One of my goals for 2019 is to read 1 book per month. After doing virtually no reading in Q1 I’ve prioritized making time to read every day. As a result, I cranked through 9 books in Q2, 13 in Q3, and 11 in Q4.
For each book I’ve read I’ve tried to take away one big lesson or theme. I’ve also written whether or not I’d recommend the book.
Note that I was able to get all of these books from my local library, and I recommend that you do the same. However, if you want to read one of these books and it’s not available at your local library, you can click on the book cover to go to the book’s Amazon page. If you purchase through this link I’ll receive a small payment from Amazon.
Recommendations
Highly recommended
- “The Black Swan” – Nicholas Nassim Taleb
- “The Millionaire Next Door” – Drs. Stanley and Danko
- “The Millionaire Mind” – Thomas Stanley
- “The Primal Blueprint” – Mark Sisson
Recommended
- “Killing Floor” – Lee Child
- “Die Trying” – Lee Child
- “Trip Wire” – Lee Child
Not recommended or conditionally recommended
- “Angle of Repose” – Wallace Stegner
- “The Sun Also Rises” – Ernest Hemingway
- “Decisive Battles of the World” – Sir Edward Creasy
- “The New Buffetology” – Mary Buffet and David Clark
Detailed Reviews
Highly Recommended
The Black Swan – Nicholas Nassim Taleb
If I could boil all the wisdom from this book down to one sentence, it would be this:
Humans are terrible at judging risk, and we are especially bad at understanding the risks of things that happen very rarely (but not never).
Nicholas Taleb is a professional trader who has spent a lot of time thinking about managing and profiting from risk. His key insight is that human behavior is impossible to precisely model, and as a result, any system which relies on human behavior is likewise impossible to model.
In a system like the stock market, this means that the mathematical models that are used to predict systemic risk are almost certainly wrong. And they aren’t just inaccurate (meaning they sometimes underestimate the amount of risk and sometimes overestimate the amount of risk). They models consistently underestimate the amount of risk.
People assume that something that hasn’t happened before will never happen. We can’t tell the difference between very, very unlikely and impossible.
The title of the book is based on the fact that, for many years, humans assumed that all swans were white, because we only saw white swans. It was impossible to know that black swans existed until we saw a black swan.
The financial impact of this realization is that you should assume that the improbable, however unlikely, could and will happen, and plan accordingly.
The underpinnings of the financial crisis of 2009 was the belief by bankers that housing prices in certain areas of the US might fall, but it was extremely unlikely that housing prices across the entire US would all fall a significant amount at the same time. The bankers felt that by diversifying their loans geographically they wouldn’t have to worry about all of their loans going bad at the same time.
We all know how that worked out for them.
Recommended? Highly recommended.
Lesson: Just because something is supposed to be very rare doesn’t mean it won’t happen. Expect and plan for the worst in financial markets.
“The Millionaire Next Door” – Drs. Stanley and Danko
If you’re reading this blog you’ve probably already read this book. And if you haven’t, go and read it. Now. It’s without a doubt of the best and most influential financial books ever written.
I’ve read this book 4 or 5 times now, and I tend to come back to it every few years just to keep the message fresh in my mind.
My only minor disagreement with the book is the emphasis on owning a business. While it’s true that a disproportionately large number of people who are rich became rich through business ownership, it’s certainly not true that a disproportionately large number of people who own businesses are rich. That is, starting or owning your own business isn’t necessarily a great way to become wealthy. It’s a great way to either become wealthy or go broke.
Recommended? Highly recommended.
Lesson: The book’s message is timeless – there’s a difference between looking rich and being rich, and if you want to be rich then you should spend less and save more.
“The Millionaire Mind” – Dr. Thomas J. Stanley
This is a sequel to “The Millionaire Next Door” written by one of the authors of the original book. In “The Millionaire Mind” Dr. Stanley digs more into the personality traits of millionaires and how they think differently from the non-wealthy.
Dr. Stanley’s research indicates that a lot of our preconceptions about why people are successful seems to be incorrect. For example, it appears that grades, test scores, and the university you attend have very little correlation with financial success.
In fact, Dr. Stanley’s research indicates that social skills are much more important to financial success than academic performance, and my own experiences in the workforce bear this out. The people who are most successful (and become managers and leaders) are typically the ones with excellent “soft” skills, like the ability to relate to people, empathy, the ability to motivate and lead, etc.
