2/26/25 Update: I created a page with all 52 books I read last year. See it here.

2/27/25 Update: I’ve created a searchable library of every book I’ve read and update it weekly. See it here.

This summer, I set a goal of creating 100 podcasts about books I was reading. It forced me to start tracking my reading in a spreadsheet. It’s nerdy, but it was necessary because every week, I read a book, wrote a blog post series, and created a podcast series about each book. The spreadsheet helped me keep everything organized. I paused the latter two after the summer because they were too inefficient and time-consuming, but I kept updating the spreadsheet and reading a book a week.

I looked at the spreadsheet as I was reflecting on the books I read in 2024. I figured I’d share some stats and learnings.

High-level stat for 2024:

• Books read: 52

2024 breakdown by month:

• January: 0 (I did read, but I can’t remember what books)
• February: 2
• March: 6
• April: 6
• May: 7
• June: 5
• July: 4
• August: 5
• September: 4
• October: 3
• November: 5
• December: 5

Here are a few things I learned along the way:

• Reading two books a week was too aggressive. I tried it in the March–May period, but I wasn’t absorbing as much of what I was reading or making as many connections. I was focused on finishing the books, which isn’t why I read. The pace was too fast, so I reduced it to a book a week, which feels more sustainable.
• Sharing what I learned from my reading was the big unlock. It took my learning and thinking to another level. Writing a blog post series and recording a podcast series forced me to identify insights and organize and communicate my thinking. The key tool in that process was creating a digest of each book, which was an extraction of the information I found important in each chapter, along with my insights.
• E-readers, such as Kindles, are great devices, but I prefer reading physical books. I highlight and add notes about insightful sections and ideas in the books. Those highlights and notes are trapped in each book, so finding and using them later is difficult. See here for more. As I’ve read more, this has become a painful problem. Trying to find something sometimes means reviewing several books’ notes and highlights. Experiencing this pain led me to several feature ideas for the “book library.”
• Reading a book is simple—but learning from what I read is more involved. It’s inefficient and involves lots of steps. The process of sharing what I learn from my reading is complex. It’s hard and has many steps and lots of moving pieces. This realization led me to add several more feature ideas to the “book library.”
• The value in reading lots of entrepreneurial biographies is that you’re exposed to the best ideas and experiences of entrepreneurs, and you can pull from them when you’re faced with a problem. The challenge is that this requires a great memory or knowing exactly where to look to quickly find something you’ve read. I don’t have a photographic memory, and I don’t always remember where I read something. I want to make it easy to find what I’ve read, which will be a big part of the “book library” MVP.
• My best ideas in 2024 came from piecing ideas together from various books. Making those connections was a great way to build upon what other entrepreneurs figured out. Solving a problem by building upon the knowledge of others rather than starting from scratch led to my having better ideas. I’m not an idea guy, so this was perfect for me, and I want to do more of it going forward. I don’t think this has to be completely manual and inefficient. Figuring out how to solve this and incorporate it into the “book library” is challenging, but I think it can be done, and I’m excited to figure this out because it’ll be a huge unlock for myself and others.

Those are my takeaways and reading stats for 2024!

Happy New Year!

I’m in the middle of synthesizing The Little Book of Market Wizards. I like this book because it details how some of the top market participants (traders and investors) avoid psychological errors that lead to bad decisions. It’s essentially wisdom on how to execute an investing strategy without making errors.

One of the people quoted in the book is Ray Dalio, founder of hedge fund Bridgewater. What he said stuck with me:

[T]here is an incredible beauty in mistakes because embedded in each mistake is a puzzle and a gem that I could get if I solved it (i.e., a principle that I could use to reduce my mistakes in the future).

I really like this framing. Mistakes are a puzzle to be solved, and solving them yields a gem. I think that’s a great way to think about future and past mistakes. Each one is an opportunity to figure something out and find a gem that will help you going forward.

This past weekend, I posted in the Library on this site the last book I’ll read in 2025. For anyone interested, it’s The Little Book of Market Wizards. This year, 2025, is the second year of my daily reading habit and the first year that I read a book every single week.

Last year, I created a page that lists all the books I read in 2024 (see here). I’ll do the same this year and should have that published early in the new year.

I’m still getting a lot out of the daily reading habit. My plan is to keep it up and read a book a week in 2026.

Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned from them

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

Cumulative metrics (since 4/1/24):

• Total books read: 95
• Total blog posts published: 630

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Blog posts published: 7

What I completed in the week ending 12/28/25 (link to the previous week’s commitments):

• Read The Little Book of Market Wizards, a framework on the core psychology principles that elite public-market investors used to execute their investing strategies and generate outsize returns over long careers
• Synthesized The Art of Execution

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book
• Synthesize The Little Book of Market Wizards
• Write a post sharing what I learned from synthesizing The Art of Execution

Asks:

• No ask this week

Week three hundred was another week of learning. Looking forward to next week!

Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned from them

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

What I struggled with:

• I synthesized a book this week—a painful process that took longer than expected. I hoped to write the blog post based on the synthesis by this weekend, but that hasn’t happened.

What I learned:

• Synthesizing a book requires a fair amount of rereading, even though I highlighted important parts during my initial read. The material sticks better the second time around, but the process still feels like it could be more efficient. Hopefully, with more reps, I’ll get better and develop some hacks too.

That’s what I learned and struggled with last week.

This week, I was catching up with an entrepreneur. It’s the end of the year, so I asked how 2025 has been for them. It’s been hard, they said. They feel like they’ve been getting beaten up all year and that nothing has gone their way. They survived the year but aren’t excited about what the future holds.

As they talked, it became apparent that they’ve navigated very painful situations in their business this year. While this entrepreneur was a bit pessimistic, I was more optimistic for them. Why? I think that pain is a necessary component of growth. Very rarely do people who achieve outsize success do so without first experiencing a period of what feels like extreme pain.

Why can pain be a good thing? Because what you learn from painful experiences becomes critical to helping you successfully navigate future situations. You learn lessons and gain wisdom that improve your decision-making. Better decision-making leads to more rewarding situations and more wins.

I think Ray Dalio put it best in his book Principles when he said this:

Pain + Reflection = Progress

I’m excited for this entrepreneur. I hope they take the time to reflect on the pain they’ve experienced so they can set themselves up to make serious progress in their business in 2026.

So, I’m adding one more thing to my Christmas and New Year holiday challenge. I haven’t been consistent with the Getting Things Done (GTD) method. I read David Allen’s Getting Things Done in 2024, and if I’m being honest, I loosely implemented it. I want to be more productive in 2026, and I think the GTD method could play a big role.

So, my goal is to read the GTD book again, create a clean, short-term (completed within a year) project list, and define next actions for each project.

That’s it. Wish me luck.

Wishing you and your loved ones a very Merry Christmas!

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I’m working on establishing a habit of synthesizing the books I read and sharing what I learn. I want to not just consume what’s in books but also digest and understand their ideas. I’ve set Thanksgiving and Christmas goals to synthesize a few books for each holiday. Here’s what I’ve learned so far:

• Painful – I don’t have a good rhythm or any tricks for synthesizing, so every time I sit down to do it, it’s painful. It reminds me of the pain when I first started blogging in 2020. It feels like the pain of learning to do something new.
• Daily is better – I started out doing marathon sessions. The problem was that it’s hard to consistently carve out time for them. So, I’ve moved to working on this as close to daily as possible. I’m basically breaking the synthesis up into smaller sessions.
• 50 pages – This seems to be the limit of what I can do in a single day before it becomes painful. That’s not a bad pace because I could hypothetically synthesize a 350-page book in a week. Luckily, most books I read are in the range of 250 to 300 pages.
• Time – Synthesizing 50 pages takes a few hours—a lot more time than I’d like. I want to get to the point where I can synthesize 50 pages in an hour or less.
• Outline – Creating an outline of key information in each chapter feels natural and is working well.
• My wording – Rewording what I read, instead of copying verbatim, forces me to really understand what I’m synthesizing. Copying word-for-word defeats the purpose.
• Blog-post prerequisite – Creating an outline while synthesizing a book makes it possible to write a rich blog post. When I don’t do this, it feels impossible to write more than a surface-level post.
• Creating assets – Creating syntheses is painful, but I think each one is an asset, and I could end up with a library of valuable (to me) assets that will likely pay dividends in the future. I can’t say how, but I know having these in electronic format will make it easier for me to use this knowledge in the future, versus being trapped in physical books. Pretty sure I’ll run these through LLMs to help me make decisions in the future.

That’s what I’ve learned so far. I’m still working to try to find my groove and establish the habit of synthesizing books. It’s not easy, but hopefully, as I get more reps, the habit will form.