Last week, I was chatting with someone about books and how I think about reading. I used to pick up random books to read, but now I’m more intentional about why I read. Before I choose a book, I write down what problem I’m trying to solve or what roadblock I’m currently facing. The more painful the problem, the more motivated I am to solve it. I then go find books written by people who have solved the problem, often biographies or framework books.

I use a synoptical reading approach to consuming the books. I’m not looking for the answer in any single book. I’m looking for patterns, and I’m comparing and contrasting ideas in the various books. The idea is to understand the problem and possible solutions from different perspectives so I can come to my own conclusions about how to solve the problem.

I found out about synoptical reading when I read How to Read a Book in 2023. I synthesized what I learned from that book here. It took a little bit of effort to embrace this approach, but I’m glad I did. It’s one I hope I can keep up for many years.

Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and investors 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: 116
• Total blog posts published: 777

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Blog posts published: 7

What I completed in the week ending 5/24/26 (link to the previous week’s commitments):

• Read Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, by Richards J. Heuer Jr., a 45-year veteran of the CIA. This book details how to make sense of complex situations using a structured intelligence analysis methodology. Heuer outlines “Analysis of Competing Hypotheses” (ACH), an eight-step framework grounded in cognitive psychology, decision analysis, and the scientific method. ACH requires analysts to identify all plausible hypotheses and test each against the available evidence instead of evaluating one favored explanation in isolation. The hypotheses that can’t be disproved by evidence are allowed to survive.

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book

Asks:

• No ask this week

Week three hundred twenty-one was another week of learning. Looking forward to next week!

Continuing with my new protocol, here I’m going to share content I consumed and learned from. This week, I spent time doing general learning about a variety of topics.

What I consumed this week and what I learned from it:

• Social media channels are information maps – YouTube interview with Chris Camillo, an investor who turned $80k into $50M by spotting trends early on social media. Camillo got on my radar when I read Jack Schwager’s latest book, Unknown Market Wizards. Chris thinks differently, and his insights are often thought-provoking. He’s made a career out of being ahead of the crowd. In this interview, he explains that social media platforms began as contained social grids, meaning you didn’t have access to what existed outside your “friends.” These platforms have evolved into open information maps where you can now see in real time what everyone in the world is talking about as they talk about it. He goes on to say that agentic AI will ultimately help people make sense of the growing amount of conversational data. This concept stuck with me and reinforced my belief that X is a valuable tool for bottom-up research. Later in the interview (see here), he reinforces what I’ve heard many entrepreneurs and investors say (in different ways): the biggest trap is making big decisions right after you have a big win. Your worst decision or investment comes right after you’ve had a massive win because you’re overconfident and you’re flush with cash, so you don’t adhere to the strict decision-making and execution process that led to your big win.
• Pace of insight to action determines success – Interview with Taylor Holiday, founder and CEO of ad agency Common Thread Collective. Holiday caught my attention when he said that the amount of time between an insight being identified and action being taken based on that insight is a critical component of achieving your goal. This ultimately determines the speed of course correction, which is important when you’re doing something that doesn’t have a clear path, especially if it’s hard. People who have superior decision-making skills act quickly when they learn new information that changes the situation or connect dots that lead to new insights.
• Customers care about their problems, not what you’re selling – Interview with Donald Miller, marketing entrepreneur and author of Building a StoryBrand 2.0. This is a great interview on the psychology of customers and how entrepreneurs should communicate to customers the reasons they should buy their product or service. The gist is that you should talk about the customer’s problem and how you’ll make them a hero by helping them solve their problem. His analogy is that if you go on a date with someone who talks about himself or herself the whole time, that’s a bad date. Customers have similar feelings about companies that talk about themselves instead of the customer’s problem.

That’s what I learned from what I consumed last week.

Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and investors 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: 115
• Total blog posts published: 770

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Blog posts published: 7

What I completed in the week ending 5/17/26 (link to the previous week’s commitments):

• Read Screw It, Let's Do It, by Richard Branson, a memoir in which Branson shares nine life lessons and stories from his life that illustrate each lesson and why it’s important

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book

Asks:

• No ask this week

Week three hundred twenty was another week of learning. Looking forward to next week!

Continuing with my new protocol, here I’m going to share content I consumed and learned from. This week, I spent time learning mostly direct-to-consumer and marketing strategies.

What I consumed this week and what I learned from it:

• TikTok Shop goldrush is changing marketing – YouTube interview with Rob the Bank. I’ve been learning more about TikTok Shop and its popular affiliate program. Rob explains how the affiliate strategy works and how he used it to scale his ecommerce brands. Rob does a good job of explaining why this strategy is effective and how to execute it.
• ButcherBox founder turned a hobby into a $600M-a-year business – YouTube interview with ButcherBox founder Mike Salguero. Mike and his friends acquired their first company, and it did well until they raised VC funding, which led to the company losing its way. He left that start-up and started a passion project involving quality meats. Very candid interview with transparency around numbers, which I really enjoyed. One interesting figure he shared is that they have 3% monthly churn, which is 36% annual churn. His success with a barbell strategy of hiring people who are very young or out of retirement caught my attention, too. His hack of reverse engineering someone’s influencer database was smart. Mike recently acquired a media company to drive growth and retention. Hormozi’s content strategy around using free content that’s demonstration-oriented (not selling-oriented) to retain customers while simultaneously driving top of funnel for new, high-intent customers who are preconditioned with how they’ll use your product when they purchase stuck with me.
• Howard Marks builds institutional knowledge through lifetime analyst positions – YouTube interview with Oaktree Capital co-founder Howard Marks. Interesting interview. He incentivizes analysts to build up excellence, which creates institutional knowledge, and to stay in that position throughout their careers. The company gets decision-making stability during periods of extreme ups and downs of the market, which has led to superior returns for the firm. Counterintuitive, given that many organizations are essentially up or out, which decays institutional knowledge.

