolous.
Instead, the Times made it a habit to print articles about the evils of crosswords. Here are just a sample of headlines from the 1920s and 1930s about this menace to society.
PITTSBURGH PASTOR SAYS CROSSWORDS ARE “THE MARK OF A CHILDISH MENTALITY.”
HUSBAND SHOOTS WIFE, THEN KILLS HIMSELF WHEN SHE WON’T HELP DO CROSS-WORD PUZZLE.
CROSS-WORD HEADACHE BOOMS OPTICAL TRADE: NEW STRAIN ON EYES REVEALS DEFECTS IN VISION.
Second, I learned the corn maze wasn't invented until...1993!? No one older than me ever mentioned they didn't have corn mazes growing up!
It's a fun book, especially if you like puzzles. He talks a bit about the philosophy of puzzles, echoing some of the ideas you'll find in Games: Agency as Art (my review here), like the way puzzles are right-sized to give us the joy of solving a problem. Or the idea that some difficulties are desirable and good. Etc etc.
make it stick: The Science of Successful Learning, by Peter C. Brown et. al.
I didn't take too many notes on Make It Stick—I've already read a number of books about learning science. I figure it's occasionally worth reading another book about a subject I'm interested in, just in case there's something I haven't seen before.
I didn't really catch any new tidbits reading this one. But it's probably still worth reminding myself about some of these ideas every once in a while. For anyone who's interested, here's a summary of their main points:
Here, more or less unadorned in list form, are some of the principal claims we make in support of our argument. We set them forth more fully in the chapters that follow.
Learning is deeper and more durable when it’s effortful. Learning that’s easy is like writing in sand, here today and gone tomorrow.
We are poor judges of when we are learning well and when we’re not. When the going is harder and slower and it doesn’t feel productive, we are drawn to strategies that feel more fruitful, unaware that the gains from these strategies are often temporary.
Rereading text and massed practice of a skill or new knowledge are by far the preferred study strategies of learners of all stripes, but they’re also among the least productive...
Retrieval practice—recalling facts or concepts or events from memory—is a more effective learning strategy than review by rereading. Flashcards are a simple example. Retrieval strengthens the memory and interrupts forgetting. A single, simple quiz after reading a text or hearing a lecture produces better learning and remembering than rereading the text or reviewing lecture notes...
When you space out practice at a task and get a little rusty between sessions, or you interleave the practice of two or more subjects, retrieval is harder and feels less productive, but the effort produces longer lasting learning and enables more versatile application of it in later settings.
Trying to solve a problem before being taught the solution leads to better learning, even when errors are made in the attempt.
The popular notion that you learn better when you receive instruction in a form consistent with your preferred learning style, for example as an auditory or visual learner, is not supported by the empirical research...
When you’re adept at extracting the underlying principles or “rules” that differentiate types of problems, you’re more successful at picking the right solutions in unfamiliar situations....
We’re all susceptible to illusions that can hijack our judgment of what we know and can do. Testing helps calibrate our judgments of what we’ve learned...
All new learning requires a foundation of prior knowledge...
Elaboration is the process of giving new material meaning by expressing it in your own words and connecting it with what you already know. The more you can explain about the way your new learning relates to your prior knowledge, the stronger your grasp of the new learning will be, and the more connections you create that will help you remember it later...
Putting new knowledge into a larger context helps learning. For example, the more of the unfolding story of history you know, the more of it you can learn...
People who learn to extract the key ideas from new material and organize them into a mental model and connect that model to prior knowledge show an advantage in learning complex mastery...
Many people believe that their intellectual ability is hardwired from birth, and that failure to meet a learning challenge is an indictment of their native ability. But every time you learn something new, you change the brain—the residue of your experiences is stored...In other words, the elements that shape your intellectual abilities lie to a surprising extent within your own control. Understanding that this is so enables you to see failure as a badge of effort and a source of useful information...
Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things, by Adam Grant
Another book on a subject I've already thought a lot about. I enjoyed Hidden Potential. It feels like a good book to suggest to someone who's ready to be inspired to achieve their potential. Lots of good quotes that match well with my own opinions on our potential to develop new skills:
A plateau is not a cue that you’ve peaked. They’re signals that it may be time to turn around and find a new route. ..But even if we discover a better method, our inexperience with it will usually make us worse at first.
When Benny is ready to start learning a new language, he sets an ambitious goal: to make at least 200 mistakes a day.
What look like differences in natural ability are often differences in opportunity and motivation.
