This book is a fantasy book. They deal with a magic of sorts. This magic is called “will” and it is the will power we have. There is a hierarchy or a basic pyramid structure where there are peasants on the bottom and powerful people on the top. It makes a general pyramid shape. In our current world, this is still true, but we use money or influence or power to show the hierarchy. In this book, it’s slightly different. They take your “will power” so to speak. So a person might have to give up some of their will to the person higher up on the pyramid. That’s a very basic way of understanding it, but that explains the hierarchy.
Enough about world building though, diving into the plot of the story now. There is also drama, multiple plot lines you need to keep track of. It was high stakes and fun to read through. The author did a good job of thinking through a lot of different view points to make this book, and you can tell. It was good. The book follows a political refugee fearing for his life in this world where if his actual identity is found out, he will probably be publicly executed simply because of who he is.
The main takeaway I got from this book, is that it’s always better to have a good character than to have an advantageous position. Multiple times, the characters who act on their good character eventually get rewarded. Other times, when characters try to take advantage of someone, they eventually falter. Not all the time, but that seems to be a major theme running through the story.
Some quotes, I thought interesting. Far from exhaustive, in no particular order.
“Death is only meaningless if it does not change us, Vis.”
“Nervousness means there’s a fear to be faced ahead, Diago. The man who is never nervous, never does anything hard. The man who is never nervous, never grows.”
“Violence is no answer to grief.”
The book isn’t filled with quotable sections like others, but it is sprinkled with wisdom. I would say more wisdom comes from the plot as a whole and the decisions the main character takes.
]]>While reading this, I kept thinking about how many nuggets of wisdom were in there. Things that I couldn’t really tell any of my sons, but if they read the book they might catch on. There were demons where their main purpose was to keep you from reaching a castle for instance. They would trick you into doing mundane things so you would be distracted so you never end up reaching it. They give you a purpose in something worthless, so you don’t pursue a worth while purpose.
Another big takeaway I got from this book is that curiosity is important. The main character couldn’t have continued on with his mission if he wasn’t curious and asked the right questions. He went from an apathetic character to a boy with a purpose. That came from his questions, curiosity and his willingness to help.
Read the book. It’s quality to length ratio is great. It’s a good book that happens to be short and to the point. That makes it a win win. If you don’t love it, you wasted a week or less reading it!
With it being a short book, it gets a short review. There are a lot of quotable parts to it, and a lot of wisdom sprinkled inside a short book. I promise, you won’t waste your time reading this book.
]]>Curiosity is king. If you aren’t curious about how something works, don’t expect to learn how it works. Staying curious about something helps you enjoy that thing. When you enjoy that thing, you are able to learn more about it and grow. That joy or spark in something helps you stick with something and grow until you are at expert level. A quote from the book talks about this, it’s from Andrew Riess when he said “I would pursue it as long as it was fun and interesting.” Referring to the field of science he was working in.
Another takeaway is that these people aren’t pursuing a prize or prestige. They are simply trying to solve problems or see why something works. Most of these people worked on the project that helped them earn the Nobel Prize, and immediately started on their next project. It was cool to read about. These people simply want to build, make, solve, etc. Rewards and accolades might come, but that isn’t the core driving factor.
They also worked with people who we would consider adversarial. If we think of the Nobel Prize as the end goal, science is a zero sum game. Someone wins and someone doesn’t. But these scientist aren’t like that. If you think of making progress as the goal, then the work isn’t a zero sum game. That is good news because you can make actual progress towards your goals if you don’t think of them as a zero sum game.
In no particular order, here are some quotes that I thought were interesting from the book.
Succeeding is not the goal of the experiment. Learning is.
It is the advice I give to everybody, but I give it to myself also: if it isn’t fun, get out of it.
Often, we have this notion that you have to literally wait for genius to strike. But in reality, you can open the door to genius by relentlessly preparing.
Obviously not exhaustive. I mostly thought these quotes were worth noting because they helped show the thought process for these
I would read this book. It’s a short read, and at the very least, humanizes the intellectual elite. It doesn’t show you what to think, or what to study to be like them. It simply shows you a behind the curtain look at them so you can see how they work.
]]>The premise of the book is that the West has fallen. Even though we see the beautiful statues, and everything else lovely about the West, it is still dead. Like a plant that was uprooted, it might look pretty in a vase for a few days or even weeks, but it will rot. We are in that stage, Kingsnorth posites, of a beautiful plant that has been uprooted but hasn’t officially withered away yet.
He states that the death of the West came around the World Wars, when “The Machine” started to take over. No longer were people content to be people. We had global wars which meant global supply chains so we could kill each other more efficiently. We had the sexual revolution right after that which meant that sex is now divorced from consequences. Cars became popular which meant that we aren’t teathered to a walking distance radius of our home, which means that your home is no longer the center of your world. Home turns to house.
