Title: Loren O’Laughlin – What He Learned Reading 50 Books In One Year
Guest: Loren O’Laughlin
Peter: Welcome to the Biz and Life Done Well podcast, where we explore what it means and what it takes to do business and life well. I’m your host, Peter Wilson. If you’re like me, you’re intrigued by stories of common people who have achieved uncommon success in business and life. Join me as I interview fascinating people about how they got started, their successes and failures, their habits and routines, and what inspires them. So I’m here with Lorne O’Laughlin, who is a friend.
He happens to do design work. That’s his kind of day job sort of thing. He is an artist. Like I said, just a good friend. We’ve known each other for four or five years, maybe longer.
Lauren, go ahead and say hi.
Loren: Hi. You wait until I take a drink of the
Peter: Beverage.
Loren: Beverage. And and like now now Lauren, say hi. Hi. I’m Lauren O’Laughlin.
Peter: Nice to have you here today. So today, you know, the title of the podcast is Biz and Life Done Well. And one of the things that Lauren was telling me about last time we got together was that he had this quest that he was going to fulfill to read 50 books in one year, and it was really fascinating. So I wanted to find out, like, a few things. First of all, what started you on this journey?
Did you start off wanting to read 50 books this year in the 2019, or how did this happen?
Loren: Yeah. So I mean, like, you know, the the 2019, I knew that I wanted to set a reading goal specifically. Like, I had not done this before. Last year, three things happened that sort of set me on a trajectory to doing a lot more reading. The first is my family and I moved across the Puget Sound to Bremerton, and I now had a one hour ferry ride at the beginning and end of my day.
And so instantly I had more time to do something and the Wi Fi was kind of spotty. Well, there’s no Wi Fi on the boat, but the cellular service is pretty spotty in the middle. And so like anything that you think you’re going to just stream, you can just forget about that. And the second thing that happened was I was enrolled in the Seth Godin’s Alt MBA program. And so not only did I have some extra reading time on my hands, I also had a reading list that was part of that program, which consisted of I think like six books.
Peter: Okay.
Loren: Most of them by Seth himself. Well, not most of them, but like I think like out of the six, three he wrote. So like it’s pretty heavy on the Seth wisdom there. Then the third thing was I joined a book club with my church and, you know, we had just moved over there. And so it was a really great opportunity to just go try to get to know the guys who were there.
And it was just like the husbands had one group and the wives had a different group. It was a really nice format for reinforcing the patriarchy. No, I’m just kidding. But like giving a safe place that we could discuss things that, you know, we saw as we read the books and we read different books. And I thought that was kind of interesting.
Like I wasn’t choosing the reading list, but it was part of something that the church had organized as like a leadership development activity to try and say, you know, like, if you think that leadership might be something interesting to you, we have a reading list that we’d like to work through and see what you think about all those things. And so between reading the six books from the Alt MBA and then reading, I think it was four books for the book club, I had picked up a few other books through the year and I started tracking them through Goodreads, which is a nifty little app. You can just kind of track your progress. Yeah. And I got my report in December.
It said, you know, like, your year end reading, you read 20 books this year. Was like, what? I’ve never read 20 books. That’s amazing. Wow.
Okay. I tried to read a lot of books because I was doing things, but I didn’t have a numerical goal in mind. Mhmm. But I tallied up 20 books and I was like, oh, that feels like that’s something. Sure.
I don’t know what it is, but it’s something. And so like, you know, that was I got this like notification from Goodreads that I had read 20 books from 2018. And so I was like, okay, well let’s like, if I did 20 without trying.
Peter: So now you identified yourself as a reader.
Loren: Yeah. Like, obviously I could do it. Yeah. And like, you know, I’d been working on, you know, books pretty intentionally. And I thought like, okay, well, if I can do if I can get 20 without like, you know, trying for a target, like what if I tried to double that?
And then like I put a little stretch goal in there, you know, not just 40, but 50. And I thought about setting 52, but then I was scared because it’s like when you admit to doing 52 of something in a year
Peter: Yeah.
Loren: You were literally saying, I’m gonna do one of these every week. Yes. And that that really terrified me. And so I backed it back too.
