I’m rereading Junk to Gold: From Salvage to the World’s Largest Online Auto Auction. It’s the autobiography of Copart founder Willis Johnson. Johnson is worth roughly $3 billion today, most of which is his stake in Copart. I listened to an interview he gave recently, and it made me want to read his book again. He founded Copart in 1982 as a salvage yard. He purchased wrecked cars and sold the parts and scrap metal for a profit. The company has expanded. It’s now a global online auction market for used and repairable vehicles. As of this writing, it has a market capitalization (i.e., valuation) of over $56 billion.

In his book, Johnson describes himself as rough around the edges. He isn’t polished and doesn’t always use the “right” words. He attended community college for one semester on the GI Bill and then dropped out. So, how did Copart become a massive company?

As I shared last year when I read the book, Johnson didn’t have a big vision for the company. He didn’t even have a plan. But he knew he wanted to grow. The key to Johnson’s success was his ability to master two things.

He was a cloner. He paid close attention to what was happening around him and what others had done. If he liked an idea and thought he could make money with it, he tried it out. He learned about a new model involving people pulling parts off cars themselves called “Pick-A-Part.” He studied it closely and copied it by creating “U-Pull-It.” The idea was a massive success. When he heard a competitor was raising capital to expand rapidly by doing an IPO, he paid attention. Two years later, Johnson’s company was trading on the stock market too.

Johnson also was an astute student and avid reader. He believed he could teach himself anything. For example, to figure out how to do an IPO, he started by trying to get a basic understanding of IPOs. He read the IPO prospectus of his competitor many times to understand what the IPO involved and to understand the Wall Street terminology. He then went to his local library to find books that explained the IPO process and all the terminology in more detail. He had trouble finding a book because nothing came up when he searched for “IPO.” He went to three different library branches. It wasn’t until someone at the third library branch told him that “IPO” stands for “initial public offering” that he found a helpful book from Ernst & Young, which he studied extensively.

Being an avid learner and reader is a great way for entrepreneurs to get ideas and strategies to grow their businesses. Some of the most successful entrepreneurs and investors didn’t invent new ideas or strategies; they copied other people’s great ideas. For example, Warren Buffett got the idea to have an insurance company (and maybe decentralization too) as part of Berkshire Hathaway from Henry Singleton and Teledyne. Henry Singleton got the idea by reading the book My Years at General Motors by former General Motors chairman Alfred Sloan.

The beauty of both of these—copying others’ good ideas and self-learning—is that anyone can do them. They don’t require permission or consent from anyone else. Not sure what to do to solve a problem? Not sure how to grow your business? No problem; start reading biographies of credible entrepreneurs. Learning about their journeys to build their companies is bound to give you some ideas about how to grow yours.

I’m finishing up Building a StoryBrand 2.0: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen by Donald Miller. The book is about a framework for communicating your company’s solution and value add in a way that resonates with customers. A framework is an approach to thinking about problems in a way that increases your chances of identifying a superior solution. I’ve been embracing frameworks, and I now view them as valuable thinking tools that lead entrepreneurs to better solutions in less time.

Miller describes the psychology of customers, what strategies can influence their perspective of a company’s solution(s), and what’s needed to get them to act (purchase or take the next step in the sales process). One of Miller’s principles is that every person is trying to avoid failure. If you can communicate to customers the downside of not using your solution, you position yourself as helping them avoid failure.

Miller, expanding on this idea, shows that one reason it works so well is human psychology—specifically, loss aversion. Loss aversion is a cognitive bias. People perceive losses as being more significant than gains. Someone can lose $1 and then gain $1, but the lost dollar will feel more painful than the dollar gained will feel pleasant, even though the amount lost and the amount gained are the same.

If you can communicate the downside to not using your solution (lost status, time, etc.), your customer will want to avoid that loss and will be more inclined to purchase.

Loss aversion is a real thing, something I’ve noticed in myself when investing. Losses are inevitable when investing. I know this and expect them to be part of the process (but not too large). But when I’ve lost money in the past, it feels more painful than an equivalent gain feels pleasant.

I’d never considered loss aversion as a potentially useful strategy in marketing messaging, but Miller’s point makes a lot of sense. Now that I know this and I’m paying attention, I see this strategy in lots of ads.

