2/26/25 Update: I created a page with all 52 books I read last year. See it here.

2/27/25 Update: I’ve created a searchable library of every book I’ve read and update it weekly. See it here.

This summer, I set a goal of creating 100 podcasts about books I was reading. It forced me to start tracking my reading in a spreadsheet. It’s nerdy, but it was necessary because every week, I read a book, wrote a blog post series, and created a podcast series about each book. The spreadsheet helped me keep everything organized. I paused the latter two after the summer because they were too inefficient and time-consuming, but I kept updating the spreadsheet and reading a book a week.

I looked at the spreadsheet as I was reflecting on the books I read in 2024. I figured I’d share some stats and learnings.

High-level stat for 2024:

• Books read: 52

2024 breakdown by month:

• January: 0 (I did read, but I can’t remember what books)
• February: 2
• March: 6
• April: 6
• May: 7
• June: 5
• July: 4
• August: 5
• September: 4
• October: 3
• November: 5
• December: 5

Here are a few things I learned along the way:

• Reading two books a week was too aggressive. I tried it in the March–May period, but I wasn’t absorbing as much of what I was reading or making as many connections. I was focused on finishing the books, which isn’t why I read. The pace was too fast, so I reduced it to a book a week, which feels more sustainable.
• Sharing what I learned from my reading was the big unlock. It took my learning and thinking to another level. Writing a blog post series and recording a podcast series forced me to identify insights and organize and communicate my thinking. The key tool in that process was creating a digest of each book, which was an extraction of the information I found important in each chapter, along with my insights.
• E-readers, such as Kindles, are great devices, but I prefer reading physical books. I highlight and add notes about insightful sections and ideas in the books. Those highlights and notes are trapped in each book, so finding and using them later is difficult. See here for more. As I’ve read more, this has become a painful problem. Trying to find something sometimes means reviewing several books’ notes and highlights. Experiencing this pain led me to several feature ideas for the “book library.”
• Reading a book is simple—but learning from what I read is more involved. It’s inefficient and involves lots of steps. The process of sharing what I learn from my reading is complex. It’s hard and has many steps and lots of moving pieces. This realization led me to add several more feature ideas to the “book library.”
• The value in reading lots of entrepreneurial biographies is that you’re exposed to the best ideas and experiences of entrepreneurs, and you can pull from them when you’re faced with a problem. The challenge is that this requires a great memory or knowing exactly where to look to quickly find something you’ve read. I don’t have a photographic memory, and I don’t always remember where I read something. I want to make it easy to find what I’ve read, which will be a big part of the “book library” MVP.
• My best ideas in 2024 came from piecing ideas together from various books. Making those connections was a great way to build upon what other entrepreneurs figured out. Solving a problem by building upon the knowledge of others rather than starting from scratch led to my having better ideas. I’m not an idea guy, so this was perfect for me, and I want to do more of it going forward. I don’t think this has to be completely manual and inefficient. Figuring out how to solve this and incorporate it into the “book library” is challenging, but I think it can be done, and I’m excited to figure this out because it’ll be a huge unlock for myself and others.

Those are my takeaways and reading stats for 2024!

I looked at the books I’ve read over the last few months and realized it’s been mostly framework books. That’s likely a reflection of two things: I was trying to understand or solve something, and I went down a rabbit hole when one framework book led me to a related one. This is especially true of Michael Mauboussin’s books—I read four of them in five weeks.

I got a ton out of these framework books, but I do want to get back to reading more biographies and autobiographies because of the personal stories in them. Personal stories are what make these books special.

The year will be over soon, and I want to read more personal stories before it ends. I’ve decided that I want at least half the books I read in the next few weeks to be biographies or autobiographies.

Some pages of specific blog posts weren’t loading correctly. In fact, some pages weren’t loading at all or were only partially loading. As a result, the page would freeze on some desktop and mobile browsers. My friend looked into this, found the root cause of the problem, and fixed it. As of now, all blog post pages should load quickly on all devices.

If you’re still seeing this issue (or any other issue), please let me know so I can fix it.

Since reading The Success Equation, I’ve been thinking about how I can improve my chances of future success. Understanding where the things I’m thinking about fall on the luck-skill continuum has changed both how I think about them and my expectations. A lot of things I want to accomplish as an investor and entrepreneur are materially influenced by luck, so I need to hone my decision-making process to increase the chances of getting the outcomes I want.

I’ve also been thinking about past outcomes—both good and bad—to determine how much luck and skill factored into them. When an outcome was good, I generally assigned too much weight to skill. The truth is that skill played a role, but factors outside my control heavily influenced many outcomes. I couldn’t predict that things would happen the way they did. But they did, and I benefited from them. I’ve had more luck on my side than I’ve previously acknowledged when outcomes were good.

When an outcome was bad, I assigned too much weight to luck. In reality, it’s been a mix of skill and luck. In some instances, I didn’t have sufficient skills to get the outcomes I wanted and thus failed. In others, luck just wasn’t on my side.

It’s interesting to think about outcomes in terms of the influence of skill and luck. I’m glad I read this book and can’t wait to use its analysis to evaluate future decisions.