Peter: Was I had like two weeks.
Loren: Oh, grace. And so like here it is December, what is today? Today is thirteenth. Thirteenth. Yes.
And I have read 55 books. This year. This year.
Peter: Wow. Congrats.
Loren: Thank you.
Peter: You seem smarter.
Loren: Well, my head’s heavier. I don’t know if I’m any smarter.
Peter: Or maybe confused. I don’t know. So, wow, that’s amazing. So you set the goal. Did you tell some other people about the goal, or did you keep it to yourself?
Loren: I told my wife about it, but I mostly kept it to myself. Because at that point in January, I still wasn’t sure, you know, what the year held for me. Yeah. So I wasn’t gonna just go start waving a banner. I like, I’m gonna read 50 books as you’re So
Peter: you Hey.
Loren: Yeah. I just met you. I’m gonna read 50 books. So you were
Peter: hopeful, but yeah.
Loren: I told Goodreads. Okay. And by that point, like I had connected with some people that I know on Goodreads and so they could see my goal. And so like that’s one of the fun kind of things about the app is you can kind of see each other’s goal. And so there are people in my professional network who saw that I had set the goal and they could see the progress bar under it, you know, if they were looking.
So it was a pseudo public declaration Fair of enough. And so I just like sort of set off in the beginning of the year and was like, okay. Well, I should read some books.
Peter: Yeah. So, I mean, the biggest question I have, you know, in thinking about setting this type of goal would be how am I gonna find 50 books worth reading? I mean, I could go to, you know, Bill Gates always has a list of books. Oprah has a list of books, you know. There’s always a list, you know, of books to read.
You know, I followed a little of that myself, and I found some very fascinating books, but what was your formula for finding books worth reading?
Loren: Well, I mean, like there are like two main criteria for books. They’re either books that I had Okay, there’s three criteria. So there’s there’s books that I that I had on my reading list that like I had always sort of intended to read, but had maybe or maybe not ever gotten around.
Peter: So like some classics perhaps?
Loren: Yeah. So classics. Like, I definitely like this year was it was heavy in like specifically young adult classics. Things that like either, you know, people that I knew had read or things that I had told teachers that I had read, but not actually read. So for example For example, The Giver.
I read The Giver, which is something that I think was like prescribed in elementary school. And like I just sort of like faked my way through those book reports. K. And so there are things like that that like, know, like I just took the opportunity to broadly pick up some reading debt that I had to try and like, know, make myself the person I was pretending to be. Yeah.
And there’s actually a lot of things in here that like there are ideas that I had been accustomed to from, you know, encounters with other people, but I never read the book.
Peter: So what are we talking like
Loren: Machiavelli or Machiavelli is on my list, but that’s that’s gonna be next year. Okay. Okay. But like, for example, the Google design sprint book. Like, I’d read a lot of medium articles about Jake Knapp’s work around the Google design sprint.
And like, I knew quite a bit. But at work, we had a workshop that we were doing. We’re gonna go to a client site and they had asked us to run a workshop in the way that Japnap prescribes the Google Design Sprint to be. Okay. And so, you know, I I felt like I knew some.
But with that threat, I downloaded the audiobook on Sunday afternoon, put my headphones in, and set it to three times speed and read it in six hours on the airplane.
Peter: So we’re not talking quality, contemplative reading here necessarily. You’re so you’re Not always. So you’re defining reading as having listened to and or read or some combination.
Loren: Yeah. I mean, I definitely consume all of it. Yes. And so, you know, I’m not I’m not doing sort of the Bill Gates, like sit and take notes in the margins of the book necessarily. Right.
One of the ways that I approach reading is, sort you of my criteria for, you know, what I’m gonna count as a book personally actually changed while I was doing this.
Peter: So like
Loren: in June, I was like, okay, so this is halfway through. How am I doing? I like pop open Goodreads. How am I doing? How many books have I read halfway through?
And I was like, 10. I had read 10 books in June. And so I was like, okay,
Peter: we need to So you’re on track to get 20.
