Books Finished in 2018

Books I read last year

Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill – This book will teach you to reprogram your subconscious mind. Very powerful. As skeptical as I am about a lot of the “science” he uses to explain the concept, I totally buy the idea that your thoughts can attract a certain kind of life to you. Maybe not magically, but through a million little things that you aren’t aware of. It strikes me as very important to get your head right and to get clear on your desires before you get too far in any endeavor. Great book, will continue to reread and study. Definitely worth owning. Could be one that changes my life.
The third Demon Cycle book by Philip V Brett – Quite the page turner. I read it in under two weeks, which is fast for me.
The Fourth Demon Cycle book by Philip V Brett – Read it back to back with the third one. Plan on reading the fifth one soon.
Unique Ability by Dan Sullivan (along with a few of his other books if I like it) I think it was fairly useful. I have a clearer view of what I’m good at having read it and done the worksheets. Probably this isn’t as powerful when you are in a work “vacuum” as opposed to a regular job. My Unique Ability: being able to look at a situation from several perspectives very quickly and intuitively, combine that with probabilistic thinking, and determine the questions to ask that will lead to the best result. To what end? So that I can better understand how systems work, and then share this knowledge with others.
Laws of Lifetime Growth by Dan Sullivan – The big thing it got me thinking about was not growing stagnant with age. He’s got lots of useful things, like “keep your future bigger than your past” that can keep you from getting stuck in your current situation. Inherently, I think growth means you’re doing something new, that transcends what you’re doing currently.
Lies of Locke Lamora – pretty good, but not amazing. I like the heist/rogue style, but the story advances either slowly or way too quickly.
Red Seas, Red Skies – pretty good, but not amazing. Similar in quality to the first book. Kind of want to finish the series with the third one, but it takes a long time to read these. Same critique with flow as the first book. At this point, I’m invested in hearing how the characters turn out in the end.
Republic of Thieves – best yet. Probably I was too harsh on the first couple, not realizing they are part of a longer series.
Trendfollowing by Michael Covel – pretty good, basic introduction to trendfollowing with insights from some of the most successful people around, but a little light on information. Seemed to repeat same claim over and over without going deep enough into the evidence to be interesting to me. Biggest piece of value to me was Appendix A, methodology for Trendfollowing of equities. In my experience, this concept works fairly well (I have been studying it outside this book for a while too via simulations, etc). ATH seems to work. And ATR was a useful tidbit to add as I refine where to set stop losses. Would recommend that interested readers instead check out Jack Schwager’s Market Wizards books.
CFP books – Good knowledge, but probably not going to make it to Oprah’s book club any time soon.
The Lean Startup – Pretty good. Foundational reading for anyone looking at starting a business. My biggest takeaway might seem obvious, but the biggest (or only-est) reason businesses fail is that they run out of money. My own reflections and added thoughts? Money is often not the limiting resource, creativity is. With creativity and patience, you can make invested capital go much further and greatly improve your chances of success. There are many businesses out there, all of varying quality. What makes some of them the sort of companies that Warren Buffett will buy and brag about to his investors, while many others fall short? It isn’t about the amount of money invested, but the experience and skill of their operators and founders.
Market Wizards by Jack Schwager – These are great books. Takeaways: play smaller when you’re losing. Beware complacency when you’re winning. Keeps losses small, and let winners grow big. Trend generally works better than most other systems. Success is following your system and being disciplined, not necessarily making money. You’ll have winning periods and losing periods; without discipline, you’ll never make it through losing periods with your system and psychology intact.
Let My People Go Surfing – Decent book. I really like the focus on the company serving a(n) (environmental) mission, and seeing how that flowed through to produce great results (employee motivation and loyalty, respected brand, minimal scandals, lower costs) for other areas of the company. He seems a lot more pessimistic on the environment than I think an entrepreneur has a right to be, as if he undervalues human ingenuity. His company is evidence that business is getting cleaner, with more integrity, and that the rewards for participating in this trend are growing constantly.
StrengthsFinder 2.0 – I went online and did the quiz that comes with the book. It made a lot of sense and highlighted aspects of myself that I otherwise would take for granted. Note to self: start charging people for my time and be a little aggressive about it. Just because I like doing something doesn’t mean I should do it for free.
