Bookworm: Revisiting Sapiens

Bruce Lee once said, “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”

If I had to reframe Bruce Lee’s quote in the context of reading books, I would say, “I fear not the man who has read many books, but I fear the man who has read one good book many times.”

A good book gets better at the second reading, writes Nassim Taleb, “a great book at the third. Any book not worth rereading isn’t worth reading.”

Books-read is just a vanity metric, claims Naval Ravikant, a silicon valley entrepreneur, “if you read one book a year that changes your life, that’s all it takes.”

So to follow the advice of Bruce Lee, Nassim Taleb, and Naval Ravikant, we are going to review a book which we’ve discussed in the past — Sapiens. The author — Yuval Noah Harari — a history professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has produced a breathtaking piece of work. I had shared a few ideas from this book in Nov 2016 issue of Value Investing Almanack. In this post, let me discuss a few more insights from Yuval Harari’s masterpiece.

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