Book Excerpts

“I’m the Richest Guy in the World” When I think about what constitutes a successful and abundant life, the investor who embodies it best for me is Arnold Van Den Berg. He’s not a billionaire or a genius. He doesn’t own a yacht or a plane. Yet there’s nobody in the investment world whom I admire more. If I had to choose just one role model from all of the remarkable investors I’ve interviewed over the last quarter of a century, it would be him. He was dealt a terrible hand, but has defied overwhelming odds to achieve a life ...

This is the second book I read Peter Lynch, which is one of my favorite investors. Check out the first one here. One of the reasons or perhaps the biggest reason I like to learn from Peter is because he has a way of communicating his common sense in an understandable way. Simplifying complex things and making them obvious. I'll share my highlights from the book and add context when needed. I own stocks where results depend on ancient fundamentals: a successful company enters new markets, its earnings rise, and the share price follows along. Or a flawed company turns ...

Being very interested in DeFi (Decentralized Finance) -- I failed to find good books about that topic out there -- other than The Infinite Machine. This book narrates the story of Ethereum. It was such a pleasure reading it. I enjoy having an insight about how radical and paradigm shifting ideas came to be. Let's start by defining Ethereum. Ethereum is a decentralized, open-source blockchain with smart contract functionality.Wikipedia To put it in easy words, Ethereum is a platform where people can run contracts that are trust-less and censorship-resistant. It turns out that not having to trust a company, country, ...

In this excerpt from What it takes, Stephen Schwarzman explains how Blackstone developed it's highly risk-averse and impersonal investing strategy. His system differs from that of Warren Buffett which I find highly interesting. Warren makes decisions on his own mostly, at Blackstone there is a process through which investing decisions have to go. THERE ARE NO BRAVE, OLD PEOPLE IN FINANCE As Blackstone was expanding, we hired a young banker from the corporate finance division at Drexel Burnham Lambert. He was smart and ambitious and soon after he arrived in 1989, he had a deal for us. Edgcomb, based in ...

In this excerpt from What it takes, the CEO and co-founder of Backstone brings clarity to economic cycles and how to deal with them effectively in investments. The success of any investment depends in large part on where you are in the cycle when you make it. Cycles can have a major impact on the growth trajectory of a business, the valuation, and, of course, the potential rate of return. We routinely discuss cycles as part of our investment process. Here are my simple rules for identifying market tops and bottoms: 1. Market tops are relatively easy to recognize. Buyers ...

What follows is an excerpt from the founder of Backstone Stephen A. Schwarzman's Biography. Blackstone is the largest alternative investment firm in the world. This is my favorite chapter so far in this book. It is so interesting to me because Stephen describes his thinking process when he created a new company. What he was looking for, his priorities. So much insight in so little text. Now that we were free of Lehman and could work together again, Pete and I began talking in earnest about starting something of our own. We had our first conversation at Pete’s house in ...

While reading about self-distancing or self-reflection from a third person perspective I had to think about David Goggins. He's who many would agree on, one of the bravest and toughest people alive. And he tends to talk about himself in the third person. Coincidence? I don't think so. I was so freaking excited while reading it that I decided to make a post immediately. Here is the excerpt from SuperBetter. Adopting a secret identity has one more benefit that you need to know about, because it can transform the way you think and feel during the most stressful times of ...

There is a lot of good things I have to say about Scott Adam's book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. The reason I'm sharing this excerpt is that I feel like I paid too much attention to the importance of being very good at something. What Scott displays here is that you don't need to be very good at anything. The combination of your skills will add up and give you something bigger than the sum. Managing Your Odds for Success The primary purpose of schools is to prepare kids for success in adulthood. That’s ...

I read this book because I'm very interested in the Wim Hoff method. The book is but a little longer than it should be. But hey, no problem as we can always skip the parts we don't need and so I did.
I summarized and quoted the most existing lessons, here they are. Humans evolved with environmental stressors, it is good to have them Modern humans live in an environment so perfectly fine-tuned for our comfort, our bodies rarely ever get exposed to stress anymore. In our distant past, the climate was one of the main stressors our ancestors endured ...

Last time we read about Empathetic Imagination, one of the defining characteristics of self-made Billionaires. Another characteristic is Patient Urgency. It means feeling an urgency to have everything in place at the right time and sustaining that urgency during prolonged periods of time. The Self-made Billionaire Effect explains. They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.
—ANDY WARHOL Groupon founder Eric Lefkofsky has a clear vision of the imaginative ideas he wants to support now and a decade from now. “Ideas that are local, social, and mobile in orientation are going to do well ...

One remark particularly stuck in my head today while reading When I Stop Talking, You'll Know I'm Dead. Thus, the title of this post. I began to look for work a few months after I started taking classes. The business side of entertainment--that's where I was heading as far back as the family trip to the Fox lot. I applied to all the television networks and talent agencies in the city, intern, gofer, office boy, mailroom clerk, anything to get in the door. Most of the big outfits had unofficial programs to recruit executive talent. The men who hired for ...

Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose. I started this book because it was mentioned several times in Alex's book The Third Door. I just felt this very intense intuition that it would turn out to be a great book to read for me at this time, turned out to be right. I love it so far. I can relate to so much of what Tony shares about his earlier experiences at work. The following chapters I particularly loved and wanted to share with you. You Win Some, You Lose Some Out in the Real World Sanjay and ...

What follows is an excerpt from the book Superbetter. Rewire your brain so it’s easier to motivate yourself, persevere, and succeed. In video games, we play as heroes. We become conquering space cowboys, warrior princesses, daredevil racecar drivers, or the last survivors of a zombie apocalypse. Even in nondigital games, we strive to be the hero of the day, accomplishing epic feats that amaze. Think about scoring a last-second goal in soccer, or marching a pawn across the chessboard to win a second queen after losing your first. But do games actually develop our heroic potential? Can games make us ...

A while ago I made a post about Janes McGonical's TED talk, watch it if you haven't. This is an excerpt of her book Superbetter. I highly recommend this book. Introduction You are stronger than you know. You are surrounded by potential allies. You are the hero of your own story. These three qualities are all it takes to become happier, braver, and more resilient in the face of any challenge. Here’s the good news: You already have these qualities within you. You don’t have to change a thing. You are already more powerful than you realize. You have the ...

What follows is a assertiveness training session taken from the book When I say no, I feel guilty. Dialogue #22
Ron handles digressive, irrelevant,
pertinent, and critical
comments during the
presentation of a
report. Ron is a young graduate student in business administration taking a course in economics. He has great difficulty in getting up in front of a group of people and organizing a discussion or giving a report. Ron’s major fear, a common one, is that people in the audience will know more than he about the subject or catch him in an error or say something stupid. Fear of public performance, even ...

If I had read this title a short while ago I would probably have scoffed it off at first but not any longer. I recently became interested in Wim Hof's teachings and physical feats of survival because I noticed that he uses breathing techniques. Breathing techniques were something on my mind since a friend who practices yoga told me how powerful they were. I'm already a daily meditator, why not explore related techniques? Especially after recognizing a pattern between yoga and Wim Hof's technique.
Reading a book about a skeptical investigative journalist trying to debunk Wim who ended up being ...

I'm fascinated by a book which explains what Self-made Billionaires have in common. One of the key factors of self-made billionaires is their ability to be empathic enough to understand the needs of other people, and imaginative enough to find and evaluate solutions to those problems. The Self-made Billionaire Effect explains. Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working. —PABLO PICASSO When a twenty-four-year-old Joe Mansueto began buying mutual funds in the early 1980s he was wading into lonely territory. Mutual funds had been around since before the Great Depression, but they were a niche product for a niche ...

There are two great books about the science of learning, A Mind for Numbers which I made a summary of and Make it Stick. The following paragraphs are from the latter. Embrace Difficulties WHEN MIA BLUNDETTO, age twenty-three, first lieutenant, U.S. Marine Corps, was billeted to logistics in Okinawa, she had to get her ticket punched at jump school. Describing that moment two years later, she said, “I hate falling, that feeling in your chest. There’s not a day in my life I wanted to jump out of an airplane. I wouldn’t even go down a water slide until I ...

When I Say No, I Feel Guilty by Manuel J. Smith has become one of my all-time favorite books. This book is like a vaccine against manipulation. I'm so grateful to my instinctual attraction to this book despite it not being popular nor new or anything. One of those rare books that are truly undervalued. Let's dive in into an example where a student of systematic assertive therapy uses what he learned to get a refund from his car dealer. Dialogue #14
Jack gets a refund
of $1,800 from
a used-car
dealer. Jack is a part-time student who also works as a physiotherapist to ...

