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GEORGE MARSHALL: DEFENDER OF THE REPUBLIC

David L. Roll

Highly Recommended

Summary​

  • George Marshall was considered by Winston Churchill as the "architect of victory" during WW2. George Marshall had an extensive career and his credited with creating and executing the Marshall Plan (the economic recovery of Western Europe).

Memorable Parts

  • "The American people had conferred a 'great asset' on the professional officer corps, in that they harbor no fear that the military will seek to alter or overthrow the government. 'We...are a member of a priesthood really, the sole purpose of which is to defend the republic.'"

  • "The night after their wedding, at the New Willard Hotel in Washington, DC, Marshall learned for the first time that Lily could not risk a pregnancy due to a heart condition."

  • "To avoid detection by the Germans the sixty-mile move by foot, horse, truck and rail would have to take place only at night. Marshall had less than twenty four hours to come up with a plan to move half a million men. Inventing the adage, 'they only way to begin is to commence'."

  • "Don't act like a dumbbell. You have sense enough to understand that few things last, good or bad."

  • "Katherine had a feeling that her husband 'lived outside' of his own body, constantly disciplining himself as if he were his own subordinate. 'I cannot allow myself to get angry.'"

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A HANDBOOK FOR NEW STOICS: HOW TO THRIVE IN A WORLD OUT OF YOUR CONTROL

Massimo Pigliucci & Gregory Lopez

Highly Recommended

Summary​

  • You can read Seneca and Epictetus all day long but to be a true Stoic, you need to practice it. This is a great book that has 52 different lessons (one per week). Combines theory and practice.

Memorable Parts

  • "AA's Serenity Prayer took a page from the Stoics: 'God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference.'"

  • "There a two types of goals that are harmful to pursue: those where you aren't likely to succeed and those you will regret if you do succeed."

  • "The Stoic diagnosis on what we feel is wrong is clear: we put too much value on the wrong things (externals), while at the same time not valuing enough what we should (or character and integrity)."

  • "Don't fret about the future and don't regret the past. The present demands your attention."

  • "It doesn't matter what you bear but how you bear it."

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ADULT CHILDREN OF EMOTIONALLY IMMATURE PARENTS: HOW TO HEAL FROM DISTANT, REJECTING, OR SELF-INVOLVED PARENTS

Lindsay C. Gibson

Recommended

Summary​

  • Parents famously say 'there is no manual to how to be a good parent.' I agree but there are certainly things we as parents should not do. Many of those habits are passed from generation to generation This books opens our attention to habits we might be doing without noticing.

Memorable Parts

  • "This children perceive that the best solution is to grow up quickly and become self-sufficient. These children become competent beyond their years but lonely at their core."

  • "Relationships are based on emotional intimacy. The feeling that someone is interesting in taking the time to really listen and understand your experience."

  • "People who are emotionally mature can function independently while also having deep emotional attachments, smoothly incorporating both in their daily life."

  • "Their personalities are like stunted bonsai trees, trained to grow in unnatural shapes. Because they had to bend to fit their families, they were unable to develop fluidly into the integrated, natural people they might have become."

  • "In this role reversal, the child catches the contagion of the parent's distress and feels responsible for making the parent feel better."

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GRAND TRANSITIONS: HOW THE MODERN WORLD WAS MADE

Vaclav Smil

Recommended

Summary​

  • This author is in his own category. I learned about Vaclav Smil from Bill Gates' website (he is one of his favorite authors) and this is the third book I read. None have disappointed me. His level of detail and analyses is astonishing.

Memorable Parts

  • "No matter how gradually or how rapidly the transitions unfold, growth of their critical parameters tends to follow an S-shaped trajectory conforming to a logistic function."

  • "Societies that have undergone all four grand transitions have emerged into an era of entirely different population dynamics, food surplus and waste, high levels of energy use and expanding economic opportunities (accompanied by growing wealth inequalities)."

  • "I have argued that the Haber-Bosch synthesis was perhaps the most consequential technical invention ever because with out it it would have been impossible to produce food for about 45% of today's population."

  • "This is  why I believe that the proximate reason for China's opening to the West was to gain access to the most advanced process of ammonia synthesis and us the increased fertilizer output to boost the yields and prevent famine."

  • "A conservative global estimate is that commuting by some 2.5 billion people spending 50 minutes a day adds up annually to nearly 60 million years of life, an enormous waste of human potential."

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THE ESSAYS OF WARREN BUFFETT: LESSONS FOR CORPORATE AMERICA

Lawrence A. Cunningham

Average

Summary​

  • The reason I rate this book as average is because all of its content is public information, from Berkshire's annual reports. So there might be better use of your money than buying this book. However, I should point out that there is value added in the way the author groups essays into themes and you can perceive the evolution of Buffett's thinking through the years.

Memorable Parts

  • "Charlie and I love such honest-to-God ownership. After all, who ever washes a rental car?"

  • "The dagger thesis, using the metaphor of the intensified care an automobile driver would take facing a dagger mounted on the steering wheel."

  • "Financial statements must answer three basic questions: approximately how much a company is worth, its likely ability to meet its future obligations and how good a job its managers are doing operating the business."

  • "I've never believed in risking what my family and friends have and need in order to pursue what they don't have and don't need."

  • "A horse that can count to ten is a remarkable horse - not a remarkable mathematician. Likewise, a textile company that allocates capital brilliantly within its industry is a remarkable textile company - not a remarkable business."

  • "What Charlie and I have learned after 25 years in business is not how to solve difficult business problems. What we have learned is how to avoid them. We've done better by avoiding dragons than by slaying them."

  • "Over the years, a number of very smart people have learned the hard way that a long string of impressive numbers multiplied by a single zero always equals zero."

  • "Said the golf pro: 'practice doesn't make perfect; practice makes permanent.'"

  • "We neglected the Noah principle: predicting rain doesn't count, building arks does."

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

Chris Gardner

Highly Recommended

Summary​

  • If you haven't heard the title, you don't live on planet Earth. This is the book that inspired the Will Smith movie. It is fascinating the lengths that this man went to to provide for his son. It is a true inspiration and puts your "struggles" in perspective.

Memorable Parts

  • "Chris Jr. stared right up at me, knowingly, as if to say, 'All right, Poppa, I'm counting on you.'"

  • "Mr. Mandela shook my hand firmly and said words to me that I'd never heard from a man in my life, 'Welcome home, son.'"

  • "If I had learned anything about being a parent, that right there was the most important lesson, just as my son said it - kids don't want to make us mad, they want to make us happy."

  • "I should enlist his assistance in getting him admitted to the Oakland day care center where they had the misspelled 'happyness' sign. If we could do that, our long days of leaving at 5:00am and not returning until 9:00pm at night would be much more manageable."

  • "After I ordered, he got to dig in first, and then I'd eat what was left over."

  • "Cracks in the concrete. Becoming familiar with cracks is not some OCD pursuit, it is a matter of survival for maneuvering a child in a fragile stroller with everything I own on my person - under weather and time constraints."

  • "Kindness sprang up out of nowhere. The hookers and a couple of other ladies started giving Christopher $5 bills. In fact, there were some days when we wouldn't have eaten without their help."

  • "For a while I was able to eat during the day whenever tasked with gofer work to set up the conference room at work. If people didn't show, the sandwiches definitively didn't go to waste."

