If you love learning, then in my opinion, books are the way to go. That’s because you get a wide variety of perspectives — unlike podcasts and YouTube channels, where you’re generally gonna get the same viewpoints over and over again.
But books are pretty hit-or-miss. Some of the books I read are useless. Most books I read, I learn a little bit from.
And every now and then, I read something so profound that it changes the way I see the world.
These are 9 of the books I’ve read in the past few years that have completely shaken up my worldview. They’ve forced me to fundamentally rethink something I previously believed, or they exposed me to a new idea that shaped the way I think about the world.
You can order some of these books yourself, if you want. Or, you can just read my summaries and hope to learn what I’ve learned through synthesis.
Either way, I hope you enjoy!
Fooled By Randomness
Fooled By Randomness author Nassim Taleb worked as a Wall Street analyst for a long time. He developed a trading strategy unlike anything the world had ever seen before: he used options trading to make bets that highly unlikely events, like stock market crashes, would happen.
Traditionally, investors make projections about stock prices using financial models. The models assume that the company in question will grow at a constant, predictable rate.
The problem is, these models typically base their assumptions off historical data — meaning implicitly, they assume that the future will be like the past.
But Taleb’s main point in Fooled By Randomness is that the future probably won’t be like the past. We have “unprecedented” market crashes that everyone says are impossible — like the housing market collapse of 2008 — all the time. Moreover, the world changes too quickly to use historical data: by the time we can understand the way it works, it doesn’t work that way anymore.
But most people don’t live long enough to see the ebb and flow of history. As a result, we tend to think the world of our childhood will last forever. That goes double for relatively stable societies, like the United States, which haven’t seen major turbulence in the lifetimes of anyone around today.
My big takeaway from Fooled By Randomness was, don’t be surprised if something weird happens. The world is a deceptive place, and often it doesn’t work the way we think it does. You can’t always trust what you’ve learned, and you can’t always bank on what’s worked for you in the past.
Antifragile
Another Nassim Taleb book. The basic theme of Antifragile is that some things — like the restaurant industry and the human body — become better under conditions of volatility and turbulence.
This is such an unintuitive concept that we didn’t even have a word for it until Taleb wrote Antifragile. But in the real, there are actually a bunch of things that gain from disorder in the long term — from the human body (which responds to some stressors, like exercise, by getting stronger) to the restaurant industry (when economic turbulence happens, bad restaurants go out of business, improving the industry as a whole).
Since humans don’t understand that short-term variance can be a good thing, many human systems are designed to minimize short-term variance. But unfortunately, by taking away short-term variance, we often increase the chances of a major catastrophe.
Think of forest fires, for instance: once upon a time, we tried to put out every forest fire that we found. But then, lots of dead wood accumulated in forests, leading to major, catastrophic fires down the road.
Economic systems work the same way: we don’t like major price changes, so politicians like to prop up markets in the short-term by passing stimulus packages and printing money. Unfortunately, this usually just leads to a greater crash down the road. Two years ago we printed a ton of money so we could send out stimulus checks, and now, we’re seeing almost double-digit inflation as a result.
The major lesson I took away from Antifragile is how important it is to have a Plan B. If you build a fragile system, with one or two major points of weakness, it will eventually collapse. (Think of the Death Star, for instance.) So it’s a good idea to make any large system redundant, idiot-proof, and flexible in response to change.
Reality Is Broken
When we think of “work”, we shudder. Work is hard, and it’s no fun. Right?
Wrong. For many people, work is one of the major sources of meaning in their lives. And people are often happiest when they’re working on something. (That’s one of the reasons why some people are “workaholics”.)
The issue is, the sort of work most people have done over the past couple centuries just isn’t that fulfilling: factory work sucks the soul out of you, office work is boring, and working for a large company you don’t believe in and that doesn’t operate ethically just doesn’t sit right.
In Reality Is Broken, Jane McGonigal says that work — the right kind of work, the kind that’s meaningful to us and that we constantly improve at, makes us happy. That’s why people love games: games simulate work — the right kind of work. According to McGonigal, we need to make work feel more like a game.
Some people think that if they could just retire to a private island and sip cocktails all day, they’d be happy. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Most people would get bored with nothing to do all day. People who are unemployed are chronically unhappy. And many people — a lot more than you expect — die within 2 years of retiring.
So instead of complaining about your job, find work that’s meaningful to you. If you don’t like your job, it’s not because work overall is bad, it’s just that you’re in the wrong environment. So spend some time finding the right environment.
The Lean Startup
Before the airplane was invented, scientists from Harvard were spending countless dollars and man-hours researching flying machines. Who would’ve thought two random weirdos from North Carolina would beat them?
Turns out, the secret lies in the way the Wright Brothers developed their plane. The Harvard researchers were mostly theoretical: they would design an airplane on paper, obsessing over every little detail and trying to make the thing fly in theory. But then, they’d build it, they’d try it out — and it wouldn’t fly.
The Wright Brothers took a different approach. They would build a flying machine as cheaply as possible, test it, and then it would crash. Then, they would learn from what went wrong, build another flying machine, and then it would crash.
