Tag: book

2025 Books

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Previous editions: 2024, 2022, 2018 , 2016

Best of the best

A Woman of No Importance. Wow. A work of nonfiction that reads like fiction. Forget David Goggins, get some Virginia Hall in your life. Not since Hillenbrand’s Unbroken did I read a book that was so powerful and inspiring.

4000 Weeks. Though I’ve read a lot of time management/ productivity books and followed hustle porn online, this book was different. It fit with a shift towards timelessness, depth, long term goals and thoughts, etc.

10 to 25 and The Anxious Generation were the best parenting, teaching, and coaching books I read this year. The former reinforces the effects of status, and what the authors call “earned prestige”. The latter goes beyond infinity pools and shows how the life of young people has changed (since the 90s) and what the adults in their life can do. Along with Good Inside, these are my favorite family books.

Your Money or Your Life. The classic is classic for good reason. Reading it after Early Retirement Extreme is backwards, but it was a reminder about why we talk about money so much, because we need that much help to live better.

Second tier

Revenge of the Tipping Point. Enjoyed this much more than expected. Gladwell was the non-fiction author who got me interested in reading as an adult but I didn’t care for much of his recent work (and don’t follow his podcast). But this was great!

The Art of Frugal Hedonism. This book wasn’t great – but it was fun! It’s like Your Money or Your Life but written by a pair of Australian hippies. It’s the most fun “personal finance” book I’ve ever ready.

Thinking in Systems. Another classic that was good, but resonated differently because we’ve been playing with these ideas.

Self improvement

The Four Agreements and Who Moved my Cheese are life compasses. We need to regularly read things to get our bearings.

Fun Fiction

Theft of Fire, a science fiction space trip. Overall fun and the first true “space travel” book I’ve read. I continued to enjoy the Slow Horses series to the point of bugging my daughters about the exploits of Jackson Lamb. The show is on Apple TV.

Speaking of which, the Murderbot stories continue to thrill though the Apple TV show didn’t resonate with me. Stick with these books first.

I read a handful of Jack Reacher books this year, mostly comfort rereads. It’s great to have a series of books that are plentiful enough to be different but also follow familiar trails.

ChatGPT was helpful to find older fun fiction: The Old Man from Thomas Perry, The Bourne Identity, and The Kill Artist. The Bourne Identity has a heavy Vietnam shadow, something that was part of all the movies I watched as a kid but few of the books I’ve read.

Misc.

Two books that were great but I need to think about more were Inner Excellence and Designing Your Life.

This year was a shift in reading patterns. Of the 29 books (not all listed) 16 were fiction. What used to be a handful is now more than half. Happy holidays and happy reading.

Alcoholic Design

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“Catherine (a former alcoholic) put the kettle on and, while waiting, scrubbed at a stain on the kitchen counter. There was always something. Not long ago, she’d imagined herself out of Slough House for good, and the life she’s led during those few months had been serviceable enough: evenings had followed afternoons had followed mornings, and during none of them had she drunk. But they weighed heavy. There are worse things an alcoholic can have on her hands than time, but not many.”

From London Rules by Mick Herron.

This is my favorite current series (even more than Reacher). The Apple TV show is great.

Even though London is foreign and there are many references I don’t get, Herron’s created wonderful characters including Catherine. If you’ve found a recent favorite, let me know!

The Art of Frugal Hedonism (Book Review)

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This is a fun book. Besides the charming Australian narrator, this book about personal finance was full of whimsy and fun. The chapters are short. The tips are good. The point is the same.

When I taught personal finance in school this year it was heavy on Morgan Housel’s ideas: there’s internal finance and external. The internal stuff is about how you view money. The external stuff is about what to do with money.

There are simple and straightforward answers to both these areas. The Art of Frugal Hedonism provides many ideas for both.

The book reminded me a lot of the joys of college. A thirty dollar paycheck was enough for a full weekend of fun: bars, pizza, games, being outside. It was all there. And the book wants us to get back to that point.

We can always shift our framing of the world and the authors of this book want us to think of that time. You don’t need money to have fun – we already know that – we lived that!

The Art of Frugal Hedonism is reminder of that. Find fun. Be around people. Embrace weirdness. Eat basic and delicious food.

Though a totally different financial scale, the suggestions in Frugal Hedonism align with the answer to: Should you buy a ski chalet?

