December 13, 2021
Damn Right: Behind the Scenes with Berkshire Hathaway Billionaire Charlie Munger
My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. The rabbit runs faster than the fox, because the rabbit is running for his life while the fox is only running for his dinner. 2. I had a considerable passion to get rich. Not because I wanted Ferraris—I wanted the independence. I desperately wanted it. 3. He wouldn't accept anything on face value....
Read more
Read more
December 9, 2021
Enzo Ferrari: The Man and the Machine
My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. If there was one essential quality about the man it was his ironbound tenacity, his fierce devotion to the single cause of winning automobile races with cars bearing his name. For nearly sixty years, hardly a day passed when this thought was not foremost in his mind. Win or lose, he unfailingly an...
Read more
Read more
November 30, 2021
Anthony Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography
My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. He demanded excellence, and he never settled for shit. He just wanted the show to be the greatest thing ever, all the time. 2. It was his life's work, and he never slacked. 3. He gave me really good advice: "Stay public. You gotta promote, promote, promote, or it all dies. You just gotta be out th...
Read more
Read more
November 24, 2021
My Turn: A Life of Total Football
My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. I'm not capable of doing something at a low level. 2. It doesn't work without full commitment. 3. I'm definitely cunning. I'm always on the lookout for the best advantage. 4. Winning was the consequence of the process that we had concentrated on. 5. A setback is probably a sign that you need to ma...
Read more
Read more
November 18, 2021
The Autobiography of Estée Lauder
My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. Risk taking is the cornerstone of empires. No one ever became a success without taking chances. 2. I was single-minded in the pursuit of my dream. 3. I sometimes wonder if I had set my heart on selling tassels, cars, furniture, or anything else but beauty, would I have risen to the top of a profes...
Read more
Read more
November 14, 2021
Authentic: A Memoir by the Founder of Vans
My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. The way we deal with hardship is our legacy. You can accept defeat, or you can overcome it. 2. Quitting Randy's had probably been the biggest stroke of luck in my life. Opportunity is a strange beast. 3. Whenever a situation went sideways and things looked dire, I always called up my one superpowe...
Read more
Read more
November 9, 2021
The General and the Genius: Groves and Oppenheimer —The Unlikely Partnership that Built the Atom Bomb
My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. It is clear that nothing short of a full-speed, all-out attempt would be worthwhile. 2. Once Leslie Groves accepted his new assignment, he embraced it completely. From his appointment in September 1942 until the end of the war, he worked at full speed, often fourteen hours a day or more. His remar...
Read more
Read more
November 2, 2021
Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography
My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. He had the attitude that he could do anything, and therefore so can you. 2. He refused to accept automatically received truths, and he wanted to examine everything himself. 3. Picasso had a saying—‘good artists copy, great artists steal’—and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas...
Read more
Read more
November 2, 2021
A Man For All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market
My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. The book reveals a thorough, rigorous, methodical person in search of life, knowledge, financial security, and, not least of all, fun. 2. I learned at an early age to teach myself. This paid off later on because there weren’t any courses in how to beat blackjack, build a computer for roulette, or ...
Read more
Read more
October 27, 2021
Michael Jordan: Driven From Within
My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. Players who practice hard when no one is paying attention play well when everyone is watching. 2. It's hard, but it's fair. I live by those words. 3. To this day, I don't enjoy working. I enjoy playing, and figuring out how to connect playing with business. To me, that's my niche. People talk abou...
Read more
Read more
October 22, 2021
Michael Jordan: The Life
My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. His competence was exceeded only by his confidence. 2. He worked at the game, and if he wasn't good at something, he had the motivation to be the best at it. 3. Whenever I was working out and got tired and figured I ought to stop, I'd close my eyes and see that list in the locker room without my n...
Read more
Read more
October 18, 2021
Aristotle Onassis: An Extravagant Life
My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. He became one of the richest men in U.S. history ever to be arrested. 2. The epic life of Aristotle Onassis is as mysterious as a tale from ancient Greek mythology and is a study of paradoxes, altogether gripping because of their seeming inconsistencies. 3. Onassis had long since begun to formulat...
Read more
Read more
October 15, 2021
Stephen King on Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. My earliest memory is of imagining I was someone else. 2. By the time I was fourteen the nail in wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing. 3. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer w...
Read more
Read more
October 6, 2021
Steven Spielberg: A Biography
My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. Whatever is there, he makes it work. 2. Spielberg once defined his approach to filmmaking by declaring, "I am the audience." 3. "He said, 'I want to be a director.' And I said, 'Well, if you want to be a director, you've gotta start at the bottom, you gotta be a gofer and work your way up.' He sai...
Read more
Read more
September 29, 2021
In the Company of Giants: Candid Conversations with the Visionaries of the Digital World
My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. A small team of A+ players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players. —Steve Jobs 2. There are no shortcuts around quality, and quality starts with people. —Steve Jobs 3. Usually people never think that much about what they're doing or why they do it. They just do it because that's th...
Read more
Read more
September 24, 2021
Scientific Advertising
My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. Individuals come and go, but they leave their records and ideas behind them. These become a guide to all who follow. 2. Genius is the art of taking pains. 3. The best ads ask no one to buy. That is useless. The best ads are based entirely on service. They offer wanted information. They site advant...