Even if your chosen expert [mentor] can walk you through their route, when you ask for directions on yours, you’ll run into a second challenge. You don’t share the same strengths and weaknesses—their hills and valleys aren’t the same as yours. You might be heading for the same destination, but you’re starting far from their position. This makes your path as unfamiliar to them as theirs is to you.
When we select leaders, we don’t usually pick the person with the strongest leadership skills. We frequently choose the person who talks the most. It’s called the babble effect.
He says that a study of world-class tennis players found that when they were young, their coaches impressed by their "unusal motivation", and not their "unusual aptitude", and that "That motivation wasn’t innate; it tended to begin with a coach or teacher who made learning fun."
This quote from the introduction summarizes Grant's main points on on the development of potential:
Traveling great distances requires the courage to seek out the right kinds of discomfort, the capacity to absorb the right information, and the will to accept the right imperfections.
Seeking out discomfort through learning is an idea I'm already quite familiar with. (See my review of Make It Stick above: "Learning is deeper and more durable when it’s effortful."). By "capacity to absorb the right information", Grant means, roughly, adopting a personal philosophy of being a sponge:
It hinges on two key habits. The first is how you acquire information: Do you react to what enters your field of vision, or are you proactive in seeking new knowledge, skills, and perspectives? The second is the goal you’re pursuing when you filter information: Do you focus on feeding your ego or fueling your growth?
The "will to accept imperfections" sometimes felt like "seeking discomfort", just by another name. Perfectionists avoid making mistakes, but making mistakes is what leads to improvement. Accepting imperfection is exactly what gets us closer to perfection:
Tolerating flaws isn’t just something novices need to do—it’s part of becoming an expert and continuing to gain mastery. The more you grow, the better you know which flaws are acceptable...
...research suggests that perfectionists tend to get three things wrong. One: they obsess about details that don’t matter. They’re so busy finding the right solution to tiny problems that they lack the discipline to find the right problems to solve. They can’t see the forest for the trees. Two: they avoid unfamiliar situations and difficult tasks that might lead to failure. That leaves them refining a narrow set of existing skills rather than working to develop new ones. Three: they berate themselves for making mistakes, which makes it harder to learn from them. They fail to realize that the purpose of reviewing your mistakes isn’t to shame your past self. It’s to educate your future self.
Hidden Potential felt like the first pop-psychology book I've read that really tried to be cognizant of the lessons of the replication crisis. In my review of The Culture Code, I wrote:
Daniel Coyle cites lots of studies...and a lot of them feel like exactly the kind of science that wouldn't replicate...Although I understand why he didn't do it, I would've trusted The Culture Code more if he added "(yes, this result has been replicated)" after discussing the result of this study or that study.
Hidden Potential actually does make a point of commenting on replications and sample sizes, and I think Adam Grant deserves credit for it. For example (bolding added by me):
Preschoolers who managed to resist the urge to gobble up the marshmallow now for a bigger fluffy treat later ended up scoring higher on the SAT as teenagers—a finding that’s been replicated recently.
In a study of over 28,000 NBA basketball games, researchers investigated what happened to teams after their star players got injured. As expected, teams got worse. But once the star returned, they won even more games than they had before he was hurt.
Across hundreds of experiments, people who are encouraged to do their best perform worse—and learn less—than those who are randomly assigned to goals that are specific and difficult.
Then I came across new evidence that people with bigger dreams go on to achieve greater things. When economists tracked thousands of people from birth until age 55, the aspirations they formed as adolescents foreshadowed how their adult lives would unfold.
The book also felt modern in its appreciation for the power of memorable images. There's lots of motivational-poster-style diagrams, like this one below:
Grant suggests two process adjustments I hadn't seen before. First, he says that instead of asking for feedback, we should ask for advice:
But research suggests [asking for feedback is] a mistake.
Instead of seeking feedback, you’re better off asking for advice. Feedback tends to focus on how well you did last time. Advice shifts attention to how you can do better next time. In experiments, that simple shift is enough to elicit more specific suggestions and more constructive input.
I'm not sure I'm totally convinced on this one. Feedback has seemed to work pretty well for me. Perhaps asking for advice is a better way to elicit useful feedback from mediocre feedback-givers, but elite feedback-givers will provide "specific" and "constructive" suggestions even if feedback is what you ask for.
His second suggestion that was new to me is that we're doing brainstorming wrong:
In brainstorming meetings, many good ideas are lost—and few are gained. Extensive evidence shows that when we generate ideas together, we fail to maximize collective intelligence...The problem isn’t meetings themselves—it’s how we run them. Think about the brainstorming sessions you’ve attended. You’ve probably seen people bite their tongues due to ego threat (I don’t want to look stupid), noise (we can’t all talk at once), and conformity pressure (let’s all jump on the boss’s bandwagon!). Goodbye diversity of thought, hello groupthink. These challenges are amplified for people who lack power or status: the most junior person in the room, [etc].
