Discover great authors from HEY World

George Lucas: A Life

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. George Lucas unapologetically invested in what he believed in the most: himself. 2. As soon as I made my first film I thought, Hey, I’m good at this. I know how to do this. From then on I’ve never questioned it. 3. When I discovered film I fell madly in love with it. I ate it. I slept it. 24 hours...

Quentin Tarantino's Cinema Speculation

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. Tarantino is possibly the most joyously infectious movie lover alive. 2. On the ride home, even if I didn't have questions, my parents would talk about the movie we had just seen. These are some of my fondest memories. 3. I was watching the most challenging movies of the greatest movie-making era ...

The Eternal Pursuit of Unhappiness: Being Very Good Is No Good, You...

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. Those who live by their wits go to work on roller coasters. The ride is exhilarating, but one has to have a stomach of titanium. 2. Bureaucracy has no place in an ideas company. 3. Discovery consists of seeing what everyone has seen and thinking what nobody has thought. 4. Rule #1: There are no ru...

The Lessons of History

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. In the end superior ability has its way. 2. History reports that the men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things, and the men who can manage money manage all. 3. Every advance in the complexity of the economy puts an added premium upon superior ability. 4. All technological ad...

Winning: The Unforgiving Race to Greatness

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. Everyone wanted to be like Mike. Mike did not want to be like anyone else. 2. Stop adding. Start deleting. Winning demands total focus. 3. Their minds were stronger than their feelings. 4. You can't buy a map to the top. 5. Motivation is entry level. 6. Every great creation and invention started w...

Relentless: From Good to Great to Unstoppable

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. You can't excel at anything before you train your mind. Mental dominance is what ultimately makes you unstoppable. 2. If one thing separated Michael from every other player, it was his stunning ability to block out everything and everyone else. He was able to shut out everything except his mission...

Joseph Duveen: Robber Baron Art Dealer

My top 10 highlights from The Days of Duveen by S.N. Behrman. 1. He repeated his cardinal dictum: "When you pay high for the priceless, you're getting it cheap." 2. Duveen noticed that Europe had plenty of art and America had plenty of money, and his entire astonishing career was the product of that simple observation. 3. Monopoly was ...

Monty Moncrief Texas Oil Billionaire

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. Optimism is the personal quality that nurtures luck. 2. No guts, no blue chips, has always been a wildcatter's expression of faith. 3. What they needed was a company that had a single man running it; no committees, no group decisions, no hierarchy of managers, no professional deal-killers or pessi...

Napoleon's Maxims

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. Hesitation and half measures lose all in war. 2. It is profitable to study the campaigns of the great masters. 3. A rapid march augments the morale of an army, and increases its means of victory. 4. Ten people who yell make more noise than ten thousand who keep silent. 5. Long orders, which requir...

The 38 Letters From J.D. Rockefeller to His Son

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. Visionary businessmen are always good at finding opportunities in every disaster. 2. The greatest reward for our hard work is not what we get, but what we become. 3. People who climb up in any industry are fully committed to what they are doing and are dedicated. Sincerely love the work you do; yo...

The NEW Poor Charlie's Almanack

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. Scale and fanaticism combined is very powerful. 2. The most important rule in management is get the incentives right. 3. You want to maximize the playing time of your top players. 4. There is an old two-part rule that often works wonders in business, science, and elsewhere: 1) Take a simple, basic...

Southwest Airlines' Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. No carrier knows its niche as well as Southwest. 2. While other carriers have been lured by the temptation to step outside their niche, Southwest has maintained the discipline to stay focused on its fundamental reason for being. 3. Southwest is obsessed with keeping costs low to maximize profitabi...

Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. Jeff had one simple rule: "It has to be perfect." He'd remind his team that one bad customer experience would undo the goodwill of hundreds of perfect ones. 2. Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. 3. Leaders have relentlessly high standards—many people may think these standards are ...

Young Titan: The Making of Winston Churchill

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. History likes winners. 2. At the heart of his story is an irrepressible spirit. 3. Little men let events take their course. I like things to happen, and if they don't happen I like to make them happen 4. While other politicians were content to get their information from a scattering of newspapers,...

Hero of the Empire: The Making of Winston Churchill

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. Always more audacity. (A maxim Churchill repeated to himself.) 2. The first time you meet Winston you see all his faults and the rest of your life you spend discovering his virtues. 3. I have faith in my star. I am intended to do something in the world. 4. Beyond the vaguest of outlines, he didn't...

The Forgotten Highlander

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. Invaders are always organized. 2. Every morning I would tell myself over and over: Survive this day. Survive this day. Survive this day. 3. On countless occasions I've seen two men with the same symptoms and same physical state and one will die and one will make it. I can only put that down to she...

Creativity, Inc.

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better. 2. Everything associated with our name needs to be good. Quality is the best business plan. 3. Every time ...

Bugatti

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. A human life, by its very nature, has to be devoted to something or other, to a glorious or humble enterprise, an illustrious or obscure destiny. This is a strange but inexorable condition of things. 2. His starting point was always to create the most extraordinary things. 3. You get the feeling o...

Balenciaga

My top 10 highlights from Balenciaga and Dior (Chapter 13 of Creators) 1. Dior dressed the rich, Balenciaga the very rich. 2. Of all the creative people I have come across, Cristóbal Balenciaga was easily the most dedicated to the business of making beautiful things. 3. From the age of three to his mid-twenties he learned every aspect ...

Come see a live show with me and Patrick O'Shaughnessy from Invest ...

I'm telling you first -- before this is announced publicly! I'm doing a live show at Webster Hall in New York City on October 19th. It will be me and Patrick O'Shaughnessy from Invest Like The Best and Positive Sum. Patrick has interviewed the world's best investors and founders on his podcast. I've read 300 biographies of history's gr...

Paul Graham (How to Do Great Work)

My top 10 highlights from the essay: 1. If you asked an oracle the secret to doing great work and the oracle replied with a single word, my bet would be on "curiosity." 2. Being prolific is underrated. 3. Seek out the best colleagues. 4. If you're interested you're not astray. 5. If you don't try to be the best you won't even be good. ...

