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Jason Cheong-Kee-You edited this page Aug 19, 2025 · 1319 revisions

History

  • Sapiens: The history of humanity. The arrow of history. Impacted how I think about colonialism, religion, and money.
  • Zealot: The history of Jesus Christ and the creation of Christianity.
  • Origin Story:
    The drive toward systems of increasing complexity in history. Big bang. Stars. Heavy metals. Planets. Life. Photosynthesis. Animals. Large organisms. Language. Culture. Fire. Domesticated animals. Farming. Politics. Accounting. Ships. Slavery. Merchants. Science. Fossil fuels. Steam engine. Industrialization. Capitalism. Electricity. War. Atomic bomb. Cold war. Nuclear power. Artificial fertilizer. Middle class. Democracy. Government. Nationalism. Consumerism. Internet. Global warming.

Philosophy

  • Tao Te Ching: Taoism seeks harmony by freeing the individual from the caustic effects of judgmental thinking, desire, and greed.
  • Meditations:
    Assess the ethical value of all habits. Change your motivation to align with ethical value. Work continuously to close the gap between behavior and ethical value. True freedom is liberation from error and passion. Think deeply, make pictures, name things, strip away until only the essential is left and identified. The Stoics held that virtue was knowledge. Wisdom is knowledge of good and bad; courage is knowledge of what to fear and what not to fear; moderation is knowledge of what to pursue and what to avoid; justice is knowledge of what to give or what not to give others.
  • Finite and Infinite Games: Evil is not the acquisition of power, but the expression of power.
  • A Guide to the Good Life: An introduction to Stoic thinking.
  • The Stoic Challenge: The stoic reframes all setbacks as tests from the stoic gods. The point of reframing is not to suffer setbacks while remaining calm. The point is to experience setbacks without suffering.
  • The Socratic Method: Tools for improving how you think.
  • How to Be Perfect:
    The big 3: virtue ethics, deontology, utilitarianism. Virtuous people are flourishing. The path to becoming virtuous is to practice virtue...habituation. Every virtue must be in balance: no deficit, no excess. Be pliable: constant learning, constant trying, constant searching. Practicing virtue makes us flexible, inquisitive, adaptable, and better people. Avoid needless cruelty. Utilitarianism. Hedonism. Integrity. Deontology: following the right rules = acting morally (regardless of the outcome). The categorical imperative: act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law. The practical imperative: act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only. Contractualism: adopt rules that no one would veto. Beyond contractualism: be considerate. Ubuntu: a person is a person through other people. Moral exhaustion. Existentialism: life is absurd, own decisions, make decisions in the presence of others. Apologize. Forgive. Know thyself. Nothing in excess.
  • How to Survive the Modern World

Biography

  • The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin:
    Franklin's virtues: 1. Temperance: Eat not to dulness. Drink not to elevation. 2. Silence: Speak not but what may benefit others or your self. Avoiding trifling conversation. 3. Order: Let all your things have their places. Let each part of your business have its time. 4. Resolution: Resolve to perform what you ought. Perform without fail what you resolve. 5. Frugality: Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself (i.e. waste nothing). 6. Industry: Lose no time. Be always employed in something useful. Cut off all unnecessary actions. 7. Sincerity: Use no hurtful deceit. Think innocently and justly; and, if you speak; speak accordingly. 8. Justice: Wrong none, by doing injuries or omitting the benefits that are your duty. 9. Moderation: Avoid extremes. Forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve. 10. Cleanliness: Tolerate no uncleanness in body, clothes or habitation. 11. Tranquility: Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable. 12. Chastity: Rarely use venery but for health or offspring; never to dulness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another's peace or reputation. 13. Humility: Imitate Jesus and Socrates.
  • The Story of a Soul
  • The Story of My Life
  • Man's Search for Meaning:
    Sensitive people who were used to a rich intellectual life may have suffered much pain, but the damage to their inner selves was less. Imagining talking with his absent wife. Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now. The true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche. Super-meaning: what is demanded of man is not to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms. For, in the past, nothing is irretrievably lost but everything is irrevocably stored. Anticipatory anxiety: the fear produces precisely that of which the patient is afraid (e.g. fear of blushing). Forced intention makes impossible what one forcibly wishes. Pleasure is a side-effect or by-product, and is destroyed and spoiled to the degree to which it is made a goal in itself. Make use of the human capacity for self-detachment inherent in a sense of humor. Today's society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness. Learned meaninglessness. Tragic optimism: turn suffering into a human achievement and accomplishment; deriving from guilt the opportunity to change oneself for the better; deriving from life's transitoriness an incentive to take responsible action.
  • Pimp
  • Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman
  • Moneyball
  • The Year of Magical Thinking
  • What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. Do not mix friends, and work, and sex. Run every day to compensate for the toxicity of writing.
  • How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big:
    Consistency is the best marker of truth. Use lack of embarrassment to conduct aggressive experiments. Passion is bullshit. Passionate people over-invest in unlikely goals. Timing is often the biggest component of success; try different things until you get the timing right by luck. Systems trump goals. Produce something that was easy to reproduce in unlimited quantities. Deciding vs wanting. If you want success, figure out the price, then pay it. Our obsession with generosity causes people to think in the short term. Take care of yourself first, so you can do a better job of being generous in the long run. Wealth produces altruism, since lack of concern over your own basic needs leads to focusing outwards. One main metric: your energy. Capitalism inspires people to work hard, to take reasonable risks, and to create value for customers. Simplifiers vs optimizers. If the situation involves communication with others, simplification is almost always the right answer. Pick practical illusions. Adopt ways of looking at the world that have a positive impact on you. Things that will someday work out well start out well. Things that will never work out start out bad and stay that way. Good + Good > Excellent. Read primarily for pleasure to ensure that you develop the habit of reading, which will naturally snowball into expanding knowledge. No criticism. Praise. The vast majority of decision are completely irrational. Story: setup, twist, punch line or thought. To overcome shyness, act. Pessimism is often a failure of imagination. The big five: flexible schedule, imagination, sleep, diet, exercise. You can reprogram your food preferences.
  • Hillbilly Elegy
  • Can't Hurt Me: All negative experience callouses the mind. You choose whether it creates bitterness or resilience.
  • Educated
  • Between Two Kingdoms
  • The Message