Framing “Life Energy”

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From Your Money or Your Life

“Money is something you trade your life energy for. You sell your time for money. It doesn’t matter that Ned over there sells his time for a hundred dollars and you sell yours for twenty dollars an hour. Ned’s money is irrelevant to you. The only real asset you have is your time.”

Money is important and how someone thinks about money should be how you communicate about money.

  1. Money is something you trade your life energy for.
  2. Money makes progress in JTBD. How to talk with your rich friends about money.
  3. I live in the tribe, the tribe keeps me safe. Our tribe has a leader.
  4. Money is part of the system. ERE and Wheaton Scales.
  5. Money is about doing good things with good people and not too much friction. Should you buy a ski chalet?
  6. Money has external roles (saving, investing, spending, etc.) and internal roles (goals, FOMO, Jones’s, Always Buy Two New Cars). The Psychology of Money.

It’s wild the resources spent on money.

Did the internet need another post about money? Yet here we are.

But maybe what we’re really talking about is spirit. It’s philosophy. It’s spiritual. What am I supposed to do? What is a life well lived? Posing the easier question shifts the topic to money.

“Why?” to be Happy.

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This book, opens Bob Moesta and Michal Horn, does not tackle getting into schools or how to rank different schools based on their features.

“Instead, if you are considering getting more education, this book will help you answer a more foundational question first. That question is why?”

Asking “Why” is a good way to be happier.

In the post from last week, we highlighted Kris’s comments about framing housing. In that same post he writes, “Neither of us wants to find ourselves servicing interest payments to some mimetic trends.”

Why do we want this house? The answer better not be The Joneses.

Moesta’s and Horn’s book Choosing College gives a framework for answering that question. “Why?” is a tough question. It’s hard to answer with a blank slate. But the authors suggest there are five Jobs to be done by going to college, and figuring out the progress shifts from the blank canvas to a paint by numbers masterpiece.

“Why?” to be happy. And when needed a book like this to help with the “How?”.

Four Thousand Weeks (book review)

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Likely one of the best books I’ll read this year.

I have soft spots. For movies it’s one last job. For books it’s This is Water.

There’s this thing that everyone talks about but everyone talks about it wrongly. That’s a soft spot.

That’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. According to author Oliver Burkeman, we are doing time management all wrong. We are swimming through water without really knowing what it is.

And water is a good analogy because water, like time, isn’t something we can grasp. It’s something we have to accept. We can scoop water. We can vacuum water. We can pour water – but these are on water’s terms. To paraphrase high school science: water does what water does.

That is also how to think about time. We act like we manage time, “time management”, but only in the same way we manage water: creating spaces for it to be.

You should read this book!

It’s difficult to review for the same reasons productivity feels important. We check things off a list. We progressed. We got-things-done. But are these the right metrics or just the easy ones?

Productivity isn’t the goal. Accomplishment isn’t either. Living. L-I-V-I-N (a similar book) is the goal.

How to live is a messy question relative to How to be productive.

But here’s a tip. An honest-to-goodness fact. This is as close to a guarantee as you’ll ever get.

Spend time with people. Optimize community. Aim for togetherness. Move from ‘me’ to unity. Move from ego to love. Less get more done, and more to-get-her.

Be that way. That’s a productivity hack.

The Algebra of Wealth (isn’t really about money)

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“The whole shooting match,” Scott Galloway ends his book, The Algebra of Wealth, “Everything meaningful in life is about others.”

It’s not a great personal finance book. It felt like Galloway looked at his bookshelf, categorized the books he’s read into sections, found some news and research, and put it together.

But it’s an interesting personal finance book.

It’s interesting because Galloway is a brand. It’s a flavor I don’t care for, without nudging from J.F., I never would have read this book. Even then, I didn’t love it. Until that last line when it all came together.

We get personal finance wrong. We think of it as a thing people do, a distinct part of their life. We have the marriage part. We have the work part. We have the parenting/childhood parts. We have all these buckets, but they aren’t buckets. These are not different parts. It’s one life.

Any message (like your choice of personal finance) is like an organ transplant. The organ might be good (advice), but if the receiver rejects it, it doesn’t matter how healthy it is. There has to be a match.