Tying marketing messaging into psychology made things click for me, given that psychology is another topic I’m actively learning more about. Interestingly, Charlie Munger talked about loss aversion, and its implications for decision-making, a good bit in Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger. When multiple people who are credible say to pay attention to something, I take heed. Loss aversion is a cognitive bias I’ll consider more heavily in my decisions and marketing.

A few weeks ago, I read The Money Masters: Nine Great Investors: Their Winning Strategies and How You Can Apply Them by John Train. The book introduced me to T. Rowe Price, and I read his biography, too (more here). I really enjoyed learning a little about several people from a single book. I decided to make biographical anthologies a bigger part of my reading and discovery strategy (more here).

This week, I’m reading another book by John Train, Money Masters of Our Time, and I’ve been reintroduced to another investor I want to learn more about. Julian Robertson founded Tiger Management. I learned about him two years ago while exploring an idea for a studio for venture capital managers. During my research, I was lucky enough to get connected to someone who worked in Robertson’s back office during his heyday who explained to me how the operation ran with the Tiger Cubs.

Robertson was a successful hedge fund investor, and he also seeded and incubated tons of investors who wanted to start their own investing firms. These budding investor entrepreneurs worked out of his office and were known as the “Tiger Cubs.” The list of people Robertson helped in this way is impressive; it includes well-known investors such as Chase Coleman of Tiger Global and Philippe Laffont of Coatue Management.

I think Robertson pioneered a model of seeding and incubating budding investors that’s needed today. The model is clearly lucrative, as Robertson’s economics in the firms of some of his successful Tiger Cubs made him another fortune.

I want to learn more about Robertson, so I’m going to see if I can find a biography of him.

I finished reading Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger last week. It’s a memoir and collection of famous speeches by Charlie Munger. I’d put off reading it for a while. Looking back, I regret that decision. The book unlocked a different way of evaluating decisions and exposed me to new psychological concepts—some that aren’t even taught in schools. It felt like an introduction to practical psychology for entrepreneurs and investors. I made tons of highlights and notes while reading this book.

I’ll eventually create a blog series on this book, so I won’t go into everything here. But here are a few more takeaways:

• Checklists – Countless times throughout the book, Charlie mentioned using mental checklists as a way to avoid mistakes in your decision process. Checklists are also a central part of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (unrelated) framework. My takeaway is that checklists are simple tools that are available to everyone, but they’re more powerful than people realize when used consistently.
• Multidisciplinary learning – I mentioned this in my post last week (here). If you have a narrow understanding of topics or a small tool set, you increase your risk of the cognitive bias of relying too much on one tool or a limited number of tools. Mark Twain described it well: “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” You apply tools to situations for which they’re not appropriate and increase the chances of making subpar decisions. Broad learning about topics that interest you helps prevent this. Often, you discover nonobvious relationships between topics that others have missed, which improves your decision-making and gives you an edge. Charlie mastered this, and it led to a life of curiosity-driven learning and a billion-dollar fortune from shrewd decisions.
• Hard work – Acting and getting things done is one form of hard work. But learning and thinking is another form, one that many people underestimate. Learning and thinking are preparation. Good preparation leads to better decisions and allows you to practice “extreme decisiveness,” which is valuable during extreme uncertainty. From an investing perspective, preparation allows you to identify when something is mispriced and gives you the confidence to bet heavily based on your work, even if everyone else is selling for dear life.
• Incentives – Incentives heavily influence individual decision-making. Getting them right is critical for entrepreneurs and managers. If you want to understand someone’s actions or thought process, think about how they’re being incentivized.
• Lollapalooza effect – When two or more factors work at the same time, they magnify outcomes. This works positively and negatively. This reminded me of twin tailwinds, which I’ve noticed when reading about Henry Singleton (see here), Warren Buffett (see here), and 2021’s IPO explosion (here). These are lollapalooza-effect examples that led to massive wealth creation.
• Mastering wisdom – Mastering the best things others have figured out is a discipline. It’s also a hack. Trying to figure out everything from scratch on your own is hard to do, and most people aren’t smart enough to do it (Charlie’s words, not mine). It’s better to take what others have figured out and build upon their wisdom. Everyone can do it, but many people won’t because it requires a passion for learning and curiosity and is hard work.
• Inversion – If you’re not sure what to do about a problem, think it through backward to figure out what not to do. By knowing what not to do, you’re one step closer to understanding what to do.
• Outsourcing thinking – You can’t outsource your thinking. You must think for yourself and, ideally, in a multidisciplinary manner.

