- Wealth Made Easy by Greg Reid
- Harvard Business Review on Emotional Intelligence
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- The Practicing Stoic by Ward Farnsworth
- Unscripted by MJ DeMarco
- The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan
When I put up my blog, I was hoping to do a weekly post on what book I’ve read that week, but I found that when I did finish one, I would be starting on the next one immediately and the ideas from the one before just went up in the ether, or I would get the desire to re-read one of my favorites, or days would go when I wouldn’t pick up a book at all. Work has been keeping me busy after all, but my free time is spread out in gaming, learning JavaScript & Python, relearning Piano and books just happen to be a night habit.
So the weekly blog has never really happened.
But I did get some good news lately, that may open up my free time even more and focus on the business that me and JM are trying to put up, so for week 3 of 2023 I’m doing a book dump of the 6 previous books I’ve read and how they contribute to my own personal development.
I’ve read one piece of fiction, and that is the classic Brave New World. Which I found very disturbing as it talks about certain controversial ideas, such as socialism, authoritarianism, group think, eugenics and the elimination of individuality in the purpose of serving the greater good. Now as a stern advocate of Individualism, I’ve always wanted every person to practice self-reliance and promote co-dependence, where no one person has the ability to control another. In a perfect society, we are specialist in the fields of our desires and contribute to society as the best person we can be. But we are not in a perfect society, and Brave New World takes this to the extreme by eliminating the nuances that make us human into rudimentary categories. You were born an Alpha, and shall forever be an Alpha, or a Gamma or a Delta. As if growth and development can never occur across your lifetime, as if change for the better is impossible. This thought experiment has been explored numerous times, that even a Rick and Morty episode was dedicated towards it.
The biggest take away from Brave New World is simply that human nature is complex, it yearns freedom to choose and decide on it’s own terms, to make mistakes and grow from those mistakes. If a singular entity is set to determine an individuals fate in society, it will never succeed.
So with themes as heavy as what I mentioned, do I recommend Brave New World? It’s an extreme slog of book to complete, as you juggle many characters and events, but if you can power through it then maybe you can also develop a fear of a government that wants to control every aspect of your life.
Among the non-fiction, I’ve read two on business and finance. Wealth Made Easy is a small pocket book with great advice in personal finance and wealth generation, some of it I’ve already began applying. For example, we have always been taught to consider saving money, but the advice is always a certain percentage, like 10 percent per month, but with needs changing constantly, sometimes 10 percent seems impossible for most. But if we think about savings as just your assets growing incrementally over time, it may seem more possible. Something I try to explain to other people, is to think of savings as simply having a larger bank account than the previous paycheck after expenses. It may just be 1 euro more, but the fact that your bank account is larger is already you saving. There are a lot of things to take away from this small book, that I highly recommend anyone who is dealing with money to read it. Think of this book as a manual, not something to read once and move on but to repeatedly return to.
The second book on business and finance is Unscripted by MJ DeMarco, and it has been the most life changing book I have read and it’s quite fortunate that I read this at the start of the year. DeMarco suggests that we are all playing the script to a good life, this script was written decades ago, and has been the same script read and reread to all of us. It goes: Go to School, Do Well in School, Get a Good Job, Work most of your adult life, Retire and Enjoy life until you die.
A lot of people stick by this so called “Tried and Tested” script because is the same rhetoric spouted by the generations before. But the script benefits the businessmen more than you the working man. You work your ass off for pay by the hour only to realize that years have gone by and you are too old to enjoy life to the fullest.
As a company man my entire adult life, I believed in the narrative that a good enough life is found in the dungeons of the rat race labyrinth. All I have to do is get a job with better pay, is what I said to myself before, and I ended up chasing the next workplace to offer a slightly higher pay check. But at the end of last year, when I became jobless for around 2 months and was doing side-gigs to pay the bills, I was overwhelmed by the prospect of owning my time. I was so fed up with doing my job that I was no longer motivated by money, I was just at home and sometimes going to work but only when I wanted to. The freedom felt amazing.
Of course, in a capitalistic society, I still needed to make money, but Unscripted tells me that it doesn’t have to be through trading my personal time. The book goes into great detail with the nuances of starting a business and investing, and I feel like the path to an early retirement is just before me.
So do I recommend this book? Absolutely. It’s the best piece of advice I’ve gotten in a long while.
The next two books is more about personal improvement. The Practicing Stoic by Ward Farnsworth is basically a collection of quotes with some explanations and other anecdotes on Stoicism. And as I have been studying Stoic Philosophy for a while now, I find that this book is not intended for me, as most of the ideas have been explored more thoroughly in other materials that I have read. I think this would be better suited as an introduction to those who are not yet familiar with Stoicism.
I have been reading so much of Harvard Business Reviews that it could potentially eat up a good amount of my budget as these books are expensive as f***. But are they worth it? As curated pieces of information, the books are formatted as academic literature and thus serve to present their topics concisely with enough room to elaborate. I found myself engaged with each topic that I end up rereading them so much. The most recent is on Emotional Intelligence. This book in particular explores how out engagement with people doesn’t always have to be transactional, and that getting to understand people (or in the context of the book team members) will lead to better relationships and better interactions. Definitely a worthwhile read.
The last book is on science and Carl Sagan makes a good point to let the reader know this. The Demon Haunted World is about embracing the scientific process, and forego superstition, hearsay and pseudoscience. And I am more secular than religious lately, so I am all for the critical thinking, but the book is a terrible read. As smart as Carl Sagan was, he is definitely a bad writer. The recurring theme of his writing is to mention the word science as much as he can, that if the book was not as long as it is, anybody could do a drinking game where one would take a shot everytime the word science is mentioned.
Now this is nothing against Carl Sagan personally, as he made major contributions to NASA’s Space Program and thus modern astronomy, but The Demon Haunted World is just a hard book that I am put off picking up another title written by Carl Sagan. Although Cosmos is highly recommended, maybe I will give that a try.
So what is next for me? I have been dealing with non-fiction so much that I feel like I need to take a break from it and dive into fantastic worlds once again. I have been itching to read the Horus Heresy, maybe it’s time to start.
Aga Aquino 
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