The Books I Read in August '24
Divine Providence, Skin in the Game, and the perils of entertainment.
Friends,
Here are some reflections on the books I read in August. August was a fun month with a couple of trips and a bunch of golfing, plus the start of my favorite part of the year: football season. Fortunately, I still was able to spend a decent amount of time reading, and I read some excellent books. On the docket for this post:
Things that do not change
Super-communicating
Opulence and belief, underneath the shadow of Divine Providence in action
The importance of exposing yourself to the consequences of your actions
The perils of everything becoming entertainment
As always, enjoy and go read.
Goodreads to help each other stay accountable: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/71192081-zack-calvert
Rating System
1 star - Hot garbage. I would like the time I spent reading it back.
2 stars - Alright.
3 stars - Pretty good. Made me think.
4 stars - Excellent, informative, fun, and/or exciting.
5 stars - Foundationally changed my life.
Stats
Time Spent Reading: 25 hours
July Progress: 5 books
2024 Progress: 40/60 books (67%)
Same as Ever by Morgan Housel - 4 stars, 2 hr 49 min
Same as Ever is a collection of essays centered around what doesn’t change in an ever-changing world.
Some ideas endure; these ideas are true. They survive for thousands of years because some things never change. Real truth is eternal.
Each chapter is a short essay focused a major idea Housel has identified as staying constant throughout human history. The writing is concise, straight to the point, and effective. He conveys the main ideas simply, gives a few examples, and lets the reader soak in and reflect on it. Great books make you think, and Same as Ever certainly made me think.
A couple of chapters that struck me: Best Story Wins and Keep Running.
Best Story Wins: “Stories are always more powerful than statistics (pg 56).” We are storytelling creatures and have been since man was endowed with the gift of intellect. We see our lives as stories, and we learn best from stories. What else could explain why most best-selling books are novels or why TV shows dominate our media consumption? Whether it’s Martin Luker King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Ken Burns’ documentaries, or Christopher Nolan’s epic movies, stories are what grab our attention and keep us interested. Learn to tell good stories and you can be quite successful.
Keep Running: “Most competitive advantages eventually die… They tend to be short-lived, often because their success plants the seeds of their own decline (pg 144/149).” Our motivation for working hard is often so we don’t need to work hard in the future. However, as soon as we succeed and become complacent, the decline starts. In anything, from our own health, to parenting kids, to coaching a football team, to running a corporation, we can never be satisfied and stop innovating if we wish to be successful in the long run. To drive this point home, 52% of Fortune 500 companies since 2000 have gone bankrupt, were acquired, or simply cease to exist. Those were the largest companies on the planet, generating the most revenue, who all failed to see their time was short-lived if they didn’t continue to innovate and evolve. Success is fleeting and often not even of our own doing. Do not become complacent, even though the temptation is alluring.
I’ve experienced this principle recently through life’s best teacher: failure. I put in a tremendous amount of hard work and sacrifice at the start of my college education, which had remarkably good results personally and professionally, but in the past 2 years, I found myself coasting through life. The habits that I’d established have gradually fallen away, replaced with complacency, and poorer results have followed. I was no longer as successful in my work, in my personal accomplishments, and simply in developing relationships as I had been.
The image I had of myself was of who I was a couple of years ago, but my actions today don’t often line up with that version of me. After stepping back from the hustle and bustle of the day-to-day to reflect, it became clear that I’d let success go to my head. I drank the rat poison, as Nick Saban would say. I stopped running and was at a standstill, content with what I had done in the past.
Luckily, I can see this and can take steps to flip it. I can always start running again, which I’ve done my best to do. It’s been hard, trying to reformulate my vision of my identity, to accurately see myself as others do, and I can’t claim I fully have that locked down. But I’m back on my feet and taking the first steps to re-enter the race.
Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg - 2 stars, Audio
Supercommunicators is an exploration into how we can learn from the best communicators so that we can learn how to more effectively communicate in every moment of our lives, from important work conversations to important life conversations to simply the basics of talking with someone for the first time. I picked this up because I loved a previous Duhigg book, The Power of Habit, and was hoping for a pleasant experience like I’d had with that. This one didn’t quite live up to my expectations.
Duhigg’s main point, which he elaborates on for quite some time, is that ‘supercommunicators’ communicate effectively by asking questions, matching and mirroring emotions, and fostering connections. For me, those aren’t groundbreaking insights into human communication, rather just taken straight from Dale Carnegie’s wonderful (but horribly titled) How to Win Friends and Influence People. The principles are important, but nothing is new. The examples are different because they’re told from a modern-day lens, but the principles are the exact same. If you want a better communication book, go look at Carnegie instead. You’ll learn more for a quarter of the price.
Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Charles Ryder by Evelyn Waugh - 5 stars, 6 hr 14 min
Bridehead Revisited follows Charles Ryder as he encounters and develops strong relationships with the aristocratic Flyte family, particularly his classmate Sebastian and Sebastian’s sister, Julia. The Flytes live at Brideshead Castle in the English countryside, a massive Victorian-era mansion, and the reader gets a glimpse into the lives of the ultra-wealthy during the abundant 1920’s.
Brideshead Revisited satirically takes on the aristocratic class, which I found to be hilarious and spot-on. If you’ve ever had the misfortune of mingling with the elite and rich, particularly dealing with the highly vain and worldly, you’ll find yourself relating and laughing throughout reading this great novel. Additionally, Brideshead tackles fundamental questions of faith, belief, and death in harrowing ways. The novel quickly turns deeply serious and produces one of the most Catholic scenes I’ve ever encountered in a novel, seemingly out of nowhere.
