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Expand Your Mind - a list by gordon
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About this list:
I read many books, listen to lots of music, surf the Net, and watch lots of TV/documentaries/movies concurrently. Mostly I am into science, econ/finance, psychology/sociology, current events/history, and strategy/business. Occasionally, I come across a great epic novel or really quality sci-fi or some book or film that really blows my mind. I love to share when I find mind-expanding media.
Qualifications:
Media junkie. I don't watch much TV except for HBO and SHO.
Xoçai: super-healthy chocolate/acai drink
First to recommend
Description
I recently discovered Xocai, a totally delicious mix of dark chocolate, acai, blueberries, and cayenne. Xocai comes as a powder and you mix in into a thick liquid and drink it as a shot 3 times/day. Packed w/tons of anti-oxidants, it is super-healthy and totally tasty. Xocai packs a wallop: drink a shot and then you feel like a super-hero. Great in the morning and before a work-out.
I am way into foods that help you super-charge your body in healthy and sustainable ways. Anything that can do that and has chocolate is a sure winner for me. Highly recommended
Updated Apr 22, 2007
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SleepEase by sprayology
First to recommend
Description
I LOVE Sprayology's SleepEase homeopathic sleep aid. I have never been a fan of sleeping pills and think making a pot of chamomille before bed is a hassle. But I totally dig SleepEase.
Made w/valerian and chamomille and other herbal goodness, just spray a couple of bursts under your tongue and you will start to chill out pretty quickly. There is no high w/SleepEase but there is a nice mellow/relaxed feeling that you get from it. And it seems to induce the most awesome, occasionally lucid (ie where you can control the action) dreams in me, which I totally love. So not only can I get a restful night of sleep (I am usually a very light sleeper), I often get the benefit of some pretty wild adventures into the subconscious.
Highly recommended
Updated Apr 10, 2007
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Gladiator - Extended Cut (Three-Disc Special Edition)
First to recommend
2 people recommended this item
Description
Gladiator is absolutely one of the best big budget movies ever. I know indie film snobs turn up their noses at this sort of content but I think Russell Crowe does a simply superb job of portraying a military commander who possesses both great charisma and great competence.
While the battle scenes are, of course, incredibly well done, it is really the Crowe's character study of a Maximus, the Roman general and Joaquin Phoenix's sniveling emperor that makes the movie gripping.
I also loved watching how Maximus gets psyched up to go into battle and into the gladiator's arena: the mental psych, the rubbing the hands w/sand ritual, the no fear/plunge right in approach. Stud. Great to think about before doing a big business pitch, getting ready to pull down on a hard pitch, or take off on a big bomb of a wave.
Updated Feb 27, 2007
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Battlestar Galactica - Season 2.0 (Episodes 1-10)
5 people recommended this item
Description
Battlestar Galactica just keeps getting better and better. Season 2 is a fascinating character study of how people respond when being hunted, hunting, and trying to rebuild. The Cylon/Human battles are great to watch but the real action is in seeing how Adama, Roslin, Apollo, Starbuck, and the rest of the crew cope and lead in such harsh conditions.
While obviously fiction, there are some great case management/leadership case studies in how to lead and deal under crisis situations: mutiny, treachery, collapse of will, resource constraints.
In the same way that some video games can teach a lot about resource planning and strategy, BSG 2.0 can teach a lot about how to deal w/people under adverse scenarios.
Updated Feb 23, 2007
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The Adversity Advantage: Turning Everyday Struggles into Everyday Greatness
First to recommend
Description
Nietzsche said, "that which does not kill you, makes you stronger" (I think the governator also said something similar in Conan: The Movie). And that aphorism is the core of The Adversity Advantage. Co-written by Erik Weihenmeyer (the blind dude who has climbed the Seven Summits and paraglides!), the Adversity Advantage is a book of personal and organizational philosophy that gives the reader tools to identity, understand, and embrace adversity. "Turning into the storm" is how facing adversity is described in the book.
I love to climb and I run a start-up (ie ThisNext) so I am familiar with adversity in both my sports and my work. But I had not thought about how to connect those two passions until recently. And, when you think about it, success-drivers in a start-up and success-drivers in an expedition are not so dissimilar: assuming weather or market conditions don't totally shut you down, your success is really contingent upon how well your team deals w/uncertainty, risk, discomfort, resource constraints, and other forms of adversity.
If you climb or if you just believe in the notion that learning to suffer well can build a lot of character, I highly recommend this book. Great for personal and organizational perspective. Be forewarned: this attitude is clearly not for everyone. The faint-hearted, the entitled, and/or the comfort-obsessed will not like this POV at all.
