Books

I love small books. I love short books. To the point. I always appreciated John Cleeses humour, and this book – even though its not going into much detail – shows a little bit of his thinking process around creativity.

Especially the part regarding hare brain, tortoise mind struck a cord with me. That an important part of creativity seems to be ones ability to be comfortable with things being unsettled for long enough to find creative solutions.

Great and light read. No single ground-breaking thoughts, but a very cohesive and interesting read. Easy to read, in the style of M. Gladwell, R. Holiday etc.

Great, light read on general life wisdom from Naval. Mostly no-fuss stupidly obvious tips, but nonetheless very straightforward and on point.

Great and light read. Kind of a bummer with certain sections that I had already read in blog form before (three sides to risk especially), but otherwise a very fun and engaging read.

Some bits:

As financial advisor Carl Richards says, “Risk is what’s left over after you think you’ve thought of everything.”

"Montesquieu wrote 275 years ago, “If you only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.”"

"What’s your secret to living a happy life?” ninety-eight-year-old Charlie Munger replied: The first rule of a happy life is low expectations. If you have unrealistic expectations you’re going to be miserable your whole life. You want to have reasonable expectations and take life’s results, good and bad, as they happen with a certain amount of stoicism."

"The key thing is that unique minds have to be accepted as a full package, because the things they do well and that we admire cannot be separated from the things we wouldn’t want for ourselves or we look down upon."

"The valuation of every company is simply a number from today multiplied by a story about tomorrow."

"Some of the most important questions to ask yourself are: Who has the right answer, but I ignore because they’re inarticulate? And what do I believe is true but is actually just good marketing?"

Jeff Bezos once said, “The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There’s something wrong with the way you are measuring it.”

I started this book a few years ago, but only got 30% in or so before I gave up.

It was too complicated for me then, but this time around I was more ready for its content.

Some bits:

“With few exceptions, when a manager with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for poor fundamental economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.”

"It’s far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price."

"One habit of Warren’s that I admire is that he keeps his schedule free of meetings. He’s good at saying no to things. He knows what he likes to do—and what he does, he does unbelievably well. He likes to sit in his office and read and think."

"Warren likes to say that he wants to give his children enough money for them to do anything but not enough for them to do nothing."

"This is the one thing I can never understand. To refer to a personal taste of mine, I’m going to buy hamburgers the rest of my life. When hamburgers go down in price, we sing the “Hallelujah Chorus” in the Buffett household. When hamburgers go up, we weep. For most people, it’s the same way with everything in life they will be buying—except stocks. When stocks go down and you can get more for your money, people don’t like them anymore."

Better than expected. Somehow I expected it to fall short of "Can't Hurt Me", but I was pleasantly surprised.

Some things that I found interesting and novel was the idea of recording yourself, and listening back to it - as an alternative note-taking method.

Partly very good and of course a very inspiring and engaging story. Overall though I found it suffered from overly verbose and difficult to read vocabulary. I guess my English is not good enough to fully enjoy a book of this vocabulary.

Fairly easy and enjoyable read, but not all the rage I feel people sell it as.