Christopher Nolan

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. Nolan does not have an email account or a cell phone. 2. He dreams with his eyes open. 3. Memento was borne into the world on the back of obsession. 4. Nolan made it because he had to. 5. Minds don't wander on a Chris Nolan set. 6. Every film I do I have to believe that I'm making the best film th...

Mark Twain

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. Doors open at 7 o’clock. The trouble will begin at 8. 2. The ad itself became legendary: “Wanted: Young, skinny, wiry fellows not over eighteen. Must be expert riders, willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred.” 3. His death would not have lengthened the life of the Confederacy or the Union b...

James Cameron: The Futurist

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. He's a truck driver who directed the highest-grossing movie of all time and then ditched Hollywood to spend a decade of his life exploring the deep ocean and the heights of science. 2. It was plain to see that Cameron was a man on his own mission. 3. A man who seemed interested only in doing thing...

Walt Disney and Picasso

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. Disney put excellence before any other consideration. 2. Disney had the American entrepreneurial spirit to an unusual degree. 3. By the age of twenty he had already run his own company, gone bankrupt, and set up again. 4. Disney had a very hard time getting work in the movie industry, trudging fro...

Arnold Schwarzenegger Before He Was Successful

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. No one could restrain his mutinous energy. 2. What separates the champion from the guy that is the second best or the loser is the person who has the psychological advantage. Everything is the mind. I had a psychological advantage. 3. Not even his peers could understand the enormity of his lifetim...

The Founder of Glock

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. Quality will always bring you more money. 2. He evolved from a provincial manager of a radiator factory to a world traveling industrialist. 3. Glock started with a blank sheet of paper. As a result, he came up with something original. 4. Glock's gross margins exceeded 65%. The Glock's simple desig...

Dynasties: The World's Great Family Businesses

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. Good was never good enough. The company's slogan was kaizen: continuous improvement. 2. It is impossible to create an innovative product unless you do it yourself, pay attention to every detail, and then test it exhaustively. Never entrust the creation of a product to others, for that will inevita...

Confessions of an Advertising Man: David Ogilvy

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. You aren't advertising to a standing army; you are advertising to a moving parade. 2. I admire people who work hard, who bite the bullet. 3. Don't bunt. Aim out of the park. Aim for the company of immortals. 4. Only First Class business, and that in a First Class way. 5. M. Pitard did not tolerate...

Robert Caro on the relationship with your father, power, poverty, r...

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. He was a guy you couldn't deny anymore. 2. I asked Tommy the Cork what had changed Lyndon Johnson's status in October, 1940, he said: "Money, kid, money." 3. Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddamned page. 4. Power doesn't always corrupt. But what power always does is reveal. 5....

Sol Price: The Founder who taught Jim Sinegal, Jeff Bezos, Sam Walt...

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. You train an animal, you teach a person. 2. If you’re not spending 90% of your time teaching, you’re not doing your job. —Jim Sinegal. 3. If you want to be successful just put yourself in the place of a cranky, demanding customer. See your business through the eyes of the customer. 4. We have said...

Warren Buffett's Favorite Founder: Rose Blumkin

My top 10 highlights from the book: Listen to the Founders episode on this book 1. There are several "Going Out of Business" advertisements from competitors's stores framed and hanging on the wall. 2. What is your favorite thing to do on a nice evening? Drive around to check the competition and plan my next attack. 3. The woman who nev...

The Mind of Napoleon

My top 10 highlights from the book: Listen to the Founders episode on this book. 1. All great events hang by a single thread. The clever man takes advantage of everything, neglects nothing that may give him some added opportunity; the less clever man, by neglecting one thing, sometimes misses everything. 2. He knows that men have alway...

Bernard Arnault and the Moet-Hennessy Louis Vuitton Story

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. I may lose once but I never lose twice. 2. He had such an appetite for victory and such a capacity for work that he was bound to succeed. 3. Arnault is an iron fist in an iron glove. 4. He did not stray from his path. Relentlessly he pursued his ascent and seized every passing opportunity. 5. It i...

The Tao of Charlie Munger

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. Munger is a deeply perceptive observer of human nature. 2. In business we often find that the winning system goes almost ridiculously far in maximizing and or minimizing one or a few variables—like the discount warehouses of Costco. 3. The one thing that all of Berkshire's businesses have in commo...

The Founder of Rolls-Royce

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. Henry Royce had known poverty and hardship all his life.The only university he had graduated from was the one of hard knocks. 2. Henry Royce ruled the lives of the people around him, claimed their body and soul, even when they were asleep. 3. Many times our position was so precarious that it seeme...

Buffett and Munger: A Study in Simplicity and Uncommon, Common Sense

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. Wisdom is prevention. 2. The fundamental algorithm of life: repeat what works. 3. Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again. 4. The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful pe...

The Wright Brothers

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. Neither ever chose to be anything other than himself. 2. What the two had in common above all was unity of purpose and unyielding determination. They had set themselves on a mission. 3. A man who works for the immediate present and its immediate rewards is nothing but a fool. 4. Wilbur was little ...

Jay Z: Decoded

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. Even back then I thought I was the best. 2. I would practice from the time I woke in the morning until I went to sleep. 3. I'm not gonna say that I thought I could get rich from rap, but I could clearly see that it was gonna get bigger before it went away. Way bigger. 4. I believe you can speak th...

The Sugar King of Havana: The Rise and Fall of Julio Lobo, Cuba's L...

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. He was an individualist who did not spare himself any sacrifice to attain his objectives. 2. I will not whine, he once said, business is not a kissing game. 3. There are times when chasing the things money can buy, one loses sight of the things which money can't buy and are usually free. 4. Lobo's...

Beyond Possible: One Man, Fourteen Peaks, and the Mountaineering Ac...

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. We worked as a small expedition unit, in teams of three, four, or five, but we moved with the power of 10 bulls and the heart of a hundred men. 2. Walking out on my career felt risky, but I was prepared to gamble everything for my ambition. 3. From an early age, I believed in the power of positive...

To Pixar And Beyond: My Unlikely Journey with Steve Jobs to Make En...

