The best books I read in 2020
The best overall & best self-help: The Magic of Thinking Big by David J. Schwartz
This instantly became the best book I’ve ever read. When finding quotes for the section below I found that I was quoting the entire book.
The only wise thing to do is fire Mr. Defeat:
Your mind is a “thought factory.” It’s a busy factory, producing countless thoughts in one day. Production in your thought factory is under the charge of two foremen, one of whom we will call Mr. Triumph and the other Mr. Defeat. Mr. Triumph is in charge of manufacturing positive thoughts. He specializes in producing reasons why you can, why you’re qualified, why you will. The other foreman, Mr. Defeat, produces negative, deprecating thoughts. He is your expert in developing reasons why you can’t, why you’re weak, why you’re inadequate. His specialty is the “why-you-will-fail” chain of thoughts. Both Mr. Triumph and Mr. Defeat are intensely obedient. They snap to attention immediately. All you need do to signal either foreman is to give the slightest mental beck and call. If the signal is positive, Mr. Triumph will step forward and go to work. Likewise, a negative signal brings Mr. Defeat forward.
Now, the more work you give either of these two foremen, the stronger he becomes. If Mr. Defeat is given more work to do, he adds personnel and takes up more space in your mind. Eventually, he will take over the entire thought-manufacturing division, and virtually all thought will be of a negative nature. The only wise thing to do is fire Mr. Defeat. You don’t need him. You don’t want him around telling you that you can’t, you’re not up to it, you’ll fail, and so on. Mr. Defeat won’t help you get where you want to go, so boot him out. Use Mr. Triumph 100 percent of the time. When any thought enters your mind, ask Mr. Triumph to go to work for you. He’ll show you how you can succeed.
Vaccinate yourself against excusitis:
Go deep into your study of people, and you’ll discover unsuccessful people suffer a mind-deadening thought disease. We call this disease excusitis. Every failure has this disease in its advanced form. And most “average” persons have at least a mild case of it.
Study the lives of successful people and you’ll discover this: all the excuses made by the mediocre fellow could be but aren’t made by the successful person. I have never met nor heard of a highly successful business executive, military officer, salesman, professional person, or leader in any field who could not have found one or more major excuses to hide behind. Roosevelt could have hidden behind his lifeless legs; Truman could have used “no college education”.
A victim of this thought disease goes through this mental process: “I’m not doing as well as I should. What can I use as an alibi that will help me save face? Let’s see: poor health? lack of education? too old? too young? bad luck? personal misfortune? wife? the way my family brought me up?”
And each time the victim makes the excuse, the excuse becomes imbedded deeper within his subconsciousness. Thoughts, positive or negative, grow stronger when fertilized with constant repetition. At first the victim of excusitis knows his alibi is more or less a lie. But the more frequently he repeats it, the more convinced he becomes that it is completely true, that the alibi is the real reason for his not being the success he should be.
And that was just in the first two chapters. I wanted to keep going but this post would’ve been too long. Just read it. It’s that good.
Self help honorable mentions:
Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull, Amy Wallace: A little long-winded but was the best book I’ve read on being comfortable working in creative, uncertain environments and understanding what is innovation and what is derivation.
The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company by Robert Iger: Bob is a very entertaining writer. I found it best to read after The Magic of Thinking Big because you can see how Bob succeeded by putting it into practice.
48-Hour Start-up: From idea to launch in 1 weekend by Fraser Doherty: If you’ve been delaying starting a business, this is the book for you. It’ll show you how it’s easier to get started than you think, and once you have that positive feedback loop going you’ll get it growing.
The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts by Gary Chapman: Mostly written from the perspective of a marriage counselor but useful for dealing with people in general too. Everyone has at least one of five love languages. There are simple tricks to spot them: words of affirmation are probably important to people who read and write or have thin skin on Twitter. Acts of service are probably important to people who naturally tend do a lot of serving. Complementing or hurting someone with their love language affects them more than the average person.
The best for personal finance: The Simple Path to Wealth: Your road map to financial independence and a rich, free life by J.L. Collins
As a personal finance nut, I’ve read a lot of these books. If you can only muster up the attention span for one, this is the one I’d recommend.
A case for investing:
If you decide to pursue financial freedom you are going to have to choose to spend your money on investments. Somehow in our culture this has come to be seen by most people as deprivation. That has never made much sense to me. Personally, there is nothing I’d rather buy or own than F-You Money.
Two close boyhood friends grow up and go their separate ways. One becomes a humble monk, the other a rich and powerful minister to the king. Years later they meet. As they catch up, the portly minister (in his fine robes) takes pity on the thin and shabby monk. Seeking to help, he says: “You know, if you could learn to cater to the king, you wouldn’t have to live on rice and beans.” To which the monk replies: “If you could learn to live on rice and beans, you wouldn’t have to cater to the king.”
