Worth Reading: My Most Impactful Books of 2019

In today's podcast, it's going to be a short format style podcast. As you all know, if you're a long-time listener of the show, I love books! I think to learn in long-form shows the effort needed to absorb quality information. A book is an investment of time and investment to reflect on what you’ve learned. A book is a window into how another person’s mind and how they view that premise. With that, let us jump into my most impactful books of 2019.

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Here is a summarized list of book I share in this post:

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan

“...Patrick had changed. He had a sense of patience he had never had before, and with me had real joy about things. It was as if he had been relieved of the duty of caring about the details of life, and he could let that all go. Now it was about being with people, enjoying his sandwich and the walk on the promenade. It was as if we lived a lifetime in a year.” - Lisa Mettes recalling her husband Patrick Mettes after participating in NYU Psilocybin Trial for Terminal Diagnosed Cancer Patients Pg. 356.

Michael Pollan is one of the best journalists out there. I learned so much about the history of psychedelics. It took on a life of its own with people like Timothy Leary, who fanned the flames. These compounds escaped the lab and into the mainstream sooner than what society was ready for. There seems to be a proclivity for these compounds to turn socially transformative. When the revolution comes too soon, the status quo has a backlash.

How to Change Your Mind dives into the history of psychedelics who the people were that started the research. In the latter half examines the neuroscience and psychotherapeutic research that is now in a resurgence after being pushed underground.

Michael Pollan says it best for trying to understand how psychedelics may affect the brain. It feels like you have a fresh coat of snow over the brain, especially at a later age, as analogy thing of shaking a snow globe. The idea is that as we age, we solidify our neural pathways, and they become like ruts in the road. When you take a psychedelic, like psilocybin, in essence, you are smoothing over some of these pathways, which allows you to come to situations with a fresh perspective. 

If you’re curious about all of the rumblings in psychedelic research and the history of why they went underground How to Change Your Mind is a great place to get you started. For a deeper paper cited in this book read “The Entropic Brain: A Theory of Conscious States Informed by Neuroimaging Research with Psychedelic Drugs” by Robin Carhart-Harris who is the Head of the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London.

Born A Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah

“Being chosen is the greatest gift you can give to another human being.” - Trevor Noah

I specifically recommend this as an audiobook. Trevor Noah narrates it himself, which allows for a richer experience to understand what it means to grow up in South Africa by having him adding in the accents such as how his mother spoke.

One of the stories that resonated was the struggles of having a deep relationship with his father. When Trevor was born, it was at the end of the apartheid in South Africa. Although his father was white, there was still a cultural stigma around having mixed children. Trevor couldn't be seen with his father. He tried to have a relationship with him for as long as he could. Eventually, his father moved away, and Trevor couldn't have regular contact. Around the age of 21, Trevor reconnected with his father. He shares how his father had saved a notebook of all the events that Trevor had been a part of as he grew up. Trevor's father had been following along with his life as best as he could. 

Trevor calls it being chosen. I love that quote. You can't give a better gift to someone than choosing that person, choosing to have that person in your life. Overall, Trevor's story reminds me of some of my friends and sharing this idea of cultural chameleons where you don't belong in only one culture. You're able to transform and shape shift into different cultures as needed.

For readers who enjoy autobiographies, this one's for you, or if you want to be exposed to culture unlike where you were born, this will help shake up your world view.

Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body by Daniel Goleman and Richard J. Davison

“Since the essence of meditation is awareness, any sensation that anchors attention can be used as support—and pain particularly can be very effective in focusing.” - Daniel Goleman and Richard J. Davison

Altered Traits was recommended by Nicole Davis on this podcast. It was another book that opened up a lot of new avenues for me because this breaks down the science of mindfulness and meditation. Altered Traits tries to build a framework of science on the reported changes in the brain and body for those that meditate.

For any of you out there who are very scientifically minded like me, this is a great place to start. If you haven't gotten into mindfulness or meditation (more here) yet.

As a final closing thought on this book, is can the idea of altering traits be expanded on? When I take a deep breath it activates the parasympathetic nervous system. My thought here is, can we alter the brain and body at level that we don't realize is taking place, such as posited by mindfulness?

For example, by choosing to work out, are you altering traits in your body and your brain? Or by choosing to eat healthily, are you changing other traits? And you do this over long periods do you continue to create new traits within yourself? There's also a case to be made that psychedelics may be activating some traits that meditation and mindfulness do, by compressing the window at which you need to be practicing if we're going to believe the 10,000-hour rule. 

To reiterate, if you want to understand the science of mindfulness or how they are trying to study what is happening within the brain. Altered Traits is scratching the surface with how science is now catching up to explain what is happening in the brain and body.

Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work by Steven Kolter and Jamie Wheal

“The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.” - David Foster Wallace

Here’s a little background, I read these books in this order, from How to Change Your Mind, Altered Traits, and then went to Stealing Fire. Stealing Fire is encapsulating all of these ideas that I didn't think existed in the same overlapping areas. All of a sudden, it puts the idea of ectstasis or flow in front of you, and I realized this was the common thread I was exploring over the last two books. I had been training myself to be as present as possible, which could be called flow by some definitions.

The book attempts to answer the question: How do we engineer our lives so that we can be in flow more often? I thought this book set up and built a framework of how to use flow as another tool in our lives.I would say flow in my own personal vocabulary, is the ability to be as present as you can for as long as you can.

The authors do temper the idea of what ecstasis triggers for us, the sense timeless, and the infinite present with a caveat, don't become a bliss junky. As we all know, intuitively, there can be too much of a good thing. 

If you're a reader that wants to push the edge of performance Stealing Fire is worth exploring and doing your homework on what triggers your flow.

I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression by Terrerance Real

“Treating covert depression is like peeling back the layers of an onion. Underneath the covertly depressed man’s addictive defenses lies the pain of a faulty relationship to himself. And at the core of this self-disorder lies the unresolved pain of childhood trauma.” - Terrerance Real from I Don’t Want To Talk About It, Pg. 279

This book was recommended many times by none other than Dr. Peter Attia. I've talked about him many times on this podcast or shared his podcast, The Drive. 

I Don't Want to Talk About It is another book that had a tremendous emotional impact on me because we can look at depression with a different lens. Most of us understand the DSM-5 version of what depression is; the turning inward on oneself, a lack of energy, not wanting to leave the house, etcetera. 

Terrance lays out the idea that this may not be the whole picture. There are other ways that depression manifests itself. So the original version I described is called overt depression. What Terrance describes is covert depression, males, in particular, are predisposed to this likely due to the way they are socialized.

That means even though a male may be covertly depressed. They can still perform in the roles that they're supposed to well enough, but they cope with it in other ways. They'll become workaholics, they'll drink, they'll become abusive. They become destructive forces to those around them.

The entire book is built around Terrence talking about his own experiences and breaking that cycle. He also shares experiences as a family therapist with how he helps others work through their trauma. It's a pathway out of the darkness.

If anyone who is going to be a parent or honestly a male should look into I Don't Want To Talk About It. Or if you want to understand how men may process their own emotions or not have a deep connection to their emotional side. This book allows for new insights to help see behaviors with fresh eyes.

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein

“I could show somebody in two minutes what would take them years of screwing around on the fingerboard like I did to find it. You don't know what's right or what's wrong. You don't have that in your head you're just trying to find a solution to problems, and after fifty lifetimes, it starts to come together for you. It's slow, but at the same time, there’s something to learning that way.” - Jack Cecchini from Range by David Epstein

As many of you know, I try to explore as broadly as possible. Maybe it's part of my engineering background, or perhaps it's a quirk of my personality, but I believe in looking at skills across the spectrum.

What are the skills that you can distill down and be a top performer with or perform within the top eighty percent? I think that's important. This book explores many of the ideas within companies like serial innovators, or looking at unique individuals that can blend skills that don’t seem intuitive. As humans we tend to look at starting in a new domain as waste but that is a sunk cost fallacy. 

For anyone interested in this, there is an idea of making your own category, a category of one. And it's looking at what you can bring to the table that only you can provide. What are the unique blending of skills that make you, you? What makes up your secret sauce? I think this generalist idea comes back because you'll become a generalized specialist at some point. Eventually, you will choose something to specialize in because you've just tried so many different things, and one thing scratches your itch enough.

I'm here talking to you guys in podcasting or writing. Right now, I am still a podcast writer, right? That's what I'm focusing on as my product in quotation marks. But I'm going to continue to absorb information across domains to then feed into the podcasting domain as an example.

Range is for anyone interested in shaking up their assumptions on learning. I find that most skills you acquire can be used in situations you never thought would pay off. Range makes a case for you to be as broad of a learner as possible. 

The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop

“Technology isn’t destiny, no matter how inexorable its evolution may seem; the way its capabilities are used is as much a matter of cultural choice and historical accident as politics is or fashion.” - M. Mitchell Waldrop from The Dream Machine Pg. 444 

Below is a small preface to what makes The Dream Machine such a unique book, painting a picture of why the world has computers today:

"Behind every great revolution is a vision and behind perhaps the greatest revolution of our time, personal computing, is the vision of J.C.R. Licklider. He did not design the first personal computers or write the software that ran on them, nor was he involved in the legendary early companies that brought them to the forefront of our everyday experience. He was instead a relentless visionary that saw the potential of the way individuals could interact with computers and software."