Updated Feb 23, 2007
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Battlestar Galactica - Season One (2004)
11 people recommended this item
Description
I loved the original Battlestar Galactica but the revised version is even better. Excellent product values, good acting, great plotlines- everything you want. But it is not just mindless entertainment. Instead the new BSG deals with interesting issues of identity, souls, and what is means to be human. Plus there is plenty of human interest side stories to keep everyone happy.
Finally, sci-fi that my wife likes to watch as well (that is a true rarity)
Get it on DVD and prepare to spend hours fleeing the Cylons
Updated Jan 21, 2007
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Andy Goldsworthy: A Collaboration with Nature
4 people recommended this item
Description
GOldsworthy is probably the best nature installation artist in the world. The man is so incredibly talented and his work is so deeply connected to the environment it's inspiring and breathtaking. A great film about his work is Rivers and Tides. For people who love nature and art alike.
Updated Aug 20, 2009
Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics
First to recommend
Description
Big, brainy, and dense. A good survey on the application of complexity to current economic thinking. The more I learn about "classical" econ, the more I wonder why anyone ever thought it was correct. True, I have the benefit of being able to look backwards w/hindsight, but it does certainly seem that econ is going to be radically shaken up. Since the dismal science rules so much of the world wrt politics, biz, etc, it is important to understand how advances in econ thinking might unfold.
Not exactly light reading but very worthwhile (if you like this sort of thing)
Updated Aug 23, 2006
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Baraka
6 people recommended this item
Description
Directed by Ron Fricke, the cinematographer of Koyaanisqatsi, Baraka wordlessly conveys the Earth-bound experience over the course of a day, spanning topics from the marvel of natural beauty and the destruction of nature to man's relationship with his surroundings, religion, and himself. The collection of images, set to a score by Michael Sterns, is meditative, insightful, and beautiful.
Updated Dec 17, 2008
Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
First to recommend
5 people recommended this item
Description
Every couple of years, I come across a book that really opens my eyes by either introducing me to new ideas or helps me synthesize known but unintegrated ideas into larger/new paradigms (yes, I agree that is a much abused/overused word but it also happens to be the right word here, imho).
Recently, I finished Nassim Nicholas Taleb's 2nd edition of Fooled by Randomness: the Role of Chance in the Markets and Life. Fooled was one of these eye-opening books that proved to be a gateway to a new way of thinking. Taleb is a quant-driven trader who uses his understanding of the foibles inherent in being human to make money.
Fooled is Taleb's meditation on evolutionary biology, behavioral finance, philosophy, poetry, statistics, media saturation, and humanity's "epistemic arrogance" boiled down into a very high level overview of Taleb's trading strategy. It is a fascinating, often startling, potentially enraging, but sometimes meandering read.
The Big Ideas
* People don't learn that they don't learn. In other words, people will insist on using the same mental models/rules or, in behavioral finance parlance, heuristics, regardless of solid evidence to the contrary. Compounding this unwillingness to remap heuristics, Taleb observes most people are very chance-blind, meaning that they do not accurately assess probabilities. Understanding how people tend to skew their estimates of the odds can be, as Taleb points out, a very powerful tool. Taleb goes on to speculate about the evolutionary biological roots of such chance-blindness and other seemingly default heuristics w/which most of operate.
* That rare events do happen. When stated this way, most people say, "well, duh!�" But the reality is most people are not prepared for what Taleb calls Black Swans, events that seem so unlikely, based on past experience, as to have never really been considered a real possibility.* But consider: how many of your personal ideas, relationships, businesses/investments, communities, or health/fitness practices make the implicit assumption that conditions will continue to evolve as a more or less linear extrapolation of today's conditions? How well suited are your strategies to the idea of a sudden and unexpected shift? In entrepreneurial circles, a Black Swan might be known as a "disruptive technology". In politics, 9/11 could rightly be considered a Black Swan that caught most people in and out of government by surprise.
While neither of these ideas seem so startling at first glance, Taleb forces the reader to take a deeper look at the manifestations, implications, and ramifications of our aforementioned "epistemic arrogance" in light of our overwhelming tendency to over-optimize for inherently ephemeral conditions. For those of you who want your cage rattled a bit, I highly recommend Fooled by Randomness- I promise it will open your eyes.
* The term "Black Swan" comes from the historical anecdote that Europeans had considered it axiomatic that all swan were white since they had never seen one any other color. Then they got to Australia and discovered that there were, in fact, black swans there.
Updated Oct 28, 2006
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gordon
I am the CEO and co-founder of ThisNext. I am a serial net entrepreneur and have all the baggage that goes along...
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