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I LOVE CAPITALISM: AN AMERICAN STORY

Ken Langone

Recommended

Summary​

  • An American story of a man who became a billionaire. At some points the book feels like a tribute to himself (charities, etc.) but there are valuable business lessons contained in the book. Worth the read.

Memorable Parts

  • "My grandfather was a peasant. He was a lovely man, and from the time he was six years old until the day he died, he had a shovel in his hand. He worked his hands to the bone."

  • "I had guys tell me years later, 'You son of a bitch, I still have boxes of that fucking stationery.'"

  • "I am convinced I could have persuaded Ross Perot to do that deal if Baker hadn't leaked. And I'm convinced that if Ross Perot had thrown his support to George H.W. Bush, Bush would have beaten Clinton."

  • "I also have no problem admitting my mistakes. I'm loaded with them. But I never bought a pencil without an eraser on it, and God invented erasers on pencils for people like me."

  • "Steve made a little gizmo for his house in Florida. Maddoff's business card is mounted inside a Lucite box, and when you walk by, a motion detector triggers a reading of my voice saying, 'What the fuck is that guy's problem.'"

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'Adam Smith'

THE MONEY GAME

Recommended

Summary​

  • Written in 1976 by Wall Street insider 'Adam Smith'. This book was recommended to me by a banker back in 2009 and finally got a chance to read. It is interesting how many things from the 60s and 70s still hold true in finance, politics and economics.

Memorable Parts

  • "The money which can preoccupy so much of our consciousness is an abstraction and a symbol. The game we create with it is an irrational one, and we play it better when we realize that."

  • "With good men, you can see the learning juices churning around every mistake. You learn from mistakes. When I look back, my life seems to be an endless chain of mistakes."

  • "This compulsion to work  [pile up money] subordinates man to things. It reduces the drives of the human being to greed and competition."

  • "It is a terrible thing to have a money adding machine write an epitaph. Perhaps measuring men by the marketplace is one of the penalties of our age."

  • "If you are only in the sealing-wax business, there is only so much leeway in accounting about what is profit and what isn't. But if you are busy buying and selling companies, every time they pass through your accounting firm you get a chance to try describe artistically some of the assets as earnings and to capitalize costs."

  • "If governments have a choice between attempting full employment and defending their currencies, they will nearly always pick jobs over the worth of the currency. Currencies do not vote."

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HOW TO INVENT EVERYTHING: A SURVIVAL GUIDE FOR THE STRANDED TIME TRAVELER

Average

Summary​

  • I think most of us have asked ourselves the question: 'If I went back in time, what could I invent from scratch?' Prepared to be humbled by that question. This book is an attempt to answer that question. My only critique is that you can't really include all the information you need in half a page. Can you truly build a light-blub from reading information contained in a single page?

Memorable Parts

  • "The five technological foundations are: spoken language, written language, non-sucky numbers, the scientific method and calories surplus."

  • "Everything you do, from smallest victories to your greatest accomplishments, will depend on a bunch of invisible single-celled microbes that live in the dirt. If they fall, so too falls your civilization."

  • "Every avocado you've probably ever eaten derives from a seed found under mysterious circumstanced in 1926."

  • "Potatoes are one of the few plants that contain all the nutrition humans need! All parts of the potato are poisonous until cooked."

  • "You can still vaccinate yourself against at least one deadly virus - smallpox. Cows can contract cowpox; it's a similar disease to smallpox. In 1768, someone finally noticed that people who milked cows tended not to die during smallpox epidemics."

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Ryan North

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A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW

Highly Recommended

Summary​

  • So far, this book is in my top ten of 2022. A book about love, acceptance and the cruelty that governments, under the banner of the common good, can do to its citizens. 

Memorable Parts

  • "In the seventeen years of making that peace in Treaty of Ports - hardly a generation - Russia had suffered a world war, a civil war, two famines, and the so-called Red Terror."

  • "The principle here is that a new generation owes a measure of thanks to every member of the previous generation. Our elders planted the fields and found in wars; they advanced the arts and sciences, and generally made sacrifices on our behalf."

  • "For however decisive the Bolsheviks' victory had been over the privileged classes on behalf of the Proletariat, they would be having banquets soon enough."

  • "For after all, if attentiveness should be measured in minutes and discipline measured in hours, then indomitability must be measured in years."

  • "As long as there have been men on earth there have been men in exile...But the Russians were the first people to master the notion of sending a man into exile at home...But when you exile a man in his own country, there is no beginning anew."

  • "Can you imagine the expression on Napoleon's face when he was roused at two in the morning and stepped from his new bedroom in the Kremlin only to find that the city he'd claimed just hours before had been set on fire by its citizens."

  • "Well, since the day I was born, Sofia, there was only one time when Life needed me to be in a particular place at a particular time, and that was when your mother brought you to the lobby of the Metropol."

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Amos Towles

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH: A HISTORY OF NAZI GERMANY

Highly Recommended

Summary​

  • A first-person account of Germany before, during and after the taking of power by the Nazis. The author was a US reporter living in Germany. I have never read a WW2 book quiet like this one.

Memorable Parts

  • "On the occupation of the Ruhr in January 1923, the mark fell to 18,000 to the dollar; by August 1 to a million. By November, when Hitler thought his hour had stuck, it took four billion marks to buy a dollar."

  • "The cardinal error of the Germans who opposed Nazism was their failure to unite against it. The 63 percent of the German people who expressed their opposition to Hitler in 1932 were much too divided."

  • "No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possible conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of the regime's calculated and incessant propaganda."

  • "On March 10, Premier Chautemps and his cabinet had resigned. All through the crucial day of March 11, when Goering was telephoning his ultimatum to Vienna, there was no one in Paris who could act."

  • "I myself, from our apartment in Plossglasse, watched squads of SS men carting off silver, tapestries, paintings and other loot from the Rothschild palace next door."

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William L. Shirer

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GOOD ECONOMICS FOR HARD TIMES

Recommended

Summary​

  • MIT economists and 2019 Nobel Prize winners. This book will likely  change your perception of why it is so difficult for the poor (and poor countries) to move on up. My only criticism with the book is that it feels like reading a list of summaries and conclusions of various experiments and pilot social programs.

Memorable Parts

  • "Researchers found that for anybody who was under 25 at the time of the eruption, losing a house led to large economic gains. By 2014, those whose parental houses were destroyed earned over $3,000 per year more than those whose parental houses were not destroyed."

  • "The right way to pay for this is to use a general tax revenue. To the extent we are all benefitting from trade, we should collectively pay for the cost. It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish."

  • "The positive up-vote increased the probability that the next user also gave an up-vote, by 32 percent. After five months, the comments that received one single artificial up-vote at the beginning were much more likely to get a top grade than those that got  a single down-vote."

  • "We remember only the endless talk about Mexicans and not the fact that first-generation immigrants, legal or otherwise, are actually less likely to be criminals than native-born Americans."

  • "The key ultimately is to not lose sight of the fact that GDP is a means and not an end. The ultimate goal remains raising the quality of life of the average person, and especially the worst-off person. Quality of life is more than just consumption."

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Esther Duflo & Abhijit V. Banerjee

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ARDENNES 1944: THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE

Average

Summary​

  • 'Stalingrad', by the same author, is one of my favorite WW2 books. This is my second book from Beevor's WW2 series and it felt a bit short of my expectations. Battle descriptions and details are superb but rest of the story lacks power.

