Favorite Books, Movie, and App of 2018

Favorite movie this year:

The Mask You Live In (currently on Netflix) - This documentary explores how our culture's narrow definition of masculinity is harming our boys, men and society at large and unveils what we can do about it.

Favorite app of the year:

RoboKiller automatically blocks over 1.1 million telemarketers and robocalls from ringing, even if they are spoofing or changing their numbers. This app has drastically reduced the number of spam phone calls I receive.

Favorite Books this year (with my favorite excerpts):

Some of these are a little late - just caught up this year!

Principles by Ray Dalio.

“Realize that you are simultaneously everything and nothing - and decide what you want to be. It is a great paradox that individually we are simultaneously everything and nothing. Through our own eyes, we are everything - e.g., when we die, the whole world disappears. So to most people (and to other species) dying is the worst thing possible, and it is of paramount importance that we have the best life possible. However, when we look down on ourselves through the eyes of nature we are of absolutely no significance. It is a reality that each one of us is only one of about seven billion of our species alive today that our species is only one of about ten million species on our planet. Earth is just one of about 100 billion planets in our galaxy, which is just one of about two trillion galaxies in the universe. And our lifetimes are only about 1/3,000 of humanity’s existence, which itself is only 1/20,000 of the Earth’s existence. In other words, we are unbelievably tiny and short-lived and no matter what we accomplish, our impact will be insignificant. At the same time, we instinctually want to matter and evolve, and we can matter a tiny bit - and it’s all those tiny bits that add up to drive the evolution of the universe.

The question is how we matter and evolve. Do we matter to others (who also don’t matter in the grand scope of things) or in some greater sense that we will never actually achieve? Or does it not matter if we matter so we should forget about the questions and just enjoy our lives while they last?”

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius:

“Concentrate every minute like a Roman - like a man - on doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions. Yes, you can - if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable. You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life? If you can manage this, that’s all even the gods can ask of you.”

A guide to the good life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy by William B. Irvine

“Remember that all we have is “on loan” from Fortune, which can reclaim it without our permission - indeed, without even advance notice. Thus, “we should love all of our dear ones…, but always with the thought that we have no promise that we may keep them forever - nay, no promise even that we may keep them for long.”

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown

“Nonessentialism dominates work lives today while true priorities do not get needed attention. The thin distribution of effort results in poor quality work.

Analysis: Successful people undergo four steps on their way to being overburdened when they approach things as Nonessentialists. First, they succeed in their endeavors. Then they gain a reputation for dependability and get more opportunities. They have fewer resources and less energy to devote to each new opportunity. Finally, they stray from their original successful approaches and end up contributing little to new projects. A Nonessentialist person or organization makes a little progress in many directions, rather than making significant progress toward the most important objective.

This should sound familiar to anyone who works in a corporation today, where multitasking and productivity have become the primary measure of an employee’s worth. Many people assume that they can successfully tackle more than one duty at the same time while doing both competently but, even when doing two things as simple as talking on the phone and checking email, it is likely that an important email will accidentally be deleted or the conversation will go silent because the multitasker was not listening... Even though this seems like common sense, convincing an organization to encourage employees to focus their attention and pare down their to-do lists would be difficult because the organization’s attention is divided. Businesses particularly often have many different types of operations, obligations to customers as well as shareholders, and emphasis on both quality and quantity, all of which divide their resources and efforts.”

The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

“CEOs should not play the odds. When you are building a company, you must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it — you just have to find it. It matters not whether your chance is at 9 in 10 or 1 and 1000, your task is the same.”

“People always ask me, “What’s the secret to being a successful CEO?” Sadly, there is no secret, but if there is one skill that stands out, it’s the ability to focus and make the best move when there are no good moves. It’s the moments where you feel most like hiding or dying that you can make the biggest difference as a CEO[…]to make it through the struggle without quitting or offering up too much.”

“Whenever I meet a successful CEO, I ask them how they did it. Mediocre CEOs point to their brilliant strategic moves or their intuitive business sense or a variety of other self-congratulatory explanations. The great CEOs tend to be markedly consistent in their answers. They all say, ‘I didn’t quit’.”

Zero to One by Peter Thiel

“New technology tends to come from new ventures—startups. From the Founding Fathers in politics to the Royal Society in science to Fairchild Semiconductor’s “traitorous eight” in business, small groups of people bound together by a sense of mission have changed the world for the better. The easiest explanation for this is negative: it’s hard to develop new things in big organizations, and it’s even harder to do it by yourself. Bureaucratic hierarchies move slowly, and entrenched interests shy away from risk. In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work (if this describes your company, you should quit now).”

The Courage to be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi

“We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences—the so-called trauma—but instead we make out of them whatever suits our purposes. We are not determined by our experiences, but the meaning we give them is self-determining.”

“Just find your shortcomings, start disliking yourself, and become someone who doesn’t enter into interpersonal relationships. That way, if you can shut yourself into your own shell, you won’t have to interact with anyone, and you’ll even have a justification ready whenever other people snub you. That it’s because of your shortcomings that you get snubbed, and if things weren’t this way, you too could be loved.”

The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant. Book from 1968 that’s as true today as it ever was.

"The first biological lesson of history is that life is competition. Competition is not only the life of trade, it is the trade of life - peaceful when food abounds, violent when the mouths outrun the food. Animals eat one another without qualm; civilized men consume one another by due process of law. Co-operation is real, and increases with social development, but mostly because it is a tool and form of competition; we co-operate in our group - our family, community, club, church, party, "race", or nation - in order to strengthen our group in its competition with other groups."

“Morality changes. Moral codes differ because they adjust themselves to historical and environmental conditions. Probably every vice was once a virtue, a quality that led to survival. Man's sins may be the relics of his rise rather than the stigmata of his fall.”

“Our knowledge of any past event is always incomplete, probably inaccurate, beclouded by ambivalent evidence and biased historians, and perhaps distorted by our own patriotic or religious partisanship. “Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice.”

Drive by Daniel Pink:

“Greatness and nearsightedness are incompatible. Meaningful achievement depends on lifting one's sights and pushing toward the horizon.”

“The ultimate freedom for creative groups is the freedom to experiment with new ideas. Some skeptics insist that innovation is expensive. In the long run, innovation is cheap. Mediocrity is expensive—and autonomy can be the antidote.”

“While complying can be an effective strategy for physical survival, it's a lousy one for personal fulfillment. Living a satisfying life requires more than simply meeting the demands of those in control. Yet in our offices and our classrooms we have way too much compliance and way too little engagement. The former might get you through the day, but only the latter will get you through the night.”

When breath becomes air by Paul Kalanithi:

"You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which are are ceaselessly striving.”

“I began to realize that coming in such close contact with my own mortality had changed both nothing and everything. Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. But now I knew it acutely. The problem wasn’t really a scientific one. The fact of death is unsettling. Yet there is no other way to live.”