My Reading Journey Backwards and Forwards
A treatise on negotiating – by Chris Voss
March 3, 2026
Listen. The truth is I talk too much. I always have. I hear myself talking over prospects – it doesn’t get any worse than that.
Elicit the NO!
Stop talking and start listening.
A book about how to experience happiness in spite of circumstances by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Date Purchased: Mar 7, 2024
Date Started: Aug 13, 2025
Date Finished: Nov 15, 2025
When I finished reading this book I created a calculator to tell me how many hours were left in this year – I don’t remember how I did it and I don’t know if I’ll be able to edit it at the end of the year – but FYI right now there are 7286 hours left in 2026.
There are 7156 hours left in 2026.
On page 59 the author writes “The concentration of the flow experience, together with clear goals and immediate feedback, provides order to consciousness, inducing the enjoyable condition of psychic negentropy. ”
So that definitely falls under the Stuff I Don’t Get category, even after having looked up the definition of negentropy – I’m having trouble understanding what he is saying.
Try Googling negentropy – it’s not a lot of help. But I think what he is saying is, we generally experience ordered thoughts positively.
Be mindful of how I spend my time.
Is it actionable to stop doing something? Stop faking my mind out playing games on my phone.
Review Title (star rating)
This book has 4.8 Stars on Amazon 68% 5 Stars.
As usual the 1 star reviews are entertaining. One in particular that, according to Amazon 13 people find helpful – let’s us know that she read all of 10 pages of the book and decided the author “has a complete disregard for all religions” and that “she” has some work to do. Lest I confuse you Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, is a man. Perhaps our well read reviewer should read a page or two more.
A Book about The Kaizen Way by Robert Mauer, Ph.D.
May 22, 2025
Copyright 2004
My first read was 2010, I read it again in 2022. And I’m going to read it again now – but I’m also going to buy the physical book.
I’ve been spending a lot of time with strategic planning recently and I believe I can see the impact this book had on the way I work.
Review Title (star rating)
A novel by Wilber Smith
📅 Started: March 2025
📅 Finished: June 2025
📚 Format: physical book
A Book about helping people find your work by Austin Kleon
May 8, 2025
When I’m struggling with posting my work, I always remind myself that no one is reading it anyway – so I can write anything I want. Spend any amount of time reading online advice and you come away with “post something every day”.
The message in this book is “Share” something every day. Uh oh, that’s a little harder.
But that’s the book, 10 Ways to share your creativity and get discovered. I’m not sure I want to “get discovered”. My anonymity is comforting – knowing no one is reading allows me to write. To wander and wonder –
I’m not sure I’m particularly creative either – it took me months to choose a paint color for my living room – and 3 years to find a picture to hang. My gardens are never up to snuff and I don’t have anything brilliant to say about the books I read.
And yet, without them …
That’s my project – documenting my reading journey – backward and forward. It’s the books that that brought me through my darkest days (well, the books and my therapist).
All kidding aside – for those of us without the amazing mentor, or therapist, whose parents and friends give bad advice, the books are always there.
Read them, use them, it helps.
By David Baldacci
📅 Started: April 27, 2025
📅 Finished*:* [date]
📚 Format: (hardcover / Kindle / library loan / audiobook, etc.)
I had just finished Beach Music and found At First Sight by Nicholas Sparks in my bookshelves. Lunchtime is fiction only, so I started it, but it wasn’t working for me. I saw this book on the shelves in Target, and I always enjoy David Baldacci, so I grabbed it.
Love it …
By Mark L Fox – A Book About Creative Problem Solving
I bought this book back in 2008. I assume it was either shortly before or after I attended a seminar at the Wizard Academy. I have highlights from 2009, 2014, 2020, and 2023 that I’ve found so far – but I feel like I never finished reading it??
Grammarly is sooo annoying.
How to Read a Book – Mortimer Adler’s classic guide to intelligent reading
April 20, 2025
I bought How to Read a Book back in 2018, and this is my third attempt to get through it. The first two tries didn’t get far—honestly, it felt nearly unreadable. But this time around, I’m not only interested, I’m finding it hard to put down. Perhaps because I’m not reading it start to finish, I’m reading what interests me most, which, at least today, was the end of the book and the beginning of the book.
“People see what they are prepared to see.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803 – 1852
April 26, 2025
I think it might also be said that people learn what they are prepared to learn.
Typically, when I feel there are gaps in my understanding of a book, I move on to the next book I think is related to what I’m trying to learn. This method of deeper, more analytical reading is new to me, and Adler’s method feels like a bit of overkill. But the proof is in the pudding, as they say – I don’t think I’d try this on more than 1 or 2 at most books in a year – but we’ll see.
So far, I’m about one-third of the way through this book, and I’ve highlighted 33 words that I either don’t know the meaning of at all or only vaguely understand. You’ll be seeing these in the vocabulary quiz(s) associated with this post – but looking them up and adding the questions is work! So you’ll have to give me a minute to finish.
Amazon has given this book a rating of 4.5, with 73% 5-star reviews. The top reviewer had not even one original word to say about the book. Instead, he listed about 20 or so excerpts he found.
April 14, 2025
A Book About Systemizing Your Business by David Jenyns and Michael E Gerber
“that the primary purpose of SYSTEMology is to create space for the business owner – to systemise the business to the point where you can step away from the day-to-day operations and know with confidence that your business will continue to perform to your standards.”
I can’t believe I didn’t post about this book back when I read it in August 2024. Systemology by David Jenyns was a quick, easy, and surprisingly impactful read. I’ve long admired Michael E. Gerber and read all his E-Myth books more than 20 years ago—in fact, I bought one of his courses back in the day when they still came in giant binders you had to make room for on your shelf. I wish I’d held onto those.
Reading Systemology felt like a return to those core ideas from Gerber. What stood out to me most was his emphasis on simplicity. It isn’t about building some massive operation manual or turning it into McDonald’s.
It’s about capturing the minimum viable systems that keep your business running so that things don’t fall apart when you’re not in the room.
Minimum viable systems. For years, I’ve been cranking out long, overly detailed SOPs that no one, including me, could use. Thinking in terms of “just enough to work,” I’m starting instead with outlines (just what, not how) and flowcharts that are actually usable. And by usable, I mean we don’t get glassy-eyed when we try to read them.
You don’t have to systematize everything. This was liberating. Not everything in your business needs a flowchart or checklist. Focus on the 20% of systems that drive 80% of the results. It turns out (according to Jenyns) perfection is not only unnecessary—it’s kind of a trap. We find this in a lot of discussions of perfectionism, don’t we?
Documenting doesn’t mean doing. Jenyns points out that you can—and should—get others to document what they do. This was a big aha for me. I don’t have to be the creator of every process. I just have to create the container for them to live in and keep the project moving.
You can start small. You don’t need a systems revolution. You need a small win. One system. One process. One chunk of chaos tamed. Then another. And another. This makes systemizing feel doable—even if you’re running in a million directions (as most of us are).
Just a reminder: my rankings are based on how usable the book was for me—and I’ve put a lot of the concepts from this one into practice.
I don’t get it – this is a hidden block? Why? What’s it for?
A book about the benefits of generalizing over specialization by David Epstein
April 3, 2025
June 1, 2025
Two Books, Two Approaches: A Quick Take on Range and 59 Seconds
I read two books this morning—Range by David Epstein and 59 Seconds by Richard Wiseman. Both challenge popular wisdom, but they do it in very different ways—and with very different levels of success.
Range is engaging, well-researched, and genuinely eye-opening. Epstein builds a compelling case for generalists in a world that often celebrates specialists. It’s the kind of book that doesn’t just repackage familiar ideas—it gives you new material to think about, to wrestle with, to apply.
59 Seconds, on the other hand, didn’t quite land the same way. To be fair, I only read the Shortform summary, so this isn’t a full review—but based on what I read, it felt more like a reframe than a revelation. The premise seems to be: “Here’s a popular idea. Now let’s disagree with it.” But the disagreement doesn’t always feel rooted in deep evidence—it’s more like a clever pivot than a clear debunking.
Maybe the full book makes a stronger case. But from what I saw, it felt less like overturning bad advice and more like presenting old advice in new packaging—with a contrarian spin.
Range made me think differently. 59 Seconds made me wonder if I was supposed to.
I told myself—no more buying books until I finished at least a couple from my current stack. But this one pulled me in, probably because it flips the script on the idea that we have to specialize.
Long-term retention, i.e., learning, is more likely to take place as a result of struggle as opposed to repetition.
Amazon has almost 12,000 rankings for this book, with an average score of 4.6. It has no 1-star ratings, and of the two-star ratings, a small percentage are, as always, people complaining about the condition of the book. Several of the negative reviews talk about the book being poorly researched – I went to Perplexity to see what I could find –
Extensive Use of Sources: Epstein is noted for his diligence in research, often going directly to primary sources and journal papers. Approximately 30% of the book consists of notes and references, underscoring the depth of his investigation.
and
Breadth of Studies and Anecdotes: Epstein incorporates numerous studies, surveys, and historical anecdotes to support his arguments about the advantages of generalists in various fields. However, some reviewers have noted that while the volume of evidence is overwhelming, the lack of meta-analyses or deeper exploration into potential biases in study selection may limit the reliability of certain claims.
So there is that. Good Reads has almost 75,000 ratings for this book, with an average score of 4.13. As of April 2025, there are over 7,000 reviews.
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