I know I’ve heard the name Malcom Gladwell before, but I do not know where or why I know it. I know he said something about not thinking people should work remotely despite him working remotely, but I feel like I’ve heard of him before. So I figured I should check out a book of his so I could try and remember. It did not remind me, but I think I understand his comments now.

The book is essentially an explanation that people who seem extraordinary or exceptional in some way, people who are outliers, are not actually that strange when you put them into their fuller context. Looking at someone’s background and upbringing can bring to light why they were able to succeed when other people failed, such as Bill Gates getting access to a computer at a young age before they were available publicly, which meant he had more experience than anyone else. Or people being born at a certain time of year make them more likely to be great hockey players because they were able to start training earlier.

I feel like in 2008 this was likely a bit more revolutionary, but in the age where I see more and more people questioning how the rich and famous got that way and nepotism is a more commonly known source of how people got into an industry, this might be one of those books that I came to far too late to get the impact that I was intended to get from it.

Not to mention it does get uncomfortable the further it goes. While there’s a sense of getting fuller context of individuals earlier on, when it moves to talking about foreign groups there’s an uncomfortable western lens put on things. Chinese kids are good at math because of language with no mention of the culture. The KIPP school is talked about as if the kids just need discipline and an opportunity without looking at the larger context of what a else a low income child might need. Korean pilots needed to be more American in their communication style.1 There’s this sense of finding one clean-enough explanation and stopping that became much more evident as the book talked about larger and larger groups that were less western.

Still, for the time and if you did not think about it much before, this might not be a bad place to start. I tend to assume we all know that people that are put up on a pedestal as exceptional (And then later transforms into an unattainable expectation) have most of their context removed, but I am often proven wrong in that regard. If you’ve never thought about it, this might be a good place to start.

1. Which was something that gave me flashbacks to the Netflix book in particular [↩]

This was a big year of me reading nonfiction, particularly in the latter half of the year. With my whole life going to absolute hell this year, finding some advice to create structure was something that I ended up gravitating to. Also, nonfiction was a lot easier on the brain than fiction as I was recovering.

Here are the top 5 nonfiction books I read this year! These may not be the best for everyone, but these are the ones that stuck with me the most and the ones that I could find myself recommending to others.

Be Scared of Everything

I don’t read many essay collections, mostly because I don’t understand why these exist. But I finally gave one of them a chance and was pretty entertained by some of the winding thoughts that came out of this! It’s a new format for me, and one that I’m actually pretty intrigued by. I will probably pick this one up again, but I’m feeling like I might give others essay collections a shot just to see what else might be out there.

One Year to an Organized Work Life review

Of all of the organize your life books I read this year, this was probably the best. Most of the advice in these books is pretty repetitive, but this one gathered most of the concepts together and put them into a very clear, structured plan. Not a quick fix, but a year long, week by week slow process that you can follow and adapt into your life in a manageable, more long term way.

Designing your Life

This book was probably the one that impacted me the most this year. Not because I followed what it said, but because it was the framing device I think I’ve been looking for in all the self help books. It was a framework to build methodologies off of to figure out how I could approach my own journey, and for that it was probably the best thing I read this year.

Measure What Matters

I didn’t read as many business-specific books this year, but this one was delightfully practical. I did just read it so that I could throw it at coworkers instead of having to sit down and explain this concept over and over again, and I am pleased to say that I fully intend to now throw this book at just about everyone who asks me about metrics and analytics so they can get a base understanding.

The Virtual Self

As someone who is now tracking far too much of their personal life in spreadsheets and other digital formats, this was a pretty interesting look at some of the other motivations and uses of tracking. I am not necessarily up for sharing private data about my recovery publicly, but it is good to hear accounts of how that level of transparency can be used for good rather than just advertising and varying degrees of evil.

I thought I had read this book before when I took it out, but there was no history on it. Upon closer investigation, this appears to be a part 2 to his previous book: Hooked. And it is weird.

This book largely focuses on different strategies to take back your time and how to not be so distracted by the world around you. And if you are reading it for that purpose, it is awful. The useful stuff appears on just about every productivity tips list, and there is a complete lack of nuance or acceptance that different people have different lives and needs. The work section in particular really requires that you have control over your own schedule, and he advocates for making your friends and family feel bad for looking at their phones.

But as a sequel to Hooked, it is fascinating. He previously wrote a book about how to use psychology to make addictive products, and in this one he’s putting the onus on the user to not fall for the things he pushed for in the previous one. The first one was from the perspective of the product, this one from the user, and he never puts together that he is remotely responsible for creating the problem in the first place.

And that’s really a larger tech and design issue that I am not getting into right now.

Overall, if you are looking for ways to become better at controlling your own attention, not this one. But if you read Hooked and you want to watch the author completely avoid any accountability in creating a world where technology is specifically designed to be addictive and blame the user for allowing themselves to become addicted to technology and the world at large around them, including I think using several of the same studies from the first book reframed as a bad thing, it’s actually pretty interesting.

Am I having some bad brain times that have made me unable to really read anything fiction, so I’m going to be on a bit of a nonfiction kick for a while? Yep! You have been warned. But this one isn’t self help or about how to better yourself this time! This one is about personal tracking. Which… well, very relevant given all the brain stuff for the moment.

The book explores the people who track their lives digitally and how that impacts both themselves and the world around them. There’s the more traditional things you might expect, like using that data to better optimize your day and otherwise use it for the purpose of improving their lives in some way. But there’s also the lesser talked about portions about people who share this information and develop an audience that are interested in the data they can get about others mundanely shared online, from comparing steps with peers to social media posts documenting the food you eat.

Below all of those levels, I really liked the reflection that a lot of this data collected is not matched with the level of reflection about the meaning of it. It’s definitely something I have seen in previous attempts to otherwise optimize various aspects via data tracking. Also interesting is the more positive social aspects of data sharing, such as being able to more accurately put together the day a pipe bomb went off in Oregon. We hear plenty about the negative aspects of data tracking and putting your information out there, so it’s refreshing to see something positive come of it.

Overall, I thought it was a really interesting read! I liked the discussions around the reasons behind tracking, where there were opportunities, and where it was maybe not accomplishing what people really intended.