In My Hands Today,,,

Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results – Shane Parrish

Few things will change your trajectory in life or business as much as learning to think clearly. Yet few of us recognize opportunities to think in the first place.You might believe you’re thinking clearly in the moments that matter most. But in all likelihood, when the pressure is on, you won’t be thinking at all. And your subsequent actions will inevitably move you further from the results you ultimately seek—love, belonging, success, wealth, victory.

According to Farnam Street founder Shane Parrish, we must get better at recognizing these opportunities for what they are, and deploying our cognitive ability in order to achieve the life we want.

Clear Thinking gives you the tools to recognize the moments that have the potential to transform your trajectory, and reshape how you navigate the critical space between stimulus and response. As Parrish shows, we may imagine we are the protagonists in the story of our lives. But the sad truth is, most of us run on autopilot. Our behavioral defaults, groomed by biology, evolution, and culture, are primed to run the show for us if we don’t intervene.

At our worst, we react to events without reasoning, not even realizing that we’ve missed an opportunity to think at all. At our best, we recognize these moments for what they are, and apply the full capacity of our reasoning and rationality to them.Through stories, mental models, and more, Parrish offers the missing link between behavioral science and real-life outcomes. The result is a must-have manual for optimizing decision-making, gaining competitive advantage, and living a more intentional life.

In My Hands Today,,,

Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes – Morgan Housel

Every investment plan under the sun is, at best, an informed speculation of what may happen in the future, based on a systematic extrapolation from the known past.

Same as Ever reverses the process, inviting us to identify the many things that never, ever change.

With his usual elan, Morgan Housel presents a master class on optimizing risk, seizing opportunity, and living your best life. Through a sequence of engaging stories and pithy examples, he shows how we can use our newfound grasp of the unchanging to see around corners, not by squinting harder through the uncertain landscape of the future, but by looking backwards, being more broad-sighted, and focusing instead on what is permanently true.

By doing so, we may better anticipate the big stuff, and achieve the greatest success, not merely financial comforts, but most importantly, a life well lived.

In My Hands Today,,,

Burn Book: A Tech Love Story – Kara Swisher

Part memoir, part history, Burn Book is a necessary chronicle of tech’s most powerful players. This is the inside story we’ve all been waiting for about modern Silicon Valley and the biggest boom in wealth creation in the history of the world.

When tech titans crowed that they would “move fast and break things,” Kara Swisher was moving faster and breaking news. While covering the explosion of the digital sector in the early 1990s, she developed a long track record of digging up and reporting the facts about this new world order. Her consistent scoops drove one CEO to accuse her of “listening in the heating ducts” and prompted Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg to once observe: “It is a constant joke in the Valley when people write memos for them to say, ‘I hope Kara never sees this.’”

While still in college, Swisher got her start at The Washington Post, where she became one of the few people in journalism interested in covering the nascent Internet. She went on to work for The Wall Street Journal, joining with Walt Mossberg to start the groundbreaking D: All Things Digital conference, as well as pioneering tech news sites.

Swisher has interviewed everyone who matters in tech over three decades, right when they presided over an explosion of world-changing innovation that has both helped and hurt our world. Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Sheryl Sandberg, Bob Iger, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Meg Whitman, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, and Mark Zuckerberg are just a few whom Swisher made sweat—figuratively and, in Zuckerberg’s case, literally.

Despite the damage she chronicles, Swisher remains optimistic about tech’s potential to help solve problems and not just create them. She calls upon the industry to make better, more thoughtful choices, even as a new set of powerful AI tools are poised to change the world yet again. At its heart, this book is a love story to, for, and about tech from someone who knows it better than anyone.

In My Hands Today…

Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of Modern India – Suchitra Vijayan

The first true people’s history of modern India is told through a seven-year, 9,000-mile journey across its many contested borders.

Sharing borders with six countries and spanning a geography that extends from Pakistan to Myanmar, India is the world’s largest democracy and second-most populous country. Yet most of us don’t understand it, or the violent history still playing out there. In fact, India as we know it didn’t exist until the map of the subcontinent was redrawn in the middle of the 20th century, the powerful repercussions of which are still being felt across South Asia.

To tell the story of political borders in the subcontinent, Suchitra Vijayan spent seven years travelling India’s 9,000-mile land border. Now, in this stunning work of narrative reportage, she shares what she learned on that groundbreaking journey. With profound empathy and a novelistic eye for detail, Vijayan shows us the forgotten people and places in the borderlands and brings us face-to-face with the legacy of colonialism and the stain of extreme violence and corruption. The result is the ground-level portrait of modern India we’ve been missing.

In My Hands Today…

Women Money Power: The Rise and Fall of Economic Equality – Josie Cox

For centuries, women were denied equal access to money and the freedom and power that came with it. They were restricted from owning property or transacting in real estate. Even well into the 20th century, women could not take out their own loans or own bank accounts without their husband’s permission. They could be fired for getting married or pregnant, and if they still had a job, they could be kept from certain roles, restricted from working longer hours, and paid less than men for equal work.

It was a raw deal, and women weren’t happy with it. So they pushed back. In Women Money Power , financial journalist Josie Cox tells the story of women’s fight for financial freedom. This is an inspirational account of brave pioneers who took on social mores and the law, including the “Rosies” who filled industrial jobs vacated by men and helped win WWII, the heiress whose fortune helped create the birth control pill, the brassy investor who broke into the boys’ club of the New York Stock Exchange, and the namesake of landmark equal pay legislation who refused to accept discrimination.

But as any woman can tell you, the battle for equality—for money and power—is far from over. Cox delves deep into the challenges women face today and the culture and systems that hold them back. This is a fascinating narrative account of progress, women’s lives, and the work still to be done.