Introduction

“Read more than you write, live more than you read.” – Junot Diaz

Reading more than I write comes easily. The living more than I read part is more interesting. Books I come across impact the way I see my day-to-day, while living leads to more book rabbit holes to fall into. 

Not all books are meant to make an impact, though. Some are like the background soundtrack to particular periods of living. Other books leave their mark. Some that leave their mark aren’t even the ones I’ve enjoyed the most or think are of the highest quality, either.

So, to celebrate turning 30, I’ve been slowly reflecting on 30 books that have the greatest impact on my first 30 years of life (minus childhood books). 

This is my list in no particular order, including my notes of ideas and quotes. 

1. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt

Impactful Ideas: 

• People’s beliefs are driven primarily by intuition, with reason operating mostly to justify beliefs which are intuitively obvious.
• “Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate self-interest and make cooperative societies possible.” – Haidt
• There’s a lot more to morality than harm and fairness (utilitarianism and deontology).
• There are 6 main “flavours” or moral foundations that underlie human responses to scenarios. They are care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity and liberty. Haidt believes liberals place value on the first two, while conservatives are more equally balanced across the six (which is why they can appeal to a broader audience). The human brain is organized to respond to several types of moral violations. 
• WEIRD (western, educated, individualistic, rich and democratic) people have an unusually narrow bandwidth of morality. Morality is wider and encompasses more of life in group focused societies. 
• Morality can both bind and blind us. Humans sometimes have an innate capacity to be “groupish” rather than “selfish”. Most of the time, we act with our own interests at heart, but we all have a hive switch. In certain situations, we will act for the good of the “team” we identify with.

What This Taught Me in One Sentence: Happiness doesn’t come from within, it comes from in-between, in-between relationships with others, work, yourself and something larger than yourself.

2.The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker

Impactful Ideas: 

• The most fundamental problem of mankind is our fear of death. Being the only animal conscious of our mortality, a life’s project is to deny or repress this fear, which drives an attempt to transcend death through culturally standardized hero systems and symbols. Every grandiosity, good or evil, is intended to transcend death and become immortal.
• Humans have a paradoxical dual nature (divine vs. animal), and the tension causes us to experience “psychological terror”. The presence of that terror makes us “partialize” the world by embedding ourselves within relatively safe pockets—we set up a game-within-the-game to play. This lets us pursue our “heroic” projects without having to face the scary limitations and risks that come with our animal nature. The pockets we hide ourselves in include the behaviours and thoughts we adhere to, so all psychological neuroses as well as “normal” human character are contextualized as various responses to a deep fear of that animal nature. This context gives us a new schema for understanding neurosis, mental health, personality, etc. – Review from lesswrong
• We naturally create the environments we need to flourish in.
• Being a “slave” is as painful as being a “God” in a relationship (this reminds me of the quote that wardens are in jail almost as much as the prisoners).
• Depression grows from a basic fear of life. 
• You can’t live with the truth all the time, you need illusions (art, God, philosophy, science, inner delusions, a secure sense of your power, counting on others, etc).
• Therapists are our new “Gods” of today.
• The more you separate and “inflate”, the more anxious you become. The more you artificially idealize, the harsher the inner critic.
• The thought process is either “I am everything” or “I am nothing secure”, so to be something you must be something secure. 
• “Neurotics” see themselves as small and weak, because that’s the truth about humanity. They take the whole world and fuse it into a single object of fear, like creative transference, it’s narrow-minded. Or they take in way too much at once, so they can’t compartmentalize and make themselves like “the whole of reality”. This is also a coping mechanism and excuse not to engage with the world. 
• “Self-willed over-evaluation of self” is not living at least partly on the terms of experience itself. 
• So, instead of action, the neurotic works it all out in his mind.
• Artists, however, spit their introversion back up at the world, while neurotics trip on it.
• “Character is the restrictive shaping of possibility”
• “A creative myth is not simply a relapse into a comfortable illusion, it must be as bold as possible to be truly generative.”
• Taking life seriously = whatever you do has to be done in the living truth of the terror of creation.

What This Taught Me in One Sentence: All I can do is make an offering to the life force, to fashion something of my own to drop into the confusion. 

3. The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less by Barry Schwartz

Impactful Ideas: 

• “Autonomy and freedom of choice are critical to our well-being, and choice is critical to freedom and autonomy. Nevertheless, though modern Americans have more choice than any group of people ever has had before, and thus, presumably, more freedom and autonomy, we don’t seem to be benefiting from it psychologically”.
• Choose when to choose, costs are subtle and cumulative, focus on subjective costs. 
• Be a “chooser”, not a “picker”. Choosers reflect on what makes a decision important, whether none of the options should even be chosen, or a new option created. Pickers are passive selectors from what is available.
• “Satisfice” more and “maximize” less, decide to choose based on being satisfied enough by the decision, not on maximal research/time/effort in picking. Maximizing leads to liking things not because of what they actually are, but because of our control in creating it.
• “Maximizing” options and deciding after lots of deliberation will always make me less happy than a good enough, “satisfier” decision.
• Learn what your own “good enough” is, and look for where you can apply it, and where you do not want to apply it. Set your own standards.
• Make your decisions nonreversible, you can pour your energy into improving it instead, rather than second-guessing it.
• Unattainable expectations + a tendency to take personal responsibility = unhappiness.

