Books 2018

I started 2018 by completing “The Great Convergence”, an insightful account of how the share of world income going to today’s wealthy nations soared from 20% to 70%, with industrial revolution in 1820 till internet revolution around 1990. And how the combination of high tech with low wages propelled industrialization in developing nations and deindustrialization in developed nations during the last 30 years has led to a reversing of this trend. China and India have become new economic super powers after several years of growth rates far exceeding that of developed nations, resulting in convergence of the share of world income in line with population.

As I looked for the next books to read, I resolved to read recent books and my searches led to Yuval Noah Harari’s classics – Sapiens and Homo Deus. I could not stop talking about these books as you can see from my earlier blog.

I followed it with “Principles: Life and Work” by Ray Dalio, the legendary American investor and hedge fund manager. We tend to get carried away by b-school promises to provide secret formulae for career success by pursuing one of their myriad programs. From the lives of people like Ray Dalio, it is enlightening to see that pursuing our vision with discipline, focus and perseverance is the key to success!

After a few books with heavy insightful content, I switched to some relatively light reading with “The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley are Changing the World” by Brad Stone and “Crushing It!: How Great Entrepreneurs Build Their Business and Influence—and How You Can, Too” by Gary Vaynerchuk. I revived my Twitter account after Gary’s book but could not sustain it with my schedule.

Then I encountered one of the most profound books I ever read – “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman. I summarized my high level learnings from this classic here.

After the intense read, I switched once again to a couple of easy reads in “Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins” by Garry Kasparov and “When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing” by Daniel Pink.

While reading reviews on “When”, I stumbled upon “Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ” by Daniel Goleman. As I read the book, there were innumerable OMG moments. This book reinforced my belief in science, explaining every conceivable action by humans. I still need to summarize my learnings from this one for future reference, but quickly jotted down an irresistible learning of being an artful critique in a blog. I started this reading this book in September and am yet to finish as I write this blog. But such has been my work schedule towards the end of the year.

As I was slowly progressing through “Emotional Intelligence”, a geek friend referred “Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration of the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation and Time Travel” by Michio Kaku. It gives a peek into the future – the scientists and engineers who breakthrough these barriers will be next-gen conquerors of the world!

That’s all I could cover in 2018 and started the new year with “Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup” by John Carreyrou and Yuval Noah Harari’s next book “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” in the backlog. Happy Reading!