Nash

This is a different angle on being more productive: don't rely on willpower alone. Remove bad stimuli, remove bad actors, remove anything negative from your environment and build an environment of accountability and one that helps you reach your goals.

Have you ever yearned to do something in life so bad that it became an obsession? That obsession hits you in your early years when you have clarity of purpose. As you grow old, things become less certain, your inner drive gets replaced with your inner demons, the lies we tell ourselves about what we can and cannot do. This book is a journey to your inner-self, about what it means to step back and listen; about following your Personal Legend and pushing forward. It's a great book for anyone trying to do something hard and keeps thinking about giving up.

Great guide on fasting by the foremost authority

The book does a good job of breaking down various myths and protocols around fasting as a healthy weight management tool

You almost forget this book was written in 1956; it gets so many things right and it still blows your mind. It's a great story about a man possessed and what he'll do to get what he wants through space, people and time

This book gives you generally good advice: avoid carbs, eat more fruits and vegetables, reduce caffeine, avoid sugars, sleep on time, sleep 8 hours, meditate, find a spiritual connection, avoid excessive social media and blue screens etc.

The books tends to get preachy at times and feels a little pesudo-sciency at a few points. Some of the recipes start to feel a little extreme and certainly feels like they are made for well-to-do.

Vicktor does the impossible: he walks us through what kept him going at a place where everything was taken away, all purpose stripped, all previous achievements gone. It didn't matter if you were a doctor, everyone was worth nothing. He saw people give up hope, die before their actual death. However; because of his own experience, he studies what made him survive and others like him. Ultimately, for him, it was the thought of seeing his wife again, of completing a scientific paper... things he could live for, beyond his immediate suffering.

If a man can crawl out from such a pit, and push through his challenges, it makes you put in perspective our own challenges and our own limits of what we think is possible and what we are actually capable of doing.

Great sense dense with actionable advice

This books finally combined all my lessons together: from knowing that will power is finite, to the 5-sec rule, to daily habits to finally the definition: a habit doesn't consume will power. This helped me tie everything together and I've been able to form stronger habits.

In a world where network tools like Facebook are designed by the smartest engineers to make you addicted to their services, how do you make sure you get deep meaningful work done? Newport does a great job in summarizing a lot of the problems we face in our new distracted world and what steps to take to win back thoughtful work. Like all things, this requires planning, practice and a conscious effort to do more with our time without expending more of it.

This book is well worth your time if you keep checking your phone, can't do something for 5-10 mins without going to Facebook, Snapchat etc.

Short, valuable read

This book talks about a few practices which you should try in analyzing yourself; how well you follow through, are your expectations out of whack? Etc. It also talks about personality types and the importance of figuring out what you're wired and doing things the way that makes you shine. Another key aspect is figuring out how you learn and digest information in the way you're naturally wired to receive it. There are some dated parts like having a second career at 40 etc (which I didn't agree with) but considering the short read that this is, it's still pretty valuable.

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Great book on various possible models to pick if you don't have access to funding right away (which is the case in Pakistan). It talks about 5 possible business models that can work in this mode which are not capital intensive (for example, you can't make a power plant like this, you need lots of capex upfront.)

Some key models discussed were: marketplaces (a la Airbnb), subscription businesses (like SaaS with monthly recurring revenue), service-to-product (think Netsol's journey to LeaseSoft), scarcity model (like Zara or Banana republic and all the Flash Sale sites), pay-in-advance models (think air ticketing, dropshipping, threadless)

The book is written by an academic but he does a good job of talked about 2 successes and 1 failure in each model and their causes.

Faulty correlations, pseudo-science-y, assertions without any substantiation. I bought this book looking to understand how good ideas are formed but I was highly disappointed.

Anecdotes and history lessons aside, my first clue was when the author extols how great the NeoNurture baby incubators that use automobile parts and how they solved a real problem. I looked up NeoNurture and it turns out, they were never manufactured. Not one.

Here's what the book itself says: “We have a natural tendency to romanticize breakthrough innovations, imagining momentous ideas transcending their surroundings, a gifted mind somehow seeing over the detritus of old ideas and ossified tradition.”

Looks like the author fell into his own romanticization. This was the start of my disappointment. He goes on and creates rather strange analogies such as early civilization acting like a “liquid”. He creates a 10/10 principle where he explains it takes 10 years for an idea to manifest and another 10 years for the idea to spread. Then he talks about YouTube and how they did it in 1/1 without a significant explanation why.

Nice quick read on how great companies die. My quick take aways were:

It's a five stage process which a company goes through when it starts falling. At any stage, they can reverse their fate.
Interesting failure signs:
- Trying to find Big-Bang, silver bullet solutions to problems rather than incrementally fixing the core through data
- Junior staff shielding senior from bad news
- “Explaining Away” bad news or bad data

Malcolm has an uncanny ability to take a lot and summarize it with anecdotes. The Tipping Point is a pretty good book on how ideas spread and essential reading for anyone in marketing.

The Leanstartup is a good starting book to read if you're about to start a startup. But I recommend Steve Blank's The Four Steps to the Epiphany if you're serious.

Unfortunately, this books is 4 times as expensive as the Four Steps to the Epiphany and covers only fourth the ground.

Critical book for anyone looking to begin a startup. The only problem is that it is terribly edited and reads like a bunch of school notes cobbled together. It's hard to read because of the format but an important one!