The Best Books and Articles I Read in 2022
I love best-of lists, especially year-end best-of lists. They are useful in many ways:
Discover the best pieces you missed.
Provide time to re-read and contemplate pieces you read throughout the year.
Give us recommendations for the future when we are looking for interesting reads.
Get ready for next year by reviewing the information I found useful.
Although I shared many of these this year, here they are all in one place.
Articles
When it comes to work, people love to talk about things that aren’t work. They talk about the tools, strategy, plans, and goals. These are often a distraction. The most important thing is the work. Do the real thing. Don’t do things that aren’t doing the thing. Do the work. It seems stupid to repeat this over and over, but it gets lost. Focus is critical, and desperation is one way to do it.
On the internet, pessimism often wins. In reality, optimism does.
One of the most powerful articles I’ve ever read. Madeleine Schwartz at the Bataclan (terrorist attack) trial (via
)Napoleon was maybe the most competent statesman of all time. He is both an inspiration and a model for managers everywhere. Matt Lakeman does an excellent job of summing up everything you need to know about him.
I remind myself all the time, everything is too slow. Be impatient. Impatience in a stagnant world is a virtue.
To move fast (and be impatience), you need energy and time. Nabeel Qureshi has good advice for this and more.
Where did all the “world historical figures” go? People like Jesus, Socrates, Alexander the Great, Buddha, Genghis Khan, Muhammed, Newton, and Darwin. Could you just try to become one? Someone is trying (
)Maybe the most important part of learning how to program is how to think like a programmer. Once you get the basics, you unlock so much. Building what you want, solving big problems, and learning new languages all becomes easier with the right mindset. Here’s an excellent guide on doing that.
Few early startup stories go into as much detail as this piece on Monzo’s growth does. There are many constraints startups have to deal with at every stage, and how they deal with them sets up how they succeed. Also, a look into how startups can leverage PR, events, and referrals for growth.
Jane Street is this mysterious tech finance company that hires the smartest people in the world. They do a lot of weird things, like focusing on a specific programming language I’ve only heard of them using (OCaml). Byrne Hobart explains what makes them so special.
Lifestyle brands defined the 2010s, what’s next? Religion, ideologies, identity says Toby Shorin in Life After Lifestyle.
Usually, when I go to in-person events, I go for the people I meet and the speaker is a distraction. I went to an event where Bryan Pellegrino spoke and I was extremely surprised. From what I can tell, he is one of the smartest people in crypto, building an important “layer,” with a great team. You can get a sense of why from this interview.
It takes incredible guts to move away from success to try for greater success. It requires a leap. George Hotz, who recently stepped away from comma.ai, his self-driving car company, captures this in The Hero's Journey.
Books
A Timeless Way of Building and A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander. So much of building is search for the “quality without a name,” and this applies well beyond building buildings. Why do some places feel better than others? Christopher Alexander explores this in beautiful depth. It also helps these books are some of the most beautiful books that exist, try to get a physical copy (even if it costs $60), it’s worth it.
Freedom and A Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger. This year, Junger has become one of my favourite authors. His writing is an amazing mix of story and interesting fact collection about every aspect of the topic. Every book I read of his is a treat.
Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge by Paul Feyerabend. Standard ways of thinking constrain you. Standards and norms constrain everything, everywhere. Even places we expect to focus on innovation, like science, are constrained by them. Feyerabend explains this and shows how more chaos can lead to more innovation.
Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor. The best books change you. I changed how I breathe because of Breath. I care about how I am breathing now and have a greater appreciation for its importance in your health.
Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace by Edward Luttwak. People love talking about strategy, but they often don’t know what it means. Luttwak explains, and it is more complicated than you think. In war, it is multi-layer, paradoxical, and complicated. Winning at one level doesn’t mean you win it all, you have to look up and down to make sure you are winning on those levels too.
Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold. I learned to code in kind of an opposite, top-down way by learning how to make small changes to massive codebases and frameworks. Code teaches from 1s and 0s upwards which is interesting. I wish more books went from the most basic parts of their field upwards to the complicated parts.
Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch. As long as we can continue to expand and improve our explanations for everything we’ll be moving in the right direction. This core idea is inspiring, and worth reading the book to grasp (even though it lags in sections).