Skin In The Game | Nassim Nicholas Taleb

In Skin In The Game, Nassim Nicholas Taleb explains how the willingness of accepting one’s own risks is an important quality of heroes, saints and successful people in all walks of life. 

Skin In The Game is about the distortions of symmetry and reciprocity in life. If you have the rewards, you must also get some of the risks and not let others pay the price of your mistakes.

Here are my highlights from the book:

If you have the rewards, you must also get some of the risks, not let others pay the price of your mistakes. If you inflict risk on others, and they are harmed, you need to pay some price for it.

Don’t tell me what you “think,” just tell me what’s in your portfolio.

Extreme Ownership | Jocko Willink and Leif Babin

In Extreme Ownership, Jocko Willink and Leif Babin share hard-hitting, Navy SEAL combat stories that translate into lessons for business and life. I have read an updated edition of the blockbuster bestselling leadership book that took America and the world by storm, two U.S. Navy SEAL officers who led the most highly decorated special operations unit of the Iraq War demonstrate how to apply powerful leadership principles from the battlefield to business and life.

It is a great read of the lessons on the battlefield and how they can be applied to everyday business efforts.

Sent to the most violent battlefield in Iraq, Jocko Willink and Leif Babin's SEAL task unit faced a seemingly impossible mission: help U.S. forces secure Ramadi, a city deemed "all but lost." In gripping firsthand accounts of heroism, tragic loss, and hard-won victories in SEAL Team Three's Task Unit Bruiser, they learned that leadership—at every level—is the most important factor in whether a team succeeds or fails.

Below you may find out my key take-aways from each part of this book. I hope you will enjoy and learn from my highlights.

The Biggest Bluff | Maria Konnikova

It's true that Maria Konnikova had never actually played poker before and didn't even know the rules when she approached Erik Seidel, Poker Hall of Fame inductee and winner of tens of millions of dollars in earnings, and convinced him to be her mentor. But she knew her man: a famously thoughtful and broad-minded player, he was intrigued by her pitch that she wasn't interested in making money so much as learning about life. She had faced a stretch of personal bad luck, and her reflections on the role of chance had led her to a giant of game theory, who pointed her to poker as the ultimate master class in learning to distinguish between what can be controlled and what can't. And she certainly brought...

The Catalyst | Jonah Berger

 Jonah Berger, the author of New York Times bestsellers Contagious and Invisible Influence brings a revolutionary approach to changing anyone's mind in his book “The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone's Mind”.

Everyone has something they want to change. But change is hard. Often, we persuade and pressure and push, but nothing moves. He tries to find the answer to that question “Could there be a better way?” in his book.

This book takes a different approach. Successful change agents know it's not about pushing harder, or providing more information, it's about being a catalyst. Catalysts remove roadblocks and reduce the barriers to change. Instead of asking, "How could I change someone's mind?" they ask a different question: "Why haven't they changed already? What's stopping them?"

How to Win Friends and Influence People | Dale Carnegie

Bernard Shaw once remarked: ‘If you teach a man anything, he will never learn.’ Shaw was right. Learning is an active process. We learn by doing. So, if you desire to master the principles you are studying in this book, do something about them. Apply these rules at every opportunity. If you don’t you will forget them quickly. Only knowledge that is used sticks in your mind.

Any fool can criticise, condemn and complain – and most fools do.

It takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving.

A great man shows his greatness by the way he treats little men.

Bob Hoover, a famous test pilot and frequent performer at air shows, was returning to his home in Los Angeles from an air show in San Diego. As described in the magazine Flight Operations, at three hundred feet in the air, both engines suddenly stopped. By deft manoeuvring he managed to land the plane, but it was badly damaged although nobody was hurt. Hoover’s first act after the emergency landing was to inspect the aeroplane’s fuel. Just as he suspected, the World War II propeller plane he had been flying had been fuelled with jet fuel rather than gasoline. Upon returning to the airport, he asked to see the mechanic who had serviced his aeroplane. The young man was sick with the agony of his mistake. Tears streamed down his face as Hoover approached. He had just caused the loss of a very expensive plane and could have caused the loss of three lives as well. You can imagine Hoover’s anger. One could anticipate the tongue-lashing that this proud and precise pilot would unleash for that carelessness. But Hoover didn’t scold the mechanic; he didn’t even criticise him. Instead, he put his big arm around the man’s shoulder and said, ‘To show you I’m sure that you’ll never do this again, I want you to service my F-51 tomorrow.

The Latte Factor | David Bach

Three Secrets

1) Pay Yourself First

Keep your first hour’s worth of each day’s pay. An hour a day, in other words, of paying yourself first.

2) Don’t Budget – Make It Automatic

3) Live Rich Now

The first two secrets – pay yourself first, make it automatic – those are the how. This is the why. Figure out what matters, and follow that.

If you don’t know where you are going, you might not like where you end up. What am I doing with my life?

Ronaldo - A Biography of a Boy Who Rose Out of Poverty

In October and November 2018, I read the biography of Cristiano Ronaldo. It was an amazing book which I really liked a lot and will keep it in my library as one of the most motivating books I've ever read. Please also note that the book is named Football Book of the Year at the Cross Sports Book Awards 2016. 

 I bought this book with some other books for my son

Although it was a paperback format book, I took notes from the book to my Evernote while reading and then collected them all in one content below.