Our Favorite Books of 2018

Life gets busy, and reading always seems to be one of those things we push to the side. But we (the Millennial Planners) have always connected on the books we read and the takeaways we get from them.  I went an entire year thinking I didn’t read much, but after Regan asked us to share our favorite books, I was pleasantly surprised how much we all read collectively.

Keeping up with an old tradition, we decided to pass along our favorite books that we read in 2018.  

[Taken from our email exchanges a few weeks back. No filter.]

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Regan

Fiction:

• The Stormlight Archive (Books 1-3 of a fantasy series)

  • Game of Thrones level hype

• Pet Sematary - Stephen King

  • Truly skin-crawling first person. My favorite King ending so far.

• Misery - Stephen King

• The Outsider - Stephen King

• Slaugterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut

• Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

Non-fiction:

• Gunslinger: The Remarkable, Improbable, Iconic Life of Brett Favre - Jeff Pearlman

  • Nothing I knew as a child was true! A very adult perspective on one of my childhood heroes.

• Meditations - Marcus Aurelius

• Unbroken - Laura Hillenbrand

Joe

• The Compound Effect - Darren Hardy (reread)

• Mindset: The New Psychology of Success - Carol S. Dweck

• Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams - Matthew Walker

• Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! - Richard P. Feynman

Luke

• Running Man: A Memoir, by Charlie Engle - A story of a crack-addict turned ultra marathon runner. Very inspiring, but it is one of those stories where nothing ever seems to go right for someone. 

• Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami - This was my fifth or sixth time reading this book. It was originally my first Murakami novel. It never fails to bring me back to that magical place I entered the first time I read it. 

• Foundation, by Issac Asimov - This was my favorite of the several Sci-Fi novels I read this year. It was also on Elon Musk's list...but I am not going to let him take credit for popularizing an author who has written 500 books and is published in 9 out of the 10 Dewey categories. 

• The Martian, by Andy Weir - I know I am late to the game on this one but it was amazing. I was impressed at the author's attention to detail when it comes to scientific principles. This was by far the book I most recommended. 

• The Giver, by Lois Lowry - A childhood favorite. One of my favorite dystopian novels. 

Bryan

• Manhood: How to Be a Better Man-or Just Live with One - Terry Crews (the old spice guy, and actor)

  • easy read, his first book. shared his bio and rough childhood. It opened me up to a powerful concept I've embraced in 2018 - being vulnerable and recognizing who you are, what your issues are, and accepting their impact on your daily behavior.  

• Your Money and Your Brain - Jason Zweig

  • super fascinating stuff and it felt like a way more tangible version of "thinking fast and slow" (which 99% of ppl don't actually finish, bc boring).  Jason did all these studies on himself to see how humans are wired and how much of our programming contradicts being good with money.

• Barking Up The Wrong Tree - Eric Barker

  • Eric writes a blog about a concept I love - what popular culture says it takes to be successful is wrong a lot of the time.  I love counter-culture stuff in general.  I did not finish this book, probably made it halfway through.  I had high hopes, but something about the writing style didn't make me want to continue on.  That said, I could pick up at any random Chapter and it would read well.

• Atomic Habits - James Clear

  • another blogger, which I actually recommend you sign up for if you like the concept (2x week emails).  I appreciate James' concise writing style too.  Perhaps Recency Bias is at play, but I feel this concept has impacted me the most this year.  "we don't rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems." "atomic" meaning small things, over and over, matter.  Goals are useful, but not the measure - habits (daily behavior) are what create progress and nothing happens overnight.  It's a double-edged sword - habits multiply in both directions.  Lifting weights weekly creates positive effects that compound.  Similarly, 1 cigarette per day will compound negatively.  The book also describes how to create positive systems.  One major one?  Tribes (Millennial Planners, anyone? ;) ). Note: I'm only on Ch. 5 of this book, and it's clearly already impacting me greatly.

• Principles - Ray Dalio

  • There are actually 2 books in the edition i have - that's why it's physically huge. I read the first half- Life Principles - and appreciated Dalio’s mindset towards making rules and creating systems that allowed Bridgewater to grow and how he learned from his mistakes. Dalio is a bit dry, but his takeaways are quite interesting. So it's good for those who want no-nonsense and straight to the point advice on life and business.

• Blogs

  • I read blogs more than anything and am on Twitter more often.  I'm an official Ritholz fanboy, and mostly read posts from their newest addition, Nick Magguili (https://ofdollarsanddata.com/).

Happy reading, everyone!

Providing Financial Advice in an Unknowable Future

We often discuss developing emotional intelligence on this blog, as it is less structured than developing technical intelligence. It’s the skill set you develop through hundreds of interactions with a variety of human temperaments and personalities. Knowing when to listen and when to speak, when to be forward and when to be subtle, when to laugh and when to be serious. