The first quarter of the year was a productive reading month including this March reading list. I read World Travel: An Irreverent Guide, The Gray Man, Four Thousand Weeks, and Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less in March. All of these books are great in their own right. My favorite book was Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less.
World Travel: An Irreverent Guide was my second Anthony Bourdain book, the first being Kitchen Confidential. The Gray Man is a new-to-me series I started after watching the movie by the same name. Four Thousand Weeks was put on my radar after listening to the author Oliver Burkman on a podcast and reading his newsletter (it’s great). Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, similar to Four Thousand Weeks, came to my attention after listening to the author Greg McKeown on a podcast. Now, let’s jump into the March reading list.
World Travel: An Irreverent Guide
Anthony Bourdain was one of my favorite humans. I was hooked after watching his many shows, including Parts Unkown and No Reservations. His book Kitchen Confidential which I read in 2017 is also quite good.
World Travel: An Irreverent Guide explores his travels to some of the most fascinating places he’s been to. It’s incredible how much of the world he was able to see before his tragic death.
The book was published after his death but includes his own words about the food he ate, the drinks he tasted, the places he visited, and how he thought about the world.
The Gray Man
Mark Greaney’s The Gray Man features Courtland Gentry, a former CIA operative who’s now hired to kill. The story follows Gentry across Europe as he attempts to rescue his handler, Sir Donald Fitzroy and his family held hostage in Normandy, France from Lloyd Hansen, an American attorney and ex-CIA operative now working for LaurentGroup, a multinational French corporation. Lloyd wants Gentry terminated to help finalize a billion-dollar oil deal in Nigeria with the Nigerian president who wants Gentry dead because he killed the president’s brother.
Four Thousand Weeks
Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman offers a stark reality that the average human life is four thousand weeks. Said another way, most of us live until we’re 80. This book drives home the point about how best to use your limited four thousand weeks. It’s an approachable guide that weaves in quotes from philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers as old as time.
Instead of getting everything done, Burkman introduces you to the concept of only getting done what needs to get done. Everything else falls to the side.
One of the stories he tells is about how short our lives are. Human civilization is roughly 6,000 years old. If you take a human lifetime of 100 years old, that’s roughly 60 human lifetimes to get you to the beginning of human civilization. Jesus is only 20 human lifetimes ago.
It’s insane to think about how short this period is. I’m guilty of trying to get too many things done, some of which I can argue are not essential. This book was a reality check on how I use my limited time on this earth.
Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
There’s no shortage of time-management books out there. I’ve read quite a few myself.
Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown offers a systematic way to find what’s essential and eliminate the rest. This allows us to make the highest effort towards what matters most to us.
Essentialism forces you to be more selective in what you put your focus on. Pursuing less helps you regain control of where you spend your time and energy instead of others choosing it for you.
What I loved about this book is its simplicity. We should not be doing one more thing (I’m guilty of this). Instead, we should do less. Only do things that matter most to us. Everything else gets put to the side.