Loren: I was on track to get 20 again. And so like, you know, that was a really like interesting like moment of learning for me of I went ahead and set a more ambitious goal, but I didn’t change any behavior. Like I just kept reading the same way that
Peter: I Oh, I see. See. You hadn’t created any particular intentional habits or
Loren: anything. Right. I mean, because like, you know, the goal itself was sort of just like a shot in the wind, like not accountable to anybody. I’m just gonna try and do this and, you know, we’ll see what happens. But like checking in in June and realizing that like I was halfway through and I was on the trajectory to just repeat my previous behavior.
Yeah. I just decided that like, okay, well, no, I want to accomplish this goal, not miss this goal by half or less. And so for one, like I decided that I was going to change my criteria.
Peter: Okay.
Loren: So I had been really strict up until that point. Like, you know, I read one, two, three, four, five, six of the 10 were non fiction instructional. Like I’m going to make my brain better with this because this is a It’s
Peter: good for you.
Loren: Well, I mean, it’s like eating vitamins. Yes. And so like, essentially like I could do one vitamin book a month as it turned out.
Peter: So what were some of those titles?
Loren: So those titles were You had asked like, what are the sources? So the very first book I read this year was The Spontaneous Healing of Belief by Greg Braden. And that’s one of the books I don’t recommend. Okay. But I read it because I had a friend who was going through some stuff and like he said that this book had really sort of opened his eyes to a lot of things.
And I was like, all right, well, what’s in your head right now? Because like I had just been doing this reading club with guys from church and I was like, okay, this is an effective way to talk to two guys. It’s like, okay, So we’re reading the same I wanted to like read that and go like, what’s in your head right now? And like, you know, some of the ideas in there are I think a little toxic because it’s sort of a new agey, like you can manifest your own destiny by wanting it, sort of the secret ish woo woo stuff. Yeah.
But even in that book, like I walked away with something positive. Like there’s a he does a deconstruction of the Lord’s prayer where he starts trying to make a code out of it. But even though the code feels really uncomfortable to me as somebody who doesn’t really like the idea of I can tell God how to do things. What? But the breakdown of the sections in the Lord’s Prayer, I had never noticed that.
So like I was able to walk away from that book even though like I didn’t necessarily align with the conclusions that I learned something about like the literary nature of, oh, well, what got dissected?
Peter: Got it. So you’ve got all these sort of, I’ll call them heavier books. Mhmm. And then you had this turning point. Yeah.
Yeah. So And then what happened?
Loren: I read two other books. I’d started the Chronicles of Narnia, reading those to my kids. And C. S. Lewis.
Yeah. C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. And so and and for the record, I counted each individual chronicle as a different book, and people can argue with me about that if they want, but they’re independent books
Peter: by Leave the feedback in the comments.
Loren: And so like I started that and I decided to just like really lean into that and to go headlong into reading more of things that were, you know, maybe geared towards a younger audience, but things this is where I decided to go and like do my like, you know, younger adult
Peter: This is your atonement for all And those books that you
Loren: so I was like, okay. There’s
Peter: pretended to have read or just known of and had The people that
Loren: I admire had said like, this is a really good book for you to read. Yeah. And I had just sort of not done it. And so I picked up the Chronicles of Narnia, read those to my kids at night. And like my two sons had very differing opinions about these books.
My five year old loved it and wanted me to just read, you know, five or six chapters a night, and I to like cut it off at three to four. Like, I can’t do this. Yeah. My mouth is dry. I can’t do it.
But my my four year old was like throwing things around the room and he said, I hate books with black and white pictures. Know, like knowing your audience is important.
Peter: Well, yeah. Or the age of your audience Yeah.
Loren: So a funny thing happened. Also you know, one of the my sort of reading debt books was Mere Christianity. And so Oh, man. I picked that up at the same time that I read I was reading, I think, The Horse and His Boy. Okay.
And I was reading Mere Christianity to myself CS on the ferry
Peter: As well.
Loren: Yeah. CS Lewis. And then I was reading The Horse and His Boy to my son at night. And what was really fun was to read a single author’s two different perspectives in their writing and to like read CS Lewis’ fiction at the same time I was reading his nonfiction. Right.
