Alex & Books 📚

“It's just God's gift. If you're into self-education, there's nothing like reading. Of course, people who do a lot of it have an enormous advantage.” –Charlie Munger

@mastersinvest Thanks!

@AlexAndBooks_ Some good quotes above!

Charlie Munger was one of the most successful and respected investors of our time. Munger was obsessed with reading and read 10-20 books a WEEK. Here are 25 reading quotes from him: 1) “In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time – none, zero.” 2) “As long as I have a book in my hand, I don’t feel like I’m wasting time.” 3) “Most books I don’t read past the first chapter. I’m not burdened by bad books.” 4) “I don’t think you can get to be a really good investor over a broad range without doing a massive amount of reading. I don’t think any one book will do it for you.” 5) "Develop into a lifelong self-learner through voracious reading; cultivate curiosity and strive to become a little wiser every day.” 6) "It's been my experience in life if you just keep thinking and reading you don't have to work." 7) “If it’s wisdom you are after, you are going to spend a lot of time sitting on your ass and reading.” 8) “If you get into the mental habit of relating what you’re reading to the basic structure of the underlying ideas being demonstrated, you gradually accumulate some wisdom.” 9) “Warren and I do more reading and thinking and less doing than most people in business. We do that because we like that kind of a life. But we’ve turned that quirk into a positive outcome for ourselves. We both insist on a lot of time being available almost every day to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. We read and think.” 10) "I have always loved to sit and read. And I never knew anything that was really worth a damn that wasn’t learned in that fashion.” 11) "If you take Warren Buffett and watched him with a time clock, I would say half of all the time he spends is sitting on his ass and reading." 12) “We read a lot. I don’t know anyone who’s wise who doesn’t read a lot. But that’s not enough: You have to have a temperament to grab ideas and do sensible things. Most people don’t grab the right ideas or don’t know what to do with them.” 12) “I met the towering intellectuals in books, not in the classroom, which is natural. I can’t remember when I first read Ben Franklin. I had Thomas Jefferson over my bed at seven or eight. My family was into all that stuff, getting ahead through discipline, knowledge, and self-control.” 13) "I am a biography nut myself. And I think when you're trying to teach the great concepts that work, it helps to tie them into the lives and personalities of the people who developed them." 14) “Obviously the more hard lessons you can learn vicariously, instead of from your own terrible experiences, the better off you will be. I don’t know anyone who did it with great rapidity. Warren Buffett has become one hell of a lot better investor since the day I met him, and so have I. If we had been frozen at any given stage, with the knowledge we had, the record would have been much worse than it is. So the game is to keep learning.” 15) "That sounds funny, making friends among the eminent dead, but if you go through life making friends with the eminent dead who had the right ideas, I think it will work better in life and work better in education." 16) “Look at this generation, with all of its electronic devices and multitasking. I will confidently predict less success than Warren, who just focused on reading.” 17) “It's just God's gift. If you're into self-education, there's nothing like reading. Of course, people who do a lot of it have an enormous advantage.” 18) "I don’t think you can get to be a really good investor over a broad range without doing a massive amount of reading. I don’t think there’s any one book that will do it for you." 19) “I either skim or read through 20 books a week. I get lots of books. I read a lot of biography and some history. I read almost no fiction.” 20) “I read myself to sleep every night. I read enormously. I like doing it. Not only that, what I found very early in life was that once I learned to read and handle elementary math, I really didn’t need professors or anything. I could figure out almost anything I wanted better from the written material than from having some professor tell it to me, because he’d be going too fast or too slow or telling me something I already knew or didn’t want to know. 21) "You look at [Andrew] Carnegie and [Benjamin] Franklin, they had a few years of primary school, they learned everything by themselves by reading. Whatever they needed, they just learned. It’s not that hard. Imagine educating yourself by firelight, no lamps, no electricity, after a day’s brutal work. Our ancestors had it tough.” 22) "The beauty of doing a lot of reading and thinking is that if you’re good at it, you don’t have to do much else." 23) “I think I learn a little something from everything I’ve read. I think that one of the reasons I was as economically successful as I was in life is because I read so damn much all my life, starting when I was about six years old. I don’t know how to get smart without reading a lot.” 24) “I met the towering intellectuals in books, not in the classroom, which is natural. I can't remember when I first read Ben Franklin. I had Thomas Jefferson over my bed at seven or eight. My family was into all that stuff, getting ahead through discipline, knowledge, and self-control.” 25) "But you know I spent my whole life with dead people. They’re so much better than many of the people I’m with here on earth. All the dead people in the world, you can learn a lot from them. And they’re very convenient to reach. You reach out and grab a book."

