Continuing what I started last week, I’m going to share content I consumed and learned from.

What I struggled with:

• No material struggles this week

What I learned:

• The science behind naming billion-dollar products – YouTube video from My First Million where they interview the guy big brands pay to name their products. The process of how he picks names is intriguing. There’s much more science to it than I realized.
• Should your portfolio be positioned for defense or offense? – YouTube video where Howard Marks shares his thinking about risk versus reward in today’s investing environment.
• Declining liquidity is negatively impacting stocks – YouTube video from Monetary Matters with an interview of global liquidity expert Michael Howell. Interesting to understand how a booming economy reduces liquidity in financial markets, which can lead to flat or lower markets. Very counterintuitive.
• Emerging trend: internal AI platform team – YouTube interview from The Biography Podcast with the CEO of Speak, Connor Zwick. He has an internal team dedicated to helping the entire company use AI. They go around the company and set up AI infrastructure for internal teams so they can make the most of AI, which helps them move faster. Interesting concept that makes a lot of sense.
• How Blockworks bootstrapped to $150 million – YouTube interview from The Biography Podcast with the CEO of Blockworks, Jason Yanowitz. Interesting strategy of going from events to media to a data company. Focusing on an overlooked niche helped them separate from the competition. Landing a busy CEO for an interview by creating a book about his company was a nice angle. Flattery works. I think I found a digital version of the book here.
• Building a $100 million AI company – YouTube interview from The Biography Podcast with Dylan Fox, founder of Assembly AI. One point stood out to me: Having clarity on how the customer hears about new products and how they buy new products is important for building successful marketing efforts. You should design processes like onboarding and demand generation by working backward from that understanding. Taking what worked at another company or space and replicating it isn’t a strategy that’s guaranteed to succeed at your company.
• $1.6 million business anyone can start – YouTube interview from Chris Koerner on The Koerner Office Podcast with Sariah Howell, founder of Memory Magnets. Howell went from broke to making $600,000 in profit in a year with a simple business idea. I loved how she turned sharing her secrets about building her business into an additional revenue stream by selling products to help others start businesses just like hers. Here, the use of social media is savvy and stood out to me.
• Zara founder getting $3.7 billion dividend – See my thoughts in my post earlier this week. Building to hold forever can lead to great wealth (he’s worth $126 billion). Building to sell will get you cash quicker but won’t create this level of generational wealth.

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

This past week, I watched a video in which the creator of Claude Code, Boris Cherny, explains what Claude Cowork is and walks through a hands-on demo of how to use it. Cowork is basically agentic AI that can do things on your behalf through your computer. The demo was helpful, and I decided to download Claude Cowork. It was easy to install.

Before I started playing with it, I wrote down one problem that I wanted Cowork to help me with (I’m trying to be mindful of Kindlin’s law). I did this because using a tool to help me solve a specific problem I’m excited about helps me better understand the tool (and its limitations). Otherwise, I poke around and get only a surface-level understanding of its capabilities, which I likely won’t retain.

I then started to work with Cowork to get connected via MCP to the data sources it needed to help me solve the problem. Connecting to Google Sheets API and Google Drive API took some troubleshooting, but Claude helped me figure out the issues quickly. Then I started putting the tool to work in Google Sheets.

I haven’t leveraged all of Cowork’s capabilities, but so far I’m impressed. Playing with it got my wheels turning about what’s possible. I feel like Cowork is something that nontechnical people can use to gain leverage and become more resourceful. I think it’s especially useful for entrepreneurs who are actively building because it’s like a quasi-employee you don’t have to pay and who never gets tired.

This tool is new, but I think becoming familiar with it is worth the effort because of the potential gains. Cowork feels like a potential force multiplier of my efforts that will increase my output and improve my outcomes.

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Today I read a blog post (see here) that had caught my eye. It was supposed to be about how to create a personal customer relationship management (CRM) system. Like a lot of people, I struggle to maintain relationships, so I gave it a read. The article turned out to be more than I expected. It’s a great read for anyone trying to understand how to use AI to help with manual tasks and how AI can connect with various tools you already use.

