Best of Books #57

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Hi Reader,

I’m excited to share four great reads with you these past two months:

​Adversity for Sale by Jeezy

Jeezy’s story was an energizing read, made all the more so if you’re a fan of hip-hop and creativity; in so many ways, it’s the classic American tale of someone born with next to nothing, making it out, all while nearly losing it all. I’ve read of Atlanta described as “a conveyor belt of exceptions,” and Jeezy was one of the prototypes. I had fallen into a slump with my reading—more on that another day—and Jeezy’s memoir completely picked me up.

Quotes:

On stealing: I never went back to Mr. Russell’s shop after that. I don’t know if he ever noticed the radio was missing or if he even cared. I never heard anything about it if he did.

What’s crazy is that when I look back on that incident, I bet old Mr. Russell probably would have just given me that radio if I’d asked. Real shit. And that’s a real lesson, too—before you take something from someone, just ask, because they just might give it to you and you’ll maintain the relationship. But once you take something from someone, that’s it. Even if you eventually come clean and give it back, the damage to the relationship is done, and you’ll both have to live with that.

On the price of principles: Just because you’ve got your principles doesn’t mean everybody’s going to get on board, and when you stick to your guns and draw that line, some deals will fall apart. And sometimes they’ll be deals you really want to do, too. But that’s the thing about having principles: they also come with a price….

He’d been standing up to his principles—my price is my price—and he’d paid the ultimate cost.

On a certain level I respected it, even then, but I hated losing my friend.

On frugality: If I made a hundred dollars a day, spent two dollars on lunch, and ate the rest of my meals at home, I knew I could put away ninety-eight dollars at the end of the day. I knew it would take that type of discipline if I ever really wanted to reach my goals, and I lived like that for years.

Instead of going to the mall and buying three pairs of Jordans every week like other hustlers my age, I’d buy one pair a month and set them aside so I could pop out and get fresh when the time came. Same thing with haircuts and clothes. Instead of hitting the barbershop every day, I’d let my hair go all week, pull up to the mall on Saturday and get right, and keep it moving from there. The rest of the week, it was work clothes, old tennis shoes, and six-inch tuna subs.

On quantity: The first songs I ever wrote were trash. Straight up.

I’m not talking about those first songs I wrote that first night either. I’m talking about all the songs I wrote for years. Thousands and thousands of them, and every single one of them was trash.

Over time, I realized the quality of the songs wasn’t the point. It was about the process. Until I picked up that pen that first night, I’d never written a song in my life, and I had a lot to learn. I had to get those reps in, just like with anything else. It was practice, fail, practice, fail, practice, fail—again and again and again.

I will say this, though: once I started writing, I saw how rewarding it was. I’d been so in my head and stressed, even writing bad songs was therapeutic.

On foundation: The truth is perfection is an impossible goal. It’s good to shoot for, but at a certain point, you’ve just gotta let things go. That’s especially true with creative projects. The power is in the doing. You never know how people will respond to your work until it’s out in the world. Everything else is just projection and speculation. At the same time, it’s helpful for you to get some distance, too, because once it’s out there, it’s easier to see it for what it is—good, bad, and ugly.

With Come Shop Wit Me, the good was that after all the work I’d been putting in, I had a solid foundation. The infrastructure was there. The bad was that the album didn’t sell, so clearly I needed more fans. And the ugly was that the product wasn’t all the way right.

On regrets: If I could do it all over again, of course I’d go back and trademark the Snowman as soon as I had Fevzi make that first chain. And I’d trademark every iteration of the Snowman that came after it, too. But you don’t know what you don’t know, and as simple as it sounds, you really do have to live and learn. At the same time, you have to be able to accept the wins and the losses. And through it all, you’ve got to keep the faith.

Even though it’s easy to say I would go back and do things differently if I could, who’s to say that would have been the right thing to do? Maybe not having the Snowman trademark in place is exactly what my career needed at the time because it allowed the Snowman to spread. Either way, it was bad business, that’s for damn sure, but it was great marketing. There’s no denying that.

​Swipe Up for More! by Stephanie McNeal

Stephanie McNeal paints portraits of three specific influencers, all the while outlining the multibillion-dollar influencer industry that has boomed in the 2010s. Whether you’re an (aspiring) influencer, or one of the many billions who are influenced, this was an intriguing read into the people on both sides of social media algorithms.

Quotes:

On being influenced: As I stared at her house, I thought about my house, which had been so heavily influenced by hers. Did I have a personal home decor style before I started following Shea on Instagram? I don’t really remember, but I know that as I looked through photo after photo of Shea’s style, mine came into focus. I could say the same about so many things in my life.

