The Bed of Procrustes – Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms – by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Date read: 8/18/17. Recommendation: 9/10.

Great introduction to Taleb's take on uncertainty, which he discusses in detail in his other books that make up the Incerto series: Antifragile, Fooled by Randomness, and The Black Swan. This book offers a succinct look into how we deal with what we don't know. Taleb examines our tendency to package and reduce ideas into neat narratives that fit within the constraints of our limited knowledge.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Every aphorism here is a about a Procrustean bed of sorts–we humans, facing limits of knowledge, and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp commoditized ideas, reductive categories, specific vocabularies, and prepackaged narratives.

These aphorisms are standalone compressed thoughts revolving around my main idea of how we deal, and should deal, with what we don't know.

The person you are most afraid to contradict is yourself.

An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.

To bankrupt a fool, give him information.

An erudite is someone who displays less than he knows; a journalist or consultant, the opposite.

Your brain is most intelligent when you don't instruct it on what to do–something people who take showers discover on occasion.

In nature we never repeat the same motion; in captivity (office, gym, commute, sports), life is just repetitive-stress injury. No randomness.

If you know, in the morning, what your day looks like with any precision, you are a little bit dead–the more precision, the more dead you are.

When we want to do something while unconsciously certain to fail, we seek advice so we can blame someone else for the failure.

The most painful moments are not those we spend with uninteresting people; rather, they are those spent with uninteresting people trying hard to be interesting.

The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind's flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality–without exploiting them for fun and profit.

You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else's narrative.

To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week's newspapers.

The opposite of success isn't failure; it is name-dropping.

Modernity needs to understand that being rich and becoming rich are not mathematically, personally, socially, and ethically the same thing.

The fastest way to become rich is to socialize with the poor; the fastest way to become poor is to socialize with the rich.

You will be civilized on the day you can spend a long period doing nothing, learning nothing, and improving nothing, without feeling the slightest amount of guilt.

Someone who says "I am busy" is either declaring incompetence (and lack of control of his life) or trying to get rid of you.

To see if you like where you are, without the chains of dependence, check if you are as happy returning as you were leaving.

Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur.

People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels–people you don't want to resemble when you grow up.

People usually apologize so they can do it again.

It is those who use others who are the most upset when someone uses them.

The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.

My only measure of success is how much time you have to kill.

With terminal disease, nature lets you die with abbreviated suffering; medicine lets you suffer with prolonged dying.

Only in recent history has "working hard" signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse, and, mostly, sprezzatura.

We are hunters; we are only truly alive in those moments when we improvise; no schedule, just small surprises and stimuli from the environment.

You are alive in inverse proportion to the density of cliches in your writing.

We unwittingly amplify commonalities with friends, dissimilarities with strangers, and contrasts with enemies.

True humility is when you can surprise yourself more than others; the rest is either shyness or good marketing.

For the robust, an error is information; for the fragile an error is an error.

Games were created to give nonheroes the illusion of winning. In real life, you don't know who really won or lost (except too late), but you can tell who is heroic and who is not.

Knowledge is subtractive, not additive–what we subtract (reduction by what does not work, what not to do), not what we add (what to do).

The best way to spot a charlatan: someone (like a consultant or a stock broker) who tells you what to do instead of what not to do.

They think that intelligence is about noticing things that are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns).

The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist.

The only definition of an alpha male: if you try to be an alpha male, you will never be one.

At any stage, humans can thirst for money, knowledge, or love; sometimes for two, never for three.

Love without sacrifice is like theft.

Our overreactive brains are more likely to impose the wrong, simplistic narrative than no narrative at all.

The mind can be a wonderful tool for self-delusion–it was not designed to deal with complexity and nonlinear uncertainties.

Counter to common discourse, more information means more delusions: our detection of false patterns is growing faster and faster as a side effect of modernity and the information age.

Thus my classical values make me advocate the triplet of erudition, elegance, and courage; against modernity's phoniness, nerdiness, and philistinism.

On Writing Well – William Zinsser

On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction – by William Zinsser
Date read: 8/14/17. Recommendation: 8/10.

An essential for nonfiction writers. This is the only book I keep within reach as I'm writing. Zinsser advocates a lean, direct writing style. He outlines strategies for crafting a more effective story that resonates with readers. This includes how to cut down first drafts, rewrite, organize the flow of an article, develop your own voice, address your audience, handle humor, and avoid the danger of clichés. There's also a practical style guide for reference that addresses everything from the use of qualifiers (rather, quite, very) to specific punctuation marks (dash, colon, exclamation point). Every writer will be better for picking this up. 

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews. 

My Notes:

Good writing has an aliveness that keeps the reader reading from one paragraph to the next, and it's not a question of gimmicks to "personalize" the author. It's a question of using the English language in a way that will achieve the greatest clarity and strength.

Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one cannot exist without the other.

Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it's because it is hard.

Clutter is the laborious phrase that has pushed out the short word that means the same thing.

Beware, then, of the long word that's no better than the short word: "assistance" (help), "numerous" (many), "facilitate" (ease), "individual" (man or woman), "remainder" (rest), "initial" (first), etc.

Don't inflate what needs no inflating: "with the possible exception of" (except), "due to the fact that" (because), "he totally lacked the ability to" (he couldn't).

Eliminate adverbs that carry same meaning as the verb: "smile happily" or "tall skyscraper."

Most first drafts can be cut by 50 percent without losing any information or losing the author's voice.

Can any thought be expressed with more economy? Is anything pompous or pretentious or faddish? Are you hanging on to something useless just because you think it's beautiful?

Few people realize how badly they write. Nobody has shown them how much excess or murkiness has crept into their style and how it obstructs what they are trying to say.

Readers want the person who is talking to them to sound genuine. Therefore a fundamental rule is: be yourself.

Writing is an intimate transaction between two people...Therefore I urge people to write in the first person: to use "I" and "me" and "we" and "us."

Sell yourself, and your subject will exert its own appeal. Believe in your own identity and your own opinions. Writing is an act of ego, and you might as well admit it. Use its energy to keep yourself going.

"Who am I writing for?" You are writing for yourself. Don't try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience–every reader is a different person.

You are writing primarily to please yourself, and if you go about it with enjoyment you will also entertain the readers who are worth writing for. If you lose the dullards back in the dust, you don't want them anyway.

Craft vs. attitude. Craft is a question of mastering a precise skill. The second is a question of how you use that skill to express your personality...First, work hard to master the tools. Simplify, prune and strive for order. Think of this as a mechanical act, and soon your sentences will become cleaner. Think of attitude as a creative act: the expressing of who you are. Relax and say what you want to say.

Never say anything in writing that you wouldn't comfortably say in conversation. If you're not a person who says "indeed" or "moreover" or who calls someone an individual, please don't write it.

Writing is learned by imitation.

See if you can gain variety by reversing the order of a sentence, or by substituting a word that has freshness or oddity, or by altering the length of your sentences.

An occasional short sentence can carry a tremendous punch. It stays with the readers ear.

Aim for beautiful precision. Incorrect usage will lose you the readers you would most like to win.

That's where all careful writers ought to be–looking at every new piece of floatsam that washes up and asking "Do we need it?"

You learn to write by writing.

Unity is the anchor of good writing.
- Unity of pronoun: Are you going to write in the first person, as a participant, or in the third person or as an observer?
- Unity of tense
- Unity of mood

Consider how much you want to cover and what one point you want to make. There is no last word.

Therefore think small. Decide what corner of your subject you're going to bit off, and be content to cover it well and stop.

So decide what single point you want to leave in the reader's mind. It will not only give you a better idea of what route you should follow and what destination you hope to reach; it will affect your decision about tone and attitude.

Take special care with the last sentence of each paragraph–it's the crucial springboard to the next paragraph. Try to give that sentence an extra twist of humor or surprise...Make the reader smile and you've got him for at least one more paragraph.

Narrative is the oldest and most compelling method of holding someone's attention; everybody wants to be told a story. Always look for ways to convey your information in narrative form.

A good last sentence–or last paragraph–is a joy in itself. It gives the reader a lift, and it lingers when the article is over.

The perfect ending should take your readers slightly by surprise and yet seem exactly right.

Often it takes just a few sentences to wrap things up. Ideally they should encapsulate the idea of the piece and conclude with a sentence that jolts us with its fitness or unexpectedness.

Something I often do in my writing is to bring the story full circle–to strike at the end of an echo of a note that was sounded at the beginning. It gratifies my sense of symmetry, and it also pleases the reader, completing with its resonance the journey we set out of together.

Verbs:
-Verbs are the most important of all your tools. They push the sentence forward and give it momentum. Active verbs push hard; passive verbs tug fitfully.
-Use precise verbs (don't say he stepped down, say he was fired/retired/etc.)

Adverbs:
-Most adverbs are unnecessary.
-Don't tell us that the radio blared loudly, that someone clenched their teeth tightly.
-Again and again in careless writing, strong verbs are weakened by redundant adverbs. So are adjectives and other parts of the speech.

Adjectives:
-Most adjectives are also unnecessary.
-Like adverbs, they are sprinkled into sentences by writers who don't stop to think that the concept is already in the noun.
-The adjectives that exists solely as decoration is a self-indulgence for the writer and a burden for the reader.
-Make your adjectives do work that needs to be done...They will have their proper power because you have learned to use adjectives sparsely.

Little Qualifiers:
-Prune out the small words that qualify how you feel and how you think and what you saw: "a bit," "a little," "sort of," "kind of," "rather," "quite," "very," "too," "pretty much," "in a sense..." They dilute your style and your persuasiveness.
-Don't say you were a bit confused...Be confused.
-Good writing is lean and confident.
-"Very" is a useful word to achieve emphasis, but far more often it's clutter. There's no need to call someone very methodical. Either he is methodical or he isn't.
-Every little qualifier whittles away some fraction of the reader's trust. Readers want a writer who believes in himself and in what he is saying. Don't diminish that belief. Don't be kind of bold. Be bold.

The Exclamation Point:
-Resist using it to notify the reader that you are making a joke or being ironic. "It never occurred to me that the water pistol might be loaded!" Readers are annoyed by your reminder that this was a comical moment. They are also robbed of the pleasure of finding it funny on their own. Humor is best achieved by understatement.

The Dash:
-The dash is used in two ways:
-One is to amplify or justify in the second part of the sentence a thought you stated in the first part. "We decided to keep going–it was only 100 miles more and we could get there in time for dinner."
-The other use involved two dashes, which set apart a parenthetical thought within a longer sentence. "She told me to get in the car–she had been after me all summer to have a haircut–and we drove silently into town."

Mood Changers:
-Learn to alert the reader as soon as possible to any change in mood from the previous sentence.
-Many of us were taught that no sentence should begin with "but." If that's what you learned, unlearn it–there's no stronger word at the start. It announces total contrast with what has gone before, and the reader is thereby primed for the change.

Contractions:
-Your style will be warmer and truer to your personality if you use contractions like "I'll" and "won't" and "can't."
-Only suggest avoiding one form–"I'd," "he'd," "we'd," etc.–because "I'd" can mean both "I had" and "I would" and readers can get well into a sentence before learning which meaning it is.

That and Which:
-Always use "that" unless it makes your meaning ambiguous.
-In most situations, "that" is what you would naturally say and therefore what you should write.
-If your sentence needs a comma to achieve its precise meaning, it probably needs "which."
-A) "Take the shoes that are in the closet." This means take the shoes that are in the closet, not under the bed.
-B) "Take the shoes, which are in the closet." Only one pair of shoes is under discussion; the "which" usage tells you where they are.

Creeping Nounism:
-Don't string together two or three nouns where one noun–or better yet, one verb–will do.
-Nobody goes broke now, we have "money problem areas." It no longer rains, "we have precipitation activity.

Paragraphs:
-Keep your paragraphs short. Writing is visual–it catches the eye before it has a chance to catch the brain.
-Short paragraphs put air around what you write and make it look inviting, whereas a long chunk of type can discourage a reader from even starting to read.

Rewriting:
-Rewriting is the essence of writing well: it's where the game is either won or lost.
-Most rewriting consists of reshaping and tightening and refining the raw material you wrote on your first try.

Trust Your Material:
-The reader plays a major role in the act of writing and must be given room to play it. Don't annoy readers by over-explaining–by telling them something they already know or can figure out.
-Try not to use words like "surprisingly," "predictably," and "of course," which put a value on a fact before the reader encounters the fact. Trust your material.

Writing About Yourself:
When students say they have to write what the teacher wants, what they often mean is that they don't have anything to say–so meager is their after-school existence, bounded largely by television and the mall, two artificial versions of reality. Still, at any age, the physical act of writing is a powerful search mechanism.

Memoir isn't the summary of a life; it's a window into a life, very much like a photograph in its selective composition.

Thoreau wrote seven different drafts of Walden in eight years; no American memoir was more painstakingly pieced together. To write a good memoir you must become the editor of your own life, imposing on an untidy sprawl of half-remembered events a narrative shape and an organizing idea.

Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.

Science and Technology:
Imagine science writing as an upside-down pyramid. Start at the bottom with the one fact a reader must know before he can learn any more.

Business Writing:
Countless careers rise or fall on the ability or the inability of employees to state a set of facts, summarize a meeting or present an idea coherently.

Be natural. How we write and how we talk is how we define ourselves.

Humor:
Humor is the secret weapon of the nonfiction writer. It's secret because so few writers realize that humor is often their best tool.

Trust the sophistication of readers who do know what you're doing, and don't worry about the rest.

You will touch more chords by finding what's funny in what you know to be true.

Don't strain for laughs; humor is built on surprise, and you can surprise the reader only so often.

The Sound of Your Voice:
Don't alter your voice to fit your subject. Develop one voice that readers will recognize when they hear it on the page, a voice that's enjoyable not only in its musical line but in its avoidance of sounds that would cheapen its tone: breeziness and condescension and cliches.

Much can be gained by knowing what to omit. Cliches, for instance, are the kiss of death. Writers who use them lack an instinct for what gives language its freshness.

Cliches are one of the things you should keep listening for when you rewrite and read your successive drafts aloud....Make an effort to replace them with fresh phrases of your own. Cliches are the enemy of taste.

Freshness is crucial. Taste chooses words that have surprise, strength and precision.

Never hesitate to imitate another writer. Imitation is part of the creative process for anyone learning an art or a craft.

Enjoyment, Fear and Confidence:
Writing is such lonely work that I try to keep myself cheered up. If something strikes me as funny in the act of writing, I throw it in just to amuse myself. If I think it's funny I assume a few other people will find it funny, and that seems to me to be a good day's work.

"The reader has to feel that the writer is feeling good...Even if he isn't." -S.J. Perelman

Writers have to jump-start themselves at the moment of performance.

Writers who write interestingly tend to be men and women who keep themselves interested. That's almost the whole point of becoming a writer. I've used writing to give myself an interesting life and a continuing education.

Any time you feel under-qualified and you're entering new territory, remember that sincerity and interest is what matters most. Your best credential is yourself.

Any time you can tell a story in the form of a quest or a pilgrimage you'll be ahead of the game.

A Writer's Decision:
Learning how to organize a long article is just as important as learning how to write a clear and pleasing sentence...Writing is linear and sequential, that logic is the glue that holds it together, that tension must be maintained from one sentence to the next, and from one paragraph to the next and from one section to the next, and that narrative is what should pull your readers along.

Much of the trouble that writers get into comes from trying to make one sentence do too much work. Never be afraid to break a long sentence into two shorts ones, or even three.

Be yourself and your readers will follow you anywhere. Try to commit an act of writing and your readers will jump overboard to get away. Your product is you.

Writing well means believing in your writing and believing in yourself, taking risks, daring to be different, pushing yourself to excel. You will write only as well as you make yourself write.

Perennial Seller – Ryan Holiday

Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts – by Ryan Holiday.
Date read: 8/6/17. Recommendation: 9/10.

You can't go wrong with any of Holiday's work. His latest is a great read for anyone who considers themselves a creative, and particularly insightful for writers and entrepreneurs. If you're thinking of writing a book or bringing an idea to life, start here and save yourself a few headaches. He outlines best practices for the creative process, along with the importance of positioning, marketing, and building a platform. The most important advice can be summed up as playing the long game. If you want to create something of lasting value, there are no shortcuts or paths to immediate gratification. Put in the work.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

People claim to want to do something that matters, yet they measure themselves against things that don't, and they track their progress not in years but in microseconds. They want to make something timeless, but they focus instead on immediate payoffs and instant gratification.

Part I: The Creative Process
The better your product is, the better your marketing will be.

"People who are thinking about things other than making the best product never make the best product." -Phil Libin [Evernote]

"The best way to increase a startup's growth rate is to make the product so good people recommend it to their friends." -Paul Graham [Y Combinator]

"Lots of people want to be the noun without doing the verb." -Austin Kleon

The hard part is not the dream or the ideas; it's the doing. It is the driving need that determines one's chances. You must have a reason–a purpose–for why you want the outcome and why you're willing to do the work to get it.

To create something is a daring, beautiful act. The architect, the author, the artist–are all building something where nothing was before.

Creating something that lives requires not just a reverence for the craft and a respect for the medium, but a real patience for the process itself.

The risk for any creator is over-accounting for what's happening right in front of them...must think bigger and more long term than that.

"If you listen to the greatest music ever made, that would be a better way to find your own voice to matter today than listening to what's on the radio and thinking: 'I want to compete with this.'" -Rick Rubin

How within seemingly ordinary people there can exist depths of wisdom, beauty, and insight–and that if they put in the work to plumb those depths, they might reap incredible rewards.

