Jun 18, 2017

books

I'm reading like 8 books right now which feels fun and daunting all at once. Like literally 8 books ...

  • Golden: The Miraculous Rise of Steph Curry by Marcus Thompson
  • My Cat Yugoslavia by Pajtim Statovci
  • Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella H. Meadows
  • What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami
  • Unf*ck Your Habitat: You're Better Than Your Mess by Rachel Hoffman
  • Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution by Lynn Margulis
  • The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman
  • The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

In this process, I did discover a little lifehacky trick, which is probably totally obvious to the rest of the world, but is a revelation to my idealist, completist brain.

So when I read a book, I really commit to reading it - to expend brain-cycles actually thinking about it. This means I read all the boring parts, footnotes and all. The downside is that I give up on a lot of books that I can't keep up with. Also, I'm not really big on "business books" per se. I sometimes feel like I need to read them, to keep up professionally and get the terminology down but it is hard to get excited about these books.

What I (finally) realized, as I tried to get through Lean Startup is that I don't actually need to read a 300 page tome that basically goes into a lot of detail on some pretty basic concepts. Most of these books have nicely summarized versions on the internet, and these versions along with some Wikipedia / Google foo will pretty much get you all the good parts. Now I can get back to my summer fun reading!

And as I write this, I realize that I just came up with Cliff Notes. 

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