And to see that like both of those things were made richer by like understanding like what were just sort of his cultural turns of phrase and what were like very pointed things that he was trying to like illuminate.
Peter: Now, C. S. Lewis in that example, there are probably very few authors where you’re going to find other opportunities
Loren: to But do like what I would suggest if somebody wants to do a similar thing for another author who has done fiction is maybe like go and read interviews or listen to interviews with them and be able to get some of who they are along with their fiction to kind of help decode what they’re doing. I found that it made it richer to be able to understand not just what they had created, but who they were and where they were coming from in that creation.
Peter: Right. Well, there’s a great way to combine the two. It’s called historical fiction.
Loren: Yeah. Another thing that was really interesting, ended up book ending my year with books by an aunt and a nephew. And I didn’t know that when I picked the books up. Oh, yeah? Yeah.
So early in the year I read N. K. Jemisin’s How Long till Black Future Month, which is an anthology of LGBT intersectional mixed race, mixed gender fiction that casts a really interesting view of a future that is not the typical future that you see in science fiction.
Peter: Okay.
Loren: Where it’s a lot more inclusive and intersectional than a lot of the sort of white boys fighting in space stories that we see.
Peter: Okay.
Loren: And that was a really interesting infusion of like just other perspective that helped sort of set me off on a path for the year of just trying to like be aware of my surroundings and like realize that like things that I think are normal or normative, that’s because I am the majority. So it’s like a white male that is very easy to just sort of slip into like, woah, everybody’s comfortable with these ideas. No. No, they’re not. And so that really helped me with my work actually.
So like reading this fiction helped me in my design work to try and think more inclusively about who might be in the audience. And one of the pieces of advice that I picked up along the way was when you’re having a discussion about what to build, I work in software design, stop sometime during the process and ask yourself like, who is not in the room that should be in the room? Because like, it’s really easy to forget that you are missing perspectives just because like we are one person.
Peter: Sure.
Loren: And then you get another person who’s like you. Yeah. And now it’s like, oh, well, we share all these experiences. Yeah. That’s universal.
It’s like, no, it’s not.
Peter: Right, right. So you transitioned, you kind of changed your rules. You said, okay, we’re gonna open it up to any type of book. Obviously, you’re Audible you probably use the library app Libby or something like that.
Loren: Yeah. So I didn’t pick up Libby until September when I decided that I’d spent too much money on books.
Peter: So you wanna mention what Libby is all about?
Loren: Oh, yeah. Libby is a free app that you can put your library card into, and it allows you to download digital copies either ebooks or audiobooks. And you can either listen or read them right on your phone or tablet. And for those of you with kids out there, like one of the things that was really fun for me is I found that they have like read along books kind of like the if you remember like the tapes or the CDs where like you like read and it go chime, turn They the have like a one up on that for ebooks where you just like hit play and the word lights up as it goes through the whole book and reads it to you. Wow.
And so like they’ve got all these like Pete the Cat books.
Peter: Did that count as one of your books?
Loren: No, I didn’t count it. Although like a few of the kids books slipped in here. Like they’ve got the seven silly eaters and the time warp trio. What are some of the ones I would consider to be like kids? Oh, Little Bear.
The adventures of Little Bear.
Peter: Don’t remember that.
Loren: It’s the same author and illustrator. At least the same illustrator. Maybe the same author. The guy who did Where the Wild Things Are. Oh, got it.
Got it. So these are these are stories that I really enjoyed reading to my children. And since Little Bear was an anthology, like so one of my criteria was I could read things that were maybe illustrated and small, but they had to be whole anthologies of things because I wanted to like draw a line, like sort of a literary bundle around a critical mass of stuff. And so Little Bear is an anthology. I counted that one.
Other anthologies is I went back and I picked up volume one, which is the first seven issues of the Ninja Turtles comic books. And what was really fun was they had author’s notes in between each issue. And like I learned so much about like both pop culture and like just what was going on in the eighties just from reading that volume. And so like, there are things out there like that, the graphic novels that I will happily fight anyone who says that a graphic novel doesn’t count as a Because like when I think about my criteria for a book, is it something that’s gonna bring me a big enough idea that I have to chew on it and it’s going to help me grow. And so like by that measure, which is a very broad definition of a book, graphic novels absolutely true.
