Category: reading list

reading list

Highlights from my Reading List – Week 4

Rahul R

Articles

    1. How to ask for advice – Micheal Seibel

      tldr: think about what you want and ask for it
    2. I’m a very slow thinker – Derek Sivers

      When a friend says something interesting to me, I usually don’t have a reaction until much later.
      When someone asks me a deep question, I say, “Hmm. I don’t know.” The next morning, I have an answer.
      I’m a disappointing person to try to debate or attack. I just have nothing to say in the moment, except maybe, “Good point.” Then a few days later, after thinking about it a lot, I have a response.
    3. This Is What Happened When I Asked My Friends to Rate Me 
      This is something I really want to do at some point.

      I totally wasn’t anxious. I mean, what really was I going to find out? I’m one of the best people I know. If you could get past the fact that I was sending out a Google Form to ex-girlfriends because of a less-than-perfect Uber rating, you’d see it, too: I’m great. I’m balanced. I’m normal.
    4. Natural Maniacs – Morgan Housel (Understanding Elon Musk)

      But no one should be shocked when people who think about the world in unique ways you like also think about the world in unique ways you don’t like.
    5. When You’re Hot, You’re Hot: Career Successes Come in Clusters
      Brilliant data viz and storytelling.

    6. How to look at evidence and not translate it into your own agenda

      True empathy is hearing and understanding in order to implement solutions to meet the actual user needs, not just our interpretation of those needs.
    7. Technology entrepreneurship and the disruption of ambition

      There has been a great deal of analysis of how technology will disrupt life in the coming decades. Little of this, though, has looked at how technology is changing one of the most powerful forces in shaping society: ambition.
      I argue three things below. First, that digital technology is the most recent in a series of ‘technologies of ambition’ that have enabled ambitious people to maximise their impact over the last millennium or so. Second, that technology entrepreneurship is likely to become the dominant ‘technology of ambition’. Third, that new institutions will be needed to channel, focus and amplify this new ambition (and that Entrepreneur First will be one of them).
    8. IIT Gandhinagar Decennial
    9. Me, my wife and our matrimonial Slack

 

Books 

Thinking in Systems: A Primer – Donella Meadows

Hackers and Painters: Paul Graham

reading list

Highlights from my Reading List – Week 3

Rahul R

Articles

  1. The Secret – Dani Alves

    Right before every match, I have same the routine. I stand in front of a mirror for five minutes and I block out everything. Then a movie begins to play in my mind. It is the movie of my life.

    I tell myself, “You are not going back to the farm until you make your father proud. You might be 51st in ability. But you are going to be No. 1 or 2 in drive. You are going to be a warrior. You are not going back home, no matter what.”

  2. The Ego and the Universe: Alan Watts on Becoming Who You Really Are (Long read)

    His 1966 masterwork The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are builds upon his indispensable earlier work as Watts argues with equal parts conviction and compassion that “the prevalent sensation of oneself as a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin is a hallucination which accords neither with Western science nor with the experimental philosophy-religions of the East.” He explores the cause and cure of that illusion in a way that flows from profound unease as we confront our cultural conditioning into a deep sense of lightness as we surrender to the comforting mystery and interconnectedness of the universe.

  3. The Valley’s Best Investors On “Distribution”

    One key ingredient missing from most startup recipes is a focus on and healthy respect for something elusive: Distribution.

  4. Japan’s habits of overwork are hard to change

    Twelve-hour days are common. Holidays are stingy—just ten days a year when you start out at work—yet Japanese workers, on average, take only half their due. Japan leads the world in paternity leave—up to a year. Yet barely 5% of men take advantage of it, and then usually for just a few days. Japan has given the world the term karoshi, or death by overwork.

  5. First Principles: The Building Blocks of True Knowledge  (Long read)

    First-principles thinking is one of the best ways to reverse-engineer complicated problems and unleash creative possibility. Sometimes called “reasoning from first principles,” the idea is to break down complicated problems into basic elements and then reassemble them from the ground up. It’s one of the best ways to learn to think for yourself, unlock your creative potential, and move from linear to non-linear results.

  6. Beginner’s Guide to Game Theory (must read if you’re unfamiliar w/ game theory)

    Game theory is the study of how and why people make decisions within a competitive situation, while keeping in mind what actions their competitors will take. You can think of it as the study of strategic decision making.

  7. Risk as a Form of Purpose 

    Fortunately, we no longer have to risk our lives to feel a sense of purpose, but the fact that risking something is what often provides purpose is not something we can just overlook.

    More than ever, people feel that what they do on a daily basis has little worth, that it isn’t meaningful and that their time could be better used if it was more clear where to invest it.