Memorable Parts

  • "Hitler believed that in the west, by driving north to Antwerp, two panzer armies could split the western Allies, forcing the Canadians out of the war and perhaps even the British in 'another Dunkirk'."

  • "In the chief of staff's office, the three men stood around a large map spread out on the floor. Strong pointed with a German ceremonial sword to Bastogne."

  • "Hemingway took great delight in drinking a stock of communion wine and then refilling the bottles with his own urine. He claimed to have relabeled them 'Schloss Hemingstein 1944' and later drank one my mistake."

  • "Their observation post was in a house, outside which a dead German lay frozen stiff with one arm extended. From then on it was a ritual to shake hands with him every time we came or left the house."

  • "German soldiers sometimes fired a bullet through their own helmet in advance, so that if they were overrun they could play dead and then shoot one of their attackers in the back."

  • "Patton had moved his headquarters into the Industrial School in Luxembourg. He proudly showed of f his lights, with the bulbs hanging in captured German helmets acting as lampshades."

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Anthony Beevor

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A MOVEABLE FEAST

Recommended

Summary​

  • A memoir written by the author in 1964 about his time living in Paris in the 1920s.

Memorable Parts

  • "I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil."

  • "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know."

  • "You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because al the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food."

  • "They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure."

  • "But hawks do not share. Scott did not write anything any more that was good until after he knew that she was insane." 

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Ernest Hemingway

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EXTREME PRODUCTIVITY: BOOST YOUR RESULTS, REDUCE YOUR HOURS.

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Summary​

  • I got this book as a gift when I went to my business school reunion. The author is a very successful executive but I could not find, in the entire book, an original piece of advice. The book even mentions Blackberries and it was written in 2012 (!)

Memorable Parts

  • "No matter what your career aspirations are, you should begin by thinking carefully about why you are engaging in an activity and what you expect to get out of it."

  • "Suppose you won $100,000 in a game and I asked you a year later what you had done with the money. You could probably tell me in great detail how much you spent on what. But unless you bill by the hour, you probably have a vague sense of how much time  you've devoted to various tasks."

  • "Procrastination is easy enough to recognize. Instead of working on your highest Target, you may be working on something less important because it seems easier."

  • "OHIO: Only handle it once."

  • "When I come home and try to get involved with my family I have a difficult time switching from my cognitive, directive management style to a more emotional, cooperative one. The very things I'm paid to do well at work create a disaster for me at home."

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Robert C. Pozen

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COMPLEX PTSD: COMPASSIONATE STRATEGIES TO BEING HEALING FROM CHILDHOOLD TRAUMA

Skip

Summary​

  • Short book about the topic. It barely scratches the surface on the topic and a good portion of the book is devoted to patient stories but they all have the same theme "they came to therapy and got better." Strategies and processes are explained at a very high level.

Memorable Parts

  • "Pervasive feelings of danger might lead you to feel as though you are still being threatened, when you are actually safe. This is called "hypervigilance" and it can lead you to startle easily or feel on guard and unable to relax."

  • "Reclaim choice: verbal agreement with yourself that you will attend to your traumatic memories at the right time and right space."

  • "Sometimes, we cope by becoming the 'good child' who develops competence or perfectionism to deal with the chaos at home. This backfires when they continue into adulthood."

  • "A child might create an idealized parent to avoid facing the reality and may carry the burden of being the 'bad' child in order to avoid the terrifying reality that there is a 'bad' parent."

  • "As you let go of your childhood longing to be taken care of, you can simultaneously increase your sense of responsibility for your own life now, in which you identify your values and strengthen your boundaries."

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Arielle Schwartz, PhD

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WHAT THE CEO WANTS YOU TO KNOW: USING BUSINESS ACUMEN TO UNDERSTAND HOW YOUR COMPANY REALLY WORKS

Ram Charan

Average

Summary​

  • The ABCs of how financial ratios, how they are calculated and why they are important. If you have taken a single finance course in college, this book might be too basic.

Memorable Parts

  • "The street vendor constantly thinks about cash - does he have enough cash, how can he get more cash, will he continue to be able to generate cash?"

  • "Cash generation, margin, velocity, return on assets, growth and customers. Everything else about a business emanates from this nucleus."

  • "Everyone in a company must be aware that his actions use cash or generate cash."

  • "One truth about business is that the returns on assets has to be greater than the cost of using your own and other people's money, the cost of capital."

  • "Do you know which product lines make money? which one makes the most money? which one makes the least? Do you know which ones consume cash? which ones generate it? It one product line more volatile than the others?"​​

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WARREN BUFFET AND THE INTERPRETATION OF FINANCIAL STATEMENTS: THE SEARCH FOR THE COMPANY WITH A DURABLE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

Mary Buffett & David Clark

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Summary​

  • If you took a single finance course in college, you will not find anything new in this book. I found really annoying the repetitive use of the phrase 'competitive advantage.' We get it, that is what he is looking for.

Memorable Parts

  • "How do you identify an exceptional company with a durable competitive advantage? How do you value a company with a durable competitive advantage?"

  • "Some men read Playboy. I read annual reports."

  • "Any gross margin of 20% and below is usually good indicator of a fiercely competitive industry."

  • "What Warren discovered is that companies that have a durable competitive advantage tend to have lower depreciation costs as a percentage of gross profit than companies that have to suffer the woes of intense competition (and investment in PP&E)."

  • "One of the things you will find with most businesses and with most individuals, is life tends to snap you at your weakest link. I've seen more people fail because of liquor and debt."

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EAT THAT FROG!: 21 WAYS TO STOP PROCRASTINATING AND GET MORE DONE IN LESS TIME

Brian Tracy

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Summary​

  • Catchy title, bland content. I am astounded that this book is the #1 rated book in Amazon for 'Life and Business Balance.' You wont' find a single unique piece of advice. Avoid it.

Memorable Parts

  • "The first rule of frog eating is this: if you have to eat two frogs, eat the ugliest one first."​

  • "Resist the temptation to clear up the small things first. Low-value tasks are like rabbits; they multiply continually. You never get caught up."

  • "Losers try to escape from their fears and drudgery with activities that are tension-relieving. Winners are motivated by their desires towards activities that are goal-oriented. Motivation requires motive."

  • "In the Sahara Desert, the French installed fifty-five gallon oils drums every five kilometers, the exact distance to the horizon, formed by the curvature of the earth. To get results in life, all we have to do is steer to the next barrel."

  • "The world is full of people waiting for someone to come along and motivate them to be the kind of people they wish they could be. The problem is that no one is coming to the rescue."

  • "If you had to leave work for a month, what would you make absolutely sure that you got done before you left?"

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BARBARIANS AT THE GATE: THE FALL OF RJR NABISCO

Bryan Burrough & John Hevlar

Highly Recommended

Summary​

  • The best way for me to describe the book is using the text in that golden sticker pasted in the front: '20th anniversary edition of the best business story of our time'.

Memorable Parts

  • "CEOs learned two things from LBOs. First, the way to build significant wealth was through equity ownership not salary and bonuses, and second, you didn't need to do any LBOs to build equity. You could give yourself stock options."

  • "It was a symbiotic relationship: raider seeks target; target seeks LBO; and raider, target, and LBO firm all profit from the outcome. The only ones hurt were the company's bondholders, whose holding were devalue in the face of new debt, and employers who lost their jobs."

