A Neophyte’s Reading List
In the past 10 weeks, I’ve read more than I have in the past 10 years. Here’s why.
ne·o·phyte
ˈnēəˌfīt/
noun
- a person who is new to a subject, skill, or belief.
- synonyms:beginner, learner, novice, newcomer
I woke up one morning a few months ago after a nightmare. A culmination of a series of personal and professional setbacks as of late caused this particular nightmare to reoccur more frequently. The final exam for a high school class was coming up and of course I forgot to study all semester. You know the one.
I woke up with a brief sigh of relief that school was behind me. Really behind me. I graduated high school 10 years ago. There was no more schooling I had left to do.
And then another fear crept in. Was this the smartest I was ever going to be? Friends around me were finishing their graduate degrees and becoming professors, lawyers, and doctors. Was I getting dumber (more dumb?)?
I sat there thinking deeply about professional paths. I had always been in startups where there was no clear path, but it usually goes:
Elementary School → Middle School → High School → College → Work/Graduate School
If you were set on becoming a doctor, often times you needed to have decided that when starting college. Can a 17 yr old really make a rational decision about becoming a doctor by then? If you wanted to do finance, you started after graduation with the rest of your class and progressed up the ranks.
The further you got along one of these pre-determined paths, the further apart the branches between paths became and therefore the harder it is to jump across those paths to another profession. Yes, of course it’s possible, but it’s that much harder, and you’re that many more years behind your peers. The more traditional the path, the more “abnormal” it is to be years behind.
For various reasons, I think that perception is breaking down. It’s partially because technology enables swings between branches more readily than it did even 10 years ago, and partially because it’s more socially acceptable to have multiple career changes across one’s lifetime.
If you subscribe to the theory that it takes 10,000 hours to master something, that equates to 5 working years (50 weeks of 40 hour work weeks). After you master something for a period of 5 years, let’s assume you want to reap the rewards for another 2 years. If you’re truly truly dedicated to your craft for that entire time, that likely puts you at the top 1-5% of your field, depending on the field. You see, most people don’t have that patience of dedication.
If you’re 21 years old when you graduate college, you’re starting on the 1st one of those 7-year journeys. If you’d like to retire at the age of 63, that leaves you with 42 years of working hard. That’s 6 distinct careers if you so choose. All of a sudden, this idea provides many people with new hope. If you’re 28 or 35 years old, and want to start a career in software engineering, does it matter if you’re 7 or 14 or 21 years behind everyone else? Maybe at this moment it does, but, in the grand scheme of things, across 42 years of working, it likely won’t matter at all.
Now a new fear has crept in. Time on earth is finite. On your deathbed, all you have is a collection of experiences and knowledge. Everyday you don’t learn something new, you’ve wasted opportunity.
Now I’m literally in a race against time to learn and absorb as much as I can.
I’m coming up on 28 years old in about a month. It’s time to begin my 2nd “career cycle.” I’m not sure what that will entail just yet, so I’ve been going to my local library everyday for the past few weeks, browsing the book stacks for whatever looks interesting.
That was a weird tangent…
Anyway, here’s the list of books and topics I’m into at the moment.
Non-Fiction
Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
Biographies
Business
Creativity, Inc. — Edwin Catmull, Amy Wallace (in progress)
The Everything Store — Brad Stone [Summary]
Google: How Google Works — Eric Schmidt (Coming Up)
In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives — Steven Levy (Coming Up)
Design & Product
Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things — Donald Norman (Coming Up)
The Design of Everyday Things — Donald Norman (Coming Up)
History
Math, Science, & Logic
The Theory of Poker — David Sklansky (in progress)
The Signal and the Noise — Nate Silver (in progress)
Genome: An Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters (Coming Up)
Thinking Frameworks
The Innovator’s Dilemma — Clayton Christensen (Coming Up)
The Innovator’s Solution — Clayton Christensen [Summary]
Thinking Fast and Slow — Daniel Khaneman (Coming Up)
The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life — Richard Herrnstein (Coming Up)
Fiction
Legal
Science Fiction
The Martian — Andy Weir (Coming Up)
Essays & Blogs
The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence — Tim Urban
The AI Revolution: Our Immortality or Extinction — Tim Urban
Are there books you would suggest for me? Definitely let me know. Click the heart below, bookmark, and share with your friends to stay in touch about new additions to the list as well as TL;DR summaries of all the books.
