Best Reads of 2021

If you're reading this, I'm probably recommending you a book! I like to think back on my favorite books and articles at the end of the year, and this year (and in years to come) I'm publishing my best of the best. I wholeheartedly recommend a read of these books and articles!

Of the books I read this year, these three stuck with me more than the rest.

This book is a deep dive into the nascent gene editing technique CRISPR, the scientists who discovered it, and the ethics of tampering with evolution. It’s extremely well written, story driven, and hard to stop thinking about.

CRISPR gene editing is already changing the world as we know it—this is not hyperbole. Jennifer Doudna’s groundbreaking paper on CRISPR was only published in 2012, and by 2018 the first known children with with CRISPR edited genes were born in China.

Worth the read for excellent background on the discovery of CRISPR, the competitive race to patent it, and the ethics of editing a genome. CRISPR gene editing can be done in somatic cells (ex. eye cells, liver cells) and germ line cells (ex. stem cells that become a baby). Therapies in somatic cells can cure disease for that single patient, but editing done to germ line cells will affect that person and all of that person's decedents. What happens to the world when artificial changes can only be bought by some and are inherited by their bloodline forever? What happens when we play with the delicate balance of genetics in our own bodies and the ecosystems of world? No one knows, but we’ve definitely turned a corner.

Walter Isaacson is an incredible author, and the book is beautifully written. He makes a point to stress how easy it is to use CRISPR technology, and even has a chapter about his own experience editing cells in a lab. I had some FOMO after reading, so I went and got an at home CRISPR kit and attempted to edit genes in my apartment. It was a big success, and I don't think there's anything like in-Manhattan-apartment biohacking to cement my belief in CRISPR as a groundbreaking innovation.

I found this book thanks to a conversation I had in 2020 with Ernie Parizeau, former VC and adjunct professor of entrepreneurship. I was asking him for career advice on whether I should leave Google to start a company (I didn't leave for another year), and he suggested I read from a series of books he’d curated on entrepreneurship, life, and venture capital. It's been an awesome resource to me, and you can check out the complete list here.

Check out The Code Breaker on Amazon

SpaceX started as a chaotic scrappy startup just like Google or Amazon, but they wanted to make something much more ambitious: reusable orbital rockets. It was so ambitious they almost didn’t make it out of thier infancy, and Musk almost went broke. Today, SpaceX has single handedly reclaimed US space dominance and transformed the space industry. It’s a wild story how they got there.

One andidote that stuck out to me: an intern litterally crawled into a rocket fuselage to stop it from collapsing during air freight and saved the day (and maybe the company). The reason they had the rocket on air freight? SpaceX couldn't secure a launch pad in the US, so they had to build one near a US military base in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

I’m not an Elon fan boy, but it's hard not to respect his ambition after reading this story. He took his $200m payout from PayPal and tried to build a rocket company from scratch! That amount of money was budgetted to fund the launch of 3 rockets, only one of which had to be successful for the company to survive (spoiler alert, there’s a ton of explosions and it comes down to the wire). This book follows the early engineers at SpaceX and their mission to get something into orbit and prove that privatized and cheaper space travel was possible.

I read this book and thought "damn, I should have been a mechanical engineer!" But more than that, I got lost in the excitement of space travel, the work of ambitious & talented people, and the chaos of an early stage company.

I found this book the first week it came out after someone tweeted an interesting paragraph. Reading about startups + space, I was hooked. Consider this a positive data point on taking random advice from Twitter!

Check out Lift Off on Amazon

The best fiction book I’ve read in a long time. This book finds a way to make crazy science seem believable enough for some truly outrageous ideas. If you liked reading The Martian by Andy Weir, you’ll love this book. It’s the Martian, taken 100 steps further.

Half of the book revolves around our main character, a biology professor on a solo mission in deep space. The other half happens as a series of flashbacks on earth. Slowly, it's revealed why a mission to deep space was necessary, how that mission would be theoretically possible, and how the whole world rallies together make it happen. It's an awesome page turner, and I think they're making a movie out of it soon.

I’d read a ton of non-fiction/startupy books and wanted to turn back into fiction. I liked the Martian, and saw that this book had been recently released. I think it's incredible science fiction, and was hard to put down.

Check out Project Hail Mary on Amazon

I probably read (skim) at least 3 articles per day from sources like the The Hustle, The Washington Post, and my Twitter feed. It’s rare I remember an article more than a week, but the best ones stick with me. (For the record, I found these three articles via Twitter)

This article struck a nerve with me when I was deciding to leave Google and work on OnePager full time. It starts with the question “What's the most expensive mistake you've made in your career?”

Apoorva claims the answer is complacency. Complacency, she says, is a cancer for big aspirations and your reputation. But how do you know when you’re being complacent and it’s time to make a change? Apoorva asks herself 5 questions every quarter, requiring a hit rate of 3/5 to continue down her current path:

I thought this framework was killer. Having felt all of these at some point but rarely all five at once, it's a great system to structure your life and know if it's time for change. Read the full article here for more depth.

Chris Dixon, entreprenuer and current a16z investor, wrote this article in 2009, but I stumbled across it in the fall of 2021. Awesome reasoning why it’s best to experiment with various roles and opportunities early on in your career. You don’t want to commit too much time to climbing the wrong hill in your life and find the peak of that hill isn't as high as you thought. It's in our nature to keep trudging forward, but picking the right hill is the real challenge.

It’s a short post about 6 paragraphs long, and absolutely worth the read.

Ok this article's insane, and I had it in my notes as the “mind bending article.” It’s an interview with cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman, who claims that our perceptions of the world do not truly depict the reality we’re living in. It sounds crazy, but it’s worth a read.

I was grabbed by their discussion of neuroscience and quantum physics—two at odds studies that meet in the middle at consciousness.

AKA consciousness in the brain doesn’t make sense to neuroscientists, and quantum physics doesn’t make sense without consciousness. Interesting thought, and the discussion on reality is mind bending.

Hope you enjoyed this list, and if you end up reading something let me know!

- Jack