To wrestle with all these conflicting, difficult ideas that go into creating, you often need real silence. Meditative isolation, where you sit and wrestle with your project.

The brilliant military strategist John Boyd utilized what he called "drawdown periods." After a one a.m. breakthrough, he'd spend weeks just looking at an idea, testing whether others had already come up with it, identifying possible problems with it. Only after this period ended would he begin the real work on the project.

For one of my books I gave myself a January 1 start date for the writing. Two months before, in November, I entered by drawdown period. No more reading or rereading. Just thinking. Long walks. Resting. Preparing.

A book should be an article before it's a book, and a dinner conversation before it's an article.

Successfully finding and "scratching" a niche requires asking and answering a question that very few creators seem to do: Who is this thing for? Instead many creators want to be for everyone...and as a result end up being for no one.

Picking a lane isn't limiting. It's the first act of empowerment.

"Having no specific user in mind" one of the eighteen major mistakes that kills startups. -Paul Graham

Stephen King believes that "every novelist has a single ideal reader" so that at various points in the process he can ask, "What will ____ think about this?"

Just as we should ask "Who is this for?" we must also ask "What does this do?" A critical test of any product: Does it have purpose? Does it add value to the world? How will it improve the lives of the people who buy it?

Yet far too many people set out to produce something that, if they were really honest with themselves, is only marginally better or different from what already exists. Instead of being bold, brash, or brave, they are derivative, complementary, imitative, banal, or trivial. The problem with this is not only that it's boring, but that it subjects them to endless amounts of competition.

"People want things that are really passionate. Often the best version is not for everybody. The best art divides the audience. If you put out a record and half the people who hear it absolutely love it and half the people who hear it absolutely hate it, you've done well. Because it is pushing that boundary." -Rick Rubin
*Think of the technology that is subject to protests and legislation (Airbnb, Uber)

"The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death." -Steven Pressfield

Part II: Positioning
So much in the history of art and culture hinges on moments like this. Faced with soul-crushing feedback or rejection, how does the creator respond? With petulance and anger? With open-mindedness and interest? With obsequiousness and desperation? Or careful consideration that parses the signal from noise?

As infuriating as it may be, we must be rational and fair about our own work. This is difficult considering our conflict of interest–which is to say, the ultimate conflict of interest. We made it.

"When people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong." -Neil Gaiman

Do I feel like overriding this feedback because it's wrong, I ask myself, or is it because I don't want to hit pause and do more work?

The fact is, most people are so terrified of what an outside voice might say that they forgo opportunities to improve what they are making. Remember: Getting feedback requires humility. It demands that you subordinate your thoughts about your project and your love for it and entertain the idea that someone else might have a valuable thing or two to add.

You must be able to explicitly say who you are building your thing for. You must know what you are aiming for–you'll miss otherwise. You need to know this so you can make the decisions that go into properly positioning the project for them...Marketing then becomes a matter of finding where those people are and figuring out the best way to reach them.

For creators, it's typically easier to reach the smaller, better-defined group. If you reach the smaller group and wow them, there will be many opportunities to spread outward and upward.

Who is buying the first one thousand copies of this thing? Who is coming in on the first day? Who is going to claim our first block of available dates? Who is buying our first production run?

The same article with a slightly different headline can have a tenfold spread in readership. One stands out; the other doesn't.

Creators will often spend years making something but then rush through their descriptive copy in an hour.

A great package on a great product is what creates an explosive reaction.

Imagine if your product were for one group–say, successful adults with disposable income–but your branding violated what they expected in terms of style and appearance? Wealthfront changed its name from KaChing.

My "book about Stoic philosophy," for example, had to become "a book that uses the ancient formula of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius to teach people how to not only overcome obstacles but thrive because of them."

There are many different missions. Whatever yours is, it must be defined and articulated. Once that has occurred, there is one last thing you must do. You must deliberately forsake all other missions.

If you've committed to doing something incredibly difficult that countless others have failed at before, you probably also shouldn't be juggling five other projects at the same time. You'll need to put 100 percent of your resources toward this one.

Nothing has sunk more creators and caused more unhappiness than this: our inherently human tendency to pursue a strategy aimed at accomplishing one goal while simultaneously expecting to achieve other goals entirely unrelated.

Only crazy people would compare themselves to people on totally different tracks.

Jeff Goins makes the distinction between starving artists and thriving artists. One adopts all the tropes and cliches of the bohemians and supposed purity. The other is resilient, ambitious, open-minded and audience-driven. Who do you want to be? Which will propel your work the furthest?

Part III: Marketing
"Customers will not come just because you build it. You have to make that happen and it's harder than it looks." -Peter Thiel

Don't delegate the marketing...You can cut back on a lot of things as a leader, but the last thing you can ever skimp on is marketing. Your product needs a champion.

Not everyone has the dedication to make it and to make it work. Marketing is an opportunity for you to distinguish yourself, to beat out the other talented folks whose entitlement or laziness holds them back.

I gave away more than a thousand copies of one of my books to marketing students...In the first month, sold 21 hard copies, 37 ebook. Took 5 months before the book sold 500 copies in a single month. Within 5 years, book had sold roughly 60,000 copies.

Think about a favorite album, restaurant, or pair of shoes. How did you first get turned on to these? How do you find most of the things you like or consume on a regular basis? How did you find your favorite book of all time?

"The problem for most artists isn't piracy, it's obscurity." In other words, we spend a lot of time insisting that nobody steal our work or get it for free...but we forget that being unknown is a far worse fate for an artist than being underpaid.

"Although it's hard to turn fame into money in the arts, it's impossible to turn obscurity into money in the arts." -Cory Doctorow

70% of book sales come from Amazon.

What we've created is a central fact of existence to us–after all, we made it. But to most other people, it's optional. They can easily do without our work. A savvy creator embraces this reality and makes taking a chance on it as easy and frictionless as possible for the audience.

I've watched an Instagram post from an influential person take a book to the top of Amazon; meanwhile, a New York Times profile about the same project had next to no impact. When a real person, a real human being whom others trust, says. "This is good," it has an effect that no brand, no ad, no faceless institution can match.

If you want to reach influential people, make something that will make them look good....Make your audiences look good.

Identifying influencers...if you're living and breathing what you do the answer should come naturally...who are the people who influence you too? Don't have to be famous, but they should matter a great deal to the audience you are trying to appeal to.

Best way to ask someone to endorse or share your work...The best way is not to ask.

Think relationship first, transaction second.

I've always found that a critical part of attracting influencers is to look for the people who aren't besieged by requests. Authors are inundated with requests for blurbs from other authors; meanwhile, generals, academics, and CEOs are asked much more rarely...Try to find the people least likely to get a request from someone like you, and approach them first, instead of going where everyone else is going. Be bold and brash and counterintuitive not only in how you create your work but also in who you use to market it.

In my experience, almost everyone–from brands to artists–overestimates the value of traditional PR. Much of the press that people chase is ephemeral and ineffectual, yet expensive and time-consuming to get.

Media outlets have trouble getting people to pay for their own product–what makes you so sure they're going to be able to convince their readers and viewers to buy yours?

Only areas where traditional press is underrated? Credibility and status.

Newsjacking–James Altucher book launch at same time Bitcoin was blowing up. Announced he was accepting Bitcoin and got tons of bonus media attention.

Advertising can add fuel to a fire, but rarely is it sufficient to start one.

We are better off taking the money set aside for advertising and putting it into every other marketing bucket instead.

Part IV: Platform
Kevin Kelly: "1000 true fans"

Building an email list is a move toward self-sufficiency for any creator. By forming a direct and regular line of communication with your supporters, you avoid ever being disintermediated.

I wasn't important or interesting enough for people to just sign up based on my name alone. So I came up with an idea: What if I gave monthly book recommendations? (The thinking being that one day I might recommend one of my own books to this list). Once a month for four years I sent this list out, and as a result it grew from ninety original sign-ups to the five thousand people to whom I announced my first book. By the time my next book came out two years later, the list was at more than thirty thousand, and today it's at eighty thousand.

Building your list is not someone else's job. People will not beg you for the opportunity to join it. You can't buy subscribers. No list is built entirely through advertising. It will take work–sometimes years of work–for it to pay off. But it will be worth it.

"I urge authors to consider how long it took them to write their books and see them published and to devote at least that much time to pushing them." -Barbara Hendricks

It is far better to measure your campaign over a period of years, not months.

Most think they're too good for it, or they are to sensitive to push hard enough..."Success almost always requires an unstoppable authors.." -Stephen Hanselman

As Goethe's maxim goes, "The greatest respect an author can have for his public is never to produce what is expected but what he himself considers right and useful for whatever stage of intellectual development has been reached by himself and others."

Most of the real money isn't in the royalties or the sales. For authors, the real money comes from speaking, teaching, or consulting.

"Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet." -Nassim Taleb

Bill Walsh (legendary 49ers coach) explained that his goal was to "establish a near-permanent 'base camp' near the summit, consistently close to the top, within striking distance." The actual probability of winning in a given year depended on a lot of external factors–injuries, schedule, drive, weather–just as it does for any mountain climber, for any author, for any filmmaker or entrepreneur or creative. We do know with certainty, however, that without the right preparation, there is zero chance of successfully making a run at the summit. Walsh made three such summits in eight years.

The Rational Optimist – Matt Ridley

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves – by Matt Ridley.
Date read: 7/29/17. Recommendation: 8/10.

I read this book to combat confirmation bias. I tend to romanticize the past and idealize the simple living we associate with the hunter-gatherer era. As such, I read a lot of books that fall in line with that interest. Ridley makes the argument that we're currently living in the best period of human history (which we are). He credits this to the free exchange of ideas and knowledge, which breeds even more innovation and knowledge. He details the driving factors of dynamic change, bottom-up innovation, and how the specialization of talents has led to mutual gain for everyone involved. It's a dense book but Ridley offers brilliant insight, which should give you a much needed boost of optimism for the future. 

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

This book is about the rapid, continuous and incessant change that human society experiences in a way that no other animal does.

It is not as if human nature changes...Yet to say that life is the same as it was 32,000 years ago would be absurd.

At some point, human intelligence became collective and cumulative in a way that happened to no other animal.

Exchange is to cultural evolution as sex is to biological evolution. By exchanging, human beings discovered 'the division of labour', the specialization of efforts and talents for mutual gain.

The rich have gotten richer, but the poor have done even better. The poor in the developing world grew their consumption twice as fast as the world as a whole between 1980 and 2000. The Chinese are ten times as rich.

The true measure of something's worth is the hours it takes to acquire it.

Healthcare and education are among the few things that cost more in terms of hours worked now than they did in the 1950s.

Study by Richard Easterlin in 1974, which found that although within a country rich people were generally happier than poor people, richer countries did not have happier citizens than poor countries. Trouble is, the 'Easterlin paradox' is wrong. New studies show that rich people are happier and rich countries have happier people and people get happier as they get richer. Easterlin study had samples too small to find significant differences.
*There are some exceptions. Americans current show no trend towards increasing happiness.

Besides, a million years of natural selection shaped human nature to be ambitious to rear successful children, not to settle for contentment: people are programmed to desire, not to appreciate.

Getting richer is not the only or even best way of getting happier. Social and political liberation is far more effective.

Self-sufficiency is therefore not the route to prosperity....If you wish to have even the most minimal improvement in your life – say metal tools, toothpaste or lighting – you are going to get some of your chores done by somebody else.

You may have no chefs, but you can decide on a whim to choose between scores of nearby bistros...Never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals.
You employ no tailor, buy you can browse the internet and instantly order from an almost infinite range of excellent, affordable clothes.
You have no carriage, but you can buy a ticket which will summon the services of a skilled pilot of a budget airline to fly you to one of hundreds of destinations.

This is the diagnostic feature of modern life, the very definition of a high standard of living: diverse consumption, simplified production.

The cumulative accretion of knowledge by specialists that allows us each to consume more and more different things by each producing fewer and fewer is, I submit, the central story of humanity.

Barter – the simultaneous exchange of different objects – was itself a human breakthrough, perhaps even the chief thing that led to the ecological dominance and burgeoning material prosperity of the species. Fundamentally, other animals do not barter.

*Primatologist Sarah Brosnan tried to teach two different groups of chimpanzees about barter and found it very problematic...They could not see the point of giving up food they liked for food they liked even more...True barter requires that you give up something you value in exchange for something else you value slightly more.

Why did human beings acquire a taste for barter as other animals did not? Perhaps it has something to do with cooking...swapping different kinds of food.

Without trade, innovation just does not happen. Exchange is to technology as sex is to evolution. It stimulates novelty.

Technological regress in Tasmania. Once connected to Australia, until about 10,000 years ago. Isolation led to losing technologies that their ancestors had once possessed....Isolation–self sufficiency–caused the shriveling of their technology.

Imagine if 4,000 people from your home town were plonked on an island and left in total isolation for ten millennia. How many skills and tools do you think they could preserve?

The success of human beings depends crucially, but precariously, on numbers and connections. A few hundred people cannot sustain a sophisticated technology: trade is a vital part of the story.

Human cultural progress is a collective enterprise and it needs a dense collective brain.

The notion of synergy, of both sides benefiting, just does not seem to come naturally to people. If sympathy is instinctive, synergy is not.

The notion that the market is a necessary evil, which allows people to be wealthy enough to offset its corrosive drawbacks, is wide off the mark...In places where traditional, honor-based feudal societies gave way to commercial, prudence-based economies, the effect is civilizing, not coarsening.

But the idea that the market destroys charity by teaching selfishness is plainly wide of the mark. When the market economy booms so does philanthropy.

Political decisions are by definition monopolistic, disenfranchising and despotically majoritarian; markets are good at supplying minority needs.

The 'long tail' of the distribution – the very many products that are each wanted by very few, rather than vice versa – can be serviced more and more easily.

The coincidence of wealth with toleration has led to the bizarre paradox of a conservative movement that embraces economic change but hates its social consequences and a liberal movement that loves the social consequences but hates the economic source from which they come. 'One side denounced capitalism but gobbled up its fruits; the other cursed the fruits while defending the system that bore them.'

As islands of top-down planning in a bottom-up sea, big companies have less and less of a future (the smaller the scale, the better planning works).

When human beings were all still hunter-gatherers, each needed about a thousand hectares of land to support him or her. Now – thanks to farming, genetics, oil, machinery and trade – each needs little more than a thousand square meters, a tenth of a hectare.

Organic farming is low-yield, whether you like it or not. The reason for this is simple chemistry.

The mechanization of agriculture has enabled, and been enabled by, a flood of people leaving the land to seek their fortune in the city, all free to make for each other things other than food.

Throughout history, empires start as trade areas before they become the playthings of military plunderers from within or without.

In these Bronze Age empires, commerce was the cause, not the symptom of prosperity.

A Bronze Age empire stagnated for much the same reason that a nationalized industry stagnates: monopoly rewards caution and discourages experiment, the income is gradually captured by the interests of the producers at the expense of the interests of the consumers, and so on. The list of innovations achieved by the pharaohs is as thin as as the list of innovations achieved by British Rail or the US Postal Service.

The message from history is so blatantly obvious – that free trade causes mutual prosperity while protectionism causes poverty. There is not a single example of a country opening its borders to trade and ending up poorer.

Cheap imports can destroy jobs at home – though in doing so they always create far more both at home and abroad, by freeing up consumers' cash to buy other goods and services. If Europeans find their shoes made cheaply in Vietnam, then they have more to spend on getting their hair done and there are more nice jobs for Europeans in hair salons and fewer dull ones in shoe factories.

Suppose you had said to my hypothetical family of 1800, eating their gristly stew in front of a log fire, that in two centuries their descendants would need to fetch no logs or water, and carry out not sewage, because water, gas and a magic form of invisible power called electricity would come into their home through pipes and wires.

The more knowledge you generate, the more you can generate. And the engine that is driving prosperity in the modern world is the accelerating generation of useful knowledge.

The dissemination of useful knowledge causes that useful knowledge to breed more useful knowledge.

Eamonn Butler, economist: "Whenever you see the word equilibrium in a textbook, blot it out." It is wrong because it assumes perfect competition, perfect knowledge and perfect rationality, none of which do or can exist.

The possibility of new knowledge makes the steady state impossible. Somewhere somebody will have a new idea and that idea will enable him to invent a new combination of atoms both to create and to exploit imperfections in the market.

There is no equilibrium in nature; there is only constant dynamism. As Heraclitus put it, 'Nothing endures but change.'

Innovation is like a bush fire that burns brightly for a short time, then dies down before flaring up somewhere else...No country remains for long the leader in knowledge creation...Just as it is true that the bush fire breaks out in different parts of the world at different times, so it leaps from technology to technology. Today, just as during the printing revolution of 500 years ago, communications is aflame with increasing returns, but transport is spluttering with diminishing returns.

In the early 1970s, when credit cards were new, politicians of all stripes denounced them as unsound, unsafe and predatory...This nicely captures the paradox of the modern world, that people embrace technological change and hate it at the same time.

The great innovators are still usually outsiders...the R&D budgets at large companies who were once dominant get captured by increasingly defensive and complacent bureaucrats who spend them on low-risk, dull projects and fail to notice gigantic new opportunities, which thereby turn into threats.

One solution is for companies to try to set their employees free to behave like entrepreneurs.

It is the ever-increasing exchange of ideas that causes the ever-increasing rate of innovation in the modern world. Not science, money, patents, government.

