save what matters from every book you read
Joined May 2024
- Tweets8.9K
- Following348
- Followers74.3K
- Likes7.3K
Nogales is one city cut in half by a fence. On the Arizona side, the average household earns about $30,000 a year. On the Mexican side, it’s about a third of that. If you haven’t read Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, you don’t know why some countries get rich. The people on both sides of that fence share the same ancestors, the same food and the same weather. What’s different is the rules they live under. Some rules let ordinary people own property, start businesses and keep what they earn. Others are built so a small elite can take everything. Geography and culture can’t explain why South Korea is about ten times richer than North Korea. Only the rules can.
A 20-year study found the average expert predicted the future about as well as a dart-throwing chimpanzee. Superforecasting by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner shows what the few people who actually can predict do differently. Tetlock tracked 284 experts making about 28,000 predictions. The famous ones did worse than the unknown ones. Then the US intelligence community ran a forecasting tournament, and Tetlock entered with thousands of ordinary volunteers. The best of them beat professional analysts who had access to classified information. What set them apart wasn’t IQ or credentials. They broke big questions into small ones. They thought in percentages instead of yes or no. They changed their minds often, in small steps. And they kept score. Everyone makes predictions every day about money, jobs and people. This is the best book there is on making better ones.
An ordinary journalist trained for one year and won the US Memory Championship. Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer is the story of how he did it. In 2005, Foer went to cover the contest as a reporter. The competitors told him they weren’t born with special memories. They had learned a technique. So he tried it. He practiced for a year, came back in 2006 and won. He memorized a shuffled deck of cards in 1 minute and 40 seconds, a new US record. The technique is about 2,500 years old. Greek and Roman orators used it to give long speeches without notes. It is the most useful book on memory you will ever read.
Poor Charlie’s Almanack is the best book on thinking clearly I’ve ever read. Charlie Munger was Warren Buffett’s partner for decades and one of the best investors who ever lived. This book collects his speeches. In one of them, he lists 25 ways the human mind tricks itself into bad decisions. In another, he explains that about 80 or 90 big ideas from different fields carry most of the weight in life, and that you should learn them all. His most famous advice is “Invert, always invert”: to work out how to succeed, first ask how you would fail. He once said that he and Buffett got ahead mainly by “trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.” It will change the way you make decisions.
You haven’t read a truly great novel until you’ve read The Leopard. It was written by a Sicilian prince in the last years of his life. Every publisher he sent it to rejected it. He died in 1957 without ever seeing it published. A year later it came out and became one of the best-selling Italian novels ever written, and it won Italy’s top literary prize. The story follows a proud Sicilian prince watching his whole world fall apart as Italy is unified in 1860. It’s a book about pride, change and growing old, and every page of it is beautifully written.