Sure, of course.
Peter: Yeah. You’re doing all this reading. Now, we really didn’t talk about the habit side of it. So, did you have like a particular ritual around reading? It sounds like you did a lot of reading at home with your kids.
How did you establish these habits, or what were the I’m reading Atomic Habits right now. Of the things that he says is in order to develop a habit, he’s got this thing called the two minute rule, which is do whatever it is for two minutes. That can be the habit. The habit shouldn’t take longer than two minutes. So maybe the habit is sitting down and opening the book and reading one page.
Loren: The habit for me, I mean with reading my kids, like it’s, you know, bedtime equals books.
Peter: Okay. So dad is habituated into Yeah.
Loren: Like dad, like it’s nighttime, dad reads. That’s how
Peter: Yes, that’s how we go to sleep.
Loren: So So that habit was already established. Yeah. But I just upped the ante by making it books that I wanted. Okay. So we also read Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.
Oh. Which was excruciating because it’s mostly nonsense. And trying to get little kids to understand like the caprice around nonsense vocabulary Sure. When they don’t even know the rest of the words to begin with. And then you’re introducing the Jabberwocky, which is like a literary device of nonsense.
Yeah. And it’s like, man, this is meta for me, but like these kids just think I’m just babbling. So that was one habit. You asked about the other habits. One of the most important habits that I developed around reading, especially digital medium, was that I would sit down on the ferry.
And if I had a book in my bag, that was an easy thing to reach for. But oftentimes I didn’t. But I had a bunch of books on my phone. And so Distracting.
Peter: The I mean, the phone can be distracting.
Loren: Right. The phone can be distracting. And so the habit that I engendered for myself around reading was that when I would open up other apps, I would catch myself as the app was loading. Instagram. Instagram, Spotify Yeah.
Podcasts. Yeah. Like any of these apps that weren’t my reading apps, I would catch myself and I’d say, Lauren, do you have a podcast goal this year?
Peter: Okay. Hardcore.
Loren: No. I don’t. Okay. What do you have? You have a reading goal.
Peter: Maybe you should have a podcast.
Loren: Maybe you should have a oh, that’s right. Here we are on a podcast. But I mean, the point was having to analyze what were the behaviors that were going to move towards my goal or away from my goal was an important part of how I engaged with my device. And deciding that when I had large chunks of time that I was going to catch myself before I squandered them. And to like also like have those books loaded on my phone and ready to go.
Peter: So you made the habit easy. Yeah. Made the By having them ready to go.
Loren: And so like, you know, I met myself where I was and made sure that I had digital medium available. And on the days when I didn’t have my headphones on the ferry, it was excruciating because I knew what I was missing.
Peter: So it sounds like you did the Audible quite a bit.
Loren: Quite a bit. So like when I look at the books that I read, I would say probably have.
Peter: Books you consumed.
Loren: Yeah. Books that well, sure. I fully I ascribe to reading audio books. I imported them into my cerebral cortex and they’re there. I don’t care which sensory object brought them in.
Peter: Touche. Touche. Go ahead.
Loren: Like, I would say it looks like about half of them, 60% were audiobooks.
Peter: So would you mind sharing the list?
Loren: Oh, absolutely.
Peter: I’d I’d be happy to. And maybe one sentence about each book perhaps.
Loren: Oh, yeah. Sure. Let me just roll through these. And if we hate how this
Peter: Well, can we can well, no. What I’d like to do is I’d actually like to publish the list, if What you don’t I would like you to do, though, is pick five books that you would recommend. Out of the 50 some, 55, I guess, that you read this year, what are five that you would highly recommend? Sure. And then two you wouldn’t Yeah.
You do not recommend.
Loren: I already nixed the sponsorship.
Peter: Yeah. You already added that one. Yeah. Okay.
Loren: I don’t think that I would recommend how to quickly get more business by being a local celebrity because that one turned out to just be an ebook, which was a direct transcription of somebody’s like interview. And I felt like I bought it as an ebook because somebody that I followed on Goodreads had read it. Like they checked it off as they had read it. And so I was like, oh, I trust that person. I’ll read that.
