Book Worm

In today’s world, we’re all designers. Whether it’s creating a powerpoint presentation, designing a website for your startup, creating a flyer for your kid’s school event or even taking a decision about your home interiors — we’re always dealing with design problems.

Most people believe that design skills are reserved for the creative lot — those who have a talent for art. But it’s not commonly known that a lot of aspects of design are actually rule-based. There’s a science to it; a formula if you will. And one doesn’t need to have an “eye” for design. Knowing the rules is good enough for us civilians.

Let me give you a few examples to make it more concrete what I mean by rules.

The L-shaped Layout

If you talk to landscape designers, they will tell you that it’s better to put three of the same kind of vertical structures — they could be pillars or trees — in your land, rather than four. Odd numbers just look better in that context. Now, why is it so is a matter of deeper investigation of human perception, but if you know this rule, you can instantly become an above average designer.
[Read more…] about Bookworm: Universal Principles of Design

If you’ve been a long time reader of Value Investing Almanack, you’d have guessed that I am a big fan of Scott Adams. 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.

I had written about this book in December 2015 issue of VIA. However, some books are so good that they deserved to be read multiple times. This book falls in the category of those “must re-reads.” Don’t let the slipshod title fool you. I can vouch for the tremendous utility of Scott’s methods.
[Read more…] about Bookworm: Revisiting How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big

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.
[Read more…] about Bookworm: Revisiting Sapiens

Longtime readers of Value Investing Almanack know that I am a huge fan of Yuval Harari’s work. His first book, Sapiens, turned my world upside down. Technically, it was a book on human history but the insights were anything but ancient. It was jaw dropping from the first word to the last. Sapiens ranks among the five best books that I have read, ever!

His second book Homo Deus was equally gripping and lived up to the expectations created by his first masterpiece Sapiens. In Sapiens, Harari explained how homo sapiens came to be the planet’s dominant species. Homo Deus was a historian’s perspective of what the future could look like for humans.

The first and the second book covering the past and the future respectively, Harari’s reader were waiting to hear his views on the present state of the world. Fortunately, the wait wasn’t long. In his latest book — 21 Lessons for the 21st Century — Harari confronts today’s 21 big questions dedicating one chapter to each of those questions.
[Read more…] about Bookworm: 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

Jason Zweig, a WSJ columnist, is famous for writing the commentary for the most popular edition of the investment classic — The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham. Warren Buffett claims that when he read Graham’s book in 1949, it changed his life forever.

With his unique writing style, Zweig made Graham’s book doubly valuable by bringing in the perspectives from today’s market. In his commentary, Zweig drew parallels between Graham’s examples and today’s financial headlines, which gives readers a deeper understanding of Graham’s principles in the modern context. Zweig is a history buff and his genius is in bringing in historical perspectives on today’s seemingly important financial news.

In Sept 2016 issue of VIA, I had written about Jason Zweig’s other book Your Money Your Brain which was based on insights from the field of behavioural finance. The one I am going to talk about in this edition of Book Worm is Zweig’s latest piece of artful work — The Devil’s Financial Dictionary.
[Read more…] about Bookworm: The Devil’s Financial Dictionary By Jason Zweig