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“Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.”
– Charles W. Eliot
The transition from the old year to the new is, for many, a time for review and reflection. Personally, a big part of this is looking back through the year’s notebooks, and particularly the copious notes I take while reading books.
While doing this review, it has become a bit of a tradition to pick one quote from each book and post the collection here on Medium.
So without further ado, below are the 42 books I read in 2021, along with one quote that, for one reason or another, resonated with me.
Non-Fiction
The Drama of Being a Child: The Search for the True Self (Alice Miller)
“The true opposite of depression is neither gaiety nor absence of pain, but vitality – the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings.”
Rise of the Youpreneur: The Definitive Guide to Becoming the Go-To Leader in Your Industry and Building a Future-Proof Business (Chris Ducker)
“The biggest mistake I see people make is they don’t value their experience, the content they provide, and what they can do for people. […] Charge what you’re worth and don’t ever say you are sorry for it.”
Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters (Ryan Singer)
“In software, everything is possible but nothing is free.”
The Practice: Shipping Creative Work (Seth Godin)
“If you want to complain that you don’t have any good ideas, please show me all your bad ideas first.”
Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art (James Nestor)
“What our bodies want, what they require to function properly, isn’t faster or deeper breaths. It’s not more air. What we need is more carbon dioxide.”
Hell Yeah or No: What’s Worth Doing (Derek Sivers)
“No matter what you tell the world or tell yourself, your actions reveal your real values. Your actions show what you actually want.”
The Consulting Bible: Everything You Need to Know to Create and Expand a Seven-Figure Consulting Practice (Alan Weiss)
“All clients know what they want. Few know what they need. That difference is your value-added.”
The Almanack of Naval Ravikant (Eric Jorgenson)
“Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep refining what you do until this is true. […] No one can compete with you on being you. Most of life is a search for who and what needs you the most.”
Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces that Stand in the Way of True Inspiration (Amy Wallace and Edwin Catmull)
“In a fear-based, failure averse culture, people will consciously or unconsciously avoid risk.”
Get Out of My Head: Inspiration for Overthinkers in an Anxious World (Meredith Arthur)
“Remember this immutable fact: You can’t always please the people you want to.”
Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World (Adam Grant)
“The hallmark of originality is rejecting the default and exploring whether a better option exists.”
I Hate Running and You Can Too: How to Get Started, Keep Going, and Make Sense of an Irrational Passion (Brendan Leonard)
“Any body that runs is a runner’s body.”
Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
“Those who don’t take risks should never be involved in making decisions.”
Genius Foods: Become Smarter, Happier, and More Productive While Protecting Your Brain for Life (Max Lugavere)
“We’ve coevolved with our food, and trying to optimize our infinitely complex bodies by cherrypicking nutrients may be the ultimate exercise in hubris.”
The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (Matt Ridley)
“Optimists are dismissed as fools, pessimists as sages, by a media that likes to be spoon-fed on scary press releases.”
Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most (Greg McKeown)
“Past a certain point, more effort doesn’t produce better performance. It sabotages our performance.”
The Body: A Guide for Occupants (Bill Bryson)
“The fruits that Shakespeare ate were, for the most part, probably no sweeter than the modern carrot.”
The Art of Impossible: A Peak Performance Primer (Steven Kotler)
“The only thing more difficult than the emotional toil of pursuing true excellence is the emotional toil of not pursuing true excellence.”
Your Music and People: Creative and Considerate Fame (Derek Sivers)
“Reach the people who have headed to the edges. They’re the ones who are looking for something new, and more likely to rave about it if you impress them.”
Bio-Guided Music Therapy: A Practitioner’s Guide to the Clinical Integration of Music and Biofeedback (Eric B. Miller)
“Biofeedback is a process that enables an individual to learn how to change physiological activity for the purpose of improving health and performance.”
Music, Math, and Mind: The Physics and Neuroscience of Music (Dave Soldier)
“Sound and music travel to the cortex to modulate its synaptic activity, and in that way, playing a sound in a headphone or earbud is a noninvasive analogue to activating an electrode.”
The Physics and Psychophysics of Music (Juan Gualterio Roederer)
“Absolute ‘key colors’ or different ‘moods’ of certain tonalities have no psychoacoustic foundation as experiments have shown long ago.”
