Interested in Reading

In Search of the Miraculous

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I’m working on the plan for potential music project, which is very exciting for me since I proclaim to be strictly not a musician at all. During the planning phase I reached out to an old buddy, Aslandies, who is a fantastic singer and songwriter, to ask his opinion about the project. (Side note shout out: check out some of Aslan’s latest works here.) Before we even got into the project talk, Aslan and I diverged into a long philosophical debate and somewhere in the midst of it he mentioned this book.

“In Search of the Miraculous”, by P. D. Ouspensky. Awesome name, by the way. I know nothing about the book as of now, just that it related to our conversation and that Aslan described it as being harder and harder to get through the further you get into it. Sort of reminded me of “House of Leaves” in a way, though I take it this is not a work of fiction. Aslan said he’s on his third or fourth attempt to get through it now.

This struck me as an interesting lead and so I’m loading it up into my “interested in reading” list.

Have any of you read “In Search of the Miraculous”? If so, what’d you think?

And similarly, has anyone read anything by P. D. Ouspensky? It’s my first introduction to them so I’m curious what else they have done that might be noteworthy…

Multipliers

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Recently, I’ve been enjoying and struggling with the joys and challenges of running my own business. This is not simply being self-employed, but leading and empowering a group of employees as well… or at least trying to. Though I do often hear good feedback from them, I feel that I am not taking the step up to real, powerful, inspirational leadership.

Last night I stumbled back across a photo a friend had posted some time ago on social media. It was a snapshot of a table describing both “diminishers” and “multipliers”. It wasn’t just inspiring to me (again), but actually alarming. As I look at the list on both sides I could honestly see myself doing things not just in the multipliers category, but potentially in the diminishers category too. I felt called out.

This means it’s time to learn. And that’s when I noticed the photo my friend had posted was a snapshot of a page in a book. I quickly asked them what book it was and here we are.

Have you read Multipliers by Liz Wiseman? If not, what books would you recommend on leadership and productivity? If you did read it, what did you think of it?

Leaving the Atocha Station

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There’s one more book I want to call out “tonight” which is another one by Ben Lerner. In an interview I watched he noted this as being a novel but also being a place where has “collect” a variety of different types of writing.

I find this idea very compelling and instead of reading or hearing more about that concept I’d like to simply dive in and give it a read. I don’t like to have a lot of fiction in my Currently Reading list but for now Mortal Engines just isn’t sticking as strongly as I’d like so I’m happy to exchange it in order to give Ben’s book a chance.

What novels are you currently reading? Have you read Leaving the Atocha Station?

No Art

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After diving into Angle of Yaw I jumped online to update this blog and while looking for a cover art image for the post I stumbled onto a nice video interview of Ben Lerner. Ever since he was a college professor of mine I’ve been super interested to read his work and now having gotten started on Angle of Yaw and having seen this video I decided to note down two books. The first of which is No Art.

This collection of his works is one I should get soon, as it contains his next book, Mean Free Path, as well as others. In hindsight it may have been smarter to have gotten this before buying and diving into Angle of Yaw but oh well, live and learn. (This is inherently the issue with digital books, by the way, that they can’t then be passed onto a friend for borrowing or owning.)

Has anyone read No Art? If so, I’d be quite keen to hear your thoughts in the comments!

The Art of Discarding

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While digging into Marie Kondo’s book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying I stumbled across a line which I found to be quite interesting:

The subject of tidying first caught my attention when I was in junior high school. I came across a book called The Art of Discarding by Magisa Tatsumi (Takarajimasha, Inc.), which explained the importance of throwing things away.

The interesting aspect for me is that I was searching for Marie’s book, saw this one, and almost went to purchase and read it first, simply based on the name and clever cover (they’ve discarded the two letter i’s from the book’s title). Having now found out it was her inspiration I am further inclined to grab a copy, despite the fact that it’s very likely more of the same.

Has anyone given this a read yet? I’d love to hear your thoughts and/or recommendations in the comments!

EQ Applied

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I was just reading an article about Elon Musk’s supposedly controversial 1:20 AM memo to Tesla employees and I stumbled upon Justin Bariso’s book EQ Applied. Well, “stumbled” may be a misleading word choice as the article was written by him so a shameless self plug makes sense.

Regardless of the introduction, the book looks interesting and even delves into the “dark side” of emotional intelligence. I have no intention to utilize something so unethical, but just like the often-abused practice of NLP I’m quite curious to read up on it. As usual, if I grab the book I’ll do a short post marking my start date.

Have you read Justin’s book? I’d love to hear from folks in the comments who have thoughts about it, one way or another.