Welcome to Books & Reflections, my regular roundup of what I’ve been reading, watching, and reflecting on how it shapes my work, my writing, and myself.

Picture by me, 2025: the Botanical Gardens of Montreal.

🔍 What’s Sticking With Me

Growth through reading isn’t always pleasant or linear. I read to stretch, build empathy and explore worlds I would never otherwise inhabit. Sometimes discomfort becomes insight. Other times, it’s just draining. This month was both.

I began with The Scarlet Pimpernel, part of my escapist streak into early 20th-century fiction. Often credited as the prototype for modern superhero – Zorro, Batman, Superman – it felt surprisingly modern, despite its Odd’s Fish! slang. While the dashing male lead takes the spotlight, the most emotionally complex character is a woman. Quirky and shallow, it was a fun take on the French Revolution.

Then things got bumpy.

Pastors and Masters by Ivy Compton-Burnett was nearly unreadable. Her all-dialogue format gave me no cues to anchor the characters. While I admire the themes – power dynamics, gender repression, and queerness cloaked in respectability – the characters were so unpleasant and the dialogue so fatiguing that I gave myself permission to abandon it. A rare move.

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, which I first attempted during the pandemic, disappointed for different reasons. The premise – quantum-surfing alternate lives after a suicide attempt – felt oversimplified. I respect the message that no life is perfect and that meaning lives in embracing imperfection, but you can’t think your way out of despair. It’s a bare-knuckle fight. This book felt like a lecture on optimism by someone who’s read about suffering, not survived it.

Even nonfiction left me frustrated.

Sarah Wynn-Willliams’ Careless People, a memoir of her time shaping Facebook’s policy agenda, promised accountability but mostly delivered victimhood. Despite grotesque anecdotes of ego and corruption, it takes 200 pages for any introspection or whistleblowing to surface. Marketed as a cautionary tale, it reads more like a personal vendetta.

By month’s end, I found refuge in short essays. Gracián’s How to Use Your Enemies was fine but forgettable. Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists was crisp and humourous. The standout? Sontag’s Notes on ‘Camp’. Her analysis of such a mercurial aesthetic was surgical, a master of her craft.

The takeaway? Discernment. Avoiding discomfort entirely breeds fragility. But too much kills curiosity. I’m learning to protect the joy of reading by limiting how much heaviness I take on at once. Next month, only one difficult read on the nightstand at a time.

💬 One Sentence I Can’t Shake

Leadership is a role, not a right. It demands discipline, foresight, and the humility to recognize that your feelings are not the organization’s moral compass. In an age that glorifies mindless authenticity, the most responsible leaders are those who spend a great deal of effort and attention on harnessing a positive professional reputation – one that is more representative of their best self than their authentic, real, or whole self.

Chamorro-Premuzic, Thomas. ‘Why Leaders Should Bring Their Best Self—Not Their Whole Self—to Work’. HBR, 2025.

🧠 The Big Question

What does it mean to transform loss, pain, or adversity into something that sustains us and our communities?

Earlier this month, I attended a Celebration of Life for Marcus, who died five years ago from sarcoma at just 17. A gifted pianist, he’d been accepted into University of Toronto’s classical music program before illness silenced his melody. As his teacher, friends, and siblings performed in his memory, we weren’t just remembering Marcus; we were witnesssing how he lives on in the hearts of those who loved him. Grief had morphed into beauty.

It reminded me of a story Suleika Jaouad tells on Armchair Expert. During her first round of leukemia at age 22, on the same day her bone marrow transplant failed and her organs began shutting down, Jon Batiste showed up. He and his band played for an entire afternoon in her hospital room. Nurses, doctors and other cancer patients gathered around, singing together. This is what Jaouad calls creative alchemy: transforming pain into meaning through art. “Instead of resisting what I was most afraid of, instead of numbing myself against it or turning away from it, the only way for this not to be a solely miserable traumatic experience was to engage my fear and collaborate with it.”

Marcus’s celebration also made me reflect on how modern culture fails the bereaved. As Cody Delistraty notes, “We tend to treat mourning as a solitary act, but the rituals and community structures that once held us have eroded; we’re left to make our own meaning, often in isolation.” After the funeral ends, what remains? Marcus’s memorial was a reminder that grief demands witness, not passive remembrance: ongoing, communal reinvention. That is how sorrow alchemizes into beauty, joy, and love.

