What You Will Learn

We underestimate the role of randomness in just about everything. We often have the mistaken impression that a strategy is an excellent strategy, or an entrepreneur is a person endowed with unique vision. Nassim Taleb believes that the world is much more random than we think.

Skills count, obviously. But they count much less in highly random environments like trading, than they do in the predictable ones, like dentistry.

Fooled By Randomness shows us how to recognise and work with randomness and luck, which is involved in everything you do. In doing so you can humble yourself, turn down your assumptions about your abilities, and have a more accurate view of how the world IS, not how you think it should be.

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With Adam Jones turning 30 this week, we figured this was his last chance to work out what he’d done wrong (or right) during his 20s. The key message of this book is that your twenties MATTER.

A lot of young people like to say that your twenties don’t matter, that you can put off life’s big decisions until later, that the 20s are the time for fun and enjoying life and not to be taken too seriously… But the research shows otherwise:

• Two thirds of your lifetime wage growth happens in the first 10 years of your career
• More than half of people are married or at least dating/living with their future life partner by age 30, 75% by age 35
• Personality changes more in 20s then in any time period before or after
• The brain caps off it’s final stages of growth in the 20s
• Fertility reaches its peak in late 20s
• Our social networks – and the opportunities they may bring – are the widest and most diverse in the 20s, then get narrower as we age beyond

80% of life’s defining moments will have taken place by our mid-30s. Life is not over when you hit age 40, you can always claim your life back at any point. But it’s better to start sooner rather than later. William James said: “intention is the result of attention and choice”. It’s never too late, or too early, to start paying attention.

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At the height of the Second World War, the German army had minimal resources to continue the war to the East with Russia, and simultaneously execute Hitler's "Final Solution". The Nazi party had already used up all of the ideological killers in their country. They were left with the dregs of society. They would have to use Joe the local Butcher, Jim the Primary School Teacher even Grandpa George to get the job done. The only people left all had working class jobs like truck drivers, dock workers, construction workers and machine operators. They were "normal people" like you and me, but were called upon to execute millions of innocent Jews.

Ordinary Men tells the story of one faction, the Reserve Police Battalion 101 and how they were transformed from normal citizen into "professional killers"

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Despite evidence to the contrary, we all use our brains. BUT - most of us have never learned how to think effectively. We’re not talking about IQ or innate intelligence, we’re talking about thinking as a LEARNED SKILL. We’re talking about a productive method of thinking and reasoning.

Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert cartoons, author of How To Fail At Almost Everything And Still Win Big and Win Bigly, calls this ‘Loserthink’. Loserthink doesn’t mean ‘dumb’ or ‘uninformed’, it simply means unproductive or ineffective. It’s not a value judgement of a person as a whole, just on this specific method of evaluation. Plenty of ‘smart’ and ‘well-informed’ people are culprits of using Loserthink (and in some cases, they are MORE susceptible). You use Loserthink because you’ve never learned or practiced the SKILL of thinking effectively.

What this book presents is a method for thinking. By borrowing some fundamental techniques from various different fields, we can develop our thinking skills and become much more effective. If we borrow ideas from how to think like a historian, how to think like an entrepreneur, how to think like an engineer, how to think like a scientist - we can cobble together an effective process for thinking.

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In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick introduced the world to their new discovery: the double-helix DNA structure. This so-called "secret of life" was widely considered the most important scientific discovery of the 20th Century.

Their presentation won them a Nobel Prize. The most striking part of the pitch? It was only 5 minutes long. That was the COMPLETE presentation - introducing the secret of life, presenting their scientific discovery, explaining all of the need-to-know-details, showing how it works.

You need to pause and consider for a moment. If these two blokes can explain the greatest innovation of the 20th Century in under 5 minutes, why do you think you need to book in hour-long meetings to present your report or pitch your new business idea to investors??? There’s clearly something wrong with the way most people are pitching their ideas.

