Like his other recent book ‘Your Music and People’, it’s a compilation of Derek’s journal posts loosely related to the book’s title. Very inspiring droplets, with each chapter standing on its own. Works very well for picking up sporadically, re-reading one or a few from time to time and getting a boost from quick, exciting and potentially life-changing lessons.

Essentialism, or how to discern the vital few from the trivial many. This book is a worthy guide to choosing the right actions, removing obstacles and making execution effortless. In a wider context of books about de-cluttering our life and finding the core intent of living a fulfilling life, this one has served me as a true compilation of the bigger message.

It’s practical, full of quotes from other works and real-life situations where either a problem or a solution via essentialism is applied. It feels like a light read —because it’s so well redacted and edited— but it has a depth and very relatable sense to it.

Some of my key takeaways:

• Routines, once in place, are the gifts that keep on giving.
• Focus on small wins and repetition, rather than the objective.
• Make peace with the fact that saying ’no’ means trading popularity for respect.
• When people make their problem our problem, we’re not helping, we’re just enabling.
• Routinely create space to contemplate and remove the habit of always keeping the mind entertained.

This book is definitely a foundational brick for building a house of discipline, fortitude and fulfillment.

After having worked day-to-day for a few years now with English people, I found this book’s arguments to be very true and relatable.

As I grow older I’ve become more practical in thought, speech and behavior and, after reading this book, I realize it conflicts with the author’s description of English social patterns. I learned there’s a constant tendency towards indirectness, humor, self-deprecation, appearance of modesty and, moreover, moderation in argument and expression.

This makes intention and meaning of spoken words to come from a complex interpretation of voice tonality, context and body language. Which arguably applies to any culture but, in my opinion, it’s more present in this one. As the author defines it, it’s due to a “social dis-ease”.

There seems to be a cultural tendency towards not appearing comfortable in social situations. A culture of saving face in interactions, where positivism or eagerness for activities are rare. Attitudes seem driven by the feeling of the world being a nuisance that has to be coped with. The emotions meter tilts towards moderation… in everything. It doesn’t mean there’s no emotion, it just feels like it.

As Roger Waters wrote in Pink Floyd’s Time: “Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way.”

I found out about this book thanks to Derek Sivers’ journal. It’s his highest rated book, and was really interested in it after reading its premise.

It’s in a short story format, each of them with a version explaining what happens after we die. They’re unusual, creative and packed with analogies to philosophical thought or existentialist proposals that don’t necessarily change or get resolved after we die.

God is often humanised, heaven is often treated as a mundane society filled with similar vices that we endure during life and the afterlife is sometimes a multi-dimensional, uncontrollable and even insignificant existence.

Incredibly inspiring.

A journey of self-discovery and a mild introduction to eastern philosophy. Moreover, it’s a beautifully phrased, entertaining prose.

Siddharta starts out strongly. He’s confident and seemingly incredibly wise for his age. While he’s born in the highest rank of India’s social caste and already in a culture of devotion to the mind and body — which makes him seem like he’s already set up to be the spiritual compass of the story — he’s also rebellious of them. He wants something more. He’s a seeker.

This takes him on a journey of exploration and discovery of desires and vices of what’s referred to as the “child people”; experiencing abandonment, lust, wealth, greed or by ceding to the often irrational, instinctive feelings that would come from parenthood. He meets and learns from multiple characters that shape him and who are shaped by him.

One of my favourite lessons comes from his meeting with Kamala, in a period when learning the art of love. She asks him: “What skills do you have?”. Siddharta, who’s never done skilled labor, replies: “I can fast, I can wait and I can think”. While seemingly worthless in a world that values status, wealth and material possessions, Siddharta’s self-discipline, patience and wisdom grant him they keys to open all doors to achieving his goals.

You see, Kamala, when you throw a stone into the water, it hurries by the swiftest possible path to the bottom. It is like this when Siddhartha has a goal, a resolve. He does nothing — he waits, he thinks, he fasts — but he passes through the things of this world like a stone through water, without doing anything, without moving; he is drawn and lets himself fall.

A feeling of burn on exhalation. A long gaze into the infinite.

It comes from time to time. Not always there, but not shy of often stopping by.

Last time was after watching the news. A murdered celebrity. A media explosion.

I knew her name, didn’t pay much attention those days. I only knew she had fame.

An innocent ride of a long, bumpy road. A vicious habit of meeting subsistence by harming others.

The numb crowd fully domesticated. We had become comformist dystopia.

Experts at shrugging away horror and inconvenience. Quick to interpret, digest and forget.

Along with details the first drops of gut acid. A creeping burn at the base of it.

A familiar road. A murdered mate. A child with a permanent wound and an eternal loss.

It’s one slap after the other.

How much we have lost by riding on the back of tyrants?

How little have we been taught to value life?

She said goodbye with kisses and a sunset background.