I want to introduce a very powerful self-improvement concept with the following chapters from the book Can't Hurt Me, from David Goggins. In fact, this might be the most powerful/no bullshit concept ever. I showed up on her doorstep later that day with my stomach growling. I didn’t ask for forgiveness and she didn’t demand an apology. She just left the door open and walked away. I stepped into the kitchen and made myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. She passed me the letter without saying a word. I read it in my room where the walls were papered ...

This is a book excerpt from the book The Self-made Billionaire Effect by
John Sviokla. The book caught my attention first when I saw an interview with Tai Lopez and GaryVee. Tai mentioned this book when Gary explained how he lives by seemingly contradictory principles like patience and an urgent drive to act. Being egotistical while having great humility. Being grateful for being lucky while recognizing that hard work is what matters. This way of thinking fascinates me and the book helped me to get a better understanding of that mindset. EXPLODING MYTHS OF EXTREME ENTREPRENEURSHIP The test of a ...

I work in a company where we as engineers often also are the decision makers. We often listen and talk to our customers asking them for feedback. In fact, as of yet, we don’t really have a help-desk between our customers and our engineers. It baffles me how some of the bigger companies, or should I say most of the bigger companies in this country are unable to listen to their customers. The top executives are totally hidden behind big filters formed by their secretaries and are basically unreachable. Reading Mark Cuban's book I stumbled on some chapters where he ...

Manuel J. Smith’s book has quickly become one of my favorite books. Reading it is an eye opener and excellent immunizer to manipulation. Here is one particularly useful technique that will help you to be more assertive. To enforce your assertive rights and to halt manipulation of your behavior, you seed to change your own behavior in response to manipulation—the behavior that allows you to be manipulated. The rest of this manuscript deals with learning a set of assertive verbal skills that are effective in enforcing your assertive rights in your relationships with other people. BROKEN RECORD In introducing students ...

This part of the book Learned optimism shows how optimism can be influenced by a political system. Explanatory Style Across Frontiers IN 1983 I WENT to Munich to attend the Congress of the International Society for the Study of Behavioral Development, and on the second day I fell into conversation with an intense young German graduate student who introduced herself simply as Ele. "Let me tell you the idea I had when you were talking this morning about the CAVE technique," she said. "But first let me ask a question. Do you think that the benefits of optimism and the ...

I'm currently reading three books in parallel, Mindsight, Buddha's brain and The Buddha walks into a bar. All three books show how we can rewire our brain with practice although, from slightly different angles. That's what makes it so interesting to read them at the same time. Yesterday I read a few chapters of Mindsight in which the author tells an anecdote about how one of his patients was able to overcome his aggression and depression through mindfulness meditation. It is the best accounts of the power of mindfulness I've read so far so I want to share it. You will ...

In the following paragraphs, Shawn Achor explains how he managed to form a new daily habit by planning ahead and making it easier for him to play his guitar every day. THE 20-SECOND RULE How to Turn Bad Habits into Good Ones by Minimizing Barriers to Change
D uring one of the first trainings I ever gave on Wall Street, an impatient-looking man
stood up in the back of the room and shouted over the heads of his fellow analysts.
“Shawn, I know you’re from Harvard and everything, but isn’t this all a huge waste of
time? Isn’t positive psychology just common sense?”
I felt ...

“That year, 15,000 people came to Omaha’s Woodstock for Capitalists. Buffett’s $36 billion fortune was once again exceeded only by Bill Gates’s. He had bounced back, almost to the top of the heap. “What is the ideal business?” a shareholder asked when the questions began. “The ideal business is one that earns very high returns on capital and that keeps using lots of capital at those high returns. That becomes a compounding machine,” Buffett said. “So if you had your choice, if you could put a hundred million dollars into a business that earns twenty percent on that capital—twenty million—ideally, ...

“Buffett had written an article for Fortune, “Why I’m Down On the Dollar,”20 in which he explained that he had made significant investments in foreign currencies out of a belief that the dollar would decline in value. The reason was something called the trade deficit: Americans were buying more from other countries than they were selling, and at a fast-accelerating rate. They were paying for the difference through borrowing; foreigners were buying Treasury bonds, an I.O.U. from the U.S. government. In short order, the country’s “net worth,” he said, “is being transferred abroad at an alarming rate.” He posited a ...

