Myles: Read

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Introduction

These are the big and suprising ideas from books I have read- not summaries! Recommend or disagree with me!

Reading List:

1. Difficult Conversations
2. Roy Thomson of Fleet Street
3. Ready, Fire, Aim
4. Amp It Up
5. Shape Up
6. 95% is Crap: A plain man's guide to British Politics
7. It's Your Ship
8. Killing the Market: Legendary Investor Robert Wilson
9. The Hard Thing About Hard Things
10. 1,000 Dollars and an Idea: Entrepreneur to Billionaire

Big Ideas:

• Not many useful or big ideas. Just a fun and interesting book
• What happens after we die?
• I love how each story is structured. Interesting concept, the good, then the bad, then the despair

• Self Improvement
• Focus, focus, focus
• Be practical and funny!
• Industry + Frugality
• Be curious and try any new thing
• Essence of America is ordinary people can do extraordinary things if given the chance

• Be rational, temperate, virtuous, disciplined, wise, naturalistic, and have liberty from all passions
• Nothing external can harm us
• Be charitable in thought and action
• Have singular focus on the task at hand
• Stay clear-minded, right-minded, and high-minded
• Copy the best virtues; serene, dignified, industrious, sober, frugal, considerate, frank, temperate, and carry yourself with authority

• It is a moral duty to constantly learn and stay rational
• Keep things simple, but not more simple than necessary
• Use lessons from every discipline to learn and swing hard at the no-brainier decisions
• Tear down your own ideas, avoid envy, acknowledge cognitive biases, think in reverse, and never stop improving

• 10 years learning, 4 years refining, 4 years with success
• Experimental and focus on what the audience loves
• Incremental steps + a few intuitive leaps + creation of luck
• Have delusion and valid inspiration
• Stand out, no matter what

• Be relentless
• Just do it, always give back to others, constantly innovate & be creative
• Treat others right, self image and optimism is important, constantly reduce risk
• Never compartmentalize, catch the right waves early and ride them hard
• Partner with good people and find the key ideas
• Give people the freedom to have success
• Focus on solving problems and you will find the solution

• Only be satisfied with reaching your potential
• Count your blessings often
• Happiness + freedom + peace of mind
• You are no better than others, just as good
• Make mistakes and learn forever
• Control only what you can. No more.
• Have a positive self-image
• I will do the best I am capable of doing today to bring out my best tomorrow

• Getting rich is a journey with a lot of sacrifices
• Be entrepreneurial and opportunistic
• You will have to constantly learn, keep your eye on the ball, and never fear failure
• Just keep pushing

• Stop delaying life pleasures
• How much are material things holding you back from experiences and life hours?
• Be deliberate, not on autopilot
• Realize that time is your enemy. Money utility decreases, and everything has a last time

• Decisions have an implicit timeline assumption
• The best maximize performance AND survival. The later of which is more important
• Avoid things that are hard to revserse (0s). Death, injury, bankruptcy. Anything that eliminates the possibility of future returns.
• Ergodicity is the ability to take advantage of the law of large numbers instead of hitting "0"
• This is the difference between 1000 people playing Russian Roulette and one person playing 1000 times
• Over enough time, "unlikely" means "eventually"
• Resources tend to cluser
• Become irreplaceable and remember that most things can be replaced
• Centralization is only efficient to the central observer. Something can work on average and fail locally
• This book reminded me of the Howard Marks quote "never forget the 6ft man who drowned in the river that was an average of 5ft deep"

• Reciprocation, commitment/consistency bias, social proof, authority bias, liking tendency, and scarcity bias (and deprivation)
• We all have stimuli that triggers us to do certain, often dumb, things

• Write simply and cleanly
• Be clear in the head and on the paper
• Be unexpected + refreshing
• Have humanity and warmth in your writing
• Be precise and tug the reader forward
• Get rid of the useless stuff and write when you think "that is interesting"

• Focus on everybody's core interests
• Having an opinion puts you in a box
• Leverage/power comes from your Best Alternative to Negotiated Agreement
• Give others a stake in the decision
• Judge results with clear and pre-determined standards
• Ask why a lot to understand the other party

• Be different and bold
• Always be opportunistic
• Empower great people to do interesting things for the long term
• Simplify everything and have tenacity
• Protect your downside and stay optimistic

• Create safe, comfortable, and cozy environments
• Love natural and organic based materials
• Be silly + simple with others
• Savor the best in life

• Workouts, merger arb, spinoffs, distressed debt, stubs
• Figure out who you should be the bat boy for
• Predictable earnings with temporary distress, underlying high quality
• Used borrowed money for workouts
• Personal portfolio has higher turnover and better returns

• Find great companies at not-crazy valuations and hold on to them for dear life
• 100-baggers take time, but can come from anywhere
• Capital allocation is important, as is growth and returns on incremental capital invested
• Accelerating earnings + revenues with different business models

• The best investors are right 50% of the time
• adapt when losing (usually kill losers or average down aggressively)
• have a plan when losers and winners come
• stay around for the big winners
• concentrate in their best ideas
• stay liquid
• Losers take profits quickly
• Losers convince themselves they are right
• Losers stay with losers
• Losers widely diversify
• The long-term returns come from preservation of capital and a few home run investments.

