What I'm reading
The best investment you can do is to invest in yourself to improve. To put time now for a better self tomorrow. And keeping in mind that knowledge is power, the best thing you can do everyday is to expand your knowledge. Be 1% better every day, or in this case expand your knowledge 1% every day.
Books are not only a great source of knowledge, but also wisdom. You can experience multiple lives, you can learn from the mistakes of others , learn new techniques in your field, or also important put in better words ideas you already have.
As Charlie Munger says:
In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn't read all the time -- none, zero.
That's why I committed to myself to dedicate one hour minimum to reading everyday. This is a the list of books that are on my pipeline right now.
Last updated: December 2021. If this gets out out date for a few months, please write me (@juanivillarejo) and remind me to update it. Also this is a live document so I will changing and rearranging things.
Current Reading
- David Graeber, David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything
- Herbert Simon, The Science of the Artificial
Recently finished
Feline Philosophy - John Gray
Another John Gray book, even if you are not a cat lover (I wasn’t) you can enjoy the book.
The 10 tips for a feline life at the end are must read and should be re-read from time to time.
Death in Venice - Thomas Mann translated by Heim
I really liked this novel, on the second level the story is about how an old artist wants to recover the fire he had when he was young, the Eros that guided his creativity, and in the stress to recover it he only found death.
Disrupting Class - Clayton Christensen, Curtis W. Johnson, and Michael B. Horn
I have a company that provides language learning classes with private tutors as a service, so I’m reading all I can on learning. This was a good book from someone who knows a lot about innovation. It reafirmed some of the ideas that I already had and put them in better words.
All books I've read
I've been compiling a list of all the books I have been reading every year starting from 2015. You can check them out and ask me about them
All time most influentials
This are the books (or essays) that most influenced on my ideas, my personality, my career and how do I think.
Nassim Taleb, Antifragile
I can't make a summary of this great book because this book has so many ideas that cannot be summarized. However I can say that to me this book is a practical, philosophical and ethical essay on how to take better decisions.
The whole Incerto is a must read to anyone who wants open their mind to new ideas. However Antifragile is the one that smashed my mind. I reread Antifragile every year because this is a book that hasn't finished saying what all what it has to say yet. Every time that I reread it I find something new that I didn't think about before.
Nassim Taleb has been a great influence to my ideas and on the person I want to become. He puts the money where his mouth is, he's one of the most critical minds of our time and he is committed to debunk all bullsh**ters putting his skin in the game.
Peter Bevelin, Seeking Wisdom
After knowing about Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger (the best investors of all time), I decided to read about them as much as I can.
This book is the implementation of one of Charlie Munger most important ideas: Mental Models. The concept to learn the fundamental ideas of different disciplines (mathematics, economics, psychology, biology, physics, chemistry, etc) and apply them together to have different perspectives to solve problems.
Peter Bevelin amazingly achieves to transfer those ideas with business and life applications. And in the middle of all that he selects and transcribes lessons from this two great human minds. This changed me in how to think, how to take decisions, and gave me humility on taking account how little I know and I need to learn.
Nassim Taleb wrote his own review of this book and also mention Bevelin in Antifragile Acknowledgments and Bibliography. What amaze me is that you don't find any information about Bevelin on the Internet. We have an hypothesis with some friends that he might be the alter ego of someone else...
Michel de Montaigne, Essays
Reading Michel Montaigne Essays was a very mind opener to me. The book is itself a door to the mindset of the ancient Greeks and Romans.
This influence me in the way that all the questions I have in terms of who am I, what is my role in the world, what is the correct way to behave, and how to carry on in bad times were questions that the ancients tried to answer.
Many things changed in terms of technology and way of living but human behavior didn't change much at all. This powerful idea influence me into read more past books instead of new ones.
As condiment Montaigne has a very critical and skeptic mind which made me think if he was a strange light in the past or our thinking of the past is very distorted.