Last month, I set a goal for the Christmas holiday (see here). The goal was to write a blog post series on a book I’d read. I’ll get straight to it. I failed. There’s no real excuse. There’s no one to blame. I just didn’t check this box. I view every failure as a learning opportunity, so I looked for the lessons in this one.

I summarize each book by creating a digest, which I use to create a blog post series. I can’t create a quality blog post series without the digest. Creating the digest was the big obstacle to hitting this writing goal. It’s a manual process that requires multiple blocks of concentrated time totaling more than ten hours. I somehow forgot this when I set the goal. Reading is different—I can pick up a book and read a few pages if I have five extra minutes. I can’t do that with writing.

If I want to get back into the habit of creating digests, I need to ensure that I have several blocks of time exceeding ten total hours—or figure out how to use technology for digest creation. I probably won’t consistently have the blocks of time, so I’m aiming for option number two.

The book The Money Masters: Nine Great Investors: Their Winning Strategies and How You Can Apply Them by John Train introduced me to Thomas Rowe Price Jr. (aka T. Rowe Price). I’m familiar with the investment firm bearing his name but not the man himself. I wanted to learn more, so I’m reading T. Rowe Price: The Man, the Company, and the Investment Philosophy by Cornelius Bond.

The book says that Price was one of the first investors to recognize the value of growth investing and adopt it as a strategy. After the Depression began, many people focused on preserving capital, so bonds were popular. In 1934, he recognized that the largest fortunes in the country had been created by owning growing businesses. He developed an investment strategy based on this insight and pitched the investment firm he was working for to test the approach.

With the country still feeling the Great Depression, the firm turned him down. Frustrated and having conviction about his approach, Price quit in 1937 to launch his investment firm, which would become T. Rowe Price Group.

After reading several biographies about famous investors, I’ve noticed that they all came to similar realizations about their investment approaches: investing in growing businesses is the key to outsize returns (Price’s biography details why this works so well). However, how these investors executed their strategies and built their firms varies drastically. Price built a firm that made decisions by committee and was paid by fees from customer accounts. Buffett created a decentralized conglomerate (after he shuttered his investment partnership) and increased his wealth through equity ownership in the conglomerate.

There’s more than one way to capitalize on an insight, as the stories of these investors prove. The most important thing is doing so in a way that aligns with the beliefs of the founder of the investment firm (or the investor, if they’re independent).

This week, an entrepreneur friend gave me feedback on a blog and podcast series I did on a biography. He said the posts resonated with him because of the insights I shared. Connecting the dots between different people and periods was helpful and would be hard for him to do himself. And because the insights derive from the experiences of people who did what he’s attempting to do, but on a massive scale, they’re more valuable because the people’s outcomes make them more credible.

I appreciate my friend giving me his candid feedback. The books I read are available to everyone, so it surprises me when people value the connections I make between ideas in different books. Because I discovered those connections, I assume others have also done so, or could have. But I’m learning that’s not common. I suppose this is because of the effort required to find important ideas in the sea of unstructured text that is books. And because of the dispersed nature of books.

My takeaway is to lean more into sharing the connections between ideas in various books. It’s tremendously valuable to entrepreneurs.

I was chatting with a friend who’s an entrepreneur about AI workflows and learning tools. He told me about a new product from Google. Gemini Advanced just released its deep research feature, an AI research assistant. It uses Google’s Gemini large-language models to research complex topics on the internet and generate a comprehensive report of its findings. Google describes it as an “agentic system that uses Google’s expertise of finding relevant information on the web to direct Gemini’s browsing and research.” My friend told me a story about how he used it to help him learn about a topic. The tool provided him with a thirteen-page report that got him up to speed on the topic quickly.

What I like about this tool is that it gives you a step-by-step plan for how it plans to research the topic before it starts, and you can edit the plan if you need to. The tool then begins researching by searching for phrases, learns from those searches, and then searches for new phrases to learn more. It concludes by compiling everything it learned in a single document, which can be exported in a Google Doc. Google's blog post goes into more detail and includes a demo. The downside is that the tool costs $20 per month. But you can try it for free for 30 days, which is what I’m doing.

Researching things online can be a pain; it’s not something everyone is good at. I’m excited about this tool because it has the potential to help everyone efficiently find the information online that’s helpful to them.

