Essays

  Editorial Note: The majority of this post is copied and pasted directly from The Origin of Wealth. It got cumbersome and clunky to delineate exactly what was quoted and where I was making edits to clarify or explain points quotes without enough context. So, for attribution purposes, just assume everything intelligent and helpful is from the book and all errors and omissions are … [Read more...]

Buy The Innovator's Dilemma on Amazon. The Innovator's Dilemma is a book about how innovation happens (or, more often, doesn’t happen). There are many such books and most of them are bad. This one is interesting because of Christensen's detailed research on various technologies (primarily computing) and because of a counter-narrative conclusion: successful companies are disrupted not … [Read more...]

Key Concepts We're poorly adapted for the modern world and because of the overwhelming amount of stimuli and decisions that we face on a daily basis are forced to make decisions based on incomplete information. While the mechanism we've evolved for doing that are usually effective, they can be manipulated. The Six Principle Mechanisms of Influence: Reciprocity - We feel compelled to return … [Read more...]

What is Mimetic Theory? A Short Summary Mimetic theory is a concept developed and advocated for by René Girard, 20th-century French anthropologist. Mimetic theory's key insight is that human desire is not an autonomous process, but a collective one. Said most simply: we want things because other people want them. As more and more people want something and that object remains scarce, this … [Read more...]

Books in general are a vastly undervalued asset, as far as cost-to-utility are concerned. With a good book you can learn new skills, be entertained for hours, or even shift your perspective of the world. The best biographies seem to be the greatest value of all, as they condense the learnings of an entire human life into readable form. Biographies and autobiographies are also often written about … [Read more...]

“Nothing happens until you decide.” ― William Hutchison Murray The importance of a motivating force can't be understated. How can we explain something as pivotal as the force of motivation? Though motivation sometimes seems like fodder for bargain-bin self help or pop psychology titles, it is a deeper and multifaceted concept when we stop to think about it. The best motivational books seem to tap … [Read more...]

“History may not repeat, but it certainly rhymes.” — Attributed to Mark Twain “History is merely all the data we have so far.” — Paul Graham There is no better way to understand our present than by understanding our past. History is the light which shines on the present day, revealing the origin and ethos of the forces that shape the world around us. While reading the newspaper or a magazine often … [Read more...]

 Impro: Improvisation and Theatre Summary Ostensibly a book about how to teach Improvisational theatre, Impro is a fascinating and insightful look at human psychology. Starting with an amazing analaysis of how all human interaction boils down to status games and continuing through mask work, I found this book incredibly helpful for thinking about how to be "contrarian but correct" Buy a … [Read more...]

The Bitcoin Standard Summary/Review One of the interesting side effects of the rise of Bitcoin is that suddenly a lot of people are interested in Austrian economics. In The Bitcoin Standard, Ammous offers a take on why Bitcoin is the best version of what Austrians call "sound money" and why he believes that makes it the only cryptocurrency worth paying attention to. Beginning with a history … [Read more...]

The Black Swan Synopsis Nassim Taleb looks at the impact and human psychology of extreme events. Broadly, it shows that humans tend to create environments where extreme events are more likely and then underestimate their probability. This results in everything from World Wars to major market meltdowns. It is impossible to avoid black swans, but it is possible to become robust to negative … [Read more...]

The Essays of Warren Buffett Summary Every year for nearly the last half century, Warren Buffet has written an annual letter to his shareholders sharing his views and thinking on markets and investing. This book is a curated collection of the best parts of those letters. It acts as a wonderfully distilled version of his investment philosophy. Buy the book on Amazon. Quotes The CEOs at … [Read more...]

Market Mind Games Summary This is a book about the mindset of trading. Conveniently, the author offers her own summary which I'll paraphrase with some adaptations Create physical energy - Don't trade when you are tired, hungry, etc. Read other people - Think about the emotional state of the market. Is it greedy or fearful? Get the risk management edge through knowing yourself and how … [Read more...]

The 80/20 Investor Investing In An Uncertain and Complex World Summary The 80/20 Investor Investing In An Uncertain and Complex World is a helpful book on investing for small business owners. This book is for all people who are unsatisfied with their own work intensive and at times very complex investment strategies. It’s for individual investors and entrepreneurs who have day jobs and … [Read more...]

The Most Important Thing Illuminated Summary Howard Marks is one of the most well-respected living value investors. Since 1990, he has been writing a public memo every few months that is widely read by many investors. The Most Important Thing is a "best of" his letters with some additional color added. I found it imminently quotable and insightful. I would categorize Marks as a defensive value … [Read more...]

The Misbehavior of Markets Summary Mandelbrot was one of the founding thinkers of what has alternately been called Chaos and complexity science. The Misbehavior of Markets is his application of those principle to financial markets, and, in my opinion one of the best finance books ever written. At the core of much financial theory is a reliance on Newtonian physics. This sounds sort of weird, … [Read more...]

Debt by David Graeber Summary Everyone that's taken an economics class has heard the story about how money was created: people used to barter with each other but it got really inefficient because what if I wanted to trade my shoes for bread, but the baker didn't need any new shoes so money was created to form a medium of exchange. Graeber, an anthropologist, provides convincing evidence that … [Read more...]

Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit Derek Parfit was a British philosopher who specialised in personal identity, rationality, and ethics. He is widely considered one of the most important and influential moral philosophers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. This book is his most famous work. The first half of the book argues against self-interest theory, the idea that each person … [Read more...]

The Denial of Death Summary The winner of the 1974 Pulitzer Prize and the culmination of a career, The Denial of Death is a brilliant work. Becker argues, convincingly, that evolution has brought man to a point where he is trapped between his "creatureliness" and "symbolic self." Consciousness has made man aware of his own powers, but also of his miserable creatureliness and his destiny to … [Read more...]

Summary The Organization Man by William Whyte was published in 1956 and is considered among the most influential management books ever written. Whyte, a reporter at Fortune, did extensive interviews with CEOs and Executives at major American corporations like GE and Ford asking what they had seen change over the course of their careers Whyte argues that America has been overtaken by … [Read more...]

  Buy the Book on Amazon Read: July 2012 Rating: 4/5 (Good)   Summary Derek Sivers has long been one of my business philosophy inspirations and his blog, Sivers.org is one of the few I've been a subscriber to for years. In Anything You  Want, he distills his business philosophies of customer first and business as art down into bite sized chunks that I frequently … [Read more...]

  Buy the Book on Amazon Read: July 2012 Rating: 3/5 (Good)   Summary Hartford chronicles, and does a good job of explaining in an accessible way, one of the meta trends facing our generation. Namely that "success" is increasingly based on our ability to operate effectively in a complex ecosystem where inputs are not clearly connected with outputs. Takeaways Success … [Read more...]

I picked up this book on a friend's recommendation after checking out the blog, Plaformed Thinking. You can Get the Book Here (click on the Hello Bar at the top and opt-in). More of an ebook/PDF than book book FYI. Read: November 28, 2014 Rating:  3/5 (Good) Summary In the future, all business will be tech businesses. Platform thinking is about redefining the rules and playing a … [Read more...]