122 Lessons From 36 Books I Read In 2020
By: Lucas T. Jahn
Tags: Reading, 2020, Lessons Learned, Books

This year, I tried to read as much as I can. I read at least one hour before work every morning. This allowed me to learn from many different writers on a large range of topics, including founding a startup, caring about the environment, or comprehending the wonders of the cosmos. I wish I could remember everything I read, but because I cannot, I created this post to fall back on in the future.

Notes:

These short lessons are not everything to be learned from the featured books but what stuck with me

The ideas are not necessarily the author’s alone, but occasionally based on other people’s work

Some statements are quotes or direct excerpts, some are summarized statements from me

A couple of points are to be taken humorously

I do not necessarily recommend, or have enjoyed reading, every book on this list

100 Dollar Startup — Chris Guillebeau

When starting a business find the convergence point between your hobby and what customers are willing to pay for. Creating value means helping people pursue their hobbies and reach their goals. Your biggest enemy is inertia. You cannot make a sale if your site is not up.

Anything You Want — Derek Sivers

Success comes from persistently improving and inventing, not from persistently doing what’s not working. When you say “no” to most things, you leave room in your life to throw yourself completely into that rare thing that makes you say “HELL YEAH!” The way to grow your business is to focus entirely on your existing customers. Just thrill them, and they’ll tell everyone.

Atomic Habits — James Clear

All behavior is driven by the desire to solve a problem. Success is the product of daily habits — not once-in-a-lifetime transformations. Changes that seem small and unimportant at first will compound into remarkable results if you’re willing to stick with them for years. We have the brains of our ancestors but temptations they never had to face. It is the anticipation of a reward — not the fulfillment of it — that gets us to take action.

Blue Ocean Strategy — Renée Mauborgne, W. Chan Kim

Instead of trying to match or beat them [your competitors] on cost or quality, make the other players irrelevant — by staking out new market space where competitors haven’t ventured. The question is not so much, how the customers are different, but rather what the customers commonly value.

Contagious — Jonah Berger

While traditional advertising is still useful, word of mouth from everyday Joes and Janes is at least ten times more effective. Word of mouth tends to reach people who are actually interested in the topic being discussed. People don’t think in terms of information. They think in terms of narratives. But while people focus on the story itself, information comes along for the ride. Virality is most valuable when the brand or product benefit is integral to the story. When it’s woven so deeply into the narrative that people can’t tell the story without mentioning it.

Cosmos — Carl Sagan

The human mind is devised in a way to take everything around us for granted. Compared to a star, we are like mayflies, fleeting ephemeral creatures who live out their whole lives in the course of a single day. The cosmos helps to shine a light on what is around us, and that in comparison to life on earth, we don‘t have any other suitable place to live. Mars may be a remote possibility, but its a horrible trade to earth. We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost between two spiral arms in the outskirts of a galaxy which is a member of a sparse cluster of galaxies, tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people. There seem to be many people who simply wish to be told an answer, any answer, and thereby avoid the burden of keeping two mutually exclusive possibilities in their heads at the same time.

Crush It — Gary Vaynerchuk

Everybody needs to build a personal brand to stay relevant.

David And Goliath — Malcolm Gladwell

In some individuals, tragedy and adversity breed resilience. It is often those individuals that advance our society through not ‚thinking normal‘. We strive for the best and attach great importance to getting into the finest institutions we can. But rarely do we stop and consider whether the most prestigious of institutions is always in our best interest. The phenomenon of relative deprivation applied to education is called — appropriately enough — the “Big Fish–Little Pond Effect.” The more elite an educational institution is, the worse students feel about their own academic abilities.

Educated — Tara Westover

To be free means much more than freedom on a physical level. To be free means to be free of your own internal constraints, to break away from your guilt, superstitions, fears and even hopes.