Culture

  • The Failures of Capitalism

    • The Selfish Capitalist:
      Selfish Capitalism led to a massive increase in the wealth of the wealthy, with no rise in average wages and there has been a substantial increase in emotional distress since the 1970s. Emotional distress is mental illness in the form of depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and impulse disorder. Policies under Reagan, Thatcher and Blair led to following trends for English-speaking developed nations (vs. non-English speaking mainland western European nations and Japan): businesses judged largely by its short-term share price; privatization of collective goods; minimal regulation of labor and financial markets; and minimize the use of taxes to redistribute wealth. Consequences: taxes for the wealthiest people have dropped very sharply since the 1970s; in Britain, the top 1 per cent of income earners in Britain has doubled its share of the national income from 6.5 per to 13 per cent since 1982; internationally, the income gap between the bottom one-fifth richest countries and the top one-fifth richest changed from 1:30 in 1960, to 1:60 in 1990, to 1:74 in 1997; the world's richest 200 people more than doubled their net worth in just the four years between 1994 and 1998 to more than $1 trillion; real wages have either decreased or remained static in the USA and Britain since the 1970s; the growth in average household income that has occurred in the last thirty years has been achieved in two ways: women becoming as likely as men to have paid employment; and working hours have substantially increased for the average household, especially the average professional or managerial worker. The rise of geneticism, in general, and of evolutionary psychology, in particular, have been highly significant as ideologies in gaining support for Selfish Capitalism. A variety of social trends were encouraged by Selfish Capitalism to help it thrive, from the rise of positive psychology and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), to the pressure for both parents to do paid work when their children are small. The principal causes of emotional distress in English-speaking developed nations: early childhood maltreatment and the rise of consumerism and materialism promoted by Selfish Capitalism. Materialists value money, possessions, appearances and fame. Materialists are more emotionally insecure, have poorer quality personal relationships, are more inauthentic and lacking in a sense of autonomy, and have lower self-esteem. They watch more television, and the kind of programmes they tend to prefer make them more materialistic. As children they are likely to have parents who make love conditional on performance and are obsessed with results at school, making their offspring materialistic.
    • Pound Foolish: The idea of "personal finance" is a myth propagated by the personal finance industry.
    • Drug Dealer, MD:
      Recent phenomena: pain is dangerous, difference is psychopathology. Less able to tolerate pain. Response to drug validates identity of addict. Mental illness is a means for institutions to exert control. Psychiatry becomes reductionist and moves from talk therapy to drug dispensation. Financial incentives. Millennials are the first generation to embrace better living through chemistry. Nothing was as rewarding as working. Maintaining income means perpetuating illness status. Professional patients. Social roles. Previously, patient role was to get better, and doctor role was to improve health of patient. Now, patient role is to earn income through illness, and doctor role is to maximize income of patient via diagnosis. Two changes: value of social security went up, and shift to emphasizing reported pain and distress. Victim narrative. Culture creates people who didn't exist before. Maiming for profit. Drug dealer pretending to be a doctor. Billing targets. Patient satisfaction surveys. Privacy laws. All addictive drugs work on the same brain reward pathway (marijuana, alcohol, opioids, heroin). Lies propagated by Big Pharma: opioids are effective for treating chronic pain, can't overdose on opioids, opioids aren't addictive. Neuroadaptation and the pleasure-pain balance. A hijacked brain takes over basic survival mechanisms to pursue addiction. Narcissistic injury and the primitive defense. Psychological defense mechanisms: passive aggression, projection, splitting, denial, wishful thinking, rationalization, humor. Insurance companies won't pay for addiction and mental illness. AA works. Building community works. Methadone works.