Stop thinking about what your money can buy. Start thinking about what your money can earn.
If you look at all asset classes from bonds to real estate to gold to farmland to art to racehorses to whatever, stocks provide the best performance over time. Nothing else even comes close.
A case for index investing over active investing:
The Dow started the last century at 66 and ended at 11,400. How could you lose money during a period like that? A lot of people did because they tried to dance in and out
Some 60 years ago the Dow was trading at ~250. By January 2015 it was around 17,823. That’s through 60 years of turmoil and financial disasters, just like the ones sure to come over the next 60 years.
In the February 2010 issue of The Journal of Finance, Professors Laurant Barras, Olivier Scaillet and Russ Wermers presented their study of 2,076 actively managed U.S. stock funds over the 30 years from 1976 to 2006. Their conclusion? Only 0.6% showed any skill at besting the index or, as the researchers put it, the result was “…statistically indistinguishable from zero.”
They are not alone. Brad Barber of UC Davis and Terrance Odean of UC Berkeley found that only about 1% of active traders outperform the market and that the more frequently they trade, the worse they do.
Nobody is going to sit glued to their TV while some rational person talks about long-term investing. But get somebody to promise the Dow is going to 20,000 by year’s end or, better yet, is on the verge of careening into the abyss, and brother you’ve got ratings!
People want quick results, excitement and bragging rights. They want the thrill of victory and to boast about their stock that tripled or their fund that beat the S&P 500. Letting an index work its magic over the years isn’t very exciting. It is only very profitable.
Even Warren Buffett, perhaps history’s most successful stock-picker, has gone on record as recommending indexing, specifically for his wife’s trust once he has passed.
there is too much money to be made and too much weakness in human psychology for actively managed funds and managers to ever go away.
During [the] accumulation phase, celebrate market drops. While you are in the wealth accumulation phase, these are gifts. Each dollar you invest will buy you more shares.
Personal finance honorable mentions:
The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns by John C. Bogle: Can get a little dry at times but the brevity makes up for it. I think this book is best suited for people who know they should just be index investing but can’t help trying to use their knowledge to actively invest. I’ve invested a lot of time into learning how to actively invest but this book convinced me that doing so would certainly end up being my most expensive hobby. This book will also help you understand why the index has performed the way it has and how individual stocks will perform too.
One Up On Wall Street: How To Use What You Already Know To Make Money In The Market by Peter Lynch, John Rothchild: To me, even more impressive than being considered one of the only active investors to beat the index over time, Peter Lynch made a book on investing that is an absolute page turner. I still laugh about some of the things I read in this book. Oh, and it’s also a good read if you want to learn how to evaluate stocks/companies from the best.
The best for programmers: The Passionate Programmer: Creating a Remarkable Career in Software Development by Chad Fowler
Very similar takeaways to The Magic of Thinking Big but in the context of programming. If you are a programmer, I’d read this one first. This book changed my attitude towards work in a way that made me a better employee and allowed me to level up my skills faster.
Approach your work with passion:
Most people spend far more of their waking adulthood working than doing anything else. According to a 2006 survey by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics,[1] average Americans spend half of their waking time at work. Leisure and sports are a distant 15 percent of waking time spent. The facts show that our lives basically are our work. If your life is primarily consumed by your work, then loving your work is one of the most important keys to loving your life.
Doing your job well means that the activity you do for 50 percent of your available time is something you’re good at. Conversely, if you don’t do your job well, a large amount of your time will be spent feeling inadequate or guilty over not performing at your best.
When I wasn’t making a dent at work, it spilled over to my personal life too.
But, though I’m unqualified to be a typical software developer, my background as a musician gave me one key insight that ultimately allowed me to skip the step of being a typical software developer (who wants to be typical, anyway?). Nobody becomes a musician because they want to get a job and lead a stable and comfortable life. The music industry is too cruel an environment for this to be a feasible plan. People who become professional musicians all want to be great.
It drives me crazy to ask people whether they’ve seen or used certain not-quite-mainstream technologies only to hear, “I haven’t been given the opportunity to work on that” in return. Given the opportunity? Neither was I! I took the opportunity to learn.
When I’m old and dying, I plan to look back on my life and say, “Wow, that was an adventure,” not “Wow, I sure felt safe.”
If you think about the biographies you read or the documentaries you watch about the greats in various fields, this same pattern of addictive, passionate behavior surfaces. Jazz saxophone great John Coltrane reportedly practiced so much that his lips would bleed.
If I were to ask a handful of jazz musicians, “Who is your mentor?” most of them would have an answer. Now ask the same question of programmers. In the United States, they’d probably respond with “What?”
Our industry tends to practice on the job. Can you imagine a professional musician getting onstage and replicating the gibberish from my university’s practice rooms? It wouldn’t be tolerated. Musicians are paid to perform in public — not to practice. Similarly, a martial artist or boxer stressing himself or herself to fatigue during matches wouldn’t go very far in the sport. As an industry, we need to make time for practice.
