This is What I Read in 2023
The Amplified Impact Podcast
January 16th, 2023
In today’s episode, I’ll be going through some notable reads in 2023.
From a weekend warrior’s struggles in “Tennis Ball Machine Man” to Shackleton’s epic tale in “Endurance.”
Experience Rockefeller’s life in “Titan” and health insights in “Outlive” by Peter Atiya.
Dabble in magic with “Hard Magic,” Walmart’s story in “Made in America,” and the intense history of the Third Reich.
Join the minds of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk in their biographies, ending with a business twist in “Rework.”
Share your own 2023 favorites in the comments or drop a review.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“You need to fill up your information take so that you then have the ability to connect dots.”
– Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
So I love, love, love reading books. It’s one of the things that brings me the deepest joy. I find it to be a form of entertainment and escapism. And I’m not really even sure where this love for reading was born from, because as a kid with ADHD, you would think sitting down and, you know, pouring yourself into a book for hours on end, that that would be kind of a weird activity to be drawn to. But for. For some reason, I don’t know why, I just have always loved losing myself deep in books. And I think maybe part of what it was actually, come to think about it, is when I was put on Ritalin, Ritalin had this weird effect on my body, which kind of put me into this zombie like stupor, and it forced me into a state of perpetual hyper focus. And I’ve spoken about this before, how that was really actually a negative feeling for me because it made me feel trapped inside my body and like I didn’t have control.
And maybe more problematic is it robbed me of my energy, my motivation to go and achieve things. And so I would just kind of find myself tired all the time, but in a deep state of focus. I think reading was just like an activity that was naturally very simple and easy to pick up when I’m exhausted, but in a state of focus. And so for whatever the reason is, maybe that’s one of the good things that came out of Rhythland. But for whatever reason, I’ve always loved, loved reading. And there was a period in my life when I wanted to be a science fiction fantasy author, and I wrote twelve vesseling books, and I still will go back to that at some point. People always ask me, like, do you plan on ever writing more in those genres? And I do, but I have other things I want to accomplish first before I go back to that world. But back in those days, when I first started writing science fiction, I was reading well over 100 books a year.
And that wasn’t nonfiction per se. That was a lot of fiction. I was trying to brush up on all of the literature that had come before, because I think to be a great fiction writer, you really need to be aware of what your predecessors have done so you can stand on the shoulder of giants so you’re not just rehashing the things that have already come before you 100 years. Because, man, those guys, Ray Bradbury and William Gibson, writing like Isaac Asimov, those guys writing in the 20th century, they had so many brilliant ideas and covered so much ground. So you really need to be familiar with it. But as I started transitioning to entrepreneurship into business and started shifting what I was reading from fiction to nonfiction, I kind of took that same mass approach, like mass reading approach, reading hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of books. I pretty much read every book on business, every book on money and finance, investing under the sun. And that gave me a very, very wide breadth of knowledge.
And that’s great. I think that’s step one. You need to fill up your information take so that you then have the ability to connect dots. I talk about this as the difference between curiosity, which is going out there, and collecting dots, and then creativity, which is to then take those dots you’ve collected and start connecting them. And one of the traps, rather, that you can fall into, and I certainly did, is that it’s very easy to conflate collecting dots with actually doing something productive. Like you’re producing something, you’re creating something. And so you get to the end of a month where you’ve read dozen books, and then you not really in any different of a position from a life perspective, your business hasn’t grown, you haven’t made more money, and you’re like, what happened here? And so I think at a certain point, for me, I started to realize reading was starting to become just mental masturbation. And I was reading more and more, and I love it in entertainment, but it was really no different for me than just playing a video game in a lot of ways.
And so I needed to change my approach to reading so that I wasn’t just reading more, I was trying to read better, and I was trying to learn and go deeper on certain books. And so I started going less for volume and just trying to reread the books that were really, really powerful and meaningful that I could continue to learn things from. And I did a video on this where I shared the twelve books that I reread every single year. But I still do read new books. I’m not to say like, I don’t bring in new books at all, but I just read far, far less. For instance, last year, I think I read 14 books, not including the twelve that I reread every year. So that’s like a book every two weeks, which when you add in the twelve, that’s like 26 about a book every two weeks, that’s a big jump drop down from just a couple of years before I was doing 60, 70 books, or a couple of years before that, where I was doing 100 and 3140 books a year. It’s crazy.
