2023 was full of both wonder and horror, depending on which direction you were looking in and how immersed you were in your personal corner of the world. The news doesn’t help any of us live a more introspective, insightful life. For that we need to open ourselves to new experiences or dive deeper into the pond we’re swimming in already. We ought to be more aware, more open to change, more engaged and more adventurous in our days. And yes, we ought to read more, for the doors books open for us into worlds we’d never experience otherwise.
As with every year, there’s only so many books you can fit in, so we ought to make them worthwhile. This is not a “best of 2023” list, but ten of the books I found most enlightening and informative. There are no fictional novels on this list, but rest assured, some of my favorite books of the year were fiction. This was a year of personal growth, and the reading reflects that. Every book we read is a stepping stone to more books. We, in turn, become what we focus on the most. It’s no mystery that that theme comes up a few times in this list.
Brad Stulberg, The Practice of Groundedness
We must shake ourselves loose from the frantic pursuit of everything and ground ourselves in the things that matter most in our lives. Steady, focused attention on the essential moves us closer to becoming who we want to be.
“When we strive to be everywhere and do everything, we tend to feel like we’re not fully experiencing anything. If we’re not careful and protective of our attention, it can seem like we’re losing control of our lives, bouncing from one distraction to the next.”
“Most breakthroughs rest upon a long-standing foundation of steady and consistent effort. For so many of the meaningful endeavors in our lives, the best way to move fast is to go about it slowly, to proceed with a gentle yet firm persistence.”
Gary Keller, The One Thing
We can’t possibly master everything. We must decide who we will become and focus our attention on achieving it.
“Our purpose sets our priority and our priority determines the productivity our actions produce.”
“One of our biggest challenges is making sure our life’s purpose doesn’t become a beggar’s bowl, a bottomless pit of desire continually searching for the next thing that will make us happy.”
“Pick a direction, start marching down that path, and see how you like it. Time brings clarity and if you find you don’t like it, you can always change your mind. It’s your life.”
“When you can see mastery as a path you go down instead of a destination you arrive at, it starts to feel accessible and attainable. Most assume mastery is an end result, but at its core, mastery is a way of thinking, a way of acting, and a journey you experience.”
Arthur C. Brooks, From Strength to Strength: Finding success, happiness, and deep purpose in the second half of life
We will all face a decline in our fluid intelligence and physical ability. The good news is we can reinvent ourselves to maximize the talents developed over our lifetime. This is expressed as our crystalized intelligence, optimized for our latest stage of life.
“Here is the reality: in practically every high-skill profession, decline sets in sometime between one’s late thirties and early fifties. Sorry, I know that stings. And it gets worse: the more accomplished one is at the peak of one’s career, the more pronounced decline seems once it has set in.”
“If your career relies solely on fluid intelligence, it’s true that you will peak and decline pretty early. But if your career requires crystallized intelligence—or if you can repurpose your professional life to rely more on crystallized intelligence—your peak will come later but your decline will happen much, much later, if ever.”
“You must be prepared to walk away from these achievements and rewards before you feel ready. The decline in your fluid intelligence is a sign that it is time not to rage, which just doubles down on your unsatisfying attachments and leads to frustration. Rather, it is time to scale up your crystallized intelligence, use your wisdom, and share it with others.”
Pico Iyer, The Half Known Life : In Search of Paradise
Human history is a quest a search for that elusive paradise, or heaven on earth. The trouble is we don’t see it when we have it, and we tend to destroy it in our embrace.
“As soon as I came of age, I posted myself full-time in the New World, and started inhaling the gospel of possibility as it came to me through Emerson and Thoreau. Why look to old Europe and the wisdom of conventions? they reminded me: we are wiser than we know, if only we can awaken to a sense of all that lies beyond our knowledge.”
“A true paradise has meaning only after one has outgrown all notions of perfection and taken the measure of the fallen world.”
“Reality is neither an insult nor an aberration, but the partner with whom we have to make our lives.”
“In Japan a cemetery is known as a “city of tomorrow.”
Bill Perkins, Die With Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life
The three currencies in our life are time, money and health. Each stage of life offers an abundance of one or two of the three, but rarely all of them. We must maximize each stage of life based on the currency available to us.
“Unlike school years and round-trip vacations, the end points of most periods in our lives come and go without much fanfare. The periods may overlap, but sooner or later each one comes to an end. Because of this eventual finality of all of life’s passing phases, you can delay some experiences for only so long before the window of opportunity on these experiences shuts forever.”
“Being aware that your time is limited can clearly motivate you to make the most of the time you do have.”
“The more traditional bucket list is usually put together by an older individual who, when confronted with their mortality, begins to scratch out a list of activities and pursuits they not only haven’t done yet but now feel compelled to do quickly, before time runs out. By contrast, by dividing goals into time buckets, you are taking a much more proactive approach to your life. In effect, you’re looking ahead over several coming decades of your life and trying to plan out all the various activities, events, and experiences you’d like to have. Time buckets are proactive and let you plan your life; a bucket list, on the other hand, is a much more reactive effort in a sudden race against time.”
Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way
We have a lifetime to develop our character, with each day an opportunity to find something within us that is divine. Life is meant to be a joyful quest for excellence. The ancient Greeks, flawed as they were, rose to develop greatness within themselves and left a template for humanity.
“We are composite creatures, made up of soul and body, mind and spirit. When men’s attention is fixed upon one to the disregard of the others, human beings result who are only partially developed, their eyes blinded to half of what life offers and the great world holds.”
“If we had no other knowledge of what the Greeks were like, if nothing were left of Greek art and literature, the fact that they were in love with play and played magnificently would be proof enough of how they lived and how they looked at life. Wretched people, toiling people, do not play.”
“To rejoice in life, to find the world beautiful and delightful to live in, was a mark of the Greek spirit which distinguished it from all that had gone before. It is a vital distinction. The joy of life is written upon everything the Greeks left behind and they who leave it out of account fail to reckon with something that is of first importance in understanding how the Greek achievement came to pass in the world of antiquity.”
“Character is a Greek word, but it did not mean to the Greeks what it means to us. To them it stood first for the mark stamped upon the coin, and then for the impress of this or that quality upon a man, as Euripides speaks of the stamp—character—of valor upon Hercules, man the coin, valor the mark imprinted on him. To us a man’s character is that which is peculiarly his own; it distinguishes each one from the rest. To the Greeks it was a man’s share in qualities all men partake of; it united each one to the rest. We are interested in people’s special characteristics, the things in this or that person which are different from the general. The Greeks, on the contrary, thought what was important in a man were precisely the qualities he shared with all mankind. The distinction is a vital one. Our way is to consider each separate thing alone by itself; the Greeks always saw things as parts of a whole, and this habit of mind is stamped upon everything they did.”
John Stevens, Zen Bow, Zen Arrow: The Life and Teachings of Awa Kenzo, the Archery Master from Zen in the Art of Archery
Eliminate clutter from the mind and focus on that which is most essential in the moment.
“If your mind
Targets your soul,
You can abandon the ego with no self,
And make
Each day anew.”
“Continue to progress, do not stagnate. Consider a spinning top. It moves around a stable center. It spins and spins until finally falling over, exhausted.”
Winifred Gallagher, Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life
Focus is the essential ingredient to creativity and effectiveness. Carve out the time necessary to do anything of consequence.
“Paying attention to positive emotions literally expands your world, while focusing on negative feelings shrinks it—a fact that has important implications for your daily experience.”
“Attention, from the Latin for “reach toward,” is the most basic ingredient in any relationship, from a casual friendship to a lifelong marriage. Giving and receiving the undivided sort, however briefly, is the least that one person can do for another and sometimes the most.”
“If most of the time you’re not particularly concerned about whether what you’re doing is work or play, or even whether you’re happy or not, you know you’re living the focused life.”
“Because your remembering self pays attention to your thoughts about your life, rather than to the thing itself, it can be difficult to evaluate the quality of your own experience accurately.”
“Of creativity’s many integers, attention is one of the most important. Whether your form of expression involves concocting a sauce, decorating a room, or writing a poem, you need both an active, exploratory focus on the matter at hand and the long-term concentration required to gain the knowledge and skills that support true mastery.”
Brian P. Moran, The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months
We can do far more than we think we can by creating a sense of urgency and immediacy to our work.
“We mistakenly believe that there is a lot of time left in the year, and we act accordingly. We lack a sense of urgency, not realizing that every week is important, every day is important, every moment is important. Ultimately, effective execution happens daily and weekly!”
“The end of the year represents a line in the sand, a point at which we measure our success or failure. Never mind that it’s an arbitrary deadline; everyone buys into it. It is the deadline that creates the urgency.”
“Periodization began as an athletic training technique designed to dramatically improve performance. Its principles are focus, concentration, and overload on a specific skill or discipline.”
“Without a compelling reason to choose otherwise, most people will take comfortable actions over uncomfortable ones. The issue is that the important actions are often the uncomfortable ones.”
“The one thing that moves the universe is action.”
Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
History repeats, and we must be diligent in learning the lessons of history that we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past.
“The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints.”
“In England and the United States, in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, in Switzerland and Canada, democracy is today sounder than ever before. It has defended itself with courage and energy against the assaults of foreign dictatorship, and has not yielded to dictatorship at home. But if war continues to absorb and dominate it, or if the itch to rule the world requires a large military establishment and appropriation, the freedoms of democracy may one by one succumb to the discipline of arms and strife. If race or class war divides us into hostile camps, changing political argument into blind hate, one side or the other may overturn the hustings with the rule of the sword. If our economy of freedom fails to distribute wealth as ably as it has created it, the road to dictatorship will be open to any man who can persuasively promise security to all; and a martial government, under whatever charming phrases, will engulf the democratic world.”