What This Taught Me in One Sentence: Learn to “satisfice” instead of “maximize,” establish personal standards of good enough, commit to making my decisions “right” rather than second-guessing them. 

4. Factfulness: 10 Reasons We’re Wrong About the World by Hans Rosling

Impactful Ideas: 

• We have a big appetite for drama, which skews our reality of the world. 
• We all share this planet: A “us against them”, “global north vs south” belief system is outdated and wrong. 75% live in middle income areas, there is little gap.
• Only 9% of the world lives in low-income countries, 800 million in extreme poverty
• Population growth is likely to level off: we are at 8 billion population, but Rosling argues we’re only going to get to about 10-12 billion before it levels off.
• The argument that helping poor people will only further overpopulate the world is wrong, because educated people want less, more educated kids. And they won’t need them for labor.
• The “pin code” (shorthand for remembering) to the world’s population is 1-1-1-4 right now, 1 bil in Americas, 1 Europe, 1 Africa, 4 in Asia. 7 bil total.
• By 2100, it’s expected to be 1-1-4-5. That’s more than 80% in Europe and Asia. 
• By 2040, the West will not dominate the world economy. 60% of level 4 people will be in Asia. 
• Carbon emissions always need to be calculated by person, not by country like it is in order to blame others. 
• The number of people on level 3 of living conditions will double from 2 to 4 billion by 2040 so almost everyone in the world is becoming a consumer. 
• if you want to change the world, you have to understand the systems and work on them.
• “Congratulate the systems, not the heroes.”
• Fear collapses the imagination, never use it as a call to action. 

What This Taught Me in One Sentence: Don’t believe all the drama, and definitely don’t rely on the news for an accurate depiction of the world. 

5. A Confession by Leo Tolstoy

This short, 79-page essay of Tolstoy spiralling into a mid-life existential crisis, then building his own philosophical way out, is gold.

Impactful Ideas: 

• “The meaning of life and the possibility of living may be found in faith alone.”
• “Wherever there is life, there is faith; since the origin of mankind, faith has made it possible for us to live, and the main characteristics of faith are everywhere and always the same.”
• “No matter what answers a given faith might provide for us, every answer of faith gives infinite meaning to the finite existence of man, meaning that is not destroyed by suffering, deprivation, and death. Therefore, the meaning of life and the possibility of living may be found in faith alone. I realized that the essential significance of faith lies not only in the “manifestation of things unseen” and so on, or in revelation (this is simply a description of one of the signs of faith); nor is it simply the relation between man and God (faith must first be determined and then God, not the other way around), or agreeing with what one has been told, even though this is what it is most often understood to be. Faith is the knowledge of the meaning of human life, whereby the individual does not destroy himself but lives. Faith is the force of life. If a man lives, then he must have faith in something. If he did not believe that he had something he must live for, then he would not live. If he fails to see and understand the illusory nature of the finite, then he believes in the finite; if he understands the illusory nature of the finite, then he must believe in the infinite. Without faith it is impossible to live.”
• “I looked back on the course of my internal life and I was horrified. It was now clear to me that in order for a man to live, he must either fail to see the infinite or he must have an explanation of the meaning of life by which the finite and the infinite would be equated. I had such an explanation, but I did not need it as long as I believed in the finite, and I began to use reason to test it out.”
• “The whole life of the believers from our class was in opposition to their faith, while the whole life of the believers from the working people was a confirmation of that meaning of life which was the substance of their faith. So I began to examine the life and the teachings of these people, and the closer I looked, the more I was convinced that theirs was the true faith, that their faith was indispensable to them, and that this faith alone provided them with the meaning and possibility of life.”
• “Contrary to what I saw among the people of our class, where life was possible without faith and scarcely one in a thousand was a believer, among these people there was scarcely one in a thousand who was not a believer.”
• “The life of our class, of the wealthy and the learned, was not only repulsive to me but had lost all meaning. The sum of our action and thinking, of our science and art, all struck me as the overindulgences of a spoiled child. I realized that meaning was not to be sought here. The actions of the labouring people, of those who create life, began to appear to me as the one true way. I realized that the meaning provided by this life was truth, and I embraced it.”

What This Taught Me in One Sentence: Build on a foundation of faith and nothing else. 

6. Fighting for Space: How a Group of Drug Users Transformed One City’s Struggle w/ Addiction by Travis Lupik 

Note: This book didn’t call for note-taking. It reads like an adventure novel telling the story of the beginnings of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and the community’s work to reduce the harm people who use drugs experience due to drug prohibition. 

Impactful Ideas: 

• People who use drugs helping one another is the foundation of Vancouver’s harm reduction movement and is at the core of its success (in tandem with other types of social support). 

What This Taught Me in One Sentence: Help groups of people lift themselves up from the inside, out.

7. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E Frankl

Impactful Ideas: 

• “Don’t aim at success-the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensure, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run-in the long run, I say! – Success will follow you precisely because you have forgotten to think of it.”
• Suffering is like gas, it fills the space it’s released into. Suffering fills the soul and conscious mind, no matter if it’s great or little. The size is irrelevant. 
• “He who has a why to live for can bear any how” – Nietzsche
• “It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We need to stop questioning life, for it’s actually questioning us, and our answer consists of right action and conduct.”
• Life = taking responsibility to find the right answer to problems and to fulfill tasks in front of you. Our active decisions form our lives

What This Taught Me in One Sentence: It’s not what we take in or are subjected to that negatively impacts us, it’s what we allow to come out of us. 

8. Change Your World: The Science of Resilience and the True Path to Success by Michael Unger

Impactful Ideas: 

• Success depends on our ability to change the world around us, more than our ability to change ourselves. 
• “Resourced” individuals do far better than “rugged” ones. 
• Before we can create a strategy to cope, we need:
  • To understand the kind of stress it is
  • To identify the meaning we attribute to our experience of the stress
  • Resources to avoid being overwhelmed. This differentiates a crisis from an opportunity for change. 

• Emotions are as much a collective experience as individual. People tell you how you should feel about something, all trauma is just potentially traumatic. 
• Mindfulness and trauma informed CBT are actually not proven to be more effective than changing your environment and having more resources. 
• Being in control is important for resilience, including control over how others tell us to feel. 
• Relationships are the source of our identities, we want to perform our identities for others. So, build an identity, then find social networks to affirm that reality. 
• We choose from the identities available to us. 
• Good stress is the pressure that comes with realizing a goal we want to achieve. Bad stress is excessive expectations placed on us by a failing environment. 
• Intention career design doesn’t really exist, it’s all from your chance encounters, experiences, acquaintances. 
• Fulfilling careers = meaningful work + people you like.

What This Taught Me in One Sentence: Your inner world is less powerful than your outer, change life courses when you need to. 

9. Fear & Trembling by Kierkegaard

Impactful Ideas: 

• “Faith is precisely the paradox that the single individual as the single individual is higher than the universal.”
• “Infinite resignation is the last stage before faith, so anyone who has not made this movement does not have faith, for only in infinite resignation does an individual become conscious of his eternal validity, and only then can one speak of grasping existence by virtue of faith.”
• The value of faith lies not in reflecting upon it disinterestedly, but in throwing oneself passionately into it. Faith must be experienced, not just intellectualized.
• “Therefore one should not, as sometimes happens after one has been personally enamored of it pro virili [with all one’s might], disdain that category because it grew away from one, but neither should a person be all too greedy for it, for one thing is sure, to become interesting, to have an interesting life, is not a handicraft task but a momentous privilege, which, like every privilege in the world of spirit, is purchased only in severe pain.”
• Nullum unquam exstitit magnum ingenium sine aliqua dementia [No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness]

What This Taught Me in One Quote: “The individual determines his relation to the universal through his relation with the absolute, rather than determining his relation to the absolute through his relation with the universal.”

10. People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil by Scott Peck

Impactful Ideas: 

• “Evil” often manifests as an extreme form of narcissism, where people are pathologically self-centered and lack empathy. These people consistently place their own desires above others’ needs, even when doing so causes harm.
• Psychologically, certain people show consistent patterns of destructive behavior, which stem from an inability to tolerate self-criticism or acknowledge personal flaws.
• “People of the lie” are characterized by their profound self-deception. They create elaborate defenses to avoid confronting their own shortcomings, often projecting blame onto others while maintaining an image of themselves as good and righteous.
• Narcissistic parents can inflict profound psychological damage on their children by using them as extensions of themselves, rather than recognizing them as individuals with separate needs and identities.
• Evil can manifest collectively in groups and institutions, where responsibility becomes diffused and moral accountability diminished, allowing for harmful actions that individuals might not commit on their own.

What This Taught Me in One Sentence: Don’t forget that evil exists, how mundane it can appear in the world, and to protect yourself against its influence.

11. The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry

My favorite Wendell Berry essay is “Why I’m Not Going to Buy a Computer” from 1987. 

“To make myself as plain as I can, I should give my standards for technological innovation in my own work. They are as follows:
1. The new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces.
2. It should be at least as small in scale as the one it replaces.
3. It should do work that is clearly and demonstrably better than the one it replaces.
4. It should use less energy than the one it replaces.
5. If possible, it should use some form of solar energy, such as that of the body.
6. It should be repairable by a person of ordinary intelligence, provided that he or she has the necessary tools.
7. It should be purchasable and repairable as near to home as possible.
8. It should come from a small, privately owned shop or store that will take it back for maintenance and repair.
9. It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships.” 

What This Taught Me in One Sentence: Think critically about technology, and also remember the importance of top soil. 

12. Exposure: Poisoned Water, Corporate Greed, & One Lawyer’s 20-Year Battle against DuPont by Robert Bilott 

Impactful Ideas: 

• Despite environmental regulations, DuPont concealed evidence about PFOA toxicity for decades.
• Corporations have ultimate control over research, data, and create scientific uncertainty to avoid any regulation and liability.
• Regulatory capture – The close relationship between industry and the agencies meant to regulate them created blind spots that allowed PFAS to contaminate the world. 
• PFAS contamination would have never been revealed if it hadn’t been for one stubborn, relentless cattle farmer and his lawyer. 
• On PFAS contamination, see also: The Devil We Know (2018 documentary) & Dark Waters (2019 feature film) 

What This Taught Me in One Sentence: No one is coming to save us, we have to dig our own way out and never underestimate the impact of two people’s persistence over a lifetime. 

