What We’re Reading- January 2023

Ahh… the new year. A time of hope. A time of planning. A time for resolutions. 

Here’s the thing, though: resolutions are for suckers. 

That’s our takeaway from our current favorite book on habits anyway, James Clear’s Atomic Habits. It has become our go-to resource for creating and maintaining good habits, and making our less desirable ones less attractive, obvious, and hopefully less common. 

What we love about the book is that it is full of actionable steps, not just a lot of theory. In fact, the main ideas are laid out in a simple to follow framework that has ideas for implementation in every chapter. 

If you’ve fallen prey to the resolution → → → off the rails → → → back on track → → → off the rails → → → new resolution cycle, we highly recommend picking up a copy of Atomic Habits. 

The other book that is currently on our coffee table is Prisoners of Our Thoughts, which is an exploration of the works of Viktor Frankl, specifically Man’s Search for Meaning. If you are not familiar, Frankl was an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor who devoted his life to studying, understanding and promoting “meaning.” 

Frankl was a survivor of Nazi concentration camps, where he developed the idea of “Logotherapy,” or man’s quest to ascribe meaning to life. Now, we don’t claim to be any sort of experts in the field of psychology, but many of Frankl’s observations resonate deeply with us. For example: 

“What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.”

This forward-looking philosophy and desire to pursue worthy objectives is another timely reminder that while setting goals can be productive, it’s the meaning behind them and how well the goals represent our true values that ultimately determine whether or not we reach them. 

Last but not least, we have Life Lived Wild, by Rick Ridgeway. As a young high school “adventurer,” I fell in love with Seven Summits, which Ridgeway co-wrote with Dick Bass and Frank Wells. It turns out “co-wrote” was doing a lot of work there, as Ridgeway has gone on to pen multiple adventure classics.

He writes in a style that is clear and vivid, taking us all around the world, chronicling his 5 decades of adventure. From Himalayan summits to the offices of Patagonia, Ridgeway writes with a humility that invites us to come along for the ride (or hike, or paddle, or climb…)

Have you read any of these? What’s on your current or future reading list?