I just read Strengthen Your Business by Robert Bethel, here are some notes on it. It’s overall good information, but not particularly profound. It reminds me of some lessons common to Extreme Ownership and Perennial Seller. It’s far lighter than the dense philosophy I usually read, so I was able to go through it in a morning. Much of it was obvious, but it did make me look at a few things from a different perspective. Below are my unedited notes that I took while reading.

The more I learn, the more I realize that actually ethics determine business success…

“Some books cannot be summarized (real literature, poetry); some can be compressed to about 10 pages; the majority to zero pages.” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes

We can learn many important lessons from classic literature. They are the most valuable signals which survived after stressors filtered out the noisy data over time. Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa and The Count of Monte Cristoby Alexandre Dumas are two of the longest and most influential novels I have read recently. We can learn many parallel lessons from Books 1 and 2 of Musashi and Volume 1 of The Count of Monte Cristo.

In these beginning volumes, both Musashi and Edmund Dantes went through tragic events that compelled them to start their hero’s journey. Themes of karma, lonely suffering, delayed…

Over the years, I’ve tried a lot of morning routines, but none of them seemed to stick. I’ve realized that the main reason was that they were too time consuming and complicated. I also like new experiences and dislike habits in general. Therefore, I decided to shorten my morning routine to the minimum effective dosage:

1. Make my bed
2. Read or listen to Stoic philosophy
3. Meditate
4. Light exercise

Making my bed takes less than a minute. It is the simplest thing that I can do to make my immediate surroundings better. It may seem trivial, but it’s something you do every…

The truth is something that burns, it burns off deadwood and people don’t like having their deadwood burnt off often because they’re 95% deadwood.

— Jordan Peterson

This year, I don’t have a New Year’s Resolution. As the new year approaches, people are often filled with regret and say, “I’m going to do this better… that better…”, but they rarely follow through. Gymrats hate the New Year’s Resolutioners in the gym. They claim that it’s because they are doing dumb things and occupy their favorite equipments. That might be the superficial short term reason, but that’s not the main reason…

The Great Samurai Miyamoto Musashi says that the way of strategy or martial arts is for overcoming men. The first man you must overcome is yourself. Any good soldier, hunter, police officer, or others in similar warrior professions must be able to live a disciplined life, eliminate his own superfluous actions, heightened his perception of surroundings. Living and perfecting this way of life authentically is through the practice of shikantaza — seamless sitting meditation. If we want to enjoy and excel at our professions or any other aspect of life, we must have a disciplined practice of shikantaza.

Siddhārtha Gautama…

The goal of Mimetic Arbitrage is to understand and capitalize on imitative behaviors and desires. To do so, we link together the investment philosophies of Peter Thiel, Warren Buffett, Nassim Taleb, and my own observations and studies. Peter Thiel is the PayPal Mafia boss, early investor in many successful startups, and the author of Zero to One, my favorite book about startups. Warren Buffett is the Oracle of Omaha, one of the richest people in the world, a bookworm, and master of value investing. Nassim Taleb is an expert options trader turned philosopher who made a huge profit from the…