Here are the lessons I learned from all the books I read in 2021!
On Ignorance:
The truth is we don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t even know the questions we need to ask in order to find out, but when we learn one tiny little thing, a dim light comes on in a dark hallway, and suddenly a new question appears. We spend decades, centuries, millennia, trying to answer that one question so that another dim light will come on. That’s science, but that’s also everything else, isn’t it? Try. Experiment. Ask a ton of questions.
-Yaa Gyasi
Transcendent Kingdom
On Mastery:
Instead, chew on one thinker—writer, artist, activity, role model—you really love. Study everything there is to know about that thinker. Then add three people that thinker loved, and find out everything about them. Repeat this as many times as you can. Climb up the tree as far as you can go. Once you build your tree, it’s time to start your own branch.
-Austin Kleon
Steal like an Artist
If you really want to be great at something, you have to truly care about it. If you want to be great in a particular area, you have to obsess over it.
-Kobe Bryant
Mamba Mentality
Discipline is hard—harder than trustworthiness and skill and perhaps even than selflessness. We are by nature flawed and inconstant creatures. We can’t even keep from snacking between meals. We are not built for discipline. We are built for novelty and excitement, not for careful attention to detail. Discipline is something we have to work at.
-Atul Gawande
The Checklist Manifesto
On Death:
As long as we can love each other, and remember the feeling of love we had, we can die without ever really going away. All the love you created is still there. All the memories are still there. You live on—in the hearts of everyone you have touched and nurtured while you were here.
-Mitch Albom
Tuesdays with Morrie
Or, maybe nostalgia is to feel a happiness about something that is over because it is over. That in order to feel happy about it, it must be something that you can’t go back to and affect, that you can’t mess up from where you are now, but also, that you can’t really feel at all.
-Johnny Sun
Goodbye, Again
Because the truth is — we never really lose the people we lose. They are in the sunsets, and in the rain, and in the forests, and in laughter, and music that takes our breath away. We never really lose their love, their beauty, because that energy doesn’t disappear — it finds new ways to reach you. Pay attention.
-Bianca Sparacino
A Gentle Reminder
On Grieving
Sometimes my grief feels as though I’ve been left alone in a room with no doors. Every time I remember that my mother is dead, it feels like I’m colliding with a wall that won’t give. There’s no escape, just a hard surface that I keep ramming into over and over, a reminder of the immutable reality that I will never see her again.
-Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart
But sometimes unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.
-Donna Tartt
The Goldfinch
Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language.
-Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Notes on Grief
The harder it is to say goodbye to sombody, the luckier u are to have met sombody ur going to miss
-Jonny Sun
Everyone’s a Aliebn When Ur a Aliebn Too
On Empathy:
When thou art offended at any man’s fault, forthwith turn to thyself and reflect in what like manner thou dost err thyself;
-Marcus Aurelius
Meditations
Radical empathy…means putting in the work to educate oneself and to listen with a humble heart to understand another’s experience from their perspective, not as we imagine we would feel. Radical empathy is not about you and what you think you would do in a situation you have never been in and perhaps never will.
-Isabel Wilkerson
Caste
To listen well is to figure out what’s on someone’s mind and demonstrate that you care enough to want to know. It’s what we all crave; to be understood as a person with thoughts, emotions, and intentions that are unique and valuable and deserving of attention.
-Kate Murphy
You’re Not Listening
We’re all people—we all struggle and strive for the same things: love, acceptance, a sense of place and belonging. That’s the universal struggle, the human struggle.
Phuc Tran
Sigh, Gone
On Decisions:
At some point almost everyone makes a choice. Some of us don’t even notice it happening, most don’t get to plan it in advance, but there’s always a moment when we take one path instead of another that has consequences for the rest of our lives. It determines the people we will become, in other people’s eyes as well as our own.
-Fredrik Backman
Us Against You
Get calm before you carry on. When you are afraid, you see the world differently. Make as few decisions as possible until the panic has subsided.
-Hans Rosling
Factfulness
We are in the habit of saying that it was not in our power to choose the parents who were allotted to us that they were given to us by chance. But we can choose whose children we would like to be.
-Seneca
On the Shortness of Life
On Change:
But for every step forward we take, we take an almost equally large step back. Seen over time, every change is so slow that it’s barely visible when it’s happening.
-Fredrik Backman
Us Against You
Doing one thing differently is often the same as doing everything differently.
-The Midnight Library
Matt Haig
On Acceptance:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
-Ryan Holiday
The Daily Stoic
On Information Design:
Design is voice…What is to be sought in designs for the display of information is the clear portrayal of complexity. Not the complication of the simple; rather the task of the designer is to give visual access to the subtle and the difficult—that is, the revelation of the complex.
-Edward R. Tufte
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
On Reading:
For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.
-Anne Lammott
Bird by Bird
On Experimenting with Your Ideas:
Most of all, be ready. Keep your eyes open. Listen. Follow your curiosity. Ask questions. Sniff around. Remain open. Trust in the miraculous truth that new and marvelous ideas are looking for human collaborators every single day. Ideas of every kind are constantly galloping toward us, constantly passing through us, constantly trying to get our attention. Let them know you’re available. And for heaven’s sake, try not to miss the next one.
-Elizabeth Gilbert
Big Magic
The truth is, for every good idea, there are a thousand bad ones.
-Mark Randolph
That Will Never Work
On Food/Cooking:
“I hate recipes”
-Samin Nosrat
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat
I've long believed that good food, good eating, is all about risk.
-Anthony Bourdain
Kitchen Confidential
On Paradoxes:
Remember: things can be bad, and getting better.
