With too many books out there, and too little time, I thought it’d be helpful to share my 2018 reading list as single sentence summaries. Of course, reducing someone’s life work in such a manner risks misrepresentation. So take these summaries more as the key takeaways I got from each. Hopefully this helps you discover which are of interest to you.
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Whether it’s a personal or business goal; focus on the wildly important, set lead not just lag metrics, use a compelling scorecard, and ensure a cadence of accountability. |
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While you don’t have to employ dirty tricks, it’s still worth knowing so that you can better handle situations when others try to manipulate you. |
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Be proactive, work backwards, focus, think win-win, seek to understand others, synergise, and sharpen the saw. | |
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Imagine what the world would be like if everyone was just that little bit more compassionate towards each other. |
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Among the many reasons why China is poised to lead the world in AI implementation, one is the vast pool of quality tech entrepreneurs. |
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Companies need to nurture a healthy pipeline of ‘Horizon 2’ emerging businesses and ‘Horizon 3’ pilots to sustain growth over longer time periods. | |
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The opposite is fragile is not robust, but antifragile; and antifragile systems thrive in volatility. (Summary HERE) |
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Leverage the many lessons and nuggets of wisdom from the brilliant minds of the past to help lead you to success. |
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If you know yourself, your enemy, and the terrain; the battle is already won before it is even fought. |
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Employees: quit if you have a psychopathic boss, not worth it; investors: conduct proper due diligence; future villains: learn how to charm people to contain a lie for a terrifying long time. | |
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Think for yourself because a lot of the conventional wisdom out there is just wrong. | |
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People repeatedly underestimate the likelihood and impact of extreme events (black swans). | |
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Toxic sexism in tech companies is more prevalent than we hear as it’s terrifying for women to speak up; both men and women must stand up to it when we see it. | |
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The most effective salespeople focus on teaching their customers something new and reframe the problem they have, while the least effective salespeople just focus on building the relationship. | |
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Much of our beliefs are outdated, and much like a computer, we need to continually rewrite our models of reality (hardware) and ways of living (software). | |
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Simple adjustments to the way we think and act in everyday life, will make the world our daughters grow up in so much better. | |
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Learning complex things or producing craft requires distraction-free concentration – and this takes conscious effort to master. | |
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Open up to the world, trade goods and ideas, but also recognise that not everything that worked in the West will necessarily work in China. | |
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Get over yourself and you’ll be happier and will get a better vision of the truth. | |
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Select a target market, define problem, iterate solution with customers, design business model, map out customer acquisition process, identify and and test key assumptions. | |
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Much of humanity’s progress can be directly attributed to the phenomenal strides in the return multiple of energy out versus energy in. | |
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Reason, science and human qualities has led us to the best time to be alive in human history, so let’s preserve these 3 things to make tomorrow even better. |
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Yes, there are still many terrible things in the world, but let’s acknowledge how far we’ve come, and be conscious of the common mistakes we make when looking at data. | |
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Intelligence is not about seeing patterns, rather, being able to recognise false patterns. | |
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When we look at how incentives drive human behaviour, we can see that many big effects have unexpectedly subtle causes. | |
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Intelligent life will continue to do incredible things, and perhaps even be able to outsmart the inevitable death of the universe itself. | |
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The goal is throughput (sales) not output (production); also keep an eye on inventory and operational expenses; and optimize for global not local bottlenecks. | |
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Disciplined people, thoughts and actions builds up a flywheel (momentum) that leads to breakthroughs. | |
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Training your team is not a waste of time – it’s one of the highest managerial leverage yielding activities. | |
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If humans don’t actually have free will the technological and social megatrends coming our way will spur unprecedented changes. |
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Asian tiger formula: first agriculture (especially land reforms), then manufacturing (to build export discipline), then financial sector interventions that focus capital on productive sectors with high future profits (not just high immediate profits). | |
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So many world events – including supporting the most horrible dictators – were intentionally driven by US political and business interests. | |
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Humans are extremely emotional creatures; learn how to account for this to be more influential. | |
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Disruptive technologies often gain traction in low-margin niches, a zone where market-leading incumbents stay away from – this is why so few companies manage to disrupt themselves before it is forced on them by emerging players. | |
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Coordinate people through proven processes to discover and address value, usability, feasibility and business viability risks. | |
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Gender inequality unfortunately persists and probably will continue to for a while; there’s lots that both men and women can do to minimise it in the mean time. | |
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Any effort incurred that does not provide benefit to the customer is a waste. |
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Given the way intelligence works, it’s clear that general artificial intelligence will eventually arrive; for better or worse, we need to prepare and have these important discussions now. | |
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Complex problems can be broken into smaller parts, analysed, then reassembled (synthesised) into actionable insights. | |
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Label people’s pains, mirror them, create the illusion of control and practice mental patience. | |
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Successful people were lucky to have had opportunities early on, getting a head start on the “10,000 hours”, snowballing into a world-class advantage. | |
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When we observe our own emotions as they are, without judgement, and with acceptance, we can be at peace. | |
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Once we understand the cue-routine-reward loop, we can stop bad habits and start new ones effectively. | |
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We don’t have to wait for life defining moments, we can create them. | |
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Many exercise attractive qualities when rising to power but get corrupted and discard those qualities when in power. | |
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It’s hard to overcome the cognitive biases that affect our decision making, but it certain helps to know about them. | |
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Have clear goals, approach them iteratively and systematically, document what worked and what didn’t, and eventually you’ll get there. | |
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While deductive communication is good for telling everyday stories, inductive structures are better suited for business contexts. | |
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Many things that people consider as assets (puts money into pocket) are actually liabilities (takes money out of pocket). | |
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Homo sapiens got this far thanks to being able to collaborate in much larger numbers, and such grand-scale collaboration was enabled by having shared myths (religion, ideas, etc). | |
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There are so many unexpected relationships within and between various biological, organisational and social characteristics. | |
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Reports change an audience’s information, an explanation changes ability, a pitch changes action, and drama changes their beliefs. | |
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Just as anatomy helps explain how the body works, understanding the silk road routes help explain how today’s world works – it’s a shame this part of the world has been neglected in mainstream history. | |
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Little remains known in popular wisdom about the potential impact of altered states of consciousness on our distant ancestors’ experiences, visions, and beliefs; and more importantly, the potential impact this had on human progress. | |
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Be fully present , grounded, balanced, and go with the flows of nature rather than harshly intervening. | |
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Those that figure out how to unlock the power of the unconscious mind will turn their dreams into reality. | |
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Make the meaning you construct out of every experience a conscious choice. | |
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While fighting temptations is more difficult for some than others, monogamy is ultimately the best option. | |
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Organisational agility is becoming incredibly important. | |
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It really helps to understand the terminology and way that venture capital firm think and work before securing a deal. | |
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Your feet is the most honest part of the body, while your face is the least. | |
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With some simple physics, we can get a sense of what would happen in some unusual circumstances. | |
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Life is fragile, beautiful and cruel; make it count. |
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Create breakthrough technologies instead of just incremental improvements; and protect it with a monopoly. |
Thanks for reading about my reading. Until next year!
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If you liked this, you may also like:
List of My All-Time Favourite Books
An Hour a Day is 50 Books a Year: Tried and Tested Reading Tips
Single Sentence Summaries for Every Book I Read in 2019