My education is my job – March reading list
I looove a good bookshelf! Photo by Geoff Harrison from BookshelfPorn.com if you’re into them like me :-)
I’ve learned a lot from Ryan Holiday (author of “Trust me, I’m lying”, “The Obstacle Is The Way” and “Growth Hacker Marketing”) over the years. I subscribe to his reading recommendations. He is voracious (reads 250+ books per year).
He signs off the same way on the bottom of each reading recommendations email he sends and one part I particularly like is this:
“Enjoy these books, treat your education like the job that it is, and let me know if you ever need anything.“ [emphasis mine]
It was the bolded bit plus my interview with multimillionaire investor Mark Carnegie that got me thinking about how to structure (and broaden) my reading to make sure it was done each day.
Non fiction – I’ve built it into my morning routine.
Fiction – I save for before sleep and unwinding.
So I’m starting my own version of reading recommendations too. As well as taking notes as I read, I’ll write a short summary at the end of each book and then share it as an update every month or two.
March reading update:
I used to love fantasy books and devoured series like David Eddings, Michael Moorcock and many others as a teenager. It’s been years since I’ve picked up a new series. This was the second book (I read the first in December) in the King Killer Chronicles by Patrick Rothfuss. I loved it. Magic, “The Chosen One” theme, mayhem, love, good vs evil – it has it all. It made for a great relaxing read over the Xmas/New Year quiet time. I loved the distraction and complete escapism.
I’ve read China’s other books: the City and the City and others and this did not disappoint. In The Scar he creates some incredibly diverse science fiction/fantasy characters, places them in a world called La-Bas and makes it all hang together in a gripping story. He is able to describe complex concepts incredibly well in all his books but it’s what he doesn’t describe that really intrigued me this time. I was looking for detailed explanations until I gave up waiting and used my imagination. What an incredible gift to give. The Scar is huge in its scope and typically off beat for China.
This is the first book by Tony Robbins I’ve read which is a little surprising considering how many people I know have attended his seminars and become avid fans of his teaching. You can debate all you like about whether his brand of strategy is your cup of tea, but there’s no doubt that this book lays out an incredibly practical, easy to follow framework for controlling your finances.
The other thing you can’t challenge with Tony’s approach is his sheer level of access. The book is worth buying on the strength of the interviews at the back of it alone. He’s been able to interview some of the world’s top money managers and billionaires and has distilled their wisdom and experience to core principles.
I took a tonne of notes through out, but 2 things really stood out for me: asset allocation is the single most important decision you make in investing and, at the risk of sounding like new age BS, living is giving. Tony’s enthusiasm and energy can be felt through the page and I know for sure that this won’t suit everybody and even repel some.
As a relative finance/investing novice, I would dearly love to hear Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s take on the book. Overall, I found it a really useful and practical read and I’ll be looking out for his other books.
It’s a free e-book by one of the world’s greatest investors and part of my running down the rabbit hole of Money, Master The Game.
This is a cracker (it’s free, no rego). It has 3 sections: Why principles are important, Ray’s guiding personal principles and how he applies them and finally his business management principles. The first 2 sections are short and the third longer.
The piece the I most enjoyed in this (pg 23 of the PDF) was his idea of designing your machine to take you from your goals to your outcomes:
Goals -> Your Machine -> Outcomes.
And he goes into detail about his 5 step process of continually improving your machine.
If simplicity is a sign of understanding then this PDF contains a wealth of wisdom.
The sic-fi/fantasyn novel is set in a slightly different Tokyo. I’ve been to Japan twice (in 2001 to Fukuoka, in 2008 to Tokyo and Niseko) and loved it. So this book brought something else to the table that I really enjoyed. It’s ultimately a love story, set in a slightly different Tokyo in 1984. I really enjoyed the detail of the characters and the story itself was an intriguing and subtle take on the alternate universe idea.
More sci-fi from a master of the genre (seeing a pattern here??). He’s the man who coined the term cyber-space and has over a 160K followers on Twitter. I don’t think I’ve missed any of his books over the years. Pretty typically of his style, he leaves quite a few gaps in your understanding that I only filled in by the end of the book (and even then there are still a few). It seemed a bit frustrating initially, but once I just let it go, the story pace was awesome and the gaps were closed.
His ideas of what the future might be from a tech and social stand point I find fascinating.
Coming up
There are a couple of books already underway for my next instalment:
In The Shadow of The Sword – Tom Holland
Meditations – Marcus Aurelius
Galveston – Nic Pizzolatto (writer behind Season 1 of the TV series True Detective)
What are you reading? Any recommendations? Let me know if the comments below.
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