The P2P Reading List (2023 November)
Read the best books first, otherwise you will find you do not have time.—Henry David Thoreau
Big Little Breakthroughs by Josh Linkner
Breakthroughs are not made overnight; they result from small, innovative steps. Josh Linker delivers the dinner mint. He collected vivid stories to demonstrate the power of scarcity, failure, weirdness, and that of the dinner mint.
Hidden Potential by Adam Grant
What look like differences in natural ability are often differences in opportunity and motivation.
This might suggest that if you did not win the genetic lottery, everything is lost. Not so fast. You can still unlock your hidden potential, which is more about nurturing, namely, developing character. This requires three key components:
absorbing and filtering out the relevant information;
embracing discomfort and failure to grow; and
giving up being a perfectionist.1
Dig deeper
This meta-analysis shows no correlation between perfectionism and performance.
Adapt by Tim Harford
Why is failure required for success? Is it?!
When facing a problem no one has solved before, your first try will fail. You need to budget for being wrong and ensure that failures are not catastrophic. It is not about failing per se, but about experimenting and learning from the outcome. You can think of it as copying evolution (variation and selection).
Tim Harford leads us from the armed forces to oil rigs and financial institutions to show how you can funnel failure towards success. You need to fight cognitive biases, seek feedback, and ensure when (and not if) things blow up, you are still standing.
Writing with Style by Lane Greene
Whether you agree with The Economist, their writing is clear and concise. This is why my supervisor recommended me to learn from The Economist when I started writing my first paper during my PhD
This book distils the best practices of The Economist. Ambiguous words, the nitty-gritty of English grammar2 , punctuation [a big sin that they are not using the Oxford comma], and most importantly, guidelines to make your writing clear is what awaits you. What are you waiting for?
Dig Deeper
Govt Cheese: A Memoir by Steven Pressfield
People dream of overnight successes, of shortcuts. They read how innovators, famous actors, writers did their feat. They want to deceive themselves that they can do it smarter, they can find that shortcut. Imitating can be useful to learn, but the key is to do the work. This is what you can learn from Steven Pressfield. When you read his memoir, he reports about the twenty-seven years of work he did before publishing his first novel. Failure is an inevitable part of the story, his story. His memoir is sometimes so tragic that you would cry if you did not know that it had a happy ending.
How does he keep doing the work? In his words:
I’m a writer. This is what I do. It’s the only thing that makes me happy, or at least keeps me from slitting my wrists. I have this. This page in front of me. This white space. This story in my head. That’s all I’ve got and you know what? It’s enough. It’s enough.
If you are interested in all the books that piqued my interest, you can also visit my Goodreads profile.
In a meta-analysis, the average correlation between perfectionism and performance at work was zero.
People telling me that English is an easy language are about to encounter my repost/rant about the present perfect continuous, the only use of which is to disprove the statement that English grammar is simple.