Archive

This is a follow-up to 🏫 Reading Academy for Everyone.

While starting out, monthly goals can be more effective than annual ones. With this in mind, we’re starting monthly reading challenges at Reademy.

We have 4 themes with different channels for each. You need to read one book in ANY theme to complete the challenge:

1. Curiosity - this is for avid readers, picking up an out of comfort zone book, different opinion, long/academic books like architecture books, game design, etc.
2. Adulting - anything that you know will help you somehow, like atomic habits, the defining decade, becoming, lean in, educated, etc.
3. Fun - children’s literature, graphic novels, humor books
4. Escape - classic fiction/scifi go here

I completed my annual reading goal today. My plan was to read one book for satisfying my curiosity, one that directly helps me in business, and one that provides an escape every month. Here are the books I picked along with a short review:

1. The Power of Habit (5/5): I now have a solid understanding of the science behind modifying habits. I’d recommend this more than Atomic Habits.
2. The Airbnb Story (5/5): By all accounts, Airbnb should not have become this big! The very idea of letting strangers into your home raises eyebrows, but the way they executed it with belongingness at the core is amazing.

3. And Then There Were None (5/5): The thought process that went into writing this is simply incredible! I might not pick up the Mystery genre again for a while as this has set the bar quite high.

4. The Psychology of Money (5/5): This book combined my favorite topic psychology with finance, which I’ve been subconsciously avoiding for a long time. I got a good definition of freedom - being able to wake up one morning and change what I’m doing on my own terms. In other words, do the work you like with people you like at the times you want for as long as you want.

5. Steve Jobs (5/5): I see a lot of parallels in Jobs and Musk, combining great technology and aesthetic design with a team of A-players.

6. The Little Prince (5/5): It’s the most beautiful book I’ve ever read! This will now be my choice of gift for all ages. The Little Prince is one of the top translated books of all time, and I now understand why. If you’re reading this and have some recommendations for me, please let me know.

7. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant (4/5): The content is really good and crisp - it’s just that I had read most of it in bits and pieces already.

8. The Everything Store (4/5): Jeff is an embodiment of long-term thinking. He emphasizes doing what’s best for the customer, even if it translates to huge losses in the short term. However, I feel that this is not the definitive story of Amazon. It has cherry-picked bits and pieces, unlike Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs.

9. The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse (2/5): I hated the font! There wasn’t any coherent story either. It felt more like random motivational posts stitched together.

10. The Courage to be Disliked (5/5): It’s the most powerful book I’ve ever read. The book provides a nice introduction to Adlerian psychology with a unique conversational format between the philosopher and youth, which grew on me. I had a lot of aha moments and will be picking this again soon.

11. Good Strategy Bad Strategy (2/5): It helps you understand what a good strategy looks like, in an unnecessary long text.

12. Recursion (3/5): I liked the concept of traveling through memories; the story wasn’t a page-turner though.

13. The Courage to be Happy (5/5): One of those rare sequels that make you want to read more. I found a lot of parallels with religious texts. Everyone should read this.

14. Playing to Win (2/5): My key takeaway was that all successful strategies fall into two buckets: you can provide a commodity at the lowest price or you can differentiate your offering to charge a premium. Not worth reading the whole book.

15. The Midnight Library (3/5): The ending was predictable. Pick this up if you want to read self-help books but get bored quickly.

16. The Selfish Gene (5/5): When we die, there are two things we can leave behind us: genes and memes. I enjoyed the rich examples. You should definitely pick this up if you liked Sapiens.

17. Blue Ocean Strategy (4/5): This book provides good frameworks to pursue differentiation at low-cost with lots of case studies.

18. Project Hail Mary (5/5): Andy tickles my nerdy bones. If you liked “Dark Matter” or “The Martian”, you’ll love this as well.

19. Meditations (1/5): This is the first book I have left halfway. Life’s too short to spend time on things I know I’m not enjoying.

20. The E-Myth Revisited (5/5): Loved this business novel. It hit me that the sole aim of a small business owner should be to create playbooks that anyone can execute.