He suggests a modified process that he calls brainwriting:
The initial steps are solo. You start by asking everyone to generate ideas separately. Next, you pool them and share them anonymously among the group. To preserve independent judgment, each member evaluates them on their own. Only then does the team come together to select and refine the most promising options. By developing and assessing ideas individually before choosing and elaborating them, teams can surface and advance possibilities that might not get attention otherwise.
I like this suggestion a lot. His criticisms of brainstorming match up well with my experience. Not knowing the right moment to speak up in a big group of people and being hesitant to share an idea because you're not sure if it's a good one are both familiar feelings for me. And his fixes seem right to me: independent idea generation and independent initial evaluation, before coming together to elaborate on them. I look forward to trying some brainwriting next time I'm in a relevant situation.
Overall, Hidden Potential was a solid book that reinforced a few of my beliefs about achieving one's potential while also exposing me to a few ideas I hadn't seen before.
Every Moment Matters: How the World's Best Coaches Inspire Their Athletes and Build Championship Teams, by John O'Sullivan
A good book about coaching youth sports. It matches pretty well with the way I was already thinking about things. His podcast may have been recommended to me before.
Compared to my expectations from the subtitle, the book focused more on "coaching youth sports" and less on "championship teams". Let's run through a number of quick comments I thought were worth highlighting:
He stresses noticing—and commenting on—when players do something well, instead of just telling them what not to do:
catching your athletes being good is absolutely critical to give your athletes a sense of well-being and competence.
He cites research from the 2010s where children were surveyed about "why they play sports". Winning ranked...forty-eighth:
I am quite sure that I have never coached a game where there were forty-seven things more important than winning from my perspective but apparently there are for many of our athletes.
I liked this suggestion for one-on-one meetings:
He concludes his player meetings with a simple question: “How can I be better for you?”
And this one:
she decided to ask them to complete a simple activity. She asked them to finish this sentence: "I wish my teacher knew…
The results astounded her. Some were funny, and some broke her heart. All provided insight into her students and allowed her to better create a safe and supportive classroom and to connect with her students by knowing their unique stories.
He suggests writing notes to players as a good way to build them up:
Take a moment and write a note to a player and catch him being good...[a short example note is given]...I have written a lot of these notes in my coaching career. They don’t take very long, and they can make a massive impact.
...Notes such as these only take a few minutes, but they say to your athletes—and their parents—three critical words: “I see you!” You matter to me. I saw you doing well, or I saw you struggling. These notes can also say, “I screwed that up!” And I have certainly screwed up a lot...So many young athletes never have a coach or teacher admit they screwed up, and this is sad. Showing vulnerability and admitting errors is one of the most important aspects of leadership, not a sign of weakness. I have found that my notes saying, “I screwed that up,” are oftentimes more powerful than the ones that say, “I see you.”
One of his chapters is on the differences between coaching boys and girls. I'm not sure I totally trust his conclusions but he deserves credit for not completely shying away from a touchy subject. The title of the chapter is “Women Tend to Weigh the Odds; Men Tend to Ignore Them”. Here's a statistic I highlighted as maybe useful to a girls' coach:
Various studies of pre-school-aged children have found that boys are twice as likely to play in groups while girls are twice as likely to play in pairs.
One of his bigger ideas about building a team is that teams should have "standards" and not "rules":
This chapter is all about changing behaviors and implementing standards instead of rules in your program. A rule is a regulation or guideline while a standard is a level of quality. Rules can be demeaning in a way, as they are all about control, while standards can be inspiring. When young athletes encounter rules, they constantly test them to see how far they can go before they are held accountable for breaking them. Standards, on the other hand, are something to be strived for and attained.
...Defining what success looks like for an activity every session has led to more ownership and accountability and engagement for my players. Bennett suggests that before starting an activity, call your players in and ask them to describe what acceptable, unacceptable, and exceptional looks like for that activity. “We’re not telling them,” says Bennett.
He discusses standards a bit more, and concludes by sharing his favorite:
There are lots of standards I have heard over the years, but my favorite one, heard from multiple sources, is a version of this one: don’t let your teammates down.
There's lots more in the book that I didn't cover. I considered writing a longer review for this one. One reason I didn't is he cites a lot of books I've already been reading, like Make it Stick (see above) and Dan Coyle, author of The Culture Code (which I reviewed here).
Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter, by Liz Wiseman
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.
