I finished about 46 books this year. Which would I recommend and what did I learn?
Top 3 books (and links to my reviews)
Working Backwards: In-depth and useful examination of Amazon’s processes, systems, and culture. One of best business books I’ve read
Key takeaway: If you want to make sure something gets done, appoint a specific owner who is 100% responsible for seeing it through and try to eliminate as many interdependencies as possible.
Four Thousand Weeks: an “anti-time management” book, focused on living a full life
Key takeaway: Viewing time as a commodity / resource to be managed isn’t always the best choice as 1) it takes us out of the moment, 2) makes us feel guilty for enjoying ourselves, and 3) turns our lives into a never-ending optimization exercise, instead, focus on being present and letting things happen to you
Secret Life of Groceries: What actually needs to happen for you to be able to buy arugula at Whole Foods?
Key takeaway: A lot of ugly things need to happen for you to be able to buy arugula at Whole Foods and it’s unclear if we can actually fix them
Honorable mentions
Conquistador : Hernán Cortés, King Montezuma, and the last stand of the Aztecs: What happened when Spanish conquistadors came to Mexico. Very colorful story I knew very little about
Stories of Your Life and Others: I put Ted Chiang’s newer collection on the “best of 2020” list. Awesome science fiction that will be interesting to everyone
Empire of the Summer Moon: Like Conquistador, this covered a chapter of history (the Comanches, the most powerful Native American tribe v. the US) with colorful and compelling writing
Ideas and themes I’m thinking about
Single threaded leadership / ownership: As mentioned above, this is a major part of Amazon’s internal operating system. But it’s also the key idea behind the book Fair Play, which is about how families should divide household work and chores. By having one person “own” a household workstream (e.g., taxes, packing kids’ lunch), it 1) reduces cognitive overhead on the other person (as they don’t have to hold any details in their head); 2) allows the task to get done more efficiently (as the other person doesn’t need to be consulted usually), and 3) should hypothetically lead to families nagging each other less as everybody knows what is their responsibility. How many tasks or to-dos in your personal or professional life took way too long to get done because you needed something from someone else or you weren’t sure who was going to do it?
Reality v. games: Reality is Broken argues that games fix many
of reality’s “bugs”: they provide a perfectly calibrated challenge, lots of instant feedback, reward / recognition (from winning or beating a boss), and the opportunity to progress over time (e.g., your character levels up over time). The author posits that we can leverage these principles in our real lives for positive effect (a modern example would be step trackers). To test this, I downloaded the iPhone version of NFL Madden — and found it hard to stop playing, even though the gameplay was much worse than the PS2 version I used to play 17 years ago. It was less about the gameplay, and more about the game itself and the system of rewards / progression (e.g., making your team better).1 What if life could be that exciting! After reading the book - as well as Ready Player One - I spent some time thinking about the gamification of life:In 2021, we’ve made pretty good progress gamifying certain areas of life. One of biggest unlocks has been personal fitness / wellness, where you can easily gamify weight loss / gain (MyFitnessPal, etc.), exercise (Peloton, OrangeTheory), as well as overall wellness (meditation apps, sleep trackers)
The other large category is social media / the internet, where we keep score via likes on our posts and number of followers. While this has inspired people to create amazing content, it’s also conditioned us to be hypersensitive to quantified external validation from others in a way that’s probably not super healthy
What hasn’t been gamified well yet?
Many jobs or long-term projects don’t offer instant feedback or a sense of progression / leveling up2
Building and maintaining long-term relationships with people and establishing trust is important but harder to gauge v short-term actions such as likes on a Twitter post
But at some point, does gamifying start to cheapen reality? If somebody is only emailing me to get points in some app, how does that make me feel? But even without the app, they might be reaching out to me in part due to their own self-interest. That’s life. But when it’s translated into a game, it “hits different”
Unintended consequences / incentives: These really matter! A few examples I came across this year are below. It’s easy to read about them or point them out in hindsight, but how do you identify them in the moment or ahead of time?
Government / public policy: Some believe that providing permanent housing for all the homeless people in the SF will solve its homelessness crisis. Others argue that doing so will simply encourage more and more homeless people keep moving to SF until the city has built housing for 100% of America’s homeless population (San Fransicko)
Business: Juul aimed to make an e-cigarette that would allow adult smokers to consume nicotine in a safer manner. Whether fully intentional or not, they created a new market: teens that hadn’t necessarily been smokers before (Devil’s Playbook)
Foreign relations / diplomacy: When the Spanish explorer Cortes landed in the New World, the Aztec Ruler Montezuma sent him ornate gifts - including gold - as evidence of his own power to persuade Cortes to turn around in leave. Instead, Cortes was even more encouraged to venture forth into Aztec land, given the evidence he had seen of its riches (Conquistador again)
My reading goal for next year is to focus on quality. I rate every book I read and my average rating in 2021 was ~3.55, down from ~3.7-3.8 over the previous 3 years. And only about ~50% of my reading time was on books I actually completed—I stuck with less engaging books for way too long.
Thanks to everyone for subscribing and sending me their own thoughts / ideas. If there’s a book you think I should write about, please do let me know!
I deleted it after 5 days. Had I not, I would have read approximately 3 less books and never sent this out.
The hedge fund Bridgewater is the notable exception, but their approach probably doesn’t work for most people. Another interesting example is the biographer Robert Caro, who will take 7 years to write a book—he gamified this via a “planning calendar” where he could track how many words he wrote per day.