11 important books I read in 2022

I read 56 books in 2022. These are the 11 that stood out the most to me, in no particular order:

Victor Frankl — Man’s Search For Meaning

One of the most powerful books I’ve ever read. Frankl survived the concentration camps of Nazi Germany and then wrote a book about it. He’s also one of the most important psychologists of the 20th century.

Basically he says that people need meaning in their lives, and meaning is what motivates us. If you have a purpose you can do almost anything.

This matches what I’ve seen in my own personal life. I am happiest when I am pursuing a difficult goal. I am least happy when I’m just sitting around doing nothing all day.

Frankl says that when someone came to his office complaining they couldn’t handle all their problems, he would actually respond by giving them another problem. Like, he would give them a pet to take care of, or he would tell them to start paying attention to their diet, or something like that. And the added pressure and increased responsibility would force them to get their shit together and they would become happier.

Frankl also says that you can always control your attitude, even when you can’t control anything else. His attitude helped him survive the Nazi death camps. “Having a positive attitude” sounds like hocus pocus feel-good BS but it’s actually a huge life hack.

Walter Isaacson — Steve Jobs

The story of probably the greatest entrepreneur of our era, aside from Elon Musk.

Basically Steve Jobs starts his life out abrasive and young. He makes amazing computers but he’s a loose cannon and everyone at Apple hates him so they fire him.

Then he goes on to found 2 more companies, neXt and Pixar, and those become hits. In exile he matures.

Then Apple brings him back as CEO and he makes some more really cool products like the iPhone and iPod.

Steve Jobs was always really abrasive and manipulative, he basically conned Steve Wozniak into cofounding a company with him even though Woz wanted to work for Hewlett Packard.

He was really hard on his team and he often told people to do the impossible, like fit an entire computer into the hardware he had designed.

Steve Jobs was also a brilliant computer designer. Apple was usually ahead of the curve when it came to making user friendly computers. That’s because Steve Jobs had an eye for what would be easy to use.

For example in 2006, most “smartphones” had a giant keyboard and a tiny little screen. Steve Jobs imagined a phone with a finger-based touch screen (as opposed to a stylus based touch screen) which everyone thought was impossible, because the finger would always touch like 10 different points on a screen at once. But Steve Jobs got his design team to invent something called “multi-touch” which figures out where the user meant to put their finger. And then a year later the iPhone was born.

For most of the time Steve Jobs was at Apple, other computer companies basically copied what he did.

Also, Bill Gates thought Steve Jobs was a clown because he didn’t know how to code.

Ray Dalio — Principles: Life & Work

Ray Dalio is one of the most respected men on Wall Street. He started and built Bridgewater Capital, which became one of the most incredibly successful hedge funds ever. Eventually Ray Dalio got well-respected enough that governments called him in to have him help solve their problems. During the European debt crisis for instance they brought him in to help figure out how to make things not go to shit.

Dalio starts off by telling his life story. He talks about all the lessons he learned betting on the markets. He learned that the world can change quickly and that one should never be too sure of themselves.

Then he goes over all of his “principles”, or the rules he lives by.

The way he built Bridgewater Capital was really interesting. Bridgewater was a bona fide idea meritocracy where people would have open discussions about the best way to invest money, without worrying about their own status or whether they hurt people’s feelings.

I didn’t even know this could be done — it seemed to me that ego would always get in the way — but apparently Ray Dalio figured out how to do it.

He did note that he had to fire most of the people he hired after just a year or so, which maybe I’ll have to do too if I end up starting a business like that. I guess for most people, ego does get in the way.

I wish someone from Bridgewater would start a consulting firm teaching other businesses to be more like idea meritocracies, because the world would be a better place if more businesses and governments worked like that.

Dalio is a guy with some really important advice and he’s worth listening to.

The big issue I have with this book is that it’s just too boring. You can’t just give people a pile of principles and expect them to remember them all. You have to give them little stories and tidbits that their brains can handle. That way they can actually remember your principles.

The most interesting part of the book is Dalio’s life story, which he tells at the beginning. That’s what I feel I learned the most from. However he mentions that he almost cut that part because he felt it was irrelevant.

This is an important storytelling lesson for anyone who wants to teach anyone anything. Information is kind of like meat, it’s a lot better if you put it in a sandwich than if you eat it raw.

