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: 106
• Total blog posts published: 707

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Blog posts published: 7

What I completed in the week ending 3/15/26 (link to the previous week’s commitments):

• Read The Laws of Trading, a framework book about making decisions in highly competitive and uncertain environments. The title is misleading because the book is about improving decision-making and understanding how markets work.

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book

Asks:

• No ask this week

Week three hundred eleven was another week of learning. Looking forward to next week!

Continuing what I started last week, I’m going to share content I consumed and learned from.

What I struggled with:

• No material struggles this week

What I learned:

• The science behind naming billion-dollar products – YouTube video from My First Million where they interview the guy big brands pay to name their products. The process of how he picks names is intriguing. There’s much more science to it than I realized.
• Should your portfolio be positioned for defense or offense? – YouTube video where Howard Marks shares his thinking about risk versus reward in today’s investing environment.
• Declining liquidity is negatively impacting stocks – YouTube video from Monetary Matters with an interview of global liquidity expert Michael Howell. Interesting to understand how a booming economy reduces liquidity in financial markets, which can lead to flat or lower markets. Very counterintuitive.
• Emerging trend: internal AI platform team – YouTube interview from The Biography Podcast with the CEO of Speak, Connor Zwick. He has an internal team dedicated to helping the entire company use AI. They go around the company and set up AI infrastructure for internal teams so they can make the most of AI, which helps them move faster. Interesting concept that makes a lot of sense.
• How Blockworks bootstrapped to $150 million – YouTube interview from The Biography Podcast with the CEO of Blockworks, Jason Yanowitz. Interesting strategy of going from events to media to a data company. Focusing on an overlooked niche helped them separate from the competition. Landing a busy CEO for an interview by creating a book about his company was a nice angle. Flattery works. I think I found a digital version of the book here.
• Building a $100 million AI company – YouTube interview from The Biography Podcast with Dylan Fox, founder of Assembly AI. One point stood out to me: Having clarity on how the customer hears about new products and how they buy new products is important for building successful marketing efforts. You should design processes like onboarding and demand generation by working backward from that understanding. Taking what worked at another company or space and replicating it isn’t a strategy that’s guaranteed to succeed at your company.
• $1.6 million business anyone can start – YouTube interview from Chris Koerner on The Koerner Office Podcast with Sariah Howell, founder of Memory Magnets. Howell went from broke to making $600,000 in profit in a year with a simple business idea. I loved how she turned sharing her secrets about building her business into an additional revenue stream by selling products to help others start businesses just like hers. Here, the use of social media is savvy and stood out to me.
• Zara founder getting $3.7 billion dividend – See my thoughts in my post earlier this week. Building to hold forever can lead to great wealth (he’s worth $126 billion). Building to sell will get you cash quicker but won’t create this level of generational wealth.

That’s what I consumed and learned from and struggled with last week.

For over a year, in every Sunday’s post, I shared what I’d learned from a personal project I was working on. This past week, I changed the format of that post, making it broader and sharing where I learned things. More about my thinking on this change here.

It’s early, but one effect of this change was noticeable to me immediately. Creating the new type of post forced me to review all the pieces of content I consumed that week, evaluate which ones added value, and synthesize my big takeaways from each (I need to work on this). This stood out to me because although I often save pieces to review again later in my GTD system, I don’t consistently go back and synthesize them. Creating the post was a forcing function for the review and synthesis of the most-value-added content I learned from.

Not something I thought about before making the change, but definitely a benefit.

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: 105
• Total blog posts published: 700

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Blog posts published: 7

What I completed in the week ending 3/8/26 (link to the previous week’s commitments):

• Read Big Money Thinks Small, a framework book about biases, blind spots, and how to think to be a smarter investor. This book is helpful for decision-making, but it’s tailored more for thinking like a probabilistic investor.

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book

Asks:

• No ask this week

Week three hundred ten was another week of learning. Looking forward to next week!

I’m trying something new this week. I’m going to share content I consumed and learned from.