21. The Phantom Tollbooth (5/5): I enjoyed the wordplay. I’d love to write a witty book like this down the line.

22. Siddhartha (5/5): You need to experience a lot to achieve inner peace. Knowledge can be transferred via words, but wisdom must be earned on your own.

23. The Making of a Manager (4/5): Your report should never be left wondering: What does my manager think of me? If you think she is the epitome of awesome, tell her. If you don’t think she is operating at the level you’d like to see, she should know that too, and precisely why you feel that way. This hit me hard because I felt restless wondering about the same question frequently a few years back. I’m now consciously bringing this up in my weekly 1:1s. Other learnings were around delegation and caring for your team. Your job as a manager isn’t to dole out advice or “save the day”—it’s to empower your report to find the answer herself.

24. Jonathan Livingston Seagull (4/5): This is for people who think there’s more to life and are in the pursuit of perfection.

25. Freakonomics (2/5): It felt like individual blog posts, which can be compressed to a tenth of their size.

26. High Output Management (4/5): Training is the manager’s job. Along with motivation. Your management style should change with the task-relevant maturity, going from hands-on to high-level supervision.

27. Animal Farm (5/5): I’m falling in love with the fable genre. Kudos to Orwell’s effort for putting this down in such a simple language.

28. The Science of Storytelling (5/5): If you want to write a story, read this book. It is one of the densest books I’ve read so far, with a lot of great examples. This is going into my rereading list. I picked this up at the right time as I have recently started penning down another story. I got solid frameworks to develop the main character and the overall plot. This book has single-handedly improved my mental models around storytelling by an order of magnitude. There was so much I didn’t know.

29. The $100 Startup (5/5): Some key takeaways for me were to give people the fish (not many people want to learn how to fish), that you usually don’t get paid for your hobby itself but to help other people pursue the hobby or for something indirectly related to it, and have a deadline on your offerings. It reinforced my belief to improve the quality of life I lead, not the amount of money I earn. And to not sweat about the small things. The case studies also conveyed that there’s no rehab program for being addicted to freedom. Once you’ve seen what it’s like on the other side, good luck trying to follow someone else’s rules ever again.

30. Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives (3/5): I liked the variety of explanations but I have forgotten a lot of them already.

31. Bird by Bird (4/5): Anne talks candidly about the insecurities you feel while writing, especially when your early drafts are bound to be shitty.

32. Founders at Work (5/5): It’s okay to make mistakes while starting out; you can figure things out on the way. Props to Jessica for probing at all the right places.

33. Big Mushy Happy Lump (2/5): I LOL’d at some of the comic strips in the first half; the second half was a drag for me.

34. On Writing (4/5): You need to read a lot and write a lot. There’s no other way to become a great writer.

35. Tribe of Mentors (5/5): I picked this up to get book recommendations for next year. One thing that stood out to me was the emphasis on meditation throughout, every other interviewee had mentioned it!
36. Solutions and Other Problems (3/5): I liked the second half more, especially the ending which talks about being friends with yourself.

Until We Meet Again…
🖖 swap

I picked this up to get book recommendations for next year. One thing that stood out to me was the emphasis on meditation throughout, every other interviewee had mentioned it!

Here are my notes from Tribe of Mentors:

1. Then finally we hit on this idea of, "Why don't we just store money in the handheld devices?" The next iteration was this thing that would do cryptographically secure IOU notes. I would say, "I owe you $10," and put in my passphrase. It wasn't really packaged at the user interface level as an IOU, but that's what it effectively was. Then I could beam it to you, using the infrared on a Palm Pilot, which at this point is very quaint and silly since, clearly, what would you rather do, take out $5 and give someone their lunch share, or pull out two Palm Pilots and geek out at the table? But that actually is what moved the needle, because it was so weird and so innovative. The geek crowd was like, "Wow. This is the future. We want to go to the future. Take us there." So we got all this attention and were able to raise funding on that story. Then we had the famous Buck's beaming at Buck's restaurant in Woodside, which is sort of the home away from home for many VCs. Our first round of financing was actually transferred to us via Palm Pilot. Our VCs showed up with a $4.5 million preloaded Palm Pilot, and they beamed it to us.

