To learn. To teach. To stay up to date. To wonder. To be interesting. To inspire. To be inspired. To invest. To get deeper into a topic. To escape (without moving your feet!) .To laugh. To get perspective.
Reading is a frequently neglected activity that is very important in these fast-moving times. My love affair with books started when I was 7. As a single child, novels and news magazines were my best friends and I used to devour Time and Newsweek by the time I was 12. My mom, who was a college professor, always encouraged me to read and we’d talk over dinner of what I’d read that day. Now I read 30-40 books every year, I read daily and I always carry books with me; when flying and even while climbing mountains. Something magical happens when you read a great book. Don’t you agree?
Which is why I will keep posting book recommendations here. I hope they spark something in you!
I am a sucker for big picture works that connect the dots throughout history and Ridley is brilliant at this.
TEOE has a breathtaking sweep- from education to morals to economics to law to tech- and the key theme is that top down is far less common than bottom up.
So yes, I learnt very little that was new, or valuable & it was barely entertaining.
You can only plough through so much sleaze, through so many vaguely familiar and nauseating stories of constant thieving, hookers, super yachts, offshore… Read More.
A collection of essays by the famous duo.
It’s a whirlwind summary of recorded human history in 101 pages (hence the RoI is huge!). Each essay connects history with one key theme (the earth, biology, race, character, morals, religion, economics, socialism, government and war).
I always approach autobiographies with caution. Many of these are a waste of time, a dreary mx of bland narration of events, blatant self-promotion, justification for screwups and a dash of vendetta. So, I held off buying Shoe Dog for the longest time. But this turned out to be an outlier.
Read MoreI half expected this to be an essay by fear mongers, but I was blown away by how rigorously researched & compelling this book was.
Most worry about overpopulation. The authors dive deep into the current & future trends of some population hotspots- India, China, Russia, Japan, Brazil & sub-Saharan Africa.
What a revelation!
It isn’t about correlations or CAPM or DCF models. There is no math or formulae.
Instead, it’s an invaluable tutorial about REALITY, about what happens in your head when you (mis) manage your finances. It’s what you’ll NEVER learn in college or in the CFA program (they should include it in the curriculum).
Gilbert’s thesis is about why human beings are forever wrongly predicting what will make them happy. Because of errors our brains tend to make, we don't want the things that would make us happy — and the things that we want won't make us happy.
Read MoreBenjamin Hardy draws on research to kill the popular misconception that personality--a person's consistent attitudes and behaviors--is innate and unchanging.
Hardy’s idea is to set people free from the limiting belief that our "true selves" are to be discovered. He shows how we can intentionally create our desired selves and achieve amazing goals instead. He offers practical advice for personal reinvention.
Read MoreStrategy professor and management consultant Olivier Sibony draws on dozens of engaging case studies to show how cognitive biases routinely lead all of us into nine common decision-making traps.
But this book is different because instead of just serving up the same old “biases” that contaminate decision making, Sibony says the best way to avoid the screwups of cognitive bias is to design a “decision-making architecture” that uses everyone’s smarts to make the best decisions. He also provides 40 practical ways for doing so.
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In the fast lane of work today, people spend far more time on computer keyboards, smartphones, presentations and conference calls than in actual face-to-face communication. In this increasingly unnatural and complex environment, emotional intelligence is more important than ever before. This handy book is filled with invaluable insights and practical tips that can potentially transform you as a person and as a professional.
The book is an essential part of my daily routine. These days I read so much that I feel I must a) keep some record and b) share my findings with the world. Because some books are simply spectacular and unforgettable.
In this blog post, I write on all the books I’ve read and reviewed from 1 Jan 2020 to 31 Dec 2020and the three books I liked the most.
Read MoreTeenage cliques, jihadist cells, army units, Arab Spring protesters, polar expeditions, and football hooligans.
On the face of it, each of these groups might seem exceptional, but the forces that bind and drive them can affect us all. In recent decades, psychologists have uncovered how and why our innate socialness holds huge sway over how we think and act, propelling us to both high achievement and unthinking cruelty.
We are beholden to our peers, even when we think we’re calling the shots. This is the power of others.
Read MoreLife is hectic.
We cannot analyze every decision we need to make. So we depend on shortcuts like "if everybody thinks it's good, then it must be good". Those shortcuts are quite helpful and most of the time they work.
But they are occasionally exploited. This book is about how people use our mental shortcuts to get us to say "YES". You'll learn the six universal principles, how to use them to become a skilled persuader—and how to defend yourself against them.
Read MoreTaleb explores the idea of disincentivizing undesirable behavior. His solution is to enable decision makers who currently have only upside (asymmetry) to be more accountable by exposing them to the negative consequences of their actions as well (symmetry). Hence, he asks for asymmetry to be replaced with symmetry.
Skin in the Game is his fifth book. The Black Swan, a smashing success praised for its prophetic theme and huge relevance, looked – just before the financial crash of 2007 – at low probability, high-impact events.
Read MoreThis is an exploration of the assumptions and goof ups we make when dealing with people we don’t know.
It’s a long but fascinating journey, stopping off at prewar appeasement, pedophilia, espionage, the TV show Friends, the Amanda Knox and Bernie Madoff cases, suicide and Sylvia Plath, torture and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, before coming to the conclusion.
Read MoreWhen you hear about Silicon Valley’s huge success stories — Intel, Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, you inevitably hear the names of founders and key executives — Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos, Marisa Mayer, or Sheryl Sandberg. Unless you dig deep, you won’t hear the name Bill Campbell. He helped to build some of Silicon Valley’s greatest companies—including Google, Apple, and Intuit—and to create over a trillion dollars in market value.
Read MoreThe economist Robert Skidelsky wrote that fears of technological unemployment were not so much wrong as premature: “Sooner or later, we will run out of jobs.” The title of Daniel Susskind’s book, therefore, is like a reiteration. Susskind has come up with an explainer rather than a polemic, written in the relentlessly reasonable tone of a clever, sensible man telling you what’s what. Susskind’s thesis — that we are heading towards a world in which human work will become obsolete — is built on the idea that most of the conventional notions about AI learning have been wrong.
Read MoreWhen I was the MD of a small training company, there were two standing orders on the use of Smartphones. One was that no one should bring their phones into a meeting and if they did, they couldn’t check it while the meeting was in progress.
The second was that no student should check their pones during class (they had breaks) and if they did, I would call them out.
The reason was simple. Getting distracted like this is not just insulting to your colleagues/trainer, it’s also hugely unproductive.
Read MoreOne belief that has united most people is the assumption that humans are bad. It's a notion that drives newspaper headlines and guides the laws that shape our lives. From Machiavelli to Hobbes, Freud to Pinker, the roots of this belief have sunk deep. Human beings, we're taught, are by nature selfish. But what if it isn't true? Rutger Bregman provides a new perspective on the past 200,000 years of human history, setting out to prove that we are hardwired for kindness, geared toward cooperation rather than competition, and more inclined to trust rather than distrust one another. He states that this instinct has a firm evolutionary basis going back to the beginning of Homo sapiens.
Read MoreCanadian clinical psychologist Jordan B Peterson has, in recent years, become an internet celebrity, producing a slew of videos and interviews on all manner of political and social topics. And while his views have marginalized him within the academic community, they have bolstered his reputation in conservative circles and among millions of young men and women.
12 Rules for Life is his long and often peculiar foray into the self-help genre. It is a book that combines sensible advice obtained from his clinical practice with inspirational anecdotes from his personal life,
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