My Personal Canon
Why sharing the things that shaped you may be the best way to let others know you.
“Bring your whole self.”
In theory, the idea of showing up authentically and allowing others to do so as well sounds great. Unfortunately, it’s unrealistic when most people don’t feel able to express themselves. Creating an environment where people feel safe is hard, if not impossible.
I was lucky enough to hear Brené Brown talk about this. She spoke of psychological safety and why, after careful consideration, she decided to replace that phrase with a new one: psychological courage. She recognized that safety couldn’t be guaranteed in any setting. You can’t put yourself out there and remain free from judgment, criticism, or repercussion. Psychological courage doesn’t undermine efforts to make people feel included. It acknowledges realities and encourage people to speak their mind in spite of them.
I have an email thread with a few close friends that shares book and content recommendations. What started mostly as a way to keep in touch as we began moving away from Florida has turned into a decade’s long chain of milestones, memories, and jokes. The messages aren’t as frequent as they once were, but in many ways that makes every new one that much more meaningful.
A few months back, one of my friends shared an article from Tara Seshan about personal canons. He said the idea is to answer a question for yourself: what are the things that have most strongly influenced your worldview or opinions?
I immediately thought about authenticity and psychological courage. In many ways, a personal canon is a shortcut to understanding someone.
We’re all shaped by something, whether people, experiences, or beliefs. The things that resonate with us speak to our values. And the ideas we adopt impact the choices we make every day.
Sharing your canon takes courage. But there’s also a sort of distance that makes it feel easier than revealing yourself in other ways. The ideas aren’t directly yours. That separation is enough to let people see you.
With that in mind, I’d like to share my personal canon. To be clear, these aren’t the best things I’ve consumed, or my favorites. They’re the ten things that have done the most to make me who I am.
Start With Why — How Great Leaders Inspire Action by Simon Sinek
Despite a number of terrific books on leadership and culture, Simon Sinek has never been better than his viral TED talk on finding your why.1
The first time I saw it, I was at a point in my career — and my life — where I valued results over everything else. Sinek challenged that limited way of thinking by showing the power of belief and intent.
The talk itself also highlights the importance of communication. Sinek weaves scientific evidence, business examples, and historical anecdotes together in a breezy, casual conversation. The ideas alone were good, but the messaged stayed with me because I felt like I was realizing something I had known all along.
Freakanomics by Stephen J. Dubner and Steven Levitt
Freakanomics taught me to explore the world with curiosity and to consider even the strangest connections. I was blown away by the authors’ enthusiasm. They helped me get comfortable asking stupid questions and looking for answers in places no one else would think to look.
The Book by Tom Tango, Mitchell Lichtman, and Andrew Dolphin
My choice in profession wasn’t influenced by any one thing I read or got exposed to. I loved baseball from an early age. I collected cards and followed its history, I learned about advanced statistics to get better at fantasy baseball, and I played through my senior year of college. As it came time to decide what I wanted to do, I wasn’t sure of much other than the fact that I would miss baseball if it wasn’t a central part of my life.
Once I made the decision to pursue a front office career, The Book by Tango, Lichtman, and Dolphin influenced how I went about things. It affected the way I saw the game and my standards for research. They challenged the game’s conventional thinking, designed strong research questions, and provided simple, concrete evidence for their conclusions. They also showed their work, allowing others to learn alongside them or build upon their foundation.2
“7 Strange Questions That Help you Find Your Life Purpose” by Mark Manson
I came across this article toward the end of 2020 — a weird year, to say the least. Like many people, I felt more lost than ever and I spent a lot of time questioning what I was doing with my life.3
This article continues a pattern and challenges a widely held belief: that people need to find their purpose to live a meaningful life.
But Manson doesn’t reject that thought outright. He simply takes it off the pedestal and suggests a different, and better, set of questions to help someone figure out how to spend their time. Even though I still struggle occasionally, letting go of a singular and ever-lasting idea of purpose has allowed me to be much more honest about what’s important.
“Two Good Things” by Modern Baseball
It seems that canons are typically limited to things that have been read or watched. But I connect with music more quickly and intensely than any other form of art. And while music might not change my thinking the same way that reading does, it often draws things out I didn’t know existed until I heard the right chord or lyric.
That’s true of “Two Good Things” by Modern Baseball, a song that more aptly exposed than influenced me. The first time I heard it, it made me feel seen and understood. The song isn’t subtle or layered, but everything about it — from the shifting energy, to the metaphors, to the band itself — call out to me.4
Often the music that stays with us is what we listened to in our formative years. This song was released in 2014, when I was a few years out of college but still struggling to find myself.