The product wasn't really finished, and about a week before the beaming at Buck's I realized that we weren't going to be able to do it, because the code wasn't done. Obviously it was really simple to mock it up to sort of go, "Beep! Money is received.' But I was so disgusted with the idea. We have this security company; how could possibly use a mock-up for something worth $4.5 million? What if it crashes? What if it shows something? I'll have to go and commit ritual suicide to avoid any sort of embarrassment. So instead of just getting the mock-up done and getting reasonable rest, my two coders and I coded nonstop for 5 days. I think some people slept; I know I didn't sleep at all. It was just this insane marathon where we were like, "We have to get this thing working." It actually wound up working perfectly. The beaming was at 10:00 a.m.; we were done at 9:00 a.m.

What can sit between MOOCs and CBCs?

Something like Dumbledore’s Army - a group learning on their own with a community manager. Accountability comes from paying a small fee + having like-minded people set deadlines together. Feedback comes from peers + experts curated by the CM.

This came up while discussing the different ways people can learn things with a friend, who is professionally a backend engineer and now wants to learn web development.

We have MOOCs, which are abundant but filled with noise. Rarely do people complete them.

You need to read a lot and write a lot. There's no other way to become a great writer.

Here are my notes from On Writing:

1. Let's get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.

On the day this particular idea-the first really good one came sailing at me, my mother remarked that she needed six more books of stamps to get a lamp she wanted to give her sister Molly for Christmas, and she didn't think she would make it in time. "I guess it will have to be for her birthday, instead," she said. "These cussed things always look like a lot until you stick them in a book." Then she crossed her eyes and ran her tongue out at me. When she did, saw her tongue was S&H green. I thought how nice it would be if you could make those damned stamps in your basement, and in that instant a story called "Happy Stamps" was born. The concept of counterfeiting Green Stamps and the sight of my mother's green tongue created it in an instant.

One of my friends pinged me recently for a casual podcast.

To get out of our comfort zones.

Talk about our love of freedom and curiosity.

And to have fun.

It's okay to make mistakes while starting out; you can figure things out on the way. Props to Jessica for probing at all the right places.

Here are my notes from Founders at Work:

1. Then finally we hit on this idea of, "Why don't we just store money in the handheld devices?" The next iteration was this thing that would do cryptographically secure IOU notes. I would say, "I owe you $10," and put in my passphrase. It wasn't really packaged at the user interface level as an IOU, but that's what it effectively was. Then I could beam it to you, using the infrared on a Palm Pilot, which at this point is very quaint and silly since, clearly, what would you rather do, take out $5 and give someone their lunch share, or pull out two Palm Pilots and geek out at the table? But that actually is what moved the needle, because it was so weird and so innovative. The geek crowd was like, "Wow. This is the future. We want to go to the future. Take us there." So we got all this attention and were able to raise funding on that story. Then we had the famous Buck's beaming at Buck's restaurant in Woodside, which is sort of the home away from home for many VCs. Our first round of financing was actually transferred to us via Palm Pilot. Our VCs showed up with a $4.5 million preloaded Palm Pilot, and they beamed it to us.

The product wasn't really finished, and about a week before the beaming at Buck's I realized that we weren't going to be able to do it, because the code wasn't done. Obviously it was really simple to mock it up to sort of go, "Beep! Money is received.' But I was so disgusted with the idea. We have this security company; how could possibly use a mock-up for something worth $4.5 million? What if it crashes? What if it shows something? I'll have to go and commit ritual suicide to avoid any sort of embarrassment. So instead of just getting the mock-up done and getting reasonable rest, my two coders and I coded nonstop for 5 days. I think some people slept; I know I didn't sleep at all. It was just this insane marathon where we were like, "We have to get this thing working." It actually wound up working perfectly. The beaming was at 10:00 a.m.; we were done at 9:00 a.m.

If nobody calls your vision arrogant, you’re probably not thinking big enough.

Your favorite problems can be anything — related to your work life, scientific questions, your love life, your health, wealth, or humanity as a whole. The only important thing is to settle on problems you can contribute to. To find twelve worthwhile problems for your life, consider the following questions:

• What are you curious about?
• What have you always pursued?
• What puzzles you about life and society?
• Which problems you can’t stop thinking about?