One of the main killers of the West is hyper rational thought. When we act too much like Spok, we get in trouble. We lose our sense of home, we get to a point where we think we can control nature. We stop being resonable, and instead are strictly rational and trying to obtain peak intelligence while forgetting the other side of the equation, which is wisdom.
There is hope in this book. There are practical steps on how to resist this global ‘Machine’ from taking over our lives. Things like telling good stories. Stories that embody the values that our civilization should pass on. Stories that glorify sacrifice for instance.
There are also practical things this book talks about that will help us resist this growing global machine that seems to be taking over every aspect of our life.
Worth reading. If you love the world we live in, hopefully it will give you a new perspective. If you hate this world and think it’s a shell of what it once was, you’ll enjoy it. It will give you words to express what you’ve probably felt. It will give you inspiration that you can in fact live a life without a smart phone.
]]>His first business adventure with bananas was spending most of his money on the unwanted bananas. Ripes were seen as trash to the merchants because they couldn’t sell them fast enough, so if they arrived ripe, they would toss them. Sam spent all the money he had to buy them and sell them himself.
“Sam grew fixated on ripes, recognizing a product others have only seen trash.”
Another quote from the book sums up how creative he was. He always looked for uncommon solutions. He knew his strengths and likewise, he knew his oppponents weaknesses. One great example was when he was competing in a land battle with United Fruit which was the monopoly of the banana industry at the time. They were about 10 times larger than Sam’s business in every metric you could count.
Sam and United Fruit were both buying as much land as they could because they realized it was a finite resource and sooner or later, there wouldn’t be any more left. There was one track of land that had two people claiming ownership of it:
When the mess of deads came to light, United Fruit did what big bureaucracy-heavy companies always do: hired lawyers and investigators to search every file for the identity of the true owner. This took months. In the meantime, Zemurray, meeting separately with each claimant, simply bought the land from them both. He bought it twice– paid a little more, yes, but if you factor in the cost of all those lawyers, probably still spent less than U.F. and came away with the prize.
Zemurray knew it didn’t matter that he only paid the rightful owner, it mattered that he became the rightful owner. That type of creative thinking is how he became one of the most powerful men in the world at that time. All because of some bananas.
Worth reading. It was more of a story, diving into different story lines to give a rough history of people/businesses before Zemurray was involved. That was interesting. I wish it talked more about his war with United Fruit because I think that part of his life was what made him so unique.
]]>I was nervous when I started reading it and I was reading a bunch of Russian names and I feared the rest of the book would be too hard to follow with all the similar sounding, but different Russian names. Turns out that wasn’t a problem at all once you got past the first couple pages.
The book is essentially about a guy Ivan Ilyich who lives the life we all dream of having. He’s rich, loves his job. Has a wife and a few kids. But he ends up dying. The story starts off at his funeral, then jumps back to the beginning of the story in chapter 2 and goes to his death to the end of the book.
The bulk of the book after his life ending injury is spent reevaluating his life choices that lead to his current circumstances.
I loved that quote. It summed up a lot of his problems later on. He felt like he did everything correctly. He went to the good schools and took the jobs that gave him raises and did the work that he was ‘supposed to do’ so that he could have the life he thought was successful. He spends the rest of the book reaping the seeds that he sewed to get that life.
My group of friends is going through a lot of life changes and there have been a lot of moving houses with them. All of them are moving up in house. One friend before fully moving in was complaining about how they were going to need more space. A different friend was talking about extending his house some in order to add another bathroom.
A lot of my friends have moved up in house and once their income comes up they magically find ways to use it even though they were getting by just fine without that income before.
This book made you think about what’s important in life. I guess that’s why it’s a classic and has been around for well over 100 years. The story is a man’s search for meaning knowing his death is coming. There comes a point where he knows he is going to die, but he is trying to figure out if the life he lived was the life you should live.
He had everything by material standards. He was living the dream and most people would agree with that. But on his deathbed he realizes that he really didn’t live the life you should live. I mean the guy didn’t have a single friend at his funeral. Just a bunch of work associates. And they weren’t all that happy to be there. You can also tell the sadness in how his family talks to him after he is ill and he’s more of an inconvenience than anything else. It’s just awkward to be around him. Even though he did everything he was supposed to do by our standards today. He had the nice job, the wife, the social life, the everything. But when it mattered, none of his friends cared about him.
4/5
]]>At my office, there was one gentleman who parks at the closest available spot and then there is me who parks at the farthest available spot. The difference in the two? 25 seconds. So less than a minute difference between the two spots on your way to and from the office. Also. One person takes the elevator and the other person walks up the one flight of stairs. Guess what the difference is with that. Even less and in favor of the stairs and not the elevator. So the difference in parking farther away and taking the stairs is close to 10 seconds total.