  • "The total expenses for KKR approached $400 million, but Raether, careful not to push too hard, asked for only $45 million. Forty-five million dollars to wait in the lobby for sixty minutes."

  • "It totaled $18.9 billion, the amount needed to pay the cash portion. It was the biggest river of money ever to course through the US financial system. The flow was so big it made US money-supply statistics temporarily bulge as it roared through the system."

  • "On McKinsey's advice, the CEO threw it all away. The company cut back its truck fleet, reduced its deliveries and replaced the veterans with cheap kids. And Nabisco's downward spiral accelerated. Customers were furious . their old contacts gone."

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FOCUS: THE HIDDEN DRIVER OF EXCELLENCE

Daniel Goleman

Average

Summary​

  • There are more insightful books on the subject than this one. The author pointed to 2 or 3 interesting experiments about the topic that I hadn't heard about but the rest is repetitive and sometimes obvious. I rated it average because the author does do a great job of summarizing key points on the topic.

Memorable Parts

  • "If life were a movie, psychologist Daniel Kahneman wryly notes, 'the top-down mind would be a supporting character who believes herself to be the hero'."

  • "There are two major streams of self-awareness; 'me', which builds narratives about our past and future; and 'I', which brings us into the immediate present."

  • "There's an intriguing relationship between self-awareness and power. There are relatively few gaps between one's own and other's ratings among lower-level employees. But the higher someone's position in an organization, the bigger the gap."

  • "Bottom line: kids can have the most economically privileged childhood, yet if they don't master how to delay gratification in pursuit of their goals those early advantages will wash out in the course of life. Another bottom line: anything we can do to increase children's capacity for cognitive control will help them throughout life. Even Cookie Monster can learn to do better."

  • "Mindfulness training decreases activity in me-circuitry centering on the medial prefrontal cortex - and the less self-talk, the more we can experience in the moment."

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ADDICTION BY DESIGN: MACHINE GAMBLING IN LAS VEGAS

Natasha Dow Schull

Highly Recommended

Summary​

  • I can't remember how I stumbled upon this book (Amazon suggestion?) but I am glad I did. Regardless if you have an interest in gambling, this book will open your eyes to how much can be done to optimize product-client interactions. Unfortunately, in this case, it is in one that doesn't help the client.

Memorable Parts

  • "Frank J. Fahrenkopf Jr., president of the American Gaming Association, estimated in 2003 that over 85 percent of  industry profits came from machines."

  • "Cocaine addicts tell you about the last decade, but crack cocaine addicts tell you about last year, and that's very similar to the machine gamblers."

  • "The easiest access by far is the valet but casinos won't let you pull in there, especially on the Strip - they think it's bad for business, they want you to feel safe. Instead, paramedics must park around the back."

  • "The Law of Space Elimination dictates that designers 'constrict' space to create protected sanctuaries of play. One way to do this is by 'segmenting' the casino floor into compact areas isolated from the rest of the casino and not visible from one another."

  • "Harrah's software feeds a Pavlovian system that calculates how much a player can lose and still feel satisfied, there establishing personalized 'paint points'. When you hit one, the Ambassador comes by offering comp meals or show tickets."​​

  • "The virtual reel has a disproportionate number of virtual stops that are mapped just above of below the jackpot symbols. This enhances the 'near miss' sensation."

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SPRINT: SOLVE BIG PROBLEMS AND TEST NEW IDEAS IN JUST FIVE DAYS

Jake Knapp

Highly Recommended

Summary​

  • Straight out of Google Ventures. I had low expectations coming in and this book blew my mind. By far, the best book I have read about a structured process to determine the best way to enhance customer interactions. A must read for anyone involved in sales, product development, website creation, app creation, etc...

Memorable Parts

  • "This sprint is Google Venture's unique process for answering crucial questions through prototyping and testing ideas with customers. It's a 'greatest hits' of business strategy, innovation, behavioral science, design and more."

  • "Solve the surface first. The surface is where your product or service meets customers. When our new ideas fail, it's usually because we were overconfident about how well our customers would understand and how much they would care."

  • "Researchers at UC Irvine reported that it takes on average 23 minutes for distracted workers to return to their tasks."

  • "If Mission Control had worried about the air filter first, they would have missed their window to fix the trajectory, and the Apollo 13 spaceship might have careened off toward Pluto."

  • "The method is called 'How Might We' and it is a way to convert problems into questions."

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PRINCIPLES FOR DEALING WITH THE CHANGING WORLD ORDER: WHY NATIONS SUCCEED AND FAIL

Ray Dalio

Highly Recommended

Summary​

  • One of the best economic history books I have ever read. An in-depth study of empires during the last 500 years. This book provides context and a mental model for understanding the current US - China dynamic.

Memorable Parts

  • "The Big Cycle produces swings between (1) peaceful and prosperous periods pf creativity and productivity that raise living standards a lot and (2) depression, revolution, and war periods."

  • "Why the central bank actions of 1930 of creating a lot of money and credit/debt pushed financial asset prices up, which widened the wealth gap and led to an era of populism and conflict. We are now seeing the same forces at play in the post 2008-period."

  • "History shows us that after the fight for power in which the common enemy is defeated, those who united against the enemy typically fight among themselves for power. I call this the 'purge' state of the balance of power."

  • "Of the roughly 750 currencies that have existed since 1700, only about 20 percent remain, and all of them have been devalued."

  • "From studying 50-plus civil wars and revolutions, it became clear that the single most reliable leading indicator of civil war or revolutions is bankrupt government finances combined with big wealth gaps."

  • "A symbiotic relationship developed between China and the US in which the Chinese loaned the US money to buy their manufactured goods. It was a hell of a 'buy now, pay later' deal for the Americans, and the Chinese liked it because they built their savings in the world's reserve currency."

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MAINTENANCE STOREROOMS AND MRO MADE SIMPLE

Daniel M. DeWald

Average

Summary​

  • Average intro book for those in manufacturing or sales and want to learn some best practices regarding MRO (maintenance, repair and operations). 

Memorable Parts

  • "The condition and current state of MRO and storerooms are definitely a result of attitude. MRO supplies have been given a secondary status of importance. As a result, machine downtime is often a crisis and an emergency."

  • "Production is always looking to improve its uptime and throughput. They must realize that it is a partnership with maintenance, the storeroom and the supplier to succeed and meet the customer's needs."

  • "As a general rule, any items left more than one day on the receiving floor is a problem and needs to be addressed."

  • "A' items are processed typically in a two-month period, 'B' items typically can be processed all in a six-month period and 'C' items can be processed all in a year period."

  • "Typical savings from scrap salvage are about 5% multiplied by the carrying cost of 24%."

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MEMESTOCK ALPHA DEGENERATES: REDDIT VS. WALL STREET

M.G. Llaguno

Recommended

Summary​

  • The GameStop Reddit revolt is an event that few people recognize its significance. It was topic of conversation for a few weeks and died down in the press. This book is a great resource for those wanting to learn more about: what is reddit? what exactly happened? will this event fundamentally change stock pricing and Wall Street?

Memorable Parts

  • "I try to explain Reddit to people this way: It's what the internet should have always been. It is where you go and find your tribe. This is where the world bares its soul."

  • "At one point, I even considered investing in some of their bets. But I never took it seriously and left it alone. I regret that now. I could have become a millionaire."

  • "How could you describe the job you are applying for to your grandmother?"

  • "A meme, according to the Webster dictionary, is 'an amusing or interesting picture, video, etc., that is spread widely through the internet.'"