💡 What I’m Curious About Next

Alchemy isn’t magic – it’s work. Transformation through action.

Teddy Roosevelt’s infamous ‘Man in the arena’ quote, from his Citizenship in a Republic speech, calls for relentless civic effort: not one heroic act, but the ongoing willingness to try, fail, adjust, and try again. Jon Batiste embodies this artistically. In Armchair Expert, he shares his habit of getting rejected on purpose: by choosing the discomfort of failure, he sheds the ego that blocks connection and growth.

But as Batiste’s music and energy ripple outward, the public forms an image of him based on how he makes them feel. Dax Shepard summarizes it: “you make people feel a certain way with your musical output and then when they meet you… there’s some expectation that you as a person will give them that same emotion. But you can’t! You do the music because you’re frustrated, you do the music because you’re an introvert, so yeah… you can’t deliver in person the thing that they fell in love with.” That’s the paradox of vulnerability in public life: the very thing that creates connection also creates the illusion that the curated self is the whole self.

This echoes the wisdom of Chamorro-Premuzic’s HBR article Why Leaders Should Bring Their Best Self – Not Their Whole Self – to Work. It cautions that emotionally demanding or highly visible roles require discernment. Authentic impact doesn’t mean abandoning all boundaries or performing total transparency. Leaders (and artists!) must discern what, when, and how to share, curating the self they offer in a way that sustains their creative, professional, or civic contribution over time.

So now I’m asking:

• How do we build creative and civic lives that endure?
• What practices ground those of us aiming for honest public work?
• How do we stay open enough to connect but contained enough to stay whole?

📝 Creative Update

We’re living through collapse and turmoil – political, ecological, economic, technological, humanitarian. The temptation is to numb myself into paralysis. But here’s what I’ve learned: despair is just outrage that hasn’t found a path to action.

So I’m channelling mine:

• This blog is my way of resisting fractured attention and conditioned shallow thinking.
• My startup is my refusal to wait for a better job market. I’ll build the worplace I want.
• Volunteering on my friend’s municipal campaign is my push against political cynicism and polarization.

These acts might not change the world. But they’re transforming me: from guarded to curious, fearful to secure, hopeless to hopeful. I’m being alchemized.

And I’m learning my creative boundaries. Just like leadership, writing publicly is an act of curation. I now keep a visibility line document, where I’ve defined my political purpose, leadership and personal values, and authorial topics. I’m not constraining my voice but I am protecting the conditions that allow me to stay honest and impactful.

📣 Closing Thoughts

What practice, book, or conversation helped you transform pain and discomfort into something beautiful this month? I’d love to hear in the comments below!

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📚 Inputs & Influences

Books – Fiction

The Scarlet Pimpernel. Baroness Orczy, 1905.

Pasters and Masters. Ivy Compton-Burnett, 1925.

Midnight Library. Matt Haig, 2020.

Books – Non-fiction

How to Use Your Enemies. Baltasar Gracián, 1647.

Notes on ‘Camp’. Susan Sontag, 1966.

We Should All Be Feminists. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 2014.

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism. Sarah Wynn-Williams, 2025.

Essays & Editorials

The Man in the Arena: Citizenship in a Republic. Theodore Roosevelt, in a speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, 1910.

Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule, Paul Graham, 2009. (*)

Are You Solving the Right Problem? Dwayne Spradlin, HBR, 2012.

Want to Be an Outstanding Leader? Keep a Journal. Nancy J. Adler, HBR, 2016. (**)

The More Senior Your Job Title, the More You Need to Keep a Journal, Dan Ciampa, HBR, 2017. (**)

Why Leaders Should Bring Their Best Self—Not Their Whole Self—to Work, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, HBR, 2025.

I Teach Creative Writing. This is What A.I. is Doing to Students. Meghan O’Rourke, New York Times, 2025.

Podcasts

Jon Batiste. Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard, 2023.

Cody Delistraty (on Grief). Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard, 2024.

Suleika Jaouad (on Creative Alchemy). Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard, 2025. (**)

(*) Discussed in Field Notes #2: How Time Shapes Problem-Solving.

(**) Discussed in Field Notes #3: Writing Without Witness.