“Every time you hear a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, ‘How did he do it? He must be a genius!’”— Richard Feynman

Anne talks candidly about the insecurities you feel while writing, especially when your early drafts are bound to be shitty.

Here are my notes from Bird by Bird:

1. One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore. Another is that writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around.

2. And then the miracle happens. The sun comes up again. So you get up and do your morning things, and one thing leads to another, and eventually, at nine, you find yourself back at the desk, staring blankly at the pages you filled yesterday. And there on page four is a paragraph with all sorts of life in it, smells and sounds and voices and colors and even a moment of dialogue that makes you say to yourself, very, very softly, "Hmmm." You look up and stare out the window again, but this time you are drumming your fingers on the desk, and you don’t care about those first three pages; those you will throw out, those you needed to write to get to that fourth page, to get to that one long paragraph that was what you had in mind when you started, only you didn’t know that, couldn’t know that, until you got to it. And the story begins to materialize, and another thing is happening, which is that you are learning what you aren’t writing, and this is helping you to find out what you are writing. Think of a fine painter attempting to capture an inner vision, beginning with one corner of the canvas, painting what he thinks should be there, not quite pulling it off, covering it over with white paint, and trying again, each time finding out what his painting isn’t, until finally he finds out what it is.

This is a follow-up to 🏋️ Losing Weight as a Vegetarian.

So I’ve been working on fitness lately. Thought I’d give a progress update!

Over the last year, I’ve lost more than 10kg (yayy!) but now things have started plateauing (NOO!!). Till now, I’ve been mostly following a slow-carb diet along with walking regularly but now I feel I need to start lifting weights. It requires a lot of patience as now the progress has become slow. It’s a long-term game but those are the ones I like playing anyway so let’s see how it goes.

Some key takeaways for me were to give people the fish (not many people want to learn how to fish), that you usually don't get paid for your hobby itself but to help other people pursue the hobby or for something indirectly related to it, and have a deadline on your offerings. It reinforced my belief to improve the quality of life I lead, not the amount of money I earn. And to not sweat about the small things. The case studies also conveyed that there's no rehab program for being addicted to freedom. Once you’ve seen what it’s like on the other side, good luck trying to follow someone else’s rules ever again.

Here are my notes from The $100 Startup:

1. There’s no rehab program for being addicted to freedom. Once you’ve seen what it’s like on the other side, good luck trying to follow someone else’s rules ever again.

2. Many of these unusual businesses thrive by giving things away, recruiting a legion of fans and followers who support their paid work whenever it is finally offered. “My marketing plan is strategic giving,” said Megan Hunt, who makes hand-crafted dresses and wedding accessories in Omaha, Nebraska, shipping them all over the world. “Empowering others is our greatest marketing effort,” said Scott Meyer from South Dakota. “We host training sessions, give away free materials, and answer any question someone emails to us at no charge whatsoever.”

I watched Mahabharata with family in the last 3 months. The new Star Plus version.

My mom picked out two takeaways on friends:

1. Have a friend like Karna, who stands by you no matter what.
2. Have a friend like Krishna, who stays calm no matter what.

Noting down this here to reflect upon it from time to time. ❤️

If you want to write a story, read this book. It is one of the densest books I've read so far, with a lot of great examples. This is going into my rereading list. I picked this up at the right time as I have recently started penning down another story. I got solid frameworks to develop the main character and the overall plot. This book has single-handedly improved my mental models around storytelling by an order of magnitude. There was so much I didn't know.

Here are my notes from The Science of Storytelling:

1. It’s story that makes us human. Recent research suggests language evolved principally to swap ‘social information’ back when we were living in Stone Age tribes. In other words, we’d gossip. We’d tell tales about the moral rights and wrongs of other people, punish the bad behaviour, reward the good, and thereby keep everyone cooperating and the tribe in check. Stories about people being heroic or villainous, and the emotions of joy and outrage they triggered, were crucial to human survival. We’re wired to enjoy them.

