Archives for September 2016

Some nice stuff we read at the start of this new week…

Investing/Stock Market

• Stop craving excitement in the stock market! Jason Zweig writes in WSJ how a bored investor is a dangerous thing…
  

  …this is a good time for investors to remind themselves that an idle mind is the devil’s workshop.

  Scientifically speaking, boredom is a mildly unpleasant state of mind usually triggered by a monotonous environment. Experiments have shown that it can increase your heart rate and raise your levels of cortisol, a hormone associated with stress…

  Fixating on a dull market can leave you restlessly craving excitement that just isn’t there. A bored investor is probably more likely to succumb to the whims of other bored investors moving in a herd…All of this is true for professional as well as individual investors.

  [Read more…] about Safal Niveshak Stream – September 26, 2016

Some great stuff we read at the start of this weekend…

Reading/Thinking

• What books would you recommend someone reads to improve his/her general knowledge of the world? Well, here’s a list in case you are searching for one.
• A glance at the library of Marc Andreessen, where some of Silicon Valley’s secrets are hiding…
  

  I finally talked to Andreessen, and I asked him about the book collection. He said he didn’t like the lobbies at other VC firms. They looked like “monuments to themselves” filled with “tombstones”—framed IPO prospectus covers and Lucite statues that investment bankers give out when you sell a startup. “It felt like visiting the lobby of an insurance company—instead of somebody you would presumably really want to talk to,” he says. So he filled his own lobby with books. He spent three nights sorting the titles for maximum effect. Programming books on one set of shelves, Hollywood books on another, business books on a third, and so on.

• A nice infographic on learning how to learn.
• Why one should read history. Excerpt from Yuval Harari’s Homo Deus…
  

Business

• Avoid that white poison! How the sugar industry shifted blame to fat, and how it has distorted health science for more than 50 years…
  

  …Big Sugar may have done more than just advocate for favorable policies. Going back more than 50 years, the industry has been distorting scientific research by dictating what questions get asked about sugar, particularly questions around sugar’s role in promoting heart disease.

• The rise of the superstars: A small group of giant companies are once again dominating the global economy. Is that a good or a bad thing?
• Your job may be at risk in the next Industrial Revolution. An interview with Ryan Avent about how technology will change the labor force.

Life

• A wonderful TED video on how to raise successful kids, without over-parenting…
  

  I guess what I’m saying is, we spend a lot of time being very concerned about parents who aren’t involved enough in the lives of their kids and their education or their upbringing, and rightly so. But at the other end of the spectrum, there’s a lot of harm going on there as well, where parents feel a kid can’t be successful unless the parent is protecting and preventing at every turn and hovering over every happening, and micromanaging every moment, and steering their kid towards some small subset of colleges and careers.

  When we raise kids this way, and I’ll say we, because Lord knows, in raising my two teenagers, I’ve had these tendencies myself, our kids end up leading a kind of checklisted childhood.

• The Paralympic Games silver medal winner Deepa Malik’s 12-point life strategy can change your life too…
  

  “Your lows should be a jumpstart,” she says. A way to prepare for the highs. She says she uses the lows as a way to understand her shortcomings. “The purpose of sadness is not to demoralize yourself but to evaluate where you are lacking so you can bounce back,” she says.

Miscellaneous

• A conversation with Shel Kaphan, Amazon’s first employee…
  

  One thing that the Amazon experience taught me is try to imagine what a project or company would be like if it was more successful than you could ever possibly imagine. It’s very unlikely but it’s possible. You have to think about what the environment will be like if that happens, and how the people involved in it might change. When I was joining Jeff to form Amazon in the beginning, I didn’t even allow myself to go there. I’d worked for a lot of startups so it almost felt like a jinx to think too much about what might happen if it really succeeded in a big way. That was my mentality. I was like, I hope this makes it and is a moderate success. Maybe it even generates enough cash to let us retire at some point. You don’t really want to think about massive success beyond what you can imagine. Then, if it is successful, you have to start thinking, what’s my role in enabling this? Is that something I really want to be doing?

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