In keeping with yearly tradition, here are my single sentence ‘summaries’ for every book I read in 2019.
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Throughout history people have wanted similar things (freedom, security etc) – the challenge is finding the right balance for the right place at the right time. | |
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While riddled with its unique regional challenges, business opportunities in Africa are underrated. | |
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Human behaviour is incredibly complex: much of our decisions are influenced by what was going on seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years, and even generations before the event. | |
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Modern healthcare has steered too heavily on seeking treatment that merely prolongs life, even if it makes the reminder of one’s life miserable. | |
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Given we’ve moved on from the dogma of genetic determinism and towards recognising gene-environment interactions, it’s now important to realise that our own mindset is one of these environmental factors. | |
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Oftentimes, taking calculated risks to prioritise speed over efficiency sets up a business for sustainable expansion. | |
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The common practices and legal frameworks in which businesses and markets operate in today can be better understood by studying business case precedents. | |
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Design thinking brings a harmonious balance of feasibility, viability, and desirability into the heart of the most impactful projects and products. | |
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Just as the discipline-specific language once challenged scientists from conceptualising chaos theory, the practical challenge now is being able to see chaos in daily life when it is there. | |
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Once one learns the basics about the complexity – emergence, self-organising, chaos, non-linearity, entropy, computation, networks, scaling etc – it becomes apparent that it is one of the most powerful mental models to help make sense of the world. | |
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In the recurring revenue SaaS world, customer loyalty built on relationships alone is insufficient – customer health needs to be relentlessly monitored and value needs to be proactively added. | |
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Wisdom is predicated on how see things, make decisions, and deal with what’s out of our control. | |
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The assumptions behind the neoliberal economic framework has been ignored by too many, too often, for too long, and it’s about time we popularise models that better integrates sustainability. | |
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Economic theories have always been contentious and difficult to prove, so it is essential to appreciate the contextual conditions under which each theory developed, and consider economics as life-long learning. | |
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The breakthroughs that had substantial flow-on effects originated in all sorts of places, caught on due to all sorts of reasons, and all created winners and losers along the way. | |
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When the mind seeks truth, caution must be taken not to celebrate merely re-discovering self-projected ‘truths’. | |
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I’m convinced that the intimate dance between politics, science, economics, and society transcends the boundaries of fiction. | |
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Just as Western powers recede into isolationist policies, the East is acclerating its global reach and influence. | |
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An old sin of biology is to confuse the definition of a feature with the feature itself. | |
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Upcoming technologies will further escalate the wealth inequality problem and there is some data in favour of a universal basic income to alleviate this. | |
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Mental caution must be taken when one questions the logic of logic – mathematical paradoxes, circularity, self-referencing, infinite loops, nested logic, recursive functions etc – for they are dangerously fascinating, and cognitively infinite. | |
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Looking beyond proximate factors such as technology, initial geographic advantages is likely the most upstream explanation for Eurasians conquering American and African natives rather than the reverse. | |
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Entrepreneurship and leadership is not for everyone so “if you’re going to eat shit, don’t nibble”. | |
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Understanding the science and shifting cultural norms about certain psychedelics sheds new light on how the mind works, and how to get even more from it. | |
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It pays to understand the distinguishing details behind performance measurements, in the world of private equity, particularly so with IRR. | |
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The placebo effect from alternative medicines is undeniable, but most alternatives generally do more harm than good. | |
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While history smiles at all attempts to force post-hoc theoretical patterns, there is still much to learn from its reoccurring rhymes. | |
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A stubbornly persistent non-violent approach is so effective because it shames the oppressors. | |
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Living a good life requires truly understanding yourself, and truly understanding yourself requires bridging the gap between the personal conscious, personal unconscious, as well as the collective unconscious. | |
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OKRs (objectives and key results) helps bring focus, alignment, and commitment on the goals that truly matter. | |
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Old Power is centraliesd, exclusive, and specialised, while New Power is distributed, collaborative, and generalised – this doesn’t necessarily mean New Power is always better though. | |
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As China’s Belt and Road initiative revitalises the old silk roads and paves new ones into Europe and Africa, central Eurasia’s geographical importance will rise once again. | |
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The food industry has become more mechanised, monocultured, and misleading than ever before. | |
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When faced with an either-or binary choice, successful leaders always manage to find alternatives. | |
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The universe had to overcome several critical thresholds against entropy to get to where we are now. | |
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The conditions and sequence in which the 3 political institutions – rule of law, modern state, accountable government – developed explains much of a nation’s political characteristics. | |
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While many of our ideas on being, metaphysics, epistemology and morality, have changed, many more have not and perhaps never will. | |
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History has shown us that even the most politically advanced nations are subject to political decay: when political development struggles to keep up with other dimensions of development. | |
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As geography evidently enables or constraints development, states have and will continue to fight over strategic geographic positions. (summary HERE) | |
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Despite its dark past, the new Africa is coloured by a new sense of bottom-up self-assertion, with Africans solving African problems rather than getting muddled in ineffective old Africa foreign aid. | |
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Not only are planned economies ineffective, they are also likely to turn totalitarian. | |
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Despite high hopes following the wave of independence in the mid 20th century, the post-colonial institutional fragility in this region has proven incredibly difficult to overcome. | |
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Normal science accumulates and re-articulates already-accepted facts, while anomalies lead to paradigm shifts that redirects research into completely new fronts. | |
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Self-improvement is really about choosing better things to give a fuck about. | |
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Some are fortunate to get a kick out of exploring how the natural world works. | |
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The paradoxes of nature can be perhaps be reconciled by seeing balance on multiple dimensions. | |
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Game theory situations are subtly prevalent and better understanding its key concepts is incredibly useful in business and daily life. | |
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Most marketers deliver the same feelings, just in different ways, with different stories, for different products, people, and moments. | |
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The second and third order effects of advanced sex robots may take society by surprise, maybe even as much as contraceptives did in the 60s. | |
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Racism is a system, not an event – so it is important to acknowledge the subterranean social forces that affect our perceptions. | |
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We all know stress is bad, but understanding the specifics on a physiological level has been a powerful deterrent to consciously managing my own stress levels. | |
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There are two opposing approaches to environmental sustainability: Prophet says we should consume less, while Wizard says we should focus more on devloping new technologies. | |
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Without romanticising pre-agrarian tribal life, since this is how we lived through most of human history, it’s likely that there may be some surprising lessons on sociology to re-learn from our ancestors. | |
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From social services to finance, energy and telco, the Australian neoliberal reforms (privatisation, deregulation, and marketisation) in the 80s have not lived up its promises. |
Thanks for reading about my reading. Until next year!
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List of My All-Time Favourite Books
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