📚My Favorite Books of 2022📚

Dec 20, 2022

Welcome to issue #6 of Indiscrete Musings

I write about the world of Cloud Computing and Venture Capital and will most likely fall off the path from time to time. You can expect a bi-weekly to monthly update on specific sectors with Cloud Computing or uncuffed thoughts on the somewhat opaque world that is Venture Capital. I’ll be mostly wrong and sometimes right. Views my own.

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If you know me, then you know I love to read. Reading often spurs the ability to ask better questions and flourish creativity, empathy, curiosity, and overall cognitive engagement. This post will veer off the traditional VC and Cloud/Infra postings and dive into my favorite books of 2022. For each book below, I’ll be including the most profound quote that stood out to me personally. Oh, and if you have any recommendations, please shoot me a note! Enjoy!

Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by Bradford DeLong (Amazon)
The history of the long twentieth century cannot be told as a triumphal gallop, or a march, or even a walk of progress along the road that brings us closer to utopia. It is, rather, a slouch. At best.
Why Nations Fail: The Orgins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson (Amazon)
The success and failure of specific groups notwithstanding, one lesson is clear: powerful groups often stand against economic progress and against the engines of prosperity.
Different patterns of institutions today are deeply rooted in the past because once society gets organized in a particular way, this tends to persist. We’ll show that this fact comes from the way that political and economic institutions interact.
Chip War: The Fight For the World’s Most Critical Technology by Chris Miller (Amazon)
Without Intel, there won’t be a single U.S. company—or a single facility outside of Taiwan or South Korea—capable of manufacturing cutting-edge processors.
The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing by Michael J. Mauboussin (Amazon)
When we make predictions, we often fail to recognize the existence of luck, and as a consequence we dwell too much on the specific evidence, especially recent evidence. This also makes it tougher to judge performance. Once something has happened, our natural inclination is to come up with a cause to explain the effect.
The Last White Man: A Novel by Mohsin Hamid (Amazon)
She said her father had gone without warning, it had been preposterous, no other word for it, here he was, and then he was gone, and it had made her think there was a trapdoor under each of us, a trapdoor that could open at any second, like we were walking on a bridge of ropes and planks, swaying high above a canyon, and some of the planks were rotten, and you could take a normal step but find that you had stepped into nothingness.
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard Feynman (Amazon)
It was a brilliant idea: You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It’s their mistake, not my failing.
The School for Good Mothers: A Novel by Jessamine Chan (Amazon)
A mother is a shark,” Ms. Russo says. “You’re always moving. Always learning. Always trying to better yourself.”
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson (Amazon)
Steve Jobs: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
Crying in H Mart: A Memoir by Michelle Zauner (Amazon)
Now that she was gone, I began to study her like a stranger, rooting around her belongings in an attempt to rediscover her, trying to bring her back to life in any way that I could. In my grief I was desperate to construe the slightest thing as a sign.
The Overstory: A Novel by Richard Powers (Amazon)
Life is a battle between the Maker and His creation.
The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest by Edward Chancellor (Amazon)
The most encompassing view of interest is contained in the notion of interest as the ‘time value of money’ or, simply, as the price of time.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (Amazon)
But status, as in any traditional, class-conscious society, declines more slowly than wealth.
More Money Than God by Sebastian Mallaby (Amazon)
Capitalism works only when institutions are forced to absorb the consequences of the risks that they take on.
A Beautiful Ending: The Apoclyptic Imagination of and the Making of the Modern World by John Jefferies Martin (Amazon)
Fear was a powerful emotion, but hope was equally powerful, if not more so, for it was hope that moved and energized men and women to work hard to fulfill the remaining prophecies that would enable them to realize the Beautiful Ending promised in their scriptures.
The Art of War by Sun Tzu (Amazon)
When your strategy is deep and far-reaching, then what you gain by your calculations is much, so you can win before you even fight. When your strategic thinking is shallow and nearsighted, then what you gain by your calculations is little, so you lose before you do battle. Much strategy prevails over little strategy, so those with no strategy cannot but be defeated. Therefore it is said that victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.