A few days ago, I shared the stats around my reading for 2024 and what I learned from the process. I included the total number of books I read and the number of books by month. A few people have asked me for the list of book titles. I can see the value in this and want to share my reading list in an easy-to-consume way.

In a perfect world, I’d have a list I can update weekly as a dedicated page on the blog after I finish each book. That way people could easily see the current list anytime. I did some digging, and the available tools for this aren’t great. Goodreads has a few widgets that can be added to a blog, but I don’t like them.

I’m going to keep searching to see if I can find a tool that allows me to update and share my reading on my blog. I might ask some developers how involved it would be to build a custom widget. Hopefully, I’ll find a solution to this problem.

In the meantime, I’ll manually share my reading list from last year via a blog post. It’s not ideal, but it checks the box for now. Hopefully, I can get that list published in the next week or so.

Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned from them

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

Cumulative metrics (since 4/1/24):

• Total books read: 44
• Total book digests created: 15
• Total blog posts published: 273
• Total audio recordings published: 103

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Book digests created: 0
• Blog posts published: 7
• Audio recordings published: 0

What I completed this week (link to last week’s commitments):

• Finished reading John Train’s The Money Masters: Nine Great Investors: Their Winning Strategies and How You Can Apply Them, a biographical anthology about nine public market investors
• Updated draft of taxonomy using learnings from the exercise of creating four hypothetical outputs for users (see here)
• Created a concise mission statement
• Create a concise vision statement
• Created a list of potential new metrics for this weekly email update
• Created a clear problem statement
• Analyzed Google data and generated more title ideas for blog posts and other content types
• Continued linking blog posts about the same book
• Continued updating descriptions for blog posts about the same book

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book
• Pick two types of output and associated user problems and create an approach and workflow to solve each problem
• Get feedback on the problem, vision, and mission statements from two seasoned entrepreneurs
• Share the draft taxonomy with two people
• Continue linking blog posts about the same book
• Continue updating descriptions for blog posts about the same book

Asks:

• None

Week two hundred forty-nine was another week of learning. Looking forward to next week!

Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned from them

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

What I struggled with:

• The same issues as last week around being productive. I just didn’t get as much done as I’d hoped to. It was another holiday week, but even so I was frustrated because I felt I should’ve done more.

What I learned:

• A friend is starting a company, so we worked on mission and vision statements together. We gave each other feedback. That wasn’t planned, but it worked out great. He brought a fresh perspective and provided great feedback and edits.
• The vision statement is hard to craft and takes time to get concise. I can’t do it in one sitting. But working on it forced me to crystallize my thinking around how the future could look if what I’m creating is successful.
• I shared what I learned from reading 52 books. See here. A few people asked to see the list of books. I need to figure out a way to publish that list on my blog. Ideally, I’ll be able to easily update it weekly when I finish a book. Goodreads offers a widget that can plug into a website, but it’s pretty bad. I might have to share manually via a blog post for now and figure out another solution that I can update weekly down the road.

Those are my struggles and learnings from the week!

The last book I read in 2024 was The Money Masters: Nine Great Investors: Their Winning Strategies and How You Can Apply Them by John Train. It’s an older book, first published in 1980, but I read it because the author was referenced in a book about Warren Buffett. The book is a biography but not about one person. Each chapter is a profile of an investor who achieved outsize returns. The book introduced nine investors, most of whom I’d never heard of.

I went into this book with no expectations. It didn’t have a lot of reviews, and I’ve never heard anyone talk about it or seen anything written about it. But when I read it, it reminded of The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success, which I read in April. Outsiders was slightly different because it was highly rated, and many people suggested it. But it, too, was a series of mini-biographies with a slightly different focus—CEOs, not investors.

When I read Outsiders, I discovered people I didn’t know about and read another roughly twenty books. Each book mentioned another person or book, and I read it. This went on for a few months. And I still have a few more books I discovered because of Outsiders that I haven’t read yet. Something similar began playing out when I read Money Masters. I learned about investors who built their own investment firms and got really interested in them. I ended up buying a few books, and I’m starting one of them now.

I didn’t know what to call books in this category, but someone pointed out to me that they're biographical anthologies. These books are great discovery mechanisms. They don’t go as deep as a biography about one person would, but they go deep enough on each person for me to understand if I want to learn more about them. If I do, these books usually have a list of sources that I can read.