We in the jazz world weren’t special, of course. Classical composers do the same thing. So do novelists and poets. So do sculptors and painters. Studying the work of masters is an essential part of becoming a master.
Simply setting a goal (daily, weekly, or whatever you’re capable of) and tracking this type of accomplishment can radically change your behavior. When you start to search for outstanding accomplishments, you naturally go through the process of evaluating and prioritizing your activities based on the business value of what you might work on. Tracking hits at a reasonably high frequency will ensure that you don’t get stuck: if you’re supposed to produce a hit per day, you can’t spend two weeks crafting the perfect task. This type of thinking and work becomes a habit rather than a major production. And, like a developer addicted to the green bar of a unit test suite, you start to get itchy if you haven’t knocked out today’s hit. You don’t have to worry so much about tracking your progress, because performing at this level becomes more akin to a nervous tic than a set of tasks that need to be planned out.
Understand you work within the business:
The purpose of a business is to make money. To excel at a company, you’re going to have to understand how you fit into the business’s plan to make money. As we’ll explore later, keeping you employed costs your company a significant amount of money. Your company is investing in you. Your challenge is to become an obviously good investment. You will start to judge your own performance in terms of the business value you bring to the organization or customer who is employing you.
It’s not enough to think about what technologies you’re going to invest in. After all, the technology part is a commodity, right? You’re not going to be able to sit back and simply master a programming language or an operating system, letting the businesspeople take care of the business stuff. If all they needed was a code robot, it would be easy to hire someone in another country to do that kind of work. If you want to stay relevant, you’re going to have to dive into the domain of the business you’re in.
This is how your business clients feel about you: Imagine how much easier it would be to work with these programmers if they just understood what I was asking them for without me having to dumb everything down and be so ridiculously specific! And, guess what? It’s the business that pays your salary.
Your parents would rather you be OK than have a remarkable career at the cost of great personal risk. More than any other third party you might look to, your parents are going to give you fear-driven advice.
Ultimately, in a well-structured environment, the goals of your manager are the goals of your team. Solve your manager’s problem, and you’ve solved a problem for the team. Additionally, if your manager is taking the same approach you are, the problems you’re solving for him or her are really his or her boss’s problems. And so on, and so on, until it rolls up to the highest level of your company or organization — the CEO, the shareholders, or even your customers.
Most companies set a rate of return bar, under which an investment will not be made. Investments have to yield an agreed-upon percentage in an agreed-upon period of time, or they aren’t made. This number is called the hurdle rate.
Find out what your company’s hurdle rate is, and apply it to your salary. Are you a good investment?
Attempting to be irreplaceable is a defensive maneuver that creates a hostile relationship with your employer (and your co-workers) where one may not have already existed. Using this same logic, attempting to be replaceable should create an unhostile working relationship. We’re all replaceable. Those of us who embrace and even work toward this actually differentiate ourselves and, unintuitively, improve our own chances. And, of course, if you are replaceable, nothing is stopping you from moving up to the next big job.
[Bob] Martin renamed forty-hour workweek to “eight-hour burn.” The idea is that you should work so relentlessly that there is no way that you could continue longer than eight hours.
Because we all make mistakes, we also know that everyone else makes mistakes. So, within reason, we don’t judge each other on the mistakes we make. We judge each other on how we deal with those inevitable mistakes.
It’s comfortable to play the idealist and pretend you don’t care what other people think about you. But, that’s a game. You can’t let yourself believe it. You should care what other people think about you. Perception is reality. Get over it.
As disturbing a proposition as it may be, put yourself into the mind of a manager or customer (I’ll just use the word customer throughout this section to refer to both). They’re responsible for something gravely important that they ultimately have to entrust to some scary IT guys for implementation. They do what they can to help move things along, but ultimately they’re at the mercy of these programmers. Moreover, they have no idea how to control them or even to communicate intelligently about what it is that they’re doing. In this situation, what’s the most important attribute they’ll be looking for in a team member? I’ll bet you the price of this book it’s not whether they’ve memorized the latest design patterns or how many programming languages they know. They’re going to be looking for someone who can make them comfortable about the project they’re working on.
Programming honorable mentions:
Startup Playbook by Sam Altman, Gregory Koberger: The playbook given to YCombinator companies. It’s free, short, and concise. If you want to start a company, take the 45 minutes to read this.
Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash by Mary and Tom Poppendieck: Helped me better understand Lean, why it works, and how companies should set up processes.
The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries: Similar to the book above, helped me better understand Lean and applying the scientific method to making decisions.
On to 2021
Thanks for reading! It was time-consuming but rewarding to re-examine my highlighted quotes from each of these books, but I’m excited to do it again next year. What should I read in 2021?