Equilibrium and stagnation are not only avoidable in a free-exchanging world; they are impossible.

So long as people who are spending money on trying to find new ideas can profit from them before they pass them on, then increasing returns are possible.

The wonderful thing about knowledge is that it is genuinely limitless. This is the biggest cause for all my optimism.

"I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage." -John Stuart Mill

The world will not continue as it is. That is the whole point of human progress, the whole message of cultural evolution, the whole import of dynamic change–the whole thrust of this book. The real danger comes from slowing down change.

The pessimists' mistake is extrapolationism: assuming the future is just a bigger version of the past.

Recurring theme throughout human history, skepticism of new technologies and doomsday predications. Every organization/government claims that we're "at a defining moment in history." Apprehension about railroads in 1830s, nuclear doomsday predictions in 1950s, dangers of advances in human genetics and reproductive medicine in 2000s.

The endless modern laments about how texting and emails are shortening the attention span go back to Plato, who deplored writing as a destroyer of memorizing.

Famine is largely history. Where it still occurs – Darfur, Zimbabwe – the fault lies with government policy, not population pressure.

It is not as if Africa needs to invent enterprise: the streets of Africa's cities are teeming with entrepreneurs, adept at doing deals, but they cannot grow their businesses because of blockages in the system. The slums of Nairobi and Lagos are terrible places, but the chief fault lies with governments, which place bureaucratic barriers in the way of entrepreneurs trying to build affordable homes for people...In Cairo it would take seventy-seven bureaucratic procedures involving thirty-one agencies and up to fourteen years to acquire and register a ploy of state-owned land on which to build a house. No wonder nearly five million Egyptians have decided to build illegal dwellings instead.

Whereas it takes a handful of steps to set up a company in America or Europe, in Tanzania it would take 379 days and cost $5,506.

What Tanzania needs to do, as Europe and America did hundreds of years ago, is not to enforce its unaffordable official legal system, but gradually to encourage this bottom-up informal law to broaden and standardize itself.

Using such technologies, Africa can follow the same route to prosperity that the rest of the world is following: to specialize and exchange. Once two individuals find ways to divide labor between them, both are bette roff. The future for Africa lies in trade.

I Will Teach You to Be Rich – Ramit Sethi

I Will Teach You to Be Rich – by Ramit Sethi
Date read: 7/22/17. Recommendation: 9/10.

The most accessible, practical book I've read on personal finance. Sethi dismisses trendy advice, such as cutting back on lattes, and instead emphasizes saving on the big purchases that really matter. And he's hilarious. This book is all about optimizing your strategy, prioritizing what matters most, and making money work for you (instead of obsessing over the minute details). This is a must read for anyone in their 20s or 30s, and should be a required reading for all who can still take advantage of the most valuable asset in investing: time.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

When it comes to weight loss, 99.99% of us need to know only two things: Eat less and exercise more. Only elite athletes need to do more. But instead of accepting these simple truths and acting on them, we discuss trans fats, diet pills, and Atkins versus South Beach. *Finance similar in debating minutiae and valuing anecdotal over research.

An abundance of information can lead to decision paralysis.

I also often hear the cry that "credit-card companies and banks are out to profit off us." Yes, they are. So stop complaining and learn how to game the companies instead of letting them game you.

The single most important factor to getting rich is getting started, not being the smartest person in the room.

Just as the diet industry has overwhelmed us with too many choices, personal finance is a confusing mess of overblown hype, myths, outright deception.

Frankly, your goal probably isn't to become a financial expert. It's to live your life and let money serve you. So instead of saying, "How much money do I need to make?" you'll say, "What do I want to do with my life–and how can I use money to do it?"

To be extraordinary, you don't have to be a genius, but you do need to take some different steps than your folks did (like starting to manage your money and investing early).

Spend extravagantly on the things you love, and cut costs mercilessly on the things you don't.

This book isn't about telling you to stop buying lattes. Instead, it's about being able to actually spend more on the things you love by not spending money on all the knucklehead things you don't care about.

Money is just a small part of being rich...If you don't consciously choose what rich means, it's easy to end up mindlessly trying to keep up with your friends.

Chapter 1: Optimize Your Credit Cards
Establishing good credit is the first step in building an infrastructure for getting rich. Our largest purchases are almost always made on credit, and people with good credit save tens of thousands of dollars on these purchase. Credit has a far greater impact on your finances than saving a few dollars a day on a cup of coffee.

It's fine to be frugal, but you should focus on spending time on the things that matter, the big wins.

If you miss even one payment on your credit card:
- Credit can drop more than 100 points
- APR can go up to 30 percent
- Charged a late fee
- Trigger rate increases on other cards

If you miss a credit card payment, you might as well just get a shovel and repeatedly beat yourself in the face.

To improve your credit utilization rate (makes up 30% of your credit score) you have two choices: Stop carry so much debt on your credit cards or increase your total available credit (if you're debt free).

Every year call your credit cards and ask what advantages you're eligible for. Often, they can waive fees, extend credit, and give you private promotions. "Hi there. I just checked my credit and noticed that I have a 750 credit score, which is pretty good. I've been a customer of yours for the last four years, so I'm wondering what special promotions and offers you have for me...I'm thinking of fee waivers and special offers that you use for customer retention."

Although closing an account doesn't technically harm your credit score, it means you then have less available credit...People with zero debt get a free pass. If you have no debt, close as many accounts as you want. It won't affect your credit utilization score.

If you're applying for a major loan (car, home, education) don't close any accounts within six months of filing the loan application. You want as much credit as possible when you apply.

Chapter 3: Get Ready to Invest
Over the twentieth century, the average annual stock-market return was 11 percent, minus 3 percent for inflation, giving us 8 percent.

Of employees age 25 and under:
- Less than one-third participate in a 401(k)
- Less than 4 percent max out their contributions
- Only 16 percent contribute enough to get the full company match (literally free money)

Financial institutions have noticed an interesting phenomenon: When people enter their forties, they suddenly realize that they should have been saving money all along. As a result, the number one financial concern Americans have is not having enough money for retirement.

By opening an investment account, you give yourself access to the biggest moneymaking vehicle in the history of the world: the stock market.

Ladder of Personal Finance:

• Rung 1: 401(k) match, contribute enough to get full match
• Rung 2: Pay off your credit card and any other debt.
• Rung 3: Open up a Roth IRA
• Rung 4: If you have money left over, go back to your 401(k) and contribute as much as possible to it.
• Rung 5: If you still have money left to invest, open a regular non-retirement account and put as much as possible there.

Benefits of 401(k):
Using pretax money means an instant 25 percent accelerator.

Chapter 4: Conscious Spending
Cheap vs. Frugal: Cheap people care about the cost of something. Frugal people care about the value of something.

Frugality, quite simply, is about choosing the things you love enough to spend extravagantly on and then cutting costs mercilessly on the things you don't love. The mind-set of frugal people is the key to being rich.

50% of more than one thousand millionaires surveyed have never paid more than $400 for a suit, $140 for a pair of shoes, and $235 for a wristwatch.

Instead of getting caught on a spending treadmill of new phones, new cars, new vacations, and new everything, they plan what's important to them and save on the rest.

A good rule of thumb is that fixed costs (rent, utilities, debt, etc.) should be 50-60% of your take-home pay.

A good rule of thumb is to invest 10 percent of your take-home pay (after taxes) for the long term.

Another solution is "The 60 Percent Solution" splitting your money into buckets. The largest being basic expenses (60%). The remaining split four ways: Retirement (10%), Long-term savings (10%), Short-term savings (10%), Fun money (10%).

Chapter 6: The Myth of Financial Expertise
Americas love experts....But ultimately, expertise is about results. You can have the fanciest degrees from the fanciest schools, but if you can't perform what you were hired to do, your expertise is meaningless.

More information is not always good, especially when it's not actionable and causes you to make errors in your investing. The key takeaway here is to ignore any predictions that pundits make. They simply do not know what will happen in future.

Recently, Helpburn Capital studied the performance of the S&P 500 from 1983 to 2003, during which time the annualized return of the stock market was 10.01 percent. They noted something amazing: During that twenty-year period. If you missed the best twenty days of investing (the days where the sock market gained the most points), your return would have dropped from 10.01 percent to 5.03 percent. And if you missed the best forty days of investing, your returns would equal only 1.6 percent–a pitiful payback on your money. Lesson: Do not try to time the market, invest regularly and for the long-term.

Ignore the last year or two of a fund's performance. A fund manager may be able to perform very well over the short term. But over the long term he will almost never beat the market–because of expenses, fees, and the growing mathematical difficulty of picking outperforming stocks.

Most people don't actually need a financial adviser–you can do it all on your own and come out ahead.

Many people use financial advisers as a crutch and end up paying tens of thousands of dollars over their lifetime simply because they didn't spend a few hours learning about investing. If you don't learn to manage your money in your twenties, you'll cost yourself a ton one way or another–whether you do nothing, or pay someone exorbitant feeds to "manage" your money.

Mutual funds use something called "active management." This means a portfolio manager actively tries to pick the best stocks and give you the best return. Index funds are run by "passive management." These funds work by replacing portfolio managers with computers. They simply and pick the same stocks that an index holds.

Index funds have lower fees than mutual funds because there's no expensive staff to pay. Vanguard's S&P 500 index fund, for example, has an expense ratio of 0.18 percent.

Passively managed index fund (.18% expense ratio, 8% return on investment of $100/month), after 25 years: $70,542.13
Actively managed index fund (2% expense ratio, 8% return on investment of $100/month), after 25 years: $44,649.70

*Half of actively managed funds between 1993 through 1998 failed to beat the market, and only 2% beat market from 1993 through 2003.

More than 90% of your portfolio's volatility is a result of your asset allocation (your mix of stocks and bonds, not individual stocks).

Your investment plan is more important than your actual investments. Just as the way I organized this book is more important than any given word in it.

1998: US large cap stocks +28.6%, international stocks +20%, REITs -17%
2000: US large cap stocks -9.10%, international stocks -14.7%, REITs +31.04%

If you're 25 and just starting out, your biggest danger isn't having a portfolio that's too risky. It's being lazy and overwhelmed and not doing any investing at all. That's why it's important to understand the basics but not get too wrapped up in all the variables and choices.

"I believe that 98 or 99 percent–maybe more than 99 percent–of people who invest should extensively diversify and not trade. That leads them to an index fund with very low costs." -Warren Buffet

"When you realize how few advisers have beaten the market over the last several decades, you may acquire the discipline to do something even better: become a long-term index fund investor." -Mark Hulbert

Lifecycle funds, also known as target-date funds, automatically pick a blend of investments for you based on your approximate age. The 85% percent solution, not perfect, but easy enough for anyone to get started.

If you're picking your own index funds, as a general guideline, you can create a great asset allocation using anywhere from three to seven funds. The goal isn't to be exhaustive and own every single aspect of the market. It's to create an effective asset allocation and move on with your life.

Dollar Cost Averaging: Investing regular amounts over time, rather than investing all your money into a fund at once, so you don't have to guess when the market is up or down. *Set up automatic investing at regular intervals so you don't have to think about it.

Chapter 8: Easy Maintenance
Ignore the noise: It doesn't matter what happened last year, it matters what happens in the next ten to twenty years.

Renting is actually an excellent decision in certain markets–and real estate is generally a poor financial investment.

Tax inefficient (i.e. income-generating) assets such as bonds should go into a tax advantaged account like an IRS or a 401(k). Conversely, taxable accounts should only hold tax-efficient investments like equity index funds.

Invest as much as possible into tax-deferred accounts like your 401(k) and Roth IRA. Because retirement accounts are tax advantaged, you'll enjoy significant rewards.

If you sell an investment that you've held for less than a year, you'll be subject to ordinary income tax, which is usually 25-35 percent.

If you hold your investment for more than a year, you'll only pay a capital-gains tax, which in most cases is currently 15 percent. This is a strong incentive to buy and hold for the long term.

Chapter 9: A Rich Life
Being rich is about freedom–it's about not having to think about money all the time and being able to travel and work on the things that interest me. It's about being able to use money to do whatever I want–and not having to worry about my budget, asset allocation, or how I'll ever be able to afford a house.

Raises:
When you receive a raise, don't feel bad about celebrating–but do it modestly...A mere increase in your income is not a call to change your standard of living.

Big Purchases:
When it comes to saving money, big purchases are your chance to shine–and to dominate your clueless friends who are so proud of not ordering Cokes when they eat out, yet waste thousands when they buy large items like furniture, a car, or a house. When you buy something major, you can save massive amounts of money–$2000 on a car or $40,000 on a house–that will make your other attempts to save money pale in comparison.

Buying a Car:
Let me first tell you that the single most important decision associated with buying a car is not the brand or the mileage or the rims (please jump off a bridge if you buy specialty rims)...Most important factor is how long you keep the car before selling it. You could get the best deal in the world, but if you sell car after four years, you've lost money. Instead, understand how much you can afford, pick a reliable car, maintain it well, and drive it for as long as humanly possible. Yes, that means you need to drive it for more than ten years, because it's only once you finish the payments that the real savings start.

Buying a House:
Can you afford at least a 10 percent down payment for the house? If not, set a savings goal and don't even think about buying until you reach it.

I have to emphasize that buying a house is not just a natural step in getting older. Too many people assume this then get in over their heads. Buying a house changes your lifestyle forever.

If you can afford it and you're sure you'll be staying in the same area for a long time, buying a house can be a great way to make a significant purchase, build equity, and create a stable place to raise a family.

Real estate is the most overrated investment in America. It's a purchase first–a very expensive one–and an investment second.

As an investment, real estate provides mediocre returns at best. Risk: If your house is your biggest investment, how diversified is your portfolio? Poor returns: From 1890 to through 1990, the return on residential real estate was just about zero after inflation.

If someone buys a house for $250,000 and sells it for $400,000 twenty years later, they think, "Great! I made $150,000! But actually, they've forgotten to factor in important costs like property taxes, maintenance, and the opportunity cost of not having that money in the stock market.

The truth is that, over time, investing in the stock market has trumped real estate quite handily–even now–which is why renting isn't always a bad idea.

When you rent, you're not paying all those other assorted fees, which effectively frees up tons of cash that you would have been spending on a mortgage. The key is investing that extra money.

I urge you to stick by tried-and-true rules, like 20 percent down, a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, and a total monthly payment that represents no more than 30 percent of your gross pay. If you can't do that, wait until you've saved more.

If You Can: How Millennials Can Get Rich Slowly – William J. Bernstein

If You Can: How Millennials Can Get Rich Slowly – William J. Bernstein
Date read: 7/15/17. Recommendation: 7/10.

An easy-to-read overview of the topics covered in his earlier book, The Investor's Manifesto. I prefer the depth and detail of the latter. But if you're looking for an introduction to investing in low-cost index funds and the importance of developing a financial strategy at an early age, this is a good starting place. 

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Start by saving 15 percent of your salary at age 25 into a 401(k) plan, and IRA, or a taxable account (or all three). Put equal amounts of that 15 precent into just three different mutual funds:

• A US total stock market index fund

• An international total stock market index fund

• A US total bond market index fund

     *Once per year you'll adjust their amounts so that they're equal again.

Rest assured that you will get Social Security; its imbalances are relatively minor and fixable, and even if nothing is done, which is highly unlikely in view of the program's popularity, you'll still get around three-quarters of your promised benefit.

Five Hurdles to Overcome:
1) People spend too much money.

2) You need adequate understanding of what finance is all about.

3) You need to learn the basics of financial and market history.

• "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Fits finance to a tee.

• Nothing more reassuring than being able to say to yourself, "I've seen this movie before and I know how it ends."

4) Overcoming yourself.

• Human beings are simply not designed to manage long-term risks.

• We've evolved to think about risk as a short term phenomenon.

• Proper time horizon of assessing financial risk is several decades

• From time to time you will lose large amounts of money in the stock market, but these are usually short-term events.

5) Recognize the monsters that populate the financial industry.

If you're starting to save at age 25 and want to retire at 65, you'll need to put away at least 15% of your salary.

A plumber making $100,000 per year was far more likely to be a millionaire than an attorney with the same income, because the latter's peer group was far harder to keep up with.

When you buy and sell stocks, the person on the other side of the trade almost certainly has a name like Goldman Sachs or Fidelity. And that's best case scenario. What's the worse case? Trading with a company insider who knows more about his employer than 99.9999% of the people on the planet.

If you want high returns, you're going to occasionally have to endure ferocious losses with equanimity, and if you want safety, you're going to have to endure low returns.

Reading Suggestion: Jack Bogle's Common Sense on Mutual Funds.

You should use your knowledge of financial history simply as an emotional stabilizer that will keep your portfolio on an even keel and prevent you from going all-in to the market when everyone is euphoric and selling you shares when the world seems to be going to hell in a hand-basket.

The real purpose of learning financial history is to give you the courage to do the selling at high prices and the buying at low ones mandated by the discipline of sticking to a fixed stock/bond allocation.

People tend to be comically overconfident: for example, about eighty percent of us believe that we are above average drivers, a logical impossibility.

We tend to extrapolate the recent past indefinitely into the future...Both long bear and bull markets also seem to take on a life of their own.

Humans are "pattern seeking primates" who perceive relationships where in fact none exist. Ninety-five percent of what happens in finance is random noise, yet investors constantly convince themselves that they see patterns in market activity.

To be avoided at all costs are: any stock broker or "full-service" brokerage firm; any newsletter; any advisor who purchases individual securities; any hedge fund.