What I struggled with:

·      No material struggles this week

What I learned:

• 19-year-old makes $400,000 a month – Bloomberg article about how teenagers are becoming millionaires by creating games on Roblox. This is a big market and a trend that isn’t widely known or understood.
• A Wall Streeter bought one of NYC’s biggest clubs – WSJ article about a club that was doing a shocking amount of revenue. After the owners borrowed money, they ended up losing control of the club.
• “College Freshman Sells $50M AI Company” – My previous post includes links to the TechCrunch article and the founder’s X account post about the sale.
• Howard Marks memo: AI hurtles – YouTube video of Howard Marks’s latest memo on AI. This complements his December memo on AI’s ramifications for investing.
• My First Million: The product is you – YouTube video from My First Million, which is about entrepreneurship. Ideas that stuck with me: the concept of the product you’re uniquely suited to build, being you pushed out. Also, I like the impatient-with-action, patient-with-results mindset.
• Alpha Comes from a Differentiated View – YouTube video about investing from someone who worked at hedge funds like Steve Cohen’s Point72. I liked the hit rate vs. slugging thought, being right vs. getting it right, questions to ask when tracking change, and thinking in frameworks.
• Neil Howe on the Fourth Turning – YouTube interview of Cem Karsan and Neil Howe about how differences in generations lead to big societal changes and impact public markets.
• Cem Karsan’s views on current state of stock market – YouTube interview with Cem Karsan. He shares his thoughts about the current stock market and Citrini’s infamous AI report.

That’s what I consumed and learned from and struggled with last week.

I’ve read several books about decision-making over the last few months. One concept that stood out to me, and that was mentioned in multiple books, is the decision journal. The idea is to write down your thoughts and feelings about a big decision before you make the decision. Later, after you’ve made the decision and the outcome has played out, you can reflect and record your lessons learned. The idea is to record your thinking as it’s happening so you can more easily analyze and spot patterns later. You won’t accurately remember your thinking and feelings if you don’t write them down.

I liked this idea and have wanted to implement it for some time. I finally decided to try it out when I had a decision to make recently. The outcome hasn’t played out yet, but the exercise of writing down my thinking and feelings helped me crystallize which choice was best and why. Since making and executing my decision, I’ve reviewed my thinking and already spotted a few errors. One, my thinking in one area wasn’t as tight as I thought it was, and I could have put in more work into it. Two, how I executed my decision didn’t totally align with what I said I was going to do. Close, but not exactly what I was aiming for.

My takeaway so far is that the decision journal is helpful because without it, I likely wouldn’t have spotted those errors so early or at all. The ability to compare what I was thinking, what I did, and the result should be a great tool to help improve decision-making. I hope this becomes a habit when I make big decisions.

I make it a priority to consume content every week to learn about various topics I’m curious about. Podcasts, YouTube, newspapers (digital), blogs, etc. I’ve started keeping a note in my phone with takeaways from pieces I found particularly interesting. That’s been helpful because I can quickly refer to it as needed. I’ve shared some of what I’ve consumed with friends when they mention a topic or ask a question. Based on their feedback, that’s been helpful.

I want to share what I’m consuming more broadly to expose high-quality content that others might find useful. I’m thinking about sending out a weekly email for that purpose. If that’s successful, I’ll consider developing a more deliberate process.

I’ll think about this more this week, but that might be my next project.

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: 104
• Total blog posts published: 693

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Blog posts published: 7

What I completed in the week ending 3/1/26 (link to the previous week’s commitments):

• Reread Thinking in Bets, a framework and workbook from Annie Duke that details how to think about decision-making in terms of bets, like a poker player does

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book

Asks:

• No ask this week

Week three hundred 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:

• No material struggles related to this project this week

What I learned:

• This week, a friend sent me a link to a social media account that caught my eye. The account posts short videos about lessons learned from business history. I did some digging and found that they’ve built a database of business case studies (I assume from books). Looks like they take multiple lessons from each case study and share each lesson as a separate post. What they’re essentially doing is helping people learn lessons through stories, one micro lesson and one story at a time. It’s an interesting approach to sharing business wisdom through microlearning.  

That’s what I learned and struggled with last 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

Cumulative metrics (since 4/1/24):

• Total books read: 103
• Total blog posts published: 686

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Blog posts published: 7

What I completed in the week ending 2/22/26 (link to the previous week’s commitments):

• Read How to Decide, a framework and workbook from Annie Duke that details tools and a multistep process to improve your decision-making

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book

Asks:

• No ask this week

Week three hundred eight was another week of learning. Looking forward to next week!