Carl Sagan — Contact

Ellie Arroway is a hotshot young physicist who can get pretty much any job in science she wants, and she decides to spend her life looking for extraterrestrial intelligence.

She receives a message from a nearby star system that is clearly being sent by some intelligent life form. She analyzes the message a bit more and figures out that it’s the blueprints to a machine. So all the governments of the world work together to build the machine.

This one brought a tear to my eye. Carl Sagan makes you feel like there’s something bigger than us out there, and that with science we can start answering the questions of the universe that religion tries to answer and fails.

Another problem this book brought up: In Skin In The Game, Nassim Taleb says it makes sense to treat different people with different levels of moral respect. He says something like this:

“With my country, I’m a libertarian. With my state, I’m a conservative. With my town, I’m a liberal. And with my family, I’m a socialist.”

Part of the beauty of the alien message in Contact was that it helped bring the US and the USSR together. It bridged the gap a little. It helped both countries start seeing each other more as allies and less as competitors.

My big takeaway from Contact was, in the 21st century all humans will need to work together to solve global problems, like climate change, instead of turning inward or fighting each other. We’ll need to expand our moral scope. And to do that we will need to build greater and greater levels of trust with more and more people.

I’m also amazed that Sagan managed to write such a beautiful novel. He is a man of many talents.

Neil Strauss — Emergency

Neil Strauss starts freaking out. A bunch of shit happens during the Bush administration that convinces him that the US isn’t safe anymore and he needs an escape plan.

So he talks to his billionaire friend and some perpetual travelers and some other people who are into this stuff. Eventually he decides the best course of action is to get a passport in St. Kitts, which has a citizenship by investment program. So he mortgages his house to buy an apartment in St. Kitts that qualifies him for a passport and gives him an “out” in case shit hits the fan.

That’s not enough, so then he takes it on himself to learn all the skills he’ll need to survive after the apocalypse, like shooting guns and finding food in the forest.

As part of learning these skills he volunteers for a community emergency response group. Kinda like a volunteer firefighter. He finds a ton of meaning working with them and decides maybe he was misguided preparing to run away during the apocalypse. Maybe he would be better off just sticking around and protecting the people he cares about.

After traveling the world full-time last year I kind of feel the same way. I’ve learned that I was seriously undervaluing family and community. Traveling the world and shit is fun but it gets lonely sometimes. Life is more meaningful when there are other people who you’re responsible for protecting. Running forever, well that’s just not enough.

Jordan Peterson — 12 Rules Of Life

One of the most important books I’ve ever read.

For me this built on 3 thinkers I was already familiar with: Nassim Taleb, Victor Frankl, and Buddha.

As for Nassim Taleb. For most of my adult life I believed that traditions were stupid. A tradition is when you do something just because that’s the way it’s always been done, which I always felt was a dumb reason to do something.

But in Antifragile Taleb says that traditions usually exist for a reason, and just because you don’t know what that reason is doesn’t mean there isn’t a reason. Hence we should follow tradition whenever it’s practical.

I feel like a lot of what Jordan Peterson says has been overlooked for the past few decades, because they’re seen as “outdated traditions”. It’s much easier to make liberal arguments because they’re more intuitive. Peterson is the first person I’ve ever really heard make the conservative arguments as they deserve to be made. He takes tradition and helps me make sense of it.

As for Victor Frankl and Buddha, Jordan Peterson says that you should live your life to seek meaning, not avoid suffering. Spending your life avoiding suffering sucks, because you never really can. Life is hard, and instead of running away from it you must face it down and conquer it.

Human beings are most comfortable on the border between order and chaos. Too much order and we get bored. Too much chaos and we can’t handle it. All of human existence, as well as your own personal life, is the struggle to turn more and more chaos into order. That way you improve yourself and you improve the world.

This isn’t really a political book, it’s more about how to live your life. There’s some veiled political stuff in here but generally it gives you a map for how to face the challenges of the world.

Also, Jordan Peterson is much better in spoken form than written form. I’m not usually an audiobook guy — I usually like to stop when I’m reading and think about what I just read, which is harder when you’re listening to an audiobook. But Peterson’s writing can be kinda dense and rambly. This is a problem in writing, but when he speaks those very same words his adorable Albertan accent it’s awesome… it feels like a religious sermon.