Your biggest priority is to get yourself out of debt; until that point, the only investing you should be doing is with the minimum 401(k) or other defined contribution savings required to "max out" your employer match; beyond that, you should earmark every spare penny to eliminating your student and consumer debt.

Next, you'll need an emergency fund, enough for six months of living expenses.

Then, and only then, can you start to save seriously for retirement.

Your goal, as mentioned, is to save at least 15 percent of your salary in some combination of 401(k)/IRA/taxable savings. But in reality, the best strategy is to save as much as you can, and don't stop doing so until the day you die.

The optimal strategy for most young people is thus to first max out their 401(k) match, then contribute the maximum to a Roth IRA, then save in a taxable account on top of that.

Once a year you should rebalance your accounts back to equal status.

The Investor's Manifesto – William J. Bernstein

The Investor's Manifesto: Preparing for Prosperity, Armageddon, and Everything in Between – William J. Bernstein
Date Read: 7/5/17. Recommendation: 8/10.

Champions an investment strategy focused on low-cost index funds that track the market, rather than attempting to guess on individual stocks. This is a must-read when it comes to investing. And it's not a massive encyclopedia. Bernstein offers a more rational approach to investing by detailing historic returns of various asset classes, the importance of diversification, and why you must play the long game if you have any hopes of coming out ahead. 

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

"In the past, stocks have had high returns because they have been really risky. But stocks are now so expensive that there are only two possibilities: either they are going to fall dramatically in price and then have higher returns after that (in which case investors are stupid for paying such high prices now), or there will be no big fall in price and little risk, but returns hereafter will be permanently low (in which case investors are smart). So which is it?

Diversification among different kinds of stock asset classes works well over the years and decades, but often quite poorly over weeks and months.

Investment wisdom, however, begins with the realization that long-term returns are the only ones that matter. Investors who can earn 8 percent annualized return will multiply their wealth tenfold over the course of 30 years.

Using historical returns to estimate future ones is an extremely dangerous exercise.

In the past, investors could expect only low returns when investing in safe assets; today this rule applies with a vengeance to Treasury bills, which currently have a near-zero yield.

Investors earn higher returns only by bearing risks–by seeking out risk premiums.

A house is most certainly not an investment, for one simple reason: You have to live somewhere, and you are either going to have to pay for it or rent it. Always remember, investment is the deferral of present consumption for future consumption, and if anything qualifies as present consumption, it is a residence. Further, if you pay for one in cash, then you are spending capital you could otherwise invest in something else.

How much does the price of a home rise over time? The best data on house prices suggest that, after taking inflation into account, the answer is slim to none.

Real house prices in the United States did not rise at all between 1890 and 1990.

If you own the house outright, you are tying up a large amount of capital you could profitably invest elsewhere, and the imputed rent, or use of the house, is your reward for doing so. On the other hand, if you have the ability to pay for a house outright but choose instead to rent, your unspent capital can earn a return in other assets, such as stocks and bonds.

The opposite reasoning applies if you cannot afford to purchase the house outright, but instead require a mortgage. By choosing to rent instead of own, you substitute rent payments for mortgage payments. True mortgage payments, at least early on, are largely deductible, but the advantage is more than offset by the catastrophic risk of default and repossession you take on with a mortgage.

Home ownership is not an investment; it is exactly the opposite, a consumption item. After taking into consideration maintenance costs and taxes, you are often better off renting.

A good rule of thumb is never, ever pay more than 15 years fair rental value for any residence. This computes out to a 6.7% (1/15th) gross rental dividend, or 3.7% after taxes, insurance, and maintenance.

Imputed rent does have one real advantage over the return from stocks and bonds, which is that it is tax-free.

The figure I keep in mind when house shopping is 150: the number of months in 12.5 years. After hearing a realtor's spiel, I will ask, "So, what would this house reasonably rent for?" If the number seems right, multiply it by 150; this will give you an excellent idea of the home's fair market value, above which you are better off renting.

On average the three small categories (growth, mid, value) had higher returns than the three large categories. This is not surprising; after all, small companies have more room to grow than large ones. Further, small stocks are certainly riskier than large ones, as well, since they have less diversified product lines and less access to capital and are more prone to failure.

How do value ("bad") companies tend to outperform growth ("good") companies in the stock exchange, when they manifestly do not in the consumer marketplace? Very simply, because they have to...In order to attract buyers for its far riskier stock, Ford must offer investors a higher expected return than Toyota.

"Efficient Market Hypothesis" (EMH), developed by Eugene Fama, which states, more or less, that all known information about a security has already been factored into its price.* This has two implications for investors: First, stock picking is futile, to say nothing of expensive, and second, stock prices move only in response to new information–that is, surprises. Since surprises are by definition unexpected, stocks, and the stock market overall, move in a purely random pattern.

*There are actually three forms of the EMH: the strong form, which posits that all information, public and private, has already been impounded into price; and the weak form, which posits only that past price action does not predict future price moves.

The implications of the EMH for the investor could not be clearer: Do not try to time the market, and do not try to pick stocks or fund managers.

In the long run, the advantages of the indexed and passive approaches over traditional active stock-picking are nearly insurmountable.

The investor cannot learn enough about the history of stock and bond returns. These are primarily useful as a measure of risk; they are far less reliable as a predictor of future returns.

Four essential preliminaries before making asset allocation decisions: Save as much as you can, make sure you have enough liquid taxable assets for emergencies, diversify widely, and do so with passive or index funds.

The consequences of oversaving pale next to those of undersaving.

Yes, picking a small number of stocks increases your chances of getting rich, but as we just learned, it also increases your chances of getting poor. By buying and holding the entire market through a passively managed or indexed mutual fund, you guarantee that you will own all of the winning companies and thus get all of the market return. True, you will own all of the losers as well, but that is not as important: the most that can vanish with any one stock is 100 percent of its purchase value, whereas the winners can easily make 1,000 percent, and exceptionally 10,00 percent, inside of a decade or two.

Asset allocation process, investor makes two important decisions:
1) The overall allocations to stocks and bonds.
2) The allocation among stock asset classes.

The rosiest scenario for the young investor is a long, brutal bear market. For the retiree, it most definitely is not.

The best time to buy stocks is often when the economic clouds are the blackest, and the worst times to buy are when the sky is the bluest.

The anticipation is better than the pleasure. Researchers have found that the nuclei accumbens respond much more to the prospect of reward than to the reward itself.

Caring, emotionally intelligent people often make the worst investors, as they become too overwhelmed by the feelings of others to think rationally about the investment process.

Advantages of mutual funds:
-Wide diversification
-Transparency of expenses
-Professional management (brokers = used car salesmen, fund managers = advanced degree)
-Protection (Investment Company Act of 1940)
-Ease of execution

The ownership structure of any financial services company ultimately determines just how well it serves its shareholders in the long run. Do not invest with any mutual fund family that is owned by a publicly traded parent company.

In the best of all possible worlds, the fund company has no publicly or privately owned shares and is instead held directly by the mutual fund shareholders. Only one fund company does this: the Vanguard Group.

Each dollar you do not save at 25 will mean two inflation adjusted dollars that you will need to save if you start at age 35, four if you begin at 45, and eight if you start at 55. In practice, if you lack substantial savings at 45, you are in serious trouble. Since a 25-year-old should be saving at least 10 percent of his or her salary, this means that a 45-year-old will need to save nearly half of his or her salary.

The possible adverse consequences of under-consuming in your youth or middle age pale in comparison to the risks of not saving enough for old age.

Retirement: My rule of thumb is that if you spend 2 percent of your nest egg per year, adjusted upward for the cost of living, you are as secure as possible at 3 percent, you are probably safe; at 4 percent, you are taking real risks.

For example, if, in addition to Social Security and pensions, you spend $50,000 per year in living expenses, that means you will need $2.5 million to be perfectly safe, and $1.67 million to be fairly secure.

The best annuity deal available: deferring Social Security until age 70. Waiting until 70 increases by almost one-third the monthly payment you would get starting at age 66...This calculates out to a guaranteed real return from waiting of 8 percent per year.

Dollar cost averaging (DCA): fixed dollar amount is periodically invested in stocks and bonds...Forces investors to invest equal amounts periodically. Lowers the average price paid for their purchases and increases overall returns.

Month 1: $100 purchase at $15/share = 6.67 shares bought.
Month 2: $100 purchase at $5/share = 20 shares bought.
Month 3: $100 purchase at $10/share = 10 shares bought.
*DCA = $8.18/share

Value averaging technique: based on targets.
Month 1: US Total Stock ($100), International ($100)
Month 2: US Total Stock ($200), International ($200)
Month 3: US Total Stock ($300), International ($300)
Month 4: US Total Stock ($400), International ($400)

If US Large Cap fund started Month 3 with $300 in assets, and then fell 10 percent in value over the next 30 days to $270, our saver would have to add $130, not $100, to top it off to $400 at the start of Month 4. Conversely, if international stocks rose by 10 percent to $330 in value, then only $70 must be added.

From time to time, the markets can go stark raving mad...Your primary defense against being swept up in the madness of such periods is a command of the history of the financial markets and the resulting ability to say, "I've been here before, and I know how the story ends."

Never forget that at the level of individual securities, the markets are brutally efficient. Whenever you buy or sell an individual stock or bond, you are likely trading with someone who is smarter and better informed than you are, and who is working harder at it.

The portfolio's the thing; do not pay too much attention to its best and worst performing asset classes.

Investors tend to be too susceptible to the emotional impact of the news and to the fear and greed of their neighbors. The better you can tune out this emotional noise, the wealthier you will be.

Human beings are pattern-seeking primates. Most of what goes on in the financial markets, by contrast, is random noise. Avoid imagining patterns; there usually are none.

Avoid fund companies that are owned by publicly traded parent firms.

You should live as modestly as you can and save as much as you can for as long as you can. Saving too much is not nearly as harmful as saving too little.

Consider tilting toward small and value stocks, since they will likely have higher expected returns than the overall market. Precisely how much you do so depends on the nature of your employment and your tolerance for temporarily underperforming the market for up to several years.

Growth Hacker Marketing – Ryan Holiday

Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising – by Ryan Holiday
Date read: 7/2/17. Recommendation: 9/10.

Flips traditional marketing (and ad agencies) on its head in favor of the growth hacker mindset. Growth hacking still requires pulling customers in but it favors a more innovative, effective, and cheaper method of reaching the target audience. Holiday emphasizes the importance of Product Market Fit and building a product that generates explosive, contagious reactions from those who first see it. Great foundation to have in place before building any product, service or following. Digs into real examples of some of the most successful startups in Silicon Valley (Airbnb, Twitter, Dropbox, etc.) and how they were able to adapt, optimize, and make themselves indispensable in the process. 

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

"Marketing has always been about the same thing–who your customers are and where they are." -Noah Kagan

Growth hackers believe that products–even whole businesses and business models–can and should be changed until they are primed to generate explosive reactions from the first people who see them.

Airbnb went from a good but fairly impractical idea to an explosive and practical idea.
-Orginally founders put air mattresses on their floor and offered free homemade breakfast to guests.
-Repositioned as a networking alternative for conferences when hotels were booked up.
-Pivoted to the type of traveler who didn't want to crash on couches or in hostels but was looking to avoid hotels.

Instagram started as a location-based social network called Burbn (which had an optional photo feature). Core group of users flocked to one part of the app–photos and filters.

Some companies like Airbnb and Instagram spend a long time trying new iterations until they achieve what growth hackers call Product Market Fit (PMF); others find it right away. The end goal is the same, however, and it's to have the product and its customers in perfect sync with each other.

The books that tend to flop upon release are those where the author goes into a cave for a year to write it, then hands it off to the publisher for release.

On the other hand, I have clients who blog extensively before publishing. They develop their book ideas based on the themes that they naturally gravitate toward but that also get the greatest response from readers...They test the ideas they're writing about in the book on their blog.

The race has changed. The prize and spoils no longer go to the person who make it to market first. They go to the person who makes it to Product Market Fit first.

Use the Socratic method: We must simply and repeatedly question every assumption. Who is this product for? Why would they use it? Why do I use it?

"To be successful and grow your business and revenues, you must match the way you market your products with the way your prospects learn about and shop for your products." -Brian Halligan

Growth hacking still requires pulling your customers in. Except you seek to do it in a cheap, effective, and usually unique and new way.

Knowing the outlets where they [Dropbox] intended to post the video (Digg, Slashdot, and reddit), they filled it with all sorts of jokes, allusions, and references that those communities would eat up.

PR efforts are needed simply to reach out and capture, at the beginning, a group of highly interested, loyal, and fanatical users.

If they are geeks, they are at TechCrunch or Hacker News or reddit or attending a handful of conferences every year. If they are fashionistas, they are regularly checking a handful of fashion blogs like Lookbook.nu or Hypebeast. If they are ____, like you and your founders are, they are reading and doing the same things you do every day.

The best way to get people to do this enormous favor for you? Make it seem like it isn't a favor. Make it the kind of thing that is worth spreading and, of course, conducive to spreading.

You can't just expect your users to become evangelists of your product–you've got to provide the incentives and the platform for them to do so.

Dedicated and happy users are marketing tools in and of themselves.

Retention:
-Twitter: Found that users who followed 5-10 accounts on first day, much more likely to stick around.
-Pinterest: Automatically follows a selection of high-quality Pinterest users so they don't have to hope users figure it out on their own.
-Dropbox: Dragging at least one file into your dropbox, not just creating the account.

When your product is actually relevant and designed for a specific audience, bloggers love to write about you.

Lesson: Cheaply test your concept, improve it based on feedback, then launch.

Lesson: Reduce barriers to entry; use targeted media and platforms to bring your first users on board.

Lesson: Build your email list!

Ask yourself: why would anyone sign up for a beta list for a new product or sign up the week it launches? The value proposition has to be overwhelming.

If your product does not do that–even on a small scale for a much smaller audience–you need to go back to the drawing board until it does.

As far as ad agencies go, I don't like their model. Why do you have to pay someone else to make/produce the content that you use to speak directly to your potential customers? It makes no sense to me.

The growth hacker mindset still applies no matter what kind of business you're in: make your service indispensable, find some loophole or underexploited niche, encourage word of mouth, and finally, ruthlessly optimize based on data and feedback.

How to Be a Stoic – Massimo Pigliucci

How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life – by Massimo Pigliucci
Date read: 6/24/17. Recommendation: 4/10.

New addition to my library of Stoic philosophy. I didn't feel like it brought enough original ideas to the table, based on the books already out there. It's essentially a walkthrough of Epictetus. If you're looking to get into Stoicism, check out A Guide to the Good Life, Ego Is the Enemy, or The Obstacle Is the Way. Or go straight to the source and read Seneca or Marcus Aurelius. 

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Stoicism is not about suppressing or hiding emotion–rather, it is about acknowledging our emotions, reflecting on what causes them, and redirecting them for our own good.

"Einstein's God": the simple, indubitable fact that Nature is understandable by reason....Identification of God with Nature.

Stoicism, like any life philosophy, may not appeal to or work for everyone. It is rather demanding, stipulating that moral character is the only truly worthy thing to cultivate; health, education, and even wealth are considered "preferred indifferents."

Such "externals" do not define who we are as individuals and have nothing to do with our personal worth, which depends on our character and our exercise of the virtues.

A decent human life is about the cultivation of one's character and concern for other people (and even for nature itself) and is best enjoyed by way of a proper–but not fanatical–detachment from mere worldly goods.

"We must make the best of those things that are in our power, and take the rest as nature gives it." -Epictetus

Past cannot be changed and you can only affect the here and now. This recognition takes courage–not the kind needed in battle, but the more subtle, and yet arguably more important, kind needed to live your life to your best.

One of the first lessons from Stoicism, then, is to focus our attention and efforts where we have the most power and then let the universe run as it will. This will save us both a lot of energy and a lot of worry.

Stoic ethics isn't just about what we do–our actions–but more broadly about how our character is equipped to navigate real life. We live in far too intricate social environments to be able to always do the right thing, or even to do the right thing often enough to know with sufficient confidence what the right thing is to begin with.

In other words, by all means go ahead and avoid pain and experience joy in your life–but not when doing so imperils your integrity. Better to endure pain in an honorable manner than to seek joy in a shameful one.

We must have wisdom–the ability to navigate well the diverse, complex, and often contradictory circumstances of our lives.

The Stoics adopted Socrates's classification of four aspects of virtue: wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice.

"As we pity the blind and the lame, so should we pity those who are blinded and lamed in their most sovereign faculties. The man who remembers this, I say, will be angry with no one, indignant with no one, revile none, blame none, hate none, offend none." -Epictetus

Medea lacks wisdom and is affected by amathia, the sort of dis-knowledge that brings ordinary people to make unreasonable judgements about certain situations that then lead them to what outsiders correctly perceive as horrible acts.

As he [Andrew Overby] explains: "Depressed people are rather self-aware; in fact, they are too self-aware, and too negatively so, often deriding themselves for small infractions of their own idealized standards, putting themselves down for not being perfect even in a world they recognize as being full of imperfections and human capital squandered. Part of depression is fixating on failures in the past, ruminating continually on past events or circumstances, and even drawing a kind of negative confidence from them. This type of thinking is antithetical to good outcomes at the present time, at least the vast majority of the time."

"Stand by a stone and slander it: what effect will you produce? If a man then listens like a stone, what advantage has the slanderer?...'I have done you an outrage.' May it turn out to your good." -Epictetus

All the major Stoic authors insist that it is crucial that we reflect on our condition and truly make an effort to see things in a different light, one that is both more rational and more compassionate.

