Every morning I read a book for about an hour. This small habit culminated in me finishing 32 nonfiction books and reading halfway through a dozen or so more that didn't hold me interest.

Today I want to share my takeaways from my top 5 reads of the year.

My criteria for reaching the top 5 list is threefold:

1. The book must be enjoyable to read and not put me to sleep.
2. The book must open my mind and grow my capacity for thought.
3. The book must have led to real changes in my life by generating new actions.

All five books on this list tick those boxes so lets get into them.

​Stolen Focus by Johann Hari

A gripping journalistic approach to the problem of declining attention rates, Stolen Focus is a barrage of depressing facts about the negative effects of digital technology.

Statistics like how "57% of Americans now do not read a single book in a typical year." Or, how "by 2017 the average American spent seventeen minutes a day reading books and 5.4 hours on their phone."

Most of these declining reading rates are due to the highly stimulating and attention capturing effects of short form videos curated by hyper-optimized social media algorithms. The intensity of this form of media creates a habituation effect where reading simply can't match up to the excitement and novelty of an infinite feed designed to maximally engage your attention systems.

Hari makes the arguement, one that I would largely agree with, that most of these problems boil down to the monetary incentives and business models of the tech industry:

"They need to distract us to make more money."

More hours spent scrolling means more eyeballs for ads to get in front, which means more dollars in the pockets of everyone, except for you–unless of course, you're in advertising.

The book is poignant in its arguements and has informed a lot of my thinking this year. It's a major reason I deleted social media off my phone, stopped checking my phone first thing in the morning, and doubled down on going analog.

Even though it doesn't touch on AI, it gave me insight into the methods AI companies started using this year to increase their user base.

Like how AI chatbots never end the conversation but instead offer follow up prompts to keep users engaged with it. This is similar to the infinite feeds of social media.

Or, how chatGPT's models were trained to be sychophantic to increase user satisfaction because these companies understood that people like being told what they want to hear. This is similar to how social media algorithms slowly silo users into echo chambers based on catering to their preferred interests.

It's all too familiar.

These are all techniques perfected by the social media giants and AI companies are just picking up the playbook. Once I started seeing the same patterns I said, "I'm out!" and stopped using AI chatbots. I might use them to find a link or a source from time to time but you won't catch me using LLMs like chatGPT for anything more than that for the time being.

Stolen Focus will equip you with enough techno-skepticism to keep your wits about you in a fast-changing world and that's going to be more important than ever in the coming years.

​Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman

The subtitle for Four Thousand Weeks is: Time Management for Mortals but don't let that fool you into thinking this is another run of mill productivity book. It's better described as a book about existential philosphopy framed through the lens of time management arguing mainly, that time is limited, we are mortal, and there will never be enough time to do everything so you better start choosing what you are going to do with your finite life.

In Burkeman's eyes, time-management is a desperate attempt of finite beings trying to live out infinite possibilities so they can avoid the reality that they are guaranteed to die and can never actually master time.

I know...it's kind of bleak. But this book was a profound revelation to me because over the course of the book he builds up the argument that most anxiety and stress about time-management is a result of the delusion that we can control everything. "But the more you confront the facts of finitude instead–and work with them, rather than against them–the more productive, meaningful, and joyful life becomes."

And the book is full of gems like this one:

"...the more firmly you believe it ought to be possible to find time for everything, the less pressure you'll feel to ask whether any given activity is the best use for a portion of your time."

And, "When you finally face the truth that you can't dictate how fast things go, you stop trying to outrun your anxiety, and your anxiety is transformed...You give up demanding instant resolution, instant relief from discomfort and pain, and magical fixes." You develop "patience."

As someone who has spent countless hours trying to manage my time between writing, playing in a band, making YouTube videos, developing skills like drawing, leathercrafting, and printmaking, reading books, walking my dog, staying physically fit, working full-time, and of course, spending time with my wife and family, this book hit hard.

Sometimes things just take the time they take and I probably won't be able to do everything I set out to achieve before I'm gone, and you know what?

That's ok.

​The Wager by David Grann

A true story about the survival of a group of British navalmen who traveled 3000 miles on a flimsy craft after being shipwrecked off the coast of Patagonia for months. In a twist of plots, six months after their return, another group of survivors from the same shipwreck make it back to England telling a conflicting tale of mutiny and abandonment.

It's a wild story with so many fascinating details about life at sea in the 18th-century that kept me so gripped to the page I couldn't put the book down. In fact, The Wager has the rare honor of being the only nonfiction book this year that I read within 24 hours of purchasing it.

It was that good.

What most interested me was the will some of these men had to survive. It was a truly hopeless situation and yet, some of the key characters seemed to grow in strength the longer the situation dragged on. The man who rises up the ranks to become the defacto leader of the group of emaciated men had a few key qualities that were notable to me:

1. He never stopped plotting and planning. From the moment the ship went under he kept trying to figure out a solution to their situation where most of the other men resigned themselves to death and in the end, those who resigned themselves did indeed perish.
2. He documented everything. He wrote in his diary every day, at great length, recording every detail of what happened. This allowed his version of story to be told when he made it back to England and this saved him from the gallow's pole.
3. He made himself useful to others. He never stopped moving. He would swim out to the shipwreck to try to salvage supplies. He would help the carpenter build a raft. He would volunteer himself to help someone build a shelter. He was constantly pitching in and doing his best to keep hope alive and that ultimately got him, and his fellow crewmates, back home.

