Investing & Business
I love learning about investing as well as reading books about leadership, management, and business lessons. I bought my first stock when I was a freshman in college, and from that point forward I became more and more absorbed by trying to figure out the financial markets and how they affect and are affected by the overall economy. Since high school, I’ve been an avid reader of the news and current events, and I’ve always found how events change markets and peoples’ mass psychology fascinating. Starting in college, I began watching a lot of CNBC to keep track of the markets and how my little amount in stocks were doing. I was perhaps fortunate enough to become interested in financial markets during the .com boom and bust period. There are a lot of lessons to be gained by seeing how the euphoria of the moment led to so much irrational exuberance as former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan labeled it, and how it led to so many tech bankruptcies and personal investor losses. I’ll bookend that with the experience of immersing myself in the markets and business events over the next decade plus, working and making a living for the first time out of college, investing more, and then living through the latest Great Recession of 2008. In a lot of ways, I believe that seeing this radical boom and bust, boom again, and bust from my college days to my early working career will serve me well in my life as I get older. An investor has to always be cautious about the downside and the risks to their investments and the money that they’ve earned in order to preserve and grow it over the long-term.
I’ve read and watched analysis on the markets pretty much everyday from the year 2000 until today. Not a day goes by that I haven’t continued trying to learn more. I probably watch too much CNBC, but I never miss a handful of shows. Over that period I would read a lot from a variety of authors, from the famed Benjamin Graham, Warren Buffett’s mentor, to books by Peter Lynch, the legendary fund manager for Fidelity. I’ve also read books by Jim Cramer from CNBC, and William O’Neil, the founder of Investor’s Business Daily, a leading financial newspaper to name a few others. A lot of lessons and wisdom comes from current commentators and investors I watch daily and have been able to judge over my years of learning. There’s no greater teacher than experience. Nowadays, I love listening to different philosophies from many in the financial media and on Twitter, and great investors like Howard Marks, Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Ray Dalio, Lee Cooperman, and Jeffrey Gundlach among others.
Leadership & Self-Improvement
My first favorite single author and self-improvement coach is John C. Maxwell. The first book I read from him was Developing the Leader Within You, and I found it to be one of the most important reads ever for me. I read it when I was just out of college, and at the time, had never read anything like it. College reading had been so class and subject focused. After reading it, I believe colleges should try to focus more on teaching people more about self-improvement and leadership. After that book, I collected and read a plethora of other Maxwell books from his classic 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, to Winning With People (one of my favorites), to The 360 Degree Leader, to name a few. His books are uplifting and inspiring, helping one to learn how to treat people with kindness, respect, and encouragement. “No one cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.” Of course, so many other authors have been fantastic in this area like Stephen Covey, Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, Zig Ziglar, which I have taken away a lot from as well. I was privileged in early 2016 to go see Tony Robbins live and learn directly from him. I highly recommend any videos and podcasts you can watch to learn from the direct way he approaches winning at life and fostering relationships. His book Awaken The Giant Within is fantastic.
Biographies, History, and Politics
I also believe there is a lot to be learned from people’s lives. I finished the authorized Warren Buffett biography The Snowball, which is chock full of business and investing lessons. Also, the Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson was a fascinating read, and full of interesting wisdom on business and innovation, as well as his books on Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein I’ve also completed. Probably the best biography of recent years I enjoyed was Ron Chernow’s book on John D. Rockefeller Sr. called Titan.
I used to read more about political history than I do nowadays, but am still fascinated by the subject. I loved reading political leadership books for a long time. I found Presidential Biographies fascinating, and interesting lessons in leadership, as well as managing people, bureaucracies, and decision-making processes. I’ve read several books by Bob Woodward, who always seems to get deeply inside high-level Presidential meetings. I’ve also read books about Reagan, Lincoln, FDR, Nixon, Kennedy, Bush, and Clinton, varying from biographies to auto-biographies from close advisors. Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin about Lincoln which was a masterclass in how to do the right thing, and also how to treat the people around you. Lincoln is perhaps the most inspiring leader in history and was amazing at how kind and respectful he treated everyone, including people that considered him a political enemy. In 2019, I completed her book Leadership: In Turbulent Times about FDR, Teddy Roosevelt, Lincoln, and LBJ which was a great book contrasting their leadership styles and how they differed.
