The sun rises at 6 PM: Our book journey for March, 2022

“Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.” - Albert Einstein

Every day at 6 pm, we connect with the student inside us to read, discuss and heartily debate over books we have read. Books are jam-packed with information, they teach you life lessons, teach you about adversity, love, fear, and everything else that is a part of life. Books have been around for ages and provide information about our past, civilizations, and culture. From entrepreneurship, to team building and even movements like feminism, our book club gives us a chance to take a deep dive into a plethora of topics and have insightful conversations over things that inspire and drive us towards bringing about change in society.

Moment of Lift

Melinda Gates

The #MeToo movement intensified the notion of consent and the need for organizations to take a bigger stance, be it on sexual harassment, gender pay gap, or gender equality. Although the movement spread across the globe and crossed racial boundaries, it somehow does not throw enough light on the plight of women struggling through poverty in the developing world. Through her many campaigns, Gates realized that most women were primarily concerned about the inaccessibility of female contraception barring them from better planning their education and careers. While providing contraceptives and running family planning workshops are one aspect of solving the problem in impoverished countries, proper schooling is crucial to break the cycle of poor wage labor being passed on to children from their parents. The poor conditions often lead to parents marrying off their daughters at an early age, with one less child to take care of. The book throws light on the prevailing gender inequity and how societies can uplift women and their voices.

• Proper access to contraceptives helps women to raise their children better.
• In impoverished communities around the world, actions should be taken to mitigate taboos and stigma around reproductive health and other beliefs that are paramount to women’s empowerment.
• Diversity is key to a better future, and only a diverse society can uplift women.

The Necessary Revolution

Peter Senge, Bryan Smith, Nina Kruschwitz, Joe Laur, Sara Schley

In December 2015, the Paris Agreement was signed into law with the aim of reducing the emission of gasses contributing to global warming. Cut to now seven years, we are nowhere near enough. But we are in dire need of revolutionary change individually, politically, and economically. While individuals can become conscious customers and users and spread their word, corporations need to shoulder corporate social responsibility, and governments support and subsidize required policies and sustainable initiatives. The authors assert the fact that leaders need to move beyond short-term achievements and invest their time and resources in long-term initiatives that will truly make a difference. But we often see big corporations using social initiatives for immediate financial gain, ignoring the harmful impact on the environment and society. It’s time for a new sustainable revolution where sustainability and profitability both thrive, and create value by solving some of the greatest challenges facing humanity today. 

• We aren’t helpless as individuals. It is often small groups that bring in a paradigm shift. 
• As consumers, we have the power to dismiss selfish corporate financial gains by choosing to have a conscious buying behavior.

Buffettology

Mary Buffett

In Buffettology, author Mary Buffett gives us an insight into the investment strategies, tips, and methods of the legendary investor Warren Buffett from purchasing stock to identifying the most profitable businesses. Young Buffett’s idea of investing was greatly influenced by the idea that investing is most intelligent when you buy stock as a business, instead of considering it as a lottery ticket. Warren Buffet wins most of the time holding a stock for a long time giving high and predictable returns over the long term. Buffett makes sure that he invests in consumer monopolies - companies that require lesser property taxes and maintenance costs to manufacture their products or services, say Coca-Cola or Marlboro cigarettes for instance do not need many updates once their factories are built. To invest like Warren Buffett, you need to strike on time and be right on numbers. Buy the right stock at the right price, and always evaluate the future earnings of the companies you invest in. Most importantly, Warren Buffett invested in companies that made his life simpler - Gillette, Kraft Foods, and McDonald’s for that matter. Research is paramount to finding key financial information and metrics like annual earnings and EPS. 

• It’s all about choosing consumer monopolies and investing in them for longer terms. 
• Apart from consumer monopolies, the best types of investments are communication businesses and repetitive consumer services. 
• Only invest in companies that fall under your circle of competence.

Bored and Brilliant

Manoush Zomorodi

Your best ideas come to you when you have free time and your mind wanders. As Zomorodi points out in her book, we no longer allow ourselves to be bored. Our time for open attention is mostly taken up by technology. We listen to podcasts or music instead of allowing ourselves to zone out at the gym. We check our phones instead of waiting quietly for the dentist and the list goes on. Manoush Zomorodi offers a seven-day challenge in Bored and Brilliant to disconnect from your devices and experience boredom and its companion, creativity. The book inspires you to make space in your life for letting your creative mind wander and in order to unlock your potential. 

• Mobile games can be a help or a hindrance. It all depends on how they’re played.
• Young people are particularly vulnerable to technology and they must be taught to use it responsibly.

Poor Economics 

Abhijeet V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo

Poverty is nearly synonymous with hunger in the West. Banerjee and Duflo examine how the poor spend their money on food in their book, Poor Economics. It turns out that the poor do not always spend their money in such a way that they get the number of calories they require in a day. But can we really blame them? Banerjee and Duflo demonstrate how difficult it is for those living on 99 cents per day to obtain adequate nutrition.

