Wiser Than Yesterday: Educational Book Reviews and Summaries

Faster Than Normal: Turbocharge Your Focus, Productivity, and Success with the Secrets of the ADHD Brain By Peter Shankman In Faster Than Normal, Shankman shares his hard-won insights and daily hacks for making ADHD a secret weapon for living a full and deeply satisfying life. Both inspiring and practical, the book presents life rules, best practices, and simple but powerful ways to: Harness your...

Thoughts and Learnings in Investing Everyone should be thinking about investing. Every money decision you make is an investment decision. All investments are broadly equal on the risk/reward spectrum. Only actively make investment decisions when you have an edge. Your investment strategy will depend on your situation (your age, tolerance for downturns, goals, etc.) Compounding is key in investing...

Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market By Noah Horowitz Art today is defined by its relationship to money as never before. Prices of living artists' works have been driven to unprecedented heights, conventional boundaries within the art world have collapsed, and artists now think ever more strategically about how to advance their careers. Artists no longer simply make art,...

Decentralized Finance or DeFi Decentralized Finance offers financial instruments without relying on intermediaries such as brokerages, exchanges, or banks. Instead, it uses smart contracts on a blockchain. DeFi platforms allow people to lend or borrow funds from others, speculate on price movements on assets using derivatives, trade cryptocurrencies, insure against risks, and earn interest in savi...

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness By Eric Jorgenson Getting rich is not just about luck; happiness is not just a trait we are born with. These aspirations may seem out of reach, but building wealth and being happy are skills we can learn. So what are these skills, and how do we learn them? What are the principles that should guide our efforts? What does progress reall...

The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness By Morgan Housel Doing well with money isn’t necessarily about what you know. It’s about how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people. Money―investing, personal finance, and business decisions―is typically taught as a math-based field, where data and formulas tell us exactly what to do. But in t...

The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment By Guy Spier What happens when a young Wall Street investment banker spends a small fortune to have lunch with Warren Buffett? He becomes a real value investor. In this fascinating inside story, Guy Spier details his career from Harvard MBA to hedge fund manager. But the path was not so straightforward...

Angel: How to Invest in Technology Startups—Timeless Advice from an Angel Investor Who Turned $100,000 Into $100,000,000By Jason CalacanisOne of Silicon Valley’s most successful angel investors shares his rules for investing in startups. There are two ways to make money in startups: create something valuable—or invest in the people that are creating valuable things. Over the past twenty-five years...

NFTs (Non-Fungible Token), explainedA non-fungible token (NFT) is a unique and non-interchangeable unit of data stored on a digital ledger (blockchain). NFTs can be associated with easily-reproducible items such as photos, videos, 3D models, audio, and other types of digital files as unique items (analogous to a certificate of authenticity). NFTs use blockchain technology to provide a public proof...

The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central BankingBy Saifedean AmmousThe Bitcoin Standard analyzes the historical context to the rise of bitcoin, the economic properties that have allowed it to grow quickly, and its likely economic, political, and social implications. While Bitcoin is a new invention of the digital age, the problem it purports to solve is as old as human societ...

The Intelligent InvestorBy Benjamin GrahamThe Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham, first published in 1949, is a widely acclaimed book on value investing. The book provides strategies on how to successfully use value investing in the stock market. Historically, the book has been one of the most popular books on investing and Graham’s legacy remains. Key TakeawaysInvestment is not gambling or s...

Talking To My Daughter About The Economy: A Brief istory of CapitalismBy Yanis VaroufakisIn this letter to his teenage daughter, one of the world's most famous economists uses vivid stories to explain what economics is and why it is so dangerous. What is money and why does debt exist? Where do wealth and inequality come from? How come economics has the power to shape and destroy our lives? Economi...

Introduction to InvestingWe live in a capitalistic society, where everything revolves around adding value. Adding value can be anything: farmers, bakers, architects, artists, teachers, athletes. When you go to school, you are being trained to bring value to society. After you finish school and start working, you are being paid for creating value. In this episode, we will lay down the groundwork fo...