It presents a high-level overview of how you can use AI to talk to the tools you commonly use (Slack, Calendar, Gmail, Google Sheets, Notion, etc.) using the model context protocol (MCP). It describes how MCP works, who created it (Anthorpic), and how the average person can easily download and use it. MCP is powerful because most manual tasks involve shifting between systems. MCP connects all those systems to an AI assistant like Claude, empowering the AI to see the same data you do and execute on it just as you would. You can have an AI assistant complete tasks that would have taken you tons of time or energy, or you can have it do 90% of the work so you have to do only 10%.

The author then takes it a step further and shows you, pretty much step by step, how to use MCP to connect to Gmail and Calendar. It then provides example prompts for instructing AI to do tasks that you’d normally have to manage manually in a CRM. For instance, the author has AI prepare a list of names, using specified criteria, of people he needs to follow up with. He also has AI analyze his calendar for the past week and summarize all his meetings so he can report to his cofounder on Monday what he’d done that week.

I found this post helpful and will be sharing it. Not everyone needs a personal CRM, but the post does a great job of showing how anyone can use MCP and AI assistants to become more efficient and also explaining how to set it up.

I’m in the middle of synthesizing The Little Book of Market Wizards. I like this book because it details how some of the top market participants (traders and investors) avoid psychological errors that lead to bad decisions. It’s essentially wisdom on how to execute an investing strategy without making errors.

One of the people quoted in the book is Ray Dalio, founder of hedge fund Bridgewater. What he said stuck with me:

[T]here is an incredible beauty in mistakes because embedded in each mistake is a puzzle and a gem that I could get if I solved it (i.e., a principle that I could use to reduce my mistakes in the future).

I really like this framing. Mistakes are a puzzle to be solved, and solving them yields a gem. I think that’s a great way to think about future and past mistakes. Each one is an opportunity to figure something out and find a gem that will help you going forward.

So, I’m adding one more thing to my Christmas and New Year holiday challenge. I haven’t been consistent with the Getting Things Done (GTD) method. I read David Allen’s Getting Things Done in 2024, and if I’m being honest, I loosely implemented it. I want to be more productive in 2026, and I think the GTD method could play a big role.

So, my goal is to read the GTD book again, create a clean, short-term (completed within a year) project list, and define next actions for each project.

That’s it. Wish me luck.

I’m working on establishing a habit of synthesizing the books I read and sharing what I learn. I want to not just consume what’s in books but also digest and understand their ideas. I’ve set Thanksgiving and Christmas goals to synthesize a few books for each holiday. Here’s what I’ve learned so far:

• Painful – I don’t have a good rhythm or any tricks for synthesizing, so every time I sit down to do it, it’s painful. It reminds me of the pain when I first started blogging in 2020. It feels like the pain of learning to do something new.
• Daily is better – I started out doing marathon sessions. The problem was that it’s hard to consistently carve out time for them. So, I’ve moved to working on this as close to daily as possible. I’m basically breaking the synthesis up into smaller sessions.
• 50 pages – This seems to be the limit of what I can do in a single day before it becomes painful. That’s not a bad pace because I could hypothetically synthesize a 350-page book in a week. Luckily, most books I read are in the range of 250 to 300 pages.
• Time – Synthesizing 50 pages takes a few hours—a lot more time than I’d like. I want to get to the point where I can synthesize 50 pages in an hour or less.
• Outline – Creating an outline of key information in each chapter feels natural and is working well.
• My wording – Rewording what I read, instead of copying verbatim, forces me to really understand what I’m synthesizing. Copying word-for-word defeats the purpose.
• Blog-post prerequisite – Creating an outline while synthesizing a book makes it possible to write a rich blog post. When I don’t do this, it feels impossible to write more than a surface-level post.
• Creating assets – Creating syntheses is painful, but I think each one is an asset, and I could end up with a library of valuable (to me) assets that will likely pay dividends in the future. I can’t say how, but I know having these in electronic format will make it easier for me to use this knowledge in the future, versus being trapped in physical books. Pretty sure I’ll run these through LLMs to help me make decisions in the future.

That’s what I’ve learned so far. I’m still working to try to find my groove and establish the habit of synthesizing books. It’s not easy, but hopefully, as I get more reps, the habit will form.

For the past few years, I’ve challenged myself to do something difficult during each holiday break. I enjoy these challenges because they stretch me further than usual and give me something productive and fun to work on during “downtime.”