  • "I came up with the term Memestock Alpha Degenerates to describe the group of Redditors that actively trade as individual investors and also actively post on social media about their trades on the WallStreetBets subreddit."

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APPEASEMENT: CHAMBERLAIN, HITLER, CHURCHILL, AND THE ROAD TO WAR

Tim Bouverie

Recommended

Summary​

  • How? How did Hitler manage to convince so many world leaders that he was a sane, peace-loving man. Why didn't Britain or France act more quickly to Germany's aggressions (Austria, Czechoslovakia)? This book narrates the events and helps us answer those questions.

Memorable Parts

  • "France was shortly to go through the 'lean years,' whereby the number of conscripts for the army would halve as a results of the low birth rate during the First World War."

  • "The first French edition of Mine Kampf did not appear until 1934 and then for only a few month before Hitler won a legal case and had it withdrawn. An English version had been published in the United States the previous year but had been purged of the most incendiary passages."

  • "In Rome, Mussolini, similarly annoyed, drew two important conclusions: Britain was no friend of collective security and would bend when confronted by strength. The stage was set for the Duce's own adventure in East Africa."

  • "The Air Ministry was certainly in a better state than the War Office, which revealed its anachronistic mind-set with the 1935-36 Army Estimates, which increased spending in forage for horses by 44,000 pounds but only 12,000 (pounds) for motor fuel."

  • "The French Air Force would lose 40 percent of its machines during the first month of war, declared Joseph Vuillemin, after returning from a six-day tour of the Luftwaffe and its installations, during which the Germans flew the same gleaming airplanes from airfield to airfield, just ahead of the French party."

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AFRICAN SAMURAI: THE TRUE STORY OF YASKUE, A LEGENDARY BLACK WARRIOR IN FEUDAL JAPAN

Thomas Lockley & Geoffrey Girard

Recommended

Summary​

  • 1579. The Jesuit missionary from Europe, sent by the Pope himself, Alessandro Valignano has just arrived in Japan. He has arrived with a new bodyguard employed to protect him, Yasuke.

Memorable Parts

  • "While Alessandro Valignano's name means almost nothing today, in the late 1500s, it moved armies, assembled fleets and razed cities. He'd been given the official position of 'Visitor to the Indies' by Pope Gregory XIII and was then dispatched to inspect and develop the flourishing Catholic footholds in India, China and, finally, to the easternmost of the missions, Japan."

  • "Valignano changed planes and made for another port: Kuchinotsu, instead of Nagasaki. It was a political maneuver by the Jesuits to punish a Japanese lord - Omura Sumitada, in whose territory Nagasaki was - for not being accommodating enough to their mission."

  • "But first came gifts, schools, charity and weapons. One Jesuit forefather described their typical game plan: 'We came in like lambs and will rule like wolves.'"

  • "Napoleon would conclude, 'The Jesuits are a military organization, not a religious order.''

  • "It went without saying, however, that such weapons would only be available to those Japanese lords best allied with the Church's ministry. Arima requested the holy rite of baptism."

  • "...had made up the enemy heads to honor their passing, Nobutada inspected them and then sent them by courier, with the captured poems, to his father, Nobunaga."

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HOW TO BECOME A RAINMAKER: THE RULES FOR GETTING AND KEEPING CUSTOMERS AND CLIENTS

Jeffrey J. Fox

Skip

Summary​

  • Too short to make a difference. You might get two or three good tips but it is not worth the 'price of admission.'

Memorable Parts

  • "Never make a sales call on a customer unless you can answer the questions 'Why should this customer do business with our company, with me?'"

  • "You either made the sale or you didn't. No one wants to hear you didn't bring in the business. No one cares that 'the peso was devalued.' The hunter either comes home with the game or his family goes hungry."

  • "Being nice to somebody's somebody may not get you a client. But being hurtful to somebody's somebody could hurt your."

  • "No one buys a chain link by link. No one goes into a hardware store and says, 'Give me seventeen links.' If the customer is shown all the steps in a sale and agrees to the first step, the customer has bough the chain...unless you break it."

  • "Breakfast meetings are less vulnerable to cancellations. They happen before the customer's daily problems begin. and the customer is fresh, alert , and eager."

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THE FAMILY FIRM: A DATA-DRIVEN GUIDE TO BETTER DECISION MAKING IN THE EARLY SCHOOL YEARS

Emily Oster

Skip

Summary​

  • Unless you have zero planning skills, this book is not for you. The "data-driven" title is misleading. There are at most 4 graphs presented in the entire book. The rest are results from studies (mostly from Sweden or Denmark) that are inconclusive or show little impact on variables. In the end, you are left with the same questions every parent has and without data to help support your decisions.

Memorable Parts

  • "For this, and for a million other decisions, we needed to establish not what to do, but how to decide." 

  • "For decisions with complicated logistics, one thing that has worked well for my family is actually populating a (fake) calendar and looking at it. Can you be really specific about what this decision will man for the family schedule?"

  • "Relative to those  kids who had family dinner 0 to 1 times a week, those who had family dinner 5  to 7 times a week were much less likely to use alcohol or tobacco. They were half as likely to be depressed, less likely to have eating disorders, and had more school engagement."

  • "Kindergarten teachers really matter. Researchers found that kids with a more experienced kindergarten teacher not only did better in kindergarten but also had higher earnings in their late twenties."

  • "There is something deeply demoralizing about scrolling through your Instagram to see your friend's five-year old with a chess trophy while you are playing a board game called Wash My Underpants with your kids."

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HOW TO LIVE OR A LIFE OF MONTAIGNE: IN ONE QUESTION AND TWENTY ATTEMPTS AT AN ANSWER

Sarah Bakewell

Highly Recommended

Summary​

  • I had never heard of Montaigne. A friend of mine told me that his 70 year-old Dad had asked for Montaigne's Essays as a birthday gift. That caught my attention and decided to fist read this highly praised book. It is part biography and part explanation of the Essays.

Memorable Parts

  • "The idea - writing about oneself to create a mirror in which other people recognize their own humanity- has not existed forever. It had to be invented. And, unlike many cultural inventions, it can be traced to a single person: Michel Eyquem Montaigne."

  • "How to live? This is not the same as the ethical question, 'How should  one live?' He wanted to know how to live a good life - meaning a correct or honorable life, but also a fully human, satisfying, flourishing one."

  • "I defy any reader of Montaigne not to put down the book at some point and say with incredulity: 'How did he know all that about me?'"

  • "A tutor can be tougher. On the other hand, he must not be allowed to be cruel. Learning should be a pleasure, and children should grow up to imagine wisdom with a smiling face, not a fierce and terrifying one."

  • "Habit makes everything look bland; it is sleep-inducing. Jumping to a different perspective is a way of waking oneself up again."

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INVISIBLE WOMEN: DATA BIAS NI A WORLD DESIGNED FOR MEN

Caroline Criado Perez

Highly Recommended

Summary​

  • This book blew my mind. When we here about gender inequality we (men) we usually thin about the pay-gap and harassment. There is much, much more.

Memorable Parts

  • "So a group of one thousand female teachers in Spanish would be referred to as 'las profesoras' - but add a single male teacher, the group suddenly becomes 'los profesores'. Such is the power of the default male."

  • "A  typical Mumbai slum might have six bathrooms for 8,000 women."