On consistency: Influencers, in contrast, sought a more sustained relationship with their audience. Similarly to a magazine or lifestyle website, bloggers sought to cultivate an audience who would keep coming back and would check their websites weekly if not daily for updates and inspiration. The focus was less on virality and more on consistency.

On loyalty: Mirna doesn’t have millions of followers, but her more than one hundred thousand followers are extremely loyal. Many have been following her for a long time, and when Mirna recommends something to them, they pay attention. They feel like her success is their success too.

On self promotion: The opportunities just kept falling into her lap. Mirna hasn’t ever marketed herself or sought out opportunities to make money as an influencer (though she does market herself as a speaker).

On perception: They are judging the character [Shannon Bird] plays on the internet, which I am beginning to think isn’t the totality of who she really is, despite the impression of complete, unguarded authenticity she creates.

On authenticity: McRae noted that performing “authenticity” is one of the trickiest things for influencers to navigate. She described “authenticity work” as “curating a persona that is aspirational, but ordinary, attracting followers with the narrative that the extraordinary lifestyle being presented can be achieved by the average person,” noting that the most recurrent criticism of bloggers and influencers tends to stem from issues of authenticity, even if most of the commenters are not cognizant that this is what they are critiquing.

So influencers are supposed to be better than you but not too much better, the “best friend with great ideas” in your pocket, whom you could be like if only you tried hard enough.

On parasocial relationships: You don’t read Vogue for photos of real life, you read it for inspiration. That’s what early bloggers wanted to be too.

But soon, readers began wanting more. They didn’t want Caitlin to only share with them perfectly curated images of her wardrobe. They wanted to know about her life, to hear and see everything she was up to, and they wanted her to be real, to be authentic.

​Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (33 1/3) by Kirk Walker Graves

An art critic takes on one of the best albums of the 2010s (according to Billboard) made by an artist at their peak, presently facing disgrace. I don’t read much art criticism, and have heard meta-criticism of this book that it’s too pretentious; I wouldn’t disagree, though I would add that it was fascinating watching Kirk Walker Graves weave together his collage of sociology, psychology, and art, together into this very rich book.

Quotes:

On great work: A truly great record is a miracle of double endurance, thriving in the besieged sanctum of the heart – beating back the new music, the competition for our ardor – while simultaneously persisting through time in the byzantine officialdom of critical acclaim. We reflect on where and when a particular record became more than a record, looking for the point at which the music’s charm collided with our own tender susceptibility. We find meaning, prophecy, validation, and mystery in those points of connection.

On noise: Tiresome marketing hacks the world over chant their credo for our age at every opportunity: Content is king. If the fundamental creative criterion for a sixties artist of Bob Dylan’s ilk was “to have something to say” – i.e., to offer oblique philosophizing or meaningful social commentary – today the imperative is simpler and much more literal: “Keep talking.”

On narcissism, quoting Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism: Notwithstanding his occasional illusions of omnipotence, the narcissist depends on others to validate his self-esteem. He cannot live without an admiring audience. His freedom from family ties or institutional constraints does not free him to stand alone or to glory in his individuality. On the contrary, it contributes to his insecurity, which he can overcome only by seeing his “grandiose self” reflected in the attention of others, or by attaching himself to those who radiate celebrity, power, and charisma. For the narcissist, the world is a mirror, whereas the rugged individualist saw it as an empty wilderness to be shaped to his own design.

On social capital: That metaphor – the stock exchange – captures the subtle ways social media has altered the nature of our relationships. Every status update, every tweet, every photo album, every blog post, every playlist shared socially via online music services like Spotify and Rdio – all of these choices are transactions. They impart information instantaneously and without friction, flowing inexorably across borders, an abstract but no less valid currency than the dollar or the yuan. They serve to purchase shares in an abstract but fully leveraged entity: your idea of me.

On creative narcissism: The iPod was certainly not the first portable MP3 player on the market, but it was the first to double as a functional art object. With its clean design and sleek aesthetic polish, it made an irresistible promise to transform an activity into an experience. We bear daily witness to Jobs’ thought touching the canvas in the round corners and bright icons of our everyday devices. Like Jobs, Kanye places total faith in his aesthetic ego. His production ethos is one of frenzied collage, an ongoing wager with himself that he can refashion (and rebrand) whatever he finds – in the pop music past, in contemporary art, in haute couture – into manifestations of his creative narcissism (his “dreams,” as he called them during mid-show rants on his 2013 Yeezus Tour).