Everything Is Fucked — Mark Manson

The paradox of progress: The better things get, the more anxious and desperate we all seem to feel. By experiencing our hopes, we lose them. The only thing that can ever truly destroy your dream is to have it come true. Our minds amplify our problems to fit the degree of stress we expect to experience. The fact is that we require more than willpower to achieve self-control. It turns out that our emotions are instrumental in our decision-making and our actions. We are moved to action only by emotion, not by rationality. Over the last couple of decades, people seem to have confused the basic human rights with not experiencing any discomfort. People want freedom to express themselves, but they don’t want to have to deal with views that upset or offend them in some way. They want freedom of enterprise, but they don’t want to pay taxes to support legal machinery that makes that freedom possible. They want equality, but they don’t want to accept that equality requires that everybody experienced the same pain, not that everybody experienced the same pleasure.

Cause Of Flight: Africa — Reinhard Brockmann

Migration is, has always been, and always will be, part of human nature. The most fundamental human right is the right to have rights. Women invest more money in education than men. Empowering women means empowering future generations. Investing money in feeding school children is one of the best tools of development corporation. It means that parents have an incentive of sending their kids to school as they do not have to feed them. The problem is not the level of food production but the distribution.

How Democracies Die — Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt

Litmus Test for Politicians

We should worry when a politician

1) rejects, in words or action, the democratic rules of the game,

2) denies the legitimacy of opponents,

3) tolerates or encourages violence, or

4) indicates a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media.

How To Win Friends And Influence People — Dale Carnegie

People crave for nothing more than for appreciation. If you want to convince people of doing something, make them want to do it themselves. Remember that the people you are talking to are a hundred times more interested in themselves and their wants and problems than they are in you and your problems. A person’s toothache means more to that person than a famine in China which kills a million people.

Influence — Robert Cialdini

Most of the time, humans act on auto-pilot utilizing cognitive shortcuts. Consistency Principle: Sealed within the fortress walls of rigid consistency, we can be impervious to the sieges of reason. People are more motivated by the thought of losing something than by the thought of gaining something of equal value.

Lost And Founder — Rand Fishkin

A value is only a value when it costs you money. Startups, and their culture, are built around their founders. Founding a startup is hard. Public perception is distorted by the few highly successful cases. Most startups fail, if not outright, then in the eyes of their investors. An MVP is only a good idea for a brand that has not yet a substantial following. Releasing a product that doesn’t work properly will otherwise create a long-term negative impression. Aim for an EVP — exceptional viable product — instead. Build your expertise before you build your network, and build your network before you build your company.

Man’s Search For Meaning — Viktor Frankl

Humour is one of the soul’s weapons in the fight for self-preservation. There is no general meaning of life, everybody has to find the meaning of their life, or a part of it, for themselves. Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to “be happy.” Once the reason is found, however, one becomes happy automatically. As we see, a human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy.

Meditations — Marcus Aurelius

Choose not to be harmed — and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed — and you haven’t been. The cucumber is bitter? Then throw it out. It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own. Treat what you don’t have as nonexistent. Look at what you have, the things you value most, and think of how much you’d crave them if you didn’t have them. Forget everything else. Keep hold of this alone and remember it: Each of us lives only now, this brief instant.

Originals — Adam Grant

The hallmark of originality is rejecting the default and exploring whether a better option exists. Becoming original is not the easiest path in the pursuit of happiness, but it leaves us perfectly poised for the happiness of pursuit. Triple the number of ideas you generate.

Photographing Wild — Paul Nicklen

Wherever you are, whatever you shoot, whichever equipment you use — tell a story.

Pitch Perfect — Bill McGowan

When in doubt err on the side of brevity. If everybody else is doing it, you don’t want to do it. Paint a picture in your listener’s head.