Spanish
I have been working for YEARS on my Spanish. One of my goals has always been to become fluent in Spanish, but I’ve found that it is VERY difficult unless you practice regularly. It’s still a work in progress!
Books I’ve Finished in 2019:
- Zero to One by Peter Thiel
- The Fall & Rise of China: The Great Courses by Richard Baum
- Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow
- The Outsiders: 8 Unconventional CEOs by William Thorndike
- Origin Story: A Big History of Everything by David Christian
- 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson
- Who Is Michael Ovitz by Michael Ovitz
- Leadership: In Turbulent Times by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Books I Finished in 2018:
You can read a short blog on my reviews here.
Most Enjoyable Reads:
– Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman! by Richard Feynman
– Total Recall by Arnold Schwarzenegger
– Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller Sr. by Ron Chernow
– A Man for All Markets by Ed Thorpe
Most Important Reads:
– Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
– Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Taleb
– Mastering the Market Cycle by Howard Marks
Additional Reads:
– Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales
– The Red Queen by Matt Ridley
– Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended on It by Chris Voss
– Superforecasting by Philip Tetlock
– The Book of Joy by Dalai Lama & Desmond Tutu
– What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars by Brendan Moynihan & Jack Schwager
– Cathedral of the Wild by Boyd Varty
– The Lessons of History by Will & Ariel Durant
– Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert Sapolsky
– The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley
– The Story of the Human Body by Daniel Lieberman
– The Coming Storm by Michael Lewis
– The Little Book That Beats the Market by Joel Greenblatt
– When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long Term Capital Management by Roger Lowenstein
– The Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene
Books I Finished in 2017:
Fiction:
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
Non-Fiction:
-The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb
-Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Harari
-Benjamin Franklin by Walter Isaacson
-Awaken The Giant Within by Tony Robbins
-Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, founder of Nike
-Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Harari
-Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
-The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis
-The Big Short by Michael Lewis
-Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio
-Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen
-Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini
Books I’ve read a lot of but haven’t finished yet:
-Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
-Think Twice by Michael Mauboussin
-Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got by Jay Abraham
-The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene
-Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis
My favorite fiction book of the year was The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. This is a well-renowned classic book. I heard so much about it that I had to check it out. It’s a beautiful story full of a lot of life lessons intertwined with a mystical journey. I highly recommend it if you’re looking to escape to another world but also probably learn something about life that you can apply for yourself.
My favorite non-fiction book of the year was Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Harari. This has been a very commonly and highly recommended book from a lot of smart thinkers I follow. It’s a big picture, historical look at how human beings have evolved over time. It’s helped to open up a lot of thinking on how the human body and mind have formed over hundreds of thousands of years, and how evolution has affected us while our million year old brain tries to deal with the modern creations, systems, and technologies of the modern era. It’s a very thought-provoking book that anyone who likes stepping back and looking at the big picture and big themes would enjoy. Everything in our current culture and world has resulted from the process of humans being able to tell stories to one another and get others to buy-in and believe that those stories are true on a large scale. This has resulted in our success over other species including other homo-species like Neanderthals who walked the earth the same time that we did, but did not have our story-telling and story-believing ability. Delving into the changes and processes over time was fascinating.
I think the book I overall enjoyed the most though was Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen. Even though it’s a biography and technically non-fiction, Bruce has a masterful ability to tell a story. I love Bruce’s music and will still maintain he’s BY FAR the best PERFORMER I’ve ever seen live, but even if you don’t like Bruce’s music, if you love the process of music making in general, the flamboyance of the rock star lifestyle, and the struggle from coming from nothing to becoming one of the most successful ever in an industry, then you will love this book. Bruce is probably the most philosophical and thoughtful artist that I know of – choosing very carefully the topics of his writing and the feeling or thoughts he wants to convey. His thoughtfulness in how he crafts his songs, and chooses the topics in his music is on further display in the book. He’s a beautiful writer in this context but also is just REAL – he’s often hilarious in the stories he tells (probably made me laugh out loud more than any book I read/listened to), but is also very emotional, thoughtful, and vivid in describing his battles with depression and his relationship with his schizophrenic father over time and how it affected him and how he struggled to conduct himself in relationships and as a husband and father. It’s a great story of working yourself to death to be successful, but also dealing with the relationship and personal struggles we all face going into and through adulthood. HIGHLY RECOMMEND.