Making the Modern World

By Vaclav Smil.

Smil is a very smart man. Having said that, this book is also geared at Governments, policy makers and titans of industry. It's difficult to apply Smil's research to my daily life. Even if those lessons are to help you make small talk with others.

Reading Smil has got me thinking about what I want to read. Sometimes I read to improve my life. But, take Quantum entanglement. I enjoy reading about it. It also has no lessons that I can apply to my life. Perhaps if I was drinking with nerds I could regale them with my knowledge of entanglement. 

That doesn't happen.

Number's Don't Lie

By Vaclav Smil.

I think Smil writes more for policy makers, heads of industry and government officials than the likes of me. He writes of the challenges and conundrums of genuine change. 

Some of his writing is interesting and nerdy. He dives into many aspects of decarbonizing our economy. He also urges caution and to stay in this for the long run. Many of the technologies we need to switch to renewables at a large scale don't yet exist and won't for decades. Take battery powered jet's for example. A gallon of jet fuel is 40x more energy dense than today's batteries. In addition, jet fuel looses weight as it is used up. Batteries do not. As a result the economics of running battery powered airflight are very different than for running a car.

The Wandering Mind: What Medieval MOnks Tell Us About Distraction

By Jamie Kreiner

I was hoping for a guide to improving my focus. This book is more of a history of the struggles of monastic practices.

"So although we might assume that our own difficulties with distraction are symptomatic of the pressures and seductions of twenty-first-century life, Christian monks in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages would have said that distraction is inherent the experience of being human."

"Obviously, premodern monks' lives were very different from ours." Monks also cast distraction as a crisis. They also had a suspicion that their predecessors were better at dealing with it. "This narrative of decline is at least as old as Christian monasticism."

"We could try out some of these strategies ourselves, and although monks found that many of them also risked be distracting, they might work better than trying nothing at all."

"Distraction and revelation could be strikingly similar."

So, meditate, remove distractions from your life, discipline and train your thought process. That will help.