My reading journey through 2021

Like a lot of people, I suspect, I had time for a lot of reading in 2020. It was a year dominated by social distancing, staying home, and not a whole lot of FOMO about things going on outside. I got some outdoor bucket list items off the list — hiked Half Dome on the 4th of July, backpacked the Lost Coast in August — but in general, I was home a lot, and had a lot of time to read.

2021 was a bit different. For me, it started out in Seattle, then took me to Oregon and Utah and Montana before bringing me back to San Francisco, and after getting the vaccine, life kept getting progressively busier. Modern Treasury grew quickly and demanded a lot of attention, leaving me with way less time to read. But I can’t complain. I still got some good reads and listens in, and in keeping with the tradition, here’s some of my favorites of 2021. If you’re looking to pick up a book, or for holiday gift ideas, here’s a few recommendations. Hope you enjoy some of these!

Erik Larson’s The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz, was my favorite read of the year. It is a unique, minute-by-minute, day-by-day, story of Churchill’s leadership during the Blitz, which reads almost like a thriller. And in its storytelling, it is almost cartoonishly British:

“The one universal balm for the trauma of war was tea. It was the thing that helped people cope. People made tea during air raids and after air raids, and on breaks between retrieving bodies from shattered buildings. Tea bolstered the network of thirty thousand observers who watched for German aircraft over England, operating from one thousand observation posts, all stocked with tea and kettles. Mobile canteens dispensed gallons of it, steaming, from spigots. In propaganda films, the making of tea became a visual metaphor for carrying on. “Tea acquired almost a magical importance in London life,” according to one study of London during the war. “And the reassuring cup of tea actually did seem to help cheer people up in a crisis.” Tea ran through Mass-Observation diaries like a river. “That’s one trouble about the raids,” a female diarist complained. “People do nothing but make tea and expect you to drink it.”

“The talent required had to consist not alone of insight but also of decisiveness, of an ability not only to recognize a crucial moment but to seize it, to see the opening — and to strike; to move fast enough so that the opportunity did not vanish, perhaps never to come again. It was the ability to recognize the key that might suddenly unlock votes that had seemed locked forever away — and to turn the key, and turn it fast. This combination of rare insight, rare decisiveness, rare willingness to act, produced, when it was added to unbending determination and a gift for grand strategy, a rare form of political leadership: legislative leadership.”

— Robert Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate

“To find a unique position, you must ignore conventional logic. Conventional logic says you find your concept inside yourself or inside the product. Not true. What you must do is look inside the prospect’s mind.”

— Al Rise and Jack Trout, Positioning: How to Be Seen and Heard in the Overcrowded Marketplace

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

— Annie Dillard in The Abundance

“Tomorrow, in a very real sense, your life — the life you author from scratch on your own — begins. How will you use your gifts? What choices will you make? Will inertia be your guide, or will you follow your passions? Will you follow dogma, or will you be original? Will you choose a life of ease, or a life of service and adventure? Will you wilt under criticism, or will you follow your convictions? Will you bluff it out when you’re wrong, or will you apologize? Will you guard your heart against rejection, or will you act when you fall in love? Will you play it safe, or will you be a little bit swashbuckling? When it’s tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless? Will you be a cynic, or will you be a builder? Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind? I will hazard a prediction. When you are eighty years old and, in a quiet moment of reflection, narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story.”

— Jeff Bezos, Invent & Wander

“If they had wanted just $100,000 more for See’s Candies, we wouldn’t have bought it. We were that dumb back then.”

— Charlie Munger in Janet Lowe’s Damn Right! Behind the Scenes with Berkshire Hathaway Billionaire Charlie Munger

“Yet one must also recognize that morality is based on ideas and that all ideas are dangerous — dangerous because ideas can only lead to action and where the action leads no man can say.”

— James Baldwin in Notes of a Native Son

“The story about your business is more important than the facts about your business. Sound outrageous? Maybe, but the brain research proves it’s true. People relate to and remember stories — even people who make a living analyzing facts.”

— Al Ramadan, Dave Petersen, Christopher Lochhead, and Kevin Maney in Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets

“So I try to be mindful, at all times, of what a difference a small human gesture can make to people in need. What does it really cost to take a moment to look someone in the eye, to give him a hug, to let her know, I get it. You’re not alone?”

— Joe Biden in Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose

Note: Promise Me, Dad was an amazing audiobook to listen to, read by Biden himself, and you can hear the author processing his grief privately, then writing it down, then painfully reading it out loud, and the self-control, strength and emotion that takes. And it is particularly poignant given the Covid toll that history later asked him to deal with as President, and to think of the lessons his experiences as told in this book taught him in dealing with the national tragedy that he inherited.

“A good leader is always learning. The great leaders start learning young and continue until their last breath.”

— Bill Walsh in The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership

“If you go through life worrying about all the bad things that can happen, you soon convince yourself that it’s best to do nothing at all.” — Ross Perot in Ken Follett’s On Wings of Eagles

This was perhaps the wildest story I learned about in 2021. Seriously, read up on it: years before the Iranian Hostage Crisis there were two Americans taken hostage in Iran. Lucky them, they worked for Ross Perot’s EDS, at the time a private company the size of Square or Stripe today. And Ross Perot mobilized his team to literally perform a special ops rescue, unbeknownst to the US government, in Iran. Don’t mess with Texas, truly.

“When the time came, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard left with the same type of quiet dignity with which they had built the most admired firm in America. Riding the range at their ranch or speaking to respectful peers in halls of power, Hewlett and Packard surely know that from the creaky Palo Alto garage they have constructed not just a great company but a standard for quality, decency, and professionalism against which every high-technology company must be measured.

Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard proved all the theories; they personified Fred Terman’s dream. With irreproachable integrity and infinite belief in their employees — not two of the most common attributes of business leaders — they constructed one of the strongest firms in American business history: innovative but conservative, aggressive but principled. Even the Japanese respect and fear HP and, for the most part, have stayed out of its market, a fact more telling about Hewlett-Packard’s reputation than perhaps any other.

The greatness of Silicon Valley is that its generations of executives took as their role models “Bill and Dave” and struggled — if only at first — to build their companies after the Hewlett-Packard model. And it can be said that the tragedy of Silicon Valley is that almost all of them failed in the attempt, to different degrees falling short of the ideal.”

— Michael S. Malone in The Big Score

“I was an overnight success all right, but thirty years is a long, long night.”

— Ray Kroc in Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald’s

“Power corrupts — that has been said and written so often that it has become a cliche. But what is never said, but is just as true, is that power reveals.”

— Robert Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power

Happy holidays, and happy reading!

-Dimitri