Those are just some of my takeaways from this book. I’m glad I read it and will likely reread it someday.

I began reading a new book that I’d put off reading for a long time: Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger. I bought the 2005 version years ago. It’s a huge book with tons of pictures, so it’s awkward to hold and difficult to read. Stripe Press printed a version without all the pictures in late 2023 that’s the size of a normal book, making it more manageable. I bought the updated version and dug into reading it.

I’m still reading the book, but so far, I like it. A few high-level thoughts:

• Psychology – Robert Hagstrom’s books got me more interested in understanding psychology to understand human decision-making (see this post). Munger writes extensively about psychology and judgment. He reiterates the importance of understanding psychology if you want to do well in life. He shares mental models and stories that make understanding some of the big ideas in psychology easier. His insights on psychology and his views of its importance got me excited to learn more about the topic.
• Education – Munger is critical of higher education institutions, even though he graduated from Harvard Law. He highlights the gaps in how these institutions teach—or don’t teach—certain topics like psychology that make them difficult to apply in everyday life. His big gripe is that they teach these topics in isolation and don’t educate students on how they work in conjunction with other disciplines. They also don’t teach all concepts in a discipline; they selectively choose which ones to cover. He advocates for a multidisciplinary approach to teaching because it better reflects the complexities of the real world. He also advocates for learning all the big ideas in a discipline. He gives the example of how his law classes, such as negotiations, would have been enhanced by psychology concepts. He advocates for people to educate themselves by reading about the big ideas in a discipline such as psychology. The education you can give yourself can be better than what you get at a college or university because it can be multidisciplinary and include all concepts in a discipline.
• Multidisciplinary learning – Munger is a big believer in the idea that understanding lots of different disciplines and how they work together better prepares you to navigate life and, in his case, make better investments. Having mental models from the various disciplines enhances your ability to read situations and make decisions superior to those of others.

I’m glad I got around to reading this book. I’ve made lots of highlights and notes already. I’m looking forward to finishing it.

If you’re interested in the book, you can learn more about it and download a free PDF copy at Stripe Press here.

Last year, I added Amazon affiliate links to my blog and podcast for books I shared (see here). Affiliate programs are commission programs. For every person I refer to Amazon who purchases the item I recommended, I get a commission on the sale. These programs didn’t interest me initially. For books, the effort exceeds the reward. Affiliates earn roughly $0.50 on a book sale. But then I realized the true value is in the data. Amazon’s affiliate program is robust, and I can track which books people click on and which books they purchase. I was very interested in the data, so I signed up for the program and started using affiliate links in mid-June 2024.

I have roughly six months of data. Here are the high-level stats:

• Items purchased: 14
• Total revenue generated (for Amazon): $226.05
• Average revenue per item (for Amazon): $16.14
• Total affiliate earnings (for me): $6.17
• Average earnings per purchase (for me): $0.44

I earned about $1 a month from affiliate commissions. My time to implement and execute this was worth more than $6, lol.

But I dug into the data and had some interesting insights:

• No book had more than one affiliate purchase.
• The books purchased were mostly about investors who became entrepreneurs when they founded investment firms: Jim Simons, Ed Thorpe, etc. This was interesting and unexpected.
• I had three international sales in Germany and the United Kingdom. I didn’t expect to have international reach.
• The majority of purchases were of Kindle or audiobook versions. I’m a physical-book person, so this surprised me.

Absent this affiliate experiment, I wouldn’t have known any of these things. So, from an insights perspective, the experiment was valuable. The sample size is small, of course, so I can’t draw definitive conclusions, but it’s still helpful.

So, what’s the verdict on my Amazon affiliate experiment? I’m glad I did the experiment because of the data it provides. I won’t get rich off affiliate commissions on book sales, but the insights are valuable. Now that I’ve got this, stopping the experiment doesn’t make sense. I’ll keep adding the affiliate links to content I share about books.

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.

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.

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!

2/26/25 Update: I finally published a list of all 52 books. You can see the list here.

2/27/25 Update: I created a searchable list of all the books I’ve read, and I’ll be updating it weekly. See here.