When I hear the line, “Bottom of the ninth, can’t find my socks,” I am soothed and ignited. I am surrounded by familiar faces. And more than anything, I’m comfortable with who I am.
Atomic Habits by James Clear
James Clear might be my favorite author. Reading Atomic Habits helped me realize that many of my goals felt more like obligations than things I actually wanted to do. Paired with his weekly newsletter, “3-2-1”, Clear has done more to expand my thinking than any other writer.
Shane Parrish and Farnam Street
I decided to cite Shane Parrish’s full writing catalogue rather than a single article because it’s his approach to knowledge that’s impacted me the most. Sure, I came to learn more about outside views, decision journals, and premortems from Parrish, but no individual idea compares to his mantra of “mastering the best of what other people have already figured out.”
It’s a value statement I immediately connected with and adopted. It’s humble and curious. It makes continuous learning mandatory. It shows the value of borrowing and applying insights across domains. Most importantly, it forces an active approach to growth — because mastery demands that you wrestle with others’ ideas to understand what you believe.
Alchemy by Rory Sutherland
Most of these works consist of logical thinkers presenting evidence-based arguments to make a seemingly obvious point. It wasn’t until I stumbled across Alchemy that I saw another — often equally valid — way to view the world. Sutherland’s basic premise “the opposite of a good idea can be a good idea” initially sounds dubious. But the longer that I work, the more I see the need for his unconventional problem solving that centers on human behavior and relationships.
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
Despite a canon littered with non-fiction works, there’s little I enjoy as much as a good novel. Fiction opens up the mind and unlocks endless possibilities.
But for a long time I ignored fiction because I didn’t see how it would help me or my career.
A Little Life is the book I credit most with changing the way I read. It was my gateway to dozens of other books I wouldn’t have picked up otherwise. The subject matter is difficult throughout and, at times, downright disturbing. And yet, the story is a compelling tale of friendship, love, and hope that I couldn’t put down. It brought up complex emotions and a desire to discuss the book that I rarely feel with non-fiction.
“Came Out Swinging” by the The Wonder Years
One more song to close.5
“Came Out Swinging” was released in the summer of 2011. I had graduated college and moved to York, PA to chase my dream of working in a Major League front office with an internship in independent ball. Not the most glamourous beginning.
The internship turned into a full-time job where, on a relatively small scale, I was… managing a baseball operations department. I was doing some of the very things I dreamed of, but I still wasn’t where I wanted to be.
To get where I wanted, it was becoming clear I would need to be willing to take a step back and bet on myself. So, that’s what I did. I left my full-time job to move to St. Petersburg, FL for a ten month internship with the Tampa Bay Rays.
Maybe I would have done it on my own. But on some level, I know I was influenced by the opening lines of “Came Out Swinging” that I’d been belting out in my car for the past three years.
Moved all my shit to my parent’s basement
And out of our old apartment
And I know things changed but I’m not sure when
I guess you’d call this regression
I left a real job and a girlfriend
Convinced myself that I’m brave enough for all of this
I haven’t faced much adversity in my life. Compared to most, I’ve had a very comfortable and fortunate existence. And while it’s easy to say now that it was the right choice, moving to Florida bordered on terrifying at the time. I probably would have been even more scared had I given it more thought.
But I jumped in, convincing myself that I was brave (and capable) enough for all of it. On some level, I don’t know that it would have worked with any other approach. I threw myself into work and learned as much as I could in the time I had. Luckily — and luck absolutely played a part — when the internship ended, there was an opportunity for me to stay on in a full-time capacity.
That one choice not only led to the start of my career in Major League Baseball, but also to a few amazing life-long friendships. And a certain email thread that’s still going today. I’m not sure that happens without “Came Out Swinging.”
That’s my canon. It’s authentically me. Your list would and should look quite different. That’s the point.
If reading this does nothing more than allow you to know me better, it will have served its purpose. But I hope it also inspires you to share your own canon with a friend, family member, a colleague or with me.
That’s not meant as a criticism, either. Hopefully Sinek has the same attitude as Joseph Heller. When asked why he had not written anything as good as his first book, Catch-22, Heller replied, “Who has?”
Highly recommend following Tango on social media if you aren’t already. He’s insightful and funny, and no one has done more for sports analytics in the last 25 years.
I hadn’t read any of Manson’s books at this point. It was a rather bleak “what am I doing with my life” Google search that led me the article.
The band is called Modern Baseball and they’re an emo band from Philadelphia. It doesn’t get much more me than that.
The Wonder Years are also an emo band from the greater Philadelphia area (they’re from Lansdale which is essentially the town a went to college in). I listen to music from a more diverse range of artists, but I guess they never influenced me as much.