Book Review 2024.18: Grit, Why Passion and resilience are the secrets to success, Angela Duckworth, Paperback, 2016 -December 21, 2024 This is a very essential book at the current phase of my life, where in the last two years I have started more projects and given up midway without completing it than in the last four decades of my life combined. The appeal of this book is in its ability to educate the reader in an engaging mode on Grit, …
Author: Shankar Jaganathan
Book Review 2024.17: What I Learnt About Investing From Darwin, Pulak Prasad, 298 pages, Hardbound, 2023 -December 9, 2024 A sublime blend of Animal Planet, National Geography, and the CNBC, this book fuses the distinct expertise required in each one of these fields to make it an extremely insightful, readable, and engaging read on investment. The author’s personal investing experience adds a distinct color to the narration making it a practical lesson for anyone interested in equity markets. The investment …
Book Review 2024.16: Good Strategy Bad Strategy Richard Rumelt, 298 pages, Paperback, 2011 -December 2, 2024 Strategy as a concept always interested me, for I believe that if we have to accomplish anything ambitious beyond our existing abilities and available resources, we need to do something unique or different that leverages what we have to help us achieve our goals, which is my definition of the word strategy. I picked up this book after seeing very good reviews and to …
Book Review 2024.15: Originals, Adam Grant, 254 pages, Paperback, 2016 Picked up this book during my routine quarterly visits to Blossoms book shop on Church Street, Bangalore earlier this month. I was quickly hooked on to this book while browsing through it the Metro ride back home. I finished this book in two weeks, much longer than I expected, which is a result of the numerous triggers in the book that led me explore new concepts and topics in the …
Book Review 2024.14: Hooked, How to Build Habit-Forming Products, Nir Eyal, 214 pages, Paperback, 2019 -November 11, 2024 This is a short and insightful book, that is invaluable for anyone interested in digital products design. How I wish I had read this book a decade earlier when our team was designing a digital portal to automate corporate law compliances for Indian corporates secretarial automation. The utility of this book is not only in the crip framework it prescribes, but also …
Book Review 2024.13: 50 Philosophical Classics, Tom Butler-Bowdon, 317 pages, Paperback, 2022 -November 2, 2024 A book to be savored, to be read at leisure and when required reread more than once, as it offers new insights to reevaluate our views on issues that appeared crystal clear like democracy, meritocracy and scientific method, in addition to revealing new lights on feminism and the impact of social media. I read this book on influential western philosophers in over three months, in …
Book Review 2024.12: The Forty Rules of Love, Elif Shafak, 350 pages, Paperback, 2011 Reading a blog on Sufism I came across a reference to this book that was highly recommended for its engaging narration of the life of Rumi, the Sufi poet. As an ardent lover of Sufi qawwalis it was impossible for me not to order this book. This book lay in my library for more than a month, before I picked it up three days ago and …
“The noblest pleasure is in the joy of understanding.” “Every selection of one is a rejection of many.” “Fear is a reaction, courage is a decision.” “The source of stress is lack of time.” “Hearing is listening to what is said, listening is hearing to what is unsaid.” …
Sporting Insights -17: Breakdance in Paris 2024 Olympics: Can An Art Become a Game? October 17, 2024
Breakdance in Paris 2024 Olympics: Can An Art Become a Game? If you are wondering how Breakdance is a part of Paris 2024 Summer Olympics, be rest assured you are not alone. This highlights the distinction between art and sports that is blurring with each passing day. Curious, I searched for a conceptual model that differentiates an art from a sport to understand how it was included in Olympics. Luckly, I found a model that separates not only art from …
Sporting Insights -16 Finding the Right Balance between Sports & Commerce What at start seems a tough art to master, but soon becomes our second nature is cycling. The art of balance is one of the key life skills that we learn at a young age. The same seems to be the case in sports too. Commercially successful sports like football, Tennis, and cricket have learnt to balance commercial interest with sporting excellence effortlessly, which for many other sports seems …
Sporting Insights -15 Tennis -Why the Second Serve? In his engaging book filled with intriguing anecdotes, Tennis: Origin and Mysteries, written by Malcolm Whitman, the US National Tennis Champion for three successive years between 1898 and 1900, the author explores the origin of all quaint practices in Tennis. After searching for evidence of the origin for second serve and not finding anything concrete, he concludes by quoting the gossip of its origin related to a King with poor serving ability, …
Book Review 2024.11: EGO is the Enemy, The Fight to Master our Greatest Opponent, 159 pages, Paperback, 2016 The title, its bright red cover and its small size, in that order attracted me to this book. Under the mistaken belief that I can read it in a couple of days I picked it up, only to take a couple of weeks to finish it. Designed as a self-help book, the author blends a strong portion of philosophy and interesting …
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