BookMarks #103: Life Is Short And So Is This Book

Title: Life Is Short And So Is This Book: Brief Thoughts On Making The Most Of Your Life

Author: Peter Atkins

Genre: Non-fiction, Self-help

Published: 2011

BookMarks

“If I’d had more time I would have written a shorter letter”- said Winston Churchill once. And that is the brief of this book, keeping things short and simple and not meandering towards unnecessary examples/anecdotes and taking inspiration from them. It is a very short volume, easy to read and gives general guidelines on what is to be done with life and not how one should go about doing it. It is not something which people do not know, but it is always good to keep revisiting.

Here are the nuggets which I liked best from the book.

“If I wanted to do my best work, I needed to do fewer things, and really focus on what mattered.” Very well put, the author also does his bit to shatter the myth of multi-tasking. “A number of people I know claim to be great multi-taskers. The brain, however, doesn’t work that way; instead it focuses on one activity at a time. If you switch back and forth between multiple tasks, your brain works more slowly than it would if you focused on each activity for a period of time.” And yet, everyone I know claims to have varying degrees of proficiency in multi-tasking!

These are terrible times. The last couple of years have been an especially harrowing one, with no one sure if the worst is over or not! Then comes this bit of advise – “you can focus on something going well, or something beautiful, or something interesting -- even amidst terrible times.” There are things one can do something about and others where one can’t. So focus attention and energies where something can be done. Quite a simple advise and yet very difficult to follow.

The easiest way to success or avoiding failures/mishaps is not doing dumb things. Proceeding when there are obvious issues is a dumb thing to do. Even if it’s inconvenient or painful it is better doing nothing when the only available choice has glaring issues.

On character - Do what you think is right. Don't follow other people blindly. Be honest and keep your word. Admit your mistakes.

On dealing with success and failures which everyone encounters We learn more from our failures than from our successes.

On how to work towards success - You may delay but time will not. There is no overnight success but a series of continuous efforts. Progress depends on action, taking small steps which work. Over time, small steps add up, and you end up in a different place.

On being happy - To be happy, you need to pay attention to who you are, what you want, and how you feel. And most importantly Life has to be lived forwards and not backwards.

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts. – Another Churchill quote to round up this post.

Overall, a good read with actionable, implementable advise.

Previously on BookMarks: The Tattooist of Auschwitz 

The Perfect Jinx

Started reading (once again), Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus. And on the second page came across this passage.

One line stood out “…. in the last few decades we have managed to rein in famine, plague and war”.

This book was written in 2015. The existing diseases were being managed; the new ones (SARS, Ebola etc.) were being controlled before they acquired pandemic proportions. The world’s political boundaries had been more or less stable for years except for few localized hotspots. Meanwhile, technological innovations were ensuring that global hunger was reducing despite an increasing population. In fact, obesity was becoming a bigger issue than hunger. And the efficient global supply chains ensured that men and material could be moved fast to the place of need in the event of any natural disaster.

Fast Forward to 2022. We have the “plague” - It’s been two and a half years since Covid 19 pandemic struck and upended the world as we knew it. We have “war” - the Russian invasion of Ukraine gave the western world its biggest war since 1945 with the added threat of nuclear weapons. And we are also staring at a global famine – the pandemic and the war disrupted the global supply chains, which combined with climate change has created the beginning of a global food shortage.

All of a sudden, the future is not looking so rosy for the homo sapiens!

As any sports fan can relate, this line is the perfect epitome of the “commentator’s curse” or simply “the jinx”.

Yet, jokes aside, the human beings have become more and more resilient and have better control over such matters. Fast-tracked global development of vaccines certainly helped in curbing the covid19 pandemic (although a lot of damage has already been done, but things could have been much worse). The Russia-Ukraine stand-off has not spiraled beyond the region (yet!). And steps are being taken to manage the food crisis. So overall, while not a rosy picture, history is replete with examples of things having gone much, much worse. 

So, in essence, Harari is right, we as a species, certainly have matters in our own control. How we handle it is also a decision totally in our hands and we have only ourselves to blame if do not evolve for the better!

BookMarks #102: The Tattooist of Auschwitz

Title: The Tattooist of Auschwitz

Author: Heather Morris

Genre: Fiction based on true story, Biography, Holocaust

Published: 2018

BookMarks

“The Tattooist of Auschwitz” is a fictional take on the life of Lale Sokolov and his incarceration in Auschwitz. The story is simultaneously one of brutality and the never-dying hope. It is a story of a determination to survive the horrors all around even though there are not many signs of things going in your favour. It is also tale of people fighting for themselves as well as one another in a quest to survive.

While the novel is set inside a concentration camp, it somehow does not bring up the real horrors of them. They are mentioned in passing, sometimes directly witnessed by the protagonists and yet somehow the true impact just does not hit the reader. Probably on account of the easy writing style which glosses over the more terrible brutalities. Or it could be because the protagonist is one filled with a firm belief of hope, which dims the rest of tragedies unfolding around him.

Some of the situations described are simply too fantastic. For instance, throughout the story, never really understood why Lale was given certain privileges for tattooing numbers on to all new arrivals to the camp. This wasn’t exactly a job of high skill and replacements were readily available. But one never knows, the truth is always stranger than fiction.

Overall, a decent read. I certainly did not like the almost celebratory sounding notes of the author at the end when the Slovak edition of the book is launched. 

Previously on BookMarks: Don’t Go There