I love to read, and try to get through a couple dozen books a year. I didn’t always keep a list so there are plenty missing. I’ve also been going back and adding a meaningful quote or two.

Some favorites

  • Antifragile
  • Boyd
  • Blindsight
  • Complexity a Guided Tour
  • Exhalation
  • Finite and Infinite Games
  • Lessons of History

    Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies.

  • A Man for all Markets

    We didn’t ask, Is the market efficient? but rather, In what ways and to what extent is the market inefficient? and How can we exploit this?

  • Man’s Search for Meaning
  • Meditations

    The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.

  • The Most Important Thing
  • The Moves that Matter

    Similarly, if you ask a Grandmaster about the chessboard in their head, you will find it doesn’t have a size or a shape or a colour. What we have is an implicit sense of the rules of the game, the relationships between the pieces and the prevailing strategic purposes.

  • The Obstacle is the Way
  • Outliers
  • Sapiens
  • Seveneves
  • Siddhartha
  • Stories of Your Life and Others
  • Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman
  • Thinking in Bets
  • The Three-Body Problem Trilogy
  • Zero to One

Somewhat chronologically

  • Reflections on Net Assessment
  • Foundry
  • Conflict
  • Reap3r
  • Net Assessment and Military Strategy
  • The Maniac
  • Mastery
  • 2034
  • Every Life Is on Fire: How Thermodynamics Explains the Origins of Living Things
  • The Jungle Grows back
  • The Theoretical Minimum: Quantum Mechanics
  • Chaos Kings
  • The Art of Learning
  • Blindsight
  • The Theoretical Minimum: Classical Mechanics
  • The Player of Games
  • The Last Warrior: Andrew Marshall and the Shaping of Modern American Defense Strategy
  • Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned

    The problem is that the stepping stone does not resemble the final product.

  • Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd

    The dominant and overarching theme in Boyd’s work is not the narrow interpretation of rapid OODA looping, or “decision superiority”, but rather the ability to adapt to the unfolding, multidimensional events, which occur at different time scales.

  • The Mind of War

    What Boyd is all about is a way of thinking and the creation of organizations and organisms that are adaptive and capable of rapidity, variety, harmony, and initiative. Only in this way can they hope to survive and prosper in the face of complex change and uncertainty.

  • The Kill Chain

    In reality, true military innovation is less about technology than about operational and organizational transformation. Indeed, history is replete with examples of military rivals that had the same technologies, and what set them apart is how they used them and organized themselves differently.

    Our focus must be on building and buying integrated networks of kill chains, not individual platforms and systems. We need to buy outcomes, not things.

  • Market Tremors

    If we had to write a rough prescription for adjusting risk estimates in the presence of a Dominant Agent, it would be guided by the following questions. Who are the main players in a given market or asset class? How big are they, in terms of balance sheet size, ownership or percentage of volume traded? What is their typical behavior? Do they trade in the direction of a price move, trade against it or do they display chameleon-like behavior based on prevailing market conditions? How much will they be forced to trade, given a sufficiently large price shock in a specific direction? What is the likely price impact of forced rebalancing of fixed size?

  • Red Blooded Risk

    Taking less risk than is optimal is not safer; it just locks in a worse outcome. In competitive fields, doing less than the best often means failing completely. Taking more risk than is optimal also results in a worse outcome, and often leads to complete disaster.

  • Ball Lightning
  • The Silk Roads
  • Price Wars
  • Ball Lightning
  • Draft No 4
  • Finite and Infinite Games
  • Boyd
  • Exhalation
  • working backwards
  • Earth unaware
  • How to take smart notes
  • Genome
  • Cryptonomicon
  • Complexity a Guided Tour
  • Thinking in Systems
  • Thinking in Bets
  • Arrival
  • The Man Who Solved the Market
  • Good omens
  • Dark Forest
  • Superforecasting
  • Training for the Uphill Athlete
  • Seventh Sense
  • Way of the Peaceful Warrior
  • Left of Boom
  • Emotional Intelligence (Goleman)
  • Leonardo da Vinci
  • Homo Deus
  • Influence
  • The Rise of Money
  • Outliers
  • David and Goliath
  • Tipping Point
  • 12 Rules for Life
  • Stealing fire
  • The Three Body Problem
  • Zero to One
  • The First Tycoon
  • First Man
  • Iron Gold - Red Rising 4
  • Small Puddles
  • Irrational Exuberance- Jan
  • Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynmann
  • The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck
  • Seveneves
  • Seeking Wisdom
  • Man for All Markets
  • Double Government
  • Fooled by Randomness
  • The Undoing Project
  • The Afghan Campaign
  • The Most Important Thing

    Risk means more things can happen than will happen.

    The process of intelligently building a portfolio consists of buying the best investments, making room for them by selling lesser ones, and staying clear of the worst. The raw materials for the process consist of (a) a list of potential investments, (b) estimates of their intrinsic value, (c) a sense for how their prices compare with their intrinsic value, and (d) an understanding of the risks involved in each, and of the effect their inclusion would have on the portfolio being assembled.

  • Destined for War
  • 33 Strategies of War

    In strategy all of life is a game that you are playing.

  • The Effective Executive

    The effective executive is concerned first with understanding. Only then does he even think about who is right and who is wrong.

    I have never encountered an executive who remains effective while tackling more than two tasks at a time.

  • Grokking Algorithms
  • Lessons of History
  • Principles (Dalio)
  • Code
  • Foundation
  • Artemis
  • Tribe
  • Letters from a Stoic
  • Meditations
  • Antifragile
  • The War of Art

    The paradox seems to be, as Socrates demonstrated long ago, that the truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery. While those who will not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them.

  • Man’s Search for Meaning
  • Intelligent Investor
  • Random Walk down Wall Street
  • How to not be wrong
  • Game of Thrones
  • Ego is the Enemy
  • Sapiens
  • Failure is not an Option
  • Elon Musk
  • The Obstacle is the Way

    What we can do is limit and expand our perspective to whatever will keep us calmest and most ready for the task at hand. Think of it as selective editing—not to deceive others, but to properly orient ourselves.