A book about using your role as a leader to get the most out of everyone in the organization:
If you’ve built a reputation as a big thinker, don’t be surprised if people save the big thinking for you.
I'd say it's mostly the same ideas as a few other books I've read recently (Hidden Potential, The Culture Code), with the terminology and phrasing adapted to her personal context (more business-centric than those books). The central idea is basically what we saw in the culture code: creating environments where people truly feel comfortable giving honest feedback. This table from Chapter 1 summarizes the ideas, though it may be too terse to make sense out of context:
She says of one manager:
he spoke only about 10 percent of the time, mostly just to “crisp up” the problem statement.
And later says that 'multipliers' "use their intelligence to make challenges concrete for others. "
One of her main ideas, which I generally agree with, is that your beliefs (about other people, about managing, etc) can become reality:
Diminishers’ two-step logic appears to be that people who don’t “get it” now, never will; therefore, I’ll need to keep doing the thinking for everyone.
You might ask yourself how you would operate if, deep down, you held these beliefs. You would probably tell people what to do, make all the important decisions, and jump in and take over when someone appeared to be failing. And in the end, you would almost always be right, because your assumptions would cause you to manage in a way that produced subordination and dependency.
The Culture Code talks about leaders who "love you to death" yet at the same time "are brutally honest". Multipliers similarly stresses that being a great manager isn't just about being everyone's best friend:
Multipliers deliver and sustain superior results by inculcating high expectations across the organization...they hold people accountable for their commitments. One of the most critical insights from our study of Multipliers is how hard-edged these managers are.
You may have noticed I'm reading a lot of books about coaching and leadership recently. I think I would've enjoyed Multipliers more if it was just a bit shorter. But overall I appreciated seeing some of the same concepts I've been thinking about from a slightly new angle.
The Book of Eels, by Patrik Svensson
I read a few surprisingly good books about sea creatures in the past few years. Why Fish Don't Exist and How Far the Light Reaches make for a good trilogy with The Book of Eels.
Eels are a lot more interesting than I ever realized. Did you know Aristotle studied eels extensively? And one of Sigmund Freud's first academic jobs was attempting to find the eel's reproductive organs? (He failed—the reproductive organs of eels don't develop until they're ready to mate.) Or did you know that still no human has ever seen an eel reproduce?
The author grew up fishing for eels with his dad in the stream behind their house, and the stories of his own encounters with eels make a fun counterpoint to the (surprisingly interesting) eel science. For example [trigger warning, this quote is a little gruesome]:
As evening came on, we’d kill the eels, a brutal spectacle. Dad would pick up an eel and hold it down against a table, grab his fishing knife, and ram the sharp point straight through its head. The eel would writhe in rapid convulsions, tensing its body as though it were one big muscle. When it calmed down a little, Dad would pull the knife out and put the eel on a three-foot-long wooden board. He’d secure it to the board with a five-inch nail hammered through its head so the eel hung suspended as if on a crucifix. With his knife, he would then make an incision, all the way around the body, right below the head.
“Let’s take off its pajamas,” Dad would say and hand me a pair of pliers. I’d get a firm grip on the edge and pull the skin off in one long, fluid motion. It was blueish on the inside. Like a child’s pajamas. Sometimes the body would still be undulating slowly, sluggishly.
I liked this book. I learned a lot about something I'd never thought much about, and the book wasn't any longer than it needed to be (i.e.: it's short).
How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen, by David Brooks
Sort of a modern version of How to Win Friends and Influence People, except it's about making deep connections and not just about being likeable on the surface level. I find books like these interesting, and have read a few of them. My thought process is something like this:
In the internet age, it's possible to learn just about anything, and learn it from some of the best teachers in the world
Things I'm going to spend a lot of time doing are worth doing well
Obviously, interacting with other people is something I'm going to spend my whole life doing
So why not invest time learning to do it well?
Social skills are of course different from sports skills (for example), in that it's important to still be the genuine you. You can't just play the role of someone who behaves a certain way, you have to really be that person. But that's a lot easier if you see yourself as someone who's capable of change, as author David Brooks does (and I agree):
As Brent Roberts and Hee J. Yoon wrote in a 2022 review on personality psychology, “Although it is still widely thought that personality is not changeable, recent research has roundly contradicted that notion. In a review of over 200 intervention studies, personality traits, and especially neuroticism, were found to be modifiable through clinical intervention, with changes being on average half of a standard deviation over periods as short as 6 weeks.
And Brooks admits that he, too, is still learning these skills. At the end of the book, an anecdote concludes with this self-criticism:
After this one day’s encounters, I realized that I have to work on my ability to spot the crucial conversational moments in real time.
