Tag: book review

The Art of Frugal Hedonism (Book Review)

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This is a fun book. Besides the charming Australian narrator, this book about personal finance was full of whimsy and fun. The chapters are short. The tips are good. The point is the same.

When I taught personal finance in school this year it was heavy on Morgan Housel’s ideas: there’s internal finance and external. The internal stuff is about how you view money. The external stuff is about what to do with money.

There are simple and straightforward answers to both these areas. The Art of Frugal Hedonism provides many ideas for both.

The book reminded me a lot of the joys of college. A thirty dollar paycheck was enough for a full weekend of fun: bars, pizza, games, being outside. It was all there. And the book wants us to get back to that point.

We can always shift our framing of the world and the authors of this book want us to think of that time. You don’t need money to have fun – we already know that – we lived that!

The Art of Frugal Hedonism is reminder of that. Find fun. Be around people. Embrace weirdness. Eat basic and delicious food.

Though a totally different financial scale, the suggestions in Frugal Hedonism align with the answer to: Should you buy a ski chalet?

Four Thousand Weeks (book review)

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Likely one of the best books I’ll read this year.

I have soft spots. For movies it’s one last job. For books it’s This is Water.

There’s this thing that everyone talks about but everyone talks about it wrongly. That’s a soft spot.

That’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. According to author Oliver Burkeman, we are doing time management all wrong. We are swimming through water without really knowing what it is.

And water is a good analogy because water, like time, isn’t something we can grasp. It’s something we have to accept. We can scoop water. We can vacuum water. We can pour water – but these are on water’s terms. To paraphrase high school science: water does what water does.

That is also how to think about time. We act like we manage time, “time management”, but only in the same way we manage water: creating spaces for it to be.

You should read this book!

It’s difficult to review for the same reasons productivity feels important. We check things off a list. We progressed. We got-things-done. But are these the right metrics or just the easy ones?

Productivity isn’t the goal. Accomplishment isn’t either. Living. L-I-V-I-N (a similar book) is the goal.

How to live is a messy question relative to How to be productive.

But here’s a tip. An honest-to-goodness fact. This is as close to a guarantee as you’ll ever get.

Spend time with people. Optimize community. Aim for togetherness. Move from ‘me’ to unity. Move from ego to love. Less get more done, and more to-get-her.

Be that way. That’s a productivity hack.

The Algebra of Wealth (isn’t really about money)

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“The whole shooting match,” Scott Galloway ends his book, The Algebra of Wealth, “Everything meaningful in life is about others.”

It’s not a great personal finance book. It felt like Galloway looked at his bookshelf, categorized the books he’s read into sections, found some news and research, and put it together.

But it’s an interesting personal finance book.

It’s interesting because Galloway is a brand. It’s a flavor I don’t care for, without nudging from J.F., I never would have read this book. Even then, I didn’t love it. Until that last line when it all came together.

We get personal finance wrong. We think of it as a thing people do, a distinct part of their life. We have the marriage part. We have the work part. We have the parenting/childhood parts. We have all these buckets, but they aren’t buckets. These are not different parts. It’s one life.

Any message (like your choice of personal finance) is like an organ transplant. The organ might be good (advice), but if the receiver rejects it, it doesn’t matter how healthy it is. There has to be a match.

This is why personal finance is full of gurus. Scott, Dave, Suze, Ramit, don’t persuade. They select. It’s a sampling effect. Ramit’s book: I Will Teach You To Be Rich brings in people willing to hear the message. Scott’s book brings in people familiar with his schtick.

And this is what Galloway gets so right. It’s not about money, it’s about the meaning and, “everything meaningful in life is about others.” That’s the seed to a successful transplant.

We miss this in our message. Maybe the medium isn’t the message. Maybe the meaning is the message. What does this mean to us? To our tribe? To my history?

People want meaning. They find it thru gurus.

Outlive (book advice)

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My thoughts of Outlive by Peter Attia revolve around two 80/20 ideas.

