I rushed to finish what I was reading so I could pick up the next. Now I don't do this anymore. Different practices have converged into lifting weights soon after I wake up. Less time is spent reading, fewer books are finished, and less value is placed on it.

If I had to pick five:

The brighter ones I haven't finish, the darker ones I'm not planning to:

The ones in red were either not appealing or intelligible enough. Four years into my reading habit and 50-100 pages into a book, I can tell how glad I would be to have finished it. If I can't explain what I'm reading and why, the opportunity cost is too high.

The ones in yellow were making me spend less time reading than I would like. I will get back to them the moment the themes are on my mind again.

The ones in blue are inventories of technical recipes that I know I will get back to. I finished all the introductory and abstract parts and then looked at what was most relevant to my current situation. When I need the rest in the future, I know where to look.

Here are a few that I believe have impacted how I show up the most:

And I enjoyed these best:

An agreement involves who's going to do what by when. A lot of drama in life is caused because we have unclear and unkept agreements.

'Hello? Good morning, I'm waiting outside the gate.'
'Oh, I have only woken up now. Please give me fifteen minutes.'

As soon as you know you're not going to keep an agreement, let the other party know and renegotiate. You can't do this with 80% of your agreements. Take responsibility for broken agreements without making excuses, justifications, or rationalisations. There's no such thing as a small breach of integrity.

I started considering leaving before he arrived. That would teach him a lesson! But also get me nowhere and I'd need to find someone else.

There are three things to do with people who don't keep their agreements. Let's say they are always late.

Option 1: Ask them if they'd be willing to play this game with you. Explain that being always on time is something you enjoy.

Option 2: Take care of yourself. Always bring a book. Let them know that you don't mind but if they take too long, you may leave.

Option 3: Explain how you like to populate your life with people who keep their agreements. So ask them: would they be willing? Then after the third time they don't keep their agreement, say: 'I hear that you want to keep your agreements, but you're not willing to, as evidenced by the results. I'm going to go ahead and end our relationship.'

A boundary is something we tell someone we will do and it requires them to do nothing.

I tend to be tired around 10 PM and I like to wake up early. I need for us to start watching the movie before 8:30. If you're ready before 8:30, I'll be super excited to watch something together. But if you're busy until 9, I'm going to read my book and go to bed.

To keep the momentum, I did another one in a couple of months. And then when a company reached out, I said yes to running webinars and online classes regularly.

Around ten events into it, I was still feeling the same — stressing out all day before each class. And then when these feelings suddenly stopped, my motivation also plummeted. Without the stress, I just didn't look forward to going through the same topics again. Now I have a theory that people with stage fright make the best presenters. They obsess over the quality of their stuff, worrying about what everyone will think.

Last winter I also did one live event. Someone invited me to speak at their meetup. I put tens of hours into preparation and it went well. I sent the same topic to two conferences but got rejected both times. Not sure how it works.

Two years ago, I was feeling dizzy and mixing words one hour into teaching a class. Now, after twice as long, I'm not even that tired. As a rather quiet person, I also find myself talking more during dinners and walks. When I start explaining my ideas, I'm not rushing to finish after two sentences.

The cars that others arrived in included a Tesla, a 4 Series, and the latest M5 Competition. When I looked up the M5, the cost averaged forty times that of our car's.

At some point, the host asked when I would be looking for a new car. My guess is, meaning to give me space to explain myself. And assuming tax optimisation or other more urgent financial goals. Well, not buying an expensive car is my financial goal. Just like never getting fat is my health-related goal.

Cars are a major status symbol where I live. Appearing to be doing worse than you are is fun most of the time, but sometimes you hear this voice in the back of your head: If you can afford it, imagine how it would feel to show them.

First, this is a sure way to never be satisfied. Second, cars are of no interest to me.

