The 5 Most Influential Things I Read This Year

And how they shaped my thinking

Oh, December. Month of leftover turkey sammies, four-thirty masquerading as seven or eight, and more lists than you can shake a social media button at.

One of the nice things about setting a goal to write all year is that as a side product, kind of like ordering Christmas gifts and getting a free tote bag in the process, I also ended up reading a lot more. It became a nervous twitch, this compulsive clicking-and-reading (I am much more a long-form article person than a book person.) I read a lot about business and a little about politics. I read a ton on Medium. Nytimes.com became what my fingers typed when left to their own devices. The Atlantic started popping up as every third story in my news feed, that’s how much I clicked on it.

Of the millions of words I scanned, only a few made the leap into long-term memory.

In no particular order, they are…

Why good ideas spread by Atul Gawande

In the era of the iPhone, Facebook, and Twitter, we’ve become enamored of ideas that spread as effortlessly as ether. We want frictionless, “turnkey” solutions to the major difficulties of the world—hunger, disease, poverty. We prefer instructional videos to teachers, drones to troops, incentives to institutions. People and institutions can feel messy and anachronistic. They introduce, as the engineers put it, uncontrolled variability. But technology and incentive programs are not enough.

Most of the time, it’s knowing what’s good that’s the problem. But in the cases when the good is known—obvious, even—why is it so hard to put into practice? Why can’t we eat healthier, exercise more, pay attention, follow step-for-step the best practices for doing something?

The way Gawande writes is so clarifying and so deeply empathetic that I could not stop thinking about his words days and weeks after reading them. If you are in any kind of leadership position, this is likely a question you confront daily: how do you shift a culture? How do you make it so that a new initiative that has few immediate benefits but deep long-term value eventually becomes the normal and standard way of doing things?

Gawande’s answer isn’t easy. At the same time, I found it strangely uplifting.

This is Water by David Foster Wallace

Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on.

More astounding than the fact that I only discovered Wallace’s famous 2005 commencement speech this year is how beautiful and elegiac and humbling it remains, all these years later. It is as close to capital-T Truth as anything out there, and I find it impossible to not be slapped in the face with the weight of our own selfness and biases after reading.

Of course, empathy is a hot topic in this day and age. We talk about achieving goals by fostering a community of respect and understanding. But Wallace isn’t talking about empathy towards some end purpose. He is talking about the simple and plain wrongness of our inborn and default belief that we ourselves are the center of everything we know and understand. No matter how rational we think we are, we see a slanted truth. So day in and day out, what more exhausting, important, and critical mission is there than to get past that, to consciously make a choice in how to think?

Lean in by Sheryl Sandberg

The upside of painful knowledge is so much greater than the downside of blissful ignorance.

I fully expect that 25 years from now, any narrative of the history of women in society will cite this book. It is my sincerest hope that when that time comes, it will be because Lean In was a catalyst from which things began to change, one avalanche of spectacular female accomplishment after another.

For myself personally, Sheryl’s book is both a bite from the apple—the problems real, the barriers tangible, the road upwards laden with potholes—and a glass of wine with a confidante, where the most important message is simply that you are not alone, that there is someone rooting for you—many someones, women past and present and future.

It has been a privilege to be a part of a Lean-In circle this year, to swap stories with a group of funny, brilliant, self-assured and self-critical women across many different disciplines. Together, we swam through the doubts, we said “of course this is possible,” and we mined for the bright, shiny shards of greatness within ourselves.

Why can’t we all just get along? by Robert Wright

It’s one thing to say “Isn’t it crazy that you’ll drive 10 miles to save $50 on a $100 purchase but not to save $50 on a $500 purchase?” It’s another thing to say “Isn’t it crazy that you’ll dutifully kill a guy by pulling a lever but refuse on principle to give him a nudge that leads to the same outcome?” The first question is about self-help. The second question is about something more.

If articles were salads, then my go-to would be a bed of behavioral science or psychology tossed with a few generous spoonfuls of culture, philosophy, and perhaps a light evolution dressing. Wright’s salad, then, would be one of the most delicious I’ve ever happened upon. It starts off with a well-beloved philosophical thought exercise and follows up with a few theories on how and why our moral compasses got to be pointed where they are. The article travels far and wide, touching on everything from the best meta-moral theory to hunting woolly mammoths to sports rivalries and global conflicts (Israel and Palestine, American and Iran) to babies and their notions of good and evil.

If Wallace’s “This is Water” holds up a mirror to our biases, Wright’s article sheds some light on why our brain has armed itself with these biases and how they lead to mistruths, strife and tragedy, both big and small.

In the face of these two articles, a simple conclusion became devastatingly clear to me: we ourselves can’t be trusted.

So practice mindfulness, practice kindness. It’s the best we can do.

Cognitive Overhead, Or Why Your Product Isn’t As Simple As You Think by David Lieb

But “simplicity” comes in many flavors. We can make products simpler by optimizing along a number of vectors… But the most important, and often most overlooked, is Cognitive Simplicity.

I hadn’t heard of the framing of “cognitive overhead” to describe products before, but after reading this piece it was the only way I could think about simplicity moving forward. As Lieb so succinctly describes, simplicity isn’t about number of steps or time spent or amount of pixels on screen—it’s about whether a product or feature can be easily explained, easily taught, and easily spread because it’s easy to grok.

I’d actually put Dropbox in the bucket of cognitively simple, because it uses the metaphor of a folder which is pretty well-understood to the folks who care the most about syncing files across multiple devices. Generally, things that claim magic tend to be cognitively simple to grasp. Shazam is one example that Lieb used, and Apple’s fingerprint sensor also falls into this category. (Although, of course, this assume that the magic works and is reliable.)

Conversely, conversations about platforms, APIs or services can often feel cognitively complex. One needs to make many mental leaps to understand the benefits and promises of a platform. (When we were in middle school, my best friend would always tell me that her MacOS was better than my Windows, and that I should switch. But when pressed to explain why it was better, she had little to say beyond that it showed a happy, smiling computer upon startup.) Products or services that grow too many features also take on cognitive complexity. It’s part of the reason why we invested in making Messenger a standalone app from Facebook, with its own distinct look and feel—because people understand messaging with their friends and using Facebook to be distinct activities.

As I’ve written before, true power is the story or narrative that connects so deeply it delivers its listeners a new framework with which to approach their own life. This year, the five articles above have shaped my thinking on how I’ve approached my work, my relationships, and my outlook.

Give them a read. Who knows? Maybe you’ll find them useful too.