First, 80% of health outcomes derive from an absence. Don’t smoke. Don’t be overweight. Don’t under sleep. Don’t be sedentary. Avoid environmental contaminants. Avoid sunburns. Regardless of what someone does do, if they don’t do those things their health will mostly be fine.

Then 80% of the remaining 20% is about what people do do. My rough prioritization:

  1. Exercise, make it easy. Do enjoyable things. Do accessible things. Design it!
  2. Sleep better. Put the phone away through design choices.
  3. Continue the birthday cake diet along with tasty vegetarian foods.
  4. Poop in a box. It’s relatively costless and early prevention of colon cancer seems to matter.
  5. Avoid sunburns, especially in Florida!

To be accurate rather than precise the thinking looks like this:

0-80% of the effect is from avoiding the really bad things.

81-96% of the effect is from doing the basic good things: get stronger, eat better and less, sleep well.

97-99.9% of the effect is from optimization: finding spring water, taking metformin, and so on.

But, being a loss averse human being I don’t do any of the optimization. The chance it helps in a meaningful way is so small compared to the chance it mucks things up.

Summary: Full Fee Agent

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Full Fee Agent is written for real estate agents but it’s a book that applies to anyone is sales. It covers a lot of ideas we tread over but includes something I’ve undervalued over time. That is relationships matter a lot. Our outcomes are some mix of what and who we know. The bridge for each of my career changes was a person, not a subject, degree, or work-sample. Salespersons have known this a long time and Voss’ book emphasizes that.

Here is a summary: build empathy with people by seeing things from their point of view and understanding its importance. Done well, this builds trust and supercharges someone’s willingness to partner. Trust is inversely related to CAC. Finally, with trust, the deal terms (Full Fee) become worthwhile. 

The biggest ideas is legibility.

  • Home owners see dollar sign 🏷️
  • Agents see actions ☎️

But these aren’t actually that important.

The illegible connective tissue is empathy and trust. 

Agents who misunderstand spend time and money 🤑 on people who aren’t actually going to be clients 🤮. Don’t confuse the counts of dollars, calls, and miles driven for meaning within empathy and trust.

Full Fee Agent is written from the point of view of an agent, here are four tactical steps: 

🙉 Listen, listen, listen, not location is the key part of real estate. Use tools like mirroring and labeling (‘that sounds stressful, that must have been agonizing,…’). In all caps Voss writes: “Your primary job as a real estate agent is to cultivate relationships”.  

🐘 Get the elephant out early. Build trust by pointing out flaws. Not only does this build trust, but it brings up deal stressors. 😬 Bracing is one way to do this: “I have some bad news”. Often what people hear is not as bad as what people think. 

👣 Cross the street to see things from their point of view. Rather than you-you-you, think about what the clients want. “The first step toward your goal of having your influence stick is to learn what’s really going on inside their heads. Not the pro/ con, profit/ loss calculations but the emotions that so often override logical reasoning.”

🎯 Calibrated questions. Rather than salesy talk, get customers to lead the way. ‘What would success look like to you’. “Never forget,” Voss writes, “people will die over their autonomy.”   

Full Fee Agent isn’t a great book. Never Split the Difference, Uncommon Service, The Sandler Rules, and Start with No are all better. But sometimes mimicry (if you’re an agent, or in sales of the real estate variety) makes a difference. If so, the book will help.

Clear Thinking (book review)

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Comparison is the thief of joy, this is how Shane Parish closes his book, Clear Thinking.

But it’s how he should have started it.

Maybe that’s another book, but we have to want the right things first. What’s important?

My gripe is that this book was not a daily devotional. It could’ve started with wanting the big things , enforce that each day, and given specific tactics, ideas, and questions. 

We want actions, but what are we acting towards?

Comparison is the thief of joy. We have to be careful about our wants. It is easy to want the wrong things. Many celebrities have noted that the downside of fame – the things we don’t see! – do not balance the upside.

And this is where the book could have started. Making sure we use clear thinking on the important things. 

It’s a good book, even though it isn’t a daily devotional. It’s broken down into two big ideas.

