Author: Millionaire

Most books I read don’t lead to a recommendation. Some do… but how does Superforcasting fare, and what can we take away from this work?

I’ll be honest, I only picked up this book for two reasons:
1. My primary job is to build prediction algorithms, and I realized its been a while since I read something that really increased my knowledge in this area.
2. Amazon was giving me a 2-for-1 special, and one of the other books on the list was one I was already wanting to read, so this one came along for the ride.

While this book was not recommended to me, nor did it “speak” to me when I saw it, I begrudgingly eventually got around to picking it up. I really had to force myself to begin, but once my other books were done, I had nothing else lined up, so this was as good of a pick as any other.

There’s three real ways to get original research into your head- conduct original research yourself, read Journals, or read books that take someones research and present it in a more readable fashion. If its an area that you absolutely live for, original research and Journals are a great way to go… but if its outside of your core competency and day to day lives, I prefer getting into the books.

The thing about forecasting is that we all do it, and we all need to do it better. Whether its buying a real estate property, where we have to forecast growth and rents… to forecasting economic changes, stock shifts, or one of many other things- forecasting is part of our day-to-day basis. Understanding what you do wrong and what you can do better is helpful. Despite doing it every day, we often fail to think about thinking. This means that despite forecasting, we rarely step back and think about how we forecast.

The same is true about those we trust and follow. Do we follow someone because they are a great forecaster? Or do we follow someone because they are a great pundit- unyielding in their story, and a great storyteller? This is what this book will help you think about. This book will convince you to begin embracing the teachings of Enrico Fermi, but as you near the end you’ll begin realizing that what the author is fighting for is out of your scope and only has a 2.7% chance of happening in the next 5 years (have forecasters scored and evaluated in such a way).

Somehow, this book was a New York Times Best Seller. I think most readers will be bored as all get out honestly. To me this book was very much like an academic journal or an academic textbook. At times it was painful reading, but you KNEW it was good for you, so you made yourself do it anyway.

And ultimately this was my take-away. It was definitely worth the read. You will learn from it. It will improve what you do, but there’s a good chance you won’t love every minute of it. There are times you will want to put the book down, and times you won’t want to pick it back up… but you will grudgingly do so because you know its good for you. You’ll also have to put aside the authors core argument about changing the way the world forecasts, because its out of scope for most readers. You probably won’t be forecasting world events, but rather you’ll be forecasting company sales, or real estate investments. That doesn’t mean the conversation can’t be beneficial though.

In fact this reminded me NOT to make precise forecasts any time someones going to be keeping score, and that is completely against the goals of the author!

So if you are ready to learn something new that a lot of other books don’t cover, and want to get better at something all of us have to do to be successful (after all, stocks- real estate- even CDs are all based on forecasting what is around the corner, right?) – Go pick this one up!

I didn’t really want to pick up the book, “The Power of Habit- Why we do what we do in life and business”, by Charles Duhigg, but it was recommended by a colleague at work, and recommended by Google’s reps, so I figured “I’m short on book options so I’ll pick it up”.

It doesn’t SOUND like a good book… the cover doesn’t LOOK like a good book. It sounds pretty lame, but on the contrary, you should pick it up!

The book dives into habits, and discusses what habits really are, and how much of our lives are truly dictated by habits. Most of what we do on a day to day basis really is habit. Then it gets into both how they impact us, and how they impact our organizations.

Whether your looking at it from a personal perspective or you are looking at it from the standpoint of your organization, it applies. Every one of us is influenced by habits. Many of us are influencing OTHER people’s habits too, and therefore it is challenging to find someone who this doesn’t apply to.

One chapter in particular, Chapter 7 in the book and chapter 8 in the Audiobook, really stood out to me. This is because it is an area that I focus most of my day-to-day professional energy. Using data to frankly predict and understand what people are doing better than they do. To some people this chapter may be “enlightening”, as they don’t realize how the data is used around them and how companies are using it. To me personally, its not a surprise at all, as I’m one of the people doing this, and I’m well past the “surprise” stage, and frankly am doing cutting edge things that are beyond the scope of this book.

But this helped jump into some case studies that other companies are engaging in, and it talks about what they discovered about implementing this type of analytics, which is something many of us in this industry deal with on a regular basis.

The book is broken into four sections:
Part 1: Individuals
Part 2: Organizations
Part 3: Society
Appendix: What to do about it.

The chapters jump around quite a bit, so reading them out of order won’t cause you too much headache once you get past Part 1, which lays the groundwork for the rest. In addition, you can skip the appendix if your not trying to change your own habits.

Some people will find part 1 and part 3 most interesting, more of the corporate folks will find 1 and 2 more interesting, but get through part 1 and feel your way around a bit…. or just dive in and take it all in. You will be better off understanding how habits work, and how much they control our day to day lives.

Procter & Gamble’s Febreeze was going to be a failure, until they found out how to fit it into habits.
Target was able to predict whose going to have a baby when, even when mothers didn’t tell them, creeping them out until they changed their approach.

Hard to say this type of content isn’t relevant, and I’m skipping over the “obvious” take away from the book, which is how to identify a habit, identify the triggers and rewards, and then create a new habit to replace it. I’m guessing most people got that plot line by simply reading the title, but it is indeed in there. When I read other reviews on the book, this is actually the part they “focus” on, but to me this part isn’t the most important part- the application of this information is, and its the application of this knowledge to your life and organizations that can make a big difference to yourself and others… in fact it even changed the way I am approaching marketing MillionaireWho (which I wasn’t even going to market at all, until I really thought about how I need to get inside people’s day to day habits if I want to help improve their lives!)

I’d talk about it more, but I think in this case you should pick it up.

One of the easiest ways for me to judge if I like a book or not is to determine what I do when I get home. I primarily “read” audiobooks, and listen during my 1 hour daily commute. Books I don’t like, I’ll “forget” to restart it the next time I get in the car at worst, or just shut it off and keep listening to it next time I get in the car at best.

The really good books however, I’ll sit in the garage for a while when I get home, or I’ll sit in the parking lot for a little bit after I get to work, because I don’t want to shut it off.

The BEST books on the other hand, I plug headphones into, and find an excuse to listen to it at various times throughout the days. these books are incredibly rare.

The Power of Habit definitely falls in the “really good” book category, but not the “best”. I recommend others read it. It actually has new original information you haven’t pulled together in this way before, which is really helpful to your personal life and career. I didn’t want to go into the house when I got home, and I didn’t want to head into the office when I got to work- I wanted to keep listening. What is really impressive about this, is the book is over TEN HOURS long. There are other long audiobooks, but there’s a lot that are just a couple of hours long. This was more than 10 hours, and totally worth it.

You’ll start living with a different perspective on things! So if this intrigues you, go pick up the book… and if it doesn’t… well, your missing out!

The book:

The Audiobook: