Asra Yousuf

While 2018 was yet another year that witnessed an unfinished Goodreads Reading Challenge, I did manage to pick up a bunch of interesting books this year. I am no Bill Gates to curate reading suggestion lists but since I haven’t heard anyone complain about “too many suggested books”, here goes my top 3 favourites of the year for anyone resolving to read more this new year.

Sometimes Brilliant: The Impossible Adventure of a Spiritual Seeker and Visionary Physician Who Helped Conquer the Worst Disease in History

“When a powerful mystic steps on the hand of a radical young hippie doctor from Detroit, it changes lives and the world”. And that’s how the Goodreads description of the this book by Larry Brilliant starts. Seems like a far-fetched fictitious novel, doesn’t it? Surprisingly, it turned out to be anything but that. Chronicling a quest for a meaningful existence, this autobiography by Brilliant traces his path from a young, free-spirited hippie to one of the instrumental figures behind the eradication of small pox. From Michigan to San Francisco to London to India, the book takes you on an exciting journey of a man extraordinaire. Along the way, he does a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo in a Bollywood movie, finds a guru who helps him discover his life’s purpose, and happens to meet The Dalai Lama, Steve Jobs, Mikhail Gorbachev, JRD Tata amongst many others and ultimately connects with his own spiritual being. The book takes you through ups and downs, moments of dejection and hope, spurred with dead-ends and revelations as the battle rages to beat the rapidly-spreading, deathly small pox virus across the hinterlands of India.

So good that they can’t ignore you

Newport’s book speaks to millennials- those who believe that there is a career out there curated just for them. While some do find it, a majority don’t. Newport vehemently argues against the idea of having a ‘passion’ and living a life centered around it. Instead he introduces the ‘craftsman hypothesis’- be good at what you do and then you are bound to feel passionate about it. To quote him simply, “Don’t follow your passion”. Passion needs to be complemented with skills, and it is the development of these skills that one should focus on rather than chasing after the elusive and the ephemeral!

While the book may sound preachy, it surprisingly isn’t. One of my key takeaways from the book was Newport’s theory of “Control requires Capital”- only take control over things that you have had gained expertise in overtime. While a lot of the lessons might seem obvious, in reality they aren’t. And its only when you reflect through the stories shared in the book, do you realise the things you’ve been doing wrong all along.

Weapons of Math Destruction

Cathy O’ Neil looks beyond the harmless product recommendations on e-commerce websites, to assess the repercussions of predictive algorithms applied on “big data”. The book is not only an interesting read, but an important one, as machine learning black boxes are being rolled out into production across the world- some to infer credit scores, some to determine your insurance premium, and some to determine if you are capable of retaining your current job or getting a new one. Neil investigates the biases and inequality propagated by these algorithms that unknowingly judge you based on your race, color, and even your zip code. While many might be aware of the threats to privacy that these systems pose, few go on to analyze the systems where our data feeds in and the manner in which it can be used against us. Given that machine learning isn’t dying anytime soon, and hence neither is its downsides, the book sheds an important perspective on the systems that can alter the world while also making it divisive and unfair.