Tag: book

Loss

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Loss wraps around us like tentacles of an octopus, the vines of ivy.

Loss inhabits physical space. It resides in the house, in the water, in the seasons, in a smell.

Loss is unexplained. We may know exactly what happened, but we do not understand.

We deal with loss by distraction. Sharks must keep swimming to breathe, and so do we.

All loss is irreplaceable. Whatever it was is gone, completely.

All loss is symmetrical with love.

Potential replacements are new, unfamiliar. They are like a new pair of shoes – does this really fit?

There is no best, there only what is.

You can love what was, and love what is.

You can love what is lost, and love what is found.

Feelings haunt places. New feelings bloom in places.

Search, because loss feels imprisoning. Love is the key.

Act, because even imprisoned you must do something.

There is no timeline for loss. But there are regular opportunities for love.

Take the time it takes, but not longer. Opportunities await.

Be bold. Do not be a coward.

A coward hides.

Be bold. Look around.

You will not find what you had, but you will find enough.

This is a book review for Remarkably Bright Creatures, one of my favorite books of the year.

Walsh’s Steps to Solving Problems

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“What Bill Walsh did is easy to describe: (1) He could identify problems that needed to be solved; and (2) He could solve them.” Mike White, Assistant Coach in The Score Takes Care of Itself

Solving problems is like making a sandwich. Personal and cultural preparations are the slices of bread. A collection of solutions is peanut butter and jelly.

1/ It’s a mistake to start with solutions.

2/ Instead, an individual must prepare themselves to find solutions.

3/ The first thing that comes to mind is only the first thing that comes to mind. The accessibility of an idea is not its merit.

4/ Individuals should build their recipe box: read books, listen to podcasts, walk quietly, talk to people, begin experiments.

5/ Alongside personal preparation is cultural preparation. Authority to implement. Trust from peers. Culture of the place. Leadership.

6/ How much friction is there between what is said and what will be done?

7/ Solutions have legibility, but it’s often hidden.

8/ Twenty-percent of football wins are due to chance. Wins are legible but not that helpful.

9/ Football has many other statistics that are more helpful.

10/ Football has structural opportunities to reflect: film, bye weeks, the off-season.

11/ The best solutions fit both the opportunity and the constraints. Cowboy caviar is delicious, but not at a Greek restaurant.

The west coast offense is the pinnacle example of these steps. Walsh spent years thinking about football. He worked his way through the system, earning respect and was assigned authority. Then, the system was only created because his quarterback had a better ability to read the field than throw it deep. It wasn’t the offense Walsh wanted, but it was the one he needed.

Joyful, Anyway (short thoughts)

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(Joyful, Anyway has been my favorite book through the first half of 2026. It’s perfect for anyone who has felt loss, struggled, or breathes).

We have a gap in our lives. It’s not financial, though we try to close it with money. It’s not relational, though we try to solve it that way too. It’s not physical. The gap is internal and it can’t be named. *The name that can be named is not the eternal name.* 

We will call it the gap. 

We notice it in the feelings of disappointment, guilt, and desire. I was meeting a friend, and the trials and shenanigans of parenting came up. We shared and compared mishaps – and I felt it. Instead of talking about my kids should I be with my kids? My oldest was leaving for college in forty days, and I was here instead. There it was, there was the gap.  

I felt this parent / child gap a lot in 2025. One daughter is moving from high school to college. Another is driving and more independent. There were more moments of stillness, free of podcasts, to do lists, and notifications. Which is odd. Life can feel like being the person at the bottom of a slope in charge of emptying a (very important) bucket that’s constantly collecting water. Me versus the two infinite forces: gravity and time. We make life so full but it can sometimes feel so empty. That’s the gap.

So I acted, and begin to mark moments on a calendar. Graduation party. Marked. Project Hail Mary. Marked. Dinner out, coffee out, a ten minute hang out. All marked. Those narrow the gap. 

But nothing closes the gap. 

The gap, Kate Bowler calls it “the ache” in Joyful, Anyway, is permanent. It’s another infinite force, alongside gravity and time. Yet man is born to trouble as surely as sparks fly upward.  Life is a chronic condition.

I picked up Joyful, Anyway on Ryan Holiday’s recommendation and was pleased to see the blurb by Oliver Burkeman of 4,000 Weeks, a book about acceptance. Stop trying to be more productive, Burkeman writes, and instead choose to be more focused. Do the important things. Like seeing Project Hail Mary with your kids and accept that not everything you think needs to be done needs to be done.

Joyful, Anyway does not offer a solution. The secret algorithm!? No. Well, not that I think about it, maybe it does.

Accept the Gap

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We have a gap in our lives. It’s not financial, though we try to close it with money. It’s not relational, though we try to solve it that way too. It’s not physical. The gap is internal and it can’t be named. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. But we will call it the gap.

We notice that gap in the feelings of disappointment, guilt, and desire. I was meeting a friend, and the trials and shenanigans of parenting came up. We shared and compared mishaps – and I felt it. Instead of talking about my kids should I be with my kids? My oldest was leaving for college in forty days, and I was here instead. There it was, there was the gap.