Death itself is not under our control (it will happen one way or another), but how we think about death most definitely is under our control.

Epictetus is reminding us that if we are afraid of death, then it is out of ignorance: if we knew or truly understood more about the human condition–as a horse trainer knows and understands horses–then we wouldn't react the way we do to the prospect of our own death.

Singularity: the moment when computers will outsmart people and begin to drive technological progress independently–and perhaps even in spite–of humanity itself.

But our sage disagrees with the judgment of the thief, whose conclusion he finds highly questionable: he gained an iron lamp, but in the transaction he lost something much more precious–his integrity.

It is more helpful to think of people who do bad things as mistaken and therefore to be pitied and helped if possible, not condemned as evil.

"When I see a man in a state of anxiety, I say, 'What can this man want? If he did not want something which is not in his power, how could he still be anxious? It is for this reason that one who sings to the lyre is not anxious when he is performing by himself, but when he enters the theatre, even if he has a very good voice and pays well: for he not only wants to perform well, but also to win a great name, and that is beyond his own control." -Epictetus

Stoic principles:
- Virtue is the highest good, and everything else is indifferent.
- Follow nature...we should strive to apply reason to achieve a better society.
- Dichotomy of control. Some things are under our control, and others are not.

Stoic virtues:
- Wisdom: Navigating complex situations in the best available fashion.
- Courage: Doing the right thing, both physically and morally, under all circumstances.
- Justice: Treating every human being–regardless of his or her stature in life–with fairness and kindness.
- Temperance: Exercising moderation and self-control in all spheres of life.

Epictetus exhorts us to practice what is arguably the most fundamental of his doctrines: to constantly examine our "impressions"–that is, our initial reactions to events, people, and what we are being told–by stepping back to make room for rational deliberation, avoiding rash emotional reactions, and asking whether whatever is being thrown at us is under our control.

Reverse clause: Reminding us that we may set out with a particular goal in mind but that events may not go the way we wish. That being the case, our choices are to make ourselves miserable, thereby willfully worsening our situation, or to remember our overarching goal: to be a decent person who doesn't do anything that is unvirtuous or that may compromise our integrity (like behaving obnoxiously in reaction to another's obnoxious behavior).

^There is a nice analogy in Stoic lore meant to explain the point...dog leashed to the cart.

"For every challenge, remember the resources you have within you to cope with it...Faced with pain, you will discover the power of endurance. If you are insulted, you will discover patience. In time, you will grow to be confident that there is not a single impression that you will not have the moral means to tolerate." -Epictetus

If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation.

"Let silence be your goal for the most part; say only what is necessary, and be brief about it." -Epictetus

"In your conversation, don't dwell at excessive length on your own deeds or adventures. Just because you enjoy recounting your exploits doesn't mean that others derive the same pleasure from hearing about them." -Epictetus

Live Your Truth – Kamal Ravikant

Live Your Truth – by Kamal Ravikant
Date read: 6/19/17. Recommendation: 6/10.

Not a book I would typically read, but there are a few hidden gems in its passages. If you're looking for inspiration, it's an easy read that you can get through in a day. Ravikant's handful of original, eye-opening insights make it worth it. Most of the book is focused on tapping into yourself and living an authentic life.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

What are the key components of one's life? Buckets, that if you fill daily, even if just a drop, move you forward and create progress.

Example of four buckets? Health, wealth, relationships, and self-expression

We don't stumble accidentally into an amazing life. It takes decision, a commitment to consistently work on ourselves.

Our ability to love and create – that alone makes this entire experiment worthwhile.

If there's a definition of freedom, I think it's this: living life on your terms.

The truth: I live my days as if I will live forever. Putting off so much, expecting there to be more time, another chance. If I accepted my mortality to my core, never knowing when the chain snaps, then how would I live? More on my terms. A free man. I'd write more, I'd love more, I'd laugh more.

Ask yourself: what is it, that if I believed it down to my core, would change everything?

Whatever you experience in your life, choose for it to make you grow in amazing and unbelievable ways.

Now I know what success is: living your truth, sharing it. Whether through a book, raising a child, building a company, creating art, or a conversation. Whatever human endeavor we choose, as long as we live our truth, it is a success.

Hemingway, whenever he was stuck in his writing, would tell himself to write one true thing. A true sentence. Then, he would write another. And another.

Peace is letting it be. Letting life flow, letting emotions flow through you. If you don't fight them, they pass through quickly and you feel better.

There is something magical about creating.

But that's the gift of any art. When we go all in, we find the answers. They're in us.

Suffering is when we resist the moment.

I once asked one of the best entrepreneurs in the Valley how he did it. He's created game-changing companies multiple times. He sort of laughed, then said, "if I only stuck with what I was qualified for, I'd be pushing a broom somewhere."

The best people, they're afraid, they question themselves. Many, if you corner them, will admit that they wonder if they're good enough. But what separates them from the rest is that they jump off the cliff anyway. Sprout wings on the way down.

It's the knowledge – or confidence or hope or sheer stupidity; the word doesn't matter – that they will figure it out. That's it. The only qualification you need to create anything.

I am not the outcome. I am never the result. I am only the effort.

One thing about discovering a truth: first you live it, and after you experience the transformative results, it is real for you unlike anything else. Then you almost become obsessive about sharing it.

Instead, I wrote the type of book that I would want to read. Importantly, a book I wish someone had given me when I was down.

Confidence comes from crossing thresholds.

You dive deeper, you strip away the cleverness and the words becomes more important than your ego and that's when you know it's real, when it's good.

The feeling of when you step away, finished, and you look at the page and you know you tapped into something bigger than yourself, that feeling is, dare I say, spiritual.

Homo Deus – Yuval Noah Harari

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow – by Yuval Noah Harari
Date read: 6/11/17. Recommendation: 8/10.

Follow-up to Harari's critically acclaimed Sapiens. Whereas Sapiens is focuses on humanity's history, Homo Deus examines on humanity's future. Compelling book in its own right and worth reading. Guaranteed to expand your perspective and worldview. He discusses how Homo sapiens came to dominate the world, imagine and assign meaning to life, and what our current trajectory looks like.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

The New Human Agenda
For thousand of years, human agenda centered around same three problems: famine, plague, and war.

For the first time in history, more people die today from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals combined.

There are no longer natural famines in the world; there are only political famines.

In 2014 more than 2.1 billion people were overweight, compared to 850 million who suffered from malnutrition. Half of humankind is expected to be overweight by 2030. In 2010 famine and malnutrition killed about 1 million people, whereas obesity killed 3 million.

Black Death began in the 1330s...between 75 million and 200 million people died – more than a quarter of the population in Eurasia.

Until the early twentieth century, about a third of children died before reaching adulthood. (now less than 5%)

In 2012 about 56 million people died throughout the world; 620,000 of them died due to human violence. In contrast, 800,000 committed suicide, and 1.5 million died of diabetes. Sugar is now more dangerous than gunpowder.

Today the main source of wealth is knowledge. And whereas you can conquer oil fields through war, you cannot acquire knowledge that way. Hence as knowledge became the most important economic resource, the profitability of war declined and wars became increasingly restricted to those parts of the world – such as the Middle East and Central Africa – where the economies are still old-fashioned material-based economies.

For the average American or European, Coca-Cola poses a far deadlier threat than al-Qaeda....In essence, terrorism is a show...Terrorists are like a fly that tries to destroy a china shop.

Contrary to common notions, seventy-year olds weren't considered rare freaks of nature in previous centuries. Galileo Galilei died at seventy-seven, Isaac Newton at eighty-four, and Michelangelo lived to the ripe age of eighty-eight without help from antibiotics, vaccinations, or organ transplants.

In truth, so far modern medicine hasn't extended our natural life span by a single year. Its great achievement has been to save us from premature death, and allow us to enjoy the full measure of our years.

The war against death is still likely to be the flagship project of the coming century...Our ideological commitment to human life will never allow us simply to accept human death.

If you think that religious fanatics with burning eyes and flowing beards are ruthless, just wait and see what elderly retail moguls and ageing Hollywood starlets will do when they think the elixir of life is within reach.

People are made happy by one thing and one thing only – pleasant sensations in their bodies.

If science is right and our happiness is determined by our biochemical system, then the only way to ensure lasting contentment is by rigging this system. Forget economic growth, social reforms and political revolutions: in order to raise global happiness levels, we need to manipulate human biochemistry.

This is the best reason to learn history: not in order to predict the future, but to free yourself of the past and imagine alternative destinies.

Part 1: Homo sapiens Conquers the World
In most Semitic languages, 'Eve' means 'snake' or even 'female snake'. The name of our ancestral biblical mother hides an archaic animist myth, according to which snakes are not our enemies but our ancestors.

The Bible, along with its belief in human distinctiveness, was one of the by-products of the Agricultural Revolution.

Whereas hunter-gatherers were seldom aware of the damage they inflicted on the ecosystem, farmers knew perfectly well what they were doing. They knew they were exploiting domesticated animals and subjugating them to human desires and whims. They justified their actions in the name of new theist religions, which mushroomed and spread in the wake of the Agricultural Revolution.

Biblical Judaism, for instance, catered to peasants and shepherds. Most of its commandments dealt with farming and village life, and its major holidays were harvest festivals.

Animist religions had previously depicted the universe as a grand Chinese opera with a limitless cast of colorful actors. Elephants and oak trees, crocodiles and rivers, mountains and frogs, ghosts and fairies, angels and demons – each had a role in the cosmic opera. Theist religions rewrote the script, turning the universe into a bleak Ibsen drama with just two main characters: man and God.

In the new theist drama Sapiens became the central hero around whom the entire universe evolved.

According to Christianity, God gave an eternal soul only to humans...Humans thus became the apex of creation, while all other organisms were pushed to the sidelines.

There is no doubt that Homo sapiens is the most powerful species in the world. Homo sapiens also likes to think that it enjoys a superior moral status, and that human life has much greater value than the lives of pigs, elephants or wolves. This is less obvious. Does might make right? Is human life more previous than porcine life simply because the human collective is more powerful than the pig collective? The United States is far more powerful than Afghanistan; does this imply that American lives have greater intrinsic value than Afghan lives?

We want to believe that human lives really are superior in some fundamental way. We Sapiens loves telling ourselves that we enjoy some magical quality that not only accounts for our immense power, but also gives moral justification for our privileged status.

According to a 2012 Gallup survey, only 15 percent of Americans think that Homo sapiens evolved through natural selection alone, free of all divine intervention...Spending three years in college has absolutely no impact on these views. The same survey found that among BA graduates...14 percent think that humans evolved without any divine supervision. Even among holders of MA and PhD degrees...only 29 percent credit natural selection alone with the creation of our species.

If you really understand the theory of evolution, you understand that there is no soul...the existence of souls cannot be squared with the theory of evolution. Evolution means change, and is incapable of producing everlasting entities.

However, there is a crucial difference between mind and soul...Whereas the existence of eternal souls is pure conjecture, the experience of pain is a direct and very tangible reality.

By humanizing animals we usually underestimate animal cognition and ignore the unique abilities of other creatures.

Humans nowadays completely dominate the planet not because the individual human is far smarter and more nimble-fingered than the individual chimp or wolf, but because Homo sapiens is the only species on earth capable of cooperating flexibly in large numbers.

Sapiens don't behave according to a cold mathematical logic, but rather according to a warm social logic. We are ruled by emotions. These emotions, as we saw earlier, are in fact sophisticated algorithms that reflect the social mechanisms of ancient hunter-gatherer bands.

People constantly reinforce each other's beliefs in a self-perpetuating loop. Each round of mutual confirmation tightens the web of meaning further, until you have little choice but to believe what everyone else believes.

This is how history unfolds. People weave a web of meaning, believe in it with all their heart, but sooner or later the web unravels, and when we look back we cannot understand how anybody could have taken it seriously.

Part 2: Homo Sapiens Gives Meaning to the World
Humans think they make history, but history actually revolves around the web of stories. The basic abilities of individual humans have no changed much since the Stone Age. But the web of stories has grown...pushing history from the Stone Age to the Silicon Age.

For the Sumerians, Enki and Inanna (gods) were as real as Google and Microsoft are real for us.

Prior to the invention of writing, stories were confined by the limited capacity of human brains. You couldn't invent overly complex stories which people couldn't remember.

Writing has thus enabled humans to organize entire societies in an algorithmic fashion...In literate societies people are organized into networks, so that each person is only a small step in a huge algorithm, and it is the algorithm as a whole that make the important decisions. This is the essence of bureaucracy.

Such self-absorption characterizes all humans in childhood. Children of all religions and cultures think they are the center of this world and therefore who little genuine interest in the conditions and feelings of other people. That's why divorce is so traumatic for children. A five-year old cannot understand that something important is happening for reasons unrelated to him...He is convinced that everything happens because of him. Most people grow out of this infantile delusion. Monotheists hold on to it till the day they die.

No matter how mistaken the biblical world view was, it provided a better basis for large-scale human cooperation.

Human cooperative networks usually judge themselves by yardsticks of their own invention, and, not surprisingly, they often give themselves high marks.

Fiction isn't bad. It is vital. Without commonly accepted stories about things like money, states or corporations, no complex human society can function...But the stories are just tools. They should not become our goals or our yardsticks.

Stories serve as the foundations and pillars of human societies. As history unfolded, stories about gods, nations and corporations grew so powerful that they began to dominate objective reality...Unfortunately, blind faith in these stories meant that human efforts frequently focused on increasing the glory of fictional entities such as gods and nations, instead of bettering the lives of real sentient beings.

It is often said that God helps those who help themselves. This is a roundabout way of saying that God doesn't exist, but if our belief in Him inspires us to do something ourselves–it helps.

Religion is any all-encompassing story that confers superhuman legitimacy on human laws, norms and values.

Religion is a deal, whereas spirituality is a journey.
-Religion gives a complete description of the world and offers us a well-defined contract with predetermined goals.
-Spiritual journeys are nothing like that. They usually take people in mysterious ways towards unknown destinations. The quest usually begins with some big question...Whereas most people just accept the ready-made answers provided by the power that be, spiritual seekers are not so easily satisfied. They are determined to follow the big question wherever it leads, and not just to places they know well or wish to visit.

Religion is interested above all in order. It aims to create and maintain the social structure. Science is interested above all in power. Through research, it aims to acquire the power to cure diseases, fight wards and product food. As individuals, scientists and priests may give immense importance to the truth; but as collective institutions, science and religion prefer order and power over truth.

Modernity is a deal...The entire contract can be summarized in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.

Modern culture is the most powerful in history, and it is ceaselessly researching, inventing, discovering and growing. At the same time, it is plagued by more existential angst than any previous culture.

The greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance. Once humans realized how little they knew about the world, they suddenly had a very good reason to seek new knowledge, which opened up the scientific road to progress.

Wilhelm von Humboldt, aim of existence is 'a distillation of the widest possible experience of life into wisdom.'

God is dead – it's just taking a while to get rid of the body. Radical Islam poses no serious threat to the liberal package, because for all their fervor the zealots don't really understand the world of the twenty-first century, and having nothing relevant to say about the novel dangers and opportunities that new technologies are generating all around us.

True, hundreds of millions may nevertheless go on believing in Islam, Christianity or Hinduism. But numbers alone don't count for much in history. History is often shaped by small groups of forward-looking innovators rather than by backward-looking masses.

Ask yourself: what was the most influential discovery, invention or creation of the twentieth century? That's a difficult question, because it is hard to choose from a long list of candidates...Now ask yourself: what was the most influential discovery, invention or creation of traditional religions such as Islam and Christianity in the twentieth century? This too is a very difficult question, because there is so little to choose from.

Think, for example, about the acceptance of gay marriage or female clergy by the more progressive branches of Christianity. Where did this acceptance originate? Not from reading the Bible, St Augustine or Martin Luther. Rather, it came from reading texts like Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality or Donna Haraway's 'A Cyborg Manifesto.'

Yet Christian true-believers – however progressive – cannot admit to drawing their ethics from Foucault and Haraway. So they go back to the Bible, to St Augustine and to Martin Luther, and make a very thorough search. They read page after page and story after story with the utmost attention, until they finally discover what they need: some maxim, parable or ruling that, if interpreted creatively enough means God blesses gay marriages and women can be ordained to the priesthood. They then pretend the idea originated in the Bible, when in fact it originated with Foucault.

Part 3: Homo Sapiens Loses Control
Free will exists only in the imaginary stories we humans have invented.

Every time the narrating self evaluates our experiences, it discounts their duration and adopts the 'peak-end-rule' – it remembers only the peak moment and the end moment, and assesses the whole experience according to their average. This has far-reaching impact on all our practical decisions.

Given the unbearable torments that many women undergo during childbirth, one might think that after going through it once no sane woman would ever agree to do so again. However, at the end of labor and in the following days the hormonal system secretes cortisol and beta-endorphins, which reduce the pain and create a feeling of relief and sometimes even elation. Moreover, the growing love towards the baby and the acclaim from friends, family members, religious dogmas and nationalist propaganda, conspire to transform childbirth from a trauma into a positive memory.

If you want to make people believe in imaginary entities such as gods and nations, you should make them sacrifice something valuable. The more painful the sacrifice, the more convinced they will be of the existence of the imaginary recipient.

Humans are masters of cognitive dissonance, and we allow ourselves to believe in one thing in the laboratory and an altogether different thing in the courthouse or in parliament.

Organisms are algorithms. Every animal – including Homo sapiens – is an assemblage of organic algorithms shaped by natural selection over millions of years of evolution.