-Hans Rosling
Factfulness
We are at once far too powerful and not nearly powerful enough. We are powerful enough to radically reshape Earth’s climate and biodiversity, but not powerful enough to choose how we reshape them. We are so powerful that we have escaped our planet’s atmosphere. But we are not powerful enough to save those we love from suffering.
-John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
On Suffering:
The more time you spend thinking about yourself, the more suffering you will experience.
-The Book of Joy
Dalai Lama
On Words:
We can talk and talk and talk about what the pain is like, but we can never manage to convey what it is.
-John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
The human language, as precise as it is with its thousands of words, can still be so wonderfully vague.
-Garth Stein
The Art of Racing in the Rain
On Forgiveness:
Ultimately, forgiveness is usually about one thing—“This is for me, not for you.”
-Robert M. Sapolsky
Behave
…for every wickedness, there is an equal and opposite possibility of redemption.
-Jeanine Cummins
American Dirt
Like you, your parents will change. Many times. Be kind and forgiving when they do.
-Samra Habib
We have Always been Here
On Emotional Intelligence:
“I know that man is capable of great deeds. But if he isn't capable of great emotion, well, he leaves me cold.”
-Albert Camus
The Plague
But it’s not having fear that is the problem. It’s how you handle fear. It’s how you handle losing. It’s how you handle failure that makes the difference in one’s life. The primary difference between a rich person and a poor person is how they manage that fear.
-Robert T. Kiyosaki
Rich Dad Poor Dad
When you’re self-aware, you know your message. When you know your message, it’s easy to keep it consistent in every setting.
-Gary Vaynerchuk
Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook
On Society:
“Every condition exists simply because someone profits by its existence
Matthew Desmond
Evicted
Locks won’t protect you from the thieves, who can get in your if the really want to. They will only protect you from the mostly honest people who might be tempted to try your door if it had no lock.
-Dan Ariely
The Honest Truth about Dishonesty
On Creating:
If you don’t produce, you won’t thrive—no matter how skilled or talented you are.
-Cal Newport
Deep Work
…the moment where you begin, when you commit yourself is the scariest moment.
-Bonnie Tsui
Why We Swim
On Moving Forward:
One of the strange things about adulthood is that you are your current self, but you are also all the selves you used to be, the ones you grew out of but can’t ever quite get rid of.
-John Green
The Anthropocene Reviewed
Choose yourself, unapologetically and without guilt — the way you choose others. Show up for yourself. Give yourself permission to hope, to care, to trust in the things you deeply crave from life. Choose letting go. Choose forgiveness, choose to turn your losses into lessons. Choose to move forward, into the kind of story that fulfills you, into the kind of person that holds your heart just as carefully as you hold theirs, into the kind of happiness that exists because you chose to fight for it, and never stop fighting for it. Never stop.
-Bianca Sparacino
A Gentle Reminder
But now that I am old, moving every year closer to the end of my life, I also feel closer to the beginning. And I remember everything that happened that day because it has happened many times in my life. The same innocence, trust, and restlessness; the wonder, fear, and loneliness. How I lost myself.
-Amy Tan
The Joy Luck Club
On Legacy:
First we only want to be seen, but once we’re seen, that’s not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered.
-Emily St. John Mandel
Station Eleven
On Love:
“Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.”
-Alain de Botton
The Course of Love
I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love.
-Jonathan Saffran Foer
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it’s just too much. The current’s too strong. They’ve got to let go, drift apart. That’s how I think it is with us. It’s a shame, Kath, because we’ve loved each other all our lives. But in the end, we can’t stay together forever
-Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro
Love is never any better than the lover.
-The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison
“A good rule of thumb for any relationship is to leave three unimportant things unsaid each day.”
-Kim Scott
Radical Candor
On Learning/Thinking:
Learn everything. Fill your mind with knowledge – it’s the only kind of power no one can take away from you.
-Min Jin Lee
Pachinko
“Learning how to think” really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.
-David Foster Wallace
This is Water
Every belief will be outgrown, in time. The first lesson of the universe is to never reason from only a single instance. Unless you only have one instance. In which case: find another.
-Richard Powers
Bewilderment
But no matter who stays or who walked away, remember all the things they taught you.
-Morgan Harper Nichols
All Along You were Blooming
On Life:
I never stop being amazed by how simultaneously cruel and beautiful this world can be.
-Nina Riggs
The Bright Hour
Play iterated games. All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.
-Eric Jorgenson, Jack Butcher, Tim Ferriss
The Almanack of Naval Ravikant:
Nothing for me is too early nor too late, which is in due time for thee.
-Marcus Aurelius
Meditations
Whatever you do won’t be enough. Try Anyways.
-Barack Obama
The Promise Land
There are a few years when you make almost all of your important memories. And then you spend the next few decades reliving them.
-Charles Yu
Interior Chinatown
Well that’s the beauty, isn’t it? You just never know how it ends.
-Matt Haig
The Midnight Library
On 2021:
Life is a weird thing. We spend all our time trying to manage different aspects of it, yet we are still largely shaped by things that happen beyond our control. We will never forget this year, not the best of it and not the worse. It will never stop influencing us.
-Fredrik Backman
Us Against You
On Transformation:
Maybe you will never get back to the person you used to be. But maybe that is okay. Maybe that is something to celebrate, something to embrace, because who you were is a version of yourself that exists in the past. A version of yourself that didn’t go through the heartbreak or the hardship; a version of yourself that did not have to navigate all of the ways in which life was trying to weather it. Who you were is a version of yourself that didn’t have to fight their way out of the dark, that didn’t have to deal with the things that caused change to crack within the soul of you — and those things transform a human being.
-Bianca Sparacino
A Gentle Reminder
For Dad:
Thank you for everything, Dad. I’ll be brave, and I’ll be okay. I love you from here to there.
-Adam Silvera
They Both Die at the End