  • The Fragile Millennials

    • The Coddling of the American Mind: The 3 Great Untruths: what doesn't kill you makes you weaker, always trust your feelings, and life is a battle between good people and evil people. Minimize screen time, maximize unsupervised outdoor play.

  • The Loss of Attention

    • The Shallows:
      The internet degrades our reason, memory, perception and emotions, even as it makes us feel like we're more intelligent. Quiet breaks vs distraction: calculator, links, video, sound, animation, illustration. Plasticity: internet shapes the brain in 5 hours. Hippocampus: short-term memory, long-term memory (focus, repetition, intellectual or emotional engagement). Google search algorithm, web pages, eye tracking, skimming, Taylorism. Smartphones: supernormal stimulus (pleasurable, novel or unexpected, personally relevant, emotionally engaging), proximity, misattribution and delusions of intelligence, loss of empathy and compassion. Letter writing, email, text: narrowing of expressiveness and loss of eloquence.
    • Irresistible
      Addiction is rooted in the systems created by evolution in humans to seek out mates, raise children, and to seek the comfort of friends when distressed. This results in a capacity to persist in the face of negative outcomes, and to be motivated to seek behaviors that mitigate distress, even if those behaviors are unpleasant, or have long-term negative consequences. In the trigger, routine, reward cycle: you must identify the unmet psychological need to understand what behavior to substitute in for the routine, or there's no hope to break the addiction cycle. No distinction substance abuse and behavioral addiction. People relapse when they're at the their best because they think they're not vulnerable. Once the dopamine pathway is laid down, then triggers will consistently motivate the behavior. To break the addiction, it's essential to change environment so that triggers are never encountered. Gamification is very motivating, but it destroys internal motivation.
    • Stolen Focus:
      Decreasing attention is due to rise of information. Surveillance capitalism. Cruel optimism. Charge for social media. Four-day work week. The right to disconnect. Flow state. The medium is the message. Mind-wandering. Magicians can control a person's behavior without their awareness. Endless scroll. Recommendations. Style transfer. Abuse produces hypervigilance, which reduces attention.
    • The Anxious Generation: No smartphones before high school. No social media before 16. Phone-free schools. Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence.

Math

Design

Health

  • Sleep well

    • Why We Sleep: Sleep 7 hours. Turn down the lights. No computer in the bedroom. Set a 10pm alarm to turn off lights. Each night of bad sleep is permanent harm. Nature has no defense against sleep deprivation.

  • Eat well

    • The China Study: Eat fruits and vegetables. Minimize refined carbohydrates, vegetable oils, fish. Avoid meat, poultry, dairy, eggs.
    • In Defense of Food: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
    • How Not to Die:
      Eat whole, plant-based foods. Minimize meats, dairy products, eggs, and refined and processed foods. Unprocessed food: nothing bad added, nothing good removed. Don't add salt (during cooking or after). Five-to-One Rule: only eat "whole grain" products with carbohydrate-to-dietary-fiber ratio of 5 or less.
    • The Ageless Brain:
      The brain and body will make tradeoffs between short-term gain and long-term consequences. Avoid sugar. Plant-rich diet. Exercise. Take on new challenges. Noise and movies cause stress. Sleep from 10pm to 6am every day. Read. Neurology and psychiatry are the same field: therapy is just neuroplasticity. Diet: no grains or dairy; no simple carbohydrates; high in fibre; high in avocados, nuts, seeds; wild-caught fish (no tuna), pastured chicken, pastured eggs, grass-fed beef; brussels sprouts, cabbage; organic leafy greens; fermented vegetables; fast for 3 hours before bed, and 12 hours between dinner and breakfast.
  • Exercise
    • The Time-Saver's Workout:
      Three sets of ten reps (increase weight between sets). 30 seconds to 1 minute rest between sets. Machine workout: leg press, seated row, chest press. Free weight workout: military press, bench press, bent-over row, curls, squats; optional: deadlift, toe raises, bent-leg sit-ups. Exercising when stressed will decrease your health. Some people (due to their genes) cannot benefit from exercise. Excessive exercise is an unhealthy addiction. If you're going to run, doing 5 to 10 minutes of high-intensity interval runs beats jogging for 3 hours. Most people do not have a genetic predisposition to build large muscles. Genetics is a large determiner of the best athletes. Conservation of Energy Phenomenon.
  • Maintain proper posture
    • Becoming a Supple Leopard: Pain is a symptom of misuse.
    • Deskbound: Expensive chairs are a scam. The important thing is to not remain in one position for long periods of time.