My mantra says that the money I put into savings and investments every month is roughly what my car is worth. This framing feels great. Keeps me out of trouble and in a situation where I can relax about a lot of everyday stuff. My spin class subscription doubled in price? No problem. Save an hour by taking a taxi? Most defintely. Accept a lower offer for a camera I am selling. Overpay for a better plane connection. Be a little kinder than necessary.

See:

Unique ideas or luck are negligible when you increase the considered time horizon. To invest means to do what is safe and sure to produce a satisfactory return. Some strategies are like this by definition. Example: sticking to an exercise routine for at least a year. Others require a lot of learning through experimentation. Example: starting a profitable business.

One sure way to never have enough is not to recognise the external sources of your wants.

There are things we all learn naturally, things that we get better at through apparently unrelated practice, and things to accept our minds will never embrace.

Stories structure our insights about reality. The appealing ones fit into those we have heard before. Mistakes in assumptions about the lives of others scale exponentially in the stories we tell to explain their behaviour. Imagine never having taken access to running water as a given.

You stick to your strategies expecting specific outcomes. If the strategies work now, it may not be because of your input and so they may not work in the future. Then, it is often more difficult to change course than to continue.

People will never forget how you made them feel. Expressing your expectations for others by framing them with your feelings is more productive than rational explanations. Productivity is also a feeling, the opposite of the overload of trying to remember too many things. Righting down reduces stress. Feeling motivated comes from progress, that is only after you get started.

Not being able to sit silently in a room for 30 minutes is a source of a lot of problems. Appreciate the value of not doing certain things. Almost no one needs to develop their brand online. Talking about your plans chips away from the drive to fulfil them.

Inaction and acceptance are the way: when someone talks to you about their problems; when you get sick and it is nothing serious; when you get sick and you are going to die.

Chess and investing theory share the concept of positional play. It means seeking to put yourself in a situation where you are at your best and will benefit from whatever happens next. At work, you are best positioned if your nature is beneficial to the role you are in. In software, the best designs make future changes easy. This simple principle could not be further from easy.

After that, the talk started.

I was at a tech conference, having gotten up early on a Saturday and driven 40 km to be there.

And I had no badge because I had gotten in without a ticket.

*

When the talk ended, I walked through the main area with company booths. It took me less than a minute to bump into the person who'd made the announcement.

'Where's your badge, please?'

'I don't have one. Tickets sold out but I figured I'd come anyway.'

He sighed.

'There are a couple of talks that I really wanted to hear. When you spoke earlier, I was wondering what you'd think about my case.'

'Well, you're not here to steal anything. You're just crazy,' he paused. 'All right, follow me.'

We walked to the registration area and the people there got asked to find me a badge.

Why would he do that?

For one, I was open about what I wanted — to listen to talks that his team had spent the last couple of months putting together. I wouldn't mind someone appreciating my work this way. Getting up in the morning and driving 40 km. Risking not getting in.

What I don't agree with is that it was crazy. I placed a bet in which losing meant having to go back home. But I got to hear two live talks that I loved. Both will improve my future project and career decisions. That's a bigger win than you expect on most days.

See:

Sometime later, as he started working on his first book, he imagined walking into any bookstore and being able to find his own books on a shelf.

More recently, having three young children at home, he realised there was no way everyone would remain quiet while he recorded the first episodes of his podcast. He knew he needed a dedicated space and was interested to see if what the podcast made could cover the rent within a year.

Each of these goals was SMART but more importantly, Cal designed them to be a continued source of joy for weeks and months after completion. This secret ingredient steered him away from always only focusing on what's next.

Knowing why you want to get somewhere also makes it easier to stop. In Quit, Annie Duke explains the importance of setting clear kill criteria for any venture. Defining them upfront helps minimise biases like the sunk cost fallacy.

See:

Reading 40+ books helped me learn a lot again this year. Each of the five clusters below is a new lens to bring out extra detail in whatever you put behind it.

