1) Time and tide waits for none. 2021 is coming to an end. I am one more year older and hopefully one more year wiser. Here are some books, courses, newsletters, and resources that I learnt from in 2021. It made me less ignorant, and I hope that you’ll find some of them useful.
2) Your body is the only permanent address where you live. Most of us can minimize the chance of getting chronic diseases if we are mindful of what we eat.
2a) Why We Get Sick: The Hidden Epidemic at the Root of Most Chronic Disease--and How to Fight It
amazon.com/gp/product/195…
amazon.com/gp/product/195…
3) The Lindy Effect is the idea that the older something is, the longer it's likely to be around in the future. Thirukkural is a collection of verses that teaches life lessons on virtue, wealth, love. It was written by the sage Thiruvalluvar around 2,000 years back.
3a) Thirukkural will feature among the best of the best if measured in the scale of page-for-page wisdom.
amazon.com/Thirukkural-Pe…
amazon.com/Thirukkural-Pe…
4) The iron law of nature is that all of us have 24 hours in a day. People who think in a structured way produce 10x more results compared to those who approach it mindlessly through brute force.
4a) Maxims for Thinking Analytically: The wisdom of legendary Harvard Professor Richard Zeckhauser
amazon.com/Maxims-Thinkin…
amazon.com/Maxims-Thinkin…
4b) Cases in Intelligence Analysis: Structured Analytic Techniques in Action
amazon.com/Cases-Intellig…
amazon.com/Cases-Intellig…
4c) How to Get the Right Diagnosis: 16 Tips for Navigating the Medical System
amazon.com/How-Get-Right-…
amazon.com/How-Get-Right-…
5) Businesses are in the business of solving customer problems, delighting them, and adding tons of value to all stakeholders. Only then, they deserve the right to capture their fair share of value. I love learning about businesses, and gained so many insights from these books.
5e) The Innovation Stack: Building an Unbeatable Business One Crazy Idea at a Time
amazon.com/Innovation-Sta…
amazon.com/Innovation-Sta…
6) Around 70% of my equity portfolio is indexed. The remaining 30% is a collection of high-quality franchisee’s that I like to hold for the long-term as long as their businesses continue to get stronger.
6a) Investing for Growth: How to make money by only buying the best companies in the world
amazon.com/Investing-Grow…
amazon.com/Investing-Grow…
7) Coding is an enabler that can scale our thinking to 10-100x. Here’s a powerful example of how Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio, leveraged coding to finish the task in one afternoon vs. spending an entire quarter. H/T @10kdiver 
7a) In the past, I used to compile key metrics on Indian banks using RBI data. The process would take a few hours. I automated this mind-numbing manual task into 50 lines of Python code. The script runs in a couple of seconds and automatically populates my Google Sheet.
7b) Python for Data Analysis: Data Wrangling with Pandas, NumPy, and IPython
amazon.com/Python-Data-An…
amazon.com/Python-Data-An…
7d) Introduction to Machine Learning with Python: A Guide for Data Scientists
amazon.com/Introduction-M…
amazon.com/Introduction-M…
7g) Math for Programmers: 3D graphics, machine learning, and simulations with Python
amazon.com/Math-Programme…
amazon.com/Math-Programme…
8) Who would have thought that humanity would be locked down for 2 years in their homes by a tiny virus that none of us could even see with our naked eyes? Human ingenuity (vaccines and money printing) minimized the havoc caused by the virus and we learnt to co-exist with it.
8a) Presently about 40% of the world’s population lives within 100 kilometers of the coast. Unless we start acting immediately, the devastation caused by global warming will cause irreversible damage.
8b) How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need
amazon.com/gp/product/B07…
amazon.com/gp/product/B07…
9) Basics of Finance and Investing is one subject that I wish they taught me in school. I learnt it the hard way in my late 20s. Starting a decade late resulted in missing one extra double, assuming 7% rate of growth. I taught my elder son the basics when he turned 18.
10) Information was hard to get in the 90s. If you lived in India, you would consider yourself lucky if you had a library nearby. Today, information is pushed at you at breakneck speed choking most of us. Finding the needle in a haystack is the most important challenge today.
10a) We miss out on the big trends when things come in tiny increments. These 2 resources show how technology unfolded since the 1990s to till date. It made me realize how dumb I was to miss out every big trend in the last two plus decades. Hindsight is 20/20.
10b) I'm a big fan of @10kdiver fintwit threads. This person has a rare skill of going deep and more importantly makes difficult finance and investing concepts easy to understand for everyone.
10c) MorningBrew makes reading daily news enjoyable. In 5 minutes, you get to know the news that mattered from the previous day.
morningbrew.com
morningbrew.com
10d) Two weekly newsletters that help me keep up with the most important things happening in technology.
ben-evans.com/newsletter
nzscapital.com/sitalweek
ben-evans.com/newsletter
nzscapital.com/sitalweek
10e) Breaking Bad is the BEST show I have ever watched. I can't agree more with what The Economist wrote in 2013 — The best television show is also a first-rate primer on business.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
