Article

On Pattern, Practice, and the Books That Built My Mind

December 10, 2025

On Pattern, Practice, and the Books That Built My Mind

Most people think the books you keep on your shelves are a reflection of your interests.
Mine are something different.
They are an X-ray of how my mind works—and occasionally, why it refuses to work like everyone else’s.

For years, I tried to explain why I read such a strange combination of things: Hofstadter and Taleb, Peter Watts and Atul Gawande, global strategy texts and endocrinology references, Harold McGee and Modernist Cuisine, software architecture and behavioral psychology. The list is eclectic bordering on chaotic.

But at some point, I realized something.
My shelves weren’t a collection.
They were a map—a cognitive atlas that only made sense when viewed through the lenses that shaped my thinking.

This is the story of those lenses.

1. The Systems Lens: Seeing Infrastructure Everywhere

If I trace the origin of my worldview, it always leads back to systems.
Not machines—systems.

Because a machine, you can fix.
A system, you must understand.

My shelves are full of books that taught me to see the invisible machinery behind visible outcomes:

Later, I realized this pattern of interest wasn’t accidental.
It matched the wiring of my own brain—especially my top CliftonStrengths themes:

People often tell me, “You seem calm in chaos.”
But chaos isn’t chaotic if you know what you’re looking at.
A failing system telegraphs its decay if you understand the signals.

The books on my shelves taught me to read those signals long before I knew how much that skill would matter—in engineering disputes, medical crises, organizational analysis, and even in everyday life.

2. The Diagnostic Lens: Failure as Information

I don’t see failures as catastrophes.
I see them as diagnostic opportunities.

This comes from years of being the person who gets called when the thing is already on fire.
It’s the same instinct that leads me toward certain kinds of books:

These aren’t “business books.”
They are autopsies.

And whether I’m analyzing a broken concrete deck, a medical anomaly my wife is battling through, a software platform that’s failing quietly, or a contractor’s contradictory statements—the same principles apply:

  1. A failure is a signal, not an endpoint.
  2. Every signal has a structure.
  3. Find the structure and the truth reveals itself.

I never consciously set out to become “diagnostic,” but the books taught me to treat information like a forensic trail.
Most people talk about “connecting the dots.”
But the dots are rarely the problem.
The problem is seeing the pattern they’re quietly forming.

The real turning point for me was realizing this wasn’t a learned skill—not entirely.
It was my cognitive architecture showing through.

CliftonStrengths calls this Analytical, but that’s too simplistic.
It’s more of a reflex:
a need to understand what lies beneath the surface, the unseen variables, the contradictions that shouldn’t coexist.

And once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

3. The Fiction-as-Simulator Lens: Training on Other Worlds

I’ve read the entire Expeditionary Force series, the Bobiverse, The Three-Body Problem, nearly all of John Scalzi, Redshirts, Peter Watts, Alastair Reynolds, and countless others.

I don’t read fiction to escape.
I read fiction to simulate.

Good sci-fi is a stress test for intuition:

Books like Blindsight interrogate consciousness.
Books like Revelation Space explore inevitability.
Books like Project Hail Mary model resourcefulness under constraint.
Books like Good Omens explore the absurdity of certainty.

People underestimate how much fiction can sharpen real-world reasoning.
To me, fiction was never passive entertainment.
It was a cognitive gym.

You learn how to think by watching fictional characters fail safely.
You learn how you might behave before life forces you to test the theory.

4. The Craft Lens: Cooking as Applied Systems Thinking

Most people don’t realize how much a cookbook shelf can reveal about someone.

Mine isn’t a shelf.
It’s a culinary R&D lab.

This isn’t a hobby.
It’s a lens.
Cooking is the purest form of applied systems thinking I know:

You learn humility when a recipe fails.
You learn adaptability when something breaks mid-process.
You learn pattern recognition when you notice the same cue in twenty different dishes.
You learn precision because heat doesn’t care about your feelings.

My shelves look like the back room of a Michelin test kitchen not because I’m a chef, but because I’m a systems person who happens to cook.

Cooking gives structure to intuition.
Intuition gives flexibility to structure.

It’s the same pattern I use everywhere else.

5. The Strategic Lens: Seeing the Map Behind the Moment

When I read Barnett’s The Pentagon’s New Map, something clicked that no other strategic book had fully articulated for me:

Most chaos comes from disconnects.
Most conflict comes from mismatches.
Most threats come from gaps.
Most instability comes from systems that don’t talk to each other.

Barnett made the world make sense the same way Hofstadter made consciousness make sense—not by simplifying it, but by clarifying the constraints and incentives that shape the complexity.

It’s the same instinct that makes me interested in:

This is why I read strategy.
Not to be strategic—
but to understand why human systems behave the way they do, even when no one is steering them.

6. The Identity Lens: Cognitive Architecture as Destiny (But Not Ego)

This part is important.
It took me years to articulate it in a way that wasn’t self-flattering or self-diminishing.

Most people cannot be me.
Not because I’m “better.”
But because my mind is literally configured differently.

My top strengths—Adaptability, Learner, Input, Analytical, Intellection—don’t operate independently.
They form a loop:

  1. Something happens.
  2. I analyze it.
  3. I learn from it.
  4. I collect the entire domain.
  5. I think about it deeply.
  6. I adapt how I operate the next time.
  7. Repeat.

This is not superiority.
This is architecture.

It is why:

Most people have one of these strengths.
A few have two.
Very few have all five, aligned in a reinforcing loop.

This loop is not “better”—
it’s simply built for a different environment.
It thrives in complexity, in ambiguity, in systems with too many moving parts.

And life, for better or worse, has given me many such environments.

7. The Meta Lens: Why I Read the Way I Do

People sometimes ask me:

“Why do you read all of that?”

The answer is beautifully simple:

I read to understand how things work—
and how things break.

The world is full of noise.
Books are where the signal hides.

When you read across enough domains, patterns emerge:

Books taught me to see the world with fewer blind spots.
Not no blind spots—fewer.

They taught me how to think, how to adapt, how to diagnose, how to cook, how to reason, how to question, how to advocate, how to solve, and occasionally, how to accept.

If there’s one insight I’ve earned—not read, but earned—it’s this:

Your mind is something you build as much as something you inherit.

My shelves are proof of the building.

8. If You Read What I’ve Read, You Won’t Become Me—

But You Will See the World Differently

People often assume reading someone’s book list can make you think like them.

It won’t.

But it will give you access to the raw materials.

The architecture is mine.
But the insights are transferable.

If someone else read:

They wouldn’t become me.
But they would learn to see structure where they once saw surface.

And that is the real value.

9. The Final Lens: The Books Aren’t the Point—The Patterns Are

This essay isn’t really about books.
It’s about the pattern that emerges when you read them for long enough.

Books shape thinking.
Thinking shapes decisions.
Decisions shape identity.
Identity shapes behavior.
Behavior shapes outcomes.

When I look at my shelves now, I don’t see a library.

I see:

This is not the story of what I’ve read.
It is the story of how I became the person who reads these things.

And that, I think, is the real story worth telling.