But all that’s to say, I wanted to do in this episode. I just wanted to go and revisit the books that I read rather in 2023. So there’s 16 here. I’m not going to include the twelve that I reread every year because I did a video on that. If you want to go check that out, go to YouTube.com Anthony Vasino. You can check out my list of twelve books. I recommend reading every single year, but let’s take this from the top. Let’s do it.
The first book I read this year, not the first book, but I have them written down here but in no particular order. The first book is called Tennis Ball Machine man. This is a short little book that one of my best friends, Brandon Rudy, wrote. He wrote it last year. He self published it. It’s not a very big book. It’s maybe like 60, 70, 80 pages long. Brandon’s a fantastically interesting person.
I lived with him for a while back in 2009, 2010. Him and his wife took me and my girlfriend in at the time and we’ve been friends ever since the rock climbing days, that’s how we first met. And then we got into ping pong and we got into all these weird activities together and now we play tennis every week and we play chess together a lot. And he wrote a book, tennis ball machine band. Really? This book is really good, actually, for being a novice writer. He shares the struggles of being a weekend warrior who has dreams of grandeur despite the fact that he’s in his mid fifty s and he’s never going to go pro, he’s never going to compete at the highest levels and yet he still approaches this activity, this craft, as though it’s very, very important to him and it’s a core part of his identity and he wants to be better. But it’s the struggle that all of us weekend warriors have. It’s a very good book.
I highly recommend it. Very raw, very authentic. Second book is endurance. Jamie and I, we went down to Antarctica with my brother and his wife in February of last year, which is actually interestingly warmer in February in Antarctica than it is in Minnesota. So it was actually kind of like a warm destination spot for us. But we went down to Antarctica and I’d always wanted to read the book endurance, which is the story of Shackleton and his crew who tried to sail down there and then they were going to cross the Antarctic on dog sleds and it went horribly awry and I was planning on reading it before going down there, but then when I got down there, I was in their library. You don’t have a lot to do when you’re in Antarctica. You spend a lot of time on the boat looking at snow, which is cool.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s very beautiful. But one of the books that was on their shelf, they had like twelve copies of endurance. And so I picked it up and started reading it as we did this tour of Antarctica. And that was a really cool experience to be able to read the book of these men’s harrowing adventure while in the luxury off the shore and observing what they must have been going through. It was a very wild experience. Next book is Titan. This is the autobiography of Rockefeller. And it was good.
This book was good. I started reading a lot of biographies a couple years ago and I find them to be far more entertaining and I learn a lot more from them than I do from just straight business books. I think reading about interesting people’s lives, I don’t know what it is. I find that just really, really motivating and compelling and just seeing that they russell with a lot of the same issues that we do. And Titan is one of those books. It took me a couple of months to get through. It was a very, very big read. It actually took me the entire month of February, March and like April.
A very, very big book. But just learning about how he took over the oil industry in the early or late 19th century, early 20th century is very fascinating. Don’t know if I’d recommend it unless you’re like a hardcore nerd, but it was good. The next book is hard magic by Darwin Ortiz. This is a weird book. I’m not into magic. I don’t do sleight of hand. I’m not a magician.
So why am I reading a book on magic? Well, one of my goals in 2024 is to get on more stages, give more keynotes, be a better presenter, be a better public speaker, better keynote. And what I realized is that you can get good at being a keynote speaker by watching other keynote speakers, but you can also get good by watching people who spend other, spend a lot of time on stages. So like comedians and magicians. And this book, hard magic is all about how to be a more skilled magician, more skilled presenter of your magic. And I thought that would be kind of a cool book to read. And turned out it was. I learned a lot, actually. Again, don’t know if I’d recommend this book to most people, but it was pretty interesting.