Mind

Your access to objective reality is questionable. Nature and nurture combined with how you feel shape your mind's momentary model of reality. Space and time are the scaffolding for your models. Your memories might be more real than time.

Craving and aversion are two sides of the mismatch between what seems to be the case and your preference. This mismatch is the root of all suffering.

Introverts don't realise their inherent aversion to intense stimuli. Bodily reactions to such imbalances are handled by constructing ideas about how you feel, confined by your language. Whatever you fail to label is the most difficult to handle.

Conversation

Focusing on facts is not helpful if you disagree with someone. The tendency to first pick views and then find facts to support them is nothing to be ashamed of or shame others for. Evolution has made us this way and it is for the good. Reevaluating everything all the time is a recipe for complete dysfunction.

Clearly stating your intentions at the beginning of a challenging conversation is not easy. But it's the first step to making the other person feel safe and ready to let you in on their way of thinking.

There is no reason to believe in one ultimate moral code. What's more universal is how easy it's become to text and not face the unpredictability of talking—including to yourself.

Business

Businesses depend on providing value. Marketing is about communicating what you have to offer to the right people. There's no reason to worry about pleasing everyone.

Politics

Americans believe all other nations would be better off copying their way of living. The Chinese know that only they can be Chinese. As the oldest culture in the world, they value patient execution of long-term plans.

Economic models oversimplify people's motivations. Goods move freely in global trade agreements, but people and money don’t.

Psychological narratives don't have to be right. Like any other type of capital, they are a tool that some people get to use to their advantage.

Tech

Models reflect selected aspects of reality. You evaluate your models based on their utility, rather than truthfulness. Space and time are an example of human models of reality. This doesn't mean they're the most accurate but that they proved favourable in the process of evolution. Building software lets you play mother nature. You get to decide on your program's way of understanding the world.

Besides the reality to represent and the purpose of the endeavour, your software is equally impacted by interactions between everyone involved in building it. If you have a certain shape of your system in mind, design the teams first.

Self-help

With no one to copy, people have no idea what they want. Their desires don't come from within. Without realising it, everyone keeps track of what they think others—often perfect strangers—wanted at some point in the past.

At the same time, you don't look at the people driving expensive cars. You imagine yourself behind the wheel. And that you yourself would then be noticed.

Knowledge workers struggle to do relevant work in environments dominated by email and instant messaging. Giving your undivided attention to the most challenging tasks can earn you the trust you need if you want to get away with being less responsive.

The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.

Finding something to practice and keep getting better at is more sustainable than setting and achieving goals.

Because it was only a five-minute walk from where I lived, I quickly became a regular, and then also the main organiser. It required quite some effort to keep the thing going. We needed between 12 and 21 people every week. And then there was a reservation to be made and money gathered. We had some ground rules too: if you said you'd come and didn't show up, you were banned for two weeks. And when we had 21 people on the list, we would close it.

One time, a close friend showed up late and unexpected with two more guys I didn't know. On the pitch, there were already more players warming up than I would have liked. I don't know if you ever tried to organise 20 footballers. Believe me, if you let them get into a discussion, you're not starting the game anytime soon.

That's why I told my friend and the two guys he had brought to pack up and leave. Not surprising, after coming all this way, they were quite upset. My friend didn't speak to me for a couple of days. But they left and we could start the game.

Clearly, I was only able to act for the good of the group because I had decided not to share the disappointment of those being told to leave. Understanding how someone feels is one thing, just like wishing them happiness. It's another to take it upon yourself to find a solution. How do you weigh the annoyance of 20 people who followed pre-agreed rules against the discontent of 3 unexpected guests?

See:

A lot of it is HIIT – high-intensity interval training. Over and again, you get to your maximum power output. In between the effort, you lower either your cadence (leg speed) or resistance with a knob on the bike. The entire excitement comes from getting better at recovery during the breaks – while still pedalling. It is possible to recover by lowering your output just a little, without stopping.