The best therapist in the world is a walk in the woods.

@JoshuaKushner Legendary album

@addyosmani @JimmyDorv The world needs more readers! Also, if people outsource their reading to AI, they also outsource their understanding and experience of those books to AI.

@JimmyDorv I'm glad folks like @AlexAndBooks_ encourage the value of reading. There are many benefits to AI, but intellectual laziness is a real risk. Reading remains one of the best ways to build deep comprehension.

"Cognitive surrender is when you stop thinking altogether and blindly accept the answer the AI gives you"

@ZssBecker Books are the antidote to brainrot.

The best form of biohacking. Literally THE most incredible nootropic and brain fixer... Is reading chunky-thick fantasy books. Sit down. Read about elves and dragons. If you can do it for 2 hour a day your brain will turn into a sniper scope of focus.

@zeta_globin here you go: x.com/AlexAndBooks_/…

does anyone have any non-fiction audiobook or podcast recommendations! to listen to while speed cleaning my place for visitors this weekend

"I spent my whole life with dead people. They’re so much better than many of the people I’m with here on earth. All the dead people in the world, you can learn a lot from them. And they’re very convenient to reach. You reach out and grab a book." –Charlie Munger

@SteveStuWill @HTLGIFestival Adding this to my TBR list !

First sighting of my new book in the wild! At the @HTLGIFestival at Hay on Wye. #ABillionYearsOfSexDifferences

@CameronSorsby Great list Cameron!

We had fun putting this together. Can’t wait to crack them open with the students. September can’t get here soon enough!

@JoshuaLisec Great books to get people into reading–especially into nonfiction!

Whatever happened to Business Fables? I loved these! We need more, don't we. Would you write one? What would it be about?

@ItsKieranDrew The older, the better.

With AI, a good rule is to avoid reading books that are not 5 years old.

@CoachDanGo The 1 question I always ask myself, "Did you go outside today?" If not, there's a 99% chance going for a walk outside fixes my mood.

Are you really in a bad mood? Or did you not get enough sleep, didn't exercise, eat a shitty diet, and stayed inside all day rotting your brain with useless scrolling?