I first read Expectation Investing by Michael Mauboussin this past summer, and I ended up reading that book twice and starting to read all of Mauboussin’s other books. This post is about the fourth of his books that I’ve read in the last few months, and it didn’t disappoint.

The Success Equation is about understanding the impact that luck and skill have on your successes and failures. The book provides a framework for understanding, in advance, how much skill and luck will impact a decision or activity. Understanding how what you want to do is affected by skill and luck can alter your planning, expectations, learnings, and a host of other things.

This book is full of things I’ve found helpful, two of which I’ve written about already:

• Rationality quotient (RQ) matters more than intelligence quotient (IQ)
• How checklists tame luck

Another concept that stuck with me is what he called the “luck-skill continuum.” Mauboussin explained how to gauge the extent to which an activity is influenced by skill and luck by visualizing it on a continuum. He then explained why the sample size required to draw a reasonable conclusion about future expectations differs for activities heavily influenced by skill vs. luck. He also explained reversion to the mean and why it impacts activities of skill and luck differently. I have lots of notes and highlights in the chapter on the luck-skill continuum that I’ll revisit often.  

This book was a great read. Anyone interested in improving their chances of success by improving their decision-making should consider reading The Success Equation.

I’ve started on my new weekend project: cleaning up the images of all the books that I’ve uploaded to this site. Several issues need to be resolved, including these two:

• Load time – It takes too long for the page listing all the books I’ve read to load. This causes the list of returned books to be incomplete, the count to be wrong, etc. Part of the issue is that some book cover images are too large.
• Social sharing – When a link to a book page is shared via text message or social media, the link should load the book cover image. That isn’t happening consistently. I know of two reasons for this: an improper file type and a too-small file size.

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To fix these and other issues, I’ve been going through all the book cover images and changing the file type, renaming the file, compressing the file, etc.

I should complete this project by the end of November at the latest. I’ll provide more details on what I’m doing and my progress in later posts.

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Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned from them

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

Cumulative metrics (since 4/1/24):

• Total books read: 88
• Total blog posts published: 581

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Blog posts published: 7

What I completed in the week ending 11/9/25 (link to the previous week’s commitments):

• Read The Success Equation, a framework for improving your decision-making by understanding how luck and skill impact outcomes

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book
• Pick my next weekend project and start working on it

Asks:

• No ask this week

Week two hundred ninety-three was another week of learning. Looking forward to next week!

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Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned from them

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

What I struggled with:

• No material struggles related to this project

What I learned:

• When it comes to learning, the human element can’t be replaced. It may be possible to come somewhat close to replicating the process of learning by talking with others, but you can’t fully replicate it. Therefore, people will always prefer interacting with other humans over other forms of learning.

That’s what I learned and struggled with last week.

Last week I shared that I’ve been riding shotgun with a VC-backed founder to help him sell his company. The deal was in the final stages of closing last week. It closed on time late last week, but there was a hiccup. The buyer attempted to send the funds to the seller, but he made an error. The seller had provided bank wire instructions, but the buyer sent an ACH transfer based on the bank wire details. Wire transfers and ACH transfers use different types of routing information, so the funds never reach the seller.

The deal technically closed, but this issue delayed the transfer of assets to the buyer. The seller wanted the funds before he transferred the assets—rightly so.

The ACH transfer was returned to the buyer by the bank when it realized that no recipient matched the information provided. The buyer re-sent the funds, and they arrived in the middle of this past week. The transfer of assets was also completed this past week.

I always tell founders that the deal isn’t done until the wire (or ACH) clears your bank. Until then, keep pushing, because things can and do go wrong.

Congrats to this founder for closing the deal and finally getting his funds . . . even if they were a little late.

This week I had lunch with a group of entrepreneurs. One of them, a CEO, had a pressing issue he wanted input on. He had a few million in revenue and was having trouble finding a firm to handle his company’s marketing. They all pitch the same strategy, which doesn’t resonate with him. He’s frustrated and wanted to know what other founders have done to get their marketing efforts off the ground.

When clarifying questions were answered, we learned that the CEO’s focus has been solely on outsourcing the marketing function to an agency. He wants to achieve a specific output or goal and wants an agency to figure out how to do that.

The feedback from founders centered on two points:

• You can’t outsource marketing entirely. It’s hard for an external company to develop a strategy when they don’t have a great understanding of your customer or the problem(s) you solve for your customers. Some founders have had success hiring a full-time marketing leader, who developed the marketing strategy and outsourced some tactical work to agencies. The function and strategy were owned internally by a full-time company employee.
• Deep understanding of the customer, their problem, and their journey lives with the CEO. It’s the CEO’s job to get others in the company to understand those things too and, in the case of marketing, to create appropriate strategies. The CEO can hand his or her understanding off to marketing, but it’s not realistic to expect marketers to develop that understanding and the messaging around it.

I’m no marketing savant, but I’m actively learning to understand it better. Based on my past mistakes and what I’ve read from marketing thought leaders, I agree with these points.

The feedback was useful to the founder with the problem, who walked away thinking differently about marketing. Instead of outsourcing, he’s now considering finding someone to lead his marketing strategy. He’s also thinking about how to convey his deep understanding of the customer’s journey on day one to his new marketing lead so he can set them up for success.