What RamP's reading: Oct'20

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness

Naval Ravikant is an entrepreneur, philosopher, and investor who has captivated the world with his principles for building wealth and creating long-term happiness. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant is a collection of Naval’s wisdom and experience from the last ten years, shared as a curation of his most insightful interviews and poignant reflections. This isn’t a how-to book, or a step-by-step gimmick. Instead, through Naval’s own words, you will learn how to walk your own unique path toward a happier, wealthier life.

The Most Important Thing : Uncommon Sense for the Thoughtful Investor
The Most Important Thing explains the keys to successful investment and the pitfalls that can destroy capital or ruin a career. Utilizing passages from his memos to illustrate his ideas, Marks teaches by example, detailing the development of an investment philosophy that fully acknowledges the complexities of investing and the perils of the financial world. Brilliantly applying insight to today's volatile markets, Marks offers a volume that is part memoir, part creed, with a number of broad takeaways.

The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business
True leaders aren't made by business schools-they make themselves, seeking out the knowledge, skills, and experience they need to succeed. Read this book and you will learn the principles it takes most business professionals a lifetime of trial and error to master.

Ramen Profitable

As a budding and a small-time Angel Investor I often get to hear passionate founders of start-ups. Their energy, conviction and optimism rubs on anyone around and I'm no exception. 

This week I saw a tweet from Paul Graham of Y-Combinator, in which he had shared an old mail from the founders of AirBnB, when they became Ramen Profitable. Ramen Profitable means the start-up is making just enough money to pay founder's living expenses as Paul describes in his essay.

A flurry of thought entered my mind as I read the tweet, the original essay, and things I had read about AirBnB in the book Upstarts. It just means laser focus, continuous tinkering till you get it right, not getting distracted and keeping it lean and mean. For investors, it cannot get any better and what a joy to work with such founders and both help and learn from them.

It also brought back memories of my failed investments. As an Angel one should expect and be ready to lose entire investment. But then there are a few founders who fought and fought to keep it afloat and some wound-up without any fight after squandering investor's money. The first will have no trouble raising monies again when they move on as their integrity remained intact and their demonstrated grit made them even more valuable in the eyes of investors. The latter might have burnt all the goodwill and likely to struggle raise monies again - they are well advised to internalise being Ramen Profitable. 

What RamP's Reading: Sep'20

Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur

When Derek Sivers started CD Baby, he wasn’t planning on building a major business. He was a successful independent musician who just wanted to sell his CDs online. When no one would help him do it, he set out on his own and built an online store from scratch. Sivers didn’t need a business plan, and neither do you. You don’t need to think big; in fact, it’s better if you don’t. Start with what you have, care about your customers more than yourself, and run your business like you don’t need the money.

How to change your mind - Michael Pollan (reco'd by Naval)
A unique and elegant blend of science, memoir, travel writing, history, and medicine, How to Change Your Mind is a triumph of participatory journalism. By turns dazzling and edifying, it is the gripping account of a journey to an exciting and unexpected new frontier in our understanding of the mind, the self, and our place in the world. The true subject of Pollan's "mental travelogue" is not just psychedelic drugs but also the eternal puzzle of human consciousness and how, in a world that offers us both suffering and joy, we can do our best to be fully present and find meaning in our lives.

Stumbling on happiness
In this fascinating and often hilarious work – winner of the Royal Society of Science Prize 2007 – pre-eminent psychologist Daniel Gilbert shows how – and why – the majority of us have no idea how to make ourselves happy.
We all want to be happy, but do we know how? When it comes to improving tomorrow at the expense of today, we're terrible at predicting how to please our future selves.

The War of Art: Winning the Creative Battle
Bestselling novelist Steven Pressfield identifies the enemy that every one of us must face, outlines a battle plan to conquer this internal foe, then pinpoints just how to achieve the greatest success. The War of Art emphasizes the resolve needed to recognize and overcome the obstacles of ambition and then effectively shows how to reach the highest level of creative discipline. Think of it as tough love . . . for yourself.

Naval's Jewels

I found myself frequently referring people to works of Naval Ravikant. I thought I will put all my recommendations in a post here.

Twitter: 

• @naval (https://twitter.com/naval), 
  
• @NavalBot (https://twitter.com/NavalBot). (maintained by a fan)
  

Web sites: 

• https://nav.al (Naval's new web site, all his content is getting consolidated here)
  
• https://theangelphilosopher.com (has lot of his thoughts, don't know who maintains it)
  
• Angel List: India US  (democraticizing angel investing)
• Books recommended by Naval 
• Almanack of Naval Ravikant (This (free) book collects and curates Naval’s wisdom from Twitter, Podcasts, and Essays over the past decade).

