Non Fiction Books
This is a page I update periodically with key takeaways from non-fiction books I've read. My current top 25 are:
- Four thousand weeks
- Fooled by randomness
- Atomic Habits
- Make Time
- Thanks for the feedback
- Radical Candor
- High output management
- The 4 hour work week
- The 4 hour body
- The hard thing about hard things
- The lean startup
- Deep Work
- Digital Minimalism
- The power of now
- Why we sleep
- In defence of food
- The tipping point
- Breath
- Outlive
- Getting things done
- Algorithms to live by
- Thinking in systems
- Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance
- The 48 laws of power
- Inspired
- The dip
It's mainly a tool for me to skim through and remind myself of what I've read as a way to jog my thinking. The summaries are a mixture of notes I wrote when reading them, reminders from Shortform summaries and what I remember. So they've been heavily filtered by my interpretation and what I was thinking about at the time I read them. They are almost certainly not accurate summaries of the books themselves!
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Four thousand weeks
This is the book that gave me a framework for carving out dedicated, non negotiable time usually early in the morning for an ongoing passion project. For a long time I used the “make time” app for this.
Four thousand weeks focuses on the shortness of life and how we spend it. It drives home that the deciding factor in how we spend our life is where and how we direct our attention.
One of the quotes that has never left me is about how apt the idea of "spending" your time is, because once each moment is spent, you can never have it back:
Pay attention, because you are paying with your life
It emphasises how time will pass no matter what, and so it is our decisions about where to direct our attention that govern the quality of our life.
The core thread of the book is around the extent to which you really control your time. In essence that we never have full control over our time, or at least we will never be able to do all of the things we want. There are probably a variety of reasons for this, not least that as we get more efficient, we come up with more things we want to do. So we will never get to the end of the list.
This resonates with one of the most important lessons I learned from my father. That many people imagine if they could just have a day to get to the end of their todo list, they'd be caught up and "on top of things". But in reality this would be true for mere hours until the todo list started to grow again. So the real skill in life is doing the right things from the list and learning to live peacfully with the fact it will never end.
The book turns to some practical considerations for making the most of the little time we have:
- Force time for the things that matter, never wait for time to "open up". Because it never will.
- Limit your work in progress projects. Probably to 3-4.
- Become comfortable with and embrace discomfort. Especially the type of discomfort that might cause you to deviate from your project. The main approach suggested is noticing the distraction and discomfort and directing constantly increasing attention to it rather than shying away from it.
- Stop expecting the future to unfold in a particular away. In particular reflect on how little of your life to date your eally controlled and stop expecting a far greater degree of control over the future.
- Develop patience for how long things really take. An interesting tactic here is time boxing heavily and refusing to allow yourself more than that amount of time to work on something. Whenever you run out of time, your forced to become a little more comfortable with the feeling of impatience.
- Align your free time with your friend. As someone who obsessively tries to control my schedule, this one came from left field. The goal being to align your schedule to maximise the chances you can spend time with those you love.
The second part of the book delves more deeply into the idea of life being finite. This comes with the - to me at least - calming sentiment that you can never have all of the experiences you want, because every choice you make implicitly takes the space of something else. Because it is fundamentally finite, the thing that matters is choosing things that matter, not wasting time on todo lists.
The book suggests four tactics in particular:
- Make and strongly commit to life choices. The essence of this is that since you'll never be able to do everything, you'll be happier if you commit to something and do it well. The underlying principle is that more happiness is created by committing and doing well than by keeping options open.
- Focus on the present not the future. This hit quite hard, that it's tempting to spend lots of time on actions with future payoffs, to control the future. But generally these payoffs are highly uncertain, but the payoffs now are much clearer. An example would be working on a marketing campaign for the future vs going outside to enjoy the good weather. The happiness from the good weather is certain, the payoff from the marketing campaign is very much not. I didn't interpret this as not investing in the future, just that many people - me included - have a tendancy to over-invest in the future, at the expense of realising a return on the present.
- Incorporate purposeless time. I loved this one. In a world where it's fashionable to try and turn every hobby into a profit making "side hustle", the emphasis here is on the importance of doing things purely for the sake of doing them, with no expectation of a return.
- Don't live only for changing the world, because you probably won't. Nobody has that much impact on the world in the grand scheme of things. Humanities impact will be insignificant on many timescales. Once you let go of a need to make a grand change to the world, you open yourself up to being able to make the little changes which are possible and actually matter.
On a tangent, this is the book that led me to have a poster on my wall where I mark off the weeks, counting down to 4000. Tosome people this seems morbid. For me it aligns nicely with the parts of Stoicism I relate to, acting as a reminder to enjoy each moment.
Reading list
- Five Dysfunctions of a team