Traditionally, life has been divided into two main parts: a period of learning followed by a period of working. Very soon this traditional model will become utterly obsolete, and the only way for humans to stay in the game will be to keep learning throughout their lives, and to reinvent themselves repeatedly. Many if not most humans may be unable to do so.

Medicine is undergoing a tremendous conceptual revolution. Twentieth-century medicine aimed to heal the sick. Twenty-first-century medicine is increasingly aiming to upgrade the healthy.

Twentieth-century armies needed millions of healthy soldiers, and economies needed millions of healthy workers. Consequently states established public health services to ensure the health and vigor of everyone...In 1914 the Japanese elite had a vested interest in vaccinating the poor and building hospitals and sewage systems in the slums, because if they wanted Japan to be a strong nation with a powerful army and a robust economy, they needed many millions of healthy soldiers and workers.

In themselves human experiences are not superior at all to the experiences of wolves or elephants. One bit of data is as good as another. However, humans can write poems and blogs about their experiences and post them online, thereby enriching the global data-processing system....No wonder we are so busy converting our experiences into data. It isn't a question of trendiness. It is a question of survival. We must prove to ourselves and to the system that we still have value.

After Darwin, biologists began explaining that feelings are complex algorithms honed by evolution to help animals make correct decisions...For millions upon millions of years, feelings were the best algorithms in the world.

The Time Paradox – Philip Zimbardo

The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life – by Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd
Date Read: 6/3/17. Recommendation: 9/10.

Fascinating look at how the way we regard time influences the course of our lives. Zimbardo and Boyd discuss six distinct time perspectives and illustrate how they are a reflection of our personal attitudes, beliefs and values. Great insight into the future-oriented world we live in and what that means for those who are more present-oriented. Also offers an interesting examination of various religions and their effect on individual time perspectives and behaviors.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Nothing that any of us does in this life will allow us to accrue a moment's more time, and nothing will allow us to regain time misspent...Our scarcest resource, time, is actually much more valuable than money.

Only during the last few thousand years have people gained the luxury of discretionary time, and only during the last few hundred years have substantial segments of us enjoyed it–or endured it.

Remember that people are more likely to regret actions not taken than actions taken, regardless of outcome.

Your body–even if it is in mint condition–is designed for success in the past. It is an antique biological machine that evolved in response to a world that no longer exists.

The transition from event time to clock time profoundly changed society, especially economic relations.

Your time perspective reflects attitudes, beliefs, and values related to time.
-Past-negative
-Past-positive
-Present-fatalistic
-Present-hedonistic
-Future
-Transcendental-future

I think that the events of childhood are overrated; in fact, I think past history in general is overrated. It has turned out to be difficult to find even small effects of childhood events on adult personality...There is no justification in these studies for blaming your adult depression, anxiety, bad marriage, drug use, sexual problems, unemployment, aggression against your children, alcoholism, or anger on what happened to you as a child.

Everyone is affected by the objective past but not completely determined by it. And it is not the events of the past that most strongly influence our lives. Your attitudes towards events in the past matter more than the events themselves.

You cannot change what happened in the past, but you can change your attitude toward what happened.

People who have positive attitudes about the past–whether or not these attitudes are based upon accurate memories–tend to be happier, healthier, and more successful than people who have negative attitudes toward the past.

If you are stuck in the past, you are less likely to take chances and risks, to make new friends, to try new foods, or to expose yourself to new music and art. You want the status quo and abhor change.

This is the paradox of time: Some present orientation is needed to enjoy life. Too much present orientation can rob life of happiness.

The development of a future orientation requires stability and consistency in the present, or people cannot make reasonable estimates of the future consequences of their actions.

All that is tangible and real in this world undeniably exists in the present.

Flow: a special state of mind in which there is total absorption for a period of time in a given activity. Main characteristics...
-Clear goals
-Concentrating and focusing
-Loss of the feeling of self-consciousness, merging of action and awareness
-Distorted sense of time
-Balance between ability level and challenge
-A sense of personal control over the situation or activity
-Intrinsically rewarding

What is wrong with all such programs (DARE) and their related advertising campaigns? They focus on aversive future consequences that work for future-oriented people but not for present-oriented–the target audience. They also focus on personal willpower, resolve, and character, which fails to recognize powerful situational and social forces in the present behavioral context that influence Hedonists.

Talent, intelligence, and ability are necessary for success, but they are not sufficient. Discipline, perseverance, and a sense of personal efficacy are also required.

Unlike their present-hedonistic peers who live in their bodies, the futures live in their minds, envisioning other selves, scenarios, rewards, and successes.

You become future-oriented by being born in the right place at the right time, where environmental conditions help transform little present-oriented babies into restrained, successful, future-oriented adults. These conditions include:
-Living in a temperate zone (requires planning/preparing for seasonal/weather change)
-Living in a stable family, society, nation
-Protestant or Jewish
-Educated
-Young/middle-aged
-Employed
-Tech-savvy
-Successful
-Future-oriented role models
-Recovering form childhood illness

Key predictors of children's financial success are their fathers' conscientiousness and their parents' future orientation.

We [authors] believe that the common good is not a moral matter but a time-perspective matter. Adopting a narrowly focused present orientation for immediate gain is not selfish; it is simply the way presents everywhere think.

There is not something unique about Muslim people that causes them to become suicide bombers. There is something about the situation in which some of them currently find themselves (of which beliefs about a heavenly future are a large part) that motivates them to become suicide bombers.

The Muslim profile is also extremely low on past-positive and present-hedonistic time perspectives. The Muslims in our sample tended not to bring positive elements from their past into the present, and they tend not to focus on pleasure. For Muslims, the focus is on the mundane and transcendental futures.

Seen from a transcendental-future perspective, a suicide bomber's act is not crazy, fanatical, hate-filled or hopeless, but an act committed by a religious person who may have had little hope for his future in this life but has abundant hope in the transcendental future.

Daylight savings time: car accidents increase by 10% the day after clocks are set forward in the spring, and decrease by a smaller amount the day after clocks are set back one hour in the fall.

The key to relieving depression lies not in untangling the Gordian knot of the past but in accepting and planning for the uncertain future.

In moderation, the present is a wonderful place to be, but in excess, it robs you of your ability to learn from the past and plan for the future.

Marshmallow test: Give single marshmallow to 4 year old, can eat now or wait a few minutes and get two. Children who were able to delay gratification (when later interviewed at 18) had developed a range of superior emotional and social competencies compared with the children who had eaten the treat immediately. They were better able to deal with adversity and stress, and they were more self-confident, diligent, and self-reliant. Intellectual ability markedly higher.

After adolescence, however, chronological age becomes a less reliable predictor of motivation, thought process, and emotional response.

Learning to control impulses and make better decisions is inextricably connected with being aware of one's internal states and with managing feelings rather than acting them out. Emotions rather than reason tend to drive the behavior of people who have poor impulse control.

Genetic happiness set point accounts for only about 50% of your overall happiness level. In addition, life circumstance–age, sex, ethnicity, nationality, marital status, physical health, income level–account for an additional 10% of your overall happiness. (leaves open possibility of increasing your level of happiness by 40%).

Our ability to reconstruct the past, to interpret the present, and to construct the future gives us the power to be happy. We must just take the time to use it.

As a society, we impose future-oriented punishments on present-oriented criminals...For presents, however, the threat of jail time is unlikely to matter. When a person does not have a concept of the future or believes there is no future for him, the future cannot be taken from him.

We live in a world created by futures for futures.

Sprint – Jake Knapp

Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days – by Jake Knapp
Date read: 5/28/17. Recommendation: 8/10.

Targeted to those working in technology, but useful lessons that can be applied more broadly. The authors pioneered their own rapid sprint process at Google Ventures. The book documents, step-by-step, the best way to examine, prototype, and test new ideas with customers, in a single week. The faster you can test out a new idea out and gather real feedback, the better. Great framework for creative problem solving, no matter what project or initiative you're working on.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

my notes:

The sprint is Google Venture's unique five-day 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–packaged into a step-by-step process that any team can use.

Monday: Make a map, choose a target. Tuesday: Sketch competing solutions. Wednesday: Decide on the best. Thursday: Build a realistic prototype. Friday: Test with target customers.

Solve the surface first:
The surface is important. It's where your product or service meets customers. Human beings are complex and fickle, so it's impossible to predict how they'll react to a brand-new solution. When our new ideas fail, it's usually because we were overconfident about how well customers would understand and how much they would care.

Get that surface right, and you can work backward to figure out the underlying systems or technology. Focusing on the surface allows you to move fast and answer big questions before you commit to execution, which is why any challenge, no matter how large, can benefit from a sprint.

Fragmentation hurts productivity.

Longer hours don't equal better results.

If you're looking at a screen (laptop, phone, etc.), you're not paying attention to what's going on in the room, so you won't be able to help the team. What's worse, you're unconsciously saying, "This work isn't interesting."

Imagine you've gone forward in time one year, and your project was a disaster. What caused it to fail? Lurking beneath every goal are dangerous assumptions.

*An important part of this is rephrasing assumptions and obstacles into questions.
Q: To reach new customers what has to be true? A: They have to trust our experience.
Q: How can we phrase that as a question? A: Will customers trust our experience?

Turning these potential problems into questions makes them easier to track–and easier to answer with sketches, prototypes, and tests. Also creates a subtle shift from uncertainty (which is uncomfortable) to curiosity (which is exciting)

Map the challenge:
Map should be simple, include only the major steps required for customers to move from beginning to completion.

Each map is customer-centric, with a list of key actors on the left. Each map is a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Keep it between 5-15 steps.

How Might We's: take notes in the form of a question, beginning with the words "How might we...?" (How might we re-create the cafe experience? How might we ensure coffee arrives fresh? How might we structure key info for screening patients? How might we streamline discussion with outside doctors? How might we make reviewing electronic medical records faster?)

Lightning Demos:
Team takes turn giving three-minute tours of their favorite solutions from other products/different domains, etc.

Finding Customers (for prototype/interviews):
-Recruit customers through Craigslist (post a generic ad with a link to a screener survey)
-Recruit customers through your network

Storyboard:
Best opening scene for your prototype will boost the quality of your test (can help customers forget they're trying a prototype and react to your product in a natural way)

The trick is to take one or two steps upstream from the beginning of the actual solution you want to test...How do customers find out your company exists?

It's almost always a good idea to present your solution alongside the competition. As a matter of fact, you can ask customers to test out your competitors' products on Friday right alongside your own prototype.

When in doubt take risks, sprint is great for testing risky solutions that might have  a huge payoff.

"Prototype" mindset – it isn't a real product, it just needs to appear real.

Interview customers and learn by watching them react to your prototype.

After you've recruited and carefully selected participants for your test who match the profile of your target customer.
-Why five people? 85% of problems are observed after just five people.
-Testing with more people doesn't lead to many more insights - just a lot more work.
-The number of findings quickly reaches the point of diminishing returns.
-When 2-3 people out of 5 have the same strong reaction, positive or negative, you should pay attention.

One-on-one interviews are a remarkable shortcut. They allow you to test a facade of your product, long before you've build the real thing.

Offer important insight that's nearly impossible to get with large-scale quantitative data: why things work or don't work.

Remind the customer that you're testing the prototype, not her.
-"There are no right and wrong answers. Since I didn't design this, you won't hurt my feelings or flatter me. In fact, frank, candid feedback is the most helpful."

NOT: "Now that you've seen the site, would you be ready to sign up now, or do you need more information?"
YES: "Now that you've seen the site, what are you thinking?" (after answer, "why is that?)

DON'T ask multiple choice or yes/no questions (would you, do you, is it?)
DO ask "Five Ws and One H" questions

You can also learn a lot by just remaining quiet. Don't always feel compelled to fill the silence with conversation.

Being in a curiosity mindset means being fascinated by your customers and their reactions.
-Always ask "why?"

Once you've run your test an identified patterns, look back at your sprint questions. This will help you decide which patterns are most important, and also point you toward next steps.

Instead of jumping right into solutions, take your time to map out the problem and agree on the initial target. Start slow so you can go fast.

Instead of shouting out ideas, work independently to make detailed sketches of possible solutions.

Adopt the prototype mindset so you can learn quickly.

Test your prototype with target customers and get their honest reactions.

Walden – Henry David Thoreau

Walden – by Henry David Thoreau
Date read: 5/21/17. Recommendation: 8/10.

Another classic. Thoreau documents his two years of simple living in a cabin near Walden Pond outside Concord, Massachusetts. He discusses themes of minimalism and self-sufficiency. Along the way he emphasizes the value of reconnecting with the natural world, and hints at stoic themes with his disdain for modern luxuries and comforts. His motivation for the book? Ensuring he was not wasting his life on trivialities, and instead living in a more deliberate, meaningful fashion. 

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

 

My Notes:

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of...Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born?

But men labor under a mistake...By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves will break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before.

Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.

One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels.

It would be some advantage to live a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization, if only to learn what are the gross necessities of life and what methods have been taken to obtain them.

For the improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential laws of man's existence; as our skeletons, probably, are not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors.

Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are not only indispensable, but positive hinderances to the elevation of mankind.

As for clothing...perhaps we are led oftener by the love of novelty, and a regard for the opinion of men, in procuring it, than by a true utility.

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

Every child begins the world again, to some extent, and loves to stay out doors, even in wet and cold.

The farmer is endeavoring to solve the problem of a livelihood by a formula more complicated than the problem itself.

A taste for the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors, where there is no house and no housekeeper.

I mean that they should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?

All memorable events, I should say, transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere. The Vedas say, "All intelligences awake with the morning." Poetry and art, and the fairest and most memorable actions of men, date from such an hour.

The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary.

And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked...we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad of instances and applications?

When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence–that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality. This is always exhilarating and sublime. By closing the eyes and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by shows, men establish and confirm their daily life of routine and habit every where, which is still built on purely illusory foundations.

My days were not days of the week, bearing the stamp of any heathen deity, nor were they minced into hours and fretted by the ticking of a clock; for I lived like the Puri Indians, of whom it is said that "for yesterday, today, and tomorrow, they have only one word..."

I am convinced, that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while other have not enough.

The virtues of a superior man are like the wind; the virtues of a common man are like the grass, when the wind passes over it, bends.

I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings.

Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change.

The Art of Travel – Alain de Botton

The Art of Travel – by Alain de Botton
Date read: 5/15/17. Recommendation: 6/10.

Interesting book that feels like a series of essays. Dissects why we travel, the inspiration for doing so, and contemplates the experience of traveling abroad in a way that resonates with any seasoned traveler. In certain sections the language gets a bit too abstract and flowery for my taste. But if traveling is a large part of your identity, you'll appreciate de Botton's ideas.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest–in all its ardor and paradoxes–than our travels. They express, however inarticulately, an understanding of what life might be about, outside of the constraints of work and of the struggle for survival.

Eudaimonia: Greek philosophy term for human flourishing.

It is easy for us to forget ourselves when we contemplate pictorial and verbal descriptions of places.

We are sad at home and blame the weather and the ugliness of the buildings, but on the tropical island we learn that the state of the skies and the appearance of our dwellings can never on their own either underwrite our joy or condemn us to misery.

Charles Baudelaire: "It always seems to me that I'll be well where I am not, and this question of moving is one that I'm forever entertaining with my soul."

The value we ascribe to the process of traveling, to wandering without reference to a destination, connects us to a broad shift in sensibilities dating back to some two hundred years ago, whereby the outsider came to be seen as morally superior to the insider.

What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.

Anything I learnt would have to be justified by private benefit rather than by the interest of others. My discoveries would have to enliven me; they would have in some way to prove 'life-enhancing.'

What would it mean to seek knowledge 'for life' in one's travels?

Nietzsche also proposes a second kind of tourism, whereby we may learn how our societies and identities have been formed by the past and so acquire a sense of continuity and belonging. The person practicing this kind of tourism 'looks beyond his own individual transitory existence and feels himself to be the spirit of his house, his race, his city'. He can gaze at old buildings and feel 'the happiness of knowing that he is not wholly accidental and arbitrary but grown out of a past as its heir, flower and fruit, and that his existence is thus excused and indeed justified.'

A danger of travel is that we may see things at the wrong time, before we have had an opportunity to build up the necessary receptivity, so that new information is as useless and fugitive as a necklace without beads without a connecting chain.

Even in the most fascinating cities, [many] have occasionally been visited by a strong wish to remain in bed and take the next flight home.

Our identities are to a greater or lesser extent malleable, changing according to whom–and sometimes what–we are with. The company of certain people may excited our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy.

Natural scenes have the power to suggest certain values to us–oaks dignity, pines resolution, lakes calm–and therefore may, in unobtrusive ways, act as inspirations to virtue.

[William] Wordsworth urged us to travel through landscapes in order to feel emotions that may benefit our souls. I set out for the desert so as to be made to feel small.

There are few emotions about places for which adequate single words exist; we are forced instead to make awkward piles of words to convey what we feel as we watch the light fade on an early-autumn evening, or when we encounter a pool of perfectly still water in a clearing.

Sublime places embodied a defiance to man's will.

Sublime places repeat in grand terms a lesson that ordinary life typically introduces viciously: that the universe is mightier than we are, that we are frail and temporary and have no alternative but to accept limitations on our will; that we must bow to necessities greater than ourselves.

What, then, is this traveling mind-set? Receptivity might be said to be its chief characteristic. Receptive, we approach new places with humility. We carry with us no rigid ideas about what is or is not interesting.

