This page contains summaries of my favorite books. The list comprises the following books,
The subtle art of not giving a fuck – Mark Manson
The psychology of money – Morgan Housel
The defining decade – Meg Jay
Deep Work – Cal Newport
Don’t try
No matter what you do, life is filled with failures, loss, regrets, and even deaths. Not give a fuck about each and everything. Find what is fuck worthy. As we grow old, we mature and know to be okay about a lot of things. Like the roads not taken, it is the fucks not given that make all the difference.
The desire for more positive experiences is itself a negative experience. And the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience. We get angry about being angry. We get anxious about feeling anxious. Welcome to the feedback loop from hell. Cut the feedback loop. I feel like shit, but who gives a fuck,
Our crisis is no longer material, it is existential, it’s spiritual.
Happiness is a problem
Life is not a solvable equation. Dissatisfaction and unease are essential components of consistent happiness. It is an endless series of problems. The solution to one problem is merely the creation of the next one. Don’t hope for a life without problems, hope for a life of good problems.
Suffering is biologically useful. It inspires change. Mildly dissatisfied and insecure creatures are going to do the most work to innovate and survive. Emotional pain can be healthy. It teaches us how to avoid making the same mistakes in the future.
“hedonic treadmill”, we are always working hard to change our life situations but we never actually feel different. Life is a never-ending upward spiral. And joy is in the climb itself. Who you are is defined by what you’re willing to struggle for.
You are not special
You are not special. Merely feeling good about yourself without any good reason doesn’t mean anything. Adversity and failures are actually necessary for developing strong-minded, self-esteemed, and successful adults.
Entitlement is just another high. Measurement of self-worth is not how a person feels about her positive experiences but rather how she feels about the negative experiences.
Realizing that you and your problems are actually not privileged in their severity or pains is the first step towards solving them.
The internet has not just open-sourced information; it has also open-sourced insecurity, self-doubt, and shame. The flood of extreme information has conditioned us to believe that exceptionalism is the new normal. And because we’re all quite average most of the time, this drives us to feel pretty damn insecure and desperate.
We are all not destined to be truly extraordinary. If everyone were extraordinary, then by definition no one would be extraordinary. The rare people who do become truly exceptional, believe that they are, in fact, not that great at all and that they could be so much better.
The pleasures of simple friendship, creating something, helping a person in need, reading a good book, laughing with someone you care-all seem like ordinary things and they are what actually matters.
The value of suffering
Problems are inevitable, but the meaning of each problem is not. We get to control what our problems mean based on how we choose to think about them, the standard by which we choose to measure them.
We all have different values, and we measure ourselves by different metrics. So, if you want to change how you see your problems, you have to change what you value and/ or how you measure failures/success.
Some values and metrics are better than others. Some lead to good problems and are regularly solved. Pleasure, material success, always being right – these are bad values. In retrospect, the years of good struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.
Good values are 1) reality-based, 2) socially constructive, 3) immediate or controllable. They are achieved internally. Creativity or humility can be experienced right now. On contrary, Bad values are 1) superstitious 2) socially destructive 3) not immediate or controllable. They rely on external events and are often socially destructive. “Being told you are right all the time”, “people should respect me”, are bad values.
You are always choosing
We, individually, are responsible for everything in our lives, no matter the external circumstances. We don’t always control what happens to us. But, we always control how we interpret what happens to us, as well as how we respond. This realization leads to personal improvements and growth emerges.
We are always choosing the values by which we live and the metrics by which we measure everything that happens to us. The real question is, what are we choosing to baser our actions on? What metrics are we choosing to use to measure our life?
With great responsibility comes great power. The more we choose to accept responsibility for our lives, the more power we will exercise over our lives. Accepting responsibility for our problems is thus the first step to solving them. We all love to take responsibility for success and happiness. But taking responsibility for our problems is far more important because that’s where the real learning comes from.
Nobody makes it through life without collecting a few scars on the way out.
You’re wrong abot everything
Growth is an endlessly iterative process. We shouldn’t seek to find the ultimate “right” answer for ourselves, but rather, we should seek to chip away at the ways that we’re wrong today so that we can be a little less wrong tomorrow. Your obsession with being “right” about life can end up with you never living it.
Certainty is the enemy of growth. Being wrong opens up the possibility of change. Don’t trust your conception of positive/negative experiences. All we know for certain is what hurts in the moment and what doesn’t. And that is not worth much in life.
We all have values that we protect, justify and maintain even if we don’t mean to. We’re unfairly biased towards what we know, what we believe to be certain. I say don’t find yourself, never know who you are. That is what keeps you striving and discovering. It keeps you humble and makes accepting of the differences of others.