  • "Silicon Valley's affair with meritocracy is ironic. Women make up only a quarter of the employees and 11% of the executives. This despite women earning more than half of all undergraduate degrees in the US."

  • "Brophys found that after working in the auto-plastics industry a woman's likelihood of developing breast cancer trebles."

  • "In the 2017 images study, pictures of cooking were over 33% more likely to involve women than men, but algorithms trained on this dataset connected pictures of kitchens with women 68% of the time."

  • "When a women is involved in a car crash, she is 47% more likely to be seriously injured than a man. And it's all do with how the car is designed - and for whom. The passenger seat is the only seat commonly tested with a female crash-test dummy, not the driver's seat."

  • "The FDA study revealed that in phase one trials women represented only 22% of participants."

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MISTAKES WHERE MADE (BUT NOT BY ME): WHY WE JUSTIFY FOOLISH BELIEFS, BAD DECISIONS, AND HURTFUL ACTS

Carol Travis & Elliot Aronson

Recommended

Summary​

  • Thinking we are not subject to any bias is a bias! This book will make you a better manager, friend, spouse, son/daughter and father/mother. No one is immune to the distortion our minds create.

Memorable Parts

  • "When politicians' backs are against the wall, they may reluctantly acknowledge error but not their responsibility for it. The phrase 'mistakes were made' is such a glaring effort to absolve oneself of culpability that it becomes a national joke."

  • "How do you get a n honest man to lose his ethical compass? You get him to take one step and self-justification will do the rest."

  • "We misremember our history as being worse than it was, thus distorting our perception of how much we have improved so that we'll feel better about ourselves now."

  • "The more a suspect denies his involvement, the more difficult it becomes for him to admit. If the suspect says 'Could I say something?' the interrogator should respond with a command to wait and return to the original questioning."

  • "These courageous individuals who admit their mistakes take us straight into the heart of dissonance: the mind wants to protect itself from the pain with the balm of self-justification, but the soul wants to confess."

  • "Eisenhower made on small but crucial change. He crossed out the phrase 'the troops have been withdrawn' with 'I have withdrawn the troops'. The eloquence of that I echoes down the decades."

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HAPPINESS: A HISTORY

Darrin M. McMahon

Recommended

Summary​

  • What is happiness and how can we obtain it? From pleasure? From the virtue of self-control? Can we obtain it here and now or in the after-life? From Aristotle to Freud, this question has shaped centuries, created revolutions and changed the world order.

Memorable Parts

  • "The happy man is content with his present lot, no matter what it is." [Seneca]

  • "Happy the man who, free from cares, like men of old still works his father's fields with his own oxen, encumbered by no debt."

  • "Christianity became known as 'the worship of sorrow', a tradition whose foremost symbol is an instrument of torture."

  • "And though this task fell on many shoulders, one man bore the greatest burden. Thomas Aquinas of converting Aristotle to Christ."

  • "The moment we have on thing, we want another. Man is pushed by his restlessness and by his ambition to search farther and farther. Such a man will end his  career having always imagined that he was going to be happy one day."

  • "But as he recounts in the Confessions of an English Opium Eater, the apocalypse of the divine enjoyment quickly gave way to the hell of addiction. Happiness could not be bought with money."

  • "It is possible to consider history from the point of view of happiness, but history is not the soil in which happiness grows. The periods of happiness in it are the blank pages of history."

  • "Nearly all creators of utopia have resembled the man who has a toothache, and therefore  thinks happiness consists in not having toothache."

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COMPUTER SCIENCE DISTILLED: LEARN THE ART OF SOLVING COMPUTATIONAL PROBLEMS

Wladston Ferreira  Filho

Average

Summary​

  • A good intro book if you have some coding experience. Provides an overview of computer science topics such as: databases, strategy, algorithms and computer architecture.

Memorable Parts

  • "Computer science is not about machines, in the same way that astronomy is not about telescopes. There is an essential unity of mathematics and computer science."

  • "A method that always requires a finite series of operations is called an algorithm."

  • "Time complexity is written in T(n). It gives the number of operations the algorithm performs when processing an input of size n. We refer to an algorithm's T(n) as its running cost."

  • "Alan Turing discovered that machines can compute anything as long as it is able to read/write data in memory and perform conditional branching (if a memory address has a given value, jump to another point in the program)."

  • "When someone says 'I want a programming language in which I need only say what I wish done', give him a lollipop."

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HUNTER, GATHER, PARENT: WHAT ANCIENT CULTURES CAN TEACH US ABOUT THE LOST ART OF RAISING  HAPPY, HELPFUL LITTLE HUMANS

Michaeleen Doucleff

Recommended

Summary​

  • 96% of major Psychology studies are examined only on people from European backgrounds and, yet, they make up only 12% of the population. What kind of biases can we find in parenting  recommendations? What are we missing from other cultures?

Memorable Parts

  • "If being a member of a culture [WEIRD] distorts something as simple as the way we  view two black lines on a page, how might our culture be influencing more complex psychological processes?"

  • "Much of the parenting advice out there is based on centuries-old pamphlets written by mostly male doctors for foundling hospitals and nurses who cared for hundreds of abandoned babies."

  • "Child-centered activities, designed only for kids, erode this team motivation and give a child the impression that they're exempt from family responsibilities."

  • "When we get angry and yell, we are training them to yell when they get upset and that yelling solves problems."

  • "Parents often state questions to their children. They aren't meant to make a child defensive. Instead, the questions are more like a puzzle for the child to solve, a prompt for the child to consider their actions and consequences."

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THE POWER BROKER: ROBERT MOSES AND THE FALL OF NEW YORK

Robert A. Caro

Highly Recommended

Summary​

  • A mammoth achievement of a biography. Makes you reflect on the following: the disease of power, what people sacrifice and do in order to be remembered and how fast we forget about them.

Memorable Parts

  • "One measure of Robert Moses is longevity. His power was measured in decades. For forty-four years thereafter he held power, a power so substantial that in the fields in which he chose to exercise it, it was not challenged seriously by any Governor of New York State."

  • "Nicknames would come later when, all but unknown to the public but almost legendary figure among politicians, she would be possessed of more power and influence than any woman in the United States. She would be called 'Mrs. M'."

  • "Trust in a man's word is all important. When he would break it, the word on him would soon begin to circulate through the corridors of the capitol. 'We deal in writing' was the ultimate insult."

  • "Power is being able to laugh at people who oppose you and to laugh at them with impunity. Now Robert Moses seemed to be going out of his way to laugh at people."

  • "Paul had two hundred dollars in the world. He had become frightened that his wife Millie would be left with nothing. In the most gallant of all his gallant gestures, he decided to write his brother and ask him for a job. He got an errand boy's job for $96.16 a week."

  • "Spargo's session with Moses lasted for almost three hours and he left pale and trembling. He was never the same after that meeting. Within days he suffered a heart attack - from which he never recuperated."

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LEADERSHIP IN TURBULENT TIMES

Doris Kearns Goodwin

Highly Recommended

Summary​

  • Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR and LBJ. All suffered from depression, suffered losses but all stood up and moved forward. Great read, particularly in these troubled times. 

Memorable Parts

  • "When asked later to shed light on his beginnings, Lincoln claimed his story could be 'condensed into a single sentence: The short and simple annals of the poor.'"

  • "Always bear in mind that your own resolution  to succeed, is more important than any other one thing."