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. Steve had an almost permanent intensity about him, like he was always in top gear. 2. Steve once told me that the gestation of great products takes much longer than it appears. What seems to emerge from nowhere belies a long process of development, trials, and missteps. 3. Once Steve decided what ...

Sam Walton: Made In America

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. We were serious operators who were in it for the long haul. We had a disciplined financial philosophy and we had growth on our minds. 2. You can make a lot of different mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation. Or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you’re too ...

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped ...

My top 15 highlights from the book: 1. Payne walked into Musk's bedroom. The room was literally filled with books—biographies about business luminaries and how they succeeded. It kind of clicked to me that Elon was prepping himself and studying to be a famous entrepreneur. 2. "I think you may misread me a little. My mind is always on X...

Alexander the Great: The Brief Life and Towering Exploits of Histor...

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. No trait of Alexander's was more firmly held or enduring than his admiration for genuine excellence and brilliant achievement. 2. Stand firm, for it is toil and danger that lead to glorious achievements. 3. True men need no reward for their labors aside from those labors themselves, as long as the...

Time to Make the Donuts: The Founder of Dunkin Donuts Shares an Ame...

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. Find solutions under any circumstances. 2. There's nothing in the world you can do to solve the problems of a liar. 3. Adversity is a great teacher. 4. One of the best lessons I ever learned from my dad is what he didn’'t do properly. Sometimes the best lessons you learn in life are from what you ...

The Autobiography of Lucille Ball

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. People with happy childhoods never overdo; they don't strive or exert themselves. They're moderate, pleasant, well liked, and good citizens. Society needs them. But the tremendous drive and dedication necessary to succeed in any field-not only show business-often seems to be rooted in a disturbed ...

Mind Your Own Business: A Maverick's Guide to Business, Leadership ...

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. I regard myself as guardian of the company’s soul. 2. Reducing business matters to their essence, whittling away that which obscures or is unnecessary, has served me well. I admire greatly those who practice the art. 3. I loved building a business. What could be better? The products were wonderful...

The Essays of Warren Buffett

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. On a daily basis, the effects of our actions are imperceptible; cumulatively, though, their consequences are enormous. 2. We play offense while others scramble for survival. 3. Games are won by players who focus on the playing field—not by those whose eyes are glued to the scoreboard. 4. Forming m...

Heroes: From Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar to Churchill and...

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. Four principal traits of heroes: Absolute independence of mind. Think everything through yourself. Treat whatever is the current consensus on any issue with skepticism. Act resolutely and consistently. Ignore the media. Act with personal courage at all times, regardless of the consequences to your...

Churchill

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. He read everything of value he could get his hands on, and forgot nothing he read. 2. He thirsted for office, power, and the chance to make history. 3. It is not easy to classify Churchill. 4. Never flinch, never weary, never despair. 5. Churchill was never content to be silent or inactive when th...

Unstoppable: Siggi B. Wilzig's Astonishing Journey from Auschwitz S...

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. Never give up. Only death is permanent. Everything else can be fixed. 2. I couldn't take such talk about not coming out alive. I didn't want to hear it. Whenever my mind told me I was not going to survive, the Almighty told me to keep going. So I stayed away from the others. 3. Because I could out...

Damn Right: Behind the Scenes with Berkshire Hathaway Billionaire C...

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. The rabbit runs faster than the fox, because the rabbit is running for his life while the fox is only running for his dinner. 2. I had a considerable passion to get rich. Not because I wanted Ferraris—I wanted the independence. I desperately wanted it. 3. He wouldn't accept anything on face value....

Enzo Ferrari: The Man and the Machine

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. If there was one essential quality about the man it was his ironbound tenacity, his fierce devotion to the single cause of winning automobile races with cars bearing his name. For nearly sixty years, hardly a day passed when this thought was not foremost in his mind. Win or lose, he unfailingly an...

Anthony Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. He demanded excellence, and he never settled for shit. He just wanted the show to be the greatest thing ever, all the time. 2. It was his life's work, and he never slacked. 3. He gave me really good advice: "Stay public. You gotta promote, promote, promote, or it all dies. You just gotta be out th...

My Turn: A Life of Total Football

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. I'm not capable of doing something at a low level. 2. It doesn't work without full commitment. 3. I'm definitely cunning. I'm always on the lookout for the best advantage. 4. Winning was the consequence of the process that we had concentrated on. 5. A setback is probably a sign that you need to ma...

The Autobiography of Estée Lauder

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. Risk taking is the cornerstone of empires. No one ever became a success without taking chances. 2. I was single-minded in the pursuit of my dream. 3. I sometimes wonder if I had set my heart on selling tassels, cars, furniture, or anything else but beauty, would I have risen to the top of a profes...

Authentic: A Memoir by the Founder of Vans

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. The way we deal with hardship is our legacy. You can accept defeat, or you can overcome it. 2. Quitting Randy's had probably been the biggest stroke of luck in my life. Opportunity is a strange beast. 3. Whenever a situation went sideways and things looked dire, I always called up my one superpowe...

The General and the Genius: Groves and Oppenheimer —The Unlikely Pa...

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. It is clear that nothing short of a full-speed, all-out attempt would be worthwhile. 2. Once Leslie Groves accepted his new assignment, he embraced it completely. From his appointment in September 1942 until the end of the war, he worked at full speed, often fourteen hours a day or more. His remar...

Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. He had the attitude that he could do anything, and therefore so can you. 2. He refused to accept automatically received truths, and he wanted to examine everything himself. 3. Picasso had a saying—‘good artists copy, great artists steal’—and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas...

A Man For All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat th...

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. The book reveals a thorough, rigorous, methodical person in search of life, knowledge, financial security, and, not least of all, fun. 2. I learned at an early age to teach myself. This paid off later on because there weren’t any courses in how to beat blackjack, build a computer for roulette, or ...

Michael Jordan: Driven From Within

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. Players who practice hard when no one is paying attention play well when everyone is watching. 2. It's hard, but it's fair. I live by those words. 3. To this day, I don't enjoy working. I enjoy playing, and figuring out how to connect playing with business. To me, that's my niche. People talk abou...