Some researchers believe grandparents came to perform a vital role in such tribes: elders told different kinds of stories – about ancestor heroes, exciting quests and spirits and magic – that helped children to navigate their physical, spiritual and moral worlds. It’s from these stories that complex human culture emerged. When we started farming and rearing livestock, and our tribes settled down and slowly merged into states, these grandparental campfire tales morphed into great religions that had the power to hold large numbers of humans together. Still, today, modern nations are principally defined by the stories we tell about our collective selves: our victories and defeats; our heroes and foes; our distinctive values and ways of being, all of which are encoded in the tales we tell and enjoy.

There have been a handful of step functions in my life. One of them was building a reading habit. Today marks day 1000 from when I consciously made a decision to read more. It went pretty well; I’ve read 100+ books since then. It’s my second-best habit after journaling as of today.

My main learning was that reading is like a muscle. It can be trained to progressively higher weights, i.e. going from 10 pages/day to 20, 50, 100, etc. or starting with 10 minutes/day to 20, 30, 60, etc.

I did an AMA on Twitter. Here’s a compilation:

1. What’s your daily routine? When do you set aside time for books?

Training is the manager's job. Along with motivation. Your management style should change with the task-relevant maturity, going from hands-on to high-level supervision.

Here are my notes from High Output Management:

1. A manager’s skills and knowledge are only valuable if she uses them to get more leverage from her people. So, Ms. Manager, you know more about our product’s viral loop than anyone in the company? That’s worth exactly nothing unless you can effectively transfer that knowledge to the rest of the organization. That’s what being a manager is about. It’s not about how smart you are or how well you know your business; it’s about how that translates to the team’s performance and output.

As a means to obtain this leverage, a manager must understand, as Andy writes: “When a person is not doing his job, there can only be two reasons for it. The person either can’t do it or won’t do it; he is either not capable or not motivated.” This insight enables a manager to dramatically focus her efforts. All you can do to improve the output of an employee is motivate and train. There is nothing else.

This is a follow-up to 🔥 Meetups are dead. Enter Mastermind Groups!

I had mentioned 4 key ingredients of a successful mastermind group in the above post. CBCs fall into the sweet spot of what I was looking for:

1) Curation

Since there’s a decent price point for enrolling into a CBC, it acts as a self-selection for high-agency and curiosity. Most people who join are very committed.

It felt like individual blog posts, which can be compressed to a tenth of their size.

Here are my notes from Freakonomics:

1. How did Roe v. Wade help trigger, a generation later, the greatest crime drop in recorded history?

As far as crime is concerned, it turns out that not all children are born equal. Not even close. Decades of studies have shown that a child born into an adverse family environment is far more likely than other children to become a criminal. And the millions of women most likely to have an abortion in the wake of Roe v. Wade—poor, unmarried, and teenage mothers for whom illegal abortions had been too expensive or too hard to get—were often models of adversity. They were the very women whose children, if born, would have been much more likely than average to become criminals. But because of Roe v. Wade, these children weren’t being born. This powerful cause would have a drastic, distant effect: years later, just as these unborn children would have entered their criminal primes, the rate of crime began to plummet.

Tony Khan is my role model. After being a lifelong avid fan of professional wrestling, he started All Elite Wrestling.

I love Tony. His passion and love for wrestling shows up in AEW storytelling. I hope someday I become a manager who’s one quarter as good to my folks as Tony Khan is to his (Brodie, Mox, Hangman/MJF, Sting, and everyone else really). Their talent is treated well and has creative freedom. I aspire to have the same passion in whatever I choose to do in life.

He brought CM Punk back into the industry after 7 long years!!! I got goosebumps hearing him talk about why he left: “I was never going to get healthy physically, mentally, spiritually, or emotionally staying in the same place that got me sick in the first place.” Thank you Tony for making me cry like a baby.

My moonshot plan for 2024 is to create a show like AEW that focuses on long-term storytelling in our industry and provides emotion as a service.

Your report should never be left wondering: What does my manager think of me? If you think she is the epitome of awesome, tell her. If you don’t think she is operating at the level you’d like to see, she should know that too, and precisely why you feel that way. This hit me hard because I felt restless wondering about the same question frequently a few years back. I'm now consciously bringing this up in my weekly 1:1s. Other learnings were around delegation and caring for your team. Your job as a manager isn’t to dole out advice or “save the day”—it’s to empower your report to find the answer herself.

