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This is the bookshelf from my home growing up.
The end of the year is a time when you can either look backward with regrets, or forward with hope, or backward with longing, and forward with dread. I guess it depends on how your year went.
For me, I look backward with fondness and forward with determination.
I love the pictures above. My son Dax is 2 years old and loves books like a mad man. We went to the doctor a few months ago and he said Dax is an advanced talker for his age. Now, every child is different and they develop at different speeds. What works for one will be different for another. But when it comes to Dax, I have a hypothesis on why he can talk as well as he can. And it doesn’t have to do with me; it has everything to do with how often I come home from work and find Dax and Camden deep in a book.
I’m grateful for my wife Camden, who works tirelessly and never slips into madness even when she reads The Little Blue Truck for the 98th time in one day. Books are an important part of our family. Recently, I was asked what my wife and I do for fun. The only things I could think of are play catch while we talk and go to bookstores. We anchor our day trips and vacations around bookstores.
I’m grateful to be a part of this little man’s journey as we all learn something new every day.
Originally published on Medium as Part 1 and Part 2 on December 26th, 2018
Here are some things to know.
First, this is a long post. This isn’t meant for casual consumption, so if you’re here at all, you’re a brave soul. This is meant, more than anything, as a repository for me to remember what struck me as I read, and as summaries of books I don’t want to forget. The desire to read has raced so much further ahead of the desire to comprehend, and I want to make sure that I do everything I can to improve my comprehension. I included all the quotes that I underlined or highlighted as I read. I included images of the book covers so you can quickly scroll from book to book if you’re curious.
The second thing, I made a concerted effort to read more fiction this year (thanks to my English-major wife Camden, and my champion-reader Aunt Cindy, who read 177 books in 2017.) I gravitated a lot towards Cormac McCarthy because I thought “I need more reasons to be depressed in my life.” In all seriousness, McCarthy is one of the most enjoyable authors I’ve had the privilege to peruse. Not that I’ve perused him. But like his words. On the page. Anyways… I bring this up because I also highlighted what struck me from the fiction I read. I tried not to have any spoilers, but if you’re hankering for some of the fiction I’ve got here, and you’re a spoiler-averse conformist, best to skip those ones.
This post is to continue a record of the books I read during the second half of the year. Part 1 includes the first 30 books I read this year from January to June. You’ll notice that in Part 2, I only read 11 books. After I finished Part 1, I did some reflecting on what I was trying to accomplish with the reading I was doing.
My wife read High Performance Habits by Brendon Burchard and shared the following quote with me and it set me on a path to try and think through my personal curriculum.
High performers are very clear about the skill sets they need to develop now to win in the future. They don’t draw a blank when you ask them, “What three skills are you currently working to develop so you’ll be more successful next year?” When I’m brought in to work with Fortune 500 senior executives, I have them open their calendars and talk me through their upcoming days, weeks, and months. It turns out that executives who score higher on the HPI tend to have more blocks of time already scheduled for learning than do their peers with lower scores. There’s an hour blocked out here for taking an online training, another there for executive coaching, another for reading, and yet another for a mastery-oriented hobby (piano, language learning, cooking class, and so on). They’ve built a curriculum for themselves and are actively engaged in learning. What’s clearly linking all these blocks of scheduled time is the desire to develop specific skill sets. The online training is about how to code or manage finances better; the executive coaching is focused on developing listening skills; the reading focuses on a specific skill they’ve been trying to master, such as strategy, listening in meetings, or story development; the hobby is something they take seriously — they aren’t doing it just for pleasure, per se, but to actively develop mastery. Here’s the big distinction: High performers are also working on skills that focus on what I call their primary field of interest (PFI). They aren’t scattershot learners. They’ve homed in on their passionate interests, and they set up activities or routines to develop skill in those areas. If they love music, they laser in on what kind of music they want to learn, and then study it. Their PFI is specific. They don’t just say “music” and then try to learn all forms of music — playing guitar, joining an orchestra, singing with a band. They choose, say, a five-string guitar, find a master teacher, and make time for practice sessions that focus more on skill building than on casual exploration. In other words, they know their passions and set up time to dial in the skills that will turn those passions into proficiencies. This means high performers approach their learning not as generalists but as specialists.