Monday, January 23, 2017

Links

Released tomorrow: A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market - by Edward O. Thorp

How I Built This podcast -- Zappos: Tony Hsieh (LINK)
Related book: Delivering Happiness
Warren Buffett’s old proposal to end trade wars applies today [H/T Vishal and Linc] (LINK)

How Kraft Heinz Plans to Build a New Global Food Giant [H/T Linc] (LINK)

Analyst Ratings and the Institutional Imperative - by John Huber (LINK)

Product Study: Falcon 9 (LINK)

Amazon's next frontier to conquer? Auto parts [H/T @GSpier] (LINK)

Robert Cialdini on the Mixergy podcast (LINK)
Related book: Pre-Suasion
Charley Ellis has another chat with Barry Ritholtz on the Masters in Business podcast (LINK)

Book of the day: The Discovery of Slowness

I came across the book above in this excerpt from How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer:
Montaigne would make a good model for the modern “Slow Movement,” which has spread (in a leisurely fashion) to become something of a cult since its inception in the late twentieth century. Like Montaigne, its adherents make slow speed into a moral principle. Its founding text is Sten Nadolny’s novel The Discovery of Slowness, which relates the life of Arctic explorer John Franklin, a man whose natural pace of living and thinking is portrayed as that of an elderly sloth after a long massage and a pipe of opium. Franklin is mocked as a child, but when he reaches the far North he finds the environment perfectly suited to his nature: a place where one takes one’s time, where very little happens, and where it is important to stop and think before rushing into action. Long after its publication in Germany in 1983, The Discovery of Slowness remained a best seller and was even marketed as an alternative management manual. Meanwhile, Italy generated the Slow Food movement, which began in protest against the Rome branch of McDonald’s and grew to become an entire philosophy of good living. 
Montaigne would have understood all this very well. For him, slowness opened the way to wisdom, and to a spirit of moderation which offset the excess and zealotry dominating the France of his time. He was lucky enough to be naturally immune to both, having no tendency to be carried away by the enthusiasms others seemed prone to. “I am nearly always in place, like heavy and inert bodies,” he wrote. Once planted, it was easy for him to resist intimidation, for nature had made him “incapable of submitting to force and violence.” 
As with most things in Montaigne, this is only part of the story. As a young man he could fly off the handle, and he was restless: in the Essays he says, “I know not which of the two, my mind or my body, I have had more difficulty in keeping to one place.” Perhaps he only played the sloth when it suited him.

“Forget much of what you learn” and “Be slow-witted” became two of Montaigne’s best answers to the question of how to live. They freed him to think wisely rather than glibly; they allowed him to avoid the fanatical notions and foolish deceptions that ensnared other people; and they let him follow his own thoughts wherever they led — which was all he really wanted to do.