Sivers Brilliance
Sivers and Literature Leading Life
"Last week someone asked why I prefer books. My immediate answer was that I love their quiet, non-commercial nature. No ads. No hype. Just quiet wisdom with deep rewards for a focused mind.
But today I realized something more profound: Each of my biggest life-changing moments came from a single sentence deep inside a book." (Sivers D. 2026)
I still prefer to hold a book in my hands, the weight of it, the rough-hewn pages beneath my fingers, the quiet ritual of turning one page after another.
Reading, for me, has never been simply about absorbing information. It is the privilege of living for a while through another person’s eyes. We borrow their world, their memories, their fears and joys, and somehow return to our own lives seeing them a little differently.
And then there are the words themselves. Sometimes I stop not because of what happened in the story, but because of the way someone chose to say it. A sentence can be so beautiful that it deserves to be read twice.
Perhaps that is what I love most about books.
For a little while, the world gets quiet, someone else begins to speak, and I get to simply be in love with words.
For me, the changes are not as profound as Derek noted in his response. (hit the link below to read his life altering passages) For me, most passages were more in line with philosophy and health.
1) Nature Wants Us to Be Fat by Richard Johnson. Passage summary: Dr. Johnson points out that hummingbirds have an almost absurd metabolic rate: heart rates around 1,200/min, wings beating at 3000/min and enormous energy expenditure relative to body size. You would think such an animal would be essentially incapable of becoming fat. Yet hummingbirds consume nectar, which is unusually rich in sucrose and therefore fructose. During feeding they can rapidly accumulate fat, develop very high blood glucose, and accumulate substantial liver fat. Johnson describes them as becoming, metabolically speaking, almost transiently diabetic.
The remarkable part is that this isn't disease for the hummingbird. It's physiology. Overnight, when it stops eating, it burns through the accumulated fuel. Migrating hummingbirds can take this strategy much further, deliberately building large fat reserves before a long flight. Fat is ideal fuel because it stores roughly twice as much energy per gram as carbohydrate or protein.
This story was the aha moment for me to truly bake in the reality that mammals, humans in particular, have and innate ability to partition and store fuel for periods of food scarcity. This is fundamental to species survival, like the hummingbird. Our love affair with sugar and ultra processed food has upended the normal evolutionary benefit.
2) Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin - Passage summary: The “Discipline Equals Freedom” chapter near the end of Extreme Ownership is one my all time favorites because they are describing something that initially sounds contradictory: rules and structure can create greater freedom rather than less of it. He illustrates it through SEAL operations. His platoon initially searched buildings in a somewhat ad hoc fashion. When they imposed a highly structured procedure, specific responsibilities, standardized movements, systematic searches, the process became dramatically faster and more reliable. One account of the chapter describes search time falling from roughly 45 minutes to 10 minutes, while simultaneously reducing missed rooms and evidence.
The lesson was larger than efficiency. Because everyone knew the procedures almost automatically, leaders didn't have to micromanage every action. A leader could essentially tell a team to take a building, and the team already understood how to move, communicate, handle casualties, deal with unknown people, and complete the mission. Structure at the foundational level created autonomy at the higher level.
That's what Willink means by: “Discipline is the pathway to freedom.”
He extends the principle beyond combat to the land of business - that is the exact place from which I changed my entire management and leadership style. Want a practice with financial freedom? It requires the discipline to save and control spending. Want more free time? It requires disciplined scheduling and saying no to things that waste time. Want a staff that is capable? It requires consistently training when you don't particularly feel like training.
Discipline is not the opposite of freedom. Discipline is the infrastructure that makes freedom possible.
The person who continually chooses immediate freedom eventually loses freedom. Spend whatever you want and you lose financial freedom. Eat whatever you want and neglect your body and eventually you lose physical freedom. Waste your time however you want and eventually you lose control of your time. Conversely, accepting small constraints voluntarily today creates greater optionality tomorrow.
Game changing books are worth their weight in gold.
Dr. M
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