This excerpt from the book Snowball explains why taking debt to make up losses is tempting but not good. “The advent of the Bloomberg terminal, symbol of the new computerized trading, mirrored the ongoing struggle over Salomon’s identity, which continued within the firm. Its laggard businesses had never gotten back on their feet. In 1994, Maughan had tried to realign pay at Salomon on the theory that employees should shoulder the same risk as shareholders. When times were good, they would get bonuses, but when times were bad, they would suffer as well. There were people inside the firm who agreed ...

Excerpt from the book The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life “At the time that Buffett invested in Salomon, the market was near a breaking point. In his shareholder letter the previous March, he had said that money managers were so hyperkinetic they made “whirling dervishes appear sedated.” He didn’t have a partnership to dissolve, but over the next few months he started dumping stocks. He knew that as the market continued upward, part of what was driving it was a new invention, the “S&P 500 future.” Salomon, like all major banks, now traded derivative contracts that were a ...

Warren Buffet's biography The Snowball is a fascinating read. The following chapters will show you how Warren Buffet made his first profit from buying stocks at the age of 11, and his first big mistake. "A year later, he brought forth the kernel of his reality. To his family’s amusement and surprise, by the spring of 1942, his hoard totaled $120. Enlisting his sister Doris as a partner, he bought three shares of a stock for each of them, costing him $114.75 for his three shares of Cities Service Preferred.11 “I didn’t understand that stock very well when I bought ...

Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger explain why volatility does not equal risk. This reasoning applies beautifully to cryptocurrency investing, in my opinion. Another important lesson is to not put too much trust in charts and statistics but rather apply, as Charlie calls it, "enlightened common sense." "Buffett noted with fascination that what is taught about investing has gone backward over the last 40 years. Munger claimed that it is because professors are so enamored by modern portfolio theory. For the man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Buffett continued the thought, noting that because computers can generate ...

“Working with these kids taught me a lot about myself. Until then I thought I was the poster boy for the American dream. I came to the United States virtually broke, worked hard, kept focused on my goal, and made it. This really was the land of opportunity, I thought. If a kid like me could do it, anybody could. Well, that wasn’t so. Traveling to schools, I saw that it wasn’t enough to grow up with the United States as your address. In the inner cities, kids didn’t even dare to dream. The message they got was “Don’t bother ...

Excerpt from Your 3 best superpowers “HAVE REALISTIC EXPECTATIONS The next step in preparing to successfully meditate is to have realistic, grounded expectations of your practice before you begin. When I began learning to play the piano (which is a wonderful form of meditation, by the way), I was very enthusiastic. Learning scales was easy, and I loved and looked forward to playing for at least 30 minutes a day. But after a few weeks, it was time to start learning to play simple songs and then more complicated ones. This didn’t prove quite as easy for me as playing ...

Everyone seems to talk about periodization training but what exactly is it? I like the explanation of Mark Lauren from his Book You are your own gym, one of my favorite exercise books and the one with which I started my new fitness journey some time ago. Let's read what Mark has to say about periodization. Knowing why and how you should be doing each workout, rather than blindly going through the motions, will give you the drive to push through hard times, prevent burnout, and give you the know-how to customize the program as your body changes and adapts ...

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vq ocmg htgg rjqpg ecnnu? My instinct for finding a way around barriers and safeguards began very early. At about age one and a half, I found a way to climb out of my crib, crawl to the child gate at the door, and figure out how to open it. For my mom, it was the first wake-up call for all that was to follow. I grew up as an only child. After my dad left when I was three, my mother, Shelly, and I lived in nice, medium-priced apartments ...

In the following excerpt from Dr. Garth Davis's book Proteinaholic he explains how to recognize valid research and manipulated/biased/sponsored research. Research Truth and BS: How to Speak Science In Chapter 3, I told you about my rapid transformation from sick, overweight, and sluggish patient to healthy, lean, energetic triathlete. Had I been an accountant, a bricklayer, a rock musician, that would have been the end of the story. But I was a doctor, a surgeon—and a weight-loss surgeon at that. My old proteinaholic views on nutrition were public record, enshrined in Chapter 12 of my 2008 book, The Expert’s Guide to Weight-Loss ...

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I've read many books about motivation, drive and willpower, but I had never seen lack of motivation from the stress angle. It makes a lot of sense, as I myself feel more energized and motivated since I switched to a plant-based diet. Brendan Brazier's explains in his book Thrive that stress is a big deal when it comes to unfulfilled goals and lack of ambition in peoples lives. Here is what he has to say: In addition to its negative physical effects, uncomplementary stress has been shown to have a significant adverse effect on the psyche and motivation. Scientists now ...

