The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) is one of the most enduring works of American literature, capturing the mischief, adventure, and freedom of boyhood along the banks of the Mississippi River. But reading it in 2025, especially for someone accustomed to modern storytelling, can feel like stepping into a world that requires both patience and adjustment.
At its heart, Tom Sawyer is a coming-of-age story about a clever, rebellious boy navigating childhood in a small town during the 19th century. He tricks his friends into painting a fence for him, gets lost in a cave, witnesses a murder, and hunts for buried treasure. The book is filled with humor, adventure, and a nostalgia for youth that remains universal. However, Twain’s writing, while brilliant, can be challenging for contemporary readers. His prose is layered with dialect, long-winded descriptions, and a vocabulary that may feel overly ornate compared to today’s more direct, streamlined fiction. That’s not necessarily a flaw, it’s a product of its time, but it does mean the novel demands more effort than a fast-paced thriller or even most modern young adult books.
A sweet, little reminder that we are all part of something grander.
Let me preface by stating this isn’t a traditional book, but a limited collage of tree species presented as analogues to life lessons for humans. You can read it in less than half an hour.
As I entered the third decade of my existence I was told that at some point over the next few years, I will care way too deeply about a tree. It was laughable. Surely shared in the spirit of joshing around. Then, as I became more invested in real estate, I began learning about tree prices and how certain trees increase property value. I learned about tree maintenance, landscaping and arborist knowledge. I began calculating which tree species could be grown where. It even went so far that I explored importing pine cones from a friend’s farm in Alabama to sell the bud syrup (also called Mugolio) to high-end chefs in California. That’s when I realized the prophecy had become reality.
Some few weeks ago, I came across “How To Be More Tree: Essential Life Lessons for Perennial Happiness”. Annie Davidson’s illustration work immediately struck a chord with me. Her playful style of illustrating nature reminded me of the German children’s author and illustrator Horst Eckert better known as Janosch. The author, Liz Marvin, added crisp and thoughtful tree knowledge to make those illustrations come to and apply to your life. Let’s look into a handful.
The Hornbeam is captioned with “Be Authentic”. The author shows that even without fancy flowers, a particularly tall trunk, or delicious fruit the Hornbeam has been around for thousands of years, growing solid and strong without expectations of support or laurels. It just does its thing, so should you.
The Mangrove is captioned with “Plan for the future”. This tree evolved to be prepared to make it anywhere. It can live in salt water and even use the water to spread future generations of trees. Instead of seeds, it drops propagules which contain the genetic material, but can float. It adapts to wherever it grows. Be like the Mangrove.
The Guarea is captioned with “Focus on the positive”. We all get knocked over in life. When that happens, our life is defined by who gets back up again. If you’re a tree, this is easier said than done. Guareas sprout growth even if a storm uproots the tree. It takes a terrible circumstance and turns it into an opportunity to grow.
Lastly, the Sierra Palm is captioned with “Don’t hold on to what’s holding you back”. To weather a storm, Sierra Palms ditch their leaves in order to reduce chances of being toppled over. Being in control of our lives and working hard to make our existence matter is a core pillar of being human. However, sometimes, we just need to back down and ride out the storm. Just like the Sierra Palm.
Altogether, the book presents about sixty trees. Each with their own illustration. I found “How To Be More Tree” insightful. It could have expanded on tree characteristics and include more species, but its brevity makes it a perfect catalyst for reflection. Its analogies aptly induce a positive and curious peace of mind. On the back of the book is a wonderful, short free verse I find perfect as a closing thought:
Put down strong roots. Bask in the sun. Don’t be afraid to branch out. Stand tall.
Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki taught me that a job is only a short-term solution to a long term problem.
A job is an acronym for ‘just over broke’ according to Robert T. Kiyosaki. In Rich Dad, Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not! the author advocates for financial literacy, critical thinking, and fundamentally poses the theory that the poor and the middle class work for money while the rich have money work for them. Essentially, favors to invest in income-generating, true assets. Pay yourself first and buy more income-generating assets so you can get out of ‘the rat race’.
The first edition of this book was published in 1997. As 2024 draws to a close this seems a lifetime away. The financial independence, retire early (FIRE) movement has grown significantly since then. With this in mind, I will briefly address only two aspects of this book: (1) financial literacy and (2) ten steps the author recommends to reach financial freedom.
