10 lessons I learned from the first 10 books I read in 2021
All I was able to learn from a 30 minute daily routine ⚡️ lifetothemax no.18 ⚡️
At the beginning of the year, I set myself a New Year’s resolution to read 30 minutes a day, every day, for the whole year. This has been my most successful resolution so far, and I’ve already finished 13 books. This is quite an achievement coming from someone who in previous years could read at most a handful of books.
When I wrote about this achievement a few weeks back and how I plan to read 1000 books before I die, a few people messaged me asking for book recommendations. I told them about one or two books that I really liked, and also gave a quick description of the book, and specifically my main takeaways.
Hence, this idea: writing down one main idea I learned from each of the first ten books I read in 2021. I’ll write about them in the order in which I read them, and for the sake of briefness, I’ll just give a five-star rating and the main takeaway. That’s it.
Without further ado, here is: 10 lessons I learned from the first 10 books I read in 2021.
BOOK 1/10
“Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids about Money”
by Robert Kiyosaki
My rating: ★★★★☆
Not all investments that are traditionally deemed good are, in fact, good investments. Kiyosaki discusses how rich people (through the perspective of his “rich dad”, who is in reality his best friend’s wealthy father) see investing and earning money differently than the not-so-rich but highly educated (as is his actual father). A house, for example, is widely considered one of the greatest and safest investments one can make in a lifetime. To Kiyosaki, however, this is not the case.
To him, taking out a mortgage, which in turn increases your monthly expenses, to buy a house that may appreciate in value, but can also very much depreciate in the long run if the value of its neighborhood decreases, is simply not a smart investment. Kiyosaki invites the reader to use their head to reason about what is and isn’t a good investment, by looking at these investments through one lens: will this make me wealthier or not? And this is key because Kiyosaki gives a very interesting definition of wealth. To him, wealth is how long someone can sustain their current lifestyle if they suddenly lose job security.
Through this lens, a mortgage is terrible: it adds an extra expense every month, which, if you lose your job, will weigh you down even more. However, if this same mortgage is used to buy a rental property whose rent outweighs the monthly expenses, then that is positive cash flow every month (I don’t personally love the idea of making money off of a necessity like housing, but this illustrates the point quite well). Lose your job, and this is not an added expense. Much the contrary: it is more money in your pocket, every month.
This definition of wealth and the surrounding examples were really eye-opening, and I do recommend that everyone read this book. I deducted a star as I don’t agree with all of the author’s opinions (he’s quite a bit more conservative than I’d like).
BOOK 2/10
“Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action”
by Simon Sinek
My rating: ★★★★☆
All great leaders start with why. That “why” is their reason to be, the thing that makes them passionate, the thing that gives them life. (I talk about my why in the newsletter titled, “Living life to the MAX”.) How these leaders achieve their why, and their resulting what (a product, movement, newsletter, etc.) all arise from that why.
Sinek, in his book, discusses and proves this idea and the resulting power that starting with why and clearly communicating your why has on your success or the success of your organization.
Apple is the perfect example. People often criticize Apple devices for being a few years late on certain features compared to other companies. This would matter if Apple defined itself by their products (their what), but they don’t. Apple is not a computer company, or a phone company, or even a technology company per se. To quote Sinek, Apple starts with why: “Everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo. We believe in thinking differently.” Then how: “The way we challenge the status quo is by making our products beautifully designed, simple to use, and user-friendly.” And finally, what: “And we happen to make great computers. Wanna buy one?” Now, you may not personally believe or adhere to Apple’s why, but this idea clearly shows why someone who does believe in it will buy whatever product they make, even if it is behind the competition.
By starting with why, in your life, you can get people to follow you, regardless of how you do it or what you do. Just get people to believe in your why and you can lead of a generation.
BOOK 3/10
“Fight Club”
by Chuck Palahniuk
My rating: ★★★★☆
The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club.
BOOK 4/10
“White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism”
by Robin DiAngelo
My rating: ★★★★★
Being racist is not something that you either are or are not. It is something that you should consistently work on to educate yourself and better yourself over time. As a white person especially, you can never get to a point where you are perfectly not racist: there will always be implicit biases, and you want to strive to find what those biases are so that you can actively work on fixing them.
DiAngelo brings up the point that because racism is bad, an no one wants to be bad, rather than wanting to actively work on becoming less racist, white people instead often try to actively seem not racist. Rather than taking criticism as the possibility for growth that it is, we will often try to argue and prove how what we did was not racist, and in worse cases even actively partake in destructive behavior like gaslighting (“you misinterpreted what I was saying”, “I’m not a bad person, how can I be racist”, etc.) Note: It is also, always, the effects and not the intentions of what we do and say that matter.
