Book Notes

A bit hyperbolic, but overall it's a pretty solid book about the value of entrepreneurship, building money systems, and maximizing control and leverage in your work life.

A good breakdown of Amazon's operating principles. Pretty high signal-to-noise ratio compared to most business books. These guys are definitely drinking the Kool-Aid – not the most balanced analysis.

It doesn't matter how innovative your product is if customers don’t understand what it is, or why they should care. Positioning is all about deliberately framing the product in a way that makes the benefits super salient to a well-defined target market. April Dunford's book teaches you how to do that in a succinct and easy-to-follow way.

Reading is an art – and by learning to read in a more active and earnest way, we can get a lot more out of what we read. A key idea is to let our goal (e.g. entertainment, information, or understanding) determine how we tackle each book. True understanding only comes from pushing ourselves to read difficult books, and this requires serious mental effort.

If you're looking for a book to help you develop better habits, look no further.

Not quite as eye opening as Thinking Fast and Slow, but a solid read nonetheless.

This book is about using behavioral economics to "nudge" people towards make better decisions. We can use the tools of choice architecture – such as smart defaults – to significantly influence people's behavior for the better. Although Sunstein and Thaler do their best to make the book entertaining, it's a bit of a slog at times.