• Looking seriously at how poor people make economic decisions is vital for eradicating poverty.
• A successful fight against poverty will require small, local actions alongside big institutional reforms.

Start With Why

Simon Sinek

Start With Why delves into the assumptions we make and how they influence our actions. Sinek provides various examples of how looking at the big picture can shape your behavior and drive long-term results. While energy motivates, charisma inspires. Energy is simple to see, measure, and replicate. All great leaders have charisma because they all have a clear "Why"; an unwavering belief in a purpose or cause greater than themselves. The "Why" types, according to the author, are visionaries with overactive imaginations. They are optimists who believe that anything they can imagine is possible, and they are focused on things that most people cannot see, such as the future. 

• Success is the fruit of design, not of short term patches.
• Companies and teams run into trouble when they lose their sense of “why.”

Don’t Go Back to School

Kio Stark

Graduate from high school, get a degree and get a good job so you can retire comfortably. This is the path that many people want to take, and each of these steps is often regarded as necessary for a happy life. In fact, the desire to obtain a formal education has become a defining feature of generations born after the mid-twentieth century. The book delves into how the value of a college education is debatable, and how independent learning is far superior to traditional schooling. The book teaches the reader how to learn things in their own unique way and for the right reasons rather than using traditional methods.

• Despite the need for a radical shift towards independent learning, we shouldn’t do away with schools just yet.
• Don’t learn alone; Be independent but not an autodidact.

Man And His Symbols

Carl Jung

Man and His Symbols arose from one of Jung's own dreams. The great psychologist hoped that his work would be understood by a wider audience than just psychiatrists, so he agreed to write and edit this fascinating book. Jung investigates the entire world of the unconscious, whose language he believed to be the symbols revealed in dreams. Jung believed that self-understanding would lead to a full and productive life because dreams provide practical advice sent from the unconscious to the conscious self. 

• Our unconscious minds convey ideas to us symbolically through dreams.
• Representations of the self send specific messages to the dreamer.

The User Illusion

Tor Nørretranders

The User Illusion by Tor Nørretranders. In this book the author explains how conscious mind can process 60 bits a second of information even if we are unconsciously absorbing around 11 million bits per second constantly by treating the human brain like a computer.

For example when you click your ears you become aware of how it feels even if you ears always existed all the time doing its sensory duties. But only when you click your ears it is brought into conscious awareness. Our conscious mind is like an iceberg where only the tip can be felt and underneath the body is continuously processing the outside world. In conclusion the author says the value of information is determined by what is disregarded which he terms as “exformation” and so our entire life consciousness depends on the type and quality of our information filters.

• In the real world the ratio of conscious to unconscious inputs is million to one where vast amount of information reached our mind but never reached the awareness. Like if you are in a crowded party hundreds of people talking at the same time but your mind consciousness give us the ability to listen to only one.
• This is highly practical as human mind could be overwhelmed and can drown in the ocean of sensory input we come across where we can never function normally. Like the case of light bulb attached to a nuclear reactor. 

Barking up the Wrong Tree

Eric Baker

Bad boys do well in life. Much better than the class toppers, says Eric Barker, in Barking Up The Wrong Tree. After capturing your attention with these provocative theories, Barker proceeds to dispel conventional wisdom on how to be successful. Work hard and be obsessive, for example. Also, networking. So, join groups, meet new people, and always follow up with phone calls, emails, or small favors; these are some of the networking 101 principles he promotes in the book.

• Confidence is the key to success but too much of it can make you hurt others.
• Playing by the rules will only get you so far; Creativity is the real engine of success.

We Should All Be Feminists

Chimamanda Ngoze Adichie

The book 'We Should All Be Feminists' can be used as an introduction to feminism. While the author relates her own experiences as well as those of her friends and family in Nigeria, the topics raised in the book are universal in the sense that individuals all over the world may connect to them. In my review, I have concentrated on two parts of the books: the stereotyped image of feminism and the term feminist, and the process of normalization. Other topics covered by the author include invisibility, salary disparities, rearing girls and boys differently, culture, and gender.

• There are many common misconceptions surrounding the word feminism.
• We need a cultural shift towards a society that integrates feminism.

Blitzscalling

Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh

Blitzscaling is what you do when you need to expand swiftly. It is the science and art of rapidly expanding a firm to service a vast, typically worldwide market, with the objective of being the first mover at scale. This is high-impact entrepreneurship. Blitzscaling is a set of strategies for sparking and controlling rapid growth; it is an expedited approach to the point in a startup's life-cycle when the most value is made. It promotes speed above efficiency in an unpredictable environment, allowing a firm to go from "startup" to "scaleup" at a breakneck rate that catches the market.

• Rapid growth thrives on networks, which allow unprecedented access to sizeable markets.
• Blitzscaling embraces uncertainty and risk.