Psychology

  • Understand healthy and unhealthy patterns in psychological development

    • The Road Less Traveled: On infatuation, love, and the development of ego boundaries.
    • The Developing Mind: The brain is principally a tool for social navigation. Consequently, the most influential stimulus in the development of a child is the quality of the emotional interaction the child has with adults.
    • When the Body Says No: If you don't say "no", your body will do so in the form of illness.
    • In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts:
      Lack of attunement in the first 3 years of life makes people vulnerable to addiction. Attunement happens when a child feels understood, accepted, mirrored. Bare attention. Counter will: we naturally resist external and internal imposition. Shame destroys motivation. Functional differentiation is the ability to function depending on certain conditions in the environments. Basic differentiation is the ability to function independent of the environmental context.
    • Far From the Tree: This removed all fear I had of having children. This book shows that most people have a great capacity for meeting challenge. Challenge is something we work hard to avoid, but it can serve to give meaning to our lives.
    • The Tools: Embrace pain, active love, align with shadow self, express gratitude.
    • Achieve Your Potential with Positive Psychology:
      Reset buttons. Hedonic adaptation. Values: wisdom, courage, love, justice, temperance, transcendence. Practical wisdom is a foundational virtue. Zest, hope, and curiosity are important values. Developing pathways. Defensive pessimism. Learned optimism (permanent, personal, pervasive). Active and constructive responding. CBT five-part model: situation, emotions, thoughts, body, behavior. Serenity prayer. Use meditation to cultivate calmness and non-reactivity. Four Horsemen: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, stonewalling. Psychological problems arise from imbalance of three emotional systems: drive system (pleasure, achievement), protective system (protection against danger), soothing system (soothing and contentment). Sternberg's balance theory of wisdom: interest in self vs others; long-term vs short-term interest; whether to adapt, shape, or select environments. Focus on what you can control. Focus on intentions, not outcomes. Change judgements to change emotions. Do not think of yourself as the center. Pay continual attention to your judgements and actions. Recognize upsetting thoughts as impressions. Consider yourself as part of the human race.
    • The Body Keeps the Score
    • On Mental Toughness:
      Resilient people have certain traits. Tendency to orient towards the future and focus on solutions, rather than tendency to focus on the past and focus on problems. Physically strong. Always learning. Seek competition. Open to critique. Encourage debate. Find meaning in adversity. React optimistically to failure. Collaborate with others to generate solutions. Walk the floor to remain in touch with people and have access to their perspectives. Maintain good habits. Have mentors and proteges. Rooted in their values. Motivated by a higher cause. Reflect deeply. Participative management.

  • Avoid deception

    • Games Criminals Play: In any interaction, the person with the strongest agenda and preparation will determine the outcome. Any time you feel like you can't talk to someone (because of embarrassment or fear), you should immediately talk to someone to gain perspective and insight.
    • Influence: Defense from reciprocation: distinguish between favor and compliance trick. Defense from consistency: follow your gut; tell person the trick they are employing; ask yourself if you would do the same thing if you could go back in time.
    • Never Split the Difference: Tone. Mirroring. Tactical empathy. Labelling (it seems, it sounds, it looks). Speak directly to the negative (I'm an asshole). Move to "no".

