Library.
A short list of things I've been with recently — some I'm reading, some I keep coming back to.
Books
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East of Eden— John Steinbeck
timshel — thou mayest. choice as the dignity, belief before ability.
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Cannery Row— John Steinbeck
life is beautiful because it is — no quantified or societal justification needed.
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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.
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The Billion Dollar Molecule— Barry Werth
take enough of the right bets and you set yourself apart.
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Poor Charlie's Almanack— Charlie Munger
mental models as latticework. the lollapalooza is when a bunch of them point the same way at once.
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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.
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The Alchemist— Paulo Coelho
personal legend, intuition, the circular journey where the treasure was where you began.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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.