That’s what I learned from what I consumed last week.

Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and investors 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: 114
• Total blog posts published: 763

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Blog posts published: 7

What I completed in the week ending 5/10/26 (link to the previous week’s commitments):

• Reread Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, by the Venezuelan economist Carlota Perez. The book is a blend of a history and a framework book. It describes a way of thinking about cycles created by new technology and financial capital and analyzes the five major technology revolutions over the last 250 years and their implications for society: the industrial revolution; steam and railways; steel, electricity, and heavy engineering; oil, cars, and mass production; and information technology and telecommunications.

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book

Asks:

• No ask this week

Week three hundred nineteen was another week of learning. Looking forward to next week!

Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and investors 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: 113
• Total blog posts published: 756

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Blog posts published: 7

What I completed in the week ending 5/3/26 (link to the previous week’s commitments):

• Read More Than a Hobby, a memoir by Hobby Lobby founder David Green. Green describes his early years growing up in a financially strapped family and how he stumbled upon his love for retail in high school and never looked back. He shares his simple business and retailing principles that guided him as he turned a $600 bank loan into a home-and-craft empire with hundreds of stores and over $1.4 billion in annual revenue (as of 2005; it’s much larger now).

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book

Asks:

• No ask this week

Week three hundred eighteen was another week of learning. Looking forward to next week!

Weekly Update: Week Three Hundred Seventeen

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: 112
• Total blog posts published: 749

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Blog posts published: 7

What I completed in the week ending 4/26/26 (link to the previous week’s commitments):

• Read Stock Market Maestros, a framework book by Clare Finley Levy that details the decision-making process of the best public-equity investors. Using years of historical buy-and-sell data, the book rates each investor in decision-making, hit rate (which is lower than I would have thought), and payoff ratio. The book then provides 41 case studies in which the investor breaks down the investment case, why it made or lost money, why they made the decisions they made, and what they learned. This book’s co-author, Lee Freeman-Shor, also wrote The Art of Execution, which was a great decision-making book for public-market investors. When I found out that Stock Market Maestros is the follow-up to that book, I immediately bought it.

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book

Asks:

• No ask this week

Week three hundred seventeen was another week of learning. Looking forward to next week!

Continuing with my new protocol, here I’m going to share content I consumed and learned from. This week, I spent time trying to understand physical AI, whether it’s the next frontier in AI, and how valuable training data sets are in training models for physical AI.

What I consumed this week and what I learned from it:

• Closing the data gap in robotics – YouTube presentation by UC Berkeley Ken Goldberg at an MIT Robotics seminar. This helped me understand the role that data plays in training models for robotics. His framing and quantification of the robot data-gap problem in hours and then 100,000 years was eye opening. His categorization of the four current ways to solve this problem was helpful too.
• NVIDIA Cosmos world foundation models for physical AI – YouTube presentation by Ming-Yu Liu at NVIDIA’s March 2026 GTC conference explaining their model for generating the photorealistic data needed to train machines and robots to navigate the real world. This helped me understand what Cosmos is and what it does.
• Introducing NVIDIA’s Cosmos world models – YouTube presentation by NVIDIA’s VP Generative AI Research, Ming-Yu Liu at NVIDIA’s March 2025 GTC conference. This is their introduction of Cosmos world models. This helped me understand how Cosmos was introduced last year and how far it’s come in a year.
• NVIDIA’s robotics research – YouTube presentation by Jim Fan, Yashraj Narang, and Yuke Zhu about NVIDIA’s latest robotics research. This video helped me understand NVIDIA’s robotics mission and how its strategy for physical AI focuses on offering three “computers” to customers to help them solve physical AI. Understanding their lab’s three pillars (AI, simulation, and compute-focused ) for solving physical AI research problems was helpful.
• Digital twins and simulations – YouTube presentation by Rev Lebaredian at NVIDIA’s 2026 GTC conference about how digital twins and simulation will help make physical AI a reality. This helped me understand why physical AI is so important to NVIDIA, what each of the three computers needed for robotics actually does, and how digital twins and simulations fit into that model.
• Intro to physical AI and robotics – YouTube presentation by Kalyan Vadrevu on what physical AI and robotics are. This is a good introduction. It helped me understand what physical AI really is and why NVIDIA things it’s the next wave of AI.

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

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: 111
• Total blog posts published: 742

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Blog posts published: 7

What I completed in the week ending 4/19/26 (link to the previous week’s commitments):

• Read Warren Buffett and the Art of Stock Arbitrage, a framework book that details the less-publicized side of Warren Buffett’s operation, which generated over 81% annualized returns from 1980 to 2003 through merger arbitrage, spin-offs, and other special situations

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book

Asks:

• No ask this week

Week three hundred sixteen was another week of learning. Looking forward to next week!