Library.

Books

• East of Eden— John Steinbeck

  timshel — thou mayest. choice as the dignity, belief before ability.

• Cannery Row— John Steinbeck

  life is beautiful because it is — no quantified or societal justification needed.

• Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage— Alfred Lansing

  not supermen, just mortal men in extraordinary circumstances. pick a game where boldness and determination still count for something.

• The Billion Dollar Molecule— Barry Werth

  take enough of the right bets and you set yourself apart.

• Poor Charlie's Almanack— Charlie Munger

  mental models as latticework. the lollapalooza is when a bunch of them point the same way at once.

• Principles: Life and Work— Ray Dalio

  maybe it's about maximizing the experiences that give you useful pain — so you can extract and reflect after.

• The Alchemist— Paulo Coelho

  personal legend, intuition, the circular journey where the treasure was where you began.

• Meditations— Marcus Aurelius

  never meant to be read. marcus didn't even give it a title. the most powerful man alive still had to talk himself into being a person every morning — and most of that work is the same work as ours.

• Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder— Nassim Taleb

  the barbell — paranoid on ruin, aggressive on upside, allergic to the medium-risk middle. and via negativa: most improvements come from subtracting harm, not adding fixes.

• How Will You Measure Your Life?— Clayton Christensen

  inaction is action. be conscious about what's important, make time for the things that matter, and don't overprioritize the quantifiable.

• Tabula Rasa: Volume 1— John McPhee

  beauty of life caught in small stories — and how much of it we let go by us.

Essays & Letters

• An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?— Immanuel Kant, 1784

  sapere aude — have the courage to use your own understanding. we don't live in an enlightened age; we live in an age of enlightenment.

• Amazon shareholder letters, 1997–2020— Jeff Bezos

  a quietly furious case for long‑termism. a body is the work of not coming into equilibrium with its environment — so be different on purpose.

On Loop

• Pray for Me— Mustard

  let me do everything that I was created to do — that's the calling, the destiny, and the onus is on you to exact the potential you were given.

Watching

• Whiplash— Damien Chazelle, 2014

  the same paradox as marginalization — you can't internalize the wrong without it defining you, and you can't disregard it either. the ending lands somewhere between Neiman's triumph and his loss.