So we act.

I felt this parent / child gap a lot in 2025. There would be a moment of stillness, free of podcasts, to do lists, and notifications. Which is odd. Often I feel like the person at the bottom of a slope in charge of emptying a (very important) bucket that’s constantly collecting water. Me versus the two infinite forces of gravity and time. But while on bucket duty I felt the gap.

So I acted, and begin to mark moments on a calendar. Graduation party. Marked. Project Hail Mary. Marked. Dinner out, coffee out, a ten minute hang out. All marked. Those narrow the gap.
But nothing closes the gap.

The gap, Kate Bowler calls it “the ache” in Joyful, Anyway is permanent. It’s an infinite force, alongside gravity and time. “If what you have seems insufficient to you,” commented Seneca, “then though you posses the world, you will yet be miserable.” We are creatures who desire.

I picked up Joyful, Anyway on Ryan Holiday’s recommendation and was pleased to see the blurb by Oliver Burkeman of 4,000 Weeks, a book about acceptance of limitations. Stop trying to be more productive, Burkeman writes, and instead choose to be more focused. Do the important things. Like seeing Project Hail Mary with your kids.

Maybe Joyful, Anyway will have the solution to close the gap. The secret algorithm! Probably not. The secret might be acceptance and action. Accept that the gap will never fully close but take action to narrow the sucker.

It’s how to what you do.

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A friend is a personal trainer. She shared a clients review: I can’t believe I pay Melissa to yell at me, but I love it.

Personal trainers and financial advisors are similar. Each tells you what to do. Sometimes we don’t know. Sometimes we’re inconsistent. Sometimes we’re unsure. There’s a gap between what we want and what we are.

And sometimes we forget about that gap. Sometimes we just are.

If I don’t see something I forget about it. My oldest daughter graduated high school. She’s off to college. Our time is limited!

But I wasn’t using that time well. I didn’t see it.

Now, I note good moments on the calendar. A few too many days without a mark and it’s time to act.

Forgetting the is what Cal Newport’s book Digital Minimalism is about. Technology has utility. It’s adopted. It shifts. It grows. It consumes time, attention, and energy in excess of its value. The juice ain’t worth the squeeze. We forget the gap. We don’t grow. We tweet, swipe, reel, short, like, subscribe.

Life has few needs and is filled with excess commitments. But that’s a different book about livin’.

Have a great Monday.

Pesky Proclivities

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My friend Stephen wakes up and immediately checks the news. That’s not good, he said.

He’s trying to quit. Or do something else. Or read the news with more mindfulness. Or prayer. Or something.

But history can help us, maybe not check the news, but at least remember that crazy is the norm. Henry Oliver told Tyler Cowen in March 2026, “Obviously, Shakespeare is always writing about the Reformation, and he’s always writing about the tension between pre- and post-Reformation culture, not the least in terms of, there’s now an official policy, but everyone remembers what it was like, and they miss ordinary life in pre-Reformation times, and their mothers did things differently.”

In the 1500s people pined for the good old days.

And more recently too! David McCullough ‘Wrights’ that when bicycles were first introduced people did not like them. Adults thought they were for lunatics. Teens were forbidden from riding them. The innocent bicycle began as pariah.

Change is uncomfortable. Ambiguity is icky. But it’s the norm. Immediately checking the news probably isn’t good. But taking note of people’s proclivities probably is.

Proximity to Money

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Reading The Art of Spending Money by Morgan Housel inspired this thought. And it felt like this was the heart of, not the book, but my interpretation. It was like, this is the idea to organize your actions around.

The closer something is to money, the less value it contains.

Like a Venn diagram, the more a thing overlaps with money, the less ultimate value it has.

Money as the first example. Money is money. Complete overlap. Money is good but because of the things it allows, not itself. You can’t eat money. You can’t stick your toes in money, well you can but it doesn’t feel like sand at the beach.

Nouns can be a second example. Money buys food, which leads to sharing meals. Money buys pickleball paddles, which leads to time exercising, laughing, and seeing friends. Money buys cars, which travel to beaches where there is sand.

Verbs. Money pays people to landscape, which leads to time with family. Money pays for tax services, especially this time of year. Money pays for haircuts, which help us feel better.

This frame of money is so heavily tilted by JTBD theory and Early Retirement Extreme I can’t get away from it.

Both JTBD and ERE point past the initial assumption and ask what’s really the goal?

And both rely on creativity to find a solution which leads to that goal.

Now, thanks to Morgan Housel, there’s a question to ask when making choices: What is this proximity to money? If it’s close, it’s probably not what I want.

Framing Resolutions

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Reframing metrics is catnip. In book form this is Moneyball, but there are many posts about framing and metrics.

How might we frame a meaningful life? And what metrics?

“Ultimately, the number of things you did can’t be definition of a. meaningful life. It’s got to be what you did and whether you did it in the spirit of showing up for it.”

That’s Oliver Burkeman’s advice to Rich Roll (November 2025). Burkeman’s book, 4000 Weeks, was one of my favorites last year. Happy New Year.

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!