Home, by contrast, finds us more settled in our expectations.

A Guide to the Good Life – William B. Irvine

A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy – by William B. Irvine
Date read: 5/8/17. Recommendation: 9/10.

There's no better modern introduction to Stoicism. Contrary to today's understanding of the term as a lack of outward emotion, it's a life philosophy which cultivates rationality, appreciation, and joy. Irvine discusses the practicality of Stoicism, how it applies to our every day lives, and the importance of adopting a coherent philosophy of life that suits us as individuals. He hits on key concepts in Stoic philosophy and wraps them in a modern, logical context. I originally read this book over a year ago, and almost every single word struck a chord with me. It was one of my first encounters with Stoicism and I was surprised to find it matched almost identically with my existing worldview, which I had pieced together over the years.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews. 

My Notes:

The Stoics feel somewhere between the Cyrenaics and the Cynics: They thought people should enjoy the good things life has to offer, including friendship and wealth, but only if they did not cling to these good things.

The sage is to Stoicism as Buddha is to Buddhism.

Greek Stoics: Primary ethical goal was the attainment of virtue.
Roman Stoics: Retained this goal, but we also find them repeatedly advancing a second goal, the attainment of tranquility.

Stoic tranquility: psychological state marked by the absence of negative emotions, such as grief, anger, and anxiety, and the presence of positive emotions, such as joy.

Roman Stoics argue tranquility and virtue are connected. Someone who is not tranquil, who is distracted by negative emotions such as anger or grief, might find it difficult to do what his reason tells him to do: His emotions will triumph over his intellect. This person might therefore become confused about what things are really good, consequently might fail to pursue them, and might, as a result, fail to attain virtue.

According to Epictetus, the primary concern of philosophy should be the art of living: Just as wood is the medium of the carpenter and bronze is the medium of the sculptor, your life is the medium on which you practice the art of living.

Negative visualization: spending time imagining that we have lost the things we value. The single most valuable technique in the Stoics' psychological tool kit.

As we go about our day, we should periodically pause to reflect on the fact that we will not live forever and therefore that this day could be our last. Such reflection, rather than converting us into hedonists, will make us appreciate how wonderful it is that we are alive and have the opportunity to fill this day with activity.

Hedonic adaptation has the power to extinguish our enjoyment of the world...Negative visualization is therefore a wonderful way to regain our appreciation of life and with it our capacity for joy.

One reason children are capable of joy is because they take almost nothing for granted. To them, the world is is wonderfully new and surprising.

By contemplating the impermanence of everything in the world, we are forced to recognize that every time we do something could be the last time we do it, and this recognition can invest the things we do with a significance and intensity that would otherwise be absent. We will no longer sleepwalk through our life.

Our most important choice in life, according to Epictetus, is whether to concern ourselves with things external to us or things internal. Most people choose the former because they think harms and benefits come from outside themselves.

The trichotomy of control:
-Things over which we have complete control: goals we set for ourselves
-Things over which we have no control: whether the sun rises tomorrow
-Things over which we have some but not complete control: whether we win while playing tennis. Setting internal rather than external goals (playing to the best of your ability, not to always win).

It will clearly make sense for us to spend time and energy setting goals for ourselves and determining our values. Doing this will take relatively little time and energy. Furthermore, the reward for choosing our goals and values properly can. Indeed, Marcus thinks that the key to having a good life is to value things that are genuinely valuable and be indifferent to things that lack value.

Marcus thinks that by forming opinions properly – by assigning things their correct value – we can avoid much suffering, grief, and anxiety and can thereby achieve the tranquility the Stoics seek.

Musonius would point to three benefits to be derived from acts of voluntary discomfort:
1) Harden ourselves against misfortune that might befall us in the future.
2) Grow confident that we can withstand major discomforts so they aren't a present source of anxiety. Training to be courageous.
3) Help us appreciate what we already have.

Someone who tries to avoid all discomfort is less likely to be comfortable than someone who periodically embraces discomfort. The latter individual is likely to have a much wider "comfort zone"

The worse a man is, the less likely he is to accept constructive criticism.

There will be times when we must associate with annoying, misguided, or malicious people in order to work for common interests. We can, however, be selective about whom we befriend.

If we detect anger or hatred within us and wish to seek revenge, one of the best forms of revenge on another person is to refuse to be like him.

When you don't respect the source of an insult, you should feel relieved. If he disapproves of what you are doing, then what you are doing is doubtless the right thing to do.

The political correctness movement has some untoward side effects. One is that the process of protecting disadvantaged individuals from insults will tend to make them hypersensitive to insults...Epictetus would argue we shouldn't punish these individuals, but instead teach them techniques of insult self-defense.

"Unless reason puts an end to our tears, fortune will not do so." -Seneca

The advice that we respond to the grief of friends by grieving ourselves is as foolish as the advice that we help someone who has been poisoned by taking the poison ourselves or help someone who has the flu by intentionally catching it from him. Grief is a negative emotion and therefore one that we should, to the extent possible, avoid experiencing. If a friend is grieving, our goal should be to help her overcome her grief.

By allowing ourselves to get angry over little things, we take what might have been a barely noticeable disruption of our day and transform it into a tranquility-shattering state of agitation.

People are unhappy, the Stoics argue, in large part because they are confused about what is valuable. Because of their confusion, they spend their days pursuing things that, rather than making them happy, make them anxious and miserable.

Stoics value their freedom, and they are therefore reluctant to do anything that will give others power over them. But if we seek social status, we give other people power over us: We have to do things calculated to make them admire us, and we have to refrain from doing things that will trigger their disfavor.

It is foolish to worry about what other people think of us and particularly foolish for us to seek the approval of people whose values we reject. Our goal should therefore be to become indifferent to other people's opinions of us.

Most people use their wealth to finance a luxurious lifestyle, one that will win them the admiration of others.

Desire for luxuries is not a natural desires. Natural desires, such as a desire for water when we are thirsty, can be satisfied; unnatural desires cannot.

Those who crave luxury typically have to spend considerable time and energy to attain it; those who eschew luxury can devote this same time and energy to other, more worthwhile undertakings.

A Stoic who disparages wealth might become wealthier than those individuals whose principal goal is its acquisition (lost interest in luxurious living, overcome craving for consumer goods, more likely to retain a large portion of income).

What stands between most of us and happiness is not our government or the society in which we live, but defects in our philosophy of life.

If you consider yourself a victim, you are not going to have a good life; if, however, you refuse to think of yourself as a victim–if you refuse to let your inner self be conquered by your external circumstances–you are likely to have a good life.

The Stoics pointed to two principal sources of human unhappiness–our insatiability and our tendency to worry about things beyond our control.

There are people, I think, whose personality is uniquely well-suited to Stoicism. Even if no one formally introduces these individuals to Stoicism, they will figure it out on their own. These "congenital Stoics" are perpetually optimistic and they are appreciative of the world they find themselves in. If they were to pick up Seneca and start reading, they would instantly recognize him as a kindred spirit.

And why is self-discipline worth possessing? Because those who possess it have the ability to determine what they do with their life. Those who lack self-discipline will have the path they take through life determined by someone or something else, and as a result, there is a very real danger that they will mislive.

Most people go to the mall not because they have a specific need, but in hopes that doing so will trigger a desire for something that before going they didn't want. Why go out of their way to trigger a desire? Because if they trigger one, they can enjoy the rush that comes when they extinguish that desire by buying its object. It is a rush, of course, that has little to do with their long-term happiness.

The profound realization, thanks to the practice of Stoicism, that acquiring things that those in my social circle typically crave and work hard to afford will, in the long run, make zero difference in how happy I am and will in no way contribute to my having a good life.

On the Shortness of Life – Seneca

On the Shortness of Life – by Seneca
Date read: 5/4/17. Recommendation: 9/10.

If you're looking to dive deeper into the works of Seneca, this is a great follow up to Letters from a Stoic. I read the Penguin Great Ideas edition. It's a collection of three essays filled with plenty of brilliant insight that Seneca is so well known for. 

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Life is long if you know how to use it. But one man is gripped by insatiable greed, another by a laborious dedication to useless tasks. One man is soaked in wine, another sluggish with idleness...

You will find no one willing to share out his money; but to how many does each of us divide up his life! People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing which it is right to be stingy.

You are living as if destined to live for ever; your own frailty never occurs to you; you don't notice how much time has already passed, but squander it as though you had a full and overflowing supply...You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire.

How stupid to forget our mortality, and put off sensible plans to our fiftieth and sixtieth years, aiming to begin life from a point at which few have arrived!

Everyone hustles his life along, and is troubled by a longing for the future and a weariness of the present. But the man who spends all his time on his own needs, who organizes every day as though it were his last, neither longs for nor fears the next day. For what new pleasures can any hour now bring him? He hast tried everything, and enjoyed everything to repletion.

So you must not think a man has lived long because he has white hair and wrinkles: he has not lived long, just existed long.

But nobody works out the value of time: men use it lavishly as if it costs nothing.

The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today.

Of all people only those are at leisure who make time for philosophy, only those are really alive. For they not only keep a good watch over their own lifetimes, but they annex every age to theirs. All the years that have passed before them are added to their own.

We are excluded from no age, but we have access to them all; and if we are prepared in loftiness of mind to pass beyond the narrow confines of human weakness, there is a long period of time through which we can roam. We can argue with Socrates, express doubt with Carneades, cultivate retirement with Epicurus, overcome human nature with Stoics, and exceed its limits with the Cynics.

Honors, monuments, whatever the ambitious have ordered by decrees or raised in public buildings are soon destroyed: there is nothing that the passage of time does not demolish and remove.

But life is very short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future.

It was nature's intention that there should be no need of great equipment for a good life: every individual can make himself happy. External goods are of trivial importance and without much influence in either direction: prosperity does not elevate the sage and adversity does not depress him.

Never have I trusted Fortune, even when she seemed to offer peace. All those blessing which she kindly bestowed on me – money, public office, influence – I relegated to a place whence she could claim them back without bothering me. I kept a wide gap between them and me, with the result that she has taken them away, not torn them away.

Let us pass on to the rich: how frequently they are just like the poor! When they travel abroad their luggage is restricted, and whenever they are forced to hasten their journey they dismiss their retinue of attendants.

No man is despised by another unless he is first despised by himself.

What you need is...confidence in yourself and the belief that you are on the right path, and not led astray by the many tracks which cross yours of people who are hopelessly lost, though some are wandering not far from the true path. But what you are longing for is great and supreme and nearly divine – not to be shaken. The Greeks call this stead firmness of mind 'euthymia', but I call it tranquility.

If you apply yourself to study you will avoid all boredom with life, you will not long for night because you are sick of daylight, you will be neither a burden to yourself nor useless to others, you will attract many to become your friends and the finest people will flock about you.

We must be especially careful in choosing people, and deciding whether they are worth devoting a part of our lives to them, whether the sacrifice of our time makes a difference to them.

Avoid those who are gloomy and always lamenting, and who grasp at every pretext for complaint...a companion who is agitated and groaning about everything is an enemy to peace of mind.

People are more cheerful whom Fortune has never favored than those whom she has deserted.

Let us aim to acquire our riches from ourselves rather than from Fortune.

In this race course of our lives, we must keep to the inner track. (minimalism)

So we should buy enough books for us, and none just for embellishment...Excess in any sphere is reprehensible.

Should Nature demand back what she previously entrusted to us we shall say to her too: "Take back my spirit in better shape than when you gave it."

For by foreseeing anything that can happen as though it will happen he will soften the onslaught of all of his troubles, which present no surprises to those who are ready and waiting for them, but fall heavily on those who are careless in the expectation.

It is too late for the mind to equip itself to endure dangers once they are already there.

Nothing happens to the wise man against his expectation.

So we should make light of all things and endure them with tolerance: it is more civilized to make fun of life than to bewail it.

We must indulge the mind and from time to time allow it the leisure which is its food and strength. We must go for walks out of doors, so that the mind can be strengthened and invigorated by a clear sky and plenty of fresh air.

The 48 Laws of Power – Robert Greene

The 48 Laws of Power – by Robert Greene
Date read: 4/17/17. Recommendation: 10/10.

This took me months to read because there's so much to it. Perhaps the most detailed, convincing book I've ever read. Greene sets forth the individual laws of power and offers countless historical examples of each in practice. Not a book you're going to finish over the weekend, but a very important book and investment. Greene makes the argument that it's not a question of ethics, the game of power is inescapable, even in our daily lives. We might as well learn the game and master the laws of power so we're more aware, less distracted, and better able to negotiate situations in our favor. 

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

If the game of power is inescapable, better to be an artist than a denier or a bungler.

An emotional response to a situation is the single greatest barrier to power.

Emotions cloud reason, and if you cannot see the situation clearly, you cannot prepare for and respond to it with any degree of control.

Deception is a developed art of civilization and the most potent weapon in the game of power. Patience in all things is your crucial shield. Impatience is a principal impediment to power.

Law 3: Conceal your intentions
Hide your intentions not by closing up (with the risk of appearing secretive, and making people suspicious) but by talking endlessly about your desires and goals–just not your real ones. You will kill three birds with one stone: You appear friendly, open, and trusting; you conceal your intentions, and you send your rivals on time-consuming wild good chases.

Law 4: Always say less than necessary
The more you say, the more common you appear

Law 8: Make other people come to you - use bait if necessary
When you make the other person come to you, he wears himself out, wasting his energy on the trip...also create the illusion that he is controlling the situation.

Law 9: Win through your actions, never through argument
Words have that insidious ability to be interpreted according to the other person's mood and insecurities...Action and demonstration are much more powerful and meaningful.

Law 10: Infection: Avoid the unhappy and unlucky
You can die from someone else's misery - emotional states are as infectious as diseases. You may feel you are helping the drowning man but you are only precipitating your own disaster. The unfortunate sometimes draw misfortunate on themselves; they will also draw it on you. Associate with the happy and fortunate instead.

The answer lies in judging people on the effects they have on the world and not on the reasons they give for their problems.

Law 13: When asking for help, appeal to people's self-interest, never to their mercy or gratitude
Self-interest is the lever that will move people. Once you make them see how you can in some way meet their needs or advance their cause, their resistance to your requests fro help will magically fall away. At each step on the way to acquiring power, you must train yourself to think your way inside the other person's mind, to see their needs and interests, to get rid of the screen of your own feelings that obscure the truth. Master this art and there will be limits to what you can accomplish.

Law 19: Know who you're dealing with–do not offend the wrong person
We forget a lot in our lives, but we rarely forget an insult...There is nothing to be gained by insulting a person unnecessarily. The satisfaction is meager compared to the danger than someday he or she will be in a position to hurt you.

Law 20: Do not commit to anyone
Slowness to pick up your weapons can be a weapon itself, especially if you let other people exhaust themselves fighting, then take advantage of their exhaustion.

That is what holding back from the fray allow you: time to position yourself to take advantage of the situation once one side starts to lose.

In the forest, one shrub latches on to another, entangling its neighbor with its thorns, the thicket slowly extending its impenetrable domain. Only what keeps its distance and stands apart can grow and rise above the thicket.

Law 25: Re-create yourself
Do not accept the roles that society foists on you. Re-create yourself by forging a new identity.

The world wants to assign you a role in life. And once you accept that role you are doomed. Your power is limited to the tiny amount allotted to the role you have selected or have been forced to assume. An actor, on the other hand, plays many roles...forge a new identity, one of your own making, one that has had no boundaries assigned to it by an envious and resentful world.

Law 28: Enter action with boldness
If boldness is not natural, neither is timidity. It is an acquired habit, picked up out of a desire to avoid conflict.

Law 34: Be royal in your own fashion: act like a king to be treated like one
David and Goliath Strategy: By choosing a great opponent, you create the appearance of greatness.

Law 38: Think as you like but behave like others
If you make a show of going against the times, flaunting your unconventional ideas and unorthodox ways, people will think that you only want attention and that you look down upon them.

It is an old but powerful trick: You pretend to disagree with dangerous ideas, but in the course of your disagreement you give those ideas expression and exposure. You seem to conform to the prevailing orthodoxy, but those who know will understand the irony involved. You are protected.

Wise and clever people learn early on that they can display conventional behavior and mouth conventional ideas without having to believe in them.

Law 39: Stir up waters to catch fish
If a person explodes with anger at you, you must remind yourself that it is not exclusively directed at you–do not be so vain. The cause is much larger, goes way back in time, involves dozens of prior hurts...

Law 40: Despise the free lunch
The powerful learn early to protect their most valuable resources: independence and room to maneuver. By paying the full price, they keep themselves free of dangerous entanglements and worries.

Powerful people judge everything by what it costs, not just in money but in time, dignity, and peace of mind. And this is exactly what Bargain Demons cannot do. Wasting valuable time digging for bargains, they worry endlessly about what they could have gotten elsewhere for a little less.

Law 47: Do not go past the mark you aimed for; in victory learn when to stop
Set a goal, and when you reach it, stop.

Law 48: Assume formlessness
The best way to protect yourself is to be as fluid and formless as water; never bet on stability or lasting order. Everything changes.

Meditations – Marcus Aurelius

Meditations – by Marcus Aurelius
Date read: 4/5/17. Recommendation: 10/10.

A cornerstone of Stoic philosophy, along with Letters from a Stoic by Seneca. It's critical which interpretation you read. I highly recommend the Modern Library version with an introduction by Gregory Hays. It's a short read with some of the most useful insights and aphorisms that money can buy. 