  • "LBJ took four separate showers in the shared bathroom his first night to engage as many people as possible; the next morning he brushed his teeth every ten minutes - all to winnow out the most useful informants in the lot."

  • "There is an appreciation of LBJ's unsurpassed work ethic. No matter how late they stayed, nearly all the staff members agreed, Johnson closed the door behind them. No matter how early they arrived, he was already there."

  • "Humility is the first and greatest of virtues. If we don't learn it on our own, the Lord will surely teach it to us by humiliation."

  • "The life Lincoln had led, a life marked by perpetual struggle, provided his best preparation for the challenges the country faced. His temperament was stamped with depression but devoid of pessimism and brightened by wit."

  • "If defeat is an orphan then victory has a thousand fathers."

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PSICOLOGÍA DE VENTAS: CÓMO VENDER MÁS, MÁS FÁCIL Y RÁPIDAMENTE DE LO QUE ALGUNA VEZ PENSASTE QUE FUESE POSIBLE.

Brian Tracy

Evitar

Resumen​

  • Con la portada tienes para saber la calidad del contenido. Lo tenía en grupo de libros que me regalaron y me aventuré. Algunas frases motivacionales interesantes pero no vale la pena leer todo el libro por solamente por eso.

Partes Memorables

  • "Por ejemplo, si un caballo compite en una carrera  y gana por una cabeza, gana diez veces el dinero que el que perdió. ¿Es el caballo que gana por una cabeza diez veces más rápido que el que pierde por una?

  • "Nunca puedes ganar más en el exterior de lo que ganas en tu interior."

  • "Pero, de alguna manera, los inmigrantes en pocos años superan cada una de las dificultades y se convierten en líderes en su campo. En cada caso, las razones no tienen que ver más con lo que está sucediendo dentro de ellos que con lo que ocurre fuera."

  • "Todo el mundo se visualiza y se habla continuamente mientras están en sus asuntos diarios. La diferencia entre los mejores vendedores y los promedio es en el contenido de su diálogo."

  • "Cada cliente tiene tres opciones. Puede  comprarte a ti, a la competencia o no comprar nada. Tu trabajo es convencerlo de comprarte a tí."

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BECOMING TRADER JOE: HOW I DID BUSINESS MY WAY & STILL BEAT THE BIG GUYS

Joe Coulombe

Highly Recommended

Summary

  • Trader Joe's was founded in the 60s?! A gem of a book if you work in retail. This company had a average growth rate of 19% for almost 26 years. Joe Coulombe was definitively doing something right.

Memorable Parts

  • "I took a cue from General Patton, who thought that the greatest danger was not that the enemy would learn his plans, but that his own troops would not."

  • "Whenever a vendor claimed to be truly desperate, we offered to meet him at 6:00pm on a Friday night. That separates the wheat from the chaff!"

  • "Any fool with cash has 'buying power.' What most people mean by 'buying power' is actually selling power: the ability to move large quantities."

  • "The question most people ask me is 'What percentage margin did you aim for? Which launches me into my tirade that you pay your bills with dollars, not percents."

  • "The last thing I wanted was to target customers living in new $400,000 houses. Those people are the poorest of the poor. Sure they have high incomes - that's how they qualified for those monster mortgages!"

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HOW EMOTIONS ARE MADE: THE SECRET LIFE OF THE BRAIN

Lisa Feldman Barrett

Highly Recommended

Summary

  • This one is easily a top candidate of mine to be in my top 10 of all time. Completely changed my view on what are emotions, how do they arise and how to control them (I am not exaggerating). One of the best neuroscience books I have ever read. Very original work. 

Memorable Parts

  • "These purely physical sensations we perceive from our body have no objective psychological meaning. Once your concepts enter the picture, however, those sensations may take on additional meaning."

  • "Movement feels like a two-step process but that is an illusion. Your brain issues motor predictions to move your body well before you become aware of your intent to move."

  • "People like to say that seeing is believing, but affective realism demonstrates that believing is seeing. The world often takes a backseat to your predictions."

  • "Your bodily feeling right now will project forward to influence what you will feel and do in the future. It is an elegantly orchestrated, self-fulfilling prophecy, embodied within the architecture of your brain."

  • "Each one of us needs a concept before we can experience emotion. This definition does not match common sense or everyday experience; emotions feel so built-in. But they are constructed by prediction."

  • "I tell my clients they have been victimized twice: once in the moment and again because they have been left with a brain that continues to model a hostile world, even after they've escaped to a better one."

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THE COURAGE TO BE DISLIKED: HW TO FREE YOURSELF, CHANGE YOUR LIFE AND ACHIEVE REAL HAPPINESS

Ichiro Kishimi & Fumitake Koga

Recommended

Summary

  • Written in Socrates-Plato dialogue style. Focuses on psychologist Alfred Adler, contemporary of Freud and Jung. Enjoyable read that "flips" Freud's ideas of how our subconscious and the past influence our present. 

Memorable Parts

  • "Don't judge people by having an idealized version of 100 and subtracting their flaws and mistakes. Rather, start from 0 and add up their virtues and good deeds."

  • "None of us live in an objective world, but instead in a subjective world that we ourselves have given meaning to. The world you see is different from the one I see, and it's impossible to share your world with anyone else."

  • "In Adlerian psychology, we do not think about past 'cause', but rather about present 'goals'. Your friend had a goal of not going beforehand, and he's been manufacturing a state of anxiety and fear."

  • "We are not determined by our experiences (or trauma), but the meaning we give them is self-determining."

  • "Your life is not something that someone gives you, but something you choose yourself, and your are the one who decides how you live."

  • "It's that you are disliked by someone. It is proof that you are exercising your freedom and living in freedom, and a sign that you are living in accordance to your own principles."

  • "You are using the term 'desire for recognition', but what you are really saying is that you don't want to be disliked by anyone."

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THE SECOND MACHINE AGE: WORK, PROGRESS, AND PROSPERITY IN A TIME OF BRILLIANT TECHNOLOGIES

Erik Brynjolfsson & Adrew McAfee

Average

Summary

  • The only reason I rated it average is because it was written in 2014 and many predictions turned out not to be true and/or some of the technologies they talk about are outdated. I just think it is better use of your time reading a more recent book about the subject (robots and labor). 

Memorable Parts

  • "So a vast and unprecedented boost to mental power (computers) should be a boost to humanity, just as the earlier boost to physical power (steam engine) so clearly was."

  • "Morris has done thoughtful and careful work to quantify what he terms social development: a group's ability to master its physical and intellectual environment to get things done."

  • "It's because the steady and rapid exponential growth of Moore's Law has added up to the point that we're now in a different regime of computing: we're now in the second half of the chessboard."

  • "Work saves a man from three great evils: boredom, vice, and need." - Voltaire​

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THEIR FINEST HOUR

Winston Churchill

Recommended

Summary

  • Volume 2 of Churchill's World War 2 series. I can't remember if volume 1 had contained as many telegrams as this one. Perhaps 90% of this book was reading telegrams from Churchill to others. Nonetheless, a great book to learn about leadership, communication and history.

Memorable Parts

  • "How the British people held the fort ALONE till those who hitherto had been half blind were half ready."

  • "I said a few weeks later, 'if the present tries to sit in judgment on the past, it will lose the future.'"

  • "It is always better, except in the hierarchy of military discipline, to express opinions and wishes rather than to give orders."

  • "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat."