  • Avoid self-deception

    • Sperm Wars: We are built for opportunistic infidelity, and opportunistic rape. Homosexuality receives hostility, since it confers reproductive advantage.
    • The Red Queen: How to account for sex? Answer: parasites. The cost of the brain is tremendous. The only advantage is the red queen race of sexual selection: humor and foreplay. Brains are like peacock's feathers: arbitrary, perverse, and conferring no relative advantage.
    • The Moral Animal: Humans are built for self-deception.
    • The Handicap Principle: An explanation of waste in animal behavior. Altruism is a means of expressing social rank.
    • The Robot's Rebellion: Cognitive dissonance arises from the conflict between the organism and the replicators (genes and memes). Reason is the organism's defense against replicators.
    • The Scout Mindset:
      Noticing bias: actually imagine counterfactual worlds. An accurate picture of your odds helps you choose between goals. Motivation without self-deception: identify those things worth pursing even when failure is likely. Focus on facts, not opinions. Thought experiments: double standard test, outsider test, conformity test, selective skeptic test, status quo bias test. How sure are you: the equivalent bet test. Coping with reality: make a plan; notice silver linings; focus on a different goal; things could be worse. Accepting variance gives you equanimity. Admit when you're wrong. See current belief as temporary, uncertain and constantly under assessment and improving. Lean in to confusion. Admit uncertainty. Hold your identity lightly.

  • Seek meaning, not happiness

  • Cultivate strong relationships

    • Give and Take:
      The happiest and unhappiest people are both Givers. The unhappy ones give to everyone. The happy ones do not give to Takers. The Golden Rule: give to everyone, but cutoff Takers once you identify them. Givers see the best in people, and their expectations usually cause others to meet those expectations. Givers outperform others because they create networks of learning. Givers outperform others because they have stronger motivation (purpose beyond themselves). Cultivate activities outside of work, but related to the larger mission of work, to avoid burnout. One Taker will neutralize the presence of ten Givers. Givers are successful because the vast majority of people are Matchers. Matchers go out of their way to reward Givers and punish Takers. Matchers handicap themselves because they don't ask for help if they don't think they can reciprocate. Givers ask for help easily.
    • Stop the Fight: How to avoid all arguments. "I" statements. No judgement. Benefit of doubt. Ask questions. Intent and impact. Time out. Say "ouch". Discuss while holding both key values. Establish spending budgets.