Kiyosaki makes a case for building financial literacy early on. He defines financial IQ as something made of knowledge of four broad areas of expertise:
Accounting
Investing
Understanding Markets
Laws
To break this down, accounting is the ability to read and understand financial statements, records and balance sheets in addition to basic knowledge of business transactions. He combines investing with understanding markets to showcase a need for understanding economic principles, market making strategies, and – in a sense – to develop a general interest in (stock) market dynamics. Lastly, he highlights the need to utilize available business vehicles such as the proper form of incorporation and knowledge of tax avoidance (not evasion – big difference!) strategies. To illustrate this last point, he provides the example of a poor decision maker investing into liabilities, i.e. things that continue to cost money (think mortgage and property tax for a house) versus a rich decision maker moving all their assets into a corporate vehicle to shift the tax burden towards the corporate entity and take advantage of tax breaks these organizations often enjoy in America. Financial literacy is of utmost importance and while we can debate the areas of expertise, Kiyosaki certainly raises enough awareness to get started learning either of those areas.
The concluding chapters of his book focus on the ten steps to reach financial freedom. Here are the steps:
Find a reason greater than reality
Making daily choices
Choose friends carefully
Master a formula and then learn a new one
Pay yourself first
Pay your brokers well
Be a giver
Use assets to buy luxuries
Have heroes
Teach and you shall receive
As one can tell from their name, the steps are over-simplifying and vague. This section was the least interesting to read for his narrative jumps from story to story without conveying much. Perhaps the most controversial or misunderstood section is ‘pay yourself first’. It seems he’s building an argument for always paying yourself first ignoring debtors or other financial responsibilities. Hypothetically, someone could read this as subtracting ‘your salary’ before you pay anyone else. However, he concludes this section by stating he would never get into consumer debt and when he pays himself he’d readily invest into true assets who in turn generate the income to pay off liabilities. It’s a confusing and contradicting section. It fails to outline steps someone can take who does have consumer or student debt or who still is in the early stages of their entrepreneurial journey.
In conclusion, I still wish I had read this book earlier in my life. I heard about it here and there. I was aware of some of his principles, but it seems different to read this book knowing what I know now versus having read it when I was 15 years old. That being said, the book certainly has aged and some principles seem a little dated through today’s lens. Kiyosaki also leans strong into the narrative of ‘being poor is a choice’ completely ignoring financial inequalities that burden some and financial privileges enjoyed by others. Nevertheless, I still find this book an easy yet insightful read with principles that inspire and encourage to learn more about finance. Any form of financial education is welcome and much needed in today’s society.
In life, we sometimes make critical and trivial decisions based on our intuition. But how can we be sure our lack of deliberation serves our interests? Are we better off without a lengthy thought-process? Shoot from the hip more often? In ‘Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking,’ Malcolm Gladwell explores these and other questions, providing insights on the quality, or lack thereof, of these brief yet critical and often trivial decisions.
At its core, Blink is about intuitive decision-making. Gladwell explores a plethora of situations where we have limited information yet our decisions formed based on those thin slices of data will often lead to accurate or beneficial outcomes. Therefore, decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and after long deliberation.
To illustrate his concept, he tells the story of Paul Van Riper, a retired Marine Corps general known for his unconventional strategies. Van Riper became the leading figure during the Millennium Challenge 2002 military exercise, which was designed to explore critical warfighting challenges at the operational level of war that will confront United States joint military forces after 2010. Van Riper oversaw the hostile forces during the exercise. Instead of following established military protocol, he deliberately chose to rely on his intuition, experience, and simple but effective strategies. In contrast, his opponent chose to follow established military strategies, data-heavy analytics, and to rely on technology. Van Riper communicated with his team using basic methods like motorcycle couriers and coded signals, bypassing his opponent’s forces’ sophisticated surveillance tools. His quick, decisive actions—guided by gut instincts rather than exhaustive deliberation—allowed him to exploit his opponent’s forces’ rigidity and outmaneuver them, achieving unexpected victories in the early stages of the exercise. Gladwell highlights the paralyzing effects of over-analyzing, deliberation, and adherence to military hierarchy. Van Riper leveraged a decentralized command structure allowing his forces to act autonomously when his opponent expected coordination. However, Gladwell also cautions the reader to exclusively rely on intuition, but rather make context and skill-based decisions. Van Riper leveraged a combination of experience, skill and bravado to achieve his results. Therefore, context and skill-set of the decision-maker determine the speed at which a decision can be made.
