2/26/25 Update: I created a page with all 52 books I read last year. See it here.

2/27/25 Update: I’ve created a searchable library of every book I’ve read and update it weekly. See it here.

This summer, I set a goal of creating 100 podcasts about books I was reading. It forced me to start tracking my reading in a spreadsheet. It’s nerdy, but it was necessary because every week, I read a book, wrote a blog post series, and created a podcast series about each book. The spreadsheet helped me keep everything organized. I paused the latter two after the summer because they were too inefficient and time-consuming, but I kept updating the spreadsheet and reading a book a week.

I looked at the spreadsheet as I was reflecting on the books I read in 2024. I figured I’d share some stats and learnings.

High-level stat for 2024:

• Books read: 52

2024 breakdown by month:

• January: 0 (I did read, but I can’t remember what books)
• February: 2
• March: 6
• April: 6
• May: 7
• June: 5
• July: 4
• August: 5
• September: 4
• October: 3
• November: 5
• December: 5

Here are a few things I learned along the way:

• Reading two books a week was too aggressive. I tried it in the March–May period, but I wasn’t absorbing as much of what I was reading or making as many connections. I was focused on finishing the books, which isn’t why I read. The pace was too fast, so I reduced it to a book a week, which feels more sustainable.
• Sharing what I learned from my reading was the big unlock. It took my learning and thinking to another level. Writing a blog post series and recording a podcast series forced me to identify insights and organize and communicate my thinking. The key tool in that process was creating a digest of each book, which was an extraction of the information I found important in each chapter, along with my insights.
• E-readers, such as Kindles, are great devices, but I prefer reading physical books. I highlight and add notes about insightful sections and ideas in the books. Those highlights and notes are trapped in each book, so finding and using them later is difficult. See here for more. As I’ve read more, this has become a painful problem. Trying to find something sometimes means reviewing several books’ notes and highlights. Experiencing this pain led me to several feature ideas for the “book library.”
• Reading a book is simple—but learning from what I read is more involved. It’s inefficient and involves lots of steps. The process of sharing what I learn from my reading is complex. It’s hard and has many steps and lots of moving pieces. This realization led me to add several more feature ideas to the “book library.”
• The value in reading lots of entrepreneurial biographies is that you’re exposed to the best ideas and experiences of entrepreneurs, and you can pull from them when you’re faced with a problem. The challenge is that this requires a great memory or knowing exactly where to look to quickly find something you’ve read. I don’t have a photographic memory, and I don’t always remember where I read something. I want to make it easy to find what I’ve read, which will be a big part of the “book library” MVP.
• My best ideas in 2024 came from piecing ideas together from various books. Making those connections was a great way to build upon what other entrepreneurs figured out. Solving a problem by building upon the knowledge of others rather than starting from scratch led to my having better ideas. I’m not an idea guy, so this was perfect for me, and I want to do more of it going forward. I don’t think this has to be completely manual and inefficient. Figuring out how to solve this and incorporate it into the “book library” is challenging, but I think it can be done, and I’m excited to figure this out because it’ll be a huge unlock for myself and others.

Those are my takeaways and reading stats for 2024!

This week, I caught up with a friend who’s an entrepreneur. During our chat, I inquired about how he works. How does he determine what he’s working on each day? How does he know what needs to be done for each objective or project he’s working on? You get the idea. He said that he learned how to work—meaning he learned the process of working efficiently and consistently—while employed by a large corporation known for its world-class training. But that was a few decades into his career.

What I took away from this conversation is that most people are never taught how to work. They’re taught skills, and they gain expertise. But they’re never taught how to effectively execute their skills from day to day to accomplish goals or objectives. Instead, they try to remember and manage everything in their head and end up stressed or burnt out as their responsibilities at work and home increase.

To take this a step further, entrepreneurs experience many times more pain than the average person because of not knowing how to work. They often start out by doing literally everything in the business—much of which they have zero skills or experience in. Over time, many of them experience high levels of stress and anxiety because of this, which causes other problems.

My big takeaway is that the costs of never being taught how to work are high, especially for entrepreneurs.