I’m going to refrain from spoilers because you should absolutely read this book. 4 months later, I am still thinking about Brideshead Revisited. That is the highest praise I can give it. It has made me question by preconceived beliefs, my entire upbringing, and my lack of gratitude in ways I never could have imagined, alongside stirring me to see Divine Providence working in ways unfathomable to the mere human mind. This is a wonderful novel; I strongly encourage you to read it.
Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb - 5 stars, 5 hr 8 min
“Never trust anyone who doesn’t have skin the in game. Without it, fools and crooks will profit, and their mistakes will never come back to haunt them (back cover).” If someone is not exposed to the consequences of their decisions, do not trust them to make those decisions. With no potential consequences, they will maximize their profit at the expense of those who will take on real risk. Here lies the major theme of Taleb’s thought-provoking entry into his Incerto series. Here’s a quick summarization of what that means in practice and who truly has Skin in the Game:
If you run into people on the left column, run away as fast as you can and ensure you are not led astray by the bullshit they espouse. If you encounter someone in the middle, take what they say and do as authentic and courageous; they have legitimate risk and are exposed to the consequences should something go wrong. For those on the right, these are the people whose actions propel society forward; they bring about change that evolves the human race. We should do everything in our power to incentive them to continue doing what they do, even though they may fail.
What troubles me about this idea is how far removed my work is from the consequences of my actions. This not only applies to my current work, but most jobs today, which have no real consequences if poor work is performed, beyond maybe getting fired and let go. Especially in the corporate sphere, employees are often completely protected from the potential consequences of their decisions.
Just look at the 2008 Financial Crisis, which Taleb brings up to hammer his point. Of the people who directly caused that crisis to occur, which significantly negatively affected the lives of millions of low-income Americans and even more across the globe, the vast majority of them received bonuses in the range of millions of dollars from their companies and the federal government when they were bailed out. In what sort of perverse world do we live in which the men who ruined our economy were rewarded with million-dollar bonuses instead of jail time? This is just one example in a world fraught with them. Clearly, the incentive structures in our modern world are misaligned in major ways.
What Taleb writes in Skin in the Game is poignant, critical of much of modernity, and most importantly, true. He gives no fucks and is not afraid to make enemies. He specifically calls out people by name he believes to be charlatans and says exactly how and why they are charlatans. He is brutally honest, poignant in his writing, and takes no prisoners. His authenticity is a breath of fresh air in a world where everyone’s running around like a chicken with its head cut off. Taleb was one of my dad’s favorite authors, and I’ll be reading (and rereading) more of his work in the future.
Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman - 5 stars, 3 hr 39 min
Amusing Ourselves to Death is Neil Postman’s magnum opus, which focuses on the negative effects television has had on society, most especially public discourse. Written in 1985, this work was highly prescient of what was to come over the next 40 years, even as our modes of media switched to the cellphone. His conclusions are startling and true. Amusing Ourselves to Death made me reflect on the role the media I consume has shaped my desires and aims, and the results I found were not pleasant.
“Today, we must look to the city of Las Vegas, Nevada, as a metaphor of our national character and aspiration, its symbol a thirty-foot-high cardboard picture of a slot machine and a chorus girl. For Las Vegas is a city entirely devoted to the idea of entertainment, and as such proclaims the spirit of a culture in which all public discourse increasingly takes the form of entertainment. Our politics, news, athletics, education, and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death (pgs 3-4).”
Postman’s thesis is that television has made it so everything is directed towards the end of entertaining you, and as such, anything whose explicit purpose should not be to entertain has been corrupted as a result. The problem is not movies or television shows. Oppenheimer and Barbie, Stranger Things and The Big Bang Theory are not the problems with television that concern Postman. In fact, he sees those are the goods television is directed towards. Rather CNN, NBA Twitter, Cross-Fire, televangelists, Sesame Street, and Duolingo are the problem he identifies with TV and subsequent media developments.
If politics is not ordered towards serving the common good and solving the pressing problems in the world, but rather towards entertaining the viewer above all else, it ceases to be politics. It’s just entertainment.
If education is not ordered towards learning, sparking curiosity, and the development of one’s mind through tackling hard problems and stretching the brain, but rather towards entertaining the viewer or “learner”, it ceases to be education. It’s just entertainment.
If sports are not ordered towards the awe of athletic achievement, competition, and the mutual desire to improve, but rather towards entertainment, it ceases to be sports. It’s just entertainment.
And if religion is not ordered towards the raising of one’s mind to God, but rather towards entertaining the listener and making him/her feel good, it ceases to be religion. It’s just entertainment.
Entertainment has a place in the world, but if everything is entertainment, we’ve lost the soul of our culture.
Postman makes a compelling argument, and I agree.
Reflecting on my media consumption, I’ve found most of it is used as a numbing agent to entertain me in moments where I do not want to accept the fundamental truths of reality, instead I just want to be entertained and forget about the harsh realities of life. I don’t want to accept the problems in my life as my own, I don’t want to think about how I’m wasting away this precious little time I have on Earth, and I don’t want to come face to face with the fact that I am a flawed person who has a difficult time handling the stresses of daily life. I just want to be entertained because isn’t life supposed to be fun and exciting?
Clearly, this is problematic, and my own experience demonstrates Postman’s thesis: if everything is about entertainment, life loses its real meaning. Our culture of entertainment has produced a cesspool of hedonism not found even in the most pagan parts of Ancient Rome. There is more to life than entertainment, but it is solely our responsibility as individuals with free will and choice to choose the higher good. Our culture will forever be oriented towards the path of least resistance, even if legislation makes strides in the right direction. It is ultimately 100% our own responsibility, each and every one of us, to recognize and strive for greater things in life, to rise above the shallow entertainment that permeates every corner of our age, and to live a life that recognizes the gift that is existing, giving back all that we possibly can.
Get busy living,
Zack