13. Brain Energy: A Revolutionary Breakthrough in Understanding Mental Health by Christopher Palmer

Impactful Ideas: 

• Mental illness as a metabolic disorder. Many psychiatric conditions stem from problems with how the brain produces and uses energy at the cellular level.
• The mitochondrial dysfunction connection – Impaired mitochondria contribute to depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, and other mental health conditions previously considered to be solely chemical imbalances.
• Ketogenic diets might help treat certain psychiatric conditions by improving brain energy production.
• The connection between chronic inflammation to metabolic dysfunction in the brain, creating a bridge between physical and mental health conditions.
• The metabolic theory explains why sleep, exercise, stress management, and diet significantly impact mental health—they all influence cellular energy production and brain metabolism.
• Understanding each individual’s unique metabolic profile could allow for more targeted and effective treatments, rather than the current trial-and-error approach to psychiatric medication.

What This Taught Me in One Sentence: Mental illness is a metabolic disorder rooted in mitochondrial dysfunction. 

14. Widsom of Insecurity by Alan Watts

Impactful Ideas: 

• Belief clings, faith let’s go – you can’t understand life and its mysteries as long as you try to grasp it. 
• The more we experience, the more we pay for the knowledge. 
• The more we feel pleasure, the more pain we feel. To be fully human and alive, you must be willing to suffer for your pleasures. 
• We are in the great stream of change, everything is, by trying to fix change, we are chasing our own tail and causing it. 
• The way to make sense of change is to plunge into it, join the dance. 
• We forget that words and language don’t equal what they describe, so all attempts to describe the unknowable universe are circular and leave the most essential things unexplained and undefined, like the dictionary – using words to describe other words.
• Words don’t give life, they symbolize it. They are conventions. So either get isolated in the world of words or feel uncertain and insecure just living in the real world. 
• Man uses science to describe the universe for a specific reason for an ulterior motive from the future, and by doing so loses the actual joy and meaning of life itself.
• The moment you name something, it is no longer God. Just like the moment.
• Our society isn’t actually materialistic, because money doesn’t equal wealth. We just like shallow metaphors. We like measures, like money, not actual matter. 
• The brain is meant to effortlessly work like passive digestion, the unconscious is the ultimate wisdom, and it doesn’t operate under strain. 
• To cling to security takes you out of the dance of life and leads you to feel more insecure in your separation. 
• Pain thrives on the tension caused by trying to avoid it. 

What This Taught Me in One Sentence: The way to make sense of change is to plunge into it, join the dance. 

15. How To Think by Alan Jacobs

Impactful Ideas: 

• There is no such thing as independent thought, all thought is formed in relation to other things.
• We default to feelings-based rationalizations when we run out of information.
• Learning to feel as we should is vital in learning how to think as we should. 
• Learning to think with the best and not the worst is important (and more based on dispositions rather than beliefs). 
• Value learning over debating. Don’t “talk for victory.”
• As best you can, online and off, avoid the people who fan flames.
• Beware of metaphors and myths that do too much heavy cognitive lifting; notice what your “terministic screens” are directing your attention to-and what they’re directing your attention away from; look closely for hidden metaphors and beware the power of myth.
• Try to describe others’ positions in the language that they use, without indulging in “in-other-wordsing”. 

What This Taught Me in One Sentence: Learning to feel as we should is vital in learning how to think as we should. 

16. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell 

Impactful Ideas: 

• Our attention has become highly commodified, with tech platforms designed to capture and monetize it while fragmenting our focus.
• “Doing nothing” is actually doing something. True resistance isn’t passive withdrawal but an active redirection of attention to what truly matters—local communities, environments, and deeper relationships.
• Bioregionalism as an alternative focus. Reconnecting with our local ecology and understanding the specific natural environment where we live can ground us in something more meaningful than the digital stream.
• Social media shapes identity formation. Platforms encourage preformative identities and simplistic thinking by designing for immediate reactions rather than reflection or nuance.
• Value maintaining, caring, and repairing over the relentless demand for novelty, productivity, and growth. 
• Slowing down allows us to experience different tempos—like seasonal changes or longer-term community projects—that can’t be appreciated at the speed of scrolling.
• Activities without specific goals or outputs have inherent worth that can’t be measured in productivity metrics but are essential for creativity and well-being.

What This Taught Me in One Sentence: “Doing nothing” is actually doing lots.

17. The First and Last Freedom by J. Krishnamurti

Impactful Ideas: 

• Liberation comes not through following systems or authorities, but through direct, unfiltered awareness of our thoughts, feelings, and conditioning.
• True freedom isn’t something to be achieved in the future through methods or practices, but exists in the present moment when we see clearly without distortion.
• Our interactions with others reveal our conditioning, reactions, and attachments, making relationships the most direct path to self-knowledge.
• Inner conflict arises from contradiction between “what is” and “what should be”—the actual and the ideal—and resolves when we fully face reality without seeking escape.
• There’s a difference between concentrated effort (which creates tension) and effortless attention that comes from genuine interest and contains transformative power.