In this book, it chronicles the life of J.C.R Licklider as I said above, but it is so much more than that. It talks about how Lick was at this unique intersection across domains. He started as a psychologist in psychoacoustics, how the brain interprets sounds. Then he became interested in machines that were computers. They were mechanical at first, and there's something about them that captured his attention. One of the first projects that he got to work on was thinking about human factors with computers, how will people interface with this technology.

Licklider was truly ahead of his time with his ideas; one such paper was called Man-Computer Symbiosis. He believed that computers would one day be our ultimate partners, not overtake us like the AI industry would like us to understand. No, he thought that AI or computers would do the routinized work, the automated work for us so that we as humans could do more of what we're best at, which is creativity. Allowing us to synthesize and create. The computers are there to facilitate the data gathering, or test our hypothesis more effectively. 

Lick was the Johnny Appleseed for computer research in the early days. He was the first director of the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) at ARPA, the United States Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. They gave him money, and he went around the United States giving it to universities and other researchers. He planted the seed for the computer science industry, as we see it today, what I'm using right now to talk to the world is fruits of that 60-year legacy.

He has more influential papers like the Man-Computer Symbiosis that was mentioned above. The Computer As A Communication Device is another one. He also wrote of an idea that is similar to the internet as we call it today, but is closer to science fiction in name The Intergalactic Network. All these papers are worth the time to read in and of themselves because it feels like this technology was always here, but the ideas had to come from somewhere first!

It's so exciting to see how Lick made an impact on people. He would look for people vision and fund people. Lick wasn't the type to hold your hand, but he would want you to create your vision. Try to make it real, live in the future. Lick's superpower wasn't building technology; it was giving away ideas and allow those that could develop technology to make that jump to reality.

As an engineer, I think this book should be given to every engineering and computer science student. I may go so far as to say that everyone should read this book because we are reaping the rewards of an entire industry of researchers and thinkers that never looked to sell it or keep the technology for themselves. We should know the foundation of where the technology that we're building on and using comes from because that is the only way we can continue to iterate.

Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality by Anthony De Mello

”The beauty of an action comes not from its having become a habit but from its sensitivity, consciousness, clarity of perception, and accuracy of response.” - Anthony De Mello from Awareness

I used Awareness as my sleep aid to clear my brain, and it felt like a soothing wave over me. I would read one section each night and let it sit with me as I slept. It is excerpted talks from Tony onstage as he would have given them, and he doesn't beat around the bush. I don't think everyone is going to be impacted the same way that I was, but I think it's worth checking out because you may find something in it that you wouldn't expect. For me, this is not my typical kind of book, but I got so much value and processed so much of my inner turmoil in many ways. Helping me to let go of thoughts that I hadn't processed before. I would recommend Awareness to anyone. I don’t know what you’ll get out of it specifically but I’m sure one passage will resonate. This book has now become my most gifted book, at least for 2019.

Closing

“Books are among the most beautifully engineered, and human-engineered, components in existence, and they will continue to be functionally important within the context of man-computer symbiosis. (Hopefully, the computer will expedite the finding, delivering, and returning of books.)” - J.C.R. Licklider from Man-Computer Symbiosis

I hope you find value in these books and, at the very least, share a book with someone this year. As the year ends, think about the books that you've read, because I think a lot of people try to read just for reading sake, but it's not about just reading. It's about taking something away from these books. For me to look at all the books I have read and parse down, which have made an impact on me was more difficult than expected. Furthermore, by taking the time to share these books with you I have made more connections by outlining them here. I would appreciate all of you if you shared what books you found valuable in 2019 as well, if not with me, but someone you think could use it.

 
Erich WenzelBooks, Reading, Books of 2019, Audiobooks, Michael Pollan, How to change your mind, Trevor Noah, Reading Lists, Altered Traits by Daniel Goleman and Richard J. Davison, Worth Reading, Stealing Fire by Steven Kolter and Jamie Wheal, I Don't Want To Talk About It by Terrerance Real, Range by David Epstein, The Dream Machine By M. Mitchell Waldrop, Awareness by Anthony De Mello, J.C.R Licklider, Psychedelics Research, Robin Carhart-Harriss, Cultural Chameleon, Ecstasis, Flow, Covert Depression, Generalized Specialist, Human Factors, Man-Computer Symbiosis1 Comment