I’ve got my daily reading habit down now, but I never established a habit of making sure I absorb what I read. So, this year, I’ve been focusing more on sharing what I’ve learned from books to make sure I’ve really absorbed them and, hopefully, to help others. To do this, I’ve been trying to synthesize some books and write posts about what I learned from them.

It’s not an established habit, so it’s been hard to do. I felt the same way when I started blogging daily and reading books daily. In both cases, I just needed more reps to get my brain used to the activity and establish the habit.

With that said, my goal for the Christmas and New Year holidays is to make progress on establishing this habit. Specifically, I plan to synthesize two books (that I’ve already read) and share posts explaining the main ideas I learned from each of them.

Wish me luck!

I learned something else from my Thanksgiving Day challenge. From synthesizing and writing posts about books I read months or years ago, I realized how much I’d forgotten. I now see that it’s valuable to refresh knowledge. Secondarily, synthesizing and sharing is the ultimate way to do a refresh, because I can’t write good posts explaining something if I don’t understand it myself.

So, what does this mean? My weekly reading habit has mostly been about reading a new book every week. I want to change this a bit so I’m rereading books at some regular (to be determined) interval  and sharing what I learned from them. I’ll get a lot out of this, especially since I’ve marked a few books as worth reading annually but don’t have a process to make sure it happens.

It's my first new habit for 2026! I’ll think it over more and share what I settle on.

After revisiting How to Read a Book and synthesizing it (see here), I realized that I prefer synoptical reading and had spent most of the year doing it. Hence, in the library section of this site, you see that each book lists the number of books it’s connected to. I also read analytically, but less often, and honestly that isn’t my first choice.

Another thing I realized is that I haven’t been consistent in doing Stage 1 (which, ironically, I added to the process). Stage one is “Define the problem you need to solve or the topic you want to understand.” But most times, I pick up a book based on what feels good at the time. I read it, and if it mentions another book, I read that book too. The result is that I’m not reading to solve top-of-mind problems or understand the very issues slowing me down. I’m just gathering knowledge that might not be what I need to move forward.

I thought about it today and realized that it takes effort to crystallize a specific problem. It’s not easy or natural for many people, which explains why so many early-stage founders can’t articulate the problem they’re solving (see here). But, as Kidlin’s Law says, if you write a problem down clearly, then the matter is half solved.

So, going forward, I’ll write down the problem I want to solve or the topic I want to understand better before I start reading synoptically. My hunch is that I’ll read more intensely and accelerate my progress by focusing on that problem or topic as I read.

I’m wrapping up my blog posts about the three books I synthesized as part of my Thanksgiving challenge (see here). As I was working today, I thought about several insights:

• The synthesis of the books happened within the time frame I planned (i.e., Thanksgiving weekend). But sharing what I learned in a way others could easily pick up took longer than I estimated.
• Creating a post that summarizes an entire book is something I can do, but it’s likely to be rare.
• Creating the digest is helpful, albeit painful and time-consuming. It forces me to pick out the most important points from the book. But the process of turning it into something useful to others forces me to understand the material deeply. I didn’t realize how much of what I’d consumed, even after I created the digest, I didn’t fully grasp. Sharing is a force function in understanding.  
• The more poorly a book is written, the more work it is to create a digest and post. One book, written in the 1940s, was wordy and poorly structured. Piecing together what the author was trying to convey in a simple way that people could grasp quickly took more effort. Good content, but not presented well.
• The concept of ideas is starting to resonate with me. What ideas in a book got me excited, and why? If I can answer those questions, those ideas are probably worth sharing.
• Breaking complex frameworks down into something easily understood by others (and giving myself a quick reference) is something I toyed with and enjoyed. Lots of work, but curation and simplification are valuable to others (and will be valuable to my future self when I need my memory jogged quickly).
• You don’t deeply understand something unless you can communicate or teach it to others in a way they can easily grasp. If I want to force myself to understand something deeply, I should make myself write a blog post about it.
• Investors who teach or openly share what they know may have a secondary motive. It helps people, which is great. But it also forces them to learn things more deeply, which likely has a positive impact on their decision-making and investment returns. This is likely true for other professionals outside investing, too.

Those are a few quick takeaways from my latest holiday challenge. I’m glad I decided to do it. It reminded me of the value of synthesizing my reading, and it’s forcing me to figure out how to develop the habit of doing so consistently.