In this excerpt from The Art of Happiness the Dalai Lama explains the difference between beneficial and less beneficial desires. Crossing the hotel parking lot on my way to meet with the Dalai Lama one afternoon, I stopped to admire a brand-new Toyota Land Cruiser, the type of car I had been wanting for a long time. Still thinking of that car as I began my session, I asked, “Sometimes it seems that our whole culture, Western culture, is based on material acquisition; we’re surrounded, bombarded, with ads for the latest things to buy, the latest car and so on ...

This is from one of my favorite books The 7 habits of highly effective people. When we make deposits of unconditional love, when we live the primary laws of love, we encourage others to live the primary laws of life. In other words, when we truly love others without condition, without strings, we help them feel secure and safe and validated and affirmed in their essential worth, identity, and integrity. Their natural growth process is encouraged. We make it easier for them to live the laws of life—cooperation, contribution, self-discipline, integrity—and to discover and live true to the highest and ...

In this excerpt from the book Total Recall, Arnold made me think with a brilliant statement. He exemplifies with his own experience that we feel bad after failure, not due to the failure, but because we haven't done everything we could to get a successful outcome. “That afternoon at the gym, I thought more about my loss to Frank Zane. Now that I’d stopped feeling sorry for myself, I came to harsher conclusions than those I’d reached the night before. I still felt the judging had been unfair, but I discovered this wasn’t the real cause of my pain. It was the ...

In the following chapter from the book Finding Ultra, Rick Roll tells how changing to a plant based diet flooded him with so much energy that he started running for hours without effort. This sudden rise in energy ultimately made him an Ultra Man and EPIC5 CHALLENGE champ [BIO]. Furthermore, he was named one of the world's 25 fittest men by Men's Fitness magazine. A LINE IN THE SAND It was the night before I turned forty. That cool, late-October evening in 2006, Julie and our three kids were sound asleep as I tried to enjoy some peaceful moments in ...

The following excerpt is from the book Finding Ultra. MY SECRET WEAPON Power in Plants It’s 1984, a Tuesday, 7:15 A.M., and two high school students stand in line at Montgomery Donuts, out Old Georgetown Road in Bethesda, Maryland. Marking time, my swimming buddy Brian Nicosia and I consider the merits of ordering chocolate-covered custard versus jelly-filled with powdered sugar on top. In the end, we split the difference: “Six custard-filled, six jellies,” I say, and Brian forks over some crumpled bills. We tread lightly across the icy parking lot, eating mouthfuls of doughnut as we make it to Brian’s ...

The following excerpt is from Dr. McDougall's latest book, The healthiest Diet on the Planet. Damned lies harm the public and planet Earth. In June 2015, the Journal of the American Medical Association, in a reckless opinion piece, called for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) to remove an upper limit on the intake of total dietary fat in its most recent Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2015−2020. 1 To my dismay, the authors of this article also applauded the “elimination of dietary cholesterol as a ‘nutrient of concern.’” The facts behind ...

The following expert is from the book How not to die from Dr. Michael Greger. In chapters 11 and 13, we will see how effective flaxseeds can be against breast and prostate cancers, but you have to be a little skeptical when scientists throw around words like “miraculous” to describe them. (One medical journal published a review titled “Flaxseed: A Miraculous Defense Against Some Critical Maladies.”) But a remarkable intervention trial published in the journal Hypertension suggests that in this case, the term “miraculous” may not be too far off. Rarely does one see a dietary study of this caliber: ...

Do you feel overwhelmed and don't know what to do about it? Did you hear about the benefits of meditation but you think you have not enough time to practice? Worry no more, in this excerpt the authors of the very recommended book Mindfulness explain how you can meditate in just 1 minute. A one-minute meditation

• Sit erect in a straight-backed chair. If possible, bring your back a little way from the rear of the chair so that your spine is self-supporting. Your feet can be flat on the floor. Close your eyes or lower your gaze.
• Focus your ...
  
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📚 Happiness | Science | Meditation| Buddhism Excerpt From: Dalai Lama. “The Art of Happiness.” The key question is: Does Buddhism have anything to contribute to the scientific investigation of happiness? In considering this question, it is important to understand that Buddhism is not a faith-based system in the traditional sense. In fact, when the Buddha first began to teach, he advised his disciples not to blindly accept his teachings out of faith, but rather to investigate the validity of his theories and test his methods for themselves. This reliance on empirical investigation, the uncompromising commitment to truth, and a ...