Productivity

  • Create a wealth of attention

    • Digital Minimalism: We are losing the capacity for solace. High quality leisure. Renunciation creates more well being than the benefits of what is being renounced. This is only true if the person renouncing has a clear picture of what they value, and how the act of renunciation is optimizing for what they value.
    • Dopamine Nation:
      Hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, leads to anhedonia, which is the inability to enjoy pleasure of any kind. Those prone to gambling addiction receive more dopamine when they lose. Loss chasing. Methamphetamine inhibits learning. With prolonged and repeated exposure to pleasurable stimuli, our capacity to tolerate pain decreases, and our threshold for experiencing pleasure increases. Our brains are well-adapted to environments of scarcity, not abundance. Dopamine fasting. Data. Objectives. Problems. Abstinence. Mindfulness. Insight. Next steps. Experiment. Self-binding. Delay discounting. Addicts think of a future 9 days long; non-addicts think of a future 5 years long. Frequent intense natural highs can become addictive and produce anhedonia (e.g. sky diving). Intense pain can also be addictive and produce anhedonia. Small amounts of pain can make life more pleasurable (e.g. cold showers). Radical honesty. Awareness. Denial. Recounting our experiences gives us mastery over them. Denial is a disconnect in the brain between rewards centers and the higher cortical brain regions that allow us to narrate the events of our lives, appreciate consequences, and plan for the future. Radical honesty strengthens the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for future planning, emotional regulation, and delayed gratification. Disclosure porn. Drunkalogues. Empathy without accountability is a shortsighted attempt to relieve suffering. Truth-telling and lying are contagious. Plenty mindset vs the scarcity mindset. Destructive shame vs prosocial shame is determined by the reaction of others towards the shameful behavior. Do people react with judgement or support? Sacrifice and stigma in religious institutions are effective at eliminating free riders.
    • Four Thousand Weeks:
      We make ourselves busy to numb ourselves to ourselves. Task oriented vs timeline oriented. Procrastination: we can't fail at what we don't start. Labor-saving devices don't save time, since standards rise to offset benefits. The Efficiency Trap: becoming more efficient increases demands that offsets any benefits. Existential angst leads people to pack their lives with as much experience as possible. Convenience removes the benefits of friction: social ties in community; less likely to make frivolous purchases. Human existence is defined by its finitude. All decisions are radically limited: history constrains what decisions are possible; to decide anything is to give up the infinite alternatives. To avoid existential angst we seek distraction and busyness. Encountering death produces bright sadness, stubborn gladness, sober joy. Finite is depressing compared to infinite, but joyful compared to zero. The joy of missing out. Pay yourself first. Limit your work in progress. Resist the allure of middling priorities. Devoting our full attention to the experience of a task we judge unpleasant can neutralize the experience of suffering. Worrying is the activity of repetitiously contemplating and failing to find how to make the future more secure. Don't use people instrumentally. Don't use digital services (e.g. buy things online). Go for walks. Have hobbies that are embarrassing (pointless, no skill development, no achievements). All technological efficiencies frustrate us because they heighten the awareness that our time is limited. Societal impatience (e.g. email response time). Increasing impatience makes us inclined to interruption and unable to read. Workaholics and alcoholics are both attempting to exert a level of control over their emotions that can never be attained. When we finally admit to ourselves that we don't control time, we lose frustration, and we gain patience and the ability to appreciate and take on challenge. Reseting the tempo (watch art for 3 hours). If you're able to tolerate the discomfort of not knowing, the perfect solution will reveal itself. Three principles of patience: develop a taste for having problems; embrace radical incrementalism; originality lies on the far side of unoriginality. Time is only valuable when it's spent with other people. People think incorrectly that social independence produces freedom and happiness; social regulation is what actually produces happiness. Cosmic insignificance therapy. The end of hope can be motivational; it can give you the freedom to focus on a small number of things that matter.
  • Eliminate clutter
    • Getting Things Done: The brain is a poor tool for holding to do lists.
    • The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: Minimalism plus optimizing for joy.
    • Spark Joy: Optimize for joy. Most people have three categories: things you love, things you don't love, and things you have to keep. Marie Kondo refuses to accept the third category. This uncompromising attitude allows her to optimize for joy in creative and surprisingly effective ways.
    • The Bullet Journal Method:
      Minimize number of words. One line per item. Habit tracking. Prefer concrete over abstract. Success and improvement is empty and addictive if not connected to meaning and purpose. Pleasure used to be rare; now, it's a commodity. Contentedness is a byproduct of personal industry. Meaning is found in passion. Passion is found in curiosity. Safely indulge curiosity, try things on for size, without wasting time. Prefer small changes. Use the structure and urgency of time boxing to create flow. Focus on process, not goals/outcomes/achievements. Express gratitude: dig deep each day to find something new to be thankful for. Challenge yourself: what to learn, why, how, baby steps. Understand the value of mundane chores. Face challenge: 5 whys, brainstorm options, pick option based on enthusiasm, breakdown option into baby steps. Wabi-sabi: celebrate imperfection.
  • Be intentional about your habits
    • The Miracle Morning: Keep a metrics journal. Develop self-awareness. Change your relationship with yourself to intentionally become the person you want to be.
    • Better Than Before: Know thyself. Do only once or every day.
    • Atomic Habits: Identity and habits form a feedback loop. Point and call: make all habits conscious. Inventory and evaluate all habits. Habit stacking. One space, one use. Social norms. Fall in love with boredom.

Self-Help

  • Affluenza: Have positive volition (not 'think positive'). Replace virus motives (with intrinsic ones). Be beautiful (not attractive). Be authentic (not sincere). Be vivacious (not hyperactive). Be playful (not game-playing).
  • Contented Dementia: Don’t ask questions. Learn from them as the experts on their disability. Always agree with everything they say, never interrupting them.
  • 12 Rules for Life: How to live well? Take on the maximum responsibility you can bear.
  • From Strength to Strength:
    Fluid intelligence vs crystalized intelligence. Success addiction. Lists give a dopamine hit and create attachment. The reverse bucket list: identify the things you crave, but do not contribute to well-being and happiness (money, power, pleasure, fame). Pay attention to smaller and smaller things. Friendship hierarchy: friendship based on utility; based on pleasure; based on willing each other's well-being and a shared love for something good an virtuous that is outside either of you. Successful people are good at marginal thinking: making sure each hour is spent on its best use at the moment. The trouble is that this always marginalizes the things in life that don't have a clear payoff in the short run--like relationships. Think about what you want for other people. Honesty, compassion, faith. Invest in others to cultivate what you want for them. Four stages of life: learn; ambition; relinquish attachments, focus on the spiritual; bliss. Weakness can become a strength because it can become a source of human connection. Suffering lowers happiness, but has the potential to increase meaning. Use things. Love people. Worship the divine.
  • Let Them:
    Let them. Let me. Frame of reference. We're all eight year olds. Emotions are contagious. Let emotions rise and fall. Confront difficult situations, ride the emotional wave. Upward comparison, downward comparison. Jealousy as motivation. You are not responsible for the emotional, financial, and physical support of other adults. Enabling is when you justify or support someone's problematic behaviors because you think you're helping them. Don't rescue people. Don't allow them to avoid consequences. Don't give them money without conditions. Create an environment that makes change and getting better easier. Start with what you value and what you want. Weigh regret vs resentment.