We aren’t meant to be comfortable. We aren’t meant to have an easy life. Our purpose in life isn’t built around living an easy life. We all go through life trying to feel as comfortable as possible. Trying to fit in as much as we can. We try to fill out our life with the comforts of life versus actually living life.
I do stupid stuff all the time. At least, my wife tells me that. I run a lot. I love challenging my body with long distance runs. I have a 50k race and a 24 hour race planned for later this fall. Not exactly easy. I’m not doing them becuase they’re easy. I’m doing them because they’re hard.
When you experience things we don’t normally experience becuase we are choosing to be uncomfortable, we grow. I have a car with no AC. It’s a simple thing, but it’s something I can do every day that challenges me to be OK without the comforts of life.
When I th
]]>Values are things that you regard highly on a personal level. That’s what I’m going to mention here.
I tell myself I value reading. I really do. I enjoy reading and I love that most books I read are filled with nuggets of wisdom from men and women smarter than me and I get a chance to hear their wisdom. Some of the time, it’s overwhelming because I will pick up a 1,000 page book and feel like it will never end. Other times I get so excited I’ll have 3 books that I’ve started and I feel like I can’t make any progress.
When things like that happen, I feel overwhelmed and I’ll either stop reading or I’ll just start a new book leaving 3 unfinished books in my wake.
I’m a news junkie. I love reading snippets of news articles. One reason is to stay informed. I think that’s an important virtue in our world. Another reason, I’m not proud of, is to either confirm my suspicions that I was right and make myself feel like I’m always right.
Esspecially on opinion news sites. When someone opines my opinion that I have, I feel validated and want to do that more and more. I’m not proud of that, but it’s pretty accurate.
The reason why I bring that up, is I tell myself that I value reading timeless books more than timely news. Timely news serves a purpose, albeit a small purpose. If you’re anything like the layman, you love feeling validated and watching polarizing news networks helps you feel validated every day.
So if you’re writing down the values that you hold most dear to you, you should take it one step further. Write down what you do. There’s a saying that goes something like this: “Show me your bank statment and I’ll show you what you value.”
There isn’t a bank statement for your time, but you can write it down. You can look at usage data on your phone to see how much time you’re spending on your phone. That’s a big struggle for me. I tell myself I don’t value a phone, but I spend more time on that than on reading. Some of that is work related, but there is a good bit of escapism going on too.
Writing down what you value and writing down what you do will be alarming. Do you value helping people? How much time do you spend helping people? Do you value reading the Bible every day? How much time do you dedicate that that every day? There are about 60 hours a week when you’re not working or sleeping. How are your values filling those times?
We have a tendency to fill the void with the easiest tasks. I’m guilty of it almost daily. It’s easier to scoll through my phone and look at news headlines that don’t impact my day to day life at all than to read the Autobiography of Ben Franklin. (That’s one of my 3 books I’m currently working through).
There’s also this ‘blog’ that I’m not actively publishing. It’s acting more as a place to voice thoughts I have when I’m bored. Is this something I value more than writing or running? Not really. But here I am writing this.
]]>I’m supposed to work 8 hours a day, then I had 5 hours on my phone a day and then throw in sleeping and time with family, my day is done. Between work and my phone, that is a little more than 1/2 the total day. And then sleep (11pm - 5:45 am). That’s about 20 hours of my day where I’m not actively focused on my family or myself. I can’t change sleep that much. I have a lot more control over the first 2 (work and phone). I’m not working 8 hours a day. I’m usually at the office for 9 hours a day, but I’m not working that whole time.
I have been known to play on my phone while at the office from time to time. So if I limit the amount of time on my phone at the office, I might not even have to be at the office for 9 hours a day. I don’t have a time quota to meet. I have a work quota to meet. So if I can get the work done, it doesn’t matter how much or how little I work.
I also spend a lot of time on the phone after I put my son to be and before I go to bed. So that’s from about 9 to 11 PM. If I can cut that out and spend that time reading books, then I could read about 50 pages of a book. Average book being around 250 pages, then I could read 3 new books every month just from that extra found time.
#Running improvements
By cutting phone time after I put my son to bed, I can get about 2 hours a day of my life.
I’ve been cutting my phone use by doing some little times like deleting high usage apps off my phone. Goodbye Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit
]]>The one day I leave something valuable (about a $300 tablet) it gets stolen.
Life is brutal. Life doesn’t care about you. Life could care less if you have a great plan or if you’re a deadbeat. It all seems random for the most part.
I carry a coin around that says “Momento Mori.” It means at any moment I could die. It sounds morbid, but it’s true. Life is indifferent to you.
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