• Stocks are part ownership in businesses
• Buy with a margin of safety
• Take advantage of Mr. Market when possible
• Develop your own discipline and courage

• Companies do not borrow because of balance sheet problems and lack of domestic reinvestment opportunities
• Many savers + no borrowers shrinks the economy ($ that would have been borrowed is sitting idle)
• Pre-industrial revolution: little reinvestment opportunities
• Urbanization was seen as the golden area for most countries as there was constant upward mobility
• Companies that went through urbanization are now going through being pursued

• Remember that you own part of a company's future earnings
• Buy high return on capital businesses for bargain prices, and stick to your strategy
• Try to make as little predictions as possible, find what works, save all the time
• Use the Magic Formula!

• Opportunity when people flow between fear and greed
• Avoidance of risk is margin of safety
• Understand institutional investors + their weaknesses
• Use every relevant valuation technique
• Be ready to change your mind
• Look for flaws

• Value, growth, 1-year momentum, and small-stuff works best in markets
• Combining multiple factors together can outperform the market even more than single-factor models
• The best strategy is something you are able to stick with and is a sound strategy

• Respect the capital cycle
• Everybody eventually falls to it, but fate can be cheated for a while
• Focus on good capital allocators and moats
• Supply side economics runs the capital cycle
• Your own case is not unique- look at relevant parallels
• Always remain skeptical, logical, and safe

• Buy great companies out of favor that have good long-term plans
• Scuttlebutt all the time, ask people questions: customers, competitors, suppliers
• Be forward looking, rational, and focus on management

• Activists should let managers manage, but focus on capital allocation
• Where is the company's true value? Massive arbitrage between public market value and private value with a different management team
• Truly a messy space

• You need an ego
• Be constantly optimistic, yet calm and competitive
• Be more opportunistic than competitors
• Never give up
• No pain, no gain
• Find great partners and let them share in the profits

• Find asymmetric risk/reward scenarios
• The best risk reward is 0 risk, unlimited reward. No brainers
• Heads I win, tails I don't lose much
• Work hard and save all you can with equity
• Distress and uncertainty can provide returns

• Use simple websites as a hub
• Be remarkable, not unique
• Write good niche content with calls to action
• Focus on being a hub, not an advertisement
• Focus on titles. Like, a lot

• Cheap Experimental ideas are important
• Say: the team believes exploring X action will likely result in Y outcome. We will know this because Z metric changed
• Lean on testable ideas
• Be simple, fast, cheap, smart, lean, and important

• Be cartoonishly ambitious
• Show true enthusiasm
• Set a long term strategy for winning, have self-belief and constant persistence
• Make it easy for the other party to say yes, find the root of the problem, and tell a story
• Excuses are reprehensible because you still have the ability to act

• We are not sure what we want. So we look to others (models) and desire what they desire. We make many choices according to the desires of others.
• What have you helped others desire?
• Jealousy and conflict comes from mimetic desire
• The harder it is to get- the more we want it
• Everybody has models
• Hidden models show the illusion of autonomy
• Rivalry is a function of proximity. Eventually the object becomes moot

• Companies are monopolies or in perfect competition
• Focus on network effects, mimetic desire
• Focus on being bold and different
• Reduce the role of luck and take control

• Bias thoughts influence action which influence results
• Market biases move markets
• Credit cycles matter above all else

• Rationality + be focused on cognitive biases
• Take advantage of your luck
• Avoid controversy
• Highlight your contradictions/biases
• Take time to reflect
• Do not blindly follow others

• Take the low-hanging fruit, and what others are throwing away may be valuable
• Take a niche and take it hard
• Control the supply and diversify, have a good reputation, beware of debt, stay ambitious
• Run as lean as possible and trust the people on the ground- stay nimble

• Work with great people
• Don't be afraid of doing something unconventional or odd- even when others think you are crazy!
• Give everybody compensated on overall success, and have a great infrastructure
• Share ideas and be intellectually honest with others
• Do something new, never give up, and hope for good luck!
• Bad ideas are good, good ideas are great, no ideas are terrible.

