Reading

This post was first sent to my newsletter on November 2nd, 2020. You really ought to subscribe :) Nothing really exciting this month. I had lots of work and could not quite focus on reading hard books or non fiction. I needed to escape from the humdrum of life So, I read a lot of Jack Reacher. I decided to read all of the Lee Child novels featuring the character. And all of that, started because I read a book, that followed Lee Child around for a year, describing his writing process and the work that goes into a Reacher novel. It’s been fun, reading. Like meeting an old friend. Considering that he writes about one a year, I find it slightly alarming that I have now read seventeen years of Child’s work in a month. ...

This post was sent to my newsletter on October 25th, 2020. You really ought to subscribe :) What I Learnt from Antifragile (III) What Does Not Kill Me … Antifragility for the Collective What does not kill me makes me stronger. — Friedrich Nietzsche, Maxims and Arrows The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry. — Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms ...

This post was sent to my newsletter on October 18th, 2020 You really ought to subscribe :) What I Learnt from Antifragile (II) I fell sick and missed writing last week. I have to live up the name of the news letter, anyhoo. It would not be erratic without me whiffing once in a while, non? Apologies all around, anyway! The Barbell Heuristic to Taking Risks Basically a shortcut to figuring out whether you ought to do something or not, based on the risks it entails. How do we take a decision, when we don’t know all the pros and cons? How do we decide in an uncertain world? Simply put, ...

There seems never to be the right time to write or the right amount that I could learn from Antifragile, so I’m just going to take a long, rambling stab at it this morning. It will be a living document that I’ll keep adding to on the blog, sooner or later, but for now, this is just for you, my dear newsletter1 family. Here goes … While I love the way he writes, I don’t have that much a familiarity with English that, I can easily process stuff like this, every time I just want to grab a principle quickly. ...

I want to keep reading books and stories about how folks pick themselves up. It helps me deal with the storms in my life better. It assures me I am not alone. And people often have it worse. Neil Pasricha shares his story in You are Awesome. Most of which are relates with everything we face in our lives. And I was meh. But he also shares his parents stories. And those are really, really inspiring. ...

It’s a Michael Lewis book. That alone, is enough for me to tell you to go read it. Kahneman and Tversky’s work has probably been the biggest influence on my life in recent years, since Taleb.1 We cannot think in probabilities in our daily lives. We keep fooling ourselves, with various biases. And the intuition we have, is because we are really amazing biological machines. And even that is subject to error. Unless the intuition is backed by extensive experience. And even then we can easily be fooled. That basically is the gist of their work (to me, so far). I flunked nearly every experiment in Danny Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow.2 We need to think slowly, through every implication, when it comes to the few big decisions in life. ...