And then there is the way I feel for the rest of the day. In the beginning, a draining workout in the morning had me feeling washed-out for the next couple of hours, to the point where sometimes I felt a little sick. A couple of weeks in, though, my body learned to recover much faster. Now once I get my post-workout shower and eat – and by the time I start my day at my desk – I feel fresh and energised.

As of April, I have been with the same company for three years. Longer than with any of my three previous employers! I have had some high-intensity times, but I managed to get over them without burnout or quitting. My capacity for sustained high effort has not grown much. The capability to recover? Definitely.

That includes putting myself in a minimally-stimulating environment. Spending most of the day working with code does the trick. It feels a lot like turning the resistance knob to the left.

See:

The Antilibrary

I heard about it sometime in early 2021. I’m almost sure that it was from Krzysiek and he got it from Robert. The story comes from Nassim Taleb’s book, Black Swan. Someone asked Umberto Eco if he had read all the books in his huge library. In reply, Eco suggested we only hold onto the books we have finished out of vanity. On the contrary, we hoard books to read out of a need to grow.

I took this advice very seriously. In 2021, I started buying way more books than I could read. But soon I started seeing the side-effects no one warned me about – I was also reading more than I ever had.

I’m not sure how this trick works. In part, I’m more excited to finish a book when I have so many others waiting. It must be something about them sitting on the shelves. Having a lot of files downloaded to my Kindle never had the same effect.

Losses > gains

Before 2021, I was planning to start writing blog posts. I managed to do around two during my time at GS - not a result I can be proud of over the two years of working there. Knowing I wasn’t going to stay there forever, I didn’t have the motivation.

At Evojam, there’s a 750 PLN bonus for each blog post written on your own time. Judging by the content we manage to put together, it may not be enough. It wasn’t for me or at least not until I framed the 750 PLN to me as a potential loss.

Here is what I did: I took my base salary (let’s say 15k), added 750 PLN to it, and started telling myself that was now my base (almost 16k). I know it seems silly, but it works.

If you read Danny Kahneman’s book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, you know how much we want to avoid losses as compared to how little interest we have in gains. The fear of losing 750 PLN always beats the excitement of winning the same amount. Am I really comfortable with being paid almost 1k less this month? Obviously not, so I better write that blog post!

Physical barriers

In his book, Elastic Leadership, Roy Osherove talks about knowing when you are becoming a technical leader. Suddenly, you are involved in almost everything going on with your team. You become a bottleneck for everyone else – either because you know too much or are accepting responsibility for all decisions.

When Evojam moved to fully remote work in 2020 and 2021, I found myself in front of my own keyboard when talking to someone. I was always able to start looking at the code or log into a machine over SSH. I ended up fixing things myself more often than I should have. And while I always offered an explanation, I was effectively stealing opportunities to learn from the rest of my team.

Once I understood this and started experimenting with the idea, I realised that not giving someone straight answers can be really challenging. At some point, I ended up dialing into a production emergency call with my team from outside my apartment. I kept my laptop in my bag and only talked over a voice connection. Seeing them figure things out by themselves helped me to interfere less in the future. But at the time, I was only able to make progress by physically removing myself from the keyboard.

Originally published on https://evojam.com/blog

I skipped what I didn’t finish or am not glad I read.

Fiction / Sci-Fi

Most of my reading since I was a child has been fiction. These were not the first books I read from Myśliwski and Le Clezio. I reread the stories of Borges after being reminded about them in the writings of Taleb.

Although I was never into sci-fi, I had the idea to seek out titles from recent years, and am very glad I did. I ordered the next two books from Cixin Liu even before finishing The Three-Body Problem. Based on it, Ray Bradbury showed up on one of the recommendation engines. Ted Chiang’s stories were my last read of the year, but I’m also craving for more.

Mission / Vision

One of my ideas for 2021 was to start working on a mission statement for the work I do. These four reads helped me a lot in my research. Before reading Sinek and Jiwa, I had a very vague understanding of what a mission even is. Hillman and Ali/Kubba pointed me to the best places to look for a solid foundation.

