On Seeking Wisdom, the Secrets of the Four Seasons, and Fooled by Randomness
On Seeking Wisdom, the Secrets of the Four Seasons, and Fooled by Randomness
Books that changed my life
Hello all!
Here is your weekly dose of books that changed my life.
1. Personal development
Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger
Summary
This book will blow your mind away for the amount of knowledge, advice, and wisdom that is packed in it. It can be overwhelming and needs to be digested in small amounts, but if you can make your way through it, you’ll pick up more than a handful of ideas that can impact your behaviors, thoughts, and actions.
Insight: We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom in it and stop there, lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove. She will not sit down on a hot stove again, but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.
Principle: As things get better, increases in fitness show diminishing returns: more food is better, but only up to a point. But as things get worse, decreases in fitness can take you out of the game: not enough food and you’re dead.
Strategy of tit-for-tat: We should cooperate at the first meeting and then do whatever our opponent did the last time. When our opponent cooperates, we should cooperate. When our opponent doesn’t cooperate, we should retaliate. Then forgive and go back to cooperating next round. This rewards past cooperation and punishes past defection. This assumes that the game is repeated time after time. In reality, we never know if we meet our opponent again in the future. As long as neither our opponent nor we knows when the game ends, it pays to be nice.
Author: Peter Bevelin
Themes: Personal development, Living a full life, Investing, Human psychology, Decision making
My personal notes from the book
2. Memoir
Four Seasons: The Story of a Business Philosophy
Summary
I always heard about the incredible service provided at Four Seasons hotels. So back in the early twenty-tens I decided to splurge and stay a week at the iconic Four Seasons Maui (the same hotel in the first season of White Lotus). The trip was less about relaxing and vacation, and more about observing and learning how the Four Seasons operates. My take away…no one does anticipation better than the Four Seasons. The staff learned everything they could about their guests and then anticipated every need (for example, when I stepped away from a book I was reading at the pool, a bookmark was placed in the book at the page I had dog-eared). I learned from this experience and implemented the Four Seasons principles in my business. It had a profound impact and helped to set ourselves apart in a competitive environment. This book is the story about how the Four Seasons came to define customer service.
Principle: We were the undisputed leader in hotel amenities. There was nothing outstandingly dramatic, just continuous minor improvement, always from a customer's point of view, until over time it added up to major creative change.
Insight: We didn't want people who thought servicing others was demeaning–we wanted people with high self-esteem. Not people who said in a crisis, "that's not my job," but people who'd say, "how can I help?" People who'd never answer a customer's question by saying "I don't know," but rather, I'll find out. In hiring we gave more weight to character and personality than we did to traditional resumes and technical experience. And we were hiring for position in future leadership.
Quote: The great law of culture is: let each become all that he was created capable of being. -Thomas Carlyle
Author: Isadore Sharp
Themes: Memoir, Entrepreneurism, Management, Running a business, Culture
My personal notes from the book
3. Decision making
Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
Summary
Another wonderful book by Taleb. Fooled by Randomness is an investigation of luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand. It will change the way you think (hopefully!).
Insight: Past events will always look less random than they were (hindsight bias).
Insight: Risk-conscious hard work and discipline can lead someone to achieve a comfortable life with a very high probability. Beyond that, it is all randomness: either by taking enormous (and unconscious) risks, or by being extraordinarily lucky. Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.
Insight: There is a difference between a wealth level reached from above and a wealth reached from below. The road from $16mm to $1mm is not as pleasant as the one from 0 to $1mm.
Principle: Reality is far more viscous than Russian roulette. First, it delivers the fatal bullet rather infrequently, like a revolver that would have hundreds, even thousands of chambers instead of six. After a few dozen tries, one forgets about the existence of a bullet, under a numbing false sense of security.
Author: Nassim Taleb
Themes: Decision making, Human psychology, Investing
My personal notes from the book
That’s a wrap. Thanks for reading!
Please continue to share with me the books that changed your life!
Best,
Adam
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