This feels like a continuing challenge for me as well.
On the topic of people changing over time, I found this quote interesting:
Intriguingly, William Ickes [a researcher] finds that the longer many couples are married, the less accurate they are at reading each other. They lock in some early version of who their spouse is, and over the years, as the other person changes, that version stays fixed—and they know less and less about what’s actually going on in the other’s heart and mind.
This feels similar to many other challenges of mindfulness—it can be hard to stay alert when we're in our ultra-familiar comfort zone. Other examples might be staying vigilant when driving a car down a familiar road or staying sharp in a sports competition against a weaker team that you "should" beat. The situation may be familiar but we still need to be vigilant to notice what makes this particular moment unique.
Here are a few more quotes I highlighted:
Everyone in a conversation is facing an internal conflict between self-expression and self-inhibition. If you listen passively, the other person is likely to become inhibited. Active listening, on the other hand, is an invitation to express. One way to think of it is through the metaphor of hospitality. When you are listening, you are like the host of a dinner party. You have set the scene. You’re exuding warmth toward your guests, showing how happy you are to be with them, drawing them closer to where they want to go. When you are speaking, you are like a guest at a dinner party. You are bringing gifts.
...a good conversationalist controls her impatience and listens to learn, rather than to respond. That means she’ll wait for the end of the other person’s comment, and then pause for a few beats to consider how to respond to what’s been said, holding up her hand, so the other person doesn’t just keep on talking. Taking that extra breath creates space for reflection.
In her book, Murphy notes that Japanese culture encourages people to pause and reflect before replying. A study of Japanese businesspeople found that they are typically comfortable with eight-second pauses between one comment and another, roughly twice as long as Americans generally tolerate. They’re wise to take that pause.
One theme that came up a few times is just how powerful it can be to...simply ask people about themselves (these two quotes are separated by many chapters):
People come up to David twenty years after they got the index-card treatment to tell him how transformative the experience was. I asked David why he thinks this is. “People often haven’t had anyone tell them about themselves,” he responded.
[Dan McAdams] studies how people construct their personal narratives—how they tell the story of their lives. To find out, he invites research subjects onto campus, offers them some money for their time, and then over four hours or so, asks them questions that elicit their life stories. He asks people, for example, to tell him about the high points of their lives, the low points, and the turning points. Half the people he interviews end up crying at some point, recalling some hard event in their lives. At the end of the session, most of them are elated. They tell him that no one has ever asked them about their life story before. Some of them want to give the research fee back. “I don’t want to take money for this,” they say. “This has been the best afternoon I’ve had in a long time.”
The Effortless Sleep Method: The Incredible New Cure for Insomnia and Chronic Sleep Problems, by Sasha Stephens
I've always sort-of-struggled with my sleep habits, and earlier this year I finally decided to get serious about trying to fix them. There are a few things I like about this book:
It's short. I believe it was just over 100 pages on my Kindle—short and to the point.
She's realistic about the fact that your results depend more on whether you actually follow the advice than on the advice itself. Honestly, most self-help books would probably help people who are looking to improve—if they actually followed the advice in the book. Stephens spends a surprising amount of time reminding the reader: you're not special*, this advice will work for you if you follow it strictly and patiently. (*She claims high IQ people are more likely to be insomniac, although more recent research suggests that probably isn't true.) The amount of time she spend focusing on this made me more confident she actually understands the struggles people have.
The advice matches what I hear from the doctors/scientists. I'm a little confused about this one. Stephens explains her method as something she came up with. But it's pretty much the same advice I've gotten from doctors and read in books written by sleep researchers. So did she come up with it and then research proved it right? Or did they independently converge on the same ideas? Neither the book nor its author seem to have a Wikipedia page, so it's not as trivial as I'd like it to be to find the answer to this question. Anyways, even though the book has a "heterodox" tone, the advice is actually pretty standard stuff.
If you don't need to sleep better, don't waste your time thinking about or reading this book. If you do need to sleep better, give it a try.
I've been following the advice in the book, and have been tracking my progress in a journal/draft blog post, which I may publish some day if I ever get to the point that I feel there's a clear conclusion.
Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet, by Hannah Ritchie
Not the End of the World is a semi-optimistic take on the climate crisis. Yes, things are bad, but they're not unfixably bad. Or to paraphrase a line from the book, we shouldn't have "complacent optimism", but we can have "conditional optimism" (if we try, we can fix these problems). For some problems, the worst is already in the past:
In the US, fertiliser use hasn’t increased since the mid-1970s. Meanwhile, food production has increased by 75%. France now uses about half as much fertiliser as it did in the 1980s.