And like, I just felt so scammed by it. Like Yeah. Like I paid a dollar for it on Amazon and like, it’s like I almost want that dollar back. Yeah. Oh, and the other book that I wouldn’t really recommend, but was still interesting, it was a compilation of children’s letters to Albert Einstein because there’s a archive collection somewhere that like has all of these letters that he had kept that children had sent him.
Peter: Okay.
Loren: And they had copies of some of his replies to them,
Peter: which was
Loren: like interesting. But like I wanted more out of that book that it just didn’t have. So we were talking about different vectors for books.
Peter: Yes.
Loren: There are a bunch of books here that I just would go to goodwill and I would just look and see if anything on the goodwill shelf looked interesting. And I took that as like, you know, like somebody bothered to buy this at one time. Yeah. And so like, I was like, it’s a first pass on being interesting. So like I would pick those up for, you know, pennies.
And that was another way. Like this was about the same time where I decided I’d spent too much on books already for
Peter: the year. Got it. So I think we’ve got the don’t read list. So let’s do five, like of everything you see on the list, what are five that just really strike you as like, was definitely worth it.
Loren: So books that like are definitely worth it, I’m going to be loath to try and like keep away from like entire series of books because that was definitely rewarding. Like I’m gonna just go ahead, even though I counted each individual Chronicles of Narnia. Sure. I’m going to suggest them in whole as one of my suggestions. The other one is there’s a series of three books that are written by a theoretical quantum physicist named Carlo Rovelli.
The first one is Reality is Not What It Seems. The second one is seven brief lessons on physics. And then the third one is the order of time. The order of time, if you are into audiobooks is read by Benedict Cumberbatch and it’s very satisfying. Okay.
Carlo Rovelli does a really good job of capturing in very, very thin books. So like I read one of them in print and I listened to an audiobook and then I forgot the way I read the other one. Okay. But they’re less than an eighth of an inch thick. And they are Like the seven brief lessons on physics was originally published in Italian in an Italian newspaper as a series of seven articles for the general public.
That just sort like kind of sort of state of the union on where are we at with quantum physics. Okay. But they do a really good job of setting forth some foundational ideas that then you can go build other concepts on. Okay. And so it’s a really good introduction to physics in general.
And so I would absolutely recommend that. And I have recommended that book a lot. Okay. The seven brief lessons.
Peter: So that’s two books, two series.
Loren: Yeah. Timothy Keller’s Every Good Endeavor is If you’re not familiar with Timothy Keller, he’s a pastor in New York who works at the sort of intersection between faith and the big city because he’s like right there in New York. And so his ministry really like envelops a lot of really high performing business people. And so this book was sort of an answer to the question that he got regularly of how does my faith and my work match up?
Peter: What’s the name
Loren: of the book again? It’s called Every Good Endeavor.
Peter: Okay.
Loren: And I had that recommended to me by a visiting pastor at church who just planted a church up on Capitol Hill. And so that was something that I took as a strong recommendation and I really enjoyed it. For those who are more bent on business, there are two books by Jake Knapp, Make Time and the Google Design Sprint. There’s two authors, but you can find it by Jake Knapp. Okay.
The two books set out how to be more productive faster And then the second book, so Make Time is the second book after the Google design sprint where the second point that they make is, yeah, sure you can do a lot of things, but which ones? And so for time prioritization, as well as like, you know, really thinking about what is your highlight for every day and making sure that you do the things that matter, I really appreciated that. And actually MakeTime helped me finish my reading list because one of the pieces of advice they had in that was to give yourself partial credit. And so that’s when I decided my page count didn’t count.
Peter: So it’s called make? Make time. Make time. Okay.
Loren: Yeah. Not bake time.
Peter: No. Or I thought it was maybe make time.
Loren: No. Make time. So I’m totally cheating here by like recommending pairs of books, but this is That’s fine. This is how I think. And like, this is what I think actually helped me read more was by linking ideas.