Here are my notes from The Making of a Manager:

1. This is the crux of management: It is the belief that a team of people can achieve more than a single person going it alone. It is the realization that you don’t have to do everything yourself, be the best at everything yourself, or even know how to do everything yourself.

Your job, as a manager, is to get better outcomes from a group of people working together.

This is a follow-up to ⚔️ A Personal Assistant to Maximize your Productivity.

I recently switched my task management workflow from Todoist to Things 3. It was probably my nerdiest purchase of 2021 (I’ve never paid $50 for an app before!).

1. The main reason for switching is its clean interface. I’m a sucker for nice UI. Also, switching forced me to review all of my pending tasks and do a Marie Kondo after almost 3 years. I had a lot of projects going on before - now I have started optimizing for outcomes instead.

2. The latest 3.14 update brought Markdown support and you know I love Markdown.

3. It also changes how I see my calendar events now. Todoist made events as tasks in my day which I need to check off. Things 3 shows them at the top together for a quick review of the day so I know what my non-negotiables are (calendar is sacred territory for me) and then I can look at my daily list.

4. It gives me a logbook! Seeing what I spent my day on is oddly satisfying.

5. Another nifty little feature is that it shows a ring next to the project indicating its progress, calculated by the completion rate of tasks.

6. You can schedule a task for the evening which is shown in a separate section, which is pretty handy to plan out your evenings / take a quick glance.

7. It gives better control for repeating tasks.

8. You can set both a reminder and a deadline for a task. Todoist allows for only one time set to a task, whereas Things 3 allows for setting a reminder for today while noting that the deadline is 2 days away. I can’t go back now. The design choices are quite thoughtful.

Overall, it’s pretty neat and new things are exciting. See what I did there?

You need to experience a lot to achieve inner peace. Knowledge can be transferred via words, but wisdom must be earned on your own.

Here are my notes from Siddhartha:

1. Siddhartha laughed in such a way that his voice expressed a shade of sorrow and a shade of mockery and he said: ‘You have spoken well, Govinda, you have remembered well, but you must also remember what else I told you — that I have become distrustful of teachings and learning and that I have little faith in words that come to us from teachers. But, very well, my friend, I am ready to hear that new teaching, although I believe in my heart that we have already tasted the best fruit of it.’

Govinda replied: ‘I am delighted that you are agreed. But tell me, how can the teachings of the Gotama disclose to us its most precious fruit before we have even heard him?’

I have been using Notion for more than 2 years now. With time, I’ve realized that it doesn’t allow cross-pollination of ideas. That’s where Roam Research comes into play.

One thing that was a deal-maker for me is that it also acts as a personal CRM. You can tag notes with any person’s name and clicking on that name gives the entire history of all previous interactions.

I have started using it now to put down my raw thoughts whenever they come up. To be honest, I still haven’t got the hang of it. But I have a good feeling that this is the future, especially as my notes will only keep increasing.

P.S. I might switch to Obsidian once it moves to version 1. Right now, it’s 0.12.15 which doesn’t give me a lot of confidence in its stability. I’ll continue using Day One for journaling as it provides password protection and prompts.

Loved this business novel. It hit me that the sole aim of a small business owner should be to create playbooks that anyone can execute.

Here are my notes from The E-Myth Revisited:

We forget most of what we consume in a few days or weeks. The forgetting curve of newly-learned knowledge depends on various factors like how meaningful it is to you, the difficulty level of the information, your stress levels, the kind of sleep you get after it, etc. A couple of ways to combat this are using mnemonic techniques for better memory representation and spaced repetition based on active recall.

Here is my current retention system:

1. While reading, I highlight anything that made me reread it or taught me something new. After completing the book, I put all and go through them once.

This is the first book I have left halfway. Life’s too short to spend time on things I know I’m not enjoying.

Here are my notes from Meditations:

Read to collect the dots, write to connect them. - David Perell

I have a bunch of dots collected already from reading a lot of books and writing a decent number of short-form articles. I’m now moving to the connection phase where I’m finding related ideas and building on them. Otter helps me connect those seamlessly.

