Category: personal AnGoL

What to Read

Knowing how to read is only half the battle. Too much of what we consume these days is the mental equivalent of junk food. Quality matters more than quantity. The Pot-Belly of ignorance talks about the importance of selecting your reading material wisely.
Arthur Schopenhauer’s timeless advice on reading is also worth reading (be quick to start books, quicker to stop them, and read the best ones again right after you finish). Montaigne’s rule with reading was the promiscuous pursuit of pleasure.
Whatever you do, don’t read what everyone else is reading. Rather than read new books, focus on old ones.

Source: A Helpful Guide to Reading Better

WHAT YOU NEED ARE THE 6CS OF PRESENTATION STORYTELLING

If you are going to tell stories in your presentations, make sure you cover these six points.

1) Context

This is the setup and the situation. This is where you bring people into your story and change the tone of your wider presentation. Probably you will also lower your voice, change its tone, maybe even slow down and turn the projector off. Or have a picture to illustrate the scene you are setting up. Evocative, specific details help – the clouds scudding, the waves kicking up, smoking, etc.  This brings your story alive and gives it realism. Detail is good.

2) Character

All your stories need a hero. In my prison story, it’s Andy. In my presentation story the hero is me. Your audience needs someone they can identify with and who overcomes some sort of challenge, or resolves a mystery.

3) Challenge

What is the obstacle our hero has to face? Typically, this will be something that they overcome and results in some sort of change. How they overcome the challenge will typically result in some lesson or moral – the point of your story.

4) Conflict

This is where the outcome is unclear. You need some tension and jeopardy. Something goes wrong. Will there be a positive outcome?

5) Conclusion

Success! The challenge is overcome and the conflict is resolved. (For example, I resolved my situation by making the links between my case studies and the client’s challenges much more obvious.)

6) Connection

This is where you bring the story back to the audience and draw out the key lessons for the audiences. Ancient fables used the technique “and the moral of the story is….”. We’ve lost this expositional technique in modern storytelling but the risk of leaving it out is that the audience doesn’t ‘get it’. Make it clear and squeeze the meaning for them.

Source: How to…Tell Stories in Your Presentations | Presentation Guru

Acquiring an edge in investing is not easy. Building a business around that edge is even more challenging. Managers must tiptoe the line between disclosing enough to win new clients and maintain the trust of existing ones, and guarding their secrets enough to protect their lead over the competition.  The following schematic describes the situation:

Source: What Billy Beane and Jim Simons Have in Common | Institutional Investor

Mental Models

Munger has a way of thinking through problems using what he calls a broad latticework of mental models. Mental models are chunks of knowledge from different disciplines that can be simplified and applied to better understand the world. The way he describes it, they help identify what information is relevant in any given situation, and the most reasonable parameters to work in. His track record shows that this doesn’t just make sense in theory but is devastatingly useful in practice. The last eight years of my life have been devoted to identifying and learning the mental models that have the greatest positive impact and trying to understand how we think, how we update, how we learn, and how we can make better decisions.
In life and business, the person with the fewest blind spots wins¹. Removing blind spots means we see, interact with, and move closer to understanding reality. We think better. And thinking better is about finding simple processes that help us work through problems from multiple dimensions and perspectives, allowing us to better choose solutions that fit what matters to us. The skill for finding the right solutions for the right problems is one form of wisdom.
This website is about the pursuit of that wisdom, the pursuit of uncovering how things work, the pursuit of going to bed smarter than when we woke up.
Decisions based on improved understanding will be better than ones based on ignorance. While we can’t predict which problems will inevitably crop up in life, we can learn time-tested ideas that help us prepare for whatever the world throws at us.
Source: The Ultimate Guide to Making Smart Decisions

Here’s how to assemble your personal dream team, with tips from business expert Anthony Tjan.

Everyone can use a mentor. Scratch that — as it turns out, we could all use fivementors. “The best mentors can help us define and express our inner calling,” says Anthony Tjan, CEO of Boston venture capital firm Cue Ball Group and author of Good People. “But rarely can one person give you everything you need to grow.”
In this short list, Tjan has identified the five kinds of people you should have in your corner. You probably already know them — and it’s possible for one person to cover two or more categories — so use this list as both a guide and a nudge to deepen your bond with them.
One reminder from Tjan: Mentorship is a two-way street — a relationship between humans — and not a transaction. So don’t just march up to people and ask them to advise you. Take the time to develop genuine connections with those you admire, and assist them whenever you can.

Source: The five types of mentors you need in your life |

That same year, the Asia Society in New York commis­sioned a story on Chan’s favourite Chinese restaurants. Chan wrote back with a dry list. When the editor followed up, asking why his list only contained places in California and none in New York, he replied with a casual aside, explaining how, in his opinion, New York Chinese food had been stag­nating for years as immigration patterns shifted, and was rotten compared with that available in California.
Without Chan’s permission, the editor published his aside along with his list.
“I was horrified,” Chan says. “That was not meant for public consumption, but that thing hit such a nerve.”

Source: The man who has eaten at more than 7,300 Chinese restaurants, but can’t use chopsticks and doesn’t care for food | Post Magazine | South China Morning Post

This dovetails with a huge amount of research and theory going back to the early 1900s on changing definitions of home. But what’s fascinating about Ikea’s report is that Ikea, simply by being the largest furniture retailer on earth, has a role to play here. The corporation has more than 400 stores in 25 countries. It reported 936 million visits to its stores last year. One favorite faux-factoid, which, obviously, can’t be verified, claims that 1 in 10 Europeans is conceived on an Ikea bed. We are increasin

Source: New Ikea report finds that people don’t feel at home in their homes

“The idea driving 402 was that it’s obvious that support for payments should be a first-class concept on the web and it’s obvious that there should be a lot of direct commerce taking place on the web,” says John “In fact, what emerged is a single dominant business model which is advertising. That leads to a lot of centralisation, because you get the highest cost per clicks and with the largest platforms. A big part of what we’re trying to do with Stripe is continually make it easy for new business to start, and for new businesses to succeed. Having commerce and direct payment succeed on the internet is a very important component of that. It’s the final piece in the Dream Machine.”

Source: The untold story of Stripe, the secretive $20bn startup driving Apple, Amazon and Facebook | WIRED UK

On February 24, 2016 the company launched the Stripe Atlas platform, designed to help entrepreneurs start a business from absolutely anywhere on the planet. The invitation-only platform allows companies from the Gaza Strip to Berwick-upon-Tweed to incorporate as a US company in Delaware – a state with such business-friendly courts, tax system, laws and policies that 60 per cent of Fortune 500 companies including the Bank of America, Google and Coca-Cola are incorporated there for just $500.

Source: The untold story of Stripe, the secretive $20bn startup driving Apple, Amazon and Facebook | WIRED UK

Higher education in America is plagued by many problems: limited access for low-income and minority students, affordability, etc.—but Berea is different than much of the rest of higher education. But those differences make it fragile. It’s unclear if its model will last forever, but for now, it has a simple purpose. It wants to keep education tuition-free for its students for as long as possible.
“Alright, give me back that bass line,” Clayton told them as the students began clapping again.
“I’m gonna keep on walkin’,” they bellowed, “keep on talkin’. Marching to my destiny.”

Source: How Berea College Makes Tuition Free with its Endowment – The Atlantic