The Hour Between Dog and Wolf

When I read books I often take notes and write in the margins. This helps me remember the big ideas and connect them with other new ideas I may read in the future. Periodically I consult back on a book I have read by rereading the notes and skimming certain passages. I recently did that for The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: How Risk Taking Transforms Us, Body and Mind by John Coates. Here are some of my highlights from when I read it the first time that I thought were particularly noteworthy:

  • Financial risk taking is as much a biological activity, with as many medical consequences, as facing down a grizzly bear.
  • Normally stress is a nasty experience, but not at low levels. At low levels it thrills. A nonthreatening stressor or challenge, like a sporting match, a fast drive, or an exciting market, releases cortisol, and in combination with dopamine, one of the most addictive drugs known to the human brain, it delivers a narcotic hit, a rush, a flow that convinces traders there is no other job in the world.
  • Intuition is the recognition of patterns.
  • Effort, risk, stress, fear, even pain in moderate doses, are, or should be, our natural state. But just as important, just as vital to our health, the key to continued growth, is what sports physiologists refer to as the recovery period.
  • Testosterone may be the molecule of irrational exuberance.
  • Humans are built to move, so move we should. The more research emerges on physical exercise, the more we find that its benefits extend far beyond our muscles and cardiovascular systems. Exercise expands the productive capacity of our amine-producing cells, helping to inoculate us against anxiety, stress, depression and learned helplessness. It also floods our brains with what are called growth factors, and these keep existing neurons young and new neurons growing—some scientists call these growth factors “brain fertilizer”—so our brains are strengthened against stress and aging. A well-designed regime of physical exercise can be a boot camp for the brain.

One of the reasons I was interested in reading this book had to do with the author’s background. John Coates is a former trader for Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank, and is currently a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge. He understands both the scientific and financial side of what he is writing. As a result, I would consider him well-qualified to write about this subject. Our mind and body are inextricably linked: physical health and mental health go hand-in-hand. Overall, The Hour Between Dog and Wolf provides a very interesting look into risk taking and its effect on one’s body and mind.

The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs

I am half way through The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs by Charlie Ellis, and I am really enjoying it. It has been both informative and entertaining. In chapter eleven, Principles, Ellis shares the Goldman Sachs IBS business development guidelines, written by John Whitehead in 1970:  

  1. Don’t waste your time going after business we don’t really want.
  2. The boss usually decides - not the assistant treasurer. Do you know the boss?
  3. It’s just as easy to get a first-rate piece of business as a second-rate one.
  4. You never learn anything when you’re talking.
  5. The client’s objective is more important than yours.
  6. The respect of one person is worth more than acquaintance with 100.
  7. When there’s business to be done, get it!
  8. Important people like to deal with other important people. Are you one?
  9. There’s nothing worse than an unhappy client.
  10. If you get the business, it’s up to you to see that it’s well handled.

I particularly like number four and number six. As one of my coauthors shared before, it is worth reflecting on guidelines or advice whenever smart people suggest it. Despite being only half of the way through, I strongly recommend The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs for an interesting look into the history of Goldman Sachs.

Second-Level Reading

I just finished reading book three, Master of the Senate, of Robert Caro’s four volume biography on Lyndon B. Johnson. I read the first, The Path to Power, in March and the second, Means of Ascent, in May of this year. All four volumes are very long; they total over 3000 pages. Caro takes a very objective approach and does an excellent job - it is not by accident that he has won the Pulitzer Prize for biographies multiple times. 

Lyndon Johnson was a remarkable person. It would not be an overstatement to call him a political genius. More than anything else, he excelled at understanding and using power, as he acknowledged himself:  “I do understand power, whatever else may be said about me. I know where to look for it, and how to use it.” In almost every phase of his life, LBJ demonstrated an extremely unusual talent for cultivating power. He was literally among the best in the world at this.

I have greatly enjoyed reading these first three books and I look forward to the fourth. (A fifth and final volume is also in the works.) I learned a lot reading about LBJ, but it required some thinking. This is a good example of the difference between first-level reading and second-level reading. I learned more about power from reading Caro’s books on LBJ than I did reading a few nonfiction books detailing the intricacies of power. I find this pattern is frequently the case. 

In school we often learn better through examples, anecdotes, or metaphors compared to simply memorizing new material. This is true for reading too. Patrick O’Shaughnessy has a killer new post where he talks about how metaphors and mental models are the key to understanding.  He writes “It is through metaphors that language and understanding grow from simple things to more complex things.” This is just as true for reading books as it is for learning in general. As a result, second-level reading requires reading between the lines and searching not just for books that attempt to directly convey something, but also books that may have some hidden lessons.

One could read a book on leadership, or one could read a book on John Wooden. One could read a book or article on wealth inequality, or one could read A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. A financial advisor could read a book on how to be empathetic with clients, or he/she could read Being Mortal by Atul Gawande. Books that are more technical are not bad; I read plenty of those too. They are just not typically how we learn ideas and information that are a bit more complex. I would strongly encourage those looking to read more to be a bit more eclectic in their learning.