And so another pair of books that I would highly recommend together, but they don’t come together, is I read The Giver. Yes. But I’m also now reading Shoshana Zubarov’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. And so I recommend those as a pair because one is a child’s book about some odd societal norms. And the other one is analyzing where we have ended up with our rogue mutation of capitalism.
And
Peter: And
Loren: the similarities between a children’s book written in like ’97, I think, and a book that was published last year that talks about the academic state of affairs online are haunting.
Peter: Got it. So that’s that is six. We’ll publish the list.
Loren: I’ll I’ll I’ll save the rest of my colorful descriptions for the show notes.
Peter: Comments. Now I do have one one last. So which which of the books that you read was just pure pleasure, no redeeming value, just for the pure pleasure of reading, what book would that be? Are you stumped? Are you stumped?
Loren: That’s a trick question because, like like I said, like, even even books that I hate, like, I’m still pulling something constructive out of it.
Peter: But which which of the books that you read in the last year was, like, eating popcorn?
Loren: Eating popcorn? Yeah. Or potato chips or naming say like, what was the lightweight one that was just fun? Yeah. I really enjoyed listening to A Grown Ups Guide to Dinosaurs, which was a Audible original book.
If you have the Audible app, they do the, you know, sort of free titles every month. Mhmm. And it was one of the free titles just popped up. You know, I just kind of like, there’s a few of those that those were more like the popcorn books for me.
Peter: Okay.
Loren: They were between my subscription. Yeah. And I was like, well, I mean, like, it’s free. I’ll just like it’s like that and Carmela is like which is a a very old book, which is one of the earliest books about vampires. And even still, like, I’m pulling stuff out of them because, now I’m understanding cultural context about vampires that I never knew.
But I mean, there was not a like goal around that aside from let’s just get another spine on the shelf.
Peter: Got it. Did you read any historical fiction?
Loren: I read any historical fiction.
Peter: Like Ken Follett or
Loren: No. Mean, or not by that. Not by that and Reines. Like, I stuck really I stuck really closely to memoirs, nonfiction, and like straight up fiction. And so that was that was kind of the camps that I lived in this year.
K. But if you have some recommendations, I would definitely be interested.
Peter: Definitely do. Ken Follett series. It’s a three part three book series on starts in World War one. Okay. It’s the first book.
Second book is World War II. The third book is The Cold War and the End of the Cold War.
Loren: Oh, okay.
Peter: It’s, and I think it’s called The Century Series. Fascinating look into history, especially, you know, recent history that I was not aware of at all. So really good stuff. And of course, the classic historical fiction, Patrick O’Brien, Master and Commander series, which is about the British Navy in the Napoleonic era. And that is just a classic was described by New York Times as the best historical fiction ever written.
Loren: Oh, wow. So Okay.
Peter: Yeah. That’s a 20 book series.
Loren: Does it have Russell Crowe in it?
Peter: No. The movie does. So what are your goals for 2020?
Loren: I haven’t set goals for 2020. One of the things that I recognized maybe last month was Okay. That because of the way that I approached setting this goal, it was exclusive to all other things. Like apparently the way that I set and achieve goals is by focusing on them to the detriment of other things. And so Okay.
I think I may choose a non reading goal for next year.
Peter: Got
Loren: it. I may set like a lighter weight reading goal, but I don’t think I’ll go so voraciously at it. Although in the last three weeks, I haven’t been able to stop. Like I hit my reading goal two weeks ago, and I’ve already racked up another four books.
Peter: So how many books do you have in your queue to read right
Loren: now? I think my like want to read list is like 30 books long.
Peter: Okay.
Loren: And so I’m not going to run out of books. Yeah. The question is just like, what am I going to prioritize? So I’m interested in like, you know, trying to figure out what is my next goal for 2020. You know, think you remember a couple years ago, I set the goal of losing a lot of weight.
And like that was also one of those like sort of mutually exclusive goals. And, you know, it was all about, you know, like really strict dieting and exercise and
Peter: Single-minded focus.
Loren: Yeah. And so like, you know, it’s one of these things that I know about myself is that it’s something that I both enjoy and suffer from is the ability to like, you know, really tune out everything that’s not my goal. Mhmm. Which is part of, I think, the ability to succeed at some really ambitious goals.
