5 Books to expand your mind

Walt Disney famously said, “there is more treasure in books than in all the pirate’s loot on Treasure Island.”

Here is a list of 5 books that expanded my mind in 2023. These are books that made me pause and think. They offer new perspectives to take in and internalize.? They contain insights that are relevant for our times, and the context we live in. They are intellectually stimulating and (hopefully) help in my journey forward.

Below is a brief and take away from each of these books.

Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel:

Money can’t buy me love, as the Beatles sang. It definitely does not buy happiness, as research has proven. However, money is necessary to provide a baseline of comfort. The key is to balance your needs and having enough money needed to support those needs.

Since its publication in 2020, this book has become a bestseller, mostly due to accessibility and simplicity of its messages. The insights are worth internalizing and passing on to your kids. For example, “being wealthy is not the same as being rich.”

Other useful insights include:

1. No one is impressed with your possessions as much as you are. And the possessions lose their value quickly.
2. How you view money is mostly determined by your experience with it as well as a function of the times you were born and conditions you lived through.
3. Take risks only to the extent you are comfortable. As the old saying goes, “don’t let it lose your sleep.”
4. Don’t let your ego drives your needs, which in turn drives the need for more money.

Some of these may seem intuitive and common sensical. The author laces it with personal stories and ample data to back things up. For example, the chapter on how consumer behavior post world war continues to drive our attitude towards things.

It is a worth a place on your bookshelf.

The Second Mountain by David Brooks

What does it mean to live a joyous life? Most of our lives, we pursue wealth, success, and achievements - the usual markers of success. They are visible, and easy to measure.

For some of us, that leaves a significant void. We ask - Is this all there is to it?

?In a world which is becoming hyper-individualistic, where do we look for the common good? What are the eternal values we should all be gravitating towards? What does it mean to live a life of purpose?

?In his earlier book, "Road To Character", David Brooks introduced us to two types of virtues. Resume virtues are skills and talent you bring to the world - e.g. your achievements, degrees, and qualifications. They are highly visible, and valued by society. Eulogy virtues are traits that are talked about at your funeral - your honesty, loyalty, kindness, etc. They define you as a human.

?In “The Second Mountain”, David takes this concept to the next level. How can we be good to society? Be a servant leader? While it comes naturally to some, it takes a crisis or a failure to trigger for most of us. We celebrate instant happiness in our Instagram lives, but internally many of us are suffering from loneliness and depression.

The "First Mountain" is about pursuing our ego needs. The "Second Mountain" is about relating and committing to a higher cause.

What I liked about this book is the author’s display of personal vulnerability that is becoming increasingly rare in today's world. Laced with personal stories and examples from historical figures, he makes a case for seeking happiness beyond the self.

?David Brooks is very precise in his use of words. It is a pleasure to read when he is in flow. Most of the book, he is very spot on in his analysis and conclusions. Some parts of the book are not an easy read, and there is a tendency to emphasize the personal virtues ad nauseam. The sentences then become dense and ideas repetitive.

All in all, the book makes the strong case for altruism in an increasingly individualized world. That is an idea worth getting behind.

Starry Messenger by Neil deGrasse Tyson

Visualize aliens visiting the earth. How do they see and perceive humans? What do they think about our cities, how we live, share resources? Our Civilization and cultures? Will they be appalled at the inequality on this planet? Would they marvel at our intelligence and accomplishments?

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson (NGDT) is blessed with the gifts of eloquence and humor. It is a rare quality among scientists who are typically reticent and matter of fact.

In this highly readable and fascinating book, NGDT offers a few “Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization”. He touches upon a variety of topics - race, politics, religion, beauty. These are “fault lines” in our society that separates us from each other. If we were to look at our planet using a common identity as a human species, will we behave differently?

NGDT makes a passionate case for scientific temper and bemoans the lack of it, and the fact that ignorance is often celebrated.

It is not a science book, though it definitely demands a scientific temper and unified view of the world. A strong need for rational thought. For me, it delivered some cool facts about humans in the current century, put it in context of history, provided it with a “cosmic perspective”.

As the author concludes, “each of us is alive against stupendous odds. We get to invoke our faculties of reason to figure out how the world works. We get to live, and ultimately die, in this glorious universe”. This is a book I will go back to.

The Half Known Life by Pico Iyer

I was introduced to Pico Iyer through his TED Talk, “Where is Home?” It is a question many of us deal with. Those who don’t have a permanent place to call home. I don’t mean it in a philosophical sense, rather geographically there are permanent travelers among us. Pico Iyer may be at the extreme end of this spectrum, having lived in multiple continents. He is of Asian Indian heritage, raised partly in the US, educated in the UK, and now live in Japan.

All of this makes him a good traveler, who is also blessed with a deep sense of observation and contemplative mind. He is friends with the Dalai Lama and has traveled with him for many years.

I came across this book soon after a vacation to Japan, and I had just read Pico Iyer’s other book, “Beginner’s Guide to Japan”. It focussed on short vignettes of every day experiences and was an easy read.

“The Half Known Life” demanded more focus. It is part memoir, part philosophy, part travelogue, and part history. Sometimes it reads like fiction. The basic theme is the human search for paradise, or shangri-la, where everything is nice and people are eternally happy. From the shrine of Imam in Iran to empty streets of North Korea, onto the holy city in Jerusalem, people are looking for their version of paradise. It seems like an unfruitful pursuit for most of mankind.

The prose contains some really long sentences. It is easy to be lost in the myriad connections the author tries to make between his multiple travels to the same city over many decades. It is fascinating to see how the same place evolves with each visit.

As in that old quote, “A man travels the world looking for happiness, and comes home to find it”.

Scarcity Brain by Michael Easter

Why do we eat that entire bag of chips? Because we might be the last one for a long while. Why some people struggle with gambling or other addictions such as social media? The common notion is that we enjoy distractions that provide an instant dopamine high (e.g. likes on our Facebook or Instagram feeds). Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that gives us? a temporary high. The trick is to become aware of these dopamine triggers and replace them with positive habits.

The author suggests an alternative theory of neuroscience - that humans evolved to overindulge in substances and activities that may become unavailable or scarce. Our hunter gatherer ancestors needed to know when the food is available for survival. They evolved to develop scarcity cues to help find food, or safety.

This drive is exploited by the corporations that want to sell us more and more — or get us hooked on their products - whether it is gaming, shopping, or anything else they can make money on. Dating apps to economic systems are exploiting this evolutionary loophole to make us increasingly addicted to low reward cravings by putting us in to a scarcity loop.

Paradoxically, this scarcity loop is one of the prime drivers of human development. It drove us to explore, evolve our brains and travel widely to all corners of the planet.

How do we fight back the scarcity loop? The author asks us to create “abundance loops” to replace them, to structure our lives to explore and create tasks the old fashioned way - e.g. explore a restaurant without looking for ratings online; take a digital detox and connect with people to develop genuine relationships. Another happiness hack is to develop? spiritually.

While the “solutions” are mostly old fashioned, this book helped me to identify an alternative to the well known “dopamine” theory. The scarcity theory is more in line with evolution of humans. It is definitely worth researching and studying. Importantly, we can better identify what is driving some of our own behaviors. Next time when I scroll on facebook or instagram, I will keep this in mind.

Happy New Year and Happy Reading!

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