If you need to sell something as part of your job (a product, a service, an idea), then it’s worth taking the time to learn how to do it properly. And when you really think about it, almost everyone is pitching SOMETHING, no matter how large or small, every single day. That initial pitch is less than 1% of the entire time and energy you need to invest into a project, but it is probably the most important 1% - that first presentation of your idea is what can either drive it forward, or see it slaughtered on the spot.

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We started the podcast back in June 2016. In the last four-and-a-quarter years, we've read and reviewed 200 books on the podcast! We thought it was a great milestone to take a step back and have a look at what lessons we've learned from all of the books we've read and how they can tie in together.

A couple of years ago when we hit our 100th book, we did our "Top 10 Lessons". You can listen to that podcast episode here: 100th BOOK – Our Top 10 Lessons. They all hold up pretty well! Feel free to go and check out that episode, on here is a reminder of just the lessons themselves:

1. You're Gonna Die Someday  
2. Be Proactive (realise that you have the power to take action) 
3. Get In The Arena, Don't Sit On The Sidelines  
4. Delayed Gratification (long-term satisfaction far outweighs instant gratification)  
5. The Power of Questions & The Importance of Curiosity 
6. Have A Bias for Action (thinking and planning and dreaming are nice, but action is vital)
7. Place lots of Minimum Bets  
8. Effectiveness VS Efficiency: The Best Time Management Tips
9. Listen Before You Talk  
10. You're Either Remarkable Or You're Invisible 

They were the big 10 lessons we took from our FIRST 100 books, now we’ve thought about what NEW lessons we’ve taken from the NEXT 100 books. We started with 10 mini lessons, but then decided that they all grouped together pretty nicely into 3 BIG lessons:

1. Question The Path
2. Dichotomies (No Single Book Has All Of The Answer)
3. The Myth Of The Silver Bullet

Read the full write up of these lessons on our website: https://whatyouwilllearn.com/200th-book 

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The identities of all of the most powerful people in the country are similar: they're white, male, middle and upper class, and able bodied. Acknowledging this may be dismissed as political correctness, but Robin Diangello notes it is still a fact. Those people in the seats of power are making decisions that affect those not sitting at the table.

Identity politics gets a pretty bad wrap. But looking through history, this has proven results. For example, women's suffrage, the American disability act, Title 9, federal recognition of same sex marriage.

Robin Diangelo’s hope is that you may gain insight into why people who identify as white are so difficult in conversations regarding race and/or gain insight into your own racial responses as you navigating the roiling racial waters of life.

Sign up for our monthly email recap: www.whatyouwilllearn.com/email

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Benjamin Disraeli: "There are three types of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics"

There are some great statisticians and data manipulators out there, and that can manoeuvre things in a way to get exactly the result they want. Any time you see a statistic, you should consider that it might be a lie.

You need to learn some of these tricks so that you can defend yourself. The author says that the crooks know exactly how to manipulate data and statistics, so the honest people must learn the tricks as a matter of self defense. (Or, if you’re that way inclined and a little sneaky, you can sue some of these tricks to manipulate data of your own and lie with statistics a little more). 

In the podcast episode and in this blog post, we’re going to cover:

• Sampling Errors
• Biased Sampling
• The different types of “averages”
• How you can use and unrelated number to answer a different question
• And How you can fight back against these dodgy statisticians

To see our ratings and what we though of the book, sign up to our monthly email newsletter: https://whatyouwilllearn.com/email

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You and everyone you know is going to one day die. This is an uncomfortable fact. So uncomfortable that we try to push it out of our minds. But this leaves  most people totally unprepared for their meeting with the ‘Grim Reaper’. 

Doctors learn a lot in medical school, but mortality isn't on the curriculum. The textbooks have almost nothing on ageing, frailty or dying. How the process unfolds, how people experience the end of their lives and how it affects those around them seem useless to the Western World.

Being Mortal explores how we might best embrace these final moments. 

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