When we let go of the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves, we free, ourselves up to actually act (and fail) and grow. There is little that is unique or special about your problems. That’s why letting go is so liberating.
Questioning yourself and doubting your own thoughts and beliefs is one of the hardest skills to develop. We’re all the world’s worst observers of ourselves, often the last ones to figure out that you are jealous, or angry. But just because you ask yourself if you have the wrong idea doesn’t necessarily mean that you do.
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. Being able to look at and evaluate different values without necessarily adopting them is perhaps the central skill required in changing one’s own life in a meaningful way.
Failure is the way forward
If someone is better than you at something, then it’s likely because she has failed at it more than you have. We can be truly successful only at something we’re willing to fail at. Fear of failure comes from choosing shitty values. Shittty values involve tangible external goals outside of our control and the pursuit of these goals causes anxiety. Better values are process-oriented. It is an ongoing, lifelong process and defies completion. Our proudest achievements come in the face of the greatest adversity. Pain is part of the process. It makes us stronger, more resilient, more grounded. Don’t just sit there. Do something. The answers will follow Action isn’t just the effect of motivation; it’s also the cause of it. When the standard of success becomes merely acting- when any result is regarded as progress and important, when inspiration is seen as a reward rather than a prerequisite- we propel ourselves ahead. We feel free to fail, and that failure moves us forward.
The Importance of Saying No
Absolute freedom, by itself, means nothing. The only way to achieve meaning and a sense of importance in one’s life is through a rejection of alternatives, a narrowing of freedom, a choice of commitment to one place, one belief, or one person. We are defined by what we choose to reject. And if we reject nothing we essentially have no identity at all. There’s a certain level of joy and meaning that you reach in life only when you’ve spent decades investing in a single relationship, a single craft, a single career. And we can’t achieve those decades of investment without rejecting the alternatives. There are healthy and unhealthy forms of love. Unhealthy love is based on two people trying to escape their problems through their emotions of each other. They are using each other as an escape. Sometimes they take on too much responsibility for others’ problems. Healthy love is based on two people acknowledging and addressing their own problems with each other’s support. They choose to support each other not because they feel obligated or entitled. Healthy and loving relationships have clear boundaries between two people and their values, and there will be an open avenue of giving and receiving rejection when necessary. Trust is like a china plate. If you break it more and more times, eventually it shatters to the point where it’s impossible to restore. There are too many broken pieces and too much dust. Honesty in a relationship is more important than feeling good all the time. When our highest priority is to always make ourselves feel good or to always make our partners feel good, then nobody ends up feeling good. And relationships fall apart without even knowing it. When trust is destroyed, it can be rebuilt if the trust breaker admits the true values that caused the breach and owns up to them, and builds a solid track record of improved behavior over time. There are some experiences that you can have only when you’ve lived in the same place for years when you’ve been working on the same skill or craft for half of your lifetime. Commitment in its own way offers a wealth of opportunity and experiences that would otherwise never be available otherwise. There is freedom and liberation in commitments. Reject alternatives and distractions in favor of what truly matters. Go and discover what seems worth investing yourself in. Depth is where gold is buried. More is not always better. We are actually often happier with less. ( Paradox of choice). The more options we are given, the less satisfied we become because we’re aware of all the other options we’re potentially forfeiting. … And then you die. Why do people care so much about death when they are so afraid alive. All the meaning in our life is shaped by an innate desire to never die. This is why people try so hard to put their names on buildings, on statues, on the spines of books. That will be remembered and revered and idolized long after our physical self ceases to exist. Confronting the reality of our own mortality is important because it obliterates all the crappy, fragile, superficial values in life. Death confronts us with a far more painful and important question: what is your legacy? Our culture today confuses great attention and great success, assuming them to be the same thing. But they are not. The pampering of modern minds has resulted in a population that feels deserving of something without earning that something without sacrificing for it. We are all going to die., all of us. That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by life’s trivialities; we are eaten up by nothing.
Doing well with money has little to do with how smart you are and a lot to do with how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people. Two topics impact everyone, whether you are interested in them or not: health and money. Physics isn’t controversial. It’s guided by laws. Finance is different. It’s guided by people’s behaviors. And how I behave might make sense to me but look crazy to you. History never repeats itself; man always does.” It applies so well to how we behave with money. No one is crazy
Your personal experience with money makes up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world, but maybe 80% of how you think the world works. Some lessons have to be experienced before they can be understood. We are all victims, in different ways, of this truth.