Talking is a great way to overcome writer’s block. In just a few minutes, magic happens - I get a lot of clarity about a topic by talking into the Otter app.

This book provides good frameworks to pursue differentiation at low-cost with lots of case studies.

Here are my notes from Blue Ocean Strategy:

Imagine a game where there are no rules and you can do anything. That would be such a boring game, isn’t it? Life is no different from MMORPGs. You can choose your missions. Or simply enjoy side-quests.

The core is your skill tree. You can unlock new skills and upgrade/master existing ones using your experiences. But experiences are limited as they cost time and energy. This is your real constraint which makes the skill tree unique to you.

When we die, there are two things we can leave behind us: genes and memes. I enjoyed the rich examples. You should definitely pick this up if you liked Sapiens.

Here are my notes from The Selfish Gene:

Alfred Adler’s thoughts have had a big impact on my thinking. They reinforced my belief that you are who you choose to be and are not bound by your past.

Let’s talk about Sam. He wants to become a novelist, but he never seems to progress. His job keeps him too busy. Freudian etiology will reason that he doesn’t have the proper environment or the talent for it.

But is that the real reason? No! It’s actually that he wants to leave the possibility of “I can do it if I try” open, by not committing to anything. Let it sink in. His actual goal is to live inside that realm of possibilities, where he can say that he could do it if only he had the time. When you see this from the lens of Adler’s teleology, Sam’s actions become coherent. In another five or ten years, he will probably start using other excuses like “I’m not young anymore” or “I’ve got a family to think about now.” Sam had a subconscious goal of not writing beforehand and he’s been manufacturing reasons to achieve that goal.

When one adopts the point of view of Freudian etiology, one sees life as a kind of great big story based on cause and effect. So then it’s all about where and when I was born, what my childhood was like, the school I attended and the company where I got a job. And that decides who I am now and who I will become. To be sure, likening one’s life to a story is probably an entertaining job. The problem is, one can see the dimness that lies ahead at the end of the story. Moreover, one will try to lead a life that is in line with that story. And then one says, “My life is such-and-such, so I have no choice but to live this way, and it’s not because of me—it’s my past, it’s the environment,” and so on. If we focus only on past causes and try to explain things solely through cause and effect, we end up with “determinism.” Because what this says is that our present and our future have already been decided by past occurrences, and are unalterable. In Adlerian psychology, we do not think about past “causes” but rather about present “goals”.

My key takeaway was that all successful strategies fall into two buckets: you can provide a commodity at the lowest price or you can differentiate your offering to charge a premium. Not worth reading the whole book.

Here are my notes from Playing to Win:

What would you do once you hit your FIRE goals?

This question came up in one of the 100+ communities I’m a part of, and it forced me to reflect. Here’s my current answer: I want to open a Read & Dine Cafe in my hometown. Travel and teaching were close contenders.

Why read? I can’t imagine myself not reading. So this has to be a part of anything I do down the line.
Why dine? I like food, duh. Why cafe? There’s a lot of scope for creating good vibes here. You’d want to spend more time by design and have a good time. Why hometown? I like metros for the exposure it brings, but I like small towns more.

One of those rare sequels that make you want to read more. I found a lot of parallels with religious texts. Everyone should read this.

Here are my notes from The Courage to be Happy:

Reframing is changing the way you look at something. It is infinitely powerful. Here are some examples from my life:

1. Imposter syndrome is real. It's a phase; it comes and goes every now and then. Using reframing, it has become a bit easier for me to handle it. I now remind myself that if I start feeling like an imposter, that means I'm not the smartest person in the room and this is a state I like being in. This subtle mindset change is working for me now.

It helps you understand what a good strategy looks like, in an unnecessary long text.

Here are my notes from Good Strategy Bad Strategy:

Some of you asked for the prompts we used in our app. Here you go!

1. Try and remember any moment from your past and write down as many details as you can.

It’s the most powerful book I’ve ever read. The book provides a nice introduction to Adlerian psychology with a unique conversational format between the philosopher and youth, which grew on me. I had a lot of aha moments and will be picking this again soon.

