Favorite books - a list by gordon

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The First 30 Days: Your Guide to Any Change (and Loving Your Life More) by Ariane De Bonvoisin

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Ariane is a good personal friend of mine and she is one super-smart and connected (in the sense of being grounded in life, as well as in the massive rolodex sense) person. First 30 days is her landmark book that is a guide ot change in one's life. In First 30 days, she has charted out the general shape of change: what it means psychologically, sociologically, and (when relevant) from a physiological and/or financial standpoint as well. Then she applies that templatized insight into various changes one might make in life: getting married, new job, death, etc. Awesome, awesome, awesome!

If you are looking for a little help in orienting yourself as we all stumble thru life, I highly recommend Ariane's work. She will definitely help you add depth to your experience of life which is really the point of our being here, after all ;-)

Updated Jul 29, 2008

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Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman by Yvon Chouinard

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2 people recommended this item

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A fantastic business book and autobiography for any entrepreneur written by climbing pioneer, environmental hero, and outdoor technical clothing category-creator, Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia.

Updated Jun 11, 2006

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Accelerando by Charles Stross

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3 people recommended this item

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an absurdist, hard sci-fi look at what the singularity might be like, sentient lobsters and all. Highly recommended though the quick-cut writing style can be a little difficult to get used to

Updated Aug 19, 2006

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Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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5 people recommended this item

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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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The Magus by John Fowles

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This is truly a mind-blowing novel. An existential thriller, it is the story of a young Englishman ensared in a the weird world of a reclusive millionaire on a Greek island in the 1950's. This book, has it all: sex, violence, love, intrigue, and probing questions/insights about the human condition and morality in general. Philosophy pumped up on adrenaline.

If you have a brain and like to have your assumptions challenged, this book will not disappoint.

Updated Jan 10, 2006

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A Soldier of the Great War by Mark Helprin

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I am not usually a fiction fan, but this is one of my all-time favorite books, ever. It is a huge, beautifully written, and rousing meditation on life, love, strife, aesthetics, adventure, and living authentically.

HIGHLY recommended. The protagonist is also a climber which is a big plus for me.

Updated Jan 10, 2006

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