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If the only reason you’re staying in your job is that it feels safe, read this. In 1994, Jeff Bezos was 30 and had a great job at a hedge fund in New York. He wanted to quit and sell books on the internet. His boss took him on a two-hour walk through Central Park. He told Jeff it was a good idea, but a better idea for someone who didn’t already have a good job. Jeff imagined himself at 80, looking back on his life. He said: “I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried.” He quit. His wife drove them across the country while he typed the business plan. He started Amazon in a garage. He told his parents there was a 70% chance they’d lose the money they put in. You will regret not trying far more than failing.
An ordinary journalist trained for one year and won the US Memory Championship. Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer is the story of how he did it. In 2005, Foer went to cover the contest as a reporter. The competitors told him they weren’t born with special memories. They had learned a technique. So he tried it. He practiced for a year, came back in 2006 and won. He memorized a shuffled deck of cards in 1 minute and 40 seconds, a new US record. The technique is about 2,500 years old. Greek and Roman orators used it to give long speeches without notes. It is the most useful book on memory you will ever read.
Poor Charlie’s Almanack is the best book on thinking clearly I’ve ever read. Charlie Munger was Warren Buffett’s partner for decades and one of the best investors who ever lived. This book collects his speeches. In one of them, he lists 25 ways the human mind tricks itself into bad decisions. In another, he explains that about 80 or 90 big ideas from different fields carry most of the weight in life, and that you should learn them all. His most famous advice is “Invert, always invert”: to work out how to succeed, first ask how you would fail. He once said that he and Buffett got ahead mainly by “trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.” It will change the way you make decisions.
Thomas Edison’s response to the worst night of his career was six words long. In December 1914, a fire broke out at Thomas Edison’s factory in West Orange, New Jersey. Chemicals exploded. Building after building went up in flames. Years of work, records and equipment were gone in one night. Edison stood outside and watched it burn. Then he told a reporter: “I’ll start all over again tomorrow.” He was already rich. He was already famous. He had every reason to stop. But the next morning, he was back at work. Within weeks, parts of the factory were running again. Never waste time mourning what you lost, just start rebuilding.
You haven’t read a truly great novel until you’ve read The Leopard. It was written by a Sicilian prince in the last years of his life. Every publisher he sent it to rejected it. He died in 1957 without ever seeing it published. A year later it came out and became one of the best-selling Italian novels ever written, and it won Italy’s top literary prize. The story follows a proud Sicilian prince watching his whole world fall apart as Italy is unified in 1860. It’s a book about pride, change and growing old, and every page of it is beautifully written.
Everyone should read The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant at least once. The Durants spent about four decades writing an 11-volume history of civilization, around 10,000 pages in total. Then they wrote this book, about 100 pages long, with everything they had learned. Each chapter takes one big idea: biology, race, war, religion, economics, government. The first lesson is blunt: “life is competition.” You can read it in an afternoon. It’s the best 100 pages of history you will ever read.
books to learn more about Caesar:
When Julius Caesar was 25, he was kidnapped by pirates. He acted like they worked for him. They demanded a ransom of 20 talents. Caesar laughed at them for not knowing who they had captured, and told them to ask for 50. He spent 38 days as their prisoner. When he wanted to sleep, he ordered them to stop talking. He wrote poems and speeches and read them out loud. When the pirates didn’t admire them, he called them illiterate barbarians. He often told them, laughing, that he would come back and execute them all. They thought he was joking. As soon as the ransom was paid, he raised a fleet, hunted them down and had every one of them crucified, exactly as he had promised.
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When Julius Caesar was 25, he was kidnapped by pirates. He acted like they worked for him. They demanded a ransom of 20 talents. Caesar laughed at them for not knowing who they had captured, and told them to ask for 50. He spent 38 days as their prisoner. When he wanted to sleep, he ordered them to stop talking. He wrote poems and speeches and read them out loud. When the pirates didn’t admire them, he called them illiterate barbarians. He often told them, laughing, that he would come back and execute them all. They thought he was joking. As soon as the ransom was paid, he raised a fleet, hunted them down and had every one of them crucified, exactly as he had promised.