Books that improve life
We need to have a growing mindset. Here are a few books that I hope will improve your life.
This book gives a generalized way to learn much faster, by learning the right things and faster.
To be able to improve, we need to understand ourselves deeply.
This book helps you to break through the wall of self-justification and biases.
Then we will stop blaming others and finally we can improve ourselves.
That is the only way for personal growth and being in wonderful lasting relationships.
This thick book lets us understand that we overconsume meat and empty carbs and how that harms us.
Eat right and live longer.
In relationships we often misunderstand each other because we expect others to be like ourselves.
But that is not how it works; everyone has different preferences.
This book gives us 5 perspective to make us understand what our partner prefers in comparison with
ourselves.
This is a book by the Swedish doctor, Anders Hansen.
He explains through research papers about the relationship of the brain and exercise.
Exercise increase blood circulation, affects hormones and a lot of things that in the end affects the
brain.
Business books
These five business books inspire me the most and I think it is worth reading if you want to start a business.
Starting business is a process.
Lean Startup gives us a tested template to start the business,
by understanding the customer/user, prototype, get feedback and iterate quickly.
This book gives you a framework to understand the business.
Seeing from different angles lets you understand and improve the strengths and weaknesses.
Steve Jobs has a lot of inspiring personality traits, good and bad ones.
His biography allows us to understand the leadership role, being a founder,
losing it, coming back and building a culture that outlives himself.
This is a well-researched book about building a lasting company that grows 10x.
Concepts like "20 mile march", "Fire Bullets, then canonballs" and "Leading above the death line" are
well
worth knowing.
This book is entertaining while it shows that the reality is not as easy as it seems.
With statistical data we can see the reality.
People are driven by incentives and we need to make sure the goals and incentives are aligned.
Books about investing
When we are young, we should invest in our knowledge and later we invest in deeper relationships.
But don't forget to invest our capital so we can have financial freedom.
This is a great book about the basics of investing.
It covers historical events, theories, asset classes and practical tips.
A must read.
This is another book about the basics of economy.
It lets you understand the complex mechanism of a market, productivity and crashes.
The finesse is that book explains it slowly from an island with two persons that catch fishes and slowly
covers all the phases of a market economy.
Nassim Taleb explains the effect of randomness and feedback.
You can do everything right, but still get a negative outcome.
Other times you have a shitty process but get great result.
We need to quantify and evaluate properly.
I think there are two winning investing strategies.
One is buying index-funds, hold it until you are close to retirement and
slowly take out the cash for spending.
The second investing strategy is to specialize in something complex.
This book shows you that if you dig a bit deeper and read about cases that other lazy people skips,
you can excel. Don't do what everyone else is doing, instead find your niche.
Howard Marks covers a lot of topics that you should think about while investing.
Philosophy for 2024
I have a few pillars of life; some might change over the years.
Writing them down here help me to keep myself accountable.
I hope this inspires you to write down your own.
Here are the seven I focus on at the moment.
Growing mindset
Always be a better person than you were last month. Learn new things,
do more exercise, eat healthier and be generous in love.
Be more awesome and be kinder.
On 2024 I will focus on reading as my main learning source.
Focus on the controllable
There are things that you can control and things that are not within your power,
focus on the things you can directly affect.
Worrying about the things that are not in your control is called anxious.
For instance, you can not choose that you will never have cancer and never be in any accidents.
What you can do is that you can eat healthy and not cross the street absent minded.
If you find yourself anxious about something,
mentally divide the controllable parts from the rest and focus on those.
Blame yourself
Take responsibility of your own life and never blame anyone else.
Because if you blame on others you will have lesser and lesser control of your own life.
This is hard, because responsibility is a heavy and we are lazy.
But the more you carry now the stronger you will be.
The stronger you are, the happier you will be,
because you worry less about things outside of your control and
you focus on things that make you happier.
Don't gossip
Refrain from talking anything bad about the person not in the room.
It will not come anything good from it.
Only low people will try to raise their own status by lowering someone else’s.
Praising someone instead and tell a good story.
Take small risks
Take many small risks.
Don’t be afraid to make mistakes or be seen as a failure.
There is no success without failures.
No failures probably means that you are not trying hard enough.
But avoid failing big, like getting a permanent injury, dying or loosing someone you love.
Money can be re-earned, but not trust and love.
Desire
Set one long term and many short-term goals.
Desire is a contract that makes you unhappy until you achieve it.
Set one long term goal as a vision, you might or might not reach it, but at least you have a direction to
go.
You can only have one vision at a time so choose it wisely.
The short-term goals should be exact and measurable.
If you can measure you can feel the progress.
Every time you reach a goal, you will be happy so set them short and plausible, preferably one to six
months.
Longer that that you will be unhappy for too long.
Don't be binary
Think in scales or percentage.
How much do you agree with Trump or Biden in percentage?
Or the climate crisis?
The lazy ones think in binary, either agree or totally disagree.
Reality is not like a school test question, there is not just yes or no.
Think in details and you will see a lot of different yes and no.
You can sum them up and say that you are 60% for and 40% against something.
In the long run, this is the only way you really see reality as it is and be better at it.
Sometimes it is better to not raise your opinion too early.
If you don’t have an opinion in an important matter go home and come to a conclusion later.
If it is unimportant, don’t express it and say that you don’t care.
Be truthful and reasonable.