Books 2023

Every morning, get up, make coffee, and read. It takes an hour a day on average to get through 40+ books a year.

Unique ideas or luck are negligible when you increase the considered time horizon. To invest means to do what is safe and sure to produce a satisfactory return. Some strategies are like this by definition. Example: sticking to an exercise routine for at least a year. Others require a lot of learning through experimentation. Example: starting a profitable business.

One sure way to never have enough is not to recognise the external sources of your wants.

There are things we all learn naturally, things that we get better at through apparently unrelated practice, and things to accept our minds will never embrace.

Stories structure our insights about reality. The appealing ones fit into those we have heard before. Mistakes in assumptions about the lives of others scale exponentially in the stories we tell to explain their behaviour. Imagine never having taken access to running water as a given.

You stick to your strategies expecting specific outcomes. If the strategies work now, it may not be because of your input and so they may not work in the future. Then, it is often more difficult to change course than to continue.

People will never forget how you made them feel. Expressing your expectations for others by framing them with your feelings is more productive than rational explanations. Productivity is also a feeling, the opposite of the overload of trying to remember too many things. Righting down reduces stress. Feeling motivated comes from progress, that is only after you get started.

Not being able to sit silently in a room for 30 minutes is a source of a lot of problems. Appreciate the value of not doing certain things. Almost no one needs to develop their brand online. Talking about your plans chips away from the drive to fulfil them.

Inaction and acceptance are the way: when someone talks to you about their problems; when you get sick and it is nothing serious; when you get sick and you are going to die.

Chess and investing theory share the concept of positional play. It means seeking to put yourself in a situation where you are at your best and will benefit from whatever happens next. At work, you are best positioned if your nature is beneficial to the role you are in. In software, the best designs make future changes easy. This simple principle could not be further from easy.