Michael Jordan: The Life

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. His competence was exceeded only by his confidence. 2. He worked at the game, and if he wasn't good at something, he had the motivation to be the best at it. 3. Whenever I was working out and got tired and figured I ought to stop, I'd close my eyes and see that list in the locker room without my n...

Aristotle Onassis: An Extravagant Life

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. He became one of the richest men in U.S. history ever to be arrested. 2. The epic life of Aristotle Onassis is as mysterious as a tale from ancient Greek mythology and is a study of paradoxes, altogether gripping because of their seeming inconsistencies. 3. Onassis had long since begun to formulat...

Stephen King on Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. My earliest memory is of imagining I was someone else. 2. By the time I was fourteen the nail in wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing. 3. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer w...

Steven Spielberg: A Biography

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. Whatever is there, he makes it work. 2. Spielberg once defined his approach to filmmaking by declaring, "I am the audience." 3. "He said, 'I want to be a director.' And I said, 'Well, if you want to be a director, you've gotta start at the bottom, you gotta be a gofer and work your way up.' He sai...

In the Company of Giants: Candid Conversations with the Visionaries...

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. A small team of A+ players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players. —Steve Jobs 2. There are no shortcuts around quality, and quality starts with people. —Steve Jobs 3. Usually people never think that much about what they're doing or why they do it. They just do it because that's th...

Scientific Advertising

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. Individuals come and go, but they leave their records and ideas behind them. These become a guide to all who follow. 2. Genius is the art of taking pains. 3. The best ads ask no one to buy. That is useless. The best ads are based entirely on service. They offer wanted information. They site advant...

The Man Who Sold America: The Amazing (but True!) Story of Albert D...

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. Advertising is a very simple thing. I can give it to you in three words: Salesmanship in print. 2. Before he arrived on the scene, advertising agencies were mostly brokers of space in newspapers and magazines. With Lasker's prodding, the industry became a creative force and began earning substanti...

Invention: A Life by James Dyson

My highlights from the book: 1. This is a story told through a life of creating and developing things, as well as expressing a call to arms for young people to become engineers, creating solutions to our current and future problems. 2. I have tried to seek out those young people who can make the world a better place. I have seen what m...

Creative Capital: Georges Doriot and the Birth of Venture Capital

My highlights from the book: 1. He was very important because he was the first one to believe there was a future in financing entrepreneurs in an organized way. 2. He brought a unique style to everything he did. 3. He called his course Manufacturing, but it was really his philosophy of life and of business. 4. At Harvard, Doriot became...

Inside Steve Jobs' Brain

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don't take the time to do that. 2. He remade Apple in his own image. Apple is Steve Jobs with ten thousand lives. 3. I'm looking for a fixer-upper with a solid foundatio...

The Operator: David Geffen Builds, Buys, and Sells the New Hollywood

My highlights from the book: 1. He told me he had recently read Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist, Buffett was Geffen's hero. 2. Geffen—with searing focus, unyielding drive, and outlandish nerve—had devised and implemented strategies to propel himself to the top of the heap of Hollywood powerbrokers. 3. I used to have phone...

A Few Lessons for Investors and Managers From Warren Buffett

My top highlights from this book: 1. Big opportunities come infrequently. When it’s raining gold, reach for a bucket, not a thimble. 2. Speculation is most dangerous when it looks easiest. 3. Now it is a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best you very often get it. —W. Somerset Maugham 4. "Moats" —a metap...

Isambard Kingdom Brunel

My top highlights from this book: 1. His career was to him a tremendous adventure. 2. I have always made it a rule, which I have found by some years experience a safe and profitable one, to have nothing to do with newspaper articles. 3. It is consoling to be thus reminded that the lunatic fringe is a hardy perennial and not a phenomeno...

Coco Chanel: The Legend and The Life

Here are some of my favorite ideas from the book: Hack away at the unessential: Coco made hats that were stripped of embellishments, of the frills that she dismissed as weighing a woman down. . . Nothing makes a woman look older than obvious expensiveness, ornateness, complication, she said. Be default aggressive: Coco began to edge he...

The House of Rothschild: Money's Prophets 1798-1848

My highlights from the book: 1. A business can only be managed well if one pays as much attention to the smaller business transactions as one does to the larger ones. 2. All banks have histories, only the Rothschilds have a mythology. 3. Ever since the second decade of the nineteenth century, there has been speculation about the origin...

Founder: A Portrait of the First Rothschild and His Time

My highlights from the book: 1. Riches cover a multitude of woes. 2. Only a few crumbling bricks are left today of the dark, foul-smelling alley in Frankfurt where, in the second half of the eighteenth century, a disenfranchised Jew named Meyer Rothschild founded a European banking dynasty. 3. Rothschild was a man of seemingly inexhaus...

The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defianc...

My highlights from the book: 1. I started thinking about London and the German aerial assault of 1940-41, and wondered how on earth anyone could have endured it: fifty-seven consecutive nights of bombing, followed by an intensifying series of nighttime raids over the next six months. In particular I thought about Winston Churchill: How...

Sid Meier's Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games

My highlights from the book: 1. Sometimes it takes a misstep to figure out where you should be headed. 2. Each game taught me something, each game was both painful and gratifying in its own way, and each game contributed to what came after it. 3. We are surrounded by decisions, and therefore games, in everything we do. 4. If my gravest...

Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Ernest Hemingway's Secret Adventures,...

My highlights from the book: 1. Hastily pulled together to fight the Axis, OSS was an odd creature—at once a collection of men and women from the upper crust of society on America's east coast, and a magnet for astonishingly talented and creative people from all walks of life, from Wall Street lawyers to Hollywood filmmakers, even the ...

Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder

My highlights from the book: 1. It was the summer I turned fifteen, a magical season for me because that year I'd discovered exactly what I wanted to do with my life. I knew I was going to be a bodybuilder. It wasn't simply that either. I would be the best bodybuilder in the world, the greatest. 2. I'm not exactly sure why I chose body...

Big Brown: The Untold Story of UPS

My highlights from the book: 1. Casey pursued a Spartan business philosophy that emphasized military discipline, drab uniforms, and reliability over flash. 2. I had heard stories about the company's tireless founder. He was a living legend. Jim Casey started working from the age of eleven to support a family of five. 3. Casey began at ...