Just before the start of the 20th century there were around 2.6 million whales in our oceans. A century later, there were only 880,000 left...It will take a long time for whale populations to recover. But the world acted just in time to allow them to do so. The story could have ended very differently.
For other problems, we're getting close to being past the worst as technologies improve:
But in recent years this growth has slowed down a lot. [CO2] Emissions barely increased at all from 2018 to 2019. And they actually fell in 2020 as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. I’m optimistic we can peak global emissions in the 2020s.
She also points out that some things are not as bad as they may seem. A few of the claims you've seen in the news are either bad science or sensationalized headlines. She starts each chapter with an example of an overblown headline. For example, this Washington Post story titled "Two generations of humans have killed off more than half the world’s wildlife populations". She says this is a poor interpretation of the "Living Planet Index" which itself depends on averaging across many species in a way that maybe doesn't make sense. Look at individual species (without averaging to create the "index" number) and you'd find:
Forty-seven per cent of mammal populations increased, 43% decreased and 10% didn’t change at all. Forty-one per cent of birds increased, 52% decreased and 7% didn’t change at all.
Again, she's not saying that everything is perfect. But you shouldn't always trust alarmist headlines.
Even after reading the book and learning how some of these claims are overblown, I'm not as optimistic as the author is. I'm optimistic we could solve these problems—we have the knowledge and technology required. But I'm not as optimistic about our ability to actually make people care or convince them we know the right solutions to these problems.
Her proposed diet is something that I don't think I could even stick to, never mind someone who cares much less about the environment than I do:
Researchers estimate that if everyone were to adopt a more plant-based diet we could halve our emissions from food production. This plant-rich diet doesn’t cut out meat and dairy completely. It includes the equivalent of one slice of bacon, four thin slices of chicken and a glass of milk per day. You could also have an egg and a fish fillet every few days.
(Last sentence bolded by me—that sounds rough. The other examples I was thinking of when writing the last paragraph are things I'm fully on board for, but I don't think America is anywhere near having enough 'political will' to make big changes: nuclear power, denser cities, less personal car usage, etc.)
One of her biggest pet peeves is "biofuels", which divert our food production for usage as fuel in a way that's not very carbon efficient when you consider the total inputs and outputs.
So, how can it possibly be true that we produce 5,000 to 6,000 calories per person per day, more than double what we need, yet still struggle to feed everyone?...The reason is that we feed livestock and cars, not people. The world produces 3 billion tonnes of cereals every year...The amount of maize that the US puts into cars for biofuels is 50% more than the entire African continent produces.
Palm oil is also used in biofuels for transport. Here, we should absolutely stamp it out. Globally, we only put small amounts of palm oil into bioenergy. Just 5% of production. But for some countries – often the richest ones – bioenergy is a big user of palm oil. Germany is one example: 41% of its palm imports go to bioenergy. That’s more than it imports for food products. This is incredibly stupid, and terrible for the environment. To be clear: Germany imports palm oil from an area at high risk of tropical deforestation to put it into cars. What’s even more insulting is that it then counts this towards its ‘renewable energy’ target. In reality, biodiesel from palm oil results in more carbon emissions than petrol or diesel.
This isn't the kind of book that you "can't put down", but it's full of interesting data if you're trying to understand the global problems we're facing.
The Hard Hat: 21 Ways to Be a Great Teammate, by Jon Gordon
The Hard Hat is just about what you'd expect from the subtitle. It's quite short so don't worry about wasting too much time on it. I personally didn't take too much away from it because I've already read a few similar books, but if you haven't, it could be a good choice to start to think about how to be a teammate/leader.
Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones, by James Clear
I first heard of this book a few years back, but never bothered reading it because I had heard so much about it (I'd listened to him discuss it on a podcast, for example), and read so many "adjacent" books, that I felt like I didn't need to. But I was looking for something to read recently so I added Atomic Habits to my Kindle even though I roughly knew what I was getting.
Although I have pretty good daily habits, there were a few areas I wanted to improve and/or re-dedicate myself to meeting some of my goals. Reading a whole book was a good excuse—a good way to create for myself a mental 'line in the sand'—to re-commit to some new and old habits.
I've made a few updates to some of my own goals based on suggestions from the book:
Using a reward to congratulate myself for completing some of my harder daily tasks (I play my favorite daily word game Squaredle only after I've finished certain goals).
Starting small with a "two-minute habit" before slowly it building up.
Discussing my goals with an "accountability partner" to keep myself honest (I've done this before but had fallen out of the habit for a number of months).