Predictably Irrational — Dan Ariely

Most people don’t know what they want unless they see it in context. Even the most brilliant and rational person, in the heat of passion, seems to be absolutely and completely divorced from the per­son he thought he was. Money, as it turns out, is very often the most expensive way to motivate people. Social norms are not only cheaper but often more effective as well. Zero is not just another discount. Zero is a dif­ferent place. The difference between two cents and one cent is small. But the difference between one cent and zero is huge! A stereotype is a way of categorizing information, in the hope of pre­dicting experiences. Stereotypes are not intrinsically malevolent. They provide shortcuts in our never-ending attempt to make sense of complicated surroundings. Our irrational behaviours are neither random nor senseless — they are systematic and predictable. We all make the same types of mistakes over and over, because of the basic wiring of our brains. We are pawns in a game whose forces we largely fail to comprehend. We usually think of ourselves as sitting in the driver’s seat, with ultimate control over the decisions we make and the direction our life takes; but, alas, this perception has more to do with our desires — with how we want to view ourselves — than with reality.

Robinson Crusoe — Daniel Defoe

Make do with what you have, and improve upon it.

Seeking Wisdom — From Darwin To Munger — Peter Bevelin

Without stress, there would be no life. Complete freedom from stress is death. Cultural evolution is faster than genetic evolution since it allows much of what we learn to be passed on and combined with what others around us have learned. Every human is born selfish, that is a genetical fact. Everything we do that appears to be altruistic is in our own self-interest. We do it for social status, to avoid guilt and many other reasons. Don’t confuse activity with results. There is no reason to do a good job with something you shouldn’t do in the first place. What is true depends on the amount of evidence supporting it, not by the lack of evidence against it.

Should We Eat Meat? — Vaclav Smil

Kōbe beef from Hyōgo prefecture is produced by feeding penned heifers for up to three years, regularly massaging them and giving them beer to drink during the summer. Meat’s importance in human diets is primarily due to the supply of high-quality protein, secondarily to the provision of essential fatty acids and micronutrients and finally as a source of food energy. Prolonged feeding on nothing but lean meat causes acute malnutrition known as rabbit starvation (or mal de caribou of the French explorers) that brings nausea, diarrhoea and eventual death.

Silent Spring — Rachel Carson

Man is nature’s cancer, multiplying through cell division until the entire organism, earth, dies. But man is also nature’s immune system, fighting invaders with cunning. Nature has introduced great variety into the landscape, but man has displayed a passion for simplifying it. The balance of nature is not a status quo; it is fluid, ever-shifting, in a constant state of adjustment. Man, too, is part of this balance. Sometimes the balance is in his favour; sometimes — and all too often through his own activities — it is shifted to his disadvantage. The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized. Given time — time not in years but in millennia — life adjusts, and a balance has been reached. For time is the essential ingredient; but in the modern world there is no time. The rapidity of change and the speed with which new situations are created follow the impetuous and heedless pace of man rather than the deliberate pace of nature. Silent Spring will continue to remind us that in our over-organized and over- mechanized age, individual initiative and courage still count: change can be brought about, not through incitement to war or violent revolution, but rather by altering the direction of our thinking about the world we live in.

Start With Why — Simon Sinek

There are only two ways to influence human behavior: you can manipulate it or you can inspire it. There is a big difference between repeat business and loyalty. Repeat business is when people do business with you multiple times. Loyalty is when people are willing to turn down a better product or a better price to continue doing business with you. Great organizations become great because the people inside the organization feel protected. The strong sense of culture creates a sense of belonging and acts like a net. People come to work knowing that their bosses, colleagues and the organization as a whole will look out for them. This results in reciprocal behaviour.

The Book Of Joy — Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, Douglas Carlton Abrams

Lasting happiness cannot be found in pursuit of any goal or achievement. It does not reside in fortune or fame. It resides only in the human mind and heart. Joy is much bigger than happiness. While happiness is often seen as being dependent on external circumstances, joy is not. Stress is a building block of life. Without stress and opposition, complex life like ours would never have developed. We would never have come into being. Stress means life adapts to different circumstances, life evolves and developed. While changing our emotions is quite hard, changing our perspective is actually relatively easy. It is a part of our mind, over which we have influence. The way you see the world, the meaning you give to what you witness, changes the way you feel. If we see a person who is being crushed by a rock, the goal is not to get under the rock and feel what they are feeling; it is to help to remove the rock.