Yesterday, I shared an interview featuring Howard Marks and his four steps to dealing with change (see here). Toward the end of the interview, Marks talked about his partnership with one of his Oaktree Capital cofounders, Bruce Karsh. He described partnership as an important part of a healthy work environment, which he has with Karsh and other Oaktree Capital founders.

So what’s the key to healthy partnership? Marks has a simple framework. Here’s the key to a healthy partnership (in all aspects of life):

• Shared values – You have to believe the same things about how you want to operate in the world. Marks gave the example that he and Karsh shared the view that they should invest by seeking moderate gains and avoiding losses. Said differently, they would aim for consistent returns rather than grand slams. Neither believed in shooting for the stars. Their values regarding their investment strategy were the same.
• Complementary skills – The key to success is having a well-rounded team that covers all the important areas—the team is strong in all key areas although each individual is not. If you have a team of really smart people who all specialize in the same thing, the team has a skill set hole that will likely cause execution and other issues. A better approach is to work with people who are strong where you’re weak, so you complement each other. This enhances the team’s ability to execute, and people won’t be stepping on each other’s toes.

I agree with Marks. I think partnerships that have both these things can do well. My gut tells me that many people understand the second point and seek complementary skills—opposites attract. But I don’t think as many people understand how important shared values are in a partnership. If you have complementary skill sets but polar-opposite views on how to go about things, you’re bound to have a day of reckoning and maybe even a huge blowup between partners.

If you’re interested in Mark’s full thoughts on partnership, take a listen here.

Last week, I listened to an interview in which Howard Marks, cofounder of Oaktree Capital, shared his views on dealing with change. He referred to his 2006 “It Is What It Is” memo (see here). In that memo, he said that “mujo means cycles will rise and fall, things will come and go, and our environment will change in ways beyond our control. Thus we must recognize, accept, cope and respond. Isn’t that the essence of investing?”

What jumped out to me was his four steps for dealing with change:

• Recognize
• Accept
• Cope
• Respond

Change is inevitable and beyond our control. We can’t change our reality. As Marks said in the interview, “what we can’t do as investors—we can’t say ‘Please sir, I'd like a different environment.’ The environment is what it is, and it’s this one we have to cope with . . . .”

Change is the only constant in life. That being true, having a rational process for dealing with change is key (fighting it usually doesn’t end well). That’s why I like Marks’s four-step process. It’s simple, easy, and something anyone can follow. If something is happening that creates uneasiness, it’s not difficult to go through each of these steps to deal with the change and hopefully become at ease with it.

Marks elaborated more on this topic in the interview. To listen to his comments, go to that section of the interview here.

The entire interview contains other great nuggets of wisdom. If you want to watch it from the beginning, take a look here.

This weekend, I was catching up with a friend who mentioned they’ve been swamped at work. It’s starting to have a negative impact on their life more broadly, which they don’t like. They work in a high-visibility, very demanding role at a well-known company. I shared that I’m refreshing my own productivity system and had just reread Getting Things Done and Building a Second Brain.

I told them about the books and offered to share what I’d relearned if they wanted the help. They accepted. I was thinking about this today, and I believe it will be a mutually beneficial arrangement. It reminded me of starting this blog because of an accountability challenge with my buddy Ethan. There’s something about doing something new with other people that requires new habits. Knowing that you have to regularly report to someone else who’s going through the same thing forces you to step up your game.

I don’t think I’ve been involved in an accountability challenge, or anything similar, since I started this blog in March 2020. The more I think about it, the more I’m looking forward to it, and think it’ll be fun and competitive (in a nerdy kind of way).

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Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned from them

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

Cumulative metrics (since 4/1/24):

• Total books read: 97
• Total blog posts published: 644

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Blog posts published: 7

What I completed in the week ending 1/11/26 (link to the previous week’s commitments):

• Reread Building a Second Brain, a framework for organizing your projects and digital life

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book
• Write a post sharing what I learned from synthesizing The Little Book of Market Wizards
• Write a post sharing what I learned from synthesizing The Art of Execution

Asks:

• No ask this week

Week three hundred two was another week of learning. Looking forward to next week!

Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned from them

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

What I struggled with:

• I had trouble getting started on synthesizing another book this week. I need to adjust my approach somehow.

What I learned:

• Distilling a book or book chapter down to the essence of its main idea should be the goal when I’m writing posts about books. If I can get it down to a maxim, even better. Maxims are easier to remember (including for me).
• Just as my reading must be done first thing in the morning, I’m realizing that the daily habit of working on a synthesis of a book must be done early, too. Once the day gets going, who knows what’ll get thrown at me? The likelihood that I’ll get to the difficult task of synthesizing drops drastically.

That’s what I learned and struggled with last week.

After reading Getting Things Done by David Allen again, I realized I don’t have a great “inbox” to capture all incoming information and thoughts. The inbox is a core piece of the GTD method. It’s the holding area where you place things until you have time to process and sort them properly. Sure, I have the inbox for my email, but I didn’t have a go-to inbox in a tool I used to manage my productivity.

I’ve been working on cleaning up my GTD system by creating a clean, short-term (to be completed within a year) project list and defining next actions for each project. That’s going pretty well and should be done shortly. But because I don’t have a solid inbox, my GTD system hasn’t been as effective as it could be.

So, this week, I created an inbox in Apple Notes, moved all unprocessed notes into it, and added all new notes to it. I must say, having a single place to drop all new thoughts and incoming information has been helpful. It’s taken some discipline to make sure I put everything there, but now that I have the hang of it, I feel more confident that everything important is being captured so I don’t have to try to remember everything.

Another thing I like about GTD is that processing and sorting are separate from capturing my thoughts and incoming information. I can quickly capture thoughts about an article, book, project, or podcast in a messy note and save the note in my inbox. When I process my inbox, I add more context to the note and save it in the appropriate folder or project so it’s where I need it when I need it.

I’m still early in the process of cleaning up my GTD system and creating new GTD habits, but I think this, along with Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain process, will boost my productivity in 2026.

This week, I had a conversation with a good friend about the power of community. He’s an entrepreneur in a traditional industry and is looking for ways to increase awareness of his brand and the products he sells. He’s got good marketing ideas that follow what others in his industry have done successfully.

I introduced the idea of building a community around his product: First, create an audience of people who love the product for a deeply personal reason (i.e., it helps them solve a problem they care deeply about). Then, hopefully, convert some percentage of that audience into a community of people who will engage with each other (with some guidelines and light moderation).

I like this idea because it leans into a key market concept: word of mouth is the best form of marketing. People in a community love talking to one another and will invite other like-minded people into the community. They share what they’re doing in the community and how the community has helped them. This all helps knowledge of the brand and product spread via word of mouth.

I also like the idea of community because it creates a moat, or competitive advantage. When you have a community of people who’ve bought into a brand or product, they don’t want to leave the tribe they’re a part of, so it’s less likely they’ll leave or switch brands or products. Community makes customers stickier and creates a moat that’s hard for competitors to replicate.

Lastly, I really like community because it’s a great way to keep a finger on the pulse of what your target customer thinks of your existing products, learn about ideas for new products, and spot early trends you can capitalize on. It’s a great feedback mechanism and a way to stay connected to customers in an organic way, which leads to product improvements and new products that keep your customers loyal.

All in all, I’m a fan of companies leaning into creating communities, especially when they’re in slow-moving or antiquated industries.

For the last few years, I’ve been using X (formerly Twitter) as a research tool and a news source. I’ve learned a ton from the platform and connected with some great people, but I rarely post anything. What I did years ago was set up an integration to X. Every time I create a new blog post, it creates a post on X with a link to the post on my blog. It’s basically the lazy way of posting on X.

The integration is easy, but not very effective. X doesn’t love it when you link out to external sites. So, this year, I want to change how I share my thoughts on X. I’m going to convert my blog posts into native X posts. Not sure what this looks like or how I’ll do it, but I want to turn it into a habit by the end of the year.