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Showing posts from December, 2023

Year 2023 in Review

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The year 2023 is kind to me in several ways, Overall a decent year I would say, and here are some things I really enjoyed. 802 miles run during this year  If you measure in a straight line, it could be the distance between Bentonville and to Canada border. Read 23 books this year.  Books I read so far:  http://jnsuryaprakash.blogspot.com/2009/03/books-i-read.html   Here is my Goodreads link:  https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/101483828-surya-jayanti 24 blogs written refer  http://jnsuryaprakash.blogspot.com/ More than 300 games of chess. Still struggling with ELO 1600-rated bots. One blood donation, and more than 100 hours of volunteering. 

Quotes from the book "Antifragile"

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Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a very interesting author, he has radical thinking and he really impressed the way he thinks differently from the crowd. Here are some quotes that hit me from his book "Antifragile". We are largely better at doing than we are at thinking. The world as a whole has never been richer, and it has never been more heavily in debt, living off borrowed money. The more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you. If I never hear anything wrong said about you. You have proven yourself incapable of generating envy. If nature ran the economy, it would not continuously bail out its living members to make them live forever. He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once. And someone who has made plenty of errors - though never the same error more than once is more reliable than someone who has never made any. When we look at risks in extremistan, we don't look a

Quotes from the book "From Strength to Strength" - Arthur C Brooks

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I really enjoyed the different perspectives projected in this book. Definitely something I would like to pick again 10 years from now and read. Here are some of the quotes I loved. Choosing to be special (intoxicated, high, successful) over happy is addiction.   Strivers tend to be addicted to alcoholism or workaholism. Many leaders tend to work 60-hour weeks.   Workaholism leads to loneliness and loneliness leads to workaholism.   If you answer yes to the below questions you are a workaholic. Do you spend your discretionary time working?   Do you usually think about work when not working?   Do you work beyond what's required for work?   Spouses want nice things to buy with money but hate when their spouse is spending time on things that get money.     Self-objectification is when you look at the person in the mirror and hate him for his performance eval that year or his physical/looks.   You are not your job. A narcissist is someone who falls in love with their self-image.      Pr

Quotes from the book "The Almanack of Naval Ravikant" - Eric Jorgenson

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Here are some interesting quotes from the inspiring book "The Almanack of Naval Ravikant" By  Eric Jorgenson. Consider everything, but take nothing as gospel. Reading is faster than listening. Doing is faster than watching. Work as hard as you can. Even though who you work with and what you work on are more important than how hard you work. Intentions don't matter. Actions do. That's why being ethical is hard. If it entertains you now but will bore you someday, it's a distraction. keep looking. The less you want something, the less you think about it, the less you obsess over it, and the more you're going to do it naturally. If they can train you to do it, then eventually they will train a computer to do it. Products with no marginal cost of replication include books, media movies, and code. This is the highest form of leverage. Forget rich versus poor, white-collar versus blue. It's now leveraged versus un-leveraged. You're never going to get rich ren

Excerpt from the book "Made to Stick"

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This is one of my favorite books this year. The authors in this book talk about 6 principles to make messaging stick.  S:  Simple: Find the core and share the core U: Unexpected: Get attention(Surprise), Hold Attention (Interest). C:  Concrete: Help people understand, remember and coordinate. C:  Credible: Help people Believe. External and internal credibility. E:  Emotional: Make people care through the power of association, self-interest, and appeal to Identity. S:  Stories: Get people to Act through simulation and inspiration. Golden Rule of Simplicity: A one-sentence statement so profound that an individual could spend a lifetime learning to follow it. People can be driven to irrational decisions by too much complexity and uncertainty. Simple messages are core and compact. We need to shift our thinking from "What information do I need to convey? to "What questions do I want my audience to ask ?" Curiosity comes from gaps in our knowledge. Statistics will, and should,