Tyler Cowen is the cofounder of Marginal Revolution. He's famously known as a great reader who reads 250+ books a year. Here are 17 helpful reading tips from @tylercowen: 1) "The important thing is to be ruthless with the books that are not good. Just stop reading, put them down." 2) "The best way to read quickly is to read lots. And lots. And to have started a long time ago. Then maybe you know what is coming in the current book." 3) "Sometimes authors just go on and on with blather or with personal detail that has no relevance to the argument or there are just pages of terminology. It’s like, well, you might still give the book a chance, but you start turning the pages more rapidly and you’re just waiting for some bit of meat." 4) "Authors should be able to signal by putting some good stuff up front, right? Because people are less patient than they used to be. A nineteenth-century book, you need to give it more time. It may not get good until chapter three, but these days, my goodness, you can tell so much sometimes just from the font of a book." 5) "The best reading is focused reading when you’re trying to solve some kind of problem. So, if I’m doing one of my own podcasts with a guest and then I’ll read or reread everything the guest has written." 6) "I advocate reading books in clusters. The author can be the clustering factor, it can be the topic, it can be the historical period, but you really get into a person’s mind if you reread everything they’ve done within the span of a few weeks or months and then watch them on YouTube and just try to think about and write out notes." 7) "You want to start with the problem or question when you’re reading. Again, you want to read books together in groups, and you want one of the early books to make the whole thing real or emotionally vivid to you. If you travel to a place, that will do it automatically, but if you’re not traveling, you want the book to do it, so your early book choice is quite important." 8) "I don’t know what’s the best book on ancient Egypt, but I know there’s enough uncertainty about what went on in ancient Egypt that there’s probably not a clearly well-defined, here’s-the-best-book-on-ancient-Egypt. So you want to read 10 or 20 of them and do a kind of cross-sectional mental econometrics and see which pieces start fitting together and take it from that. So, in so many areas it’s a mistake. “Oh, what’s the best book on X?” Rather you’re looking for some kind of portfolio of books on X." 9) "Reading fiction is important to understand the cross-sectional variation in humanity, to understand how difficult generalizations can be, to just get a sense of how social pieces fit together, and to get a sense of different historical errors. Plus reading fiction is often just plain, flat-out fun." 10) "I would say if you’re looking to read memoirs, don’t necessarily follow other people’s recommendations, focus on reading memoirs in areas you know something about. Then just Google to online lists. What are the best memoirs in that area? Read a bunch of those." 11) "Here’s the other next thing you should do: every area you don’t give a damn about, you probably should read at least one book in, because the very best book in that area is superb, and you’re not going to know what it is. So if tennis is something you don’t know anything about, well, read Andre Agassi’s memoir. That’s a wonderful book. You don’t have to know or care about tennis." 12) "Another way to read quickly is to cut bait on the losers. I start ten or so books for every one I finish. I don’t mind disliking a book, and I never regret having picked it up and started it. I am ruthless in my discards." 13) "Don’t focus on which books to read, focus on which questions to ask. Then the books, and other sources, will follow almost automatically." 14) "If you want to find new things in books you already know and love, opt for new editions, new translations, and new typesettings where you will encounter it as a very different visual and conceptual field." 15) "For truly serious books, I recommend the following. Read it once, straight through, with a minimum of fuss. If you get truly, totally stuck on some point, which the rest of the book depends upon, find somebody to ask. Otherwise just keep on plowing straight through. Then write a review of the book. Or jot down your notes, but in any case force yourself to take definite stances by putting words down on paper (or screen)." 16) "Reading groups can be useful to either a) force you to read a book you won’t otherwise pick up, b) force you to defend your point of view on a book, or c) induct you into knowing a book really really well when currently you only know the book well. Or, most of all, d) bond a group of people together." 17) "Take reading seriously. Develop a passion for it and view it as part of your practice as a knowledge worker to get ahead. Along the way, having fun doing so."

@nateliason That’s an awesome reading list

Fun hearing from parents how excited they are about the Freshman year reading list for Founders School. We’re very proud of it!

@JoannaStern @nytimes @USATODAY Congrats Joanna!

Thank you to everyone who has been so supportive of my book, I AM NOT A ROBOT. It just hit the @nytimes bestseller list. And the @USAToday list too! I can also confirm I am not a robot because I immediately cried when I found out.

@arthurbrooks Happy birthday @arthurbrooks ! 🥳

Birthdays have a way of making you take stock. What you do each morning sets the tone for your day. It affects your mood and how you respond to whatever comes your way, which is why it’s worth paying attention to. For me, today, like most days, that looked like waking up before sunrise, exercising, going to mass, coffee, breakfast, and getting to work on something meaningful. Your version may look different. But it’s a good reminder to ask whether your morning routines are helping you build the life you actually want.

@poorbjorn all good brother

@AlexAndBooks_ I hope you don’t mind that I borrowed your picture. Enjoy the book, man!

The post office doesn’t allow me to pick up my book because they fat-fingered some typos in their database. I need my Steve Jobs in Exile book now! 😠 How’s the book? Lucky person. Unlucky me: 👇 👇

@BookNoteApp I appreciate you making the exception 🙏

@AlexAndBooks_ I’m gonna skip the first rule when your book finally comes out. I hope that’s not a problem ;)

Ralph Waldo Emerson's 3 rules for reading: 1) Never read any book that is not a year old. 2) Never read any but famed books. 3) Never read any but what you like; or in Shakespeare’s phrase, “No profit goes where is no pleasure taken: In brief, sir, study what you most affect.”