In front of me right now is the worst book I have ever read in my life. I could say ‘in my life so far’ but I really doubt I am ever going to read anything this bad. It is a 60-page fiction which is effectively a 30-page book because every dialog is first written verbatim first in Hindi (in English script) followed by its translation in English. There is hardly any sentence in the book that does not have a glaring grammatical error and there are a few spelling mistakes here and there as well. I could not go beyond the 5th page (10 if we are being pedantic) because at that point in the story a minor gets raped, very casually. It was more than what I could endure and that when I stopped.

Let’s be honest about this. We all know that this COVID-19 issue is not going away anytime soon and there is a significant amount of time before our lives come back to normal. If they do ever come back to what we are used to calling normal. For the foreseeable future, I can see us working from hour homes for some time and it’s important that we set some rules and avoid mistakes. Now the tips that I am sharing are not business rules and tips on how to work from home efficiently or how to manage teams remotely. They are all personal tips and rules that I follow myself and want to share with you so that you can benefit individually. If you are looking for ways to effectively work remotely, this is not the blog post for you.

Even though I am no longer technically an entrepreneur I love everything about entrepreneurship. Mainly because it’s not really possible to stop being a startup guy once you have tasted the taste and have danced the dance. And one does not have to really run their own startup necessarily to be entrepreneurial. The spirit of a startup is still what drives my day to day approach to things. Any project that I start begins with the MVP approach with as little bells and whistles as possible. I keep wiggle room for pivoting as an when needed which has usually helped me if facing failure much less than normal. The summary - I love entrepreneurship and everything about it. Except for one thing.

The over-glorification of the “hustle”.

I do not watch Oscar winning movies. This is not a rule that I have made but a statistic that has come out from the short research that I did before writing this post. As it turns out I have watched only 3 out of the last 20 Oscar winners for “Best Movie”. Gladiator, Slumdog Millionaire, and Parasite. The very simple reason for this is that I prefer watching movies in 2 genres only - comedy and action. I can still watch thrillers but I actively avoid drama. I realize that I am missing a lot of good cinema by following this stupid rule but then I do not watch movies for “good cinema”.

So it was a pleasant surprise that Parasite was the winner this year. This movie had been on my radar for a pretty long time already but the Oscar win gave me the final push to finally make time to watch it. And it was worth it.

Today as I was getting ready for work I heard a loud crash and then a pitter-patter of tiny feet running. I come out just in time to see that Meera, my 1.5 yrs old, had dropped my laptop and was now running away from “scene of the crime”. My fully decked out MacBook Pro way lying on the floor and my child was running away trying to distance her from the “mistake” to avoid the scolding.

I finished reading ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ by Viktor Frankl today. It is one of those books that make you feel bad for not having picked them earlier. Well, better late than never. Actually I might actually read this book once every few years. This is how much I have been impacted by this book. The author was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist who survived 4 concentration camps during the Holocaust. He is also the founder of logotherapy, which assumes the primary motivational force of an individual is to find a meaning in life. I will not try to explain this here because I don’t want to misrepresent anything about it due to my new and basic understanding of it. But the concept of ‘meaning of life’ makes sense to me. A book reads (listens, in my case) like an autobiographical essay where the author uses his own experiences at the concentration camps and other examples to drive home the idea that the ultimate goal of a man is to find meaning in life which he can live for.

Here are 4 quick tips I personally follow to make my life a little simpler. These are not pro-tips to make your life super-efficient and highly performant. Well not directly but once you start making your day-to-day life simpler than how it is right now you will yourself start seeing efficiency and productivity creeping in.

This post is in continuation with my previous post where I describe who 2019 was for me books wise. In that post I also list out the top non-fiction books I read in 2019. You can find that post here (https://akhil.me/2019/best-non-fiction-books-i-read-in-2019/).

I actually like reading fiction a lot. I have mentioned many times that audiobooks are my primary medium of consuming books and in those terms listing to fiction is the best. Not only does it require less concentration compared to a typical non-fiction but also is more enjoyable with the voice acting done by the narrators.

This past year was a mixed one for me, book-wise. Last year I had read a personal best of 55 books and wanted to continue that streak this year as well. Unfortunately I could not meet that target this year. As a matter of fact, I don’t even have an exact number of books that I read this year. But. And that’s a pretty major but. I feel this year was much better in terms of the kinds of books I read. Last year was dominated by fiction which I wanted to change up this year. I am pretty happy with the mix of books this year which I felt was pretty balanced between fiction and non-fiction. I read some pretty amazing books and can only hope that this streak also continues in 2020.

Here’s a list of the top 5 non-fiction books that I read this year. These are the books I personally loved and more importantly would want my friends to read and enjoy. I am providing Amazon links to each of the books with them so that you don’t have to work too hard to find them. Full Disclosure - These are affiliate links.