Book Updates: Added Remarks and Notes – June
A summary of book recommendations and updates from the books page for the month of June 2016. This is a monthly post emailed out to my newsletter. I'm also always on the hunt for good books contact or tweet @juvoni.
Books Added:
What I Learned Losing A Million Dollars
by Brendan Moynihan
Rating: 7/10 — Reading Ease: 3/4 — Reading Time: 5 hours
“Learning how not to lose money is more important than learning how to make money.” — Brendan Moynihan
3 Reasons to Read
- A personal tale about lessons learned from losing a significant amount of money
- Understand how your emotions impact your financial decisions
- Get better as financial risk management
User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product
by Jeff Patton
Rating: 7.5/10 — Reading Ease: 3/4 — Reading Time: 8 hours
“The way you approach a big software cake is to break it down into lots of little cupcakes.” — Jeff Patton
3 Reasons to Read
- Learn about User Story Mapping
- Learn how it can help keep your team to stay focused on users and their experience throughout the development process
- Build better products that delight users. Great for PM's, Marketers, Management, and Engineers.
Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries
by Peter Sims
Rating: 5.5/10 — Reading Ease: 3/4 — Reading Time: 5 hours
“Little bets is based on the proposition that we can use a lot of little bets and certain creative methods to identify possibilities and build up to great outcomes. At the core of this experimental approach, little bets are concrete actions taken to discover test, and develop ideas that are achievable and affordable.” — Peter Sims
3 Reasons to Read:
- Stories from successful entrepreneurs on experimental methods to take little bets.
- Little Bets offers a whole new way of thinking about how to break away from the narrow strictures of the methods of analyzing and problem-solving we were all taught in school and unleash our untapped creative powers.
- A new approach to risk taking.
How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big : Kind of the Story of My Life
by Scott Adams
Rating: 7.5/10 — Reading Ease: 3/4 — Reading Time: 7 hours
“A goal is a specific objective that you either achieve or don't sometime in the future. A system is something you do on a regular basis that increases your odds of happiness in the long run. If you do something every day, its a system.[..] Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous presuccess failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do. The goals people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at each turn. The systems people are feeling good everytime they apply their system. That's a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction.” — Scott Adams
3 Reasons to Read:
- Move from simply focusing on goals, to having a system mindset for consistent progress.
- Great stories of success and failure from Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert.
- Learn to be more open to failure, and realizing you can learn from it.
F Wall Street: Joe Ponzio's No-Nonsense Approach to Value Investing for the Rest of Us
by Joel Ponzio
Rating: 7.5/10 — Reading Ease: 3/4 — Reading Time: 7 hours
"The truth is that your age and the size of your portfolio have absolutely no bearing on whether you should be investing in stocks, bonds, mutual funds, CDs, or any other investment opportunity. The decision to invest in stocks — or mutual funds that invest in stocks — should be based on your understanding of stocks, the stock market, and risk.— Joel Ponzio
3 Reasons to Read:
- Invest with a Value investing mindset
- You want to learn how to buy and sell stocks on your own
- Learn how to read financial statements
Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
by Nir Eyal
Rating: 7.0/10 — Reading Ease: 3/4 — Reading Time: 7 hours
“There are three ingredients required to initiate any and all behaviors: (1) the user must have sufficient motivation; (2) the user must have the ability to complete the desired action; and (3) a trigger must be present to activate the behavior.” - Nir Eyal
3 Reasons to Read
- Practical insights to create user habits that stick.
- Actionable steps for building products people love.
- Fascinating examples from the iPhone to Twitter, Pinterest to the Bible App, and many other habit-forming products
Notes Added:
The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking
by Edward B. Burger
Rating: 7/10 — Reading Ease: 4/4 — Reading Time: 4 hours
“The depth with which you master the basics influences how well you understand everything you learn after that.” — Edward B. Burger
3 Reasons to Read
- Improve the way you go about learning.
- Acquire more mindsets to improve your thinking.
- Better prepare yourself to be a lifelong learner.
Wait: The Art and Science of Delay
by Frank Partnoy
Rating: 6/10 — Reading Ease: 3/4 — Reading Time: 8 hours
“The essence of my case is this: given the fast pace of modern life, most of us tend to react too quickly. We don't, or can't, take enough time to think about the increasingly complex timing challenges we face. Technology surrounds us, speeding us up. We feel its crush every day, both at work and at home. Yet the best time managers are comfortable pausing for as long as necessary before they act, even in the face of the most pressing decisions. Some seem to slow down time. For good decision-makers, time is more flexible than a metronome or atomic clock.” - Frank Partnoy
3 Reasons to Read:
- Improve your time management skills
- Learn the importance of timing your actions
- You want to improve your patience and become more long-term minded
What I Learned Losing A Million Dollars by Jim Paul & Brendan Moynihan
Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
by Nir Eyal