The Invisible Billionaire: Daniel Ludwig

My highlights from the book: 1. The cameraman was excited and more than a little nervous. In a matter of moments he would enjoy a unique opportunity: the chance to snap the first unposed picture ever taken of the richest man in the world. The strange thing was that most Americans had never even heard of Daniel Keith Ludwig. 2. How coul...

Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary

My highlights from the book: 1. The more successful Linux and open source became the least he wanted to talk about it. The accidental revolutionary started Linux beause playing on a computer was fun. 2. Revolutionaries aren't born. Revolutions can't be planned. Revolutions can't be managed. Revolutions happen. 3. Basically it is short ...

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness

My highlights from the book: 1. Naval has changed my life for the better, and if you approach the following pages like a friendly but highly competent sparring partner, he might just change yours. 2. Books make for great friends, because the best thinkers of the last few thousand years tell you their nuggets of wisdom. 3. If you don't ...

The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Mo...

My highlights from the book: 1. It dawned on me that the hordes of financial novices might be ripe for a history that would chronicle how the old Wall Street evolved into the new. A straight history would be a tedious task for readers and do small justice to the turbulent pageant of heroes and scoundrels I was unearthing. 2. So I posed...

The Vagabonds: The Story of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison's Ten-Year...

My highlights from the book: 1. Ford generally accepted the responsibilities of his celebrity-he'd worked diligently to cultivate it, realizing early on that his personal fame heightened demand for Model Ts. 2. Ford's Model T changed everything. Thanks in great part to Ford's innovative assembly line, Model Ts were mass-produced on a p...

Broken Genius: The Rise and Fall of William Shockley, Creator of th...

My highlights from the book: 1. Why would a man as unquestionably brilliant as he knowingly and deliberately destroy himself? 2. The rise and fall of Bill Shockley’s company took less than a year and a half. It profoundly affected Shockley, but had even more impact on the world around him and on our lives today. In all of the history o...

Rocket Man: Robert H. Goddard and the Birth of the Space Age

My highlights from the book: 1. There are limitless opportunities open to the man who appreciates the fact that his own mind is the sole key that unlocks them. 2. A boy of exceptional brilliance, of humble origins and poor health, who dreamed great dreams and pursued them throughout a dedicated life. He was a distinguished but absentmi...

My Life with Charlie Brown

My highlights from the book: 1. You don’t work all of your life to do something so you don’t have to do it. 2. Beginning with the first strip published on October 2nd, 1950, until the last published on Sunday, February 13th, 2000, the day after his death, Schultz wrote, penciled, inked, and lettered by hand every single one of the dail...

The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes

My highlights from the book: 1. There really were poor Texas boys who discovered gushing oil wells and became overnight billionaires, patriarchs of squabbling families who owned private islands and colossal mansions and championship football teams, who slept with movie stars, and jousted with presidents, and tried to corner an internat...

The Hour of Fate: Theodore Roosevelt, J.P. Morgan, and the Battle t...

My highlights from the book: 1. Morgan was the most influential of these businessmen. He wasn’t the richest but that didn’t matter; he was commanding in a way none could match. 2. He was comfortable in his dominion, though never with his fame. 3. Morgan had an aristocrat’s disdain for public sentiment and the conviction that his action...

Overnight Success: Federal Express And: Frederick Smith, Its Renega...

My highlights from the book: 1. At age thirty Fredrick Wallace Smith was in deep trouble. His dream of creating Federal Express had become too expensive and was fast fizzling out. He had exhausted his father’s Greyhound Bus millions. He was hock for 15 or 20 million more. He appeared in danger of losing his cargo jet planes and also hi...

Revolver: Sam Colt and the Six-Shooter That Changed America

My highlights from the book: 1. Brilliantly told, Revolver brings the brazenly ambitious and profoundly innovative industrialist and leader Samuel Colt to vivid life. In the space of his forty-seven years, he seemingly lived five lives: he traveled, womanized, drank prodigiously, smuggled guns to Russia, bribed politicians, and supplie...

Becoming Dr. Seuss: Theodor Geisel and the Making of an American Im...

My highlights from the book: 1. Ted came to appreciate the considerable discipline and commitment it took to hone expertise. 2. He was an inspiration. Whatever you do, he taught me, do it to perfection. 3. You’re crazy to be a professor she told Ted. What you really want to do is draw. 4. The money he earned through his advertising wor...

Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire

My highlights from the book: 1. Microsoft had become the first software company to sell more than a billion dollars worth of software in a single year. 2. Gates was the undisputed mastermind of that success, a brilliant technocrat, ruthless salesman, and manipulative businessman. 3. Gates had slammed his fist into his palm and vowed to...

Personal History: The Autobiography of Katherine Graham

My highlights from the book: 1. The fatigue of the climb was great but it is interesting to learn once more how much further one can go on one’s second wind. I think that is an important lesson for everyone to learn for it should also be applied to one’s mental efforts. Most people go through life without ever discovering the existence...

Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos, With an In...

My highlights from the book: 1. The whole point of moving things forward is that you run into problems, failures, things that don't work. You need to back up and try again. Each one of those times when you have a setback, you get back up and you try again. You're using resourcefulness; you're using self-reliance; you're trying to inven...

Hershey: Milton S. Hershey's Extraordinary Life of Wealth, Empire, ...

My highlights from the book: 1. The town of Hershey had been created first in the imagination of the chocolate industrialist Milton S. Hershey, who then made it real in a place where there had been little more than a few farmhouses and acres of corn. The chocolate factory, the school, and the town were supposed to make up a self-perpet...

The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst

My highlights from the book: 1. When Hearst was in college, he wrote his father that he intended to do something in publishing and politics -and he did, becoming San Francisco's, then New York's, and finally the nation's most powerful publisher. He served two terms in Congress and was, for half a century, a major force in American poli...

Routines and Orgies: The Life of Peter Cundill, Financial Genius, P...

My highlights from the book: 1. Excellence as a goal in itself had been drummed into him from early boyhood. 2. I’m convinced that to achieve real greatness a person needs above all to have passion but at the same time immense discipline, concentration, patience and an unshakeable determination to become a master of his craft. 3. There...

