My reading journey through 2015

This past year was a year of many long distance flights, of train journeys fast and slow, and of freezing Boston evenings in the coldest winter of my life. And to no surprise to those friends who often ask for recs, I found the time to read a few books. So this year, I put together a list of my favorites with some memorable quotes. Next time you’re about to ask for a book recommendation — just pick any of these. Each of these is worth the time to read if you have it.

“Those who assert we will fight only certain kinds of wars in the future forget history and the reality that our enemies, as I’ve said, always have a vote, as do future presidents. In the forty years since Vietnam, our record in predicting where we will be militarily engaged next, even six months out, is perfect: we have never once gotten it right, not in Grenada, Haiti, Panama, Libya (twice), Iraq (twice), Afghanistan, the Balkans, or Somalia. When it comes to predicting future conflicts, what kind of fights they will be, and what will be needed, we need a lot more humility.”

— Robert Gates, US Secretary of Defense under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, in Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War

“As I walk the streets, the only thing that keeps me from stopping on every block and throwing my hands in the air in amazement are the old Jacob Marley chains we all clank around in, chains forged not so much by sin as by the weight of the weary world. But San Francisco, like the ghosts who visit Scrooge, always offers me another chance. In San Francisco, it is always Christmas morning.”

— Gary Kamiya, in Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco

“…the Internet is only now really disrupting the financial industry, offering a third way to join together suppliers and recipients of capital after the invention of banks and the spawning of exchanges… ”

— Andrew Palmer, of The Economist, in Smart Money: How High-Stakes Financial Innovation is Reshaping Our World for the Better

“He felt deeply that California was the only place he could live. It’s the slanting evening light on the hills, the palette, the fundamental beauty. In his very soul, Steve was a Californian. He required the liberty it afforded, the clean slate. He worked under the influence, and the inspiration, of the sublimity of the place. He needed to be refreshed by the primal rhythms of the natural world — the land, the hills, the oaks, the orchards. California’s spirit of newness invigorated him, and ratified his own spirit. Its scale is contagious: such natural grandeur is the perfect setting for thinking big. And he did think big. He was the most unfettered thinker I have ever known. It was a deep pleasure, and a lot of fun, to think alongside him.”

— Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzel, in Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of the Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader

“You have been given a very special gift — your life. Most people waste that gift waiting. Waiting for a promotion, waiting for permission, waiting for a savior. But you can’t wait. Life has no rollover minutes.”

— Jim Gilliam, founder & CEO of NationBuilder, in The Internet is My Religion

“If a hiker gets lost in the mountains, people will coordinate a search. If a train crashes, people will line up to give blood. If an earthquake levels a city, people all over the world will send emergency supplies. This is so fundamentally human that it’s found in every culture without exception. Yes, there are assholes who just don’t care, but they’re massively outnumbered by the people who do.”

— Andy Weir in The Martian

“America began to change on a mid-September day in 1958, when the Bank of America dropped its first 60,000 credit cards on the unassuming city of Fresno, California. That’s a word they liked to use in the credit card business to characterize a mass mailing of cards: a “drop,” and it is an unwittingly apt description. There had been no outward yearning among the residents of Fresno for such a device, nor even the dimmest awareness that such a thing was in the works. It simply arrived one day, with no advance warning, as if it had dropped from the sky.

Like so many subsequent moments in the evolution of personal finance in America, it was years before the significance of that date became clear — years before the Bank of America would celebrate its original BankAmericard as the first all-purpose credit card to take root; when it would note with pride its history as the precursor to Visa; when it would draw attention to its role in helping to make credit cards the most ubiquitous financial instrument.”

— Joe Nocera in A Piece of the Action: How the Middle Class Joined the Money Class

“It seemed like one should try to make the world a better place because the inverse makes no sense.”

— Elon Musk in Ashlee Vance’s Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

“It was only a flight of twelve seconds,” he would also stress later, “and it was an uncertain, wavy, creeping sort of a flight at best, but it was a real flight at last.”

…At about eleven o’clock, the wind having eased off somewhat, Wilbur took a turn and “went off like a bird” for 175 feet. Orville went again, flying 200 feet. Then, near noon, on the fourth test, Wilbur flew a little over half a mile through the air and a distance of 852 feet over the ground in 59 seconds.”

— David McCullough in The Wright Brothers

“I’d learned, the hard way, that it makes no sense to tell someone to go to hell unless you have the power to send him there.”

— Albert Podell in Around the World in 50 Years: My Adventure to Every Country on Earth

“You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising it limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.”

— Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Someone once said that World War Three would be fought with atomic weapons and the next war with sticks and stones.”

— Robert F. Kennedy in Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis

“He was impregnably armored by his good intentions — and his ignorance.”

— Graham Greene in The Quiet American

“When there is a stock-market boom, and everyone is scrambling for common stocks, take all your common stocks and sell them. Take the proceeds and buy conservative bonds. No doubt the stocks you sold will go higher. Pay no attention to this — just wait for the depression which will come sooner or later. When this depression — or panic — becomes a national catastrophe, sell out the bonds (perhaps at a loss) and buy back the stocks. No doubt the stocks will go still lower. Again pay no attention. Wait for the next boom. Continue to repeat this operation as long as you live, and you’ll have the pleasure of dying rich.”

— Fred Schwed, Jr., in Where Are the Customers’ Yachts? or A Good Hard Look at Wall Street

“the first sip is joy and the second is gladness, the third is serenity, the fourth is madness, the fifth is ecstasy.”

— Jack Kerouac in The Dharma Bums

“In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time — none, zero. You’d be amazed at how much Warren reads — and at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I’m a book with a couple of legs sticking out.”

— Charlie Munger in Tren Griffin’s Charlie Minger: The Complete Investor

“Don’t aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.”

— Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning

“There really is no such thing as ‘the future’, singular. There are only multiple, unforeseeable futures, which will never lose their capacity to take us by surprise.”

— Niall Ferguson in The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

“This brings me to my favorite paradox. The industries we care about least innovate at the highest speeds, while those we hold dearest to our heart innovate hardly at all.”

— Jonathan Bush, founder and CEO of athenahealth, in Where Does it Hurt? An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Fixing Health Care

“Frankly, you cannot get important and difficult change unless there’s a crisis, and that makes heading off a crisis quite challenging.”

— Henry Paulson, Jr., in On The Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System

“This system we live with was established in the 1930s, which was a very different time. Why do we need long-term fixed-rate mortgages in a world where the work force of the future is going to change jobs and move every three to five years? Why do we even need homeownership? Shouldn’t it be a world of renters? If what we need is energy-efficient multifamily housing for an urbanized world, what are we doing subsidizing the construction of ever-larger single-family homes? Even more, if what we want to subsidize is homeownership, why not limit government backing to first-time homebuyers, and exclude refinancings, or at least cash-out refinancings? Oh, and don’t cheap mortgages just make homes more expensive? Perhaps even more important, we live in a world of limited resources. Why should we put the government’s weight behind homeownership, of all things? Why not subsidize medical research, for instance?”

— Bethany Maclean, in Shaky Ground: The Strange Saga of the US Mortgage Giants

“That’s the paradox here: Vulnerability is the last thing I want you to see in me, but the first thing I look for in you.”

— Brene Brown, in Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead