By Joe Byerly
Essayist Maria Popova recently wrote, “To look back on a year of reading is to be handed a clear mirror of your priorities and passions, of the questions that live in you and the reckonings that keep you up at night.”
Since 2018 (2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022) I have dedicated a few days at the end of each year to hold up a mirror to my priorities and passions. I do this by reflecting on and summarizing the lessons I have learned from the books I have read.
2023 was one of my busiest years. Despite leading an extremely fast-paced organization, going on family trips, and writing my own book project, I managed to read 43 books. Where do I find the time? To quote Seth Godin in The Song of Significance, “We don’t need more time. We simply need to decide.” I made a conscious decision to prioritize reading, writing, and reflection.
This year, I would like to share some valuable insights that books have imparted to me during the early hours of the morning, small slivers of time throughout the day, or the few minutes before bedtime.
Cooperate with the inevitable. How much time and energy do we waste on getting angry or upset at things that are out of our control? I used to expend so much emotional energy on getting mad when the situation was impossible for me to affect or when deep down I knew I didn’t have the passion to take action to change it. Disclaimer: I still wrestle with this, but at least I’m wrestling!
What I’ve come to learn is that I have agency within the hand I’ve been dealt, but before I can play my cards I have to learn to cooperate with the inevitable.
I came across this phrase in Joe Hart’s and Michael Crom’s Take Command. In describing its meaning, Joe and Mike write, “We have to learn how to accept what we can’t change and then change the way we approach the situation.” Music producer Rick Rubin echoed this in The Creative Act, writing, “When something doesn’t go according to plan, we have a choice to either resist it or incorporate it.”
To resist or incorporate? We have agency.
In The Awakened Brain, Dr. Lisa Miller spoke to this in even more poetic language. She says she shifted away from trying to fix the world to fit her preferences and desires and entered into a dialogue or relationship with life instead.
When things haven’t gone my way, these books have helped me learn to cooperate with the inevitable and then have a dialogue with life. I start asking myself how I can have agency over the situation.
Viktor Frankl also wrote about this in his book, Man’s Search for Meaning. He recounted his experiences in Nazi concentration camps and how he learned that, “in robbing the present of its reality there lay a certain danger. It became easy to overlook the opportunities to make something positive.”
Cooperate with the inevitable. Enter into a dialogue with life. Find your agency.
Paper is more patient than people. This year I decided to pick up Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl (we read it as a family to encourage our son to learn what happened here in Europe through the eyes of a girl his age). In the summer of 1942, prior to moving into the warehouse annex, she wrote the phrase “paper is more patient than people.” She echoed it again from her family’s hiding spot on December 24, 1943, merely 6 months before being taken to a concentration camp. She wrote that she didn’t want to just write down the facts of her life, but that she wanted to approach her diary as a friend – someone she could share everything with.
I love this idea of treating our journal as if it’s a patient friend who allows us the space and the time to work out our ideas, our struggles, and to even brag a little about what we’ve accomplished.
The patient and friendly paper also gives us the opportunity to get to know ourselves better. In Massimo Pigliucci’s The Quest for Character, a book about ancient philosophy, the author points out that self-knowledge doesn’t come to us naturally:
Many of us make the same mistake today: Just because we are acquainted with ourselves, because we have access to inner thoughts and have lived with ourselves all our lives, we think we have a pretty good working knowledge of who we are. But such working knowledge is rather superficial. If we truly wish to know ourselves, we need to engage in critical self-reflection, ideally aided by friends or others who want to help and are not shy about pointing out our rationalizations and excuses. We all need our inner Socrates, as well as outer ones, if we can find them.
In her book, The Creative Habit, Twyla Tharp leverages the patience of paper by using it as a catalyst for growth and inspiration. She talks about how everything that happens in her life is material for her to work with, to create something out of, to help her grow and develop, and to keep her humble. She points out that Beethoven got better as he wrote things down. She said he had notebooks for rough ideas, notebooks for improvements on those ideas, and notebooks for finished ideas. “As long as he had his ideas captured on paper, his creativity would never waiver. In fact, it got stronger.”
While I’ve appreciated the patience of paper over the last few years, these books reinforced my belief that paper’s power helps us grow if we take it up on its offer.
Pay attention. I believe we all have a purpose or calling for being here. We just have to find it. As Kevin Kelly wrote in Excellent Advice for Living, “Your purpose is to discover your purpose. This is not a paradox. This is the way.”
To discover that purpose, we have to pay attention. We have to pay attention to ourselves, to our environment, to the signs the Universe is giving us when we are either on the right path or someone else’s.
In Shoe Dog, Nike founder Phil Knight encourages people to prioritize seeking out their purpose over everything else, writing:
I’d tell men and women in their mid-twenties not to settle for a job or a profession or even a career. Seek a calling. Even if you don’t know what that means, seek it. If you’re following your calling, the fatigue will be easier to bear, the disappointments will be fuel, and the highs will be like nothing you’ve ever felt.
Because, when we find that purpose, we connect with something larger than ourselves.
“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique.” Writes In Rosamund and Benjamin Zander in The Art of Possibility. “It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.”
This isn’t an easy feat because we are all busy, living lives full of commitments and distractions. “We sense that there are important fulfilling ways we could be spending our time,” writes Oliver Burkeman in Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, “even if we can’t say exactly what they are –yet we systematically spend our days doing other things instead.”
There’s a corollary to not working on this purpose, and I recently heard it put best during a podcast with Steven Pressfield. He said:
The act of not pursuing your dream, of not following where your soul wants to take you, is not without costs. You don’t get away free from that. That force inside of you that wants to be born, that wants you to give birth to it… If you don’t give birth to it, it doesn’t just go away. It goes into other channels and those channels are negative channels. And it will start to work against you. And be worse, and worse, and worse….It’s not just a luxury to live out your dream or your calling. It’s an imperative
I have learned to pay attention to life, by using the Hero’s Journey as a framework for my own life. This past year I read multiple books on the topic to include The Middle Passage by James Hollis, The Red Book by C.G. Jung, Reflections on the Art of Living by Joseph Campbell, and The Awakened Brainby Dr. Lisa Miller.
If you are interested in learning more about the Hero’s Journey, please check out my Sunday Email Series here. I spent all of 2023 writing about how this mythic structure can help us figure out what’s important to us and spend our lives discovering our purpose instead of wasting our four thousand weeks.
Featured Books By Month
- Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker, PhD
- Empire of Ice and Stone: The Disastrous and Heroic Voyage of the Karluk by Buddy Levy.
- Govt Cheese: A Memoir by Steven Pressfield.
- Will by Will Smith and Mark Manson.
- Take Command: Find Your Inner Strength, Build Enduring Relationships, and Live the Life you Wantby Joe Hart and Michael Crom
- Gilgamesh: A New English Version edited by Stephen Mitchell.
- Classics and Strategy by Jakub Grygiel
- Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
- Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman
- The Spartans: A Very Short Introduction by Oxford University Press
- The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition by Anne Frank, edited by Mirjam Pressler
- The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin
- The Awakened Brain: The New Science of Spirituality and Our Quest For an Inspired Life by Dr. Lisa Miller
- The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield
- Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier by Kevin Kelly
- By Water Beneath the Walls: The Rise of the Navy SEALs by Benjamin H. Milligan
- The Right Call: What Sports Teach Us About Work and Life by Sally Jenkins
- Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike by Phil Knight
- The Quest for Character: What The Story of Socrates and Alcibiades Teaches Us About Our Search for Good Leaders by Massimo Pigliucci
- The Power by Naomi Alderman
- Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold by Steven Fry
- White Sun War: The Campaign for Taiwan by Mick Ryan
- The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life by Twyla Tharp
- The Song of Significance by Seth Godin
- Steal Like An Artist, Show Your Work, and Keep Going by Austin Kleon
- The Performance Paradox by Eduardo Briceño
- Rising Strong: How the Ability to Reset Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent and Lead by Dr. Brene Brown
- Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield
- Becoming Dr. Seuss: Theodor Geisel and the Making of an American Imagination, George Lucas: A Life, and Jim Henson: The Biography by Brian Jay Jones
- The Body Keeps The Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Traumaby Bessel van der Kolk, M.D.
- Becoming Coachable by Scott Osman, Jacquelyn Lane, and Marshall Goldsmith
- Think Faster, Talk Smarter: How to Speak Successfully When You’re Put on the Spot by Matt Abrahams
- What You Do is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture by Ben Horowitz
- The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander
- Decoded by Jay-Z
Joe Byerly is a US Army armor officer, a squadron commander, and coauthor of My Green Notebook: “Know Thyself” Before Changing Jobs. He is also the founder of From the Green Notebook and host of the From the Green Notebook Podcast.