In short: there is always work to be done to combat our own inherent biases. Therefore, take every moment as a learning experience. Don’t get defensive, but also don’t rely on friends to educate you. Educate yourself, and work every day to become a better, less biased person, knowing that you can never achieve perfection when it comes to being not racist.
BOOK 5/10
“Gone Girl”
by Gillian Flynn
My rating: ★★★★☆
Suburbs are boring, stay in NYC. I guess that’s a lesson?
Look, this book was super entertaining, and for a longer-ish book, I read it in no time because it was really that fun. Did I get much out of it other than that? No.
I was racking my brain for a lesson about relationships or something like that, but at the end of the day, Nick and Amy are just a terrible couple of terrible people. He’s a misogynist, she’s a psychopath. There isn’t much of a lesson there, other than maybe, don’t date people like them?
Their relationship did take a turn for the worst when they moved out of the city and back to the midwest near Nick’s family, so that will be the lesson: stay in cities! I’m excited to get back to living in a big city (with friends!).
BOOK 6/10
“Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning”
by Cathy Park Hong
My rating: ★★★★★
“Minor Feelings” is the only non-fiction book in this list where I find it very difficult to define one, clear-cut, single lesson to take away. The reason I picked it up in the first place is that my girlfriend had been reading it and she really enjoyed the book, so I thought I would give it a shot. And wow, this book was a lot! It blew me away.
It was really beautifully written (the author, Cathy Park Hong, usually writes poetry). It was also devastating to read. The way she describes experiences throughout her life and her family members’ lives is very eye-opening, especially reading them as a white man. The way being Asian-American has affected how the author defines herself, sees herself, and also how she has been treated by society is, at times, utterly depressing.
As a white man, as much as you like to believe you are “woke”, and that you can empathize with what it is like to be a minority, reading about these experiences so plainly and in such heartbreaking detail did leave me somewhat bewildered. It shouldn’t have been shocking, but I simply wasn’t educated enough. Reading this book in the context of violence against AAPI communities around the country was that much more overwhelming as it felt like these decades of experiences were never-ending, and still very much happening in the present.
It is honestly hard to even grasp the scope of what I personally got out of this book. I feel like it gave me a better understanding of this country, the people within it, and the hardships of so many. This is why I can’t really take away just one lesson from this book, I feel like it would be reducing it too much. If anything, this would be the lesson: I still have a lot to learn when it comes to the experiences of minorities in our world, and that is why books like this one are so important to read.
Note: It was just announced that this book was a finalist to win a Pulitzer Prize!
BOOK 7/10
“The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business”
by Charles Duhigg
My rating: ★★★★☆
Habits have a pretty well-defined pattern that is programmed into our brains. They allow us to not require lots of brainpower to do menial tasks that we do every day. They are extremely powerful, both as a source of good and evil. A good habit can change your life profoundly for the better. A negative one can keep you from achieving even your most attainable goals.
The habit loop (which I have already spoken about in 3 newsletters) is made up of three components:
A cue: the event, time of day, or activity that triggers the habit loop in your brain to engage and begin the habit.
A routine: the habit itself.
A reward.
And these three steps are written in the fabric of your brain. Your brain is so good at this loop that it can subconsciously go through the steps without you even realizing you’ve done the routine.
Therefore, to change a bad habit, you must deconstruct this loop. What triggers the negative habit (the cue)? What routine can I replace the negative routine with so that the trigger activates that routine instead? What reward am I actually getting from the negative routine, and can the new routine supply its own reward to replace it?
BOOK 8/10
“Rich Dad's Cashflow Quadrant: Rich Dad's Guide to Financial Freedom”
by Robert Kiyosaki
My rating: ★★★★☆
In order to build long-term wealth, you should set yourself up to own systems (businesses) and assets that generate wealth for you regardless of how much work you put in.
“Rich Dad’s Cashflow Quadrant” is the more practical sequel to “Rich Dad Poor Dad”. In it, Kiyosaki describes how he analyzes jobs and occupations by separating them into four categories in his “cashflow quadrant”: employee, self-employed, business owner, investor.
These four categories are defined as:
Employee (E): you work for someone else.
Self-employed (S): you work for yourself.
Business owner (B): you own a system that works for you and makes you money.
Investor (I): you own investments (stocks, index funds, investment properties) that generate money. Your money works for you.