  8. An Interview with Morgan Housel – David Perell (On the future of Brands)
  9. Six Questions for Brent Beshore – Morgan Housel  (What have you changed your mind about in the last decade?)
  10. Advice on writing – Devon Zuegel

    The art of writing is mostly about unblocking yourself. I find I don’t really have a lack of ideas, more that I hold myself back from letting them flow out of me and onto the page.

Books 

Hackers and Painters – Paul Graham

How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big – Scott Adams 
(For a preview check this out: https://fs.blog/2013/12/scott-adams-fail-at-everything/)

 

reading list

Highlights from my Reading List – Week 2

Rahul R

Articles

  1. Economies of Unscale – how new business models combined with technology are disrupting the old economies of scale strategy.
    Link

  2. What happens when a Mars simulation goes wrong? A long read covering the incidents of a simulation that went wrong and what we can learn from it.
    https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/06/mars-simulation-hi-seas-nasa-hawaii/553532/

  3. A case for linking processed food and obesity.
    http://roguehealthandfitness.com/processed-food-and-obesity/

  4. The lure of venture capital and how returns from VC compare to other indices.
    https://mailchi.mp/verdadcap/the-lure-of-venture-capital?e=8bec682612

  5. Do you feel pressure or apply pressure? How to think of leadership by Ben Horowitz.
    Do You Feel Pressure or Do You Apply Pressure?

  6. An interview with Peter Thiel on topics ranging from politics to tech and death.
    https://www.weltwoche.ch/ausgaben/2018-29/artikel/en-hypnotische-massenphanomene-die-weltwoche-ausgabe-29-2018.html

  7. Why India needs women to work. A significant lever that can make the country prosperous lies languishing due to societal attitudes.
    https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/07/05/why-india-needs-women-to-work?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ed/

  8. Letter to My Younger Self – Edinson Cavani
    https://www.theplayerstribune.com/en-us/articles/edinson-cavani-uruguay-letter-to-my-younger-self

  9. Real World vs Book Knowledge
    http://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/real-world-vs-book-knowledge/

  10. Photostory: Football fields across the world
    https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2018/06/photos-soccer-fields-around-the-world/562862/

  11. If you have time just to read one of these articles go for this one.
    What you can’t say by Paul Graham
    http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

Books

  1. Muscle Up – P D Mangan
  2. Hackers and Painters – Paul Graham
  3. Six Easy Pieces – Richard Feynman
reading list

Highlights from my Reading List Week 1

Rahul R

Articles

  1. Netflix dissected by Matthew Ball. Part 1: Netflix’s budget and finances and why everyone misunderstands it. https://redef.com/original/5aef0993c6ebc12630896b45 
    Part 2: Netflix is a product and technology company. https://redef.com/original/5aef99591e5d473edfd9a4c5?curator=MediaREDEF
    Part 3: Netflix’s long term strategy. 
    https://redef.com/original/netflix-isnt-being-reckless-its-just-playing-a-game-no-one-else-dares-netflix-misunderstandings-pt-3

  2. How would Steve Jobs’ version of Sell me this pen look like?
    http://jiggity.com/pen.html

  3. Musings on JEE and the future of IITs – an interview with the IITD director. 
    https://indianexpress.com/article/education/jee-iit-delhi-engineering-v-ramgopal-rao-idea-exchange-higher-education-hrd-5269335/

  4. The Abecrombie and Fitch effect or why men buy high-status/priced products when around dominant men. 
    https://www.newneuromarketing.com/men-beware-the-abercrombie-fitch-effect

  5. The art of shaving and the beauty of doing mundane tasks. Your conscious mind is focused on the task at hand, so the subconscious is free to think. 
    https://nevalalee.wordpress.com/2011/06/02/the-art-of-shaving/

  6. How to fail well by Morgan Housel. 
    https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/05/24/how-to-fail-well.aspx 

  7. On the importance of Power Laws by Shane Parrish. 
    Super important mental model to have in your repertoire. 
    https://fs.blog/2017/11/power-laws/

  8. Ever had good ideas in the shower? I know I did. 
    Make this a conscious process. 
    https://nevalalee.wordpress.com/2013/12/04/how-to-think-in-the-shower/ 

  9. The Idea Maze and how to think about ideas. 
    http://cdixon.org/2013/08/04/the-idea-maze/

  10. Marc Andreessen’s blog archives. 
    https://a16z.com/2015/01/09/pmarca-blog-ebook/

     

Books

Zero to One – Peter Theil

Hackers and Painters – Paul Graham