• Anything is possible with brains, will, and energy
• Understand everybody's incentives and how to get them ahead
• Have solid reasons with worthy ends
• Common sense diligently applied

• Take advantage of any luck
• Concentrate in ideas, wealth, and partners

• Everybody has a unique task only they are able to fulfill
• Focus on what drives you
• Get your why and stick with it
• Why can change over time

• Be industrious/entrepreneurial and ambitious
• Focus on customers
• Own an under-served niche
• Create win-win scenarios
• Great values are not taught
• Reputation across family, friends, customers, and employees is what matters

• Help the customer get what they want
• Keep your reputation pristine
• Keep personalized contact with customers
• Constantly market

• Our assumptions are usually wrong. We have lazy thinking
• Answer the easy questions first
• Study failures, be aware of cognitive biases (recency bias, exposure effect, uncertainty, halo effect, framing effects, anchoring bias, availability bias)

• Focus on finding the correct processes, not the outcomes
• Quality of life = quality of bets + luck
• Acknowledge uncertainty- don't be afraid to say "I'm not sure"
• Be skeptical of your beliefs
• Think long-term, backwards, and do postmortems

• Great owner-operators can create tremendous value over time
• Outsiders tend to be idiosyncratic, independent, analytical, understated, and versatile

• Mis-alignment of financial inflows and obligations created problems
• Giving up the good businesses for the sexy business killed them
• Succession and politic issues
• Management wanted form over function

• Focus on cash flow, not reported earnings. GE got this backwards!
• At GE: bad news was not tolerated
• Make sure marketing does not get ahead of the products
• Board needs to provide consistent and adequate oversight and understanding of the business

• Constant training + improvements
• Honest, open, candid
• Set clear rules + expectations
• Constant feedback loops

• Be natural and do not force actions
• Just do. Stop thinking
• Trust yourself fully
• Focus on the goal and let your body and unconscious mind do the work
• See reality and adapt
• Let go of your ego
• Keep it simple. Keep it natural

• Have an over-arching plan, but hustle to make sure all of the little details fit
• Focus on what matters/cut to the meat of the problem
• surround yourself with great partners who have skin in the game and want more than just money from you (treat all employees really well!)
• Reputation truly matters, so protect it with everything.

• Always stay close to the customer, constantly improve from their feedback
• Help people succeed and celebrate them in your organization
• Think outside of the box and make goals that others may think are impossible

• Be a connector
• Understand where the true power lies in a new system
• Public opinion is important to get large scale projects done
• Stay open to new ideas and expanding into new areas
• Do not overleverage and be caught out with different commitments
• Good investing and business creation is creative

• Grit + luck leads to anything
• Texas oilman influence everything in their areas
• Bold will win and lose in new/budding industries

• Uncover information by asking questions
• Understand people, product, and peripheral functions
• Who works for the customers, company, or service providers
• Become fluent in the business. Ask why
• Who is the decision maker for the product? Who uses it? Who sends the check?
• Who is doing what to whom and why

• Rare + extreme impact + predictable in retrospect
• Respect and adjust to unknowable unknowns
• People love narratives, no matter how flawed
• Do not accept status quo

• People want to be able to walk
• Have easy connections with others
• Ability to appreciate beauty in nature
• Private space for retreating when people get too much

• This was one of the better personal finance books I have read
• This is now how to get rich- but how to take control of your financial life
• Focus on the big things that matter- not always the minute. Focus on the big picture first and be simple
• Spend a lot on things you love, be ruthless on those you do not love
• Online banks often have better rewards due to low overhead
• Automate everything so you do not have to think

• Millionaires are low-key
• Millionaires are compulsive savers, investors, and business owners
• Millionaires are great at allocating time, energy, and money
• Millionaires are disciplined and willing to sacrifice for financial freedom

• Countries are poor due to their institutions
• Dis-incentives for innovation and investment
• Avoiding accountability leads to weak institutions
• Increased education makes nations rich

• Eastern dictators are enabled by western institutions
• It is never a good idea to work with a criminal
• Criminals are generally greedy and act irrationally

• Always look for the true facts
• Media distorts the truth
• Remain skeptical of all second hand data

• Most countries have used or are using state capitalism to their advantage- but with varying success
• Blurring of lines between political action and commerce
• Some use State Owned Enterprises to buy loyalty, some use it for political weapons
• SOEs seem to succeed with good economics and political rules, and fail when governments act extractive
• SOEs spawn because of political regime change, or economic/market failures

• Advantages come from starting circumstances (such as geography)
• Intelligence, drive, or divinity do not determine much if you are delt a bad/great hand
• Everybody is the same. Differences come from starting circumstances

• Purposeful narratives are used to dislodge facts
• Catch 22s are great for dislodging facts
• Language creates a powerful image
• The native American struggle is ongoing and has been shaped by lies

• Copy from other cultures
• Take care of your best partners
• Discipline above all else. Even for your partners.
• Control public opinion/narrative for a competitive advantage
• Break another's spirit before attacking
• Hire engineers