About twice a year, I do a recap of the books I've recommended in the newsletter. Here's the last one. There are many reason why you should read more in long form formats. It's an enjoyable past time that stimulates the imagination — I'm a huge fan of mystery novels, so many talented authors in that genre.
From gaining access to new ideas and the experience of other people to improving understanding and connecting to existing knowledge, when we set aside time to learn and reflect, we gain in mental flexibility and ability to communicate. Polymathics, or being well read — and practiced — in more domains helps us build better judgement in all areas.
All reading is both short- and long-term.
To unlock value in the short term, interact with the book, write in the margins, summarize chapters, build on the content with your observations and references. Some chapters may require more analysis, others may inspire a second reading.
To unlock long-term value, think of each book as a building block, connected to other bodies of knowledge through the references, biography, and notes in the back. Where would the book fit in your physical and metaphorical library? What's the next building block?
Books worth reading
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Skin in the Game. The phrase “skin in the game” is one we have often heard but rarely stopped to truly dissect. It is the backbone of risk management, but it’s also an astonishingly rich worldview that, as Taleb shows in this book, applies to all aspects of our lives.
“Never trust anyone who doesn’t have skin in the game. Without it, fools and crooks will benefit, and their mistakes will never come back to haunt them.”
Some insights:
- Having exposure to the real world, with upside and downside, is the best (often the only) way to learn.
- Learning is rooted in repetition and convexity, reading one book twice is often more useful than two books once.
- Freedom entails risks, real skin in the game. Freedom is never free.
- Data does not imply rigor.
- Survival comes first, truth, understanding, and science later.
- How often you forecast correctly is not so important. What matters more is which outcomes you can forecast correctly. The payoffs matter more.
If you're curious about some of the themes in the book, this podcast between Russell Roberts and Taleb is a pretty good summary.
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Tribal Knowledge is straight from the work of an insider. The book is an immersive account of how Starbucks changed the world—not by discovering the potion to magic branding dust—but by passionately focusing on the smallest of details of the customer experience. Profit is a by-product and happens as a direct result of doing things right, and doing the right things.
A bonus idea to focus this conversation was Why Elon Musk's "People as Vectors" Analogy Resonates. Thinking about the word ‘alignment’ in Italian. Convergenza means there’s a slight deviation toward each other — e.g., tires moving the car in the same direction. A relative position vs. totally parallel. As with vision, both eyes converging to a point ahead.
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How we manage our identity needs to take into consideration the human side, our story. The truth is it looks more like tacking than pivoting. Herminia Ibarra has been asking better questions on personal change and is offering a path to making it more human with Working Identity. (the case studies are mostly European.)
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I know I have a hard time with this, but the book says success is doing a half dozen things really well, repeated five thousand times. Consistency is something we know matters to get momentum. But the idea that we don't need more knowledge, just new plan of action is important.
Another important point is that the first step toward change is awareness. The best way to become aware is to measure. Writing it all down is key.
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We misidentify taking with making, and have lost sight of what value really means. This is the powerful premise of a book not out in the U.S. yet, but worth considering. The Value of Everything. Mariana Mazzucato says we need to rethink where wealth comes from:
“While wealth is created through a collective effort, the massive imbalance in the distribution of the gains from economic growth has often been more the result of wealth extraction, whose potential scale globalization has greatly magnified. [...]
I will argue that the way the word ‘value’ is used in modern economics has made it easier for value-extracting activities to masquerade as value-creating activities. And in the process rents (unearned income) get confused with profits (earned income); inequality rises, and investment in the real economy falls.What’s more, if we cannot differentiate value creation from value extraction, it becomes nearly impossible to reward the former over the latter. If the goal is to produce growth that is more innovation-led (smart growth), more inclusive and more sustainable, we need a better understanding of value to steer us.”
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We live in a world that venerates the new, bright, and shiny. Many of us are left feeling invisible, undervalued, and threatened by 'digital natives' (perception is reality). Wisdom@Work is an argument of experience making a comeback.
Because at a time when power is shifting younger, companies are finally waking up to the value of the humility, emotional intelligence, and wisdom that come with age. While digital skills have only the shelf life of the latest fad or gadget, the human skills that mid-career workers possess — like good judgment, specialized knowledge, and the ability to collaborate and coach — never expire.