In the E and S quadrants, the money you make is dependent on how much time you work. Many move from the E to the S quadrant (think lawyers opening their own firm) in order to make more money from their work. However, this often also drastically increases their quantity of work, as they now have to deal with a lot of the administrative and business side of things. Furthermore, if they go self-employed but also increase their living expenses (by buying a fancy new car/house), this can often lead to less wealth generation as they increase their debt in the long run.
On the other hand, in the B and I quadrants, the money you make is independent of how much time you work. By building or owning businesses that run on their own, you essentially own a system that puts people to work to generate your wealth. In the case of an investor, you put your money to work.
Kiyosaki says that although most people work in the left quadrants, most wealthy people gain their wealth on the right side. You can also be in two quadrants at once (think an employee who invests some of their salary in stocks and index funds every month). Whichever way you do it, if you want to generate long-term wealth (remember: wealth to Kiyosaki is about how long you can keep up your lifestyle after losing your job) you must position yourself to some extent in the right quadrants, as a business owner/investor.
BOOK 9/10
“The Handmaid's Tale”
by Margaret Atwood
My rating: ★★★★☆
I put this book in a similar category as other dystopian books like “1984”, in that rather than gathering lessons from them, they serve as a kind of rule book of what not to do as a society. Any policy that gets remotely close to anything in The Handmaid’s Tale is most certainly one to steer clear of.
The number of parallels between the society portrayed by Atwood and the modern republican party is truly frightening: the quote-on-quote “pro-life” movement (that just serves to take away the rights of women), supporting the death penalty (like the way defectors dead bodies are put on display in the book), the worshipping of the army and war (always, somehow, protecting us from an invisible enemy abroad), the tabooing of sex and sexual expression, the spread of disinformation, etc. The list goes on.
I don’t think there really is one lesson to take away from this book, other than the fact that, as a society, we should strive for whatever the opposite of The Handmaid’s Tale may be.
BOOK 10/10
“The Great Gatsby”
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
My rating: ★★★☆☆
One lesson: look forward to the roaring twenties. That is, the 2020s.
Lol I have no idea what a lesson from this book may be.
Be rich (and white) and throw big parties and you’ll be considered cool?
Don’t kill someone’s wife or they may kill you?
Be nice to your neighbors because they could end up throwing some sick parties?
I probably would have gotten more out of this book if I had read it in an academic context, but from reading it like this, all I got was that it was a fun, relatively short story, and that’s about it. I would even read it again if I were bored one day, had 2-3 hours to spare and nothing but a copy of The Greate Gatsby to entertain myself.
But as far as a lesson, no idea… Please illuminate me if I missed any big themes or something (in the comments).
So instead, let’s just look forward to the (hopefully) roaring 2020s as we start coming out of this pandemic.
There you go, that’s the ten lessons. I am thinking that this could become a recurring newsletter topic, where I write up such a list every time I finish a set of ten books. Won’t be too often, but maybe 2-3 times a year, if I keep up with the reading and newsletter. We shall see… now on to the rest of the newsletter.
💪 Goals
Year progress: 44%
Still doing great on goals. I’m on schedule with reading, have worked out 5 times this week, and I wrote my newsletter a little everyday, allowing me to write quite long newsletter, as you can see. On top of that, I’ve still managed to keep my screentime down quite a bit, with most of it being youtube videos that are somewhat relevant to the newsletter. Once again, have not posted on TikTok, but that will be my goal for this upcoming week, and my next newsletter will be about that: “Finding my strategy for TikTok”.
I am also starting to think of goals that I may update/reevaluate for the second half of 2021 as the midway mark approaches. I think I’ll write up a whole newsletter dedicated to that at the end of the month. Subscribe to see that when it comes out!
📥 Input
Newsletters posted: 18 📈 +1
Hours read this year: 82 📈 +4 (on schedule)
Workouts this year: 37 📈 +5 (15 ahead of target)
TikToks posted in 2021: 9 +0 (14 behind target)
Screen time this week: 17h24
📤 Output
Newsletter subscribers: 40 (thank you ❤️)
Books read this year: 13
Number of abs: 1
TikTok followers: 123
📚 Reading
Finished this week:
“Blink”, Malcolm Gladwell.
Currently reading:
“The Hobbit”, J. R. R. Tolkien.
Please leave any book recommendations in the comments and add me on Goodreads.
Thank you for reading this newsletter once again. Hello to all the new subscribers since last time. If you’re new, you can subscribe here:
I hope you like these longer format newsletters. I’d love to get some feedback on the format, if you think I should keep them short, write more, if it’s just right… If you have any feedback at all, please comment or text me on social media.
See you next Sunday ❤️
In the meantime, you can read last week’s newsletter:
I'll have to read a couple of these