On Kanye’s tension: The innermost contradiction that makes Kanye who he is, the one that makes him both a great artist and a great boor, is his overindulgence of everything childish within himself.

On art as redemption: This is because art does more than imitate life for Kanye West. Listening to “Runaway,” wholly engrossed in its nine minute apologetic of the self, we learn that art justifies Kanye’s excesses. It gives sublime context to the consequences of his worst mistakes, translates his inscrutable motives into boldly comprehensible language. Incorporating the raw material of his necrotic emotional tissue, art performs miracles of healing that no amount of public apologies, press junkets, stints in treatment centers, therapy sessions with Oprah, or trips to Paris could ever achieve.

​The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel

I’ve seen this book everywhere, so I figured I didn’t need to read it. I’m glad I decided to give it a try. Some books are popular mainly because they were marketed well; this is popular because it’s a really good book. This book has changed the trajectory of how I view money, savings, wealth, and investments; barring tragedy, it could influence six- or even seven-figures of investments through the rest of my life. I hope it does the same for you.

Quotes:

On compounding: For those who knew Ronald Read, there wasn’t much else worth mentioning. His life was about as low key as they come.

Read fixed cars at a gas station for 25 years and swept floors at JCPenney for 17 years. He bought a two-bedroom house for $12,000 at age 38 and lived there for the rest of his life. He was widowed at age 50 and never remarried. A friend recalled that his main hobby was chopping firewood.

Read died in 2014, age 92. Which is when the humble rural janitor made international headlines.

2,813,503 Americans died in 2014. Fewer than 4,000 of them had a net worth of over $8 million when they passed away. Ronald Read was one of them….

It turned out there was no secret. There was no lottery win and no inheritance. Read saved what little he could and invested it in blue chip stocks. Then he waited, for decades on end, as tiny savings compounded into more than $8 million.

On behavioral change: One, financial outcomes are driven by luck, independent of intelligence and effort. That’s true to some extent, and this book will discuss it in further detail. Or, two (and I think more common), that financial success is not a hard science. It’s a soft skill, where how you behave is more important than what you know.

On soft skills: The aim of this book is to use short stories to convince you that soft skills are more important than the technical side of money. I’ll do this in a way that will help everyone—from Read to Fuscone and everyone in between—make better financial decisions.

These soft skills are, I’ve come to realize, greatly underappreciated.

On survivorship bias: The cover of Forbes magazine does not celebrate poor investors who made good decisions but happened to experience the unfortunate side of risk. But it almost certainly celebrates rich investors who made OK or even reckless decisions and happened to get lucky. Both flipped the same coin that happened to land on a different side.

On luck vs. risk: You can praise Vanderbilt for flouting the law with as much passion as you criticize Enron for doing the same. Perhaps one got lucky by avoiding the arm of the law while the other found itself on the side of risk.

On focus: Be careful who you praise and admire. Be careful who you look down upon and wish to avoid becoming.

On risk: Failure can be a lousy teacher, because it seduces smart people into thinking their decisions were terrible when sometimes they just reflect the unforgiving realities of risk. The trick when dealing with failure is arranging your financial life in a way that a bad investment here and a missed financial goal there won’t wipe you out so you can keep playing until the odds fall in your favor.

On desire: The hardest financial skill is getting the goalpost to stop moving….

Modern capitalism is a pro at two things: generating wealth and generating envy. Perhaps they go hand in hand; wanting to surpass your peers can be the fuel of hard work. But life isn’t any fun without a sense of enough. Happiness, as it’s said, is just results minus expectations.

On keeping up: A friend of mine makes an annual pilgrimage to Las Vegas. One year he asked a dealer: What games do you play, and what casinos do you play in? The dealer, stone-cold serious, replied: “The only way to win in a Las Vegas casino is to exit as soon as you enter.”

That’s exactly how the game of trying to keep up with other people’s wealth works, too.

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There is so much I wanted to write in this newsletter, in the interest of time I'll just have to summarize! I read several other books, and just wasn’t feeling them in some way or another—I’ll revisit or mention them as an aside another time. It contributed to the reading slump. I bought the Jeezy memoir the day I heard about it and that completely snapped me out of it. More on that another time too.

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I hope that some of these passages unlock the hidden doors of your mind. Maybe some will serve as catalysts for change. And remember, they’re signposts. It’s up to you whether you want to apply them or not. Reply to this and let me know which quotes or books resonate with you, what you think of the newsletter, and if there’s anything I can support you with.

Herbert

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