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

my notes:

Introduction by Gregory Hays
"States will never be happy until rulers become philosophers or philosophers become rulers." -Plato

Ancient philosophy had a more practical dimension. It was not merely a subject to write or argue about, but one that was expected to provide a "design for living" - a set of rules to live one's life by.

One pattern of thought that is central to the philosophy of the Meditations (as well as to Epictetus)...the doctrine of the three "disciplines": the disciplines of perception, of action, and of the will. Together, the three disciplines constitute a comprehensive approach to life, and in various combinations and reformulations they underlie a large number of the entries in the Meditations.

Meditations 7.54:
Everywhere, at each moment, you have the option:
-to accept this event with humility (will)
-to treat this person as he should be treated (action)
-to approach this thought with care, so that nothing irrational creeps in (perception)

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. 2.1

Make time for yourself to learn something worthwhile; stop letting yourself be pulled in all directions. 2.7

People who labor all their lives but have no purpose to direct every thought and impulse toward are wasting their time - even when hard at work. 2.7

If it doesn't harm your character, how can it harm your life? 2.11

You cannot lose another life than the one you're living now, or live another one than the one you're losing. The longest amounts to the same as the shortest. The present is the same for everyone...For you can't lose either the past or the future; how could you lose what you don't have? 2.14

We should remember that even Nature's inadvertence has its own charm, its own attractiveness. The way loaves of bread split open on top in the oven; the ridges are just by-products of the baking, and yet pleasing, somehow: they rouse our appetite without our knowing why. 3.2

Don't waste the rest of your time here worrying about other people - unless it affects the common good. It will keep you from doing anything useful. You'll be too preoccupied with what so-and-so is doing, and why, and what they're saying, and what they're thinking, and what they're up to, and all the other things that throw you off and keep you from focusing on your own mind. 3.4

If at some point in your life, you should come across anything better than justice, honestly, self-control, courage - than a mind satisfied that it has succeeded in enabling you to act rationally, and satisfied to accept what's beyond its control - if you find anything better than that, embrace it without reservations - it must be an extraordinary thing indeed - and enjoy it to the full. 3.6

Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already, or is impossible to see. The span we live is small - small as the corner of the earth in which we live it. 3.10

Nowhere you can go is more peaceful - more free of interruptions - than your own soul. 4.3

Not to live as if you had endless years ahead of you. Death overshadows you. While you're alive and able - be good. 4.17

The tranquility that comes when you stop caring what they say. Or think, or do. Only what you do. 4.18

People who are excited by posthumous fame forget that the people who remember them will soon die too. And those after them in turn. Until their memory, passed from one to another like a candle flame, gutters and goes out. 4.19

Everything is transitory - the knower and the known. 4.35

It's unfortunate that this has happened. No it's fortunate that this has happened and I've remained unharmed by it - not shattered by the present or frightened of the future. It could have happened to anyone. But not everyone could have remained unharmed by it. 4.49a

Does what's happened keep you from acting with justice, generosity, self-control, sanity, prudence, honesty, humility, straightforwardness, and all the other qualities that allow a person's nature to fulfill itself? 4.49a

So remember this principle when something threatens to cause you pain: the thing itself was no misfortune at all; to endure it and prevail is great good fortune. 4.49a

At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: "I have to go to work - as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I'm going to do what I was born for - the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm? -But it's nicer here... So you were born to feel "nice"? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? 5.1

Practice the virtues you can show: honesty, gravity, endurance, austerity, resignation, abstinence, patience, sincerity, moderation, seriousness, high-mindedness. Don't you see how much you have to offer - beyond excuses like "can't"? And yet you still settle for less. 5.5

In a sense, people are our proper occupation. Our job is to do them good and put up with them. But when they obstruct our proper tasks, they become irrelevant to us - like sun, wind, animals. Our actions may be impeded by them, but there can be no impeding our intentions or our dispositions. Because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle of our acting. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. 5.20

So other people hurt me? That's their problem. Their character and actions are not mine. 5.25

But true good fortune is what you make for yourself. Good fortune: good character, good intentions, and good actions. 5.37

Just that you do the right thing. The rest doesn't matter. 6.2

The best revenge is not to be like that. 6.6

Like seeing roasted meat and other dishes in front of you and suddenly realizing: This is a dead fish. A dead bird. A dead pig. Or that this noble vintage is grape juice, and the purple robes are sheep wool dyed with shellfish blood...Perceptions like that - latching onto things and piercing through them, so we see what they really are. That's what we need to do all the time - all through our lives when things lay claim to our trust - to lay them bare and see how pointless they are, to strip away the legend that encrusts them. 6.13

Not to assume it's impossible because you find it hard. But to recognize that if it's humanly possible, you can do it too. 6.19

If anyone can refute me - show me I'm making a mistake or looking at things from the wrong perspective - I'll gladly change. It's the truth I'm after, and the truth never harmed anyone. What harms us is to persist in self-deceit and ignorance. 6.21

Fight to be the person philosophy tried to make you. Our lives are short. The only rewards of our existence here are an unstained character and unselfish acts. 6.30

It's normal to feel pain in your hands and feet, if you're using your feet as feet and your hands as hands. And for a human being to feel stress is normal - if he's living a normal human life. And if it's normal, how can it be bad? 6.33

The only thing that isn't worthless: to live this life out truthfully and rightly. And be patient with those who don't. 6.47

When you need encouragement, think of the qualities the people around you have: this one's energy, that one's modesty, another's generosity, and so on. Nothing is as encouraging as when virtues are visibly embodied in the people around us... 6.48

Ambition means tying your well-being to what other people say or do.
Self-indulgence means tying it to the things that happen to you.
Sanity means tying it to your own actions. 6.51

You don't have to turn this into something. It doesn't have to upset you. Things can't shape our decisions by themselves. 6.52

Frightened of change? But what can exist without it? What's closer to nature's heart? Can you take a hot bath and leave the firewood as it was? Eat food without transforming it? Can any vital process take place without something being changed? 7.18

Look at what you have, the things you value most, and think of how much you'd crave them if you didn't have them. But be careful. Don't feel such satisfaction that you start to overvalue them - that it would upset you to lose them. 7.27

To watch the courses of the stars as if you revolved with them. To keep constantly in mind how the elements alter into one another. Thoughts like this wash the mud of life below. 7.47

Look at the past - empire succeeding empire - and from that, extrapolate the future: the same thing. No escape from the rhythm of events. 7.49

Everywhere, at each moment, you have the option:
-to accept this event with humility
-to treat this person as he should be treated
-to approach this thought with care, so that nothing irrational creeps in. 7.54

Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what's left and live it properly. 7.56

Perfection of character: to live your last day, every day, without frenzy, or sloth, or pretense. 7.69

It's silly to try to escape other people's faults. They are inescapable. Just try to escape your own. 7.71

You've given aid and they've received it. And yet, like an idiot, you keep holding out for more: to be credited with a Good Deed, to be repaid in kind. Why? 7.73

When you have trouble getting out of bed in the morning, remember that your defining characteristic - what defines a human being - is to work with others. 8.12

Remember that to change your mind and to accept correction are free acts too. The action is yours, based on your own will, your own decision - and your own mind. 8.16

Just as nature takes every obstacle, every impediment, and works around it - turns it to its purposes, incorporates it into itself - so, too, a rational being can turn each setback into raw material and use it to achieve its goal. 8.35

You want praise from people who kick themselves every fifteen minutes, the approval of people who despise themselves. 8.53

Fear of death is fear of what we may experience. Nothing at all, or something quite new. But if we experience nothing, we can experience nothing bad. And if our experience changes, then our existence will change with it - change, but not cease. 8.58

So this is how a thoughtful person should await death: not with indifference, not with impatience, not with disdain, but simply viewing it as one of the things that happen to us. 9.3

To do harm is to do yourself harm. To do an injustice is to do yourself an injustice - it degrades you. 9.4

And you can also commit injustice by doing nothing. 9.5

Leave other people's mistakes where they lie. 9.20

Everything that happens is either endurable or not.
If it's endurable, then endure it. Stop complaining.
If it's unendurable...then stop complaining. Your destruction will mean its end as well. 10.3

To stop talking about what the good man is like, and just be one. 10.16

To bear in mind constantly that all of this has happened before. And will happen again - the same plot from beginning to end, the identical staging. Produce them in your mind, as you know them from experience or from history...All just the same. Only the people different. 10.27

The natural can never be inferior to the artificial; art imitates nature, not the reverse. In which case, that most highly developed and comprehensive nature - Nature itself - cannot fall short of artifice in its craftsmanship. 11.10

The soul as a sphere in equilibrium: Not grasping at things beyond it or retreating inward. Not fragmenting outward, not sinking back on itself, but ablaze with light and looking at the truth, without and within. 11.12

To live a good life:
We have the potential for it. If we can learn to be indifferent to what makes no difference. This is how we learn: by looking at each thing, both the parts and the whole. Keeping in mind that none of them can dictate how we perceive it. They don't impose themselves on us. They hover before us, unmoving. It is we who generate the judgments - inscribing them on ourselves. 11.16

When you start to lose your temper, remember: There's nothing manly about rage. It's courtesy and kindness that define a human being - and a man. That's who possesses strength and nerves and guts, not the angry whiners. To react like that brings your closer to impassivity - and so to strength. Pain is the opposite of strength, and so is anger. 11.18

It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own. 12.4

When someone seems to have injured you:
But how can I be sure?
And in any case, keep in mind:
-that he's already been tried and convicted - by himself.
-that to expect a bad person not to harm others is like expecting fig trees not to secrete juice, babies not to cry, horses not to neigh - the inevitable not to happen. 12.16

At all times, look at the thing itself - the thing behind the appearance - and unpack it by analysis... 12.18

Constantly run down the list of those who felt intense anger at something: the most famous, the most unfortunate, the most hated, the most whatever. And ask: Where is all that now? Smoke, dust, legend...or not even legend. 12.27

Antifragile – Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder – by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Date read: 4/1/17. Recommendation: 10/10.

Taleb introduces his concept of antifragility, which explains that certain things (including us) benefit from a degree of randomness, chaos, and disorder. While comfort, convenience, and predictability, breed the opposite–fragility. He presents this as part of what he calls 'the central triad' which ranges from fragile to robust to antifragile. As he explains antifragility, he discusses the value systems that hold us prisoner, ancestral vs. modern life, and Seneca's version of Stoicism. It's a dense read, but worth it for a glimpse into the originality of Taleb's ideas.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

With randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind.

Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty.

Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.

If about everything top-down fragilizes and blocks antifragility and growth, everything bottom-up thrives under the right amount of stress and disorder. The process of discovery (or innovation, or technological progress) itself depends on antifragile tinkering, aggressive risk bearing rather than formal education.

Yet simplicity has been difficult to implement in modern life because it is against the spirit of a certain brand of people who seek sophistication so they can justify their profession.

But simplicity is not so simple to attain. Steve Jobs figured out that "you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple."

The record shows that, for society, the richer we become, the harder it gets to live within our means. Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.

If tired after an intercontinental flight, go to the gym for some exertion instead of resting. Also, it is a well known trick that if you need something urgently done, give the task to the busiest (or second busiest) person in the office. Most humans manage to squander their free time, as free time makes them dysfunctional, lazy, and unmotivated - the busier they get, the more active they are at other tasks.

Layers of redundancy are the central risk management property of natural systems. We human have two kidneys, extra spare parts, and extra capacity in many, many things (say, lungs, neural system, arterial apparatus). *debt is the opposite of redundancy

Information is antifragile; it feeds more on attempts to harm it than it does on efforts to promote it.

Criticism, for a book, is a truthful, unfaked badge of attention, signaling that it is not boring; and boring is the only very bad thing for a book...Almost no scandal would hurt an artist or writer. *Jobs/professions fragile to reputational harm aren't worth having.

A midlevel bank employee with a mortgage would be fragile to the extreme. In fact he would be completely a prisoner of the value system that invites him to be corrupt to the core - because of his dependence on the annual vacation in Barbados.

Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort - a disease of civilization: make life longer and longer, while people are more and more sick. In a natural environment, people die without aging - or after a very short period of aging. For instance, some markers, such as blood pressure, that tend to worsen over time for moderns do not change over the life of hunter-gatherers until the very end.

Typically, the natural–the biological–is both antifragile and fragile, depending on the source (and the range) of variation. A human body can benefit from stressors (to get stronger), but only to a point.

"Machines: use it and lose it; organisms: use it or lose it." -Frano Barovic

Language acquisition: You pick up language best thanks to situational difficulty, from error to error, when you need to communicate under more or less straining circumstances...One learns new words, mostly by being forced to read the mind of the other person - suspending one's fear of making mistakes.

Touristification: systematic removal of uncertainty and randomness from things, trying to make maters highly predictable in their smallest details. All that for the sake of comfort, convenience, and efficiency.

If you are alive - something deep in your soul likes a certain measure of randomness and disorder.

Also consider how easy it is to skip a meal when the randomness in the environment causes us to do so.

Ancestral life had no homework, no boss, no civil servants, no academic grades, no conversation with the dean, no consultant with an MBA, no table of procedure...all life was random stimuli and nothing, good or bad, ever felt like work. Dangerous, yes, but boring, never.

An environment with variability (hence randomness) does not expose us to chronic stress injury, unlike human-designed systems. If you walk on uneven, not man-made terrain, no two steps will ever be identical - compare that to the randomness-free gym machine offering the exact opposite: forcing you into endless repetitions of the very same movement.

Much of modern life is a preventable chronic stress injury.

So organisms need to die for nature to be antifragile - nature is opportunistic, ruthless, and selfish.

If nature ran the economy, it would not continuously bail out its living members to make them live forever.

Further; my characterization of a loser is someone who, after making a mistake, doesn't introspect, doesn't exploit it, feels embarrassed and defensive rather than enriched with a new piece of information, and tries to explain why he made the mistake rather than moving on. These types often consider themselves the "victims" of some large plot, a bad boss, or bad weather.

He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once. And someone who has made plenty of errors - though never the same error more than one - is more reliable than someone who has never made any.

Buridan's Donkey Metaphor: A donkey equally famished and thirsty caught at an equal distance between food and water would unavoidably die of hunger and thirst. But he can be saved thanks to a random nudge one way or the other.

When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free. You can see here that absence of randomness equals guaranteed death.

Consider the life of the lion in the comfort and predictability of the Bronx Zoo (with Sunday afternoon visitors flocking to look at him in a combination of curiosity, awe, and pity) compared to that of his cousins in freedom. We, at some point, had free-range humans and free-range children before the advent of the golden period of the soccer mom.

If you want to accelerate someone's death, give him a personal doctor....access to data increases intervention, causing us to behave like the neurotic fellow.

It is almost impossible for someone rational, with a clear, uninfected mind, someone who is not drowning in data, to mistake a vital signal, one that matters for his survival, for noise - unless he is overanxious, oversensitive, and neurotic, hence distracted and confused by other messages. Significant signals have a way to reach you.

Our track record in figuring out significant rare events in politics and economics is not close to zero; it is zero.

Curiosity is antifragile, like an addiction, and is magnified by attempts to satisfy it - books have a secret mission and ability to multiply as everyone who has wall-to-wall bookshelves knows well.

A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion - in other words, the amount of downside he is exposed to.

What we learn from reading Seneca directly, rather than through the commentators, is a different story. Seneca's version of that Stoicism is antifragility from fate. No downside from Lady Fortuna, plenty of upside.

Seneca fathomed that possessions make us worry about downside, thus acting as punishment as we depend on them.

Seneca's practical method to counter such fragility was to go through mental exercises to write off possessions, so when losses occurred he would not feel the sting - a way to wrest one's freedom from circumstances.

Seen this way, Stoicism is about the domestication, not necessarily the elimination, of emotions. It is not about turning humans into vegetables. My idea of the modern Stoic sage is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.

Seneca also provides us a catalogue of social deeds: invest in good actions. Things can be taken away from us - not good deeds and acts of virtue.

Seneca said that wealth is the slave of the wise man and the master of the fool. Thus he broke a bit with the purported Stoic habit: he kept the upside.

This kind of sum I've called in my vernacular "fuck you money"–a sum large enough to get most, if not all, of the advantages of wealth (the most important one being independence and the ability to only occupy your mind with matters that interest you) but not its side effects, such as having to attend a black-tie charity event and being forced to listen to a polite exposition of the details of a marble-rich house renovation. The worst side effect of wealth is the social associations it forces on its victims, as people with big houses tend to end up socializing with other people with big houses.

Provided we have the right type of rigor, we need randomness, mess, adventures, uncertainty, self-discovery, near-traumatic episodes, all these things that make life worth living, compared to the structured, fake, and ineffective life on an empty-suit CEO with a preset schedule and alarm clock.

What we call diseases of civilization result from the attempt by humans to make life comfortable for ourselves against our own interest, since the comfortable is what fragilizes.

Another fooled-by-randomness-style mistake is to think that because life expectancy at birth used to be thirty until the last century, that people lived just thirty years. The distribution was massively skewed, with the bulk of deaths coming from birth and childhood mortality.

If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is nothing you can do that makes you small; if you don't take risks, there is nothing you can do that makes you grand, nothing. And when you take risks, insults by half-men (small men, those who don't risk anything) are similar to barks by non-human animals: you can't feel insulted by the bark of a dog.

Anything one needs to market heavily is necessarily either an inferior product or an evil one. And it is highly unethical to portray something in a more favorable light than it actually is.

If you ever have to choose between a mobster's promise and a civil servant's, go with the mobster. Any time. Institutions do not have a sense of honor, individuals do.