Here are my notes from The Courage to be Disliked:

I’ve been journaling for the last 6 years and it has been life-changing.

I keep getting DMs on how to get started, so I pinged one of my iOS wizard friends to brainstorm. We outlined the problem statement as “newbies get overwhelmed while starting journaling”. Our aim was to create a frictionless experience (we are both fans of minimalism).

There were two things we spent a lot of time on:

Jeff is an embodiment of long-term thinking. He emphasizes doing what’s best for the customer, even if it translates to huge losses in the short term. However, I feel that this is not the definitive story of Amazon. It has cherry-picked bits and pieces, unlike Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs.

Here are my notes from The Everything Store:

Here’s my problem: People book 30min meetings with me via Calendly but they are scattered (say one at 4pm, then one at 5pm, another at 6:30pm). I want a solution that can schedule these meetings in a continuous stretch of time.

The available slots should be prioritized dynamically using multiple customizable rules. The first meeting of the day can be scheduled anytime. However, while scheduling more meetings, they should only see the slots adjacent to my current meeting slot(s). Other slots should be opened only when they explicitly mention that they aren’t available in any of the adjacent slot(s). Other rules should limit the number of total meetings and the number of continuous meetings.

Let’s say I have slots open from 11am-1pm and 4pm-6pm. The first person to book can pick any time, say they choose 4pm. Now the ideal solution should make the second person choose 4:30pm preferentially.

If you are interested in building this, hit reply.

The content is really good and crisp - it’s just that I had read most of it in bits and pieces already.

Here are my notes from The Almanack of Naval Ravikant:

I see a lot of parallels in Jobs and Musk, combining great technology and aesthetic design with a team of A-players.

Here are my notes from Steve Jobs:

This is a follow-up post to this.

Year-3 Updates

This book combined my favorite topic psychology with finance, which I’ve been subconsciously avoiding for a long time. I got a good definition of freedom - being able to wake up one morning and change what I’m doing on my own terms. In other words, do the work you like with people you like at the times you want for as long as you want.

Here are my notes from The Psychology of Money:

I recently switched phones. Here’s how my habits changed:

1. My media consumption on phone has practically dropped to zero, as it has a smaller screen size (5.4 inches compared to the previous 6.55). I do it on my tablet now.
2. I used to play a lot of idle clicker games on my phone. Smaller phone came with a smaller battery as well, so it had an unintended consequence of breaking this habit. I miss this - eagerly waiting to get my hands on PS5.

By all accounts, Airbnb should not have become this big! The very idea of letting strangers into your home raises eyebrows, but the way they executed it with belongingness at the core is amazing.

Here are my notes from The Airbnb Story:

I recently completed my 100th book. Here’s a quick reflection:

I started with self-help, but it gets repetitive real fast. Once you have read 10 or so books, the 11th book simply fails to hold interest. I had to quickly start exploring other genres. Self-help is what you see advertised or shared via word of mouth - it sounds smart. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

There’s a right time to pick a particular book. Mastering this (picking the right book at the right time) is the key. Start with a short gripping fiction to get some momentum going (like The Alchemist or The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy). Then move on to longer but readable ones (The Martian, Dark Matter, etc.) and finally non-fiction (Factfulness). The trick is to fall in love with reading itself rather than a particular book.

After reading 100 books, I now put more time into selecting books, sometimes hours at a stretch. I have reduced my non-fiction consumption to half of last year and added fiction (And Then There Were None, The Little Prince, etc.). I’ve realized that you can’t really conquer your to-read list. Each book references other books. The pile keeps growing. Hail Hydra.

I now have a solid understanding of the science behind modifying habits. I’d recommend this more than Atomic Habits.

Here are my notes from The Power of Habit:

People are different. Their goals are different. The way they do things is different.

If at any point you have tried to guess why someone does something in a particular way, you might want to take a deeper look at yourself. I first took the MBTI personality test long back and I tested as an INTP (logician). It was pretty spot on. A few years back, I was going through some changes so I took it again. I tested as an this time. The description blew my mind. For the first time, I felt like someone had finally understood me.