Posts

Quotes from the book "Thinking fast and slow"

Image
Quotes from the book "Thinking Fast and Slow" - Daniel Kahneman. The pupil of the eye is a window to the soul. Mild physical arousal of the walk may spill over into greater mental alertness. Self-control and deliberate thought apparently draw on the same limited budget of effort. There are two systems in the brain, the author calls it System 1 and 2, The dumb version of those can be the subconscious and conscious mind. System 1 is Impulsive and intuitive; Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition. When uncertain, system 1 bets on an answer, and the bets are guided by experience. System 1 is gullible and biased to believe. System 1 acquires its bad reputation as the source of errors and biases. Its operative features, include WYSIATI. System 2 is capable of reasoning, and it is cautious. System 2 is in charge of doubting and unbelieving, but System 2 is sometimes busy and often lazy. You know far l...

Year 2023 in Review

Image
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"

Image
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

Image
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...

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

Image
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"

Image
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 wil...

Quotes from "Lean Startup - Eric Ries"

  Some of the interesting quotes from the book "Lean Startup" by Eric Ries. Unfortunately, too many startup business plans look more like they are planning to launch a rocket ship than drive a car. To achieve that vision, startups employ a strategy, that includes a business model, and a product roadmap. The product is the end result of this strategy. Entrepreneurs who operate inside an established organization sometimes are called "intrapreneurs". Productivity in a startup: not in terms of how much stuff we are building but in terms of how much validated learning we're getting for our efforts. Success is not delivering a feature; success is learning how to solve the customer's problem. The goal of the MVP is to begin the process of learning, not end it. Metrics are people too. Only 5% of entrepreneurship is the big idea, the business model, the whiteboard strategizing, and the splitting up of the spoils. The other 95% is the gritty work that is measured by i...