Impact Analysis - Reading Three Books Simultaneously

Since embarking on reading three books at the same time about one month back, I am beginning my fifth and sixth new books.

The time to completion of a single book has decreased and the volume consumed has increased.

I plan to finish one more book prior to departing on my autumn break to the states with my wife this Friday too. 

Thanks to my new approach to reading I have bypassed my 'one book per month' goal that I set for myself at the beginning of the year. 

That means that I'll have to scoop more books so that I can set a higher goal for 2019. Super stoked.

Reading Books & People

The more books you read, the better reader you become.

Because books are written by people about either people or things people do, reading books also helps you read people.

You pay more attention to subtleties like past events, context, tone and word choice when you read books or people. There really is no difference.

Some people, like books, are harder to read than others, but if you have time and patience nothing and no one are absolutely unreadable.

It's a common refrain these days though that people really don't read anything. They skim or look something (usually very short) over from time to time, but beyond that they really don't read anymore.

If you don't read a lot of books, there must be some impact. Since reading sharpens your ability to detect and understand subtleties, by not reading your perception and understanding may remain dull and common.

Perhaps this explains the numerous misunderstandings that arise between people.

Whilst the work place demands absolutely clear and direct prose in communication, if you spoke to friends and loved ones in such a manner life would become as dull and staid as a generic floor in some corporate office.

These days, however, I have heard that several loved ones "need me to be clearer and more direct" about future plans and events that are in no way clear or directly knowable ahead of time.

Last night I heard it again. After I was told that, I took a long sip of my wonderfully bitter, slightly hoppy and perfectly fragrant Omija Ale, and thought, "How sad that no one seems to be able to read me."

I guess I expect more of others. If anyone bothered to read between my lines, or remember who I have always been and the loving words shared over long talks they would hear all that they apparently want stated directly, and more.

Reading isn't special. What reading allows for, though, is a richness and fullness of our human experience.

I would expect others to want to live as rich and full a life as possible, but since this requires people to read, maybe my lowly expectations of others are simply too high.

That is just so damn sad.

But at least I have you though, right?

Happy Valentines Day everybody;)

Risk as a Function of Perception

I am just about to wrap up Brad Stone's "The Everything Store," his book on Jeff Bezos and the inception, initial rise followed by hard times, and ultimate success of Amazon.

Usually biographies humanize their subjects, but in this case, Bezos has essentially become a god in my eyes. An angry god to be sure, and one that knows the devil is in the details.

Beyond Bezos though, what really struck and stuck with me, was how the book perfectly captured the anxiety and fear that permeated the markets during the bear cycle and ultimate dot.com bubble pop back in 2000.

At that time Amazon's stock fell to less than $10, losing hundreds of millions of dollars for shareholders and employees. And they were getting *trashed* in the media.

Amazon's then treasurer summed up the fear and anxiety perfectly: "The most anxiety-inducing thing about [the Wall Street bears and negative media] was that the risk [of going to zero] was a function of perception and not the reality."

The real danger was that the negative media might turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. And that strain of bearish thinking actually took hold for awhile. Large numbers of people illogically thought the Internet revolution and all its invention would just disappear.

It feels like this history is rhyming again today as the crypto sector has just lost hundreds of billions off its network value virtually overnight.

The bears and perma-critics are smugly declaring defeat for cryptocurrencies. Many retail investors probably didn't know anything about the underlying tech so they probably think crypto dead too.

But just as Amazon and its cohort of other dot.com bubble survivors have shown, these sorts of revolutions have a way of upending short-term criticism over the long run. As the internet continues to prove, it has had an extremely powerful non-linear impact on every single other sector.

Amazon used the power of the internet to provide customers - end users - with a level of instant, personalized satisfaction that was impossible before it. That in turn has helped it become a real contender to become the everything store for the whole freaking world.

The seeds carried by the sudden deluge of blockchain and cryptocurrency speculation have just been laid. Already flowers are starting to appear giving a preview of what may be possible soon for end users. It's amazing how quickly they have taken root, and I am sure that there will be an Amazon (or ten or hundred) that'll bloom and grow atop this new technology soon.