They kept doing this over and over again until eventually, they had fixed all the problems, and one of their airplanes stayed in the air.
We tend to think making mistakes is a bad thing. On the African savannah, when we were evolving, one mistake could mean death. And even today, if you make a big mistake at work that costs your company tons of money, they’ll fire you as a scapegoat. So most people try their best to avoid failure.
But in the real world, the best way to learn something is to make a mistake.
In The Lean Startup, Eric Reis offers an unintuitive recipe for doing something new: come up with a hypothesis, test it, and then fail. Then, come up with a new hypothesis, test it, and fail again. And keep going until you succeed, learning as much as you can from each failure.
This is a great way to approach building a startup. A startup is a business that aims to do something completely new. That means startups face a lot of uncertainty. The best way to deal with that uncertainty is to run lots of low-cost experiments, so you can fail, learn, and then eventually succeed.
So, don’t be afraid to fail. Low-cost failure is a good thing, because the lessons you learn from it are usually more valuable than whatever you lost by failing. As long as your worst-case scenario is acceptable, taking a risk is usually a good thing.
The Sovereign Individual
Today, we live in a world of nation-states. The UN recognises 195 “countries”, and practically all the land territory on Earth outside of Antarctica is claimed by one of those countries.
We think that’s normal. But actually, our current period is a historical outlier: for most of the past 2,000 years, much of the world’s territory was totally ungoverned.
Why is today different? Because for most of the past 500 years, the available technology has created a set of incentives that meant nation-states made sense. In the words of James Dale Davidson, the author of the Sovereign Individual, the logic of violence favors nation-states: governments have a lot to gain by conquering as much territory as possible, and it’s easy for them to do so — so they do.
But that wasn’t always the case. Case in point: during the “Dark Ages”, Europe was incredibly geographically fragmented, and few central governments reigned supreme. This was partially because of the invention of the suit of armor. If you had a suit of armor, a sword, and a horse, there weren’t any weapons at the time that could really stop you. That meant it was tough for large states to form, because states depend on the implicit threat of violence to function.
But when gunpowder became big in Europe, this flipped the logic of violence on its head. In a world with guns, assembling large armies and conquering large amounts of territory is much cheaper.
James Dale Davidson argues that the internet is another world-changing invention, and eventually, it’ll make the nation-state obsolete. That’s because it’ll concentrate most of the world’s wealth on the internet and inside of people’s brains — essentially making capital mobile.
Nation-states depend upon the predatory taxation of the rich — defined as taxation far in excess of the value of goods and services provided by the government — in order to support large militaries and welfare programs.
But the internet makes predatory taxation impossible, Davidson says, because when capital is mobile, people can choose to live anywhere in the world. They’re not tied down to a specific location by their job or by the land they own or by where their factory is located. They can go where they’re treated best.
So Davidson says that over the coming hundred years or so, nation-states will begin to collapse, because they simply won’t have enough money to keep operating the way they do today. Instead, he imagines a world of small city-states, similar to Italy before the 19th century (or Singapore today).
I don’t know if all of that will come true, or when, but we’ve already seen some movement towards a more Sovereign Individual-like world. The pandemic proved that large-scale remote work is feasible, meaning workers are no longer tied to their location. And many cities and countries are offering incentives for remote workers to come live within their borders.
In addition, more and more people are renouncing their US citizenship, citing high taxes as their reason — and many Western businesspeople now live in tax havens. And increasing globalization has led to poor economic conditions and resentment among average people in the West — hence how politicians like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders shot to popularity with angry rhetoric, even though just over a decade ago Barack Obama shot to popularity with a more hopeful message,
Nassim Taleb convinced me that the world of the future might be different, but The Sovereign Individual convinced me that it will be different. Over the coming decades, it’s likely that large countries like the United States will decline in influence, while smaller countries like Portugal, Singapore, and Turkey will become more important. And people may flee the West en masse, especially if the current trend towards lower freedom continues.
So banking on living a “traditional” life — going to college, getting a job for a big firm, working hard, and climbing the corporate ladder — might not make sense. Instead, young people today should learn as much as possible and develop a flexible set of skills, so they can re-adapt themselves to whatever the future holds.
Sapiens
Sapiens is basically a history of all of mankind, from our early days as proto-humans in Ethiopia to our internet society today — with some speculation about the future, as well.
Sapiens views humans (and in particular, the genus Homo sapiens) as a species totally different from every other species on Earth. Only about 100,000 years ago, we were just another animal. But little by little we are turning ourselves into gods — capable of impacting the climate, traveling to every remote corner of the Earth (and even to the Moon), building weapons that can annihilate us all, and driving thousands upon thousands of species into extinction.
Sapiens looks at the unique elements of Homo sapiens that allowed us to do all this. It’s not just because humans are intelligent: we’re also able to believe in myths, like religion, money, and human-made entities like countries and limited liability corporations.
These myths enable us to cooperate on massive scales. Ants can cooperate with one another, but only if they come from the same colony. But any two humans on the planet can cooperate with one another through trade. And large groups can form bonds based on religion and nationality, even if they’re not genetically related to one another.