And with that, the acid ball became whole. The burn had moved around like a metastasized tumor.

Time turned small, distortion became evident and thoughts of falling to the impune darkness were the only ones left in my mind.

A book that showcases Adlerian psychology and philosophy, written in the form of a conversation between an old philosopher and a young, angry and frustrated disciple, who’s facing disappointment from being an spectator of his unchanging and unfulfilling life. It works very well as the philosopher’s arguments are developed, the disciple’s point of view is intended to be a projection of the reader’s doubts, concerns and biased opinions.

Lifestyle is the tendencies of thoughts and actions in our life. One of the strongest arguments in the book is that, at all times, we’re in full control of steering our lifestyle. This is because it’s a subjective interpretation of the world around us and being so, we can change it. Lifestyle is not really an objective fact. It’s how we view, accept and relate to things and people. And that’s always within our control.

It argues that the root of our frustrations and feelings of inferiority always come from interpersonal relationships and their dynamics. Failure to obtain goals, supposed traumas and feelings of incompleteness are not consequence of past experiences, on the contrary, past experiences are subjective tools we use in the present to justify those feelings.

It touches on ‘separating tasks’, which means dealing only with actions, thoughts and feelings that are within our control and nothing else. By exercising this, we can achieve freedom. This will come when we learn to avoid basing our lives, actions, feelings on the actual cause of imprisonment of our minds, the one thing that keeps away from freedom: the desire for recognition.

Humans are not wired to be consistently wired.

An easy read for those interested in habits of de-cluttering our life and efficiently using modern tools, and an eye-opening read for those unaware of how much attention is stolen by digital entertainment, social media and mobile technology.

It reminisces of social and personal behaviors from before the modern smartphone era, and its benefits. It doesn’t promote a complete divorce from technology, instead it strongly argues for a more efficient use while providing insights and practical options to achieve it.

Some of the more relevant subjects: solitude as a form of liberation, the value of “high-quality leisure”, the difference in value between non-digital, real life conversations and digital connections, or how the author refers to them, high and low-bandwith communication.

Time is unconsciously taken for granted. It’s the most valuable commodity we own and the one thing tech giants are eager to take from us. As these tools are more and more invasive of our day-to-day and designed towards attracting our eyeballs, it becomes harder to develop habits for more focused, fulfilled minds and more valuable interactions.

A deep dive into big questions on human existence and progress. I enjoyed the technical, academic approach into themes like evolution, culture, philosophy, the physics of it all, and its core theme: knowledge. It’s not always explicit in the text, but it also touches very relevant subjects nowadays like climate change, energy, religion and even social media. Added to more scientific ones like quantum physics, biology and mathematics.

Not an easy read, as it sometimes dives too much into technicals and rationalizations that make the text feel like it’s questioning even its own arguments. However, even if there’s some harder chapters, there are many mind-bending and very relatable ones. For me in particular: “Optimism”, “Unsustainable”, “The Spark” and “The Evolution of Culture”.

The stronger argument (and mostly central theme of the book) is that humans, after several historical attempts to enter the state of an ever increasing snowball of knowledge, are currently favoring a society that’s increasingly open to change through constant conjecture and criticism of its own knowledge. We are now culturally seeking good explanations more and more. Explanations strong enough that are very hard to be refuted, and these come from the rationalizations of science. As long as there aren’t any proven physical laws preventing it, infinity of existence is merely blocked by a lack of knowledge. Which is a solvable problem.

A special mention to the “A Dream of Socrates” chapter, which I was able to relate to deeply. It covers a back-and-forth conversation (probably fictional) between Socrates and Apollo on the pointlessness of thinking we should ever achieve certainty in our beliefs and how much of an interesting life it is to simply seek truth on how the world works.

Saramago’s style unconventional but it’s illuminating. It made me understand that blocks of dialogue, chapter titles, character names and even usual punctuation rules aren’t requirement to convey a thrilling and smooth narrative.

The first part details the unusual way in which a town organically comes together to put its government and democractic system on the tip of its toes, in the least conventional but evident: through vote.

The rest is an essay on the effects of this premise. The clumsy and improvised attempts from the government of keeping its power quota, to which it’s blindly convinced it’s entitled to. Then the town’s actions in collective rebellion, which are so perfectly and organically synchronized that they manage to set in motion the repressive and dictatorial machinery of a government with a democratic front but essentially autocratic.

In the beginning, the story is narrated from the collective point of of view of both the town and the government. Then it focuses on specific characters and on how they react to each other’s actions. With emphasis on cabinet members, but then focus on a police commissar with the task of finding the source, real or fabricated, of the discontent. This leads him on a journey of finding his own clarity, after being exposed to the truth and individual justice. In my opinion it shows that the root of a rebellion are in our principles, and they’re spread through small actions, more than propaganda or grand scale rhetoric.