When I was younger, I had a difficult time understanding how people came to find “words to live by.” Little by little, and then suddenly I find myself forming my own words to live by, or in the parlance of more recent generations, words that live rent free in my mind. I now realize that guiding or first principles for ones life or work come through experience and when one lacks experience, they come from books, or more broadly in today’s content rich world, the written and spoken words of others.

In today’s endless stream of content, these are a few books, articles, and creators whose work has stuck with me and has guided me in both my life and my career. If you find yourself wanting to support any of these authors and creators, consider supporting them directly if possible or supporting your local bookstores and libraries.

Non-Fiction Books

• Atomic Habits by James Clear
• The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin
• Taking Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens
• A Field Guide to American Houses by Virginia Savage McAlester
• American Kingpin by Nick Bilton

Fiction Books

• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Beloved by Toni Morrison
• The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

Essays

• No Silver Bullet by Fred Brooks, published in The Mythical Man-Month
• The Cost of Cloud, A Trillion Dollar Paradox by Sarah Wang and Martin Casado
• The Engineer/Manager Pendulum by Charity Majors
• Go’s work stealing scheduler by Jaana Dogan
• Don’t get locked up into avoiding lock-in by Martin Fowler

Creators

• Folding Ideas - Dan Olson
• Julia Evans
• Charity Majors
• Proko - Stan Prokopenko

Takeaways

Form follows function

When designing anything, from software systems to physical goods to molecular interactions, the form of the design must always be informed by how it is intended to work. A Field Guide to American Houses was instrumental to help me understand this concept. McAlester describes all the elements of homes from the foundation to the finishes and explains how building material strength led to the evolution of home shapes. In Beloved, Morrison expertly executes on the same concept as her narrative circles in time around the climactic event the book is about. The book’s structure avoids the topic as much as the characters avoid it themselves. The form of the book follows the function of the narrative. The Great Gatsby and The God of Small Things also provided great examples from which to distill this principle. Fitzgerald used physical geography in East Egg and West Egg to explore the divides created by wealth and social class. Roy reinforced ideas of otherness of Baby Kochamma through the metaphor of her gardening; she is often at odds with her environment in the same way she forces temperate plants to grow in a tropical environment.

Also a special shoutout to American Kingpin. I read this excerpt of the book on Wired once a year for 3 or 4 years until I read the original book. It reminded me that I enjoyed longer form essay over short article, and most importantly reignited my interest in storytelling.

Environment over willpower

Environmental factors create greater impetus than willpower. Our willpower is a limited resource and relying on it to do what we should do and not do what we shouldn’t leads us down a path of failure. This is a foundational principle in Atomic Habits and How to Take Smart Notes. Ahrens goes as far to say that simplicity of structure allows for complexity of thought. Creating a simple structured environment around you generates the possibility for flow in your life, work, and creative endeavors. This principle is foundation in Majors’s works where building high functioning engineering teams is not about individuals, but rather the environments or company cultures in which they thrive.

Systems over goals

More often than not, our results are not a direct reflection of our efforts. Instead of focusing on short term goals, which can hinder long term development, focus on creating the proper systems to allow for continued success. This is Clear’s main thesis in Atomic Habits: creating habits form the system through which you can achieve consistent success. Ahrens touches on the same ideas. You cultivate ideas and connections continuously through the lens of your short term goals and end up accumulating a wealth of connections and knowledge that can be recombined for any future endeavor. Majors emphasizes the importance of ritual and habit when it comes to performing as an engineering organization: create smaller feedback loops by aggressively prioritizing your continuous integration and delivery habits. Waitzkin talks about this extensively in The Art of Learning in reference to his chess career, especially achieving the balance between short term motivation through goals and long term learning.

Internalize fundamentals

Proko, who incidentally introduced me to The Art of Learning, talks a lot about mastery in drawing. It comes down to knowing the fundamentals of line, shape, value, edge, and color. Those fundamentals exist in any medium and by internalizing them, you can focus on higher level aspects of your art like composition and storytelling. The same is true for any discipline you learn. Waitzkin attributes his immense capability for high performance and mastery to his ability to completely internalize the movement of chess pieces and movements from Tai Chi in order to focus on higher level concepts and achieve flow. Internalizing fundamentals is the first step to true mastery.

Use your medium to its unique advantages

When I was younger, I did not appreciate film beyond its ability to convey stories in a more life-like form. I had been trained to read books in a way that broke down how authors sought to convey their ideas, but it had never occurred to me that film, and other storytelling mediums, had the same characteristics. Olson of Folding Ideas has created long from video essay content on a variety of topics from fake dinosaur fossils to why NFTs are a menace to society to the nuance of a failed animated version of Lord of the Rings from Ralph Bakshi. The common thread through all Olson’s videos is his ability to break down the visual language of film and explain how the choices of the filmmaker affect its ability to convey its message. With this in mind I went on to watch Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina as well as read the original novel by Tolstoy. With Olson’s content in mind, I was able to greatly appreciate how each creator took advantage of their medium. Wright chose to use the framing of the film as a stage play to highlight the shallowness of society in a general form while Tolstoy was able to showcase more specifically the experiences that led characters like Kitty to change and grow. Wright would not be able to do the same because of the medium. Written word lends itself to the introspection of characters while film requires that you deduce the internal state of a character from outward appearance and character.

Closing Thoughts

The rest of the items on my list have not contributed specifically to these principles but guide how I think software, tradeoffs, career, mastery, and craft. I come back to these creators and pieces regularly despite the base level of noise we live with on the internet today. If any of my words live rent free in your head, let it be these.

If writing is the medium through which we think and learn, reading is the medium through which we expand and imagine. So read deeply, read often, and most importantly, read.