The Four-Hour Work Week — Tim Ferriss

Emphasize strengths, don’t fix weaknesses. If you focus on your weaknesses, you might become mediocre, nothing more. Efficiency and Effectiveness are two different things. Effectiveness means doing the task at hand in the best possible way. But who says if the task is even important? Efficient means to only focus on the important tasks. Eustress is the opposite of distress. It refers to positive stress needed to push our boundaries.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things — Ben Horowitz

Ask: ‚What are we not doing?‘ Focus on where you are going rather than on what you hope to avoid. There are no shortcuts to knowledge, especially knowledge gained from personal experience. Following conventional wisdom and relying on shortcuts can be worse than knowing nothing at all.

The Lean Startup — Eric Ries

Learning is the essential unit of progress for startups If there is a problem, ask ‘why’ five times to uncover the root cause of the problem. As you consider building your own minimum viable product, let this simple rule suffice: remove any feature, process, or effort that does not contribute directly to the learning you seek.

The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People — Steven Covey

Life is, by nature, highly interdependent. To try to achieve maximum effectiveness through independence is like trying to play tennis with a golf club — the tool is not suited to the reality. Each of us tends to think we see things as they are, that we are objective. But this is not the case. We see the world, not as it is, but as we are — or, as we are conditioned to see it. When we open our mouths to describe what we see, we in effect describe ourselves, our perceptions, our paradigms. A habit lies at the intersection of knowledge, skill, and desire. Knowledge is the theoretical paradigm, the what to do and the why. Skill is the how to do. And desire is the motivation, the want to do. In order to make something a habit in our lives, we have to have all three.

The Sixth Extinction — Elizabeth Kolbert

Men never really left in harmony with nature. Even the first hunter-gatherers altered the world, completely imperceptible to them. Humans have shaped the earth so much on the last centuries that the current episode is referred to as Anthropocene. As humans, we are in a position to decide which legacy we will leave behind. At the same time, by altering the environment, we might be dooming our own species.

The Storytelling Animal — Jonathan Gottschall

Sex differences in children’s play reflect the fact that biological evolution is slow, while cultural evolution is fast. We use story and fiction to practice for the real world. Mirror neurons in our brains allow us to feel the story. We do not only experience it mentally but also physically — our hearts race, we breathe faster, and sweat more. A story, in other words, continues to fulfil its ancient function of binding society, reinforcing the set of common values, and strengthening the types of common culture. When we read non-fiction, we read with our shields up. We are critical and sceptical. When we are absorbed in the story, we drop our intellectual guard. We are moved emotionally, and this seems to leave us defenseless. There are several surprises about stories. The first is that we spend a great deal of time in fictional worlds, whether in daydreams, novels, confabulations, or life narratives. When all is tallied up, the decades we spend in the realm of fantasy outstrip the time we spend in the real world.

The Thank You Economy — Gary Vaynerchuk

In the end, no matter what obstacles a company faces, the solution will always be the same. Competitors are bigger? Outcare them. They’re cheaper? Outcare them. They’ve got celebrity status and you don’t? Outcare them.

What They Don’t Teach You At Harvard Business School — Mark McCormack

Learn to listen aggressively. Manage unconventionally. Don’t just look for opportunities to do the unexpected. Create them. Aggressively pursue change. Make managing an active verb. The smarter you make the people who work for you look, the smarter you are going to look as a manager.

Zero To One — Peter Thiel

Every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1. The act of creation is singular, as is the moment of creation, and the result is something fresh and strange. Horizontal innovation is essentially globalization. Bringing technology that works to new places. Making more of the same. Vertical innovation is developing something entirely new. Disruption has recently transmogrified into a self-congratulatory buzzword for anything posing as trendy and new. When you start something, the first and most crucial decision you make is whom to start it with. Choosing a co-founder is like getting married, and founder conflict is just as ugly as divorce. Often regarded as beneficial, competition can be a sign of doing something wrong. If the market gets too crowded, then you are not in the winner’s lane.

I hope this selection of insights has given you a taste of what knowledge these books have to offer. If you have any questions, please let me know. I am also keen for any book suggestions, so please comment away!