I loved this book but I think today Peterson has gone off the rails… he’s too much culture warrior and not enough philosopher. He’s a lot angrier and a lot less interesting to listen to. Unfortunately this happens to a lot of media talking heads.

But he is a man of great courage and it’s very important to understand what he has to say, because his philosophy is both unique and very important.

Anders Ericsson & Robert Pool — Peak: Secrets From The New Science Of Expertise

When Ericsson was a young grad student he read an old science paper that said that two trained students had managed to remember 15 digits. This was odd because every other piece of evidence suggested that humans could only handle 9 digits at a time. Every single time people had tried to remember a bunch of digits they had only been able to remember 9 of them.

Is there a way to push past the 9-digit limit? Ericsson tried to figure it out. He worked with this track runner who liked to challenge himself. Ericsson would read him digits and the track runner would try to repeat them all back to him.

Eventually the track runner was able to remember, like, a hundred digits. How did he break the record? He developed a better technique for remembering numbers that no one had discovered before.

The same thing has been happening in a lot of fields of human endeavor. People can run a mile faster and faster these days because runners have developed better ways to practice running and get faster.

This book is about “deliberate practice” which, according to science, is the best way to learn anything. The reason why chess players and musicians are able to get really really good at what they do is because the way they practice is very similar in nature to deliberate practice.

Mozart, for example, was a master musician because he did a shitton of deliberate practice because his dad was fucking intense. Other than that he was just a normal boy.

This book talks about how to do deliberate practice, and what to do if you can’t.

It also speculates that we can probably create better practice techniques for just about every single human endeavor. If you want to learn a language, for instance, there are probably ways to use deliberate practice to teach yourself your target language in, like, a couple months.

Thomas Erikson — Surrounded By Idiots

A framework for understanding different types of people. According to Erikson, some people are “red”, some are “yellow”, some are “green” and some are “blue”. Reds are hardasses who are super intense and focused on getting the job done. Yellows are bubbly and extroverted and creative, but can be forgetful and can have their head in the clouds. Blues are very detail oriented and socially awkward… think computer geeks. And greens are just regular people who wanna work 9 to 5 and do their jobs and then go home.

Some people are one color, some people are two colors, and a few are three colors.

Reds and greens don’t like each other. Blues and yellows REALLY don’t like each other.

Why is this so important? Well, a lot of people just assume that everyone thinks like them. That can be really frustrating when you’re out in the real world because not everyone thinks like you. So it’s really important to have a way of categorizing people who are different from you so you can step into their minds and better work with them.

Erikson’s method of categorizing is pretty crude and designed to be something you can teach in just one day. There are probably more sophisticated ways to categorize people that are far more useful. Salesmen for instance often have really sophisticated ways of understanding the differences between the people they sell to. On the same note Ray Dalio would do a bunch of personality tests on all the people he interviewed before hiring them, and would keep “baseball cards” of all his employees so people knew what everyone was good at.

At the very least this book convinced me that it’s important to have a good system for categorizing people.

Malcolm X & Alex Haley — The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Holy shit, this guy had an insane life.

When Malcolm X was really young his dad preached self reliance. They grew all their own food and killed their animals and shit. They didn’t want to depend on white people for anything.

One day his dad got really angry at his mom. He stormed out of the house and went into town. Later that day he got killed doing god knows what. After that happened Malcolm X’s family was always poor and had trouble getting enough food.

In middle school he went to a mostly white school. He was their “mascot”. He thought of himself as just another kid in the class until one day he told his teacher he wanted to be a lawyer and the teacher was like, “well that’s no job for a negro”. Which motivated him to prove the teacher wrong.

In high school Malcolm X realized that the whole system that white people had set up was a scam so he moved to Boston to live with his sister. He fell in with his sister would call a “bad crowd”. He learned how to concoct and enact all sorts of schemes to make money, including selling drugs and stealing shit from people’s houses.

He also had a white girlfriend called Sophia, which gave him major street cred in the Black community at that time. They viewed white women as major status symbols. Sophia was like married or something but she would come see him whenever she could and they would get into all kinds of trouble.

And he “conked” his hair, like most blacks of his era, which is a way of making black people hair look more like white people hair. Apparently it burns like hell and is extremely uncomfortable.

