Aadil Mamujee

I started listening to books via Audible and it’s really helped me ‘read’ more, and am consuming books at about 3-4x the rate that I did in 2018. I prefer audio for most stories, and especially for autobiographies spoken by the author themselves.

I also decided to write 1 line for each book that I read to remind myself of one thing that I learned, which helps me remember some of my learnings from the book.

I’ve starred (*) my faves in the list (in the order I ‘read’ them)

1. *Never Split the Difference (Chris Voss): Negotiation is about empathy, and understanding the person. At the end of the negotiation, that person should want to negotiate with you again. Identify, Label, and ask questions starting with ‘How can I’. Get people to say ’that’s right’ and agree before moving the negotiation forward.
2. Thinking Fast and Slow (Daniel Kannemann): System 1: gut and System 2: logic. Often times each system can betray the other system. Presenting the same thing in different ways can profoundly change the way it’s perceived. Different people behave totally differently in the same situation given their personal circumstance.
3. Mindset (Carol Dwek): Growth mindset people derive value and joy from learning, effort and progression, Fixed mindset people derive value and self worth/unworth from comparative outcome.
4. The Outsiders (William N. Thorndike): Profiles of 8 successful CEOs – all super analytical, excellent capital allocators (including aggressively buying back stock), and focused on generating cashflow and value for investors. Great CEOs hire young, less proven leaders and incentivize them with value creation.
5. **7 Habits of highly effective people (Steven Covey): I really enjoyed this book.Do things that have meaning to you, value relationships, have a family mission statement and make sure everyone understands expectations and roles and responsibilities. Talk openly about problems and issues.
6. **Principles (Ray Dalio): When you talk to people actually be open to your idea being wrong and really listen to their point of view, especially if they have high believability. Have a set of founding principles which you run your life (e.g. meaningful relationships and meaningful work), and company and make sure that the people around you know and are bought into those principles. Idea meritocracy is his general framework – make your passion and your work one and the same.
7. *Homo Deus (Yuval Harari): Suicide rates are high (2/100 people who die, kill themselves), What’s more important – intelligence or consciousness? What happens when algorithms know us better than we know ourselves from our actions (but what about our deep conscious being)? What happens when all the tasks what we do now can all be done better by non-conscious beings (Robots)? 
8. *Red notice (Bill Browder): make sure you always do what is right and if you see an opportunity that you have unique insight on, make sure to execute on it.
9. *Born a crime (Trevor Noah): being able to communicate and be accepted in lots of wide groups is incredibly useful in life, and allows you to build bonds with people.
10. The hate u give (Angie Thomas): it’s hard being a young black person in the US and they will be subject to a level of discrimination that I’ll never experience.
11. The 10x Rule (Grant Cardone): I did not really enjoy the book. He biases to action and high effort/action to be productive – termed at ‘Massive Action’ and feels like it’s targeted towards people with high levels of inertia. This is counter to a lot of smart folks in the value investing world – e.g. Warren Buffet. 
12. *Shoe dog (Phil Knight): trade prevents war, and helps create empathy for each other. Phil reads to learn before every important tasks. America is no longer the entrepreneurial shangri la. Find your calling because you’ll be able to keep motivated with bumps along the road.
13. Sapiens (Yuval Harari): I forgot to write anything for this book so this is a bit weak – there are so many themes about culture, religion, socieatal norms that I learned about that I was ignorant to .
14. *Thousand Splendid Suns (Khalid Hosseni): Life was very hard for women in the 90s during the Afghan war. Men who beat their wives are cowards, and  this book makes you hate them even more.
15. First 90 days (Michael Watkins): Leaders try and do too much upfront. Focus on learning and getting to know the team l, culture, process and product. Make sure you have a quick win or two. Make sure you write down your plan and are in sync with your manager.
16. Extreme ownership (Jocko Willink):  I thought the book was a bit gimmicky. There are no bad teams only bad leaders, leader is ultimately responsible. Make sure teams understand the why and are empowered to ask when they don’t understand. Simplicity is important.
17. Enders shadow (Orson Scott-Card): Building relationships and trust is as important as being a great strategist.
18. *Just Mercy (Bryan Stevenson): The criminal justice system is broken in the US with so many black people incarcerated, even as children for their lives. More insight into the lives of poor, black people in America.
19. 21 Lessons (Yuval Harari): This is the 3rd book I’ve read from Yuval Harari who I really like – his clarity of thought is exceptional. This book covers topical issues like AI/Future of Work/Universal Basic Income (UBI), Religion/Country design, Mental health /Aging and Wellbeing.