Critical Thinking

  • Human Nature After Darwin: An introduction to critical thinking.
  • Good Strategy Bad Strategy:
    Strategy: a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and coherent action. Walmart redefined store to be a network. Walmart had a design of complementary policies that competitors could not benefit from if they did not understand and adopt the whole design. US cold war strategy: use your relative advantages to impose out-of-proportion costs on the opposition and complicate their problems of competing with you. Bad strategy: fluff, failure to face the challenge, mistaking goals for strategy, bad strategic objectives. If you fail to identify and analyze the obstacles, you don't have a strategy. Instead, you have either a stretch goal, a budget, or a list of things you wish would happen. When a leader characterizes the challenge as underperformance, it sets the stage for bad strategy. Underperformance is a result. The true challenges are the reasons for the underperformance.

Communication

  • Understand the nature of language

    • Words in Context: Boundaries in the semantic landscape are, for the most part, arbitrary.

  • Write well

    • The Elements of Style: Writing style guide.
    • On Writing Well: Write for yourself.
    • Manager's Guide To Business Writing:
      Clear, economical, straightforward. Subject-verb-object order. Accentuate the positive. Active voice. Avoid noun and adjective stacks. Informal. Twelve-year old vocabulary. Concrete over abstract. Specific over general. That vs which. Who vs whom. You and I. Opening: context, purpose, organization. Closing: summarize, major points, importance, recommendations. Don't teach (claim you know what's right). Don't preach (claim you have moral authority). Don't reach (make claims without evidence).
    • 10 Steps to Successful Business Writing: Keep your writing concise, clear, and consistent.
    • Writing to Persuade: Summarize other people's work as deliberate practice. Be concise. Use conversational tone. Speak to the moral values of your audience. Be concrete. Be personal. Share your personal narrative. Be curious; ask questions. Avoid jargon. Edit. Set the frame.
    • A Swim in a Pond in the Rain:
      The craft of the short story. Lessons in how to write, read, and think. What makes a piece of writing a story is that something happens within it that changes the character forever. The true beauty of a story is not in the apparent conclusion but in the alteration in the mind of the reader that has occurred along the way. Characters are present so that we can accurately assess events based on their reactions. Continuous incremental editing. Eliminate the extraneous. Pattern. Escalation. Specificity. Variation. Desire/problem/setback/improvement. Willingness to revise. Make causality.

  • Speak well

  • Present well

    • Made to Stick: How to present ideas in a compelling manner.
    • Illuminate: How to use narrative to align and motivate people in a shared challenge.

Business

  • Build effective teams
    • Extreme Programming Explained: Use test-driven development, pairing programming, refactoring, and simple design to build sustainable software.
    • The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: Many teams never overcome "avoid conflict". Only teams that can engage in catalytic conflict have a hope of becoming strong teams.
    • Extreme Ownership: Cover and move. Simple. Prioritize and execute. Decentralized command. Ask questions until you understand the 'why'. Propagate the 'why' to others. Place the shared mission above personal agendas (yours and others).
    • Nine Lies About Work: Why corporate management is ineffective. How, instead, to cultivate great teams.
    • A World Without Email:
      Technological determinism. Collaborative pacing. Autonomy. Short message protocol: short reply or schedule meeting. Pair programming: accountability, no goofing. Budget attention: requests that exceed budget must confront other stakeholders. Explicitly contract deep-to-shallow ratios. Tragedy of the commons. Allow everyone to improve system. Create seamless interface. Accumulate idiosyncratic credits by always delivering. Kanban. Deep thinking each day (1.5 hours for everyone, 3 hours for managers). Work execution vs production process. Use systems to manage projects. Instead of corporate management, build effective teams. "To Discuss" column (replace email with face-to-face). "Waiting to Hear Back" column (capture who and next action). Personal Kanban: WIP limit of 3. 30x Rule: spend 30x effort to train someone else as to do the task yourself. For all repeated tasks, schedule/structure/automate them. Office hours. Client portal. Weekly status meetings. Escalation protocols. Fire problem clients. Non personal emails. Status meeting protocol: replace weekly 1-on-1's with daily scrum. Productivity Puzzle: personal computers did not lead to increased productivity. Computers led to reduced support staff and increased administrative work. Say "no" to the non-essential. Make time: escape digital addiction. Outsource what you don't do well. Take on more accountability for increased autonomy. Google Design Sprints: focused time without being plugged into the hyperactive hive mind. Peer review quota. Meeting budgets. Hire support staff. Make support requests transactional. Prefer systems that require in-person resolution. Invisible UI for submitting support requests. Put all support staff announcements in a weekly company newsletter. Simulate your own support staff: schedule, separate emails.