What This Taught Me in One Sentence: Any system, technique, or practice eventually becomes mechanical and creates dependency rather than freedom.

18. Symbols, Sex and the Stars by Ernest Busenbark

Impactful Ideas: 

• Many religious symbols come from early observations of celestial bodies and their movements, rather than divine revelation.
• Religions didn’t develop in isolation, but constantly borrowed and adapted symbols and concepts from previous ones and contemporaries.
• Many aspects of modern monotheistic religions contain pieces of ancient solar worship, with deity attributes from solar qualities and movements.
• Common religious symbols like crosses, stars, and circles often carried meanings related to astronomy, fertility, or natural cycles obscured over time.
• Despite seeming differences between religions, there is surprising continuity in symbolism and concepts across traditions, which points to common human patterns of meaning-making.

What This Taught Me in One Sentence: Solar worship underpins all of monotheism. 

19. Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman

Impactful Ideas: 

• Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of “the feelies, the orgy porgy, the centrifugal bumblepuppy”. 
• We’re surrounded by water, without a drop to drink (information overload)
• Photography = writing with light. 
• Everything has become show business, even politics. 
• People believe we’re in an Orwellian world, but it’s actually Huxleian. We’ve grown to love our overlords of media. 
• Written word will forever be the crux of our intellectual world. 

What This Taught Me in One Sentence: We surrender our capacity for critical thought not through oppression, but through pleasure and distraction.

20. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Impactful Ideas: 

• Happiness cannot be pursued, it ensues. The unintended side effect of one’s person dedication to a course greater than oneself. 
• We gain independence from societal anxieties by creating our own rewards for ourselves. 
• Flow creates complexity in an individual. It differentiates & integrates us, but the key is not to get so differentiated that you’re self centred or so integrated that you’re conformist. 
• The difference between pleasure and flow inducing enjoyment is a challenge that requires skill. 
• Flow needs: skill, merging of action and awareness, clear goals and feedback, concentration, paradox of control, loss of self consciousness, transformation of time. 
• Mass leisure, mass culture, and even high culture, when only attended passively and for extrinsic reasons, such as, to flaunt ones status, are parasites of the mind. Their purpose is to make money for someone else. 
• “Human” from Latin meant to be among men, “dead” meant no longer among men. “Idiot” meant, private person, unable to learn from others. 
• The four steps of development are
  • preserving yourself,
  • once safe, embracing a community & conforming
  • turning outward and reflective individualism, then inward again but not reflective, focuses on growth & actualization of potential
  • integrating back into others & universal values. willingly merging interests of those of a larger whole. 
    Autotelic self:
    • setting goals
    • immersion in activity,
    • paying attention to what’s happening
    • learning to enjoy immediate experience

• A main point of early childhood trauma is to identify the challenge & interpreting difficulty to just be a challenge, which is the key to overcoming it. Significant childhood pain can lead to a well-adjusted adult’s lifelong theme of service to correct the injustice.
• The more complex a system or human, the more likely it can break. 
• We have differentiated enough, now it’s time to integrate. 
• Quadrants of flow – Goal: High challenge, high skill, Low challenge, high skill = boredom, Low skill, high challenge = anxiety
• How does someone stay relaxed under extreme pressure? “There is nothing to it. We don’t get upset because we believe that our life is in God’s hands, and whatever He decides will be fine with us.”

What This Taught Me in One Sentence: Flow creates complexity in an individual, it both differentiates and integrates us. 

21. Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg

Impactful Ideas: 

• Short sentences create clarity and power.
• Every sentence deserves attention. Good writing happens at the sentence level—each one should be deliberately crafted and able to stand on its own.
• Rather than focusing on outlines and transitions, let meaning emerge from the accumulation of carefully constructed sentences.
• Many writing problems stem from unexamined beliefs about what writing should look like. 
• True revision requires considering alternatives for each sentence and asking whether it says exactly what you mean.
• The act of writing well is a form of thinking clearly.

What This Taught Me in One Sentence: Strong writing starts with paying attention to details in our environment and thoughts that matter to us.

22. Deep Work by Cal Newport 

Impactful Ideas: 

• In an economy disrupted by technology, the ability to focus intensely on cognitively demanding tasks provides value, while becoming increasingly uncommon.
• Email, meetings, social media, and constant connectivity create a culture of busyness that prevents meaningful, concentrated work.
• Task-switching and divided attention severely impair cognitive performance, with recovery time extending far beyond the interruption itself.
• Like any valuable skill, the ability to concentrate intensely must be trained through regular, structured practice.
• Constant stimulation weakens concentration muscles; deliberately experiencing boredom strengthens your capacity for deep work.
• Track time spent in deep work, not just tasks completed, to ensure you’re prioritizing what matters most.
• Administrative tasks and communications should be batched to prevent them from consuming your workday.

What This Taught Me in One Sentence: Deep work is not for productivity, it creates the conditions for work that matters and brings genuine satisfaction. 