First, do we have the right mindset. Does someone have the right person on their shoulder, whispering in their ear? Do they have the right feelings in their heart? Do they have the norms, customs, culture, habits, in their life that leave them to the things they want?

The ways we act. The things we say. How we compose emails. How quickly we respond to text messages: and with what emojis. That’s how our norms. It’s the slope of our line (y=mx+b). There’s only so much we can do, but we need to have something helpful there.

Second, the systems we can design around our mindset. We aren’t always going to be humble, or getting after it, or on top of our game. In those situations, we rely on the systems we design around us.

The four enemies we face are emotion, ego, social pressure, and inertia. These are the enemies that rise up and whisper to our mindset. They are louder than the normal voices in our head. They steal our heart, they infiltrate our culture.

What may look like discipline often involves a carefully created environment to encourage certain behaviors. – Shane Parrish

The good news is, these enemies are not that strong. For example, Shane writes that it is easier to go to the gym seven days a week than three. Objectively this doesn’t make sense, but it uses the principle of a inertia to our advantage.

A tactic to avoid the social enemy is to have personal rules. I don’t drink on Thursday nights. I always sleep on it before signing a deal.

The influence of monger, the stoics, and the many others of Shane‘s parish run through this book. So much of it is about avoiding mistakes. It’s about avoiding these enemies, not through choice, but having good design and the right mindset.

The book also includes a section on decisions in action. It offers incredibly helpful specific questions for decision-makers to ask. I won’t spoil them here. 

The Psychology of Money (book review)

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The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel is a book of twenty money lessons but really it’s about two things.

Thing 1: How the world works.

There is the world and there is how we think about the world. The more these ideas overlap the happier more calibrated the person. People follow stories (chapter 18), pessimisms sells (17), and tails drive everything (6) are all explanations about the world.

It’s through a combination of evolution, social pressure, and a history of this-worked-for-me that we drift. Sure, we think, Tom lost so money in crypto but he didn’t listen and get in when I told him the candlestick fed cycle jump was coming (luck, chapter 2). When something bad happens to us we’re unlucky. When something bad happens to them they’re idiots (1).

Things 2: How you work.

So it’s not just outside that we misunderstand. It’s inside too. We move the goalposts (3), confuse consumption (8), and aim for the rational rather than reasonable (11).

Asking what do I really want out of this big trip is not easy.

So we don’t.

Thankfully Housel is here to help. Think of time as freedom (7), just save (10), and don’t confuse consumption for wealth (9).

–

The Psychology of Money is a difficult book to review because it’s personal. It’s how you see the world and understand yourself. Oof.

While the chapters are short, don’t spend little time on them. Read them. Stop. Think. Reflect. Note. The book is a refreshing break from the digital cycle. You’ll read this and think: Oh yes, this is a breath of fresh air and one I needed.

Outlive (book review)

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What’s the point of reading this book?

Peter Attia’s Outlive starts with the medicine: biology, physiology, chemistry and so on. There’s an excellent explanation on arterial plaque. I did not know that cardiovascular diseases were caused by the body trying to heal itself from within, dealing with LDL cholesterol as best it can. There’s also good explanations about our synapses and cancers.

But what’s the point?

Information does not change action.

–

Attia’s book is about the four modern horsemen of human mortality: cancer, heart disease, type two diabetes, and neurodegenerative diseases.

Like other areas of discovery, medicine follows the pattern: identification, react, ‘proact’. The Ghost Map tells the story of choleras identification in 1854. Covid-19’s cadence meanwhile was within a year: sequence, treatment, and bundled with the flu shot.

According to Attia, there is a lot more room to proactively address the four horsemen.

Channeling Michael Pollan, switching from hundreds of pages to a few words that address the action, the advice might be:

Get stronger. Eat your best foods. Sleep well.

–

The book is thick. Parts are dense. Even now, days later, I can’t explain parts.

But that’s okay.

The main point of the book is to be intentional. Like the vegetarian experiment and as good bayesians we should tinker. Attia is rarely absolute: Do this but not that! Instead it’s about you getting to this point of heart rate or insulin sensitivity or sleep.