One of his biggest suggestions that I chose not to adapt for myself right now is using "implementation intentions": "Hundreds of studies have shown that implementation intentions are effective for sticking to our goals".
Implementation intentions are, essentially, writing down exactly what you intend to do, and where and when you intend to do it: "I will do [task X] at [time Y] in [location Z]." It didn't feel like the right answer for me right now because I want the flexibilty to do things at different times of the day when it makes sense with my schedule. So far I've been doing well with the new habits I'm trying to develop. Perhaps I'll do a longer post about it someday if I have some interesting results to share.
Another suggestion is to increase the "friction" of doing an activity to wean yourself off bad habits. For example, I had gotten in the habit of checking my email much more than I, objectively speaking, needed to. I've been able to change my behavior pretty much immediately just by logging myself out of the account every time I close the browser tab. Just needing to type in the password is enough friction that I'm rarely succumbing to the instinct to check it whenever I have a free minute.
I liked the book's focus in the first few chapters on the way small changes can, over time, lead to big results:
Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. The same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them. They seem to make little difference on any given day and yet the impact they deliver over the months and years can be enormous...
Breakthrough moments are often the result of many previous actions, which build up the potential required to unleash a major change. ..It is not until months or years later that we realize the true value of the previous work we have done.
I think this is something I've been able to well in my own life, especially in the last few years—working patiently at getting better while avoiding burnout and stagnation.
Overall, I expect this is one of the better books on the practice and theory of building habits. Not much of the information was truly new to me, but reading it was a good excuse to invest my time in refining some of my current habits.
Prepared: What Kids Need for a Fulfilled Life, by Diane Tavenner
I picked up Prepared because the title made it sound like a book about raising kids (which, as a coach and a maybe-someday-parent, I have some interest in). I felt a little tricked because it turned out to be a book about running a high school. The author is the principal of Summit Prep, a California high school consistently ranked as one of the best in the country.
I generally agree with the author's suggestions (project-based learning, self-direction, having more one-on-one mentorship with a consistent mentor, etc.) but I feel a bit disappointed because the book wasn't what I was expecting. I'm sure the ideas can be easily adapted to my circumstances even if I'm not a high school teacher, so perhaps I'll go back and skim through the book again when I'm in need of inspiration.
Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout, by Cal Newport
Slow Productivity is a book about avoiding the always-connected, always-busy trends of modern "office work", in favor of taking your time (and reducing your distractions) to produce high quality work that lasts. Here's how Cal Newport describes 'slow productivity':
A philosophy for organizing knowledge work efforts in a sustainable and meaningful manner, based on the following three principles:
1. Do fewer things.
2. Work at a natural pace.
3. Obsess over quality.
I picked up this book knowing it would agree with ideals I already hold (I don't have a full-time job right now). And I wasn't let down. For example, he recommends using your skills to give yourself more free time/freedom instead of using them to earn more money.
He's careful to point out that not all jobs (and not all aspects of all jobs) are candidates for "slow productivity". He uses the example of early industrial jobs/"factory work", where one extra hour spent working leads, more or less linearly, to more output. In contrast, modern "knowledge work" is often full of things like meetings and inefficient collaboration over email. These annoying-yet-ineffective parts of our day generate a lot of mental overhead that prevents us from devoting our full focus, intelligence, and creativity to the core tasks of our work. (I've also read Newport's earlier book, Deep Work, which discusses some of the same issues from a slightly different perspective.)
He suggests that, in order to do the best work in the creativity/knowledge-based aspects of work, we should follow the tenets of slow productivity. To give a little detail on this three principles:
Do fewer things. Simplify your task list, at all time scales. On the scale of hours—have fewer meetings chopping up your day (and "sandbox" your email use to certain times of the day). And on the scale of months-to-years—have less projects on your plate. Devote your full attention to the 1-to-3 projects that do matter.
Work at a natural pace: Understand that some projects will slowly build over the course of years. Don't be afraid to have productive periods and other times when progress isn't really happening. Even if your boss isn't imposing "slow productivity" from the top-down, you can usually get away with no one noticing if you have some months where you work hard and other months where you do the minimum to get by. Take more breaks to recharge (again, at all timescales).
Obsess over quality. (Newport says: "Obsess over the quality of what you produce, even if this means missing opportunities in the short term. Leverage the value of these results to gain more and more freedom in your efforts over the long term." I felt this concept was pretty self-explanatory, and I didn't love the suggestions he had in this section.)