23. When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress by Gabor Maté

Impactful Ideas: 

• The mind and body are inseparable, and illness and health cannot be understood in isolation from the life histories, social context, and emotional patterns of human beings.
• The mind-body connection behind how mental state and stress over a lifetime can manifest into physical disease.
• More specifically, personality traits developed in early childhood are risk factors behind some autoimmune diseases and immune system dysregulation.
• The core personality trait that kept emerging in patient interviews was the repression of negative emotions, such as anger and resentment.
• “People-pleasing” personality, more specifically (niceness observed in patients with ALS, repression of anger in breast cancer patients).
• The immune system is about self and non-self. Discussing autoimmune disease as the body’s way of forgetting what is “self,” or being unable to distinguish between “self” and “non-self,” through boundaries, is valuable framing.
• Artistic expression is only a form of acting out emotions, not a way of working through them.
• Viewing anger as tension, releasing it mobilizes a boundary or lets go. This is the opposite of repressing the tension or turning it into rage. 
• Stress comes from taking on the roles of people we are not and adjusting ourselves to others. 
• If you have the choice between guilt and resentment, always choose guilt. 
• Over-positive thinking can lead to stress, negative thinking can be the truth more directly. 
• Having poor boundaries with others leads to poor boundaries within your brain, allowing for the thinking process to be overwhelmed by emotional feeling processes. A poorly differentiated emotional self can promote physical health issues. 

What I Learned in One Sentence: Emotional repression can surface as disease, so I can feel it now or be forced to later. 

24. The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield 

Impactful Idea: 

• Resistance is that invisible force repelling me from “callings of the heart”, aka, what I really want to be creating.

What This Taught Me In One Sentence: Resistance will bury me if I let it and don’t remain humbled by its force. 

25. How to Be an Adult in Relationships: The Five Keys to Mindful Loving by David Richo

Impactful Ideas: 

• The 5 As are the Five Keys to Mindful Loving: Attention, Affection, Acceptance, Appreciation, Allowing. Together, these are the components of unconditional presence.
• Loving Witnessing: “to witness is not to stand aloof but to stand by. We then can act without compulsion or disquiet, related to what is happening rather than becoming possessed by it”
• The 5 mindsets of ego interrupt your ability to be here now and distort reality. They interrupt unconditional presence and may cause others to feel unloved. They are virtually involuntary mental reactions that are common to everyone.

1. Fear – of or worry about a situation or of this person. “I perceive a threat in you or am afraid you may not like me, so I am on the defensive”
2. Desire – that this moment or person will meet our demands or expectations, grant us our needed emotional supplies, or fulfill our wishes – “I am trying to get something from this or you”
3. Judgement – can take the form of admiration, criticism, humour, moralism, positive or negative bias, censure, labelling, praise or blame: “I am caught up in my own opinion about you or this”
4. Control – happens when you force your own view or plan on someone else: “I am attached to a particular outcome and am caught in the need to fix, persuade, advise or change you.”
5. Illusion – overrides reality and may occur as denial, projection, fantasy, hope, idealization, depreciation or wish: “I have a mental picture of or belief about you or this and it obscures what you are really like” (The central illusion in life is that of separateness.)

• Use loneliness. Its ache creates urgency to reconnect with the world. Take that aching and use it to propel you deeper into your need for expression – “to speak, to say who you are”.

• Tool: Personal compass writing exercise –  North = what in life will stabilize and guide you, like the north star, South = three things that evoke spontaneity and creativity, like an opening in warm southern weather, West = three things that are ending, like the setting sun, East = three things that are arising
• In romance, two egos meet two egos ideals in an ideal love, in conflict, two egos meet one another in conflicted love, in commitment, two persons meet in egoless love. 
• Tool: when responding sharply or overreacting to something, ask yourself SEE. Is it Shadow, Ego or Early life issues?
• Shadow = disowned parts of ourselves we project onto others,
• Ego = inappropriate when it’s driven by fear of not being accepted or arrogance, retaliation or entitlement
• Early life: responding to the past instead of present
• * Most likely it’s all three at once
• In the face of fear, the 3 A’s: Admit, Allow, Act as if (you don’t feel the fear, push the pain, then grow)
• “Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled, made nothing? If not, you will never really change.” – DH Lawrence
• The universal yes shows that spirituality is not about transcendence of the world, but deeper involvement in it. 