Never Split the Difference: Negotiating Like Your Life Depended Upon It. Best book I’ve read all year. Awesome insights based in an empathetic (but not weak-handed!) approach to solution-finding. Key points: ask how and what questions (how can I do that?), mirror back to them what they have said, get them to say “that’s right!”, treat the entire interaction as an information-gathering process, get them to say “no” until you find out what they really want, decline diplomatically “I’m sorry, you’ve been more than generous but….”, counter with specific numbers, offer a range of acceptable prices with your desired number at the low end, haggle in steps of decreasing size, gather lots of information up front, inflect voice downward when making non-negotiable statement, invite the other side to create solutions for you through questions.
My Voice Will Go With You by Milton Erickson – You don’t need to believe in hypnotherapy to appreciate the bizarre behavior of the unconscious mind, and the ways it can be interrupted and redirected towards more desirable behavior. The book is a collection of short stories where Erickson essentially tricks his subjects’ brains into ditching bad behaviors and embracing new ones. He frequently reframes the central tensions in a person’s mind so that their old behavior becomes unattractive to them. It’s not always obvious what’s going on, although distraction and interruption are the approaches that stood out most to me. I’d skip the italicized annotations. They aren’t very entertaining or insightful.
Crossing the Chasm by George Moore – really good. Validated rather than surprised. Great to have the boost to my confidence. I feel like the lessons here are so absorbed into the ether that they are not as surprising or novel. This is a very good thing though when it comes to improving the ability of our innovators to change the world. I think the message of the book can be distilled down to, “niche down to whoever wants your stuff most. Then, hunt bigger and bigger elephants focusing always on the ones who want it most.”
It’s Not About the Coffee by Howard Behar. Written by one of the longtime leaders of Starbucks, it’s a fun read with good lessons about how orienting an company towards its employees can produce great results. Good case for clarity and having clearly established values, a north star. Often, these things are difficult to do in the short run, but are impossible to replicate in the long run.
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck – Excellent, possibly life-changing! You only have so many fucks to give so use them wisely. If you give a fuck about everything, it’s impossible to give a meaningful fuck about any thing. Beyond that (which was really just the first part of the book), he talks about the Inverse Relationship of Suffering, which says that you suffer more by trying to avoid suffering. And you can grow strong by embracing some suffering. The idea that we are supposed to be happy all the time makes us unhappy, pursuing happiness prevents us from catching it. Biggest takeaway is this: people are pretty similar in what they want from life (good home, financial security, good family, good job), but they are relatively unique in the manner of suffering they will endure to get it. Likewise, people tend to be wired to better endure one form of suffering over others. I can think of a few forms of suffering that I actually enjoy to an extent, that life would be boring without: writing, studying finance, applying finance, making high impact decisions with high uncertainty, the chaos and quiet desperation of starting a business…. The price of suffering still has to be paid though. You have to work beyond when it’s comfortable to grow, and you have to do work you don’t want to do. That’s life. Embrace it for the sake of paying the price whenever you can.
The Wind Up Bird Chronicle by Harumi Murakami. Great fiction, a slower read because I wanted to savor it. Gets a little slow towards the 70% mark, but finishes well. Amazing to me because of what the writing did for my thinking, attitude, and my own writing. Reflective, honest, style bordering on mundane, but phrased in such a way as to seem dreamlike. I actually dreamt every night I read this book before bed. The feeling it captures is beautiful. There’s a sense of uncertain possibility, of knowing what “not” to be or to do in life yet not knowing what “to” do. Youth in its essence. Very much what I needed at the time I read it. The thing that stuck with me was his reflection on different times in life. Sometimes the thing to do is nothing. To sit, to think, to reflect. To not strive and to let the world come to you. To save energy and your identity for when you need it rather than trying to guess what you are supposed to do. I feel like I have gone through periods of flinging everything against the wall to see what will stick, of frantically trying many things rather than finding one true thing. But sometimes you need to do nothing. Then, when called, act with confidence and energy. This book helped awaken and feed a sense of spirituality in me, and reminded me that that is an aspect of being that I want in life.
Seven Stages of Money Maturity by George Kinder. Another really solid book, I’m on a roll I guess. Money, not surprisingly, is tied up in many emotional issues. Takeaways: if you have a feeling, embrace it and feel it head on. Ignoring it or distracting yourself away from it leads only to more pain later. Though it seems like embracing the feeling would be more painful, after an initial twinge, you feel better and feel growth. A great read that makes you want to responsibility for yourself and situation.