Peter: Got it. Well, that’s good words to think about. Well, Lauren, is there anything you wanna just kind of share as we wrap up here? Anything we didn’t talk about?
Loren: Oh, I’m sure there’s plenty that we didn’t
Peter: talk about. I mean, related to the topic of the day.
Loren: Sure. You know, if you look down at like my reading list here, there’s a lot of different stuff. I mean, like, you know, we kind of mentioned that I stayed in a couple of camps of genres. Yeah. But being able to sort of bounce around genres was I think a really helpful thing for me in my second half of the year when I was trying to figure out how am I going to finish more books faster.
And we kind of gave the nickname vitamin books to the big heavy nonfiction books. Yeah. And when I look at this, like I’ve got it in chronological order here and you can really see there’s sort of a pattern to the books. They go like, you know, nonfiction fiction, light nonfiction, popcorn book, graphic novel, audiobook, classic, kids book, free book, nonfiction audiobook Mhmm. Kids book, nonfiction.
Peter: So you really mix it up. Yeah.
Loren: Well, and I had to because like I keep focus on the same genre for more than, you know, one book at a time. Yeah. And so like by being able to switch between the type of content, like, I don’t know if it’s like, I don’t know enough about brain science. Maybe I should read a book about that. But that being able to, what at least it felt like was move to different centers of my brain.
Peter: Right.
Loren: Like, then I wouldn’t, it’s like, you know, like, shift your weight to the other foot coming up.
Peter: Right. Well, it’s like, I’m currently reading two books. I’m reading Guns, Germs and Steel, which was one of those Bill Gates recommended books, which is fascinating book. It is a tedious read. Very tedious.
Very fascinating. I keep that one on my nightstand, on my Kindle. So I usually read about five pages a night, depending on how sleepy I am. And then in my downstairs, I have Atomic Habits, and that’s a book that I read very intentionally. I wouldn’t want to keep that book up on my nightstand because it’s not the kind of book that I would want to read as I’m drifting.
I really want to understand and apply principles of the book. So, I’ve kind of got like different places where I’m going to read different books. And then when I’m in the car, I might listen to an Audible of something, you know, that’s sort of appropriate for where I’m at, driving, something I can consume. You know, maybe a Tim Ferriss book, for example, which is very thick.
Loren: Light and airy like Tim Ferriss. Well. The other thing that comes to mind is like switching formats. The Giver was one where I I had bought the the book at Goodwill. And I was like, oh, look.
It’s actually the, like, the school copy.
Peter: Oh, okay.
Loren: I was trying to get through it, and I just decided, you know, I I gotta switch to an audio book because I need to crunch through this. Yeah. And so like, I don’t know if that would help you with, you know, sort of your guns, germs, and steel that’s like, you know, just like chewing on heavy steak. Like maybe somebody cut it up for you.
Peter: Touche. Good idea. Any other parting shots before we wrap up? We will definitely have you back by the way.
Loren: I definitely enjoy that. I would just encourage people to think about, you know, goals that they would like to set and to think not just about what you feel like you can accomplish, but things that you can like say like, oh, I might have an ability here. Let me just lean into that. You know, because there’s all sorts of things that, you know, we have talent for, but maybe not any skill. You got to kind of pair those together.
And so what I can see in this last year of reading was that I had some talent for reading, but like I had to learn some skills.
Peter: So now you are a reader. You identify as a reader.
Loren: Oh, yeah. I definitely like, I’ve got little buttons that I wear that I picked up at the library and it says space out with a book.
Peter: Cool. Well, on that note, let’s wrap up. We’ll have a bunch of notes for this podcast. We’ll try to get a list of the books, if not all the books, at least the highly recommended books. We’ll have that in the show notes.
So, Lauren, thank you for being with us, and look forward to chatting with you again. Absolutely. Thanks for listening to this episode of Biz and Life Done Well with Peter Wilson. You can subscribe to us on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and most of the other popular podcast platforms. Please tell your friends about us and leave us a review so even more people will find out about us.
Thanks again. We’ll see you soon.