The Wager reminded me that it's important to never lose hope and to keep imagining new ways to get where you're trying to go, to document the journey and the process because you never know when it might become handy, and to always try to be useful to others because it nourishes their soul as much as your own.

​How To Read A Book by Mortimer J. Adler

Before you roll your eyes at the title like some of my friends already have, let me remind you of a quote by the Stoic Epictetus:

"It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows."

That's the mindset I brought with me when I decided to read this classic. How to Read a Book was originally published in the 1940's and the version I read was updated in 1972. And let me tell you, it holds up to the test of time. I learned a lot from this book that will carry over for the rest of my life.

Adler's goal is to teach the reader the skills of reading with the aim of understanding so you can read difficult books without the assistance of external aids or teachers. Imagine reading Euclid's Elements of Geometry or Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics without needing to read commentary, ask chatGPT, or look up a YouTube video explaining what the hell is going on.

Adler believes any reader can learn to understand a book without assistance if they develop the right skills of reading.

He organizes the skills of reading into 4 different levels:

1. Elementary reading: understanding basic sentences and definitions.
2. Inspectional reading: quickly scanning a book to discover what it's about and how it's structured.
3. Analytical reading: a meticulous method of analysis that enables the reader to understand the author's terms, propositions, and arguments while also understanding how to fairly criticize them.
4. Syntopical reading: the ability to read analytically across multiple books with a single question or problem in mind.

How to Read a Book was such a thorough and well-crafted practical book that I highlighted and dog-earred just about every page and even wrote a full 17-page analysis using the methods he decribed in the book.

And that right there is the biggest takeaway: If a book recommends an action and you believe the action will lead to a result you desire, but you don't take that action, then you've wasted your time.

What's the point of learning if you don't put it into practice?

Thanks to this book I now have a framework and method for diving deep into the books I'm reading which informs how I annotate and extract notes for my research going forward.

If you really want to understand how to pull a book apart then this book will teach you, granted you put in the work.

​Primal Intelligence by Angus Fletcher

How is it that humans can act smart with limited or no information?

That's the central questions in Primal Intelligence: You Are Smarter Than You Know. It's an important question because human brains have this capacity whereas computer systems don't. Computers and AI systems need data, and lots of it, to do anything remotely intelligent, and the second you put an AI system in a low-information environment, it fails catastrophically.

That's because, as Fletcher argues, computers can only operate using logic while humans have the additional capacity to think in narrative, or in terms of plots, plans, and stories.

Fletcher has good grounds to base this theory on. He started his career working in neurophysiology labs studying the neuron where he first had the thought that there was more to the story of the brain than science has taught him. He then went to Yale to study Shakespeare and the methods of storytelling that informed his theory of narrative cognition. Eventually the US Special Forces contacted him to put his theories into practice after realizing AI was making their Operators less creative and more rigid in their thinking.

This book will challenge every assumption you have about how the human brain and computers work. Just about every idea in the book throws dust in the eyes of those who wish to reduce intelligence to a set of logical procedures.

He calls the brain's ability to think in narrative Primal Intelligence, which is a more marketable term for what he has previously called storythinking, that can be broken down into 4 components:

1. Intuition: the ability to spot an exception to the rule.
2. Imagination: to ability to imagine new plots, plans, and stories of the future.
3. Emotion: the ability to pick the best plan for your personal story.
4. Commonsense: the ability to know when you don't know.

If you're scratching your head at these definitions then I highly recommend giving this book a read because it really does expand how you think about human creativity and the limitations of AI systems.

As dense as it may sound, Fletcher's writing is to the point, entertaining, and full of stories to expand on his claims.

Since reading the book I've completely changed how I observe the world around me.

I'm now actively seeking out what makes individuals unique rather than categorize them into archtypes and sterotypes which we all know just leads to assumptions and judgments. I'm prioritizing developing my skills as a planner rather than trying to come up with perfect plans. I'm doing my best to admit when I don't know something rather than bullshit my way through an answer as AI systems like chatGPT love to do.

My synopsis of this book and Fletcher's ideas do not do it justice so if you're curious about learning more, I highly recommend this podcast video with Michael Shermer to get an introduction into the ideas he is talking about.

I'm still processing my analysis of the book myself but no other books this year has challenged more of my assumptions and it does so in an easy to read, entertaining style.

Most importantly, this book restored my sense of hope in humanity and has put to rest most of my fears about AI takeovers.

Prompt:

What are your biggest takeways from the media you consumed this year?

And if you feel inclined, respond to this email with your favorite books of the year. I'm always looking for a good read.