However, I have a few quibbles with some of the conclusions.
First, all of the data is a result of survey responses and focus groups. The problem with that is that studies have repeatedly shown that self-reported data is not very accurate. For example, when wealthy people were asked to say how important various factors were in their success, most of them listed “hard work” as “very important” and “luck” as “not important”. This is not surprising. Human attribute their successes to hard work and other positive personal traits and attribute failure to factors outside of their control.
In addition, he repeatedly makes comments in the book that indicate imply that intelligence/academic success are mutually exclusive with social skills. There’s no reason that a person can’t be academically successful and have great social skills.
But as I said, those are quibbles. The book itself is great, and I intend to make it required reading for my kids when they are old enough to appreciate it.
Recommended? Highly recommended.
Lesson: In general, financially successful people think differently and have different goals than the general public. If you can change your mindset you’ll improve your chances of being successful.
“The Primal Blueprint” – Mark Sisson
I originally heard about Mark Sisson through his website “Mark’s Daily Apple”. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Mark, he was one of the first to advocate for a “Primal” lifestyle, where “Primal” means recreating the way our ancestors did in the Paleolithic era.
At a high level, this involves recognizing that modern human (Homo Sapiens) have been around for somewhere around 200,000 years. However, agriculture was only “discovered” around 9,500 years ago. That means that human have been hunters/gatherers for about 95% of our time on Earth and farmers for about 5% of the time, and 9,500 is not enough time for humans to have evolved/adapted to a grain based diet.
Sisson’s argument is that we’ll be happier and healthier if we tweak our current lifestyle to better match how humans have lived for the 95% of our evolutionary lifespan. This involves things like eating less grains, getting lots of low intensity exercise (like walking) and a bit of high-intensity exercise (lifting weights and sprinting), getting more sun, getting more social time, eating more meat and vegetables, etc.
This is a surprisingly controversial position. The main criticisms seem to be:
1. We don’t know exactly how Paleolithic humans lived
2. The plants that Paleolithic humans ate were different than the plants we eat now (which have been changed by humans over time to be larger, sweeter, etc.)
While both of these criticisms are true, I’m not sure that they really matter. Ultimately, I think the recommendations he makes are reasonable and helpful, regardless of the rationale behind them. We SHOULD eat more vegetables and get more exercise. We would all be better off with more social connections. We probably SHOULD get a bit more sun each day (Sisson recommends getting half as much sun as you’d need to get sunburnt. For example, if 30 minutes of sun would cause a sunburn, he would recommend 15 minutes of sun exposure).
I enjoyed this book and have tried put some his “Primal Laws” into practice. For example, two or three times a week I walk down to the beach, take off my shirt, and walk along the water. I find that the exercise plus the sun is helping me sleep better at night and is a great break during the work day.
Recommended? Highly recommended.
Lesson: Humans did not evolve to spend our days sitting inside, alone at a desk and staring at LCD monitors. Changing your behavior and your diet to better match our evolutionary past will result in health and happiness.
Recommended
“Killing Floor”, “Die Trying”, and “Trip Wire” – Lee Child
Over the last 9 months I’ve been almost exclusively reading non-fiction. For me, learning new things is as enjoyable as reading fiction is to other people.
However, I realize that there are a lot of great fiction out there, and I thought I should try to mix some more “light” reading into my steady diet of financial, fitness, and military strategy.
I decided to dig into the “Jack Reacher” series and I’ve really been enjoying the books. One of the things that’s great about the Jack Reacher character is that he’s a highly competent, strong, intelligent protagonist. He does the smart thing when confronted with a difficult situation.
I also like Lee Child’s writing style, and all 3 books were really engaging. The books are an easy read, and I think I read each one in 3 days or less.
Recommended? Recommended if you’re looking for a fun mystery/thriller.
Lesson: A good novel can be a lot of fun.
Not Recommended or Conditionally Recommended
“Angle of Repose” – Wallace Stegner
About 7 years ago one of my friends gave me this book. He liked to tease me about the fact that I had gone to Stanford, and Wallace Stegner taught at and founded the creative writing department at Stanford.
I started reading the book once, couldn’t get into it, and left it on my nightstand (along with a stack of other books on my “to read” list) for years.
Then, about 2 years ago, my friend died completely unexpectedly (was in his late 40’s and died of a heart attack). When I then rediscover this book in my stack I knew I had to devote the time to get through it.