1984 by George Orwell (Amazon)
Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.
Parent Nation: Unlocking Every Child’s Potential Fulfilling Society’s Promise by Dana Suskind (Amazon)
Parents are the architects of their children’s brains and thus also the architects of society’s future.
Taste: My Life Through Food by Stanley Tucci (Amazon)
It is this interaction between customer and purveyor that then makes our connection to whatever it is we are buying stronger. To me, eating well is not just about what tastes good but about the connections that are made through the food itself.
The Lincoln Highway: A Novel by Amor Towles (Amazon)
Time is that which God uses to separate the idle from the industrious. For time is a mountain and upon seeing its steep incline, the idle will lie down among the lilies of the field and hope that someone passes by with a pitcher of lemonade. What the worthy endeavor requires is planning, effort, attentiveness, and the willingness to clean up.
Stolen Focus: Why you Can’t Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again by Johann Hari (Amazon)
If we want to do what matters in any domain—any context in life—we have to be able to give attention to the right things…. If we can’t do that, it’s really hard to do anything.
Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life by Luke Burgis (Amazon)
Desire, as Girard used the word, does not mean the drive for food or sex or shelter or security. Those things are better called needs—they’re hardwired into our bodies. Biological needs don’t rely on imitation. If I’m dying of thirst in the desert, I don’t need anyone to show me that water is desirable. But after meeting our basic needs as creatures, we enter into the human universe of desire. And knowing what to want is much harder than knowing what to need.
Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich by Norman Hler and Shaun Whiteside (Amazon)
Blitzkrieg was guided by methamphetamine. If not to say that Blitzkrieg was founded on methamphetamine.
The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt (Amazon)
A culture that allows the concept of “safety” to creep so far that it equates emotional discomfort with physical danger is a culture that encourages people to systematically protect one another from the very experiences embedded in daily life that they need in order to become strong and healthy.
The Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene (Amazon)
Learn to question yourself: Why this anger or resentment? Where does this incessant need for attention come from? Under such scrutiny, your emotions will lose their hold on you. You will begin to think for yourself instead of reacting to what others give you
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck and Robert DeMott (Amazon)
Women and children knew deep in themselves that no misfortune was too great to bear if their men were whole.
The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan by Sebastian Mallaby (Amazon)
Greed and fear and human ego trumped the dull particulars of inventories. Markets were not completely rational. They were simply too human.
Go Back to Where you Came From by Wajahat Ali (Amazon)
Every generation’s pain, trauma, dreams, hopes, and successes affect and shape the next generation. We are all connected, even when we feel so distant and untethered to each other’s truths and realities.
Essentialism: The Displined Pursuit of Less by Greg Mckeown (Amazon)
The way of the Essentialist means living by design, not by default. Instead of making choices reactively, the Essentialist deliberately distinguishes the vital few from the trivial many, eliminates the nonessentials, and then removes obstacles so the essential things have clear, smooth passage. In other words, Essentialism is a disciplined, systematic approach for determining where our highest point of contribution lies, then making execution of those things almost effortless.
Rebels Against the Raj: Western Fighers for India’s Freedom by Ramachandra Guha (Amazon)
India has more to teach than she has to learn.
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein (Amazon)
This is a widespread phenomenon. If you’re asked to predict whether a particular horse will win a race or a particular politician will win an election, the more internal details you learn about any particular scenario—physical qualities of the specific horse, the background and strategy of the particular politician—the more likely you are to say that the scenario you are investigating will occur.
The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby (Amazon)
When in doubt, take the shot,” Doug Leone summarized, reflecting on this period. “Look, I think about our business versus Amazon,” he continued. “If you are Amazon, you have customers, warehouses, infrastructure, a whole bunch of things. If you are Sequoia, you have a few investors; you have nothing. “So you better take the shot. The only way to stay alive in my opinion is to risk the franchise continuously.
The Premonition by Michael Lewis (Amazon)
The simplest explanation is usually the best.
These Precious Days: Essays by Ann Patchett (Amazon)