And this contradiction is my main problem with Blink. By and large, it’s a book that builds a case for trusting your gut and making rapid decisions. On the other hand, Gladwell cautions against making rapid decisions depending on the context and the decision-maker. But, how can we refine our intuition to mitigate possible failure? How can we better identify context when thin-slicing advocates against analysis? And, when can we be sure we are sufficiently competent to be the decision-maker for the situation-at-hand rather than merely supremely confident? Blink leaves these questions largely unanswered. Gladwell oversimplifies the complexity around our cognitive abilities and the psychological depths of our biases to an extent that it contradicts him. Personally, I would have preferred fewer stories with more depth and explanation. In addition, I would have preferred a clearer structure outlining intuitive decision-making, long deliberation, and an overview of potential biases that prevent or support either.
I read Blink in parallel to Talking To Strangers, which helped to see the broader context of Gladwell’s thinking when he wrote these books. The latter struck me as more developed, thought-out, and polished. The former reads more like a raw compendium of psychological theories applied to real life stories. This density of everything makes it a formidable base for further idea exploration, but altogether it seemed capricious to ask the reader to switch context time and again. For example on the importance of contempt, he introduces the concept of the Four Horsemen of Marriage as theorized by American psychologist John M. Gottman. In other publications, Gladwell would offer a basic understanding of the concept of discussion before diving into a specific element of it, but in Blink, he rarely brings along the reader before moving on to the next concept. Gottman’s theory embraced criticism, defensiveness, contempt, and stonewalling as the most destructive and biggest predictors of divorce and separation.
Would I recommend it? If you can get a copy for under $10, I’d recommend it. Any other price exposes Blink to other publications, e.g. Think Again by Adam Grant, which is more recent, clear and more comprehensive.
My folks have an everyday expression that goes ‘assumptions make an ass out of you and me‘. I’d get to hear it when I made a spur of the moment decision. Malcolm Gladwell compounded powerful stories in Talking To Strangers to outline the communication dynamic behind assumptions, our preconceived notions, and he explains why we sometimes misunderstand one another.
Talking To Strangers begins and ends with the events surrounding the case of Sandra Bland. She was pulled over for a minor traffic violation. Both, State Trooper Brian Encinia and Sandra Bland misunderstood, misread, and misinterpreted each other, which led to Bland’s arrest and subsequent passing while in jail. Her story illustrates the complexity of human interaction and our personal responsibilities and burdens that often elude even our closest confidants. At the core of this book, Gladwell states our default understanding about a strangers intentions, emotions, and honesty is fundamentally flawed. This isn’t so much an individual shortcoming, but a systemic issue that traces back to psychological bias and perverted societal incentives.
Another example is about Ana Montes, a former senior analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency, who was convicted for espionage after deceiving her superiors for 17 years. Montes leaned into confirmation bias of her superiors, who did not want to view her as a potential traitor. Her behavior was understood as normal for a person in her position, which led to overlooking bright, red flags visible to outsiders and those critical of her actions.
Bland and the State Trooper Encinia were strangers. Montes and her superiors were close confidants. Both examples illustrate our default to truth mindset often leads to catastrophic misunderstandings. Bernie Madoff, Elizabeth Holmes or Sam Bankman-Fried are only a few names on a long list of people who used our default trust to one up society.
So, what does it mean for our communication and engagement with people? Gladwell remains undecided about a clear position whether to trust or not trust by default. Instead he advocates for a calibrated approach towards trust. Believing someone is a necessity of society, but being aware of blind spots in our biases and systems around communication is crucial too. Especially high pressure or unusual decisions should receive more critical review, empathy and patience. For example, when a gas station clerk informs you about a traffic accident with the intent to save you time, the harm of following his advice is insignificant compared to your children making a case for their share of inheritance. The latter clearly requires more thought, awareness of biases, and potentially detaching yourself from emotions before reaching a decision.
Malcolm Gladwell has a wonderful writing style. He writes in simple terms, illustrates complex theories with visual storylines, and wraps it with a current event ribbon and the scent of society’s latest pulse. This simplicity sometimes results in moral and conceptual ambiguity leaving the reader unclear about the specifics of a concept or theory but also Gladwell’s personal position on an issue.
Nevertheless, I tend to enjoy his works. I enjoy learning about different psychological and human concepts without expanding an inordinate amount of brain energy. Plus, his critical review of current and historic events invites any interested reader to explore beyond the confines of Talking To Strangers.