The Overtaxed Investor by Phil DeMuth – Great read, cheesy sarcastic style kept things fun (as if saving money on taxes wasn’t fun enough!). Basically, while you can’t control investment returns, you can do a lot to minimize the amount you pay in taxes every year. To boil it down to four basic concepts: 1) Keep your growth in tax-free vehicles like retirement accounts (not annuities, as the tax benefits are overwhelmed by the burden of fees). 2) Pay taxes in years when your bracket is relatively low, rather than get caught with a larger bill down the road. This includes harvesting gains, either paying the lower rate, or offsetting them with losses. 3) With taxable money, make sure dividends and other income do not exceed your non-discretionary cash needs. Use a diverse portfolio of zero-dividend/low-yield stocks to defer gains, harvest losses, and get the favorable long term capital gains rates. Don’t hold mutual funds. ETFs are okay. 4) With estate planning, maximize your step-up in basis, and pass taxes to heirs selectively according to what is optimal for their tax situation.
Jurassic Park – Michelle and I read this together and it was really nice. Cool experience to share.
Fellowship of the Ring – Always good. For some reason I’m always pulled to read this in the fall. Likewise with wanting to play DnD.
For Every Problem There Is a Spiritual Solution by Wayne Dyer – Pretty spectacular, I’d recommend it to anyone with only minor reservations. One thing that bugged me, and kind of undermined the power of what he was saying is when he tried to pull in “proof” from science (quantum mechanics, etc). I felt like what he was saying stood on its own two feet, so it bugged me that he felt the need to reach for support from this area. Many, many positive things here though. The most powerful and enduring for me so far is to focus on what you want more of. Focus on a problem, and that problem will grow in your mind and become harder and harder to beat. But if you focus on what you want, and put yourself in that headspace, you’ll suddenly find yourself surrounded by options and capabilities. It’s like opening your eyes after they’ve been closed for a long time. Highly recommended for anyone starting a spiritual journey.
The Two Towers- another LOTR book. But great! Not going to read Return of the King because I’ve got a lot of other things to read.
The Upside of Stress by Kelly McGonigal – fantastic! One of the few books that can permanently improve the course of your life. Basically the core idea is that stress is only bad if you believe that it is bad, and that actually, there is a huge body of evidence that stress linked with many improvements in your life. Not only does stress correlate with greater meaning in people’s lives, but is linked to specific physiological changes such as greater neural growth, better learning, and faster recovery from stressful events. Stress is not a plague to be avoided, but a veritable super power! The whole time I was reading it, I kept thinking of The Super Soldier Serum that turned Steve Rogers into Captain America.
Man’s Search For Meaning by Victor Frankl – Biographical account of a Jewish psychiatrist’s experience in a WWII concentration camp (might have been Auschwitz). The first part of the book was stomach-turning, just due to the sheer cruelty with which humans can treat one another. Lesson here being that all humans have that same capacity for evil, not just Nazi prison guards. Then he talks about how he coped with the experience, as well as his observations on the nature of suffering and meaning. Suffering is more bearable when we can assign meaning to it, even if that assignment is irrational. Meaning comes from living for other people. At many points, Frankl seems to be in situations where he could step aside, save his energy, and not help others, but he does so anyway. Not because he’s just that good of a guy, but because it lets him retain a sense of personal value. Very heavy. Very worthwhile.
Wise Investing Made Simple by Larry Swedroe – lame. Expected better from Swedroe than a generic overview of asset classes and investing platitudes. Don’t sell at the bottom, focus on the long term, stocks build wealth, bonds reduce short term uncertainty, yada yada yada. Waste of time.
The Inner Game of Tennis – Some people say this is a book about life, but I mostly saw tennis. Sure, there’s some good stuff about not being too hard on yourself, on valuing competition and adversity for the sake of personal growth, especially in the final chapters. The criticizing Self 1 and intuitive Self 2 stuff was helpful to me, because I want to live more of life as Self 2, and believe that Self 2 is who I really am anyway. Self 1 is just ego. So that made it a worthwhile read.
The War of Art – Fantastic. Would definitely recommend to anyone in a creative endeavor because Stephen Pressfield GETS IT! Essentially, the biggest failure of creatives is to take responsibility for their productivity. You have to do the work. You can’t play the victim. You have to channel stress and suffering into creativity. The “resistance” (like stress) is omnipresent, but that really only means you’re doing something worthwhile. It doesn’t do any good to want to try to do something. You have to do something. It is easy (but unproductive) to find ways of avoiding this confrontation (whether with distractions, excuses, negative thoughts, substance abuse…).

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