This type of book is helpful to me because it provides more connections to more people and companies than a normal biography. The exposure to many people and ideas in a single book is helpful. I’m excited and curious to learn more about those people, and I know exactly what books to read.

My big takeaway is that when I’m starting to learn about something new (industry, time period, etc.), I’ll likely start with a biographical anthology. It’s a great way to learn about multiple players in a space at once and find good books about them.

This summer, I set a goal of creating 100 podcasts about books I was reading. It forced me to start tracking my reading in a spreadsheet. It’s nerdy, but it was necessary because every week, I read a book, wrote a blog post series, and created a podcast series about each book. The spreadsheet helped me keep everything organized. I paused the latter two after the summer because they were too inefficient and time-consuming, but I kept updating the spreadsheet and reading a book a week.

I looked at the spreadsheet as I was reflecting on the books I read in 2024. I figured I’d share some stats and learnings.

High-level stat for 2024:

• Books read: 52

2024 breakdown by month:

• January: 0 (I did read, but I can’t remember what books)
• February: 2
• March: 6
• April: 6
• May: 7
• June: 5
• July: 4
• August: 5
• September: 4
• October: 3
• November: 5
• December: 5

Here are a few things I learned along the way:

• Reading two books a week was too aggressive. I tried it in the March–May period, but I wasn’t absorbing as much of what I was reading or making as many connections. I was focused on finishing the books, which isn’t why I read. The pace was too fast, so I reduced it to a book a week, which feels more sustainable.
• Sharing what I learned from my reading was the big unlock. It took my learning and thinking to another level. Writing a blog post series and recording a podcast series forced me to identify insights and organize and communicate my thinking. The key tool in that process was creating a digest of each book, which was an extraction of the information I found important in each chapter, along with my insights.
• E-readers, such as Kindles, are great devices, but I prefer reading physical books. I highlight and add notes about insightful sections and ideas in the books. Those highlights and notes are trapped in each book, so finding and using them later is difficult. See here for more. As I’ve read more, this has become a painful problem. Trying to find something sometimes means reviewing several books’ notes and highlights. Experiencing this pain led me to several feature ideas for the “book library.”
• Reading a book is simple—but learning from what I read is more involved. It’s inefficient and involves lots of steps. The process of sharing what I learn from my reading is complex. It’s hard and has many steps and lots of moving pieces. This realization led me to add several more feature ideas to the “book library.”
• The value in reading lots of entrepreneurial biographies is that you’re exposed to the best ideas and experiences of entrepreneurs, and you can pull from them when you’re faced with a problem. The challenge is that this requires a great memory or knowing exactly where to look to quickly find something you’ve read. I don’t have a photographic memory, and I don’t always remember where I read something. I want to make it easy to find what I’ve read, which will be a big part of the “book library” MVP.
• My best ideas in 2024 came from piecing ideas together from various books. Making those connections was a great way to build upon what other entrepreneurs figured out. Solving a problem by building upon the knowledge of others rather than starting from scratch led to my having better ideas. I’m not an idea guy, so this was perfect for me, and I want to do more of it going forward. I don’t think this has to be completely manual and inefficient. Figuring out how to solve this and incorporate it into the “book library” is challenging, but I think it can be done, and I’m excited to figure this out because it’ll be a huge unlock for myself and others.

Those are my takeaways and reading stats for 2024!

The year 2024 was one of learning and following my curiosity. It was a good year that took me places I hadn’t anticipated. I was curious about how others approached learning, so I did a learning survey. That led to my sharing what I read from books in blog posts. That led to my sharing those blog posts in audio format. That led to my creating 100 podcast episodes about what I learned from books. From that I realized how difficult it is to read, retain, and make use of what I read. That sparked my figuring out how to solve this problem, which led to the book library project. It’s been fun. I’m excited about the potential of this project and can’t wait to see where it goes in 2025.

From a growth perspective, this past year felt different than other recent years. I think that consuming a book a week drove this feeling. The bits of information I consumed built upon one another and led to a deeper understanding of many topics that I can put to use this year. My learning was supercharged, which was nice. I enjoyed the challenge of learning from so many books and the mental growth it led to. And that was after only nine months. I can only imagine what it will lead to if I do it for a full calendar year, and I intend to continue it in 2025—hopefully with the help of my book library.