Combine that with intelligence, and you have the makings of a species that can do incredible things on amazing scales.
There’s no major lesson I took away from Sapiens, but it’s an earth-shattering book. Reading it may make your head explode, because it looks at the world without presupposing a set of values — unlike most books, which see the world through a Western lens. It questions a lot of things that people don’t usually question, and it says a lot of provocative stuff.
Plus, it’ll give you a unique look into how human history works. It may help you better understand the world around you, and it may even help you predict the future. Who knows.
The Four-Hour Work Week
There’s usually a better way to do things.
People become complacent due to tradition, laziness, bad bosses, or bad incentive structures. But if you’re willing to make changes and not settle for the status quo, you can find a better way to do whatever you do, and achieve a lot more — often in a lot less time.
That’s the whole point of The Four-Hour Work Week. Inside, Tim Ferriss explains how he made more sales working 2 hours a day than his colleagues did working 8 hours a day.
And he explains how by making 2 changes — firing 2 of his pain-in-the-ass customers, and empowering his customer service reps to make more decisions on their own — he was able to remove himself from his business and go on an extended trip to Europe.
Ferriss shows you how to escape your 9-to-5, outsource your life, develop a business that feeds you while taking up very little of your time, and go on a spree of “mini-retirements” — fun adventures in other countries.
The lesson is, don’t settle for the status quo. Instead, try to “level up” at what you do. See if you can find a tweak that’ll drastically improve your results. And don’t be afraid to step outside your comfort zone.
Why Nations Fail
Nogales, Arizona and Nogales, Mexico used to be the same town. They got split up when the US/Mexico border was arbitrarily drawn.
The two towns are culturally and demographically similar. But today, Nogales, Arizona is well-developed, and residents of Nogales, Arizona enjoy a high standard of living. Meanwhile, Nogales, Mexico is not well-developed, and residents of Nogales, Mexico do not enjoy a high standard of living. How is that possible?
Why Nations Fail explains how certain institutions, set up by governments, affects whether or not a country develops. Countries with strong property rights, capitalism, and non-corrupt governments generally develop. Countries that don’t have capitalism or strong property rights, or whose governments are highly corrupt, generally fail to develop.
In addition, successful countries need to embrace new innovations that lead to creative destruction. And they need to offer ordinary citizens some way to improve their lot in life by creating value for others, rather than reducing them to slaves or serfs or peasants. (One reason why 11th-century Venice thrived so much, say the authors, is because ordinary people could become rich on trading expeditions.)
That explains how culturally similar places — like East and West Germany, or North and South Korea — can have such different economies: their citizens have different incentives, so they behave differently. It also explains why countries like Chile, China, and Singapore grow so rapidly once they transition to market economies.
People have spent a lot of money trying to decrease poverty in the third world. But according to Why Nations Fail, investing more in education or infrastructure isn’t the answer. If a country wants to develop, it has to get its act together and embrace free-market economic policies.
Elon Musk
Today Elon Musk is best known as the world’s richest man, but that’s not a good way to describe him. Calling Elon Musk the world’s richest man is like calling Steve Jobs a guy who wears turtlenecks, or calling Benjamin Franklin a guy who ran a print shop.
Elon Musk is, first and foremost, a guy who does cool sci-fi stuff that he thinks will help humankind avoid existential threats.
For example: eventually, we will run out of oil. We’ve managed to put this off for a long time by inventing better ways to extract it from the ground. But it’s just a fact: oil is a non-renewable resource, and we only have so much.
So if our society depends on oil, it’s headed for a major catastrophe. So Elon Musk invested heavily in Tesla and SolarCity, hoping to avert this catastrophe by accelerating the shift to renewable energy,
He’s also worried about AI: eventually, says Musk, we’ll build machines that are smarter than us. Something will go wrong, and we won’t be able to stop these machines, the same way cows can’t fight back against humans. Hence Neuralink: we have to be prepared to go toe-to-toe with AI, when the time comes, so we need to become much, much smarter.
Finally, we need a backup plan in case Earth becomes uninhabitable. Something could happen to Earth at a moment’s notice: an asteroid could hit us, or we could have a nuclear war. And it could happen in a matter of just a few days, so we might not have much time to react. That’s why we have to build a civilization on another planet now, while times are good and while we’re rich in resources.
Our politics is mostly based around short-term problems, but longer-term problems are a lot more important. Short-term problems mean people lose their homes; long-term problems can mean catastrophes with mass casualties. So it’s crucial to think long-term — and Elon Musk shows us how.
But the main reason why people are impressed by Elon Musk, and why Ashlee Vance’s biography shaped my thinking so much, is that he does all sorts of things people used to think were impossible.
For a long time, everyone said that electric cars could never be commercially viable — but now, thanks to Tesla, they’re becoming the standard. People said that private companies could never go to space — but today, SpaceX is the world’s biggest player in the space race.
People lack imagination, and tend to poo-poo ideas they don’t understand as “impossible”. But humanity is all about stretching the limits of what’s possible. So if you have big dreams, don’t worry if they seem difficult to pull off. Go for them.
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