Read
Principles in Life and Work
By: Ray Dalio
Rating: 5/5
Great book that distills the life and work experiences of Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater Capital, the world’s largest hedge fund with $122 billion in AUM. Dalio lists the principles he developed over the course of his 40 year career in finance. The principles are very well organized into high level principles like “Embrace Reality and Deal with it” with related ideas grouped into subprinciples and specific applications of the principles below the subprinciples. The complete list of Dalio’s principles can be found here. So why buy the book if you can just read the principles in the link? The book provides much more context, specific case studies and personal examples from Dalio that reinforce these principles. I am also very excited for Dalio’s sequel to this book which will focus on his principles for economics.
The Lean Startup
By: Eric Ries
Rating: 5/5
The subtitle to this book is “How today’s entrepreneurs use continuous innovation to create radically successful businesses”, and this book delivers methods to implement continuous innovation in almost any business. There are several great frameworks and ideas for implementing a lean approach to rapidly innovate in any organization. From the very beginning, Ries defines terms like startup and entrepreneur before diving into some of the core principles of his lean startup methodology. These principles are also freely available here. Ries draws on personal experiences starting a company called IMVU to demonstrate the application of these principles and ideas. I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to learn more about how to make your organization more agile and innovative.
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
By: Steven Covey
Rating: 5/5
This book has probably had the biggest impact on my life and work. The 7 habits that Covey lays out in this book are easy to understand, but the book provides brilliant tactics to become a more effective person in all aspects of life. From helping to define the roles you play in life to improving your communication abilities, this book will help anybody be a more effective person in any endeavor. The 7 habits are fairly easy to remember; be proactive, begin with the end in mind, put first things first, think win-win, seek first to understand then to be understood, synergize and sharpen the saw. While these habits are easy to remember, they can often be difficult to implement, but Covey provides many tools and techniques to help build each one one of these habits. Even the order of these habits are designed to build on eachother to help people move from being dependent on others as a child to becoming an effective independent person (habits 1-3) and then to becoming an effective interdependent leader (habits 4-6). I recommend this book to anybody who wishes to become more effective in their personal or professional life.
Man’s Search for Meaning
By: Viktor Frankl
Rating: 5/5
In my opinion, this should be required reading for every high school student. The book is split into two parts; part one covers Frankl’s experience as a Jewish prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp under Nazi Germany and part two covers his philosophy of logotherapy which he developed in response to his experience. Frankl was a psychiatrist who lost his entire family in the holocaust. He is able to find meaning in his own suffering and develops logotherapy, which theorizes that the primary drive in human life is meaning or purpose. Frankl goes on to help countless people by teaching them to find meaning in their own life and suffering. This is a very short read, and you can even listen to it for free on youtube if you want, but I have purchased a few copies of this book to give to friends, family and acquaintances who I believe could be helped by Frankl’s message. I am particularly fond of Frankl’s emphasis on free will and personal responsibility.
Deep Work
By: Cal Newport
Rating: 5/5
Anybody who is a knowledge or skill worker should read this book. Being an actuary and data scientists, for example, requires the ability to intensely focus on complex math and data problems every day. Newport recommends some simple rules for avoiding distraction at work so that you don’t need to work 60 hour weeks to do your job well. The main idea involves being more intentional about your time and guarding it against typical time wasters such as social media, drop-in appointments at your desk and the urge to do “shallow work” (which are tasks that are easy to get done, but rarely produces the long term value for your business). As Newport says, the quality of work you produce is a function of your time and intensity of focus, but intense focus can be very difficult to train, so it requires practice. Deep Work will help anyone develop their ability to focus on producing high quality work in any job with some excellent strategies and tactics to spend more time doing deep and meaningful work.
Good Strategy/Bad Strategy
By: Richard Rumelt
Rating: 4/5
This is a good book, but some of the examples can get a little complex and boring towards the end, which is why I didn’t give this book 5/5. However, the first few chapters are extremely strong with an excellent definition for the kernel of good strategy, which Rumelt boils down to 3 main components: Diagnosis of a problem, a guiding policy and a set of actions that dictate how the policy will be carried out. He goes on to discuss ways to spot bad strategies so that they can be avoided and reshaped into a good strategy. Even though the book starts to wane towards the end, there are several ideas on this book that make it a worthwhile read if you are interested in business strategy.