  • "I was woken up with news that Mr. Reynaud was on the telephone at my bedside. He spoke in English and evidently under stress. 'We have been defeated.'"

  • "I saw General de Gaulle standing solid and expressionless at the doorway. Greeting him, I said 'L'homme du destin.'"

  • "Having begun, we must go on to the end. Stop at nothing."

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CONSCIOUS PARENTING OF YOUR TODDLER: STRATEGIES TO TURN DISCIPLINE INTO GROWTH AND CONNECTION

Mihaela Plugarasu

Skip

Summary

  • The first 33% of the book is solid and provides ground for insights and self reflection. The rest of the book, the author keeps repeating the same strategy to deal with various scenarios with toddlers: tantrums not wanting to go to sleep, etc.

Memorable Parts

  • "We quickly discover that parenting is hard, exhausting, and often isolating. We become aware of feelings, reactions, and thoughts we never knew existed inside of us."

  • "Conscious parenting is about the relationship w have with ourselves. This is a courageous act because it challenges our beliefs."

  • "Conscious parenting is a process of self-reflection, honesty, and the uprooting of limiting, harmful beliefs. We do this work in order to avoid passing these beliefs on to our children."

  • "By reflecting us back to ourselves, our kids reveal the unresolved and unintegrated childhood wounds."

  • "The need for control or approval activates our fear state, and when we act out from that place, we cannot be in our hearts."

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THE CODE OF CAPITAL: HOW THE LAW CREATES WEALTH AND INEQUALITY

Katharina Pistor

Recommended

Summary

  • Capital has privileges that not even citizens enjoy. Capital can "choose" its own tax regime, can cross countries without visa and can certain types of it are exempt from bankruptcy claims. Capital laws are being written in law firms, not in Congress.

Memorable Parts

  • "Capital law bestows important attributes on assets and thereby privilege its holder: priority, durability, universality and convertibility."

  • "Many a freelancer has discovered that she can capitalize her labor by establishing a corporate identity, contribute her services to it and take out dividends - thereby benefiting from a lower tax rate."

  • "Two legal systems dominate the world of global capital: English common law and the laws of New York State."

  • "Rating agencies have successfully defended themselves in the US with the argument that they are in the business of offering opinions and that they therefore enjoy the protection of free speech under the US Constitution's First Amendment."

  • "Law is code; it turns a simple asset into a capital asset by bestowing the attributes of priority, durability, universality, and convertibility on it."

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THE SIMPLE PATH TO WEALTH: YOUR ROAD MAP TO FINANCIAL INDEPENDENCE AND A RICH, FREE LIFE

JL Collins

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Summary

  • Stock market always goes up. Investment advisors are a waste of time. Invest in Vanguard´s lowest funds (stock and equity) and save 50% of your income. Voila!

Memorable Parts

  • "If you could learn to live on rice and beans, you wouldn't have to cater to the king."

  • "Debt brings the same type of negative emotions experienced by any addict: shame, guilt, loneliness, and above all, helplessness. The fact that it's a prison of your own making makes it the more difficult."

  • "I may not have owned a Mercedes, but I owned my own freedom. Freedom to chose when to leave a job and freedom from worry when the choice wasn't mine."

  • "The root of Mike Tyson's problem is that at the tie he understood money only in terms of buying stuff."

  • "It's not hard. Stop thinking about what your money can buy. Start thinking about what your money can earn. And then think about what the money it earns can earn."

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BUDDHA'S BRAIN: THE PRACTICAL NEUROSCIENCE OF HAPPINESS, LOVE AND WISDOM

Rick Hanson

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Summary

  • Unmemorable. Can't even compare it to other books about the topic, falls too short. Most of the sections felt like reading a pamphlet rather than a proper chapter in a book (in depth comments, analyses, examples, etc.)

Memorable Parts

  • "What flows through your mind sculpts your brain. Thus, you can use your mind to change your brain for the better."

  • "But to take these steps to get better, you have to be on your own side. That may not be so easy at first; most people bring less kindness to themselves than others."

  • "But to help you survive, your brain keeps trying to stop the river, struggling to hold dynamic systems in place, to find fixed patterns in this variable world, and to construct permanent plans for changing conditions."

  • "If getting upset about something unpleasant is like being bitten by a snake, grasping for what's pleasant is like grabbing the snake's tail; sooner or later, it will still bite you."

  • "In my hear, there are two wolves: a wolf of love and a wolf of hate. It all depends on which one I feed each day."

  • "Our evolutionary strategies contain inherent contradictions: separate what is actually connected, trying to stabilize what keeps changing and holding on to fleeting pleasures and escape inevitable pains."

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LEONARDO DA VINCI

Walter Isaacson

Average

Summary

  • Walter Isaacson has written biographies of the likes of Steve Jobs (approved by the man himself), Einstein, Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin. This book contains pretty much everything you ever wanted to know about Da Vinci. A compilation of facts and research, not discovery.

Memorable Parts

  • "Who on earth would decide, one day, for no apparent reason, that he wanted to know what the tongue of a woodpecker looks like?"

  • "Notoriously, he left many of his paintings unfinished, most notable the Adoration of the Magi, Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, and the Battle of Anghiari. As a result, there exist now at most fifteen paintings fully or mainly attributed to him."

  • "But Leonardo's hatching was distinctive because his lines started on the lower right and moved upward to the left, like this: \\."

  • "Leonardo's Vitruvian Man embodies a moment when art and science combine to allow mortal minds to probe timeless questions about who we are and how we fit into the grand order of the universe."

  • "When a man sits down, the distance from his seat to the top part of his head will be half of his height plus the thickness and length of his testicles."

  • "For three months during the winter of 1502-1503, three of the most fascinating figures of the Renaissance - Borgia, Machiavelli and Da Vinci, were holed up in a tiny fortified walled town that was approximately five blocks wide and eight blocks long."

  • "If you stare directly at the mouth, your retina catches these tiny details and delineations, making her appear not to be smiling. These shadows and soft sfumato at the edge of her mouth make her lips seem to turn upward into a subtle smile. The result is a smile that flickers brighter the less you search for it."

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CAROL S. DWECK

MINDSET: THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY OF SUCCESS. HOW WE CAN LEARN TO FUFILL OUR POTENTIAL

Highly Recommended

Summary

  • This is the book I have seen most often on people's top ten list for psychology and motivation books. Make sure you get an updated edition because most examples from the original book are too old or irrelevant (i.e. Jack Welch and GE).

Memorable Parts

  • "In one world- the world of fixed traits - success is about proving you're smart or talented. Validating yourself. In the world of growth mindset - it's about stretching yourself to learn something new."

  • "Darwin Smith, looking back on his extraordinary performance at Kimberly-Clark, declared, 'I never stopped trying to be qualified for the job.'"

  • "The scariest thought, which I rarely entertained, was the possibility of being ordinary. This kind of thinking led me to need constant validation."

  • "John Wooden, the legendary basketball coach, says you aren't a failure until you start to blame."

  • "One problem is that people with the fixed mindset expect everything good to happen automatically. They believe that if your compatible in a relationship, everything should come naturally. Those with growth mindset believe that a good, lasting relationship comes from effort and from working through inevitable differences."

  • "But just as there are no great achievements without setbacks, there are no great relationships without conflict and problems along the way." 

  • "Relationship expert Daniel Wile says that choosing a partner is choosing a set of problems. There are no problem-free candidates. The trick is to acknowledge each other's limitations and build from there."

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