Tuxedo Park : A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science...

My highlights from the book: 1. Few men of Loomis’ prominence and achievement have gone to greater lengths to foil history. 2. Independently wealthy, iconoclastic, and aloof, Loomis did not conform to the conventional measure of a great scientist. He was too complex to categorize—financier, philanthropist, society figure, physicist, in...

Mornings on Horseback: The Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vani...

My highlights from the book: 1. I felt great admiration for men who were fearless and I had a great desire to be like them. 2. There runs a theme of the pleasure and pride in being the first to see or do something, an eagerness to set himself apart from the others, to distinguish himself, to get out ahead of them; or simply be alone, a...

Alfred Nobel: A Biography

My highlights from the book: 1. The self-awareness that would become so characteristic of him was awakening and with it the determination to be the master of every situation. He was not going to throw himself into the world and let luck or chance lead the way. 2. When it comes to serious matters, I have adopted the rule of acting serio...

Yeager: An Autobiography

My highlights from the book: 1. In nearly every case the worst pilots die by their own stupidity. 2. I sensed that he was a very strong and determined person, a poor boy who had started with nothing and would show the world what he was really made of. 3. Every muscle in my body is hammering at me. I just want to let go of this guy and ...

Sam Walton: The Inside Story of America's Richest Man

My highlights from the book: 1. Sam Walton was no ordinary man. He was a genius in business with an iron mind —some say pig-headed—unwilling to compromise any of his carefully thought out policies and principles. 2. To him, making money was only a game. A test of his imagination and expertise to see how far he could drive a business co...

Swimming Across: A Memoir

My highlights from the book: 1. I was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1936. By the time I was twenty, I had lived through a Hungarian Fascist dictatorship, German military occupation, the Nazis’ “Final Solution,” the siege of Budapest by the Soviet Red Army, a period of chaotic democracy in the years immediately after the war, a variety o...

The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created...

My highlights from the book: 1. The history of the world is but the biography of great men. 2. She deserves respect as a person who, rising above the expectations of her background and gender and defying plagues of family demons, dedicated herself diligently to complex mathematical feats that most of us never would or could attempt. 3....

Jackie Cochran: An Autobiography

My highlights from the book: 1. At the time of her death on August 9, 1980, Jacqueline Cochran held more speed, altitude, and distance records than any other pilot, male or female, in aviation history. 2. Jacqueline Cochran was a self-named, self-created phenomenon. Whatever the circumstances of her birth, she must have been born fight...

The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Sil...

My highlights from the book: 1. Bob Noyce took me under his wing,” Steve Jobs explains. “I was young, in my twenties. He was in his early fifties. He tried to give me the lay of the land, give me a perspective that I could only partially understand.” Jobs continues, “You can’t really understand what is going on now unless you understan...

The Autobiography of Walter Chrysler

My highlights from the book: 1. Every time we had a conversation he [Walter Chrysler] shed tears yet always what started them was thinking of the past when he was a poor young man. At first, I mistakenly supposed that he was feeling sorry for himself. Finally, I came to realize what it was that so deeply moved him when he contemplated ...

Driven: An Autobiography

My highlights from the book: 1. The Larry H. Miller Group, which produces $3.2 billion in sales annually, ranking it among the 200 largest privately-owned companies in the United States. 2. All of this blossomed from a single car dealership with fewer than 30 employees. 3. He was an ordinary man even though he did extraordinary things....

The Unpublished David Ogilvy

My highlights from the book: 1. Words were what made him. Reading this collection, one is struck, piece after piece, whether in the most apparently (but perhaps not so) casual of memoranda or the most public of pronouncements, by how David's words surprise and seduce, tease and provoke. 2. His writing is opinionated, forceful, and urge...

Barnum: An American Life

My highlights from the book: 1. Barnum is a representative man. He represents the enterprise and energy of his countrymen in the nineteenth century, as Washington represented their resistance to oppression in the century preceding. 2. Even as a young man he had an unfailing sense of what the public wanted, yet he could be brazenly mani...

No Better Time: The Brief, Remarkable Life of Danny Lewin, the Geni...

My highlights from the book: 1. When he spoke about topics that energized him, which seemed to include almost everything, Lewin became so animated-arms gesticulating, eyes ablaze-that his enthusiasm was infectious. “What stood out to me was how engaging he was, almost like this live wire. When Danny was excited about something, you cou...

How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story

My highlights from the book: 1. Evan decided to study product design, to learn how to look at the things he used in his daily life and see how he could make them better and cooler. 2. One thing was clear; as he frequently put it, “I’m not going to work for someone else.” 3. While the outcome was disappointing, Evan learned a valuable l...

Finding the Next Steve Jobs: How to Find, Keep, and Nurture Talent

My highlights from the book: 1. In 1980, business at my company, Chuck E . Cheese’s, was thriving and I was feeling flush. So I bought a very large house in Paris. We threw a huge party, inviting everyone I knew at Chuck E . Cheese’s and my other company, Atari, and all my old friends as well. I looked up and noticed that my former Ata...

The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story

My highlights from the book: 1. Maybe somewhere in a footnote, it would be mentioned that he came from nothing, grew up poor, dropped out of high school, and made himself three or four billion dollars. 2. Clark was the first person to create three different multibillion dollar technology companies. 3. Oddly enough, this character at th...

Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller

My highlights from the book: 1. They had carried with them the frugal culture of Puritan New England, which John D. Rockefeller would come to exemplify. 2. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that there was something extraordinary about the way this stolid boy pinpointed goals and doggedly pursued them without any trace of childi...

Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Vis...

My highlights from the book: 1. I kept coming back to the time that many have described as his "wilderness" years, the dozen years between his first tenure at Apple and his return. That era, from 1985 to 1997, is easy to overlook. Those years are in fact the critical ones of his career. That's when he learned most everything that made ...

The Autobiography of Henry Ford

My highlights from the book: 1. Power and machinery, money and goods, are useful only as they set us free to live. They are but means to an end. 2. The fact that the commercial success of the Ford Motor Company has been most unusual is important only because it serves to demonstrate, in a way which no one can fail to understand, that t...

Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business

My highlights from the book: 1. If you want to persist and thrive, you’d better not rest on your laurels. 2. There’s nothing I’d rather be doing. I was born to go into business for myself — and I was destined to find a business that would allow me to share with others my enthusiasm for things I find pleasurable. 3. This is not a typica...

Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power

My highlights from the book: 1. Joseph Pulitzer was the midwife to the birth of the modern mass media. Pulitzer’s lasting achievement was to transform American journalism into a medium of mass consumption and immense influence. 2. Pulitzer never relaxed his grip on the World, his influential New York newspaper that had ushered in the m...

Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the B...

My highlights from the book: 1. I wrote this book to help entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs. That's why there's a lack of miracles and a surplus of marketing details including buying, advertising, distributing, and running stores; and lots of discussion of how we built a successful business on high wages. 2. The general theme in...

Einstein: His Life and Universe

My highlights from the book: 1. In a drama that would seem fake were it not so horrifying, Einstein’s brain ended up being, for more than four decades, a wandering relic. 2. Einstein remained consistent in his willingness to be a serenely amused loner who was comfortable not conforming. 3. “In teaching history,” Einstein replied, “ther...

Nuts!: Southwest Airlines' Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal S...

My highlights from the book: 1. This eccentric and outlandish company has established a consistent pattern of deviating from convention. When other airlines were creating big hubs, Southwest was flying point to point. Instead of serving expensive meals, flight attendants pass out nuts. Instead of wearing stuffy uniforms, they sport pol...

Ritz and Escoffier: The Hotelier, The Chef, and the Rise of the Lei...

My highlights from the book: 1. He hasn't the least idea how much work and care, how much imagination and effort, go into the proper running of a hotel. 2. This was the very heart of a world that had shaped him, a world of privilege and luxury in which he had forged a place for himself, against all odds. Ritz had not been born to this ...

Four Seasons: The Story of a Business Philosophy

My highlights from the book: 1. He refused to settle for the pragmatic dictum of maturity. Issy also skipped skepticism and "Let's be sensible." People said he was naïve, with a kind of glandular optimism. Perhaps. But as it turned out naïveté served him well. 2. Early on he made some audacious statements that sounded like pipe dreams....

Leonardo da Vinci

My highlights from the book: 1. They ended up having a discussion of how creativity occurs. Sometimes it requires going slowly, pausing, even procrastinating. That allows ideas to marinate, Leonardo explained. Intuition needs nurturing. 2. His notebooks are the greatest record of curiosity ever created, a wondrous guide to the most rel...

Sam Walton: Made In America

My highlights from the book: 1. Most everything I’ve done I’ve copied from somebody else. 2. Two things about Sam Walton distinguish him from almost everyone else I know. First, he gets up every day bound and determined to improve something. Second, he is less afraid of being wrong than anyone I’ve ever known. And once he sees he’s wro...

The Intel Trinity: How Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove B...

My highlights from this book: 1. Each night he would practice a technique he called “envisioning myself at the next level,” in which he would imagine doing his dives perfectly. In this he would presage the “mental rehearsal” training of Olympic and professional athletes but also invented a mental habit for himself that he would continu...

Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike

My highlights from the book: 1. In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind, there are few. 2. Life is a game. Whoever denies that truth, whoever refuses to play, gets left on the sidelines, and I didn’t want that. 3. Lightness, Bowerman believed, directly translated into less burden, more energy, and...

Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's

My highlights from this book: 1. I never considered my dreams wasted energy. They were invariably linked to some form of action. 2. It was a restaurant stripped down to the minimum in service and menu. Of course, the simplicity of the procedures allowed the McDonald’s to concentrate on quality in every step. That was the trick. 3. I ha...

Steve Jobs

My highlights from this book: 1. Jobs’ intensity was also evident in his ability to focus. He would set priorities, aim his laser attention on them, and filter out distractions. 2. “There is something indefinable in an entrepreneur, and I saw that in Steve,” Nolan Bushnell said. “I taught him that if you act like you can do something, ...

I Invented The Modern Age: The Rise of Henry Ford

My highlights from this book: 1. “The most beautiful things in the world,” Ford said, “are those from which all the excess weight has been eliminated.” 2. Ford had just one sales strategy, and that was to keep lowering the price of the car. 3. The conclusion of his report is a succinct summary of what would enable Henry Ford to sell mo...

Johnny Carson

My highlights from this book: 1. Johnny was comfortable in front of twenty million but uncomfortable in a gathering of twenty. 2. He had too keen an appreciation for how much work and talent and discipline went into success to be flattered by praise and adulation 3. Johnny Carson performed on television, but he didn’t watch it. 4. Cars...

Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist

My highlights from the book: 1. His talent sprang from his unrivaled independence of mind and ability to focus on his work and shut out the world, yet those same qualities exacted a toll. 2. Berkshire was a "job" to him in the sense that England was a job to Churchill. 3. He emerged from those first hard years with an absolute drive to...

The Story of Oregon's Legendary Coach and Nike's Cofounder

My highlights from the book: 1. Celebrate optimum rather than maximum. 2. Take a primitive organism, any weak, pitiful organism. Say a freshman. Make it lift, or jump or run. Let it rest. What happens? A little miracle. It gets a little better. It gets a little stronger or faster or more enduring. That's all training is. Stress. Recove...

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

My highlights from the book: 1. He had found a way to block out the world and dedicate all of his concentration to a single task. 2. “It is perhaps worth noting that those launch companies that succeeded also took their lumps along the way,” Musk wrote in a postmortem. “A friend of mine wrote to remind me that only 5 of the first 9 Peg...

George Lucas: A Life

My highlights from this book: 1. Lucas unapologetically invested in what he believed in the most: himself. 2. “What we’re striving for is total freedom, where we can finance our pictures, make them our way, release them where we want them released, and be completely free to express ourselves,” explained Lucas. “That’s very hard to do i...

The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Moder...

My highlights from the book: 1. Having one's own shop, working on projects of one’s own choosing, making enough money today so one could do the same tomorrow: These were the modest goals of Thomas Edison when he struck out on his own as full-time inventor and manufacturer. The grand goal was nothing other than enjoying the autonomy of ...

Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination

My highlights from the book: 1. He was a doting father who sheltered them from his own fame. He enjoyed telling how six-year-old Diane had asked him if he was Walt Disney. “You know I am,” he answered. “The Walt Disney?” she questioned. When he chortled that he was, she asked for his autograph. He would chase the girls around the house...

The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Ration...

My highlights from the book: 1. It is impossible to produce superior performance unless you do something different. 2. Henry Singleton was a remarkable man with an unusual background for a CEO. A world-class mathematician who enjoyed playing chess blindfolded, he had programmed MIT’s first computer while earning a doctorate in electric...

The Autobiography of John D. Rockefeller

My highlights from the book: 1. Don’t even think of temporary advantages. Don’t waste your effort on a thing which ends in a petty triumph unless you are satisfied with a life of petty success. 2. As our successes began to come, I seldom put my head upon the pillow at night without speaking a few words to myself in this wise: "Now a li...

Copy This!: How I turned Dyslexia, ADHD, and 100 square feet into a...

My highlights from the book: 1. I graduated from high school eighth from the bottom of my class of 1,200. Frankly, I still have no idea how those seven kids managed to do worse than I did. 2. Too many people are mired in the details of their lives. They are stuck down “in" their lives, rather than staying "on" them. They miss the large...

The Wright Brothers

My highlights from the book: 1. Orville’s first teacher in grade school, would remember him at his desk tinkering with bits of wood. Asked what he was up to, he told her he was making a machine of a kind that he and his brother were going to fly someday. 2. What is most uncharacteristic about the pose is that they sit doing nothing, so...

The Richest Woman in America: Hetty Green in the Gilded Age

My top 20 highlights from the book: 1. I go my own way, take no partners, risk nobody else’s fortune. 2. I have had fights with some of the greatest financial men in the country. Did you ever hear of any of them getting ahead of Hetty Green? 3. A few clever men like Russell Sage, a future role model for Hetty, kept substantial amounts ...

Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

My highlights from Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage: 1. In appreciation for whatever it is that makes men accomplish the impossible. 2. Their plight was naked and terrifying in its simplicity: If they were to get out—they had to get themselves out. 3. The motto of his family: By endurance we conquer. 4. From studying the outco...

Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products

My highlights from the book: 1. I just wanted a sound bite, but he launched into a passionate, twenty-minute soliloquy about his latest work. I could barely get a word in edgewise. He couldn't help himself: Design is his passion. 2. The thing is, it's very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better. 3. It becomes about conse...

Born of This Land: My Life Story

My highlights from the book: 1. In one lifetime, we can become a revered, immortalized politician, a scholar, a revolutionary, a writer, a musician, a painter, or a businessman like those we admire. These remarkable people did not take two or three lifetimes to accomplish what they did. They did it in one. 2. I think there is nothing m...

Les Schwab Pride in Performance: Keep It Going

My top 20 highlights from the book: 1. Whatever you do, you must do it with gusto, you must do it in volume. It is a case of repeat, repeat, repeat. 2. Life is hard for the man who thinks he can take a short cut. 3. I did write this 100% with my 40 year old typewriter. I didn’t have a ghost writer. I wanted it in my own words. 4. I hop...

Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop...

My highlights from the book: 1. Carmack and Romero personified an American dream: they were self-made individuals who had transformed their personal passions into a big business, a new art form, and a cultural phenomenon. Their story made them the unlikeliest of antiheroes. 2. The twenty-nine-year-old Carmack was a monkish and philanth...

A Triumph of Genius: Edwin Land, Polaroid, and the Kodak Patent War

My top 20 highlights from the book: 1. As a colleague acknowledged many years later, this man “never had an ordinary reaction to anything.” 2. There’s a rule they don’t teach you at Harvard Business School: if anything is worth doing, it’s worth doing to excess. 3. Land recalled that his “whole life has been spent trying to teach peopl...

The Autobiography of Arnold Schwarzenegger

My top 20 highlights from Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story 1. I decided that the best course for independence was to mind my own business and make my own money. 2. I never felt that I was good enough, strong enough, smart enough. He let me know that there was always room for improvement. A lot of sons would have been cripp...

Disney's Land: Walt Disney and the Invention of the Amusement Park ...

My notes from Disney's Land: Walt Disney and the Invention of the Amusement Park That Changed the World turned into maxims: • You have time. Walt Disney created his masterpiece when he was 55. • Great products are not built by consensus. Disneyland was an extension of the personality of its creator. • Invert. Everyone thought building ...

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

My highlights from the book: 1. He had an utter aversion to doing anything conventionally. 2. Every interesting thing I've ever done, every important thing I've ever done, every beneficial thing I've ever done, has been through a cascade of experiments and mistakes and failures. I'm covered in scar tissues as a result of this. 3. If Be...

Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

My highlights from the book: 1. To that Amazon is an unconventional company is an undersay statement. Its most significant initiatives have often been criticized and even derided as folly. 2. This book is primarily about showing you some of the unique principles and processes at Amazon with enough detail that you will be able to implem...

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon

My highlights from The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon: 1. When you are eighty years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are o...

Let My People Go Surfing

My highlights from Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman 1. I learned at an early age that it’s better to invent your own game; then you can always be a winner. 2. In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take awa...

Confessions of an Advertising Man

My highlights from Confessions of an Advertising Man: 1. If you detect a slight stench of conceit in this book, I would have you know that my conceit is selective. I am a miserable duffer in everything except advertising. I cannot read a balance sheet, work a computer, ski, sail, play golf, or paint. 2. Search all the parks in all your...

Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger

My highlights from the book. 1. Cicero, learned man that he was, believed in self-improvement so long as breath lasts. 2. In business we often find that the winning system goes almost ridiculously far in maximizing and/or minimizing one or a few variables-like the discount warehouses of Costco. 3. "Invert, always invert." It is in the ...

Against the Odds: An Autobiography

My highlights from Against the Odds: An Autobiography by James Dyson 1. I am a creator of products, a builder of things, and my name appears love on them. That is how I make a living and they are what have made nom my name at least familiar in a million homes. 2. This is also the exposition of a business philosophy, which is very diffe...