What This Taught Me in One Quote: “I will come to you, my friend, when I no longer need you. Then you will find a palace, not an almshouse.” – Henry Thoreau

26. Dare to Lead by Brené Brown

Impactful Ideas: 

• “You can never get enough of what you don’t need.”
• Shame is the master emotion of “never good enough”. It’s brought on by unwanted identities, often of being seen as sick, unreliable or undependable. 
• Shame is a fear of disconnection. 
• Get really clear on who’s option matters to you, no one in the cheap seats of life. Don’t be open to the rest. Who’s in my corner?
• Trust is actually built in really small actions over time. Like remembering things.
• Psychological safety = most important part of teams
• Vulnerability =/= disclosure or oversharing. That’s hot-wiring connection to others instead.
• Vulnerability is the corner of all emotion. The creative process is the most uncertain & no innovation can be made without failure. 
• WAIT = why am I talking?
• “Clear is kind, unclear is unkind”. 
• “The treasure you seek is in the cave you fear”
• Always contribute more than you criticize. 
• Perfectionism is a function of shame, and empathy is the antidote. 
• “Our ego consciousness — namely, who we think we are, or what we believe real — is at best a thin wafer floating on an iridescent sea. In any moment, we view the world through a distorting lens and make choices based on what the lens allows us to see, not what lies outside its frame.” – Jim Holly
• Joy is the most vulnerable emotion, because we worry it’ll be lost soon. 
• If we numb darkness, we also numb the light. 
• Ask yourself “what are the feelings and where did they come from?
• Strong back, soft front, wild heart = integration
• Cynicism = a “get out of contribution” card
• Goal, pathway & agency = hope
• Cut down your values to a few. Identify the slippery behaviours that are opposite them & aligned ones. Choose the 2 seats behind each value, the people who feel and see them. 
• Knowledge is useless until it lives in the bones. 
• The 3 most dangerous stories we tell are ones that diminish our lovability, divinity or creativity.
• The moment we let someone define your success = we fail. 

What This Taught Me in One Quote: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” – Theodore Roosevelt

27. A Guide for the Perplexed: Conversations with Paul Cronin by Werner Herzog

Impactful Ideas: 

• Arrive to far away places on foot, the world unfolds for those who walk.
• Don’t watch too many movies, the world belongs to those who read. 
• Phone communication dilutes in-person conversations, so avoid them when best. 
• Herzog sees himself as just a foot soldier of the film industry, not an artist. He doesn’t see film as an art, it’s a poetry.
• You don’t need money to do what you want, and you can do lots by yourself.

What This Taught Me in One Quote: “Facts do not equal the truth” – Herzog 

28. Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation by Mitch Horowitz

Note: Another book that didn’t really call for notes, it goes over the surprising hidden influence of mystical and magical traditions on American culture. It’s my favorite spiritualism history book, showing how America became a meeting place for spiritual seekers and alternative beliefs over time that couldn’t thrive in Europe. Part investigative journalism, part history book, meet spiritual weirdness. 

What This Taught Me in One Sentence: So much American culture has surprising and silly roots in new age spiritualism. 

29. Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth by Richard Foster

Impactful Ideas: 

• Spiritual habits change us from the inside. Regular practices like prayer and meditation slowly transform who we are, not just what we do.
• Silence helps us hear better. Taking time to be quiet and still lets us hear our own thoughts and connect more deeply.
• Fasting isn’t about food. Taking breaks from things we rely on (like food, media, or technology) helps us see what controls us.
• Prayer is a conversation, not a performance. Real prayer is about honest connection, not saying the “right” words to impress others or yourself.

What This Taught Me in One Sentence: Disciplines are tools for joy. 

30. The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche

Lastly, a collection of my favorite aphorisms: 

The Greatest Danger

Had there not always been a majority of men who felt the discipline of their heads – their ‘rationality’ – to be their pride, their obligation, their virtue, and who were embarrassed or ashamed by all fantasizing and debauchery of thought, being the friends of ‘healthy common sense’, humanity would have perished long ago! The greatest danger that hovered and still havers over humanity is the outbreak of madness – that is, the outbreak of arbitrariness in feeling, seeing, and hearing; the enjoyment in the lack of discipline of the head, the joy in human unreason. The opposite of the world of the madman is not truth and certainty but the generality and universal bindingness of a faith; in short, the non-arbitrary in judgement. And man’s greatest labour so far has been to reach agreement about very many things and to lay down a law of agreement – regardless of whether these things are true or false. This is the discipline of the head which has preserved humanity – but the counter-drives are still so powerful that it is basically with little confidence that one may speak of the future of humanity. The picture of things still moves and shifts continually, and perhaps more and faster from now on than ever before; continually, the most select minds bristle at this universal bindingness – the explorers of truth above all! Continually this faith, as a commonplace belief shared by everyone, breeds nausea and a new lust in subtler minds; and the slow tempo for all spiritual processes which this faith makes necessary, this imitation of the tortoise that is recognized as the norm here, would by itself be sufficient to turn artists and poets into deserters: it is these impatient minds in whom a veritable delight in madness breaks out, because madness has such a cheerful tempo! What is needed, then, are virtuous intellects – oh, I’ll use the most unambiguous word – what is needed is virtuous stupidity; what is needed are unwavering beat-keepers of the slow spirit, so that the believers of the great common faith stay together and go on dancing their dance: it is an exigency of the first order which commands and demands. We others are the exception and the danger – we stand eternally in need of defence! – Now there is certainly something to be said for the exception, provided it never wants to become the rule.