Popular podcasts and fireside chats: 

• With Tim Ferris  (nominated for best podcast of the year)
  
• With Joe Rogan
  
• With Farnam street
  
• With Nassem Taleb
• With Marco Angelo (On Investing, Happiness and Meaning of Life)
• Naval on Meditation
• Naval on Getting Wealthy (giant episode - collection of all interviews on "How to get rich without getting lucky")
• Naval - "Taming your desires makes you unbeatable"
• .... and many more at nav.al

Interesting articles:

• Navalisms - quotes and perceptions
• Naval Ravikant - 15 timeless thoughts
• Naval - How to get rich without getting lucky

Shameless plug-in: My post on my 60d meditation streak (interesting more for copy-paste of Naval's tweetstorm on meditation)

What RamP's Reading: Aug'20

    

The Time Paradox by Philip Zimbarado (reco'd by Derek Severs)
In The Time Paradox, Drs. Zimbardo and Boyd draw on thirty years of pioneering research to reveal, for the first time, how your individual time perspective shapes your life and is shaped by the world around you. Further, they demonstrate that your and every other individual's time zones interact to create national cultures, economics, and personal destinies.

Anti Fragile - Taleb
Antifragile is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand. What Taleb has identified and calls “antifragile” is that category of things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish.

Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want
In this illuminating book, leading social psychologist Nicholas Epley introduces us to what scientists have learned about our ability to understand the most complicated puzzle on the planet—other people—and the surprising mistakes we so routinely make. Mindwise will not turn others into open books, but it will give you the wisdom to revolutionize how you think about them—and yourself.

Winning Bigly - Scott Adams
Win Bigly is a field guide for persuading others in any situation—or resisting the tactics of emotional persuasion when they’re used on you. Adams goes beyond politics to look at persuasion tools that can work in any setting—the same ones Adams saw in Steve Jobs when he invested in Apple decades ago.

What RamP's Reading: Jul'20

  

Building Evolutionary Architectures: Support Constant Change
The software development ecosystem is constantly changing, providing a constant stream of new tools, frameworks, techniques, and paradigms. Over the past few years, incremental developments in core engineering practices for software development have created the foundations for rethinking how architecture changes over time, along with ways to protect important architectural characteristics as it evolves. This practical guide ties those parts together with a new way to think about architecture and time. (Reco'd by Nagashree MV)


The Motivation Manifesto: 9 Declarations to Claim Your Personal Power
The march to Personal Freedom, Burchard argues, can be won only by declaring our intent and independence, stepping into our personal power, and battling through self-doubt and the distractions of the day until full victory is won. Recalling the revolutionist voices of the past that chose freedom over tyranny, Burchard—at times poetic yet always fierce—motivates us to free ourselves from fear and take back our lives once and for all
The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself
Spiritual teacher Michael A. Singer explores the question of human identity and shows how the development of consciousness can enable us all to dwell in the present moment and achieve happiness and self-realization. (Reco'd by Naval)

The Dark Side of the Light Chasers: Reclaiming Your Power, Creativity, Brilliance, and Dreams
Through the stories and exercises in The Dark Side of the Light Chasers, Debbie Ford shows us not only how to recognize our hidden emotions, but also how to find the gifts they offer us.

Not everything need to be ATMish

Transactions at ATMs have been ridiculously made simple. You push a few buttons, the money will come out. No need to say "thank you" or "please". You need not smile, nod your head or exchange pleasantries. Its ultra efficient. Walk in, press buttons, get your money. Done. No more no less.

The rapid digitisation, automation, customer self-service etc., have all made life very quick, efficient and void of any emotion. Not everything, every transaction, every interaction needs to be like an ATM transaction. We deserve more empathy. Transactions can be more humane, real and personal.

Lets build bridges and not tear them down. Next time when you run into a routine transaction with a human, please see whether you are doing an ATM transaction or interacting with a human.

PS: Inspired by a section titled "Building bridges and not burning them", from the beautiful book What to do when its your turn (and its always your turn), by one of my favourite authors Seth Godin. I usually copy-paste excerpts from the books that I read. However I recently read this post by Derek Sivers, who asks us to not quote, instead make it personal and tell our version. It sounds like an interesting idea and will try it. This was the first post.