After a few years of being a street criminal and living by his wits, Malcolm X gets caught burglarizing some guy’s house. Because he roped his white girlfriend and her sister into it, the judges gave him a 10 year sentence even though they could’ve pretty easily given him just 2 or 3 years.

In prison he converts to the Nation of Islam, a new Black religion inspired by Islam that is sweeping America. And he reads a shitload of books to learn how the world works.

When he gets out he starts going to Nation of Islam meetings in person. Elijah Muhammad likes him and Malcolm starts devoting his life to the Nation of Islam church. He rises through the ranks and eventually he goes to New York to found a local branch of the church.

White people wanted to listen to the “integration” civil rights leaders but it seemed like Malcolm X was doing a lot more. He was helping a piece of the Black community build its own social structures. He was encouraging Nation of Islam members to start businesses and create their own schools and do all kinds of stuff on their own. Malcolm never really believed “integration” was possible because he felt like in an integrated society, white people would always give themselves the upper hand.

Malcolm describes this story of how a Nation of Islam member got arrested. He needed medical attention. And it was clear that the cops weren’t gonna give it to him. So Malcolm got a whole bunch of Nation of Islam members to march through the streets of New York right down to the place they were holding the guy until the cops relented and let the guy go to the hospital.

I realized that the Nation of Islam’s philosophy about black power matches my own philosophy about life when I was growing up. I was always trying to get more and more freedom from my parents by slowly removing the ways they could influence my life. I wanted to depend on them for as little as possible so they had nothing to hold over me. So I started doing my own laundry, I walked to/from school so I didn’t need a ride from them, I got a job, etc. That’s because I realized that independence gives you bargaining power and respect, while dependence means you can get held hostage by the people you’re dependent to.

Ultimately the downfall of the Nation of Islam was that it wasn’t forgiving enough. Malcolm X had to kick his own brother out of his church because he drank alcohol. But in Christianity you can just beg for forgiveness and bam, you’re accepted again. Which IMO seems like a far better approach. Telling people they’re never allowed to drink again is a good way to turn them off to your religion and get them to not want to be a part of your movement.

The NOI’s extreme strictness created serious problems when Elijah Muhammad got caught fucking his secretary. In theory he should have had to be expelled from the Nation for that. Malcolm wanted to change the Nation of Islam doctrine so that Elijah Muhammad could get some form of forgiveness and redemption. Whereas Elijah Muhammad just decided to sweep the whole thing under the rug.

This caused the schism in the church that ultimately led to Malcolm’s death and to the Nation of Islam losing its credibility. Elijah Muhammad always had the mentality that Malcolm couldn’t be trusted and that he was stealing too much glory for himself. He liked how Malcolm was growing the church but he knew that one day he’d have to turn on him. And I guess after Malcolm uncovered Elijah Muhammad’s affair, Muhammad decided that day had come.

It’s not clear exactly who killed Malcolm X but it’s kinda obvious that Elijah Muhammad had something to do with it.

Malcolm X was a man who understood how the world really worked. It was really clear as I was reading this that a) Malcolm was really fucking smart and b) he knew secrets about human nature that I did not know.

This book also made me wonder if the whole approach America has taken towards “integration” has been all wrong. After World War II the Jews didn’t ask to be “integrated”, they asked for their own piece of land, and that’s exactly what they got. The Nation of Islam was asking for the exact same thing, they wanted America to hand over one of the 50 states and turn it into a Black state so they could be sovereign.

Maybe if we created some artificial islands and made them into Black states, then American Black people would have some actual diplomatic leverage and a chance at self-governance, which would force American society to treat them better. I’m willing to bet that would go much further towards creating actual equal rights for blacks in America than all the fake social justice signaling bullshit and protesting we do now. Because they’d finally have some real bargaining power.

The final lesson from this book is that you can never really be sure who will turn on you. You might think someone is an honorable true believer who is fighting alongside you. Whereas really they’re a politicking schemer who will have you killed if they start to perceive you as a threat.

Malcolm got killed in part because he forgot the laws of human nature that he understood so well when he was a hustler in New York and Boston. He would never have “outshined the master” when he was working for one of his criminal bosses back in the day, but he did in the Nation of Islam because he convinced himself Elijah Muhammad wouldn’t mind. You can’t let that happen to you. You gotta stay on your toes.