The Madman

Haven’t you heard of that madman who in the bright morning lit a lantern and ran around the marketplace crying incessantly, ‘I’m looking for God! l’m looking for God!’ Since many of those who did not believe in God were standing around together just then, he caused great laughter. Has he been lost, then? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone to sea? Emigrated? – Thus they shouted and laughed, one interrupting the other. The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. ‘Where is God?’ he cried; ‘I’ll tell you! We have killed him – you and I! We are all his murderers. But how did we do this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained  this earth from its sun? Where is it moving to now? Where are we moving to? Away from all suns? Are we not continually falling? And backwards, sidewards, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an up and a down? Aren’t we straying as though through an infinite nothing? Isn’t empty space breathing at us? Hasn’t it got colder? Isn’t night and more night coming again and again? Don’t lanterns have to be lit in the morning? Do we still hear nothing of the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we still smell nothing of the divine decomposition? – Gods, too, decompose! God is dead! God remains dead! And wc have killed him! How can we console ourselves, the murderers of all murderers! The holiest and the mightiest thing the world has ever possessed has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood from us? With what water could we clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what holy games will we have to invent for ourselves? Is the magnitude of this deed not too great for us? Do we not ourselves have to become gods merely to appear worthy of it? There was never a greater deed – and whoever is horn after us will on account of this deed belong to a higher history than all history up to now!’ Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; they too were silent and looked at him disconcertedly. Finally he threw his lantern on the ground so that it broke into pieces and went out. ‘I come too early’, he then said; ‘my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder need time; the light of the stars needs time; deeds need time, even after they are done, in order to be seen and heard. This deed is still more remote to them than the remotest stars – and yet they have done it themselves!’ It is still recounted how on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there started singing his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but, ‘What then are these churches now if not the tombs and sepulchres of God?’

Cause and effect: there is probably never such a duality; in truth a continuum faces us, from which we isolate a few pieces, just as we always perceive a movement only as isolated points, i.e. do not really see, but infer. The suddenness with which many effects stand out misleads us; it is a suddenness only for us. There is an infinite number of processes that elude us in this second of suddenness. An intellect that saw cause and effect as a continuum, not, as we do, as arbitrary division and dismemberment – that saw the stream of the event – would reject the concept of cause and effect and deny all determinedness.

Be Yourself on Purpose

One thing is needful. – To ‘give style’ to one’s character – a great and rare art! It is practised by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses that their nature has to offer and then fit them into an artistic plan until each appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye. Here a great mass of second nature has been added; there a piece of first nature removed – both times through lang practice and daily work at it. Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed; there it is reinterpreted into sublimity. Much that is vague and resisted shaping has been saved and employed for distant views – it is supposed to beckon towards the remote and immense. In the end, when the work is complete, it becomes clear how it was the force of a single taste that ruled and shaped everything great and small – whether the taste was good or bad means less than one may think; it’s enough that it was one taste! It will be the strong and domineering natures who experience their most exquisite pleasure under such coercion, in being bound by but also perfected under their own law; the passion of their tremendous will becomes less intense in the face of all stylized nature, all conquered and serving nature; even when they have palaces to build and gardens to design, they resist giving nature free rein. Conversely, it is the weak characters with no power over themselves who hate the constraint of style: they feel that if this bitterly evil compulsion were to be imposed on them, they would have to become commonplace under it – they become slaves as soon as they serve; they hate to serve. Such minds – and they may be of the first rank – are always out to shape or interpret their environment as free nature – wild, arbitrary, fantastic, disorderly, and surprising – and they are well advised to do so, because only thus do they please themselves! For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself- be it through this or that poetry or art; only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold! Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is continually prepared to avenge himself for this, and we others will be his victims if only by having to endure his sight. For the sight ofsomething ugly makes one bad and gloomy.

Against the Slanderers of Nature

I find those people unpleasant in whom every natural inclination immediately becomes a sickness, something disfiguring or even contemptible – they have seduced us into the belief that man’s natural inclinations are evil; they are the cause of our great injustice towards our nature, towards all nature! There are enough people who could well entrust themselves to their inclinations with grace and without care, but who do not for fear of the imagined ‘evil essence’ of nature! That is why there is so little nobility among human beings; its distinguishing feature has always been to have no fear of oneself, to expect nothing contemptible from oneself, to fly without misgivings wherever we’re inclined – we free-born hirds! And wherever we arrive, there will always be freedom and sunlight around us.

In Favour of Criticism

Something you formerly loved as a truth or a probability now strikes you as an error; you cast it off and believe your reason has made a victory. But maybe that error was as necessary for you then, when you were still another person – you are always another person – as are all your present ‘truths’, like a skin that concealed and covered many things you weren’t allowed to see yet. It is your new life, not your reason, that has killed that opinion for you: you don ‘t need it any more, and now it collapses and unreason crawls out of it into the light like a worm. When we criticize, we are not doing something arbitrary and impersonal; it is, at least very often, proof that there are living, active forces within us shedding skin. We negate and have to negate because something in us wants to live and affirm itself, something we might not yet know or see! – This in favour of criticism.

The Heaviest Weight (Choosing actions as if it’s for all of time)

What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the <lemon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine.’ If this thought gained power over you, as you are it would transform and possibly crush you; the question in each and every thing, ‘Do you want this again and innumerable times again?’ would lie on your actions as the heaviest weight! Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to long for nothing more fervently than for this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

What This Taught Me in One Sentence: “God” (as conceptualized at that time) is dead, so we’re rebuilding our own understanding.