  • Be explicit about responsibility and delegation levels

  • Use data and short feedback cycles to drive innovation

    • Lean Startup: Developing software is the most costly way to validate a business model. Be explicit about business model validation. Create short learning cycles for customer discovery. Use customer interviews, prototypes, concierge method, innovation accounting, MVP.

  • Exploit the power of simplicity

    • Rework: Principles for business success from the founders of Basecamp. Say no by default. Let your customers outgrow you. Be at-home good. Marketing is not a department. Hire managers of one. Hire great writers. Test-drive employees. Don't scar on the first cut.
    • Remote:
      Hire candidates for trial runs to determine skill. Equal pay for equal work. Everyone has access by default to everything they need. You can't control people's motivations with punishment or rewards. Instead, encourage people to work on stuff they like and care about, with people they like and care about. No broken windows on personal communication patterns (sarcasm, passive aggressiveness). Meet with team to determine fit. Meet twice a year in-person for 5 days (industry conference, arts festival). Use colocation to start or finish project. Use routine to separate work from personal life. Use engagement and enthusiasm as a barometer to gauge if work and work environment are healthy. Everyone gets a company credit card (no expense reports).
    • It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work:
      No goals. Don't negotiate salary. No dreadlines: respect dates, cut scope. Disagree and commit. Narrow as you go. Do nothing by default. Escape collaborative pacing: 1-hour response time is enough. Do fewer things: processing checks vs credit cards. Team of three. Six-week projects, no interruptions. Be profitable: otherwise you're burning money and people. Reject per-seat pricing: so you can say no to problem customers. Library rules. Ask "What will it take?"; decide if it's worth it. May-Sep: 4-day weeks. Launch and learn. No roadmaps. Two tokens: no big deal, end of the world. Don't chase growth, scale back.

Parenting

  • Spend time outside every day
    • How to Raise a Wild Child: This book made me appreciate the importance of getting outside every day with the kids.
    • Let Them Eat Dirt: Exposure to bacteria and microbes are essential for healthy digestive and immune system development.
  • Read to your child every day
    • The Read-Aloud Handbook: Read to your child every day.
    • Igniting a Passion for Reading: How to have children fall in love with books, and how to have them develop in their ability to think and talk about books.
    • The Read-Aloud Family:
      Read for pleasure. Spend time with kids. Lighter books are fine. Let them fidget. No right answers. Focus on questions, not answers. Reading journals. Ten questions: desire, decisions, like, most, remind, fear, change, surprised, reminds of you, remember. Read slower. Repetition. Avoid beginning readers. Reference stories, create memories. Stories give children practice in being brave. Read picture books even when the child is older. Age 8-12: read-aloud more, read different genres.
  • Parent as servant leader
    • The Continuum Concept: An account of how the Yequana South American Indians raise their children. The Yequana hold their children continuously for the first year. They don't protect their children, and they don't coerce or make decisions for their children. The impact of these behaviors on the children is remarkable.
  • Cultivate a growth mindset
    • Mindset: Growth mindset vs fixed mindset. The consequences of calling your child "smart".
    • Grit: How to cultivate persistence and hard work.
    • Good Inside:
      It's the child's job to express strong emotions. It's the parent's job to validate, express empathy, and to enforce boundaries. Repair after tough moments. Apologize on the child's behalf. Tell the truth. Most Generous Interpretation. Understanding vs convincing. Focus on internal world, not external behavior. Curious and accepting of another person's perspective. Two things are true. Feelings part of brain is fully developed, but self-regulation part isn't fully developed until the twenties. Boundaries are what we do, not what we tell children not to do. Validation. Empathy. Grounded vs reactive. Repair: say sorry, what happened, what you wish you had done differently, and what you will do going forward. Happiness vs resilience. Anxiety is the intolerance of discomfort. Name and tolerate a wide range of emotions in children. General goal or principle. Support, not solve. Tolerate, not escape. Tell the truth: confirm perceptions, honor the question, label what you don't know, focus on how instead of what. Breathe: belly breathe, long out breaths, label thoughts. Practice self-care.

Literature

Fantasy

Science Fiction

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