Read more
Read more
September 22, 2021
The Man Who Sold America: The Amazing (but True!) Story of Albert D. Lasker and the Creation of the Advertising Century
My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. Advertising is a very simple thing. I can give it to you in three words: Salesmanship in print. 2. Before he arrived on the scene, advertising agencies were mostly brokers of space in newspapers and magazines. With Lasker's prodding, the industry became a creative force and began earning substanti...
Read more
Read more
September 17, 2021
Invention: A Life by James Dyson
My highlights from the book: 1. This is a story told through a life of creating and developing things, as well as expressing a call to arms for young people to become engineers, creating solutions to our current and future problems. 2. I have tried to seek out those young people who can make the world a better place. I have seen what m...
Read more
Read more
September 15, 2021
Inside Steve Jobs' Brain
My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don't take the time to do that. 2. He remade Apple in his own image. Apple is Steve Jobs with ten thousand lives. 3. I'm looking for a fixer-upper with a solid foundatio...
Read more
Read more
September 15, 2021
Creative Capital: Georges Doriot and the Birth of Venture Capital
My highlights from the book: 1. He was very important because he was the first one to believe there was a future in financing entrepreneurs in an organized way. 2. He brought a unique style to everything he did. 3. He called his course Manufacturing, but it was really his philosophy of life and of business. 4. At Harvard, Doriot became...
Read more
Read more
September 11, 2021
The Operator: David Geffen Builds, Buys, and Sells the New Hollywood
My highlights from the book: 1. He told me he had recently read Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist, Buffett was Geffen's hero. 2. Geffen—with searing focus, unyielding drive, and outlandish nerve—had devised and implemented strategies to propel himself to the top of the heap of Hollywood powerbrokers. 3. I used to have phone...
Read more
Read more
September 7, 2021
A Few Lessons for Investors and Managers From Warren Buffett
My top highlights from this book: 1. Big opportunities come infrequently. When it’s raining gold, reach for a bucket, not a thimble. 2. Speculation is most dangerous when it looks easiest. 3. Now it is a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best you very often get it. —W. Somerset Maugham 4. "Moats" —a metap...
Read more
Read more
September 7, 2021
Isambard Kingdom Brunel
My top highlights from this book: 1. His career was to him a tremendous adventure. 2. I have always made it a rule, which I have found by some years experience a safe and profitable one, to have nothing to do with newspaper articles. 3. It is consoling to be thus reminded that the lunatic fringe is a hardy perennial and not a phenomeno...
Read more
Read more
August 21, 2021
Coco Chanel: The Legend and The Life
Here are some of my favorite ideas from the book: Hack away at the unessential: Coco made hats that were stripped of embellishments, of the frills that she dismissed as weighing a woman down. . . Nothing makes a woman look older than obvious expensiveness, ornateness, complication, she said. Be default aggressive: Coco began to edge he...
Read more
Read more
August 17, 2021
The House of Rothschild: Money's Prophets 1798-1848
My highlights from the book: 1. A business can only be managed well if one pays as much attention to the smaller business transactions as one does to the larger ones. 2. All banks have histories, only the Rothschilds have a mythology. 3. Ever since the second decade of the nineteenth century, there has been speculation about the origin...
Read more
Read more
August 10, 2021
Founder: A Portrait of the First Rothschild and His Time
My highlights from the book: 1. Riches cover a multitude of woes. 2. Only a few crumbling bricks are left today of the dark, foul-smelling alley in Frankfurt where, in the second half of the eighteenth century, a disenfranchised Jew named Meyer Rothschild founded a European banking dynasty. 3. Rothschild was a man of seemingly inexhaus...
Read more
Read more
August 6, 2021
The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz
My highlights from the book: 1. I started thinking about London and the German aerial assault of 1940-41, and wondered how on earth anyone could have endured it: fifty-seven consecutive nights of bombing, followed by an intensifying series of nighttime raids over the next six months. In particular I thought about Winston Churchill: How...
Read more
Read more
August 1, 2021
Sid Meier's Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games
My highlights from the book: 1. Sometimes it takes a misstep to figure out where you should be headed. 2. Each game taught me something, each game was both painful and gratifying in its own way, and each game contributed to what came after it. 3. We are surrounded by decisions, and therefore games, in everything we do. 4. If my gravest...
Read more
Read more
July 26, 2021
Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Ernest Hemingway's Secret Adventures, 1935-1961
My highlights from the book: 1. Hastily pulled together to fight the Axis, OSS was an odd creature—at once a collection of men and women from the upper crust of society on America's east coast, and a magnet for astonishingly talented and creative people from all walks of life, from Wall Street lawyers to Hollywood filmmakers, even the ...
Read more
Read more
July 22, 2021
Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder
My highlights from the book: 1. It was the summer I turned fifteen, a magical season for me because that year I'd discovered exactly what I wanted to do with my life. I knew I was going to be a bodybuilder. It wasn't simply that either. I would be the best bodybuilder in the world, the greatest. 2. I'm not exactly sure why I chose body...
Read more
Read more
See more posts »