One highlight for me was the way he points out that many scientists, writers, or artists who we would think of as extremely productive over the course of their career may have appeared extremely unproductive if you zoomed in on their day-to-day busyness levels:
These great scientists of times past were clearly “productive” by any reasonable definition of the term. What else can you call it when someone literally changes our understanding of the universe? At the same time, however, the pace at which they toiled on their momentous discoveries seemed, by modern standards, to be uneven, and in some cases almost leisurely...Isaac Newton began thinking seriously about gravity in the summer of 1655, after he fled the plague in Cambridge for the quiet countryside of Lincolnshire. It took him until 1670 before he felt he really had a handle on the inverse square law, and then another fifteen years or so before he finally publicized his paradigm-shifting theories.
Or:
In the summer of 1966, toward the end of his second year as a staff writer for The New Yorker, John McPhee found himself on his back on a picnic table under an ash tree in his backyard near Princeton, New Jersey. “I lay down on it for nearly two weeks, staring up into branches and leaves, fighting fear and panic,” [in the process of writing a complicated article]...
...[But] If you zoom out from what he was doing on that picnic table on those specific summer days in 1966 to instead consider his entire career, you’ll find a writer who has, to date, published twenty-nine books, one of which won a Pulitzer Prize, and two of which were nominated for National Book Awards.
I try to look at my own productivity in the same way. In a way, I don't feel like I "work very hard". I often end the day feeling like I could've done more. But by working patiently for the past few years, I've been able to produce a number of essays that (I hope) will help people learn to play and coach frisbee better. Through that, I've been able to (again, I hope) have a lasting positive impact on the community I'm part of.
Gave up:
I started reading Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara and gave up about halfway through (which is not to say I disagree with the theory).
I made it a few chapters through The Ends of Knowledge—I correctly expected it to be simultaneously sort-of-boring and sort-of-intriguing. Eventually I moved on to things that felt more interesting.
Fiction
Unsong, by Scott Alexander
Life After Life, by Kate Atkinson
Lately I rarely read fiction, and when I do I've tended to re-read books I enjoyed in the past. That's the case for both of these. I don't like to write fiction reviews because I'm very anti-spoiler, but I can say I like these books enough to have read them twice. Unsong is a trippy, philosophical (and very punny) fantasy set on an Earth where the angels/devils of Christianity are a part of everyday life. Life After Life is a story set in World War II England that will make you think about what it means to live life the right way.
Well, I had been rarely reading fiction. I read two fiction books between the start of 2023 and ~April 2024. Then this summer I started reading more fiction again, with my numbers boosted by two fantasy series.
Mistborn, by Brandon Sanderson
The Well of Ascension, by Brandon Sanderson
The Hero of Ages, by Brandon Sanderson
I've read other books by Brandon Sanderson (namely The Stormlight Archive series), and I was surprised how much these two series reminded me of each other (The male main character: a strong warrior and willing to sacrifice. The female main character: a master-of-disguise who is also learning to battle and has a secret in her past). So, right now I feel like he's pretty formulaic as an author (maybe not surprising given how frequently he publishes) but that doesn't mean the books aren't also pretty fun. These aren't going to be my favorite fantasy series but are far from my least favorite.
Venomous Lumpsucker, by Ned Beauman
I sometimes find new books to read by scrolling through random year-end best-of lists, and Venomous Lumpsucker was one of those finds (the year, in this case, being 2022). I'd describe the book as a satire of "Late-Stage Capitalism", with lots of lines that have a "laugh because otherwise you'd cry" criticism of the environmental degradation happening in our world currently. I probably don't read enough to know with certainty which books are the best in any given year but I can see why a book like this would make it.
The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss
The Wise Man's Fear, by Patrick Rothfuss
I had read The Kingkiller Chronicles books (this series) in college 10+ years ago, and decided to give them a re-read. I was surprised by how much I had forgotten, especially of the second book. They've got a certain magic that makes them hard to put down, but also have their weak points—the second book in particular drags on and on, and doesn't do much to advance the overarching plot of the series. (Not to mention the meta-frustration that it's been a dozen years and the next book in the series still hasn't come out.)
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin
Suggested to me by multiple friends, and apparently the only fiction I've read in a while that wasn't sci-fi- or fantasy- adjacent (although it's definitely nerd-adjacent). The story draws you in and I finished it quite quickly.
My only complaint is that the characters are somewhat toxic/emotionally immature/have somewhat poor communication skills. The drama certainly makes for a good story. And, I admit that I had similarly poor interpersonal skills when I was younger. But there's a part of me that wants to connect with a story about emotionally mature people with good communication skills (If you know any books like that, please let me know). It's hard to commit fully to a book when there's that voice in the back of my head telling the characters: hey this whole problem would be 100% better if you just explained to your friends exactly how you feel.