** 38th book of 2021: A Shot and a Beer* ** They say don’t judge a book by it’s cover, but please, please judge this book by its delicious cover. John Boehner is retired, doesn’t give a fuck, and is ready to share with you his best stories about being ‘mayor of crazytown’ speaker of the house over a round of golf. So grab your favorite Merlot, light up a cigarette if that’s your thing, and let’s dive in. ...
** 37th book of 2021: Chaos is a Ladder ** Set in the declining days of the Mughal empire, the Anarchy follows the rise of the East India Company. In a few decades, it went from a trading company that lost more than 34% of its ships (1) to a state with twice the standing army of Britain. After a long history as arrogant traders with their own security forces, the English learned that superior training, tactics, and economic wherewithal made mercenary work a profitable side-hustle to trading goods. ...
** 36th book of 2021: Body Politic ** Everybody had politics, even if only some people had sex. * Narratives of collective action and dissonance are so often unsatisfying that mainstream culture has abandoned them. This is true in fiction, journalism, and even history. Politics and bureaucracy are dirty words. Individuals serve as the node for every story, and the anonymous and transparent cultural context reinforces a collective fundamental attribution error, hobbling our ability to understand ourselves and the world. Martine focuses on the blank spaces between individuals, and this is where A Desolation Called Peace shines. ...
** 35th book of 2021: Incomplete, Incorrect ** There are many poorly written books on real estate; this is one. The amount of content that relates to motivation and feel good stories is usually inversely related with the usefulness of the book, a ‘chicken soup index’ if you will. Complete guide is about 50/50, and even brings a story direct from Chicken Soup for the Soul. Perhaps more unique however, is that there are few books whose advice I wholeheartedly disagree with. The author shows a clear disdain for buy and hold: * please forgive my frankness, forget the buy and hold strategy. Have a well defined plan going in, execute, and get out. Yes you can make money by buying and holding, but the real money is made by buying and selling. * ...
**34th book of 2021: Dys-trope-ia ** I’m happy that this comic book series exists, a lower budget way to continue a plot that didn’t succeed in the meat grinder of television. I didn’t know I could be nostalgic for the fears of a pre-crash 2008 America, when our biggest collective anxieties were overpowered security contractors and the phantom threat of terrorism. Now I’m in the 2021 dystopia where the 2008 economic crash and 2020 pandemic reveal that we had much more boring villains to worry about. ...
** Exaggerated, but Useful ** Real estate literature is a questionable genre. Many syndicators realize that thought leadership is essential to deal flow, and the shortcut to thought leadership is authorship. Thus the surfeit of low-quality limited-run real estate books and e-books. These tomes were never meant to be well-written, rather they simply exist as a bullet on the resume of the author. So it is with no small amount of trepidation that I approach ‘Best Ever’. Yet to my surprise there was enough information to break through its brotastic tone and justify publication. ...
** 32nd book of 2021: Pivotal Generation ** For most of the world’s and China’s history, generations didn’t matter. Sons and daughters adopted the class and profession of parents, and life meandered through time. But with the modernity encouraged under Deng’s reforms, generation has become destiny. Indeed, circumstances change fast enough that plans cannot even keep up with circumstances. (计划当不上变化 ) Any economist can tell you about the unprecedented growth that China has accomplished over the last 40 years, yet outside observers still seem to miss the yawning chasm rapid economic growth has brought between the young and old. This is where Young China excels: * His country was becoming more like Brave New World than 1984 […] A population numbed by materialistic pursuits, discouraged from individual thought and the drug soma. Money, materialism, lavishness, extravagance, they distracted people from the pursuit of truth and decency. * The name for Chinese melennials is the ‘strawberry generation’ a play on words for their inexperience with hardship (吃苦), which literally translates to ‘eating bitterness’. Like the baby boomers of the American 60’s who ended up deeply alienated from the greatest generation thanks to the unprecedented prosperity of the 40’s and 50’s, Chinese millennials grew up with prosperity as their birthright, and are now looking for more. ...
** 33rd book of 2021: Red Ocean Strategy ** “We must face the fact that for 96% of people, their needs are so vulgar,” explained Gao Han, a senior UI designer, and ByteDance employee number twenty-two. He confirmed the app’s reputation was well-earned, “Toutiao is of course trashy. It’s all click-bait, all kinds of messy news.” * In the west tech companies like to think of themselves as innovators, pursuing a ‘blue ocean strategy’ where competition can be ignored and innovation is paramount. The culture created by original tech giants Google and Microsoft has led to an entire industry that pulls its punches and operates with cozy margins. The Chinese alternate reality of tech after the establishment of BAT (Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent), is the opposite: a red ocean where oxygen has been depleted and sharks abound. * Business was conducted like a brutal guerilla war in which developers, engineers, and operations staff worked themselves to death under grueling schedules in which speed of execution was everything. * ...
** 29th book of 2021: 21st Century Economy ** He is 1/4 crazy, 1/4 brilliant, and the other half is a fight between his ego and genuinely caring for people. * While this sentence describes Adam Neumann, it could be said about almost any startup founder or successful venture capitalist. Every startup needs an element of irrationality when salaries of companies like Google and Facebook are enough to surpass even the lofty expectations of ivy-league millennials. The most successful VCs must make contrarian bets to stand out, and the ones who win at the casino table return lauded as geniuses. Players on both side are selected into a system of increasing bravado and ambition. Add in a 20 year bull market for technology companies and a world awash in capital, and nonintuitive results, such as plowing billions of dollars towards nice office space with a great salesman ensue. ...
** 28th book of 2021: Power Politics ** I started my career watching Iraqi political brawls punctuated by assassinations, and now spend my days plotting personalities and reactions in the modern corporate version of a royal court, so I find royal courts endlessly fascinating. In pre-modern royal courts, social capital was not only the raw expression of human relationships unconstrained by economics or equality, but a life-or-death struggle of rumors and intrigue. ...