Non Fiction Books Notes

  • EVERY MOMENT IN BUSINESS happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them. • Horizontal or extensive progress means copying things that work—going from 1 to n. Horizontal progress is easy to imagine because we already know what it looks like.  • Vertical or intensive progress means doing new things—going from 0 to 1. Vertical progress is harder to imagine because it requires doing something nobody else has ever done. • If you take one typewriter and build 100, you have made horizontal progress. If you have a typewriter and build a word processor, you have made vertical progress. • It’s hard to develop new things in big organizations, and it’s even harder to do it by yourself. • In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a bette...

• The economists found that people’s lifetime investment decisions are heavily anchored to the experiences those investors had in their own generation— especially experiences early in their adult life. • If you grew up when inflation was high, you invested less of your money in bonds later in life compared to those who grew up when inflation was low. If you happened to grow up when the stock market was strong, you invested more of your money in stocks later in life compared to those who grew up when stocks were weak. • The difficulty in identifying what is luck, what is skill, and what is risk is one of the biggest problems we face when trying to learn about the best way to manage money. • Therefore, focus less on specific individuals and case studies and more on broad patterns. • The trick when dealing with failure is arranging your financial life in a way that a bad investment here and a missed financial goal there won’t wipe you out so you can keep playing until the odds fall in you...

  • The key thing is to force yourself through the work, force the skills to come; that’s the hardest phase. • The happiest, most passionate employees are not those who followed their passion into a position, but instead those who have been around long enough to become good at what they do. • If you feel close to people at work, you’re going to enjoy work more. • The more we focused on loving what we do, the less we ended up loving it. • If you’re not focusing on becoming so good they can’t ignore you, you’re going to be left behind. • Whereas the craftsman mindset focuses on what you can offer the world, the passion mindset focuses instead on what the world can offer you. • When you enter the working world with the passion mindset, the annoying tasks you’re assigned or the frustrations of corporate bureaucracy can become too much to handle. Second, and more serious, the deep questions driving the passion mindset—“Who am I?” and “What do I truly love?”—are essentially impossible to...

• Failure is not a prerequisite for success. People who failed before have the same amount of success as people who have never tried at all. • Unless you’re a fortune-teller, long-term business planning is a fantasy. There are just too many factors that are out of your hands: market conditions, competitors, customers, the economy, etc. Writing a plan makes you feel in control of things you can’t actually control. • If you write a big plan, you’ll most likely never look at it anyway. Plans more than a few pages long just wind up as fossils in your file cabinet. • Give up on the guesswork. Decide what you’re going to do this week, not this year. Figure out the next most important thing and do that. Make decisions right before you do something, not far in advance. • Maybe the right size for your company is five people. Maybe it’s forty. Maybe it’s two hundred. Or maybe it’s just you and a laptop. Don’t make assumptions about how big you should be ahead of time. Grow slow and see what feel...

Law 1 : NEVER OUTSHINE THE MASTER • Always make those above you feel comfortably superior. In your desire to please and impress them, do not go too far in displaying your talents or you might accomplish the opposite—inspire fear and insecurity. Make your masters appear more brilliant than they are and you will attain the heights of power. • If you cannot help being charming and superior, you must learn to avoid such monsters of vanity. Either that, or find a way to mute your good qualities when in the company of a Cesare Borgia. • Second, never imagine that because the master loves you, you can do anything you want. • First you must flatter and puff up your master. Overt flattery can be effective but has its limits; it is too direct and obvious, and looks bad to other courtiers. Discreet flattery is much more powerful. • If you are more intelligent than your master, for example, seem the opposite: Make him appear more intelligent than you. Act naive. Make it seem that you need his ...