One takeaway from Covid-19 was our heterogeneity (see: The End of Average). Outlive fits in this line of thinking. It’s your healthspan, it’s your lifespan, it’s your choice.

So get stronger, eat your best foods, and sleep well.

How to Fly a Horse (book review)

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How to Fly a Horse is one of the best books you haven’t read. It’s part inspirational (like Rosling) part instructional (like King) and part historical (like Dan Carlin). 

Simply, we are capable but more importantly, we are responsible for the world we want. “Everything around you that you call life,” Steve Jobs said, “ was made up by people that were no smarter than you.”

But this ain’t influencer stuff. 

Everyone has creative potential, Kevin Ashton writes, but it takes work. “Time is the raw material of creation.”  As Steven Pressfield noted, put your ass where your heart wants to be. 

That’s just Insta-advice. 

The world does not want creation. The system is designed against it in two ways. 

A me problem. 

We block our creations. There’s the genius myth: Creation is for a select few. That’s just not right. The End of Average explains this nicely. ‘Genius’ (or ‘athletic’ or ‘industrious’ or ‘lazy’ and so on) are collections. There’s no genius metric because there’s nothing to have. 

Ya got it or you don’t is not true. 

But this isn’t enough. It takes work, work, work. For a species designed for ease, work is hard. 

There’s a paradox too: The better we get at something the more efficient we get and the less likely we are to see novelty. Think of “expertise” Ashton writes, as “efficiency”. There is nothing more deceptive, wrote Arthur Conan Doyle, than an obvious fact. Tyler Cowen calls this “once and for all-ism.” Experts have been rewarded for seeing the world a certain way, why change? 

The solution to the paradox is to bring experience but not beliefs. To have a light identity footprint. To see the unexpected, expect to see nothing. 

A them problem. 

They, the others, those folks don’t want to see it. Or they can’t see it. It’s helpful to remember Demings, “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” People don’t randomly red-pill, laissez le bon temps rouler!

The status quo is humanity’s default (this is an assumption of JTBD). 

‘Different is bad’ is evolutionarily good. Our ancestors were the ones who didn’t try the new berries. 

Rejection, hesitation, and reluctance are good things. First creators must expect it. Knowing first drafts suck, progress is slow, and TK takes the sting out. Second, creators must use this for guidance. Feedback presents the soil to sew, the path to plan for, the itinerary to travel. Ashton advocates for the creator to utilize not internalize rejections. Ask, okay, so how could this be better?

–

The book is full of pithy quotes. Let’s end with two: 

“We sell our soul when we waste our time. We drive neither ourselves nor our world forward if we choose idling over inventing.”

“The math of time is simple: you have less than you think and need more than you know.”

–

This book was mentioned in Bob Moesta’s Learning to Build.

Learning to Build (book review)

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Rather than a traditional review, think about Learning to Build in the context of jobs to be done. 

We believe there’s no such thing as a bad book so much as bad timing. In some version of the multiverse, you need any given book right now! 

Similarly, jobs theory is about finding the pushes and pulls, habits and anxieties, and contexts for when people act. 

In that spirit, here are the Jobs books for this multiverse. 

Learning to Build is an introduction to someone who wants to learn more about Bob Moesta’s work. It introduces the five skills: empathetic perspective, uncovering demand, causal structures, prototype to learn, and making tradeoffs. 

Demand Side Sales is for someone in sales who wants a fresh idea. Never Split the Difference, Start with No, and The Sandler Rules also build the “talking to people” skill. 

Competing Against Luck is for someone with a strategic angle. It’s for someone asking: What should we do here? The Mom Test is a faster, less academic path with similar idea vistas. How to Fly a Horse is a bigger and wider picture, with more history. 

How Will You Measure Your Life is for someone who’s seen these ideas and needs a fresh – and personal! – perspective. 

26 Jobs to be Done is my short e-book about grokking jobs. 

Keep learning. Keep building. Keep growing.