Diane Ravitch — The Death (And Life) Of The Great American School System

According to Diane Ravitch, the “businessification” of school is destroying school. Businesspeople want to make schools work more like business by giving kids more tests (to measure their performance) and by holding teachers to higher standards. She also doesn’t like charter schools and other school choice programs because she feels that they rob public schools of the most motivated kids.

The problem with this, she says, is that school isn’t like business, so the same principles don’t apply. School is something that the state should provide, not something that should be bought and sold in a market. And education isn’t something you can measure.

These problems were made clear by No Child Left Behind, which was an absolute disaster. No Child Left Behind was supposed to incentivize teachers to teach better, but it ended up incentivizing teachers to fudge the numbers, teach to the test, and even outright cheat sometimes. Also, the test sucked, and so teaching to the test actually made kids dumber.

I agree with Ravitch that “businessifying” schools No Child Left Behind style probably isn’t the way to go, as No Child Left Behind made clear. However business principles like measurement and choice are fundamentally good, and when done right they should lead to higher quality education — all No Child Left Behind did is prove that the government can’t do them right.

One thing I’ve noticed is that authors tend to spend the most time talking about stuff where their arguments are strong, and the least time talking about stuff where their arguments are weak. Ravitch does this big time.

In theory, this book is about how “testing and choice are undermining education”. She spends tons of time talking about how testing is undermining education, but only 2 chapters are devoted to talking about school choice, and it’s pretty clear from those chapters that the evidence against choice is pretty flimsy.

The argument that “school choice is bad because the best kids end up going to charter schools” is especially sketch. It kinda sounds like she’s saying that if a boat sinks with 100 people on it and the lifeboats can only carry 50 people, everyone should sink. If some kids get a chance to go to a better school that should be seen as a big victory.

Her arguments against measurement are a lot better but I would argue are very specific to the environment created by No Child Left Behind. No Child Left Behind tried to measure whether kids were getting smarter by looking only at their math and reading scores.

This is a lot like trying to assess whether someone is a good employee by measuring only the writing in their written reports and the quality of their water cooler talk. It’s ridiculous and it has little correlation with the stuff that’s actually important.

Instead, we should come up with like 20 outcome variables that every parent can agree are important, and then test kids on those 20 variables and measure schools and teaching methods based on how well they do on those 20 variables.

Ravitch also seems to think that the status quo in American education — letting schools continue as they are — is acceptable. I would argue otherwise, our schools are terrible and they’re a huge waste of time and money. A lot of people’s lives are considerably worse because of the pressures put on them by the school system.

Basically Ravitch is arguing “look how bad the No Child Left Behind reforms were, let’s not do any more reforms.” She misses that reforms are desperately needed. However I think that reforms need to come from the bottom up — different education systems/techniques/measurements/etc. need to be proven at the smallest levels and then applied nationwide, not the other way around.

It’s pretty clear to me that society needs to spend a shitload of money and time and energy figuring out the best ways to educate children and then implementing those methods in public schools. Like, different science curriculums should be tested against one another, and whichever can turn children into the best scientific thinkers should be used in all schools.

Yuval Noah Harari — Homo Deus

What historian Yuval Harari thinks will happen, starting or ramping up in scale massively in the 21st century:

• People will view death and disease as technical problems and look for material ways to solve them.
• People will begin to genetically engineer themselves to create superhumans.
• Humans will create new “Dataist” religions that worship freedom of information.
• Human beings will essentially transcend themselves into gods, being capable of doing just about anything they want to.

He also argues that human beings are just really complex versions of algorithms, and that it would be possible to write a complex enough computer script to do exactly what a human would do.

Harari is a really interesting and unique thinker. He’s really good at stripping the layers of bullshit and propaganda away from the world and seeing it for its true cynical dark nature.

I’m not sure how much he’s right about the future. IMO, we’re approaching a period in history where like 300 different things can happen and I think that trying to say “this one definitely will happen” is kinda foolish. Maybe humans will discover the secret to immortality this century, or maybe we will build an AI that kills us all. Who knows.

It is pretty obvious that SOMETHING drastic is gonna change soon. The year 2100 will look totally unrecognizable to today in one way or another. Harari’s candidates are just as good as any other candidates for drastic things that can happen.

Hey! Thanks for reading. My name’s Theo, and I publish articles like these about topics I think are interesting… ranging from books I’ve read to social science secrets I daydream about.

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Happy trails!