This is why personal finance is full of gurus. Scott, Dave, Suze, Ramit, don’t persuade. They select. It’s a sampling effect. Ramit’s book: I Will Teach You To Be Rich brings in people willing to hear the message. Scott’s book brings in people familiar with his schtick.

And this is what Galloway gets so right. It’s not about money, it’s about the meaning and, “everything meaningful in life is about others.” That’s the seed to a successful transplant.

We miss this in our message. Maybe the medium isn’t the message. Maybe the meaning is the message. What does this mean to us? To our tribe? To my history?

People want meaning. They find it thru gurus.

It’s a feature, not a bug. Book edition.

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I have long advocated for the efficiency of podcasts. This blog has been published for over 10 years on that very idea. The seed was that idea.

But I might have been wrong.

Much of early podcasting, was authors talking about their book. For years, and it might still be so, Podcast interviews with the best driver of book sales.

The friendly medium to authors, combined with most books having a limited set of ideas, made podcast interviews feel like a thorough and efficient summary.

Lately though, I’ve been listening rather than reading books. Dog walks. Drives to school and volleyball tournaments. House projects, and cleaning.

Audiobooks are a different experience from reading. Narrators offer inflection. Following along, takes more focus, especially for visual people like me. And it’s more difficult to skip around, accelerate, or change the cadence.

So when I listen to books, I spend more time in them. It’s six hours, eight hours, even 14 hours or so.

And that time might be the point!

Baking a cake at 700° doesn’t make the cake cook twice as fast. And the same might go for this. The key factor might not be the information, it’s in a podcast summary, it might be the time thinking about those ideas.

There’s no single best book to read, and there are no bad books. And there’s no bad form of learning. But if you’re like me, and you’ve discounted the time books take, let’s be good busy together, and update our ideas about reading. 

Smuggling or Selling Cigarettes

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It’s 1943 and Rae and Joseph meet in a Nazi concentration camp. Then, in 1945…

When the war came to an end, Rae and Joseph fled to Hungary, where they were quickly married. The day after the wedding, they trekked through the Austrian Alps and snuck across the border into an Italian displaced persons camp. They applied to come to America, using my grandmother’s last name, Kushner, since my grandfather had accrued a rap sheet from smuggling cigarettes into the camp to provide for his family.

They were accepted into America three years later.

The same day I read this, in Jared Kushner’s Breaking History, someone had been a real jerk. A Lowlife, snake-licking, dirt-eating, inbred, overstuffed, ignorant, bloodsucking, stiff-legged jerk.

But what’s the context? When is it smuggling cigarettes and when is it selling them? When is someone a jerk and when is someone having their own bad day? Maybe they had to deal with their own snake-licking, dirt-eating, inbred, overstuffed, ignorant, bloodsucking, stiff-legged jerk?

JTBD requires an empathetic perspective. Figure out why someone acts the way they do. Not that many people roll out of bed with the express goal of being a stone in our shoe. Instead we can be curious, ask questions. We can conclude if someone was selling cigarettes or smuggling them.

Love and Trust and USA Basketball

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One theme here is that information is not enough.

In his book, 10 to 25, about communicating with young people, David Yeager writes that the compliment sandwich doesn’t work because its supply side not demand side.

JTBD works so well because it shifts the focus from me to you, a business to the customers.

The supply side version of a compliment sandwich is what Yeager calls “wise feedback”. Before young people can hear criticism they have to feel safe. Feelings matter. Being in-the-group matters.

Shane Battier tells a story about Coach K’s early Olympic experience. Coach has just come from Duke where he sets a standard. People like us do things like this. But there was one guy on the team who was not very good in pick-and-roll defense.

So, coach lit into him. “You let him know in no uncertain terms that this is not going to fly,” said Battier. “And at that moment, like, you could see the look on this player’s face. He had never been talked to like this.”

Battier had. “I lived it, so I understood where it’s coming from. It was coming from a place of love.” This is Yeager’s wise feedback. It comes from a place of wanting the best. The listener feels safe because the listener and speaker are on the same side – they’re in the same group.

Coach K wises up right way. “It clicked and you realize, oh, this is not appropriate for him at this moment.” He didn’t have the right relationship for that kind of communication. It takes trust and love which take time and effort. We evolved as group members.

Note: Another version of this idea is here: https://moontower.substack.com/p/jokers-everywhere