Book Worm

Dilbert’s creator tells you that passion is overrated and luck can be manipulated. In his signature style, humourous and incisive, Adams delivers loads of practical ideas to attract the attention of lady fortuna.

If you don’t know who Scott Adams is, odds are high that you would give a pass to a book with such a cheesy and hackneyed title. But if you did that it would be a big mistake. Scott’s book is one of my all-time personal favorites and I can vouch for the tremendous utility of his methods.

For the uninitiated, Scott Adams is the creator of Dilbert, one of the most popular and widely distributed comic strips of the past century. He has been a full-time cartoonist since 1995, after sixteen years as a technology worker for companies like Crocker National Bank and Pacific Bell. Apart from being a cartoonist, he has written many bestselling books and is sought after speaker in corporate circles.

The title of the book is intriguing and Scott claims that he has at least failed in 36 different businesses. But in the process of failing he kept accumulating useful knowledge and skills about business, marketing, product, customers etc.
[Read more…] about BookWorm: How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big

Peter Thiel is the guy who identified the multi-billion dollar businesses like Paypal, Facebook, LinkedIn and Palantir very early and invested in them. The best way to predict the future is to create it. Peter knows that for sure and in his book he reveals the secrets.

The most interesting thing about future is that it’s unpredictable. Anybody who claims that he or she can predict the future is either lying or crazy, possibly both.

However, there’s still a way in which a handful of people have ended up not only predicting the future but benefitting from it enormously and creating disproportionate amount of wealth in the process. These are the people who believe – “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”

The problem is that these people work secretly and rarely come out in public to claim their share of fame. But once in a while, you see a dark horse coming out and willing to share his or her thought process.

Peter Thiel is one such dark horse who was relatively unknown outside the group of selective people in Silicon Valley. In case you don’t know about Peter Thiel, he was the founder of PayPal (with Elon Musk) and an early stage investor in Facebook, LinkedIn and SpaceX. He is one guy who has been there, done that. Thiel’s ideas are must read for every entrepreneur.

In this post, I’ll share some big ideas I learned from Thiel’s book Zero to One. The book is based on his lectures at Stanford University. One of his students, Blake Masters, made lecture notes and published it. The notes became instant hit on the internet and soon Masters got an opportunity to co-author ‘Zero to One’ with Peter Thiel.

In just few years, Blake Masters went from being Peter Thiel’s student to co-author. I call this strategy, exposing yourself to positive black swan or in simple words, giving luck a chance to find you. But I’ll save that discussion for some other day.

Let’s talk about the book.

Nassim Taleb says in his endorsement of this book – “If a risk taker writes a book, read it. If it is Peter Thiel, read it twice. In fact, read it thrice to be safe.”
[Read more…] about BookWorm: Zero To One

An overview of one of the best books about the mental model of Deliberate Practice. If you want to become a better reader and thinker, this is a must read.

“I don’t count my situps, I only start counting when it starts hurting, when I feel pain, that’s when I start counting, because that’s when it really counts.”

I think you can guess who must have said this. The confidence and attitude oozing out of this sentence says that it could be none other than the greatest pugilist that the world has ever seen in the history of boxing – Muhammad Ali.

Ali began training at the age of 12 and won the world championship when he was 22 years old. A child prodigy, born with a gift for throwing lightning fast punches. But was he really born wearing boxing gloves and a knack for knocking people out? Of course not.

Multiple researches have established that talent is determined far less by our genes and far more by our actions: specifically the combination of intensive practice and motivation that produces brain growth.

Ali earned his talent by sweating out countless hours, practicing each and every move, working on his stamina and training his mind. He probably raked in more than ten thousand hours of practice much before he was 22.

The rule of ‘ten thousand hours’, a scientific finding, says that all world-class experts in every field have spent a minimum of ten thousand hours intensively practicing their craft. That’s how a talent is built. This 10,000 hour heuristics was made popular by Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers.

So, does it mean anybody who spends ten thousand hours doing something will become a world class expert in that activity? Of course not. There is more to the rule than the number 10,000. It’s Deliberate Practice which holds the key to developing expert level skills.

Deliberate Practice is defined as the form of learning which fuses the notion of attentive repetition with the willingness to operate on the edge of your ability, aiming for targets that are just out of reach. That’s what Muhammad Ali meant when he said – “I don’t count my sit-ups. I only start counting when it starts hurting, when I feel the pain…”

The idea is that development of skill is nothing but brain development. With quality practice, brain builds new and stronger neural pathways that result in dexterity in the skill.

Most of the professional sports people and performers have access to cutting edge techniques for harnessing Deliberate Practice, but majority of us don’t really have that luxury. In fact, how many of us really want to competeand perform at the world class expert level? I guess not many.
[Read more…] about BookWorm: The Little Book of Talent

Pat Dorsey’s book is one of the most important text that you can read to untangle the puzzle of moat and competitive advantages.

This is the continuation of our book review which we started in the special report last month. I hope the first part of this review piqued enough interest in you to start reading the book.

This is an extremely rich book, insight-wise, and it took me many weeks to absorb the content.

One of the key distinction that one needs to understand is that organic entities are intrinsically antifragile, while artificial creations are at best robust and likely fragile. Most of the man made things especially mechanical ones are subject to wear and tear and horribly fragile in long term. However, some of the intangible creations of man like ideas, technologies, and businesses exhibit antifragility.

For that matter, if you can find an antifragile business you would be done for life! Let me know if you stumble upon such business model, except of course Berkshire Hathaway 🙂
[Read more…] about BookWorm: Antifragile – Part 2

Pat Dorsey’s book is one of the most important text that you can read to untangle the puzzle of moat and competitive advantages.

Warren Buffett, in his 1987 letter to shareholders, while talking about GEICO, gave a new meaning to the word ‘Moat’. He wrote –

“The difference between GEICO’s costs and those of its competitors is a kind of moat that protects a valued and much-sought-after business castle…He [Bill Snyder, chairman of GEICO] continually widens the moat by driving down costs still more, there by defending and strengthening the economic franchise.”

Moat is a metaphor for companies having durable competitive advantage. Pat Dorsey, in this wonderful book The Little Book That Builds Wealth, explains –

“There are lot of ways to make money in the stock market. You can play the Wall Street game, keep a sharp eye on trends, and try to guess which companies will beat earnings estimates each quarter, but you’ll face quite a lot of competition.

You can buy strong stocks with bullish chart patterns or superfast growth, but you’ll run the risk that no buyers will emerge to take the shares off your hands at a higher price. You can buy dirt-cheap stocks with little regard for the quality of the underlying business, but you’ll have to balance the outsize returns in the stocks that bounce back with the losses in those that fade from existence.

Or you can simply buy wonderful companies at reasonable prices, and let those companies compound cash over long periods of time. Surprisingly, there aren’t all that many money managers who follow this strategy, even though it’s the one used by some of the world’s most successful investors. (Warren Buffett is the best-known.)”
[Read more…] about BookWorm: The Little Book that Builds Wealth