Energy

Facebook -- where I try to spend little time but inevitably end up touching now and again for this or that -- recently fed back to me a quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes that I had pulled from Caro's LBJ bio: "in the final analysis, energy is the only thing that matters."

I am feeling that right now as I continue to listen to Shoe Dog, the autobiography of Phil Knight, founder and CEO of Nike. Posted about it earlier in the week. He is still in the very early stages of getting things going right now, the sixties, still becoming the first importer-distributor of Japanese brand Tiger running shoes to the USA. 

The same is true for books. Part of me wants to trust my instinct to just read the books that are full of energy and pull me through. Then again, if I don't fight through the difficult books, I wouldn't learn the important lessons that are available from things like the bio of Deng Xiaopeng I read a couple of years back. That was a slog from which I learned a lot. But I can respect a bias for books which just demand to be read. They are not all mystery novels.