Best of 2023

Thoughts and reflections from 50+ books

With 2023 wrapped up, I want to offer my top books and key themes as I have in the last few years. (See 2022, 2021, 2020.)

Top books of the year

An Immense World: How do animals perceive the world? In colors we cannot see, sounds we cannot hear, and senses we don’t even have (bats use sonar; sea turtles have built-in magnetic compasses). Even as someone who doesn’t love “science books,” this was fascinating and an absolute joy to read. A good reminder that how we experience the world is just our “experience” and not necessarily how others do.

In the Heart of the Sea: The true story that inspired Moby-Dick: a whaling boat is rammed and destroyed by its prey in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The crew, with nothing more than a rowboat, had to survive for more than 90 days. Interesting learnings about economics, human psychology, and leadership. I hadn’t appreciated the whaling ships were the start-ups of the early 1800s: they were risky but lucrative, with employees entitled to a share of the profits that’s similar to the equity they’d receive today.

Of Boys and Men: Why are some men falling behind in America? Of Boys and Men examines this and provides multiple reasons. The answer is informed in part by biology (boys’ brains mature at a structurally slower rate than girls’) and in part by economics and culture (male-dominated fields like manufacturing are going away and men that try to go into fields like nursing generally have a worse experience). He also spends time on the meta-fact that this issue isn’t as taken seriously by policymakers and the general public as it should be.

Other books I enjoyed but didn’t write about.

• The Escape Artist: Story of Rudy Vrba, one of the few people to escape from the Auschwitz concentration camp, motivated to reveal the horrors of the Holocaust, which the Nazis had hidden from the world. His escape involved hiding in a hole in the ground for three days, then traveling 80+ miles on foot, which involved multiple close calls with Nazis, including being shot at. Once escaped, he wrote a detailed report of what was happening in the camps than was widely disseminated, eventually reaching Winston Churchill’s desk. While his report did end up delaying the deportation of tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews, it also fell on many deaf ears, with many Jewish community leaders being in denial (or having their own side deals with the Nazis), and world leaders generally not acting.

• Secrets of an Organized Mom: Ignoring the gendered title, this was a very helpful overview on how to keep your house or living space organized. The key takeaways were:

  • Be ruthless in getting rid of things you don’t use and be very wary of freebies and swag.

  • Give everything a specific place (e.g., don’t have a junk drawer) - this also involves creating more “places” for things via basic organizing tools like shelf dividers, etc. and labeling them with a label maker.

  • Store things where you use them (if you only use your fine china in the dining room, store it there as opposed to in the kitchen).

• Liberation Day: A collection of short stories by George Saunders. While he has a few specific themes that he revisits time and time over again (dystopian theme parks, the “dehumanizing” effects of late capitalism taken to extremes), the execution and creativity is always very entertaining.

Key themes I’m thinking about

Our ability to endure and persist.

I read multiple books about people managing through brutal circumstances, whether escaping from a concentration camp or surviving in the middle of the Pacific Ocean for months while slowly starving to death.

While obviously not in the same category as the above, I also read a few books on people who elected to put themselves in pain’s way. Hurts So Good was about people who choose to eat ultra-hot peppers or dunk themselves in the freezing ocean in January. And Endure focused on specifically on endurance sports. As Dopamine Nation discussed, doing things that feel bad (exercise, ice baths) in the short-term can actually make us feel better.

Friendship.

I learned a lot from the friendship deep-dive I did earlier this year. Maintaining friendships is really hard as you get older and you have more competing priorities (kids, work).

Biggest learnings for me were 1) it’s OK to “hang out” with people as opposed to formally host them and 2) try to be creative in getting in time with people (or befriend people you see regularly anyway).

Evolution is incredible.

An Immense World gave me a newfound appreciation for how crazy evolution can be (e.g., there are heatseeking beetles that are attracted to fires from miles away). How Far the Light Reaches was awesome as well, with its essays on runaway goldfish and octopus moms who starve themselves to death protecting their eggs. Exercised spoke about how humans evolved into endurance athletes who could outrun horses in long races due to the efficient way we run and our ability to keep cool while doing so (i.e., sweating).

The limits of productivity and optimization.

At times, it feels like I spend most of my mental calories thinking about productivity, optimization, and “leverage”: how do I maximize every minute of my day to get the most “output”? How do I do as many things at once in parallel to be as efficient as possible? On a given weeknight, I might find myself cooking dinner for my kids while doing dishes and trying to to answer emails. While this might be efficient in the short term, it risks reducing everything in life to an “output” or a job. How to Calm Your Mind and Awe both touched on the idea of putting limits on productivity and taking time to savor. After reading Awe, I’ve tried to spend some specific time each day simply “savoring” and engaging in one activity (e.g., a short walk with my kids).

I definitely don’t have this figured out and definitely still feel a tension between being productive and savoring. It’s also hard to context-shift between being these two states (e.g., your kid comes in when you’re in the middle of a demanding work task to say hi. As much as you might want to savor the interaction, it can be hard to switch from “deep work focus mode” to “be fully present with kid” mode.)

Executing well is hard.

I read a few books specifically focused on how to execute well (How Big Things Get Done, Recoding America, Scaling People). Executing - getting things done - in large organizations or with large projects is really hard:

• You might be dealing with complex systems that are inelegant / “kludgy” (e.g., government IT systems that involve multiple decades-old “layers” of technology and green-screen software)

• There are multiple stakeholders with their own interests (e.g., politicians that want to pass legislation that “looks good,” even if it’s not feasible; career civil servants terrified of getting fired for veering from (inefficient) processes)

• People’s expectations are too high (e.g., a large project’s costs are underplayed so that it gets approved)

There are no magic tricks to getting things done in these situations - it just requires a lot of patience, hard work, and creativity. Ideally, you might redesign all of your systems to be more efficient (as Amazon has done), but this is impossible at 99.9% of companies.

Themes for 2024

A few themes and deep-dives I’d love to explore in 2024. If you have any book recommendations (on these or others), please send them my way!

• Focus: How do you focus and efficiently use your time? I’ve read a bunch of books on the subject over the years, so this will likely be a synthesis

• Parenting: What are the agreed-upon best practices for parenting, and what is still a debate? How much of how our kids turn out is nature vs. nurture? Are we overstressing as parents or not stressing enough?

• Limits of scientific research: How real is the replication crisis? What about the “desk drawer effect”? (study shows no effect, not published because it’s boring). Are there any other structural issues with the ways we conduct research? (e.g., Weird bias)

• How to execute better and be a better “employee.” How do do consistently execute at a high level? In addition, there are a ton of books about being a good manager - but many less about being a great employee and giving the people above you leverage, which is just as important

• Future of medicine (and how much will it cost)? The last few years have seen some incredible medical innovations, like Covid mRNA vaccines. What is next - and how much will it cost?

As always, a big thank you to everyone who reads and writes in - this is a lot of fun for me.