For year end, here are the books I wanted to share with you in the hopes that we can discuss them in 2020!

Have a Very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

·       The Daily Stoic.  Why have history's greatest minds—from George Washington to Frederick the Great to Ralph Waldo Emerson, along with today's top performers from Super Bowl-winning football coaches to CEOs and celebrities—embraced the wisdom of the ancient Stoics? Because they realize that the most valuable wisdom is timeless and that philosophy is for living a better life, not a classroom exercise.

·       Stillness is the Key.  Bestselling author Ryan Holiday made ancient wisdom wildly popular with a new generation of leaders in sports, politics, and technology. In his new book, Stillness Is the Key, Holiday draws on timeless Stoic and Buddhist philosophy to show why slowing down is the secret weapon for those charging ahead.

·       Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America.  Just as Steve Coll told the story of globalization through ExxonMobil and Andrew Ross Sorkin told the story of Wall Street excess through Too Big to Fail, Christopher Leonard’s Kochland uses the extraordinary account of how one of the biggest private companies in the world grew to be that big to tell the story of modern corporate America.

·       The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution.  The unbelievable story of a secretive mathematician who pioneered the era of the algorithm - and made $23 billion doing it.  Jim Simons is the greatest money maker in modern financial history. No other investor - Warren Buffett, Peter Lynch, Ray Dalio, Steve Cohen, or George Soros - can touch his record. Since 1988, Renaissance's signature Medallion fund has generated average annual returns of 66 percent. The firm has earned profits of more than $100 billion; Simons is worth 23 billion dollars. 

·       How to Be a Dictator: The Cult of Personality in the Twentieth Century.  From the Samuel Johnson Prize-winning author of Mao's Great Famine, a sweeping and timely study of twentieth-century dictators and the development of the modern cult of personality.  No dictator can rule through fear and violence alone. Naked power can be grabbed and held temporarily, but it never suffices in the long term. In the twentieth century, as new technologies allowed leaders to place their image and voice directly into their citizens' homes, a new phenomenon appeared where dictators exploited the cult of personality to achieve the illusion of popular approval without ever having to resort to elections.