Luck and Risk
Nothing is as good or as bad as it seems. Risk and luck are close friends. As much as we recognize the role of luck in success, the role of risk means we should forgive ourselves and leave room for understanding when judging failures. If you give luck and risk their proper respect, you realize that when judging people’s financial success—both your own and others’—it’s never as good or as bad as it seems.
Luck and risk are both the reality that every outcome in life is guided by forces other than individual effort. They are so similar that you can’t believe in one without equally respecting the other. But realize that not all success is due to hard work, and not all poverty is due to laziness. Keep this in mind when judging people, including yourself.
Never Enough
There is no reason to risk what you have and need for what you don’t have and don’t need. There are many things never worth risking, no matter the potential gain. The hardest financial skill is getting the goalpost to stop moving. If a battle can’t be won, don’t fight to begin with.
Confounding Compounding
Good investing is not necessarily about making good decisions. It’s about consistently not screwing up.
The thirties are not new twenties. We can’t postpone everything to our thirties and relax. Free apps and sites have made the life of twentysomethings more diverting. These are the most transformative years of our lives, even a small shift can radically change where we end up in our thirties and beyond. The twenties are an up-in-the-air and turbulent time, but if we can figure out how to navigate, even a little bit at a time, we can get further, faster, than at any other stage in life. It is a pivotal time when the things we do—and the things we don’t do—will have an enormous effect across years and even generations to come.
So let’s get going. The time is now
Identity Capital
Adults don’t emerge. They are made.
– Kay Hymowitz, social commentator
We are born not all at once, but by bits,
-Mary Antin, writer
The one thing I have learned is that you can’t think your way through life. The only way to figure out what to do is to do something.
Weak Ties
Yes is how you get your first job, and your next job, and your spouse, and even your kids. Even if it’s a bit edgy, a bit out of your comfort zone, saying yes means you will do something new, meet someone new, and make a difference.
Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google.
The Unthought Known
Uncertainty will always be part of the taking-charge process. – Harold Geneen, businessman.
My life should look better on Facebook.
If we only wanted to be happy, it would be easy; but we want to be happier than other people, which is almost always difficult since we think they are happier than they are. – Charles de Montesquieu
For many, Facebook is less about looking up friends than it is about looking at friends. It leaves twentysomethings feeling not empowered and connected, but helpless and alone.
Forward Thinking
The frontal lobe of our brain processes probability, time, uncertainty, and the future. The frontal lobe fully develops in the late twenties. That’s why twentysomething is a critical time as your forward-thinking frontal lobe is still a work in progress. But also, forward-thinking doesn’t just come with age, it comes with practice and experiences.
An infant’s brain overprepares itself for life by rapid neuron reproduction that’s why they struggle with most things. This is followed by pruning: where the brain keeps the neurons and connections that are used while those neglected are eliminated.
Pruning doesn’t continue in a linear fashion throughout life. The neuron reproduction process again starts in adolescence and ends in the twentysomething years, this time for the uncertainty of adult life and to face complex challenges of adulthood.
As children learn to speak just from the environment, in our twenties we are sensitive to whatever is within earshot. This is our best chance to acquire technical, sophisticated skills needed in so many fields.
Neurons that fire together, wire together. The jobs we have and the company we keep are rewiring our frontal lobes. The brain knit together in the twenties to make us into adults we want to be in our thirties and beyond.
The twenties are thus a time of “great risk and great opportunity”. Never again will we be so quick to learn new things. Never again will it be so easy to become the people we hope to be. The twenties are, indeed, the time to get busy. The risk is that we may not act now.
What if 2026 is a failure ?
“Failing to prepare is preparing to fail”. To add to this line, failing to foresee the plausible reasons for failure apriori in one’s endeavor may lead to failure. This leads us to the concept of “prospective hindsight” or “premortem’ technique. This idea fits in the larger picture of risk management and strategic thinking. Imagine your project or endeavor failed miserably. Now in this premortem technique, you list every cause of failure that you can anticipate before beginning the initiative. This includes both external and internal reasons for failure. Our own psychological and personal idiosyncrasy are the most frequent internal reasons for failure. Then you reorganize the list according to their potential threat for the success of your endeavor. Now it’s time to brainstorm and come up with solutions for each of them. Suppose you plan of joining a gym. In this endeavor, premortem may reveal the following potential threats I get bored with things very easily I can’t discipline myself every day. Waking up in the early morning is impossible. I can’t manage time. Feel tired after gym and can’t study Now for each of these one needs to find solutions before he/she starts gymming. Reorganize the list put your weakest point on the top and prioritize it.