Wallace Stegner won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for this book, so it’s received a lot of critical acclaim. The book is vast in scope – it bounces between the 1970’s (when the narrator lives and is writing a book about his grandparents) and the late 1800’s, when the grandparents were alive.
My major issue with the book is that it was depressing. Nobody in the book is happy or ends up happy. Perhaps that’s realistic, but frankly, I’m not all that interested in reading books about miserable people, no matter how well written it is.
Recommended? Yes, if you don’t mind a book where everybody is unhappy.
Lesson: Life is largely what you make of it.
“The Sun Also Rises” – Ernest Hemmingway
I picked this book from a list of classic novels that everybody should read. Surprisingly, I’ve never read a single thing by Hemmingway.
I’ve heard a lot about Hemmingway’s sparse writing style, and I found that I enjoyed it. However, the story itself wasn’t to my liking. The first half of the book is about a bunch of right expats living in Paris. They drink far too much, stay out late in the various bars, and generally seem like they have shallow, empty lives. The second half of the book is about the socialites heading into the Spanish countryside to attend a bullfight.
Overall, I couldn’t get into the story. It seemed…pointless. I understand that this was a groundbreaking novel when it was published in 1926, but frankly, I don’t think it’s aged all that well.
Recommended? Only if you’re a fan of Hemmingway or are working your way through a “Greatest Novels” list.
Lesson: Just because some people think that an old book is fantastic doesn’t mean that it’s still relevant.
“Decisive Battles of the World” – Sir Edward Creasy
I was really excited to read this book. I’d seen it mentioned in a number of lists on best books on military strategy or best books on warfare.
The book purports to be a history of the 15 most important/decisive battles of the world. The book is arranged chronologically, starting with the Battle of Marathon (490 BC) and ending with The Battle of Waterloo (1850 AD).
As you can probably guess by the date of the last battle, this book is old. The first edition was written in 1851, and the edition I had was from 1899 and included three additional battles. And when I say that my book was from 1899, I mean that the physical book I borrowed from the library was published in 1899.
The writing is a bit opaque. Creasy clearly expects that the reader has an education in French and Greek, understands 19th century geopolitics, and has received a “classical” education. For example, there are a number of passages in the book where he quotes either French or Greek and simply fails to translate them to English. He also refers to locations or rulers in the 19th century that I’ve never heard about.
Unfortunately, the book wasn’t quite what I was expecting. I was hoping for a detailed explanation of the tactics and strategy that made these battles so famous. In retrospect, this was probably unrealistic, as for many of these battles there simply wasn’t sufficient contemporaneous writing for us to understand exactly how the battles unfolded.
Finally, the book should really be titled “Decisive Battles of Western Civilization”, as there wasn’t a single battle from Asia, Africa, or pre-colonial North or South America. This leaves out any battles from China, India, or Africa.
Recommended? No – the writing is hard to read, the book is lacking in details on the actual battles, and focuses exclusively on Western Civilization.
Lesson: Books written 150+ years ago can be hard for modern readers to get through.
“The New Buffetology” – Mary Buffett and David Clark
I’m a sucker for anything about Warren Buffett. Not only is Buffett a genius at investing, but he’s a genius at conveying investing ideas through simple, easy to understand examples.
I was hoping that this book would provide deeper insight into Warren Buffett’s investing strategy. I would have been happy if the book had some commentary by Buffett on why he made certain investments.
This book does none of that.
This book was made without any involvement by Warren Buffett. Mary Buffett is Buffett’s former daughter-in-law (Warren’s son and Mary have divorced). As such, the entire book seems to revolve around reverse engineering Warren’s strategy, and there are already a ton of (better) books about that.
I guess it’s possible that Mary Buffett might have some small amount of additional insight about Warren Buffett that she picked up from conversations during Thanksgiving when Mary was married to Warren’s son, but I didn’t see any of that insight in the book.
Recommended? No.
Lesson: If you want a book about a person’s thinking, verify that the book was made with that person’s participation .
Conclusion
I read some great books on a few different topics. If you’re interested in investing then I recommend “The Black Swan”, “The Millionaire Next Door”, and “The Millionaire Mind”. If health and fitness is more your style then I’d recommend “The Primal Blueprint”. And if you’re looking for some fun summer reading, then I recommend the Jack Reacher series by Lee Child.