India After Gandhi

Ramchandra Guha

Born amid a backdrop of deprivation and civil conflict, split along caste, class, language, and religion lines, independent India emerged as an unified and democratic country. Ramachandra Guha's widely regarded book reveals the complete tale of the world's largest and least expected democracy — its sorrow and struggle, humiliations and glories. While India might be the most vexing country on the planet, it is also the most fascinating. Ramachandra Guha writes compellingly about the numerous rallies and clashes that have characterized free India's history. The chronicle of contemporary India is filled with amazing personalities, moving between history and biography. Guha provides new insights on the lives and public careers of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, two long-serving Prime Ministers. However, the book also speaks with emotion and empathy about lesser-known (but no less significant) Indians — peasants, tribal, women, laborers, and musicians.

How To Think More Effectively

The School of Life

How to Think More Effectively delves into the subject of thinking mechanisms and cognitive processes, and investigates how you can think more efficiently and gain better insights from the world around you by implementing a few key practices such as filtering your thoughts or prioritizing work. Because thinking is our primary source of information, why not devote more time to learning about it, or better yet, how to improve it? How to Think More Effectively can assist you in starting to develop your thinking mechanisms and getting more out of your time by improving how you manage it.

• Devote more time to evaluating your ideas, values and goals.
• Accept that ideas develop in fits and starts.

The Hidden Habits of Genius

Craig M. Wright

Joan of Arc, Dante Alighieri, and Geoffrey Chaucer, what distinguishes them from their Middle Ages contemporaries? What about Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, and William Shakespeare? What are these Renaissance men's commonalities? According to author Craig Wright, these talented individuals were geniuses. Wright believes that we can learn from 14 habits and character traits such as resilience, childlike imagination, insatiable curiosity, passion, rebelliousness, relaxation, and concentration.

• Geniuses can turn a weakness into a source of creativity.
• Cultivate a strong sense of curiosity and look at the world through the eyes of a child.

First As Tragedy, Then As Farce

Slavoj Žižek

Slavoj Žižek frames the moral failures of the modern world in terms of the epoch-making events of the first decade of this century in this no-holds-barred analysis. What he discovers is history's classic one-two punch: the jab of tragedy, followed by the right hook of farce. Liberalism died twice in the 9/11 attacks and the global credit crunch: as a political doctrine and as an economic theory. The title of the book refers to Marx's rather caustic and dryly humorous addition to Hegel's observation that history always repeats itself: first as tragedy, then as farce.

• The hidden ideology of capitalism shifts focus away from our real enemies.
• Ideology is hidden in the new ways we consume and buy things.

Life after Google

George Gilder

Life After Google documents Silicon Valley's "nervous breakdown" as Google's aggregate and promote business generates an internet filled with excessive adverts and personal privacy violations that is eventually unsustainable. The book presents the cryptocosm solution, the new digital architecture of blockchain and its variants. While he believes that many blockchain ventures will fail, Gilder believes that the surviving companies and cryptosystem will eventually shift the next generation of the Web from closed silos of captured data to open supercomputers on which blockchain can provide an immutable database on which to build trust structures.

• Bitcoin and blockchain mark a new era of online security.
• Hardware manufacture is making a comeback, and is assisting reimagining of outdated cloud technology.

The Sweet Spot

Paul Bloom

Paul Bloom offers a compelling case that pain and suffering are necessary for pleasure, using sharp insights and concise style. According to psychologist Paul Bloom, the book Sweet Spot illustrates the quirkiness of human psychology about as well as anything else can. It delves into the link between pain and meaning, as well as why living a purposeful life entails caring about much more than enjoyment. The book isn't pro-suffering, and Bloom is careful to distinguish "chosen" suffering from "unchosen" suffering, but it is an attempt to explain why we sometimes seek out hardship and struggle, and why the conventional image of humans as purely pleasure-seeking and pain-avoiding isn't so much incorrect as incomplete.

• Try to find joy in effort and struggle which will lead you to your desired results.
• The efforts will help you in trying to understand your true purpose in life.

Stolen Focus

Johann Hari

Stolen Focus, a book by British journalist Johann Hari, examines what's happening and what's happened to our collective attention. Hari contends that we are all growing engrossed in our own lives, which are increasingly resembling a parade of distractions. And it appears to be growing worse by the year. Hari's book isn't precisely a road map for getting out of all of this, and to the degree that it is, I'm doubtful. However, it does highlight an issue that we probably don't take seriously enough. He exposes readers to Silicon Valley rebels who learned to hijack human attention and veterinarians who diagnose canines with ADHD in Stolen Focus. He visits a favela in Rio de Janeiro where everyone lost their focus in a very strange way, as well as a New Zealand workplace that developed a wonderful method to restore workers' productivity.

• Apps and online platforms are addictive by design, not by accident.
• Algorithms privilege outrage over community.