I like reading these weird, kind of tangential books that you would otherwise never stumble into and learning something about a different world that you can pull into your. It’s very, very cool. The next book is outlive by Peter Atiya. This is the best book that I’ve ever read on health and longevity. If you want to live longer and better, I think this is a must read. It’s just a fantastic book. I’ll leave it at that. Next book is made in America by Sam Walton.
This is a story of Walmart. And regardless of how you feel about Walmart as like a global conglomerate who’s taken over the world and all that stuff, it is a very interesting read. This man’s perspective and how he approached building this business that at a time was like the largest business in the world. He’s a very interesting guy, actually. Highly recommend that book. Very, very good. It’s written down to earth. He wrote it a couple of months before he passed away.
He could see the light at the end of the tunnel, and he wanted to get these stories out, get his lessons learned, shared with the world. And I’m glad he did because this was a really good book. The next book is the rise and fall of the Third Reich. This is a beast of a book. It is very long, and it took me a really grueling amount of time to get through, but it is a fascinating journey through the rise and the fall of the third Reich, World War II. And I think it’s important to understand our history and understand not just the things that were taught in school about history, but to also go deeper and try to learn more about it for ourselves. And for some reason, somebody recommended me this book. I’m not particularly interested in World War II or that period of time or Nazis or anything of that sort, but I thought, I don’t know much about that.
LEt’s learn more. LEt’s see where this goes. And it was interesting, but God, it was a slog. It was grueling. Next book is make something wonderful. This is a book about Steve Jobs, in Steve Jobs’s words. It’s a compilation of all his speeches, his interviews, and then it was put together and put out by the Steve Jobs foundation for free. So you can go download it for free.
I think you can just go to makesomewonderful.com. Maybe that might be the URL. This is a ReAlLy good book. This was STEve, in STeve’s words. And he said some things that really, really resonated with me. I’m really GLAD that I found this book. I really didn’t know much about Steve Jobs before 2023, and I decided I was going to learn more about him. So I read this book and then another book, Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson, which was another fantastic read.
Really good. I think it’s so interesting to read about these people who move through the world just so differently than you and I. And in that same vein, another book that I read this year was Elon Musk’s biography by Walter Isaacson. And this book, for the first, like 75% was fantastic. It was a great read. Elon Musk is a wild dude who just does not operate on the same wavelengths as pretty much any other human I’ve ever read about. The last three fourths of the book, it gets a little bit too into the weeds of, like, recent events, and I don’t find that to be. It got too into minutiae and I don’t think that’s a good place for biographies to spend their time.
But overall, Elon Musk’s and Steve Jobs’biography both were very, very good. What else did we read this year? We read, oh, boy. Let’s wrap it up with one more book. This one is rework. I can’t remember what the guy’s name is. It’s this weird norwegian name. This book is really nice. It’s really quick to read.
This came from the creator of the guys who put out Ruby on rails, which is like an open source coding software. And it’s just a different approach to thinking about how to build a business where maybe your goal isn’t just to build a billion dollar business, but to build something that makes a meaningful impact on the lives of your customers and changes maybe your life and improves it in a meaningful way. So I found this book to be very refreshing. But those are some of the books. I think there’s a couple that I left off of the list here, but I recommend a lot of these. Actually. It was a good year of reading. I’m pretty psyched on it.
I’m going to do another episode right off the back of this one where I’m going to share what I intend to read in the next year. So stay tuned for that. But otherwise, thanks for being here. I’d love to hear what was on your reading list for 2023. What did you get? What stood out? What was meaningful to you? Leave it in the comments. Shoot me a DM, leave a review if you’d like to do that. That helps me a lot. Honestly.
It’s my goal to get us up to 100 reviews on Spotify and on iTunes. I think we’re right very close to it. So if you could just take a moment right now and just drop a review, that would mean the world to me. Truly. Thank you. So that’s going to do it for me, guys. I’ll see you in the next episode. Until then, stay hyper focused, my friends.
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