Recap of the human body books that we have readIf Our Bodies Could Talk: A Guide to Operating and Maintaining a Human Body - James HamblinWhy We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams - Matthew WalkerBreath: The New Science of a Lost Art - James NestorLifespan: Why We Age – and Why We Don't Have To - David SinclairGut: The Inside Story of Our Body's Most Underrated Organ - Giulia EndersBur...

Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never SeenBy Christopher McDougallInspiration for reading this book came when Nico's friend came for dinner wearing these weird-ass shoes. Naturally - he asked him about it, cause Nico love weird stuff, and told him that humans have evolved to walk and run barefoot, and that cushioned shoes are the reason why so many p...

Death by Food Pyramid: How Shoddy Science, Sketchy Politics and Shady Special Interests Have Ruined Our HealthBy Denis MingerDenise Minger shares her personal story about how she got convinced to go all-out raw vegan at a pretty young age. She initially saw tremendous health improvements, but after a while she started losing a lot of weight. She decided to stop eating vegan after her dentist told...

Burn: The Misunderstood Science of MetabolismBy Herman PontzerWe burn 2,000 calories a day. And if we exercise and cut carbs, we'll lose more weight. Right? Wrong.the Hadza, who every day move around for ~4 hours and 15,000 steps, use the same amount of energy as couch-potato North Americans. Exercise doesn't increase our metabolism. Instead, we burn calories within a very narrow range: nearly 3,0...

Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organby Giulia EndersFor too long, the gut has been the body’s most ignored and least appreciated organ, but it turns out that it’s responsible for more than just dirty work: our gut is (literally and figuratively) at the core of who we are. The book starts with a voyage through our full digestive tract, discussing the pain-killing powers of our...

Lifespan: why we age - and why we don’t have toBy Dr. Savid Sinclair#1: Aging is a disease: We must move away from treating age-related diseases and focus on their root. Reclassifying aging as a disease is a critical first step in this shift in approach. Sinclair believes we’re wasting money and time on what he calls “whack-a-mole” medic“There is nothing more dangerous to us than age. Yet we have...

Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James NestorNo matter what you eat, how much you exercise, how skinny or young or wise you are, none of it matters if you're not breathing properly. The missing pillar in health is breath, it all starts thereNestor finds that the science of breathing really is a lost art, and discovers more in ancient burial sites and secret Soviet facilities than in modern...

Why we sleepWritten by Matthew WalkerAmazing breakthrough - science has discovered a new treatmentLive longerEnhances memoryMore creativeLook more attractiveMakes slimLowers food cravingsProtects cancer and dementiaWards off colds and the fluLowers risk of heart attacks and stroke and diabetesYoull even feel happier, less depressed and less anxiousNeglecting sleep undercuts your creativity, proble...

If Our Bodies Could Talk: A Guide to Operating and Maintaining a Human Bodyby James HamblinDoctor turned journalistLaunched a series of videos for the atlantic in 2014explores the human stories behind health questions that never seem to go away—and which tend to be mischaracterized and oversimplified by marketing and news media. He covers topics like:DietSleepAging• Can I “boost” my immune system?...

Recap of the business books that we have readShoedog: Autobiography of Phil Knight, founder of NikeThe lean startup, Eric Ries:How to build a startup, the antifragile wayBen Horowits The Hard thing about hard things helps throw light at the challenges a CEO goes through. The Messy Middle - Scott Belsky: Talks about stuff between the most romantic parts of a venture, from starting in a garage or co...

Good strategy, bad strategy: The difference, and why it mattersBy Richard RumeltKey insightsStrategy =/= ambitious goal setting, vision, charismaAround the 60’s, many authors started ascribing leader’s success to their vision, combined with their charisma. This has resulted in a lot of bad strategy, based on ambitious goal setting. Example: 20/20 plan - 20% growth with 20% profit margin. Often a g...

Venture Deals by Brad Feld and Jason MendelsonEver thought about getting investments for your startup? Ever thought about investing in a startup? Whether you are an entrepreneur, an investor, a lawyer or just a stakeholder in the venture capital market, this book is for you! In it, renowned investor Brad Feld addresses some topics within the Venture Capital ecosystem, explaining in a practical and...