Feynman’s Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and in Life (Leonard Mlodinow)
“[Physics research] involves the ability to move forward, follow your intuition, and accept that you don’t fully understand what you are doing. And most of all, it entails believing in yourself.”
The Sound Book: The Science of the Sonic Wonders of the World (Trevor J. Cox)
“The dominance of the visual has in fact dulled all of our senses, especially our hearing.”
How to Live: 27 conflicting answers and one weird conclusion (Derek Sivers)
“Comfort is a silent killer. Comfort is quicksand. The softer the chair, the harder it is to get out of it.”
Zero to One: Notes on Startups or How to Build the Future (Blake Masters and Peter Thiel)
“Every business is successful exactly to the extent that it does something others cannot.”
Endure: Mind, Body and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance (Alex Hutchinson)
“The limits we encounter during exercise aren’t a consequence of failing muscles; they’re imposed in advance by the brain to ensure that we never reach true failure.”
Biofeedback and Mindfulness in Everyday Life: Practical Solutions for Improving Your Health and Performance (Inna Khazan)
“Biofeedback enables you to make mindful changes by strengthening your physiological ability to self-regulate in moments of challenge and providing you with helpful ways to respond to what is not under your control.”
Fiction
Snow Country (Yasunari Kawabata)
“As he caught his footing, his head fell back, and the Milky Way flowed down inside him with a roar.”
NSA: Nationales Sicherheits Amt (Andreas Eschbach)
“Die meisten Menschen sind es ja nicht gewöhnt, sich wirklich selber ein Urteil zu bilden; es reicht ihnen vollkommen, wenn sie das von sich glauben können, während sie in Wirklichkeit Gedanken nachplappern, die sie irgendwo aufgeschnappt haben.“
A Column of Fire (Ken Follett)
“When a man is certain that he knows God’s will, and is resolved to do it regardless of the cost, he is the most dangerous person in the world.”
Gates of Fire (Steven Pressfield)
“The hardship of the exercises is intended less to strengthen the back than to toughen the mind.”
Growth of the Soil (Knut Hamsun)
“Growth of the soil was something different, a thing to be procured at any cost; the only source, the origin of all. A dull and desolate existence? Nay, least of all. A man had everything; his powers above, his dreams, his loves, his wealth of superstition.”
Alexander: The Virtues of War (Steven Pressfield)
“Warfare is theatre, I have said, and the essence of theatre is aritifce. What we show, we will not do. What we don’t show, we will do.”
The Martian (Andy Weir)
“Yes, of course duct tape works in a near-vacuum. Duct tape works anywhere. Duct tape is magic and should be worshiped.”
Little, Big (John Crowley)
“Learning to decipher words had only added to the pleasures of holding spines and turning pages, measuring the journey to the end with a thumb-riffle, poring over frontispieces. Books! Opening with a crackle of old glue, releasing perfume; closing with a solid thump.”
The Fall of Hyperion (Dan Simmons)
“Religion and ethics were not always – or even frequently – mutually compatible. The demands of religious absolutism or fundamentalism or rampaging relativism often deflected the worst aspects of contemporary culture or prejudices rather than a system which both man and God could live under with a sense of real justice.”
Killing Commendatore (Haruki Murakami)
“From a distance, most things look beautiful.”
Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened (Allie Brosh)
“I’ve always wanted not to give a fuck. While crying helplessly into my pillow for no good reason, I would often fantasize that maybe someday I could be one of those stoic badasses whose emotions are mostly comprised of rock music and not being afraid of things.”
Jurassic Park (Michael Crichton)
“God creates dinosaurs, God kills dinosaurs, God creates man, man kills God, man brings back dinosaurs.”
The Final Empire (Brandon Sanderson)
“Do you stop loving someone just because they betray you? I don’t think so. That’s what makes the betrayal hurt so much – pain, frustration, anger… and I still loved her. I still do.”
If you still haven’t had enough quotes, here are my lists from 2018, 2019 and 2020.
I hope you found some inspiration in these words and are maybe considering picking up a few of the books yourself.
And of course I would be extremely happy if you would pick up a copy of my book Time Off to put on your reading list for 2022 :)
I wish you all the best in 2022, lots of great inspiration, and hopefully some bold actions as a result!