When you talk about a mission, the natural next step is a vision, that is, what would the fulfilment of your mission look like. Though none of these four books is specifically about visions, to me they’re about influencing the shape of things to come. In a way, they’re also closely connected to my personal vision.

Leadership / Software

In 2020, I learned the hard way that my job required a new set of skills. I experienced considerable discomfort under the new circumstances, including fully remote work. After failing at a number of things, I went to books for expert knowledge. If you’re ever overwhelmed by your responsibilities as the most experienced technical person on a team, I recommend all of the above.

These books were a natural continuation of my previous professional interests. I had long been listening to talks, going to training, and reading on Software Architecture. You could say Clean Agile is in the same field if you define it as broadly, as Richards and Ford do. I also managed to read a brilliant book by Venkat. I have long been a fan of his conference talks, but I wasn’t expecting the way he writes could be equally entertaining.

Religion / Systems

This is one of the areas in which I was the most ignorant. I’m glad about the progress I was able to make. I already have a number of follow-ups sitting on my shelves.

Shoshana Zuboff and David Graeber penned the books that took me the most time to finish, but also the ones I was most happy to read. In part due to my growing interest in systems thinking, sparked by Jessica Kerr’s keynote talk at Devoxx and followed by Donella Meadows’ writings listed in a previous section, I was equally amazed by the detailed analysis of organic systems interworkings in forests as well as the acute and unforeseen results of the liberal economy witnessed and described by Jessica Bruder.

Mind / Reality

My interest in neuroscience has also been on the rise. I have high hopes in my potential to develop compassion through learning more about the mechanisms that govern our bodily systems. I might have recognised one neurological disorder that has made my life miserable on certain occasions. Accepting it has already made it less severe, by reducing my self-blame.

Epistemology, or the theory of knowledge, has proved less abstract and more connected to my daily work as a software professional than I could ever have imagined. It is about knowing what’s true, recognising underlying assumptions or narratives, and expecting the unexpected. These are all indispensable means to becoming more effective in my line of work.

You never know where a path can lead; for me, it was questioning the statistical maximum lifespan of around 100 years. David Sinclair has been a part of the research efforts that put limits on the human lifespan in doubt. In recent years, scientists have made mind-blowing discoveries on the topic of ageing.

Apparently, it’s more rational not to take anything you know for granted.

What happened was Evojam published a post about my promotion on LinkedIn. We are a software company of less than 30 people. Most of our posts get under 20 reactions, while that particular one went beyond 70.

All it meant was a lot of people from my network were happy for me. That included my close friends, family, current and past Evojam employees and contractors, a lot of people I worked with in GS and two other companies, friends from high school, people I met playing football and at parties, a few I went to uni with, the author of the photograph in the post, a former tenant… Notifications kept coming for two days. Every time I checked there were more, so I kept checking.

I have not been on social media for many years. Not since all you could leave under a post was a ‘like’ or a comment. I also don’t follow the news. For some time now, my habits have been similar to what Cal Newport describes while talking to Lex Fridman. All I am left with is occasional use of LinkedIn. I go there every few days, making sure I only ever do it late in the afternoon.

As a young adult, I spent a lot of time on Facebook. At some point, I decided never to use it again. I also quit Instagram and anything with an endless scroll. I was and still am very much prone to all that stuff though. If you haven’t had a chance, I highly recommend the conversation between Dr. Anna Lembke and Andrew Huberman. It gave me some understanding of the science behind addictions. With this knowledge, I am better aware of my ‘triggers.’

The reason Dr. Lembke gives for not being on social media herself is that ‘people are her drug.’ I guess I know what she means. It is going to be hard for me to ever do as much good as an accomplished psychiatrist like her. Still, I’d rather take my chances than spend time crafting an image of myself on any social media platform.