Books were not just my education and my entertainment, they were my partners. They told me what I was capable of. They let me stare a long way down the path of various possibilities so that I could make decisions.
The Catcher In The Rye by J.D. Salinger (Amazon)
You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement.
Atomic Habits by James Clear (Amazon)
Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits. Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits. Your clutter is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. You get what you repeat.
What Happened to You by Oprah Winfrey and Bruce D. Perry (Amazon)
Most people who are in the process of excavating the reasons they do what they do are met at some point with resistance. “You’re blaming the past.” “Your past is not an excuse.” This is true. Your past is not an excuse. But it is an explanation—offering insight into the questions so many of us ask ourselves: Why do I behave the way I behave? Why do I feel the way I do? For me, there is no doubt that our strengths, vulnerabilities, and unique responses are an expression of what happened to us. Very often, “what happened” takes years to reveal itself. It takes courage to confront our actions, peel back the layers of trauma in our lives, and expose the raw truth of our past. But this is where healing begins.
The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness by Eric Jorgenson (Amazon)
The three big ones in life are wealth, health, and happiness. We pursue them in that order, but their importance is reverse.
The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life by Alison Gopnick (Amazon)
Our brains are designed to arrive at an accurate picture of the world, and to use that accurate picture to act on the world effectively, at least overall and in the long run. The same computational and neurological capacities that let us make discoveries about physics or biology also let us make discoveries about love.
High Growth Handbook by Elad Gil (Amazon)
There are a lot of things that are urgent but not important. The hard part of being a good CEO is that you have to be willing to let some things fall apart. You don’t have enough time to do everything well. And in practice, what that means is that there are some urgent things that you just don’t do. Getting comfortable with that takes a long time. It’s hard."
Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City by Andrew Elliot (Amazon)
Whether Chanel is a “victim” or a “queen” depends on the observer. To conservatives, welfare harms the work ethic, making people dependent on the government. To progressives, welfare marginalizes the poor while failing to meet their needs. Lost in the vernacular of “welfare” is the word itself. It was enshrined in the 1787 preamble to the Constitution, commanding “the People of the United States” to “promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” It is no accident that the Constitution connects welfare to posterity, which means all future generations. For posterity relies on the existence of children, and it was children who gave rise to America’s modern welfare program.
Guided by the English poor laws of the 1600s, America’s colonists divided the downtrodden into two classes: the “worthy” and the “unworthy.” The worthy included widows, the blind, the elderly—none of whom could be blamed for their plight and thus deserved public aid. The unworthy poor, on the other hand, were seen to have chosen their condition—among them, beggars, drunks, and other undesirables who were banished to the poorhouse. Children in America migrated between these classes. Some landed in the draconian confines of the poorhouse, trading their labor for shelter and food. Others were placed with strangers, indentured as servants or apprenticed to tradesmen. Their fates, however grim, hardly compared with the horrors inflicted upon enslaved Black children. By the nineteenth century, a new system emerged to rescue the children of whites, and eventually of Blacks, placing them in orphanages, reformatories, and other institutions.
Amazon Unbound by Brad Stone (Amazon)
Every interesting thing I’ve ever done, every important thing I’ve ever done, every beneficial thing I’ve ever done, has been through a cascade of experiments and mistakes and failures,” Bezos continued.
He was a ravenous reader, leading senior executives in discussion of books like Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma, and he had an utter aversion to doing anything conventionally. Employees were instructed to model his fourteen leadership principles, such as customer obsession, high bar for talent, and frugality, and they were trained to consider them daily when making decisions about things like new hires, promotions, and even trivial changes to products.
The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap by Matt Taibbi (Amazon)
Our prison population, in fact, is now the biggest in the history of human civilization. There are more people in the United States either on parole or in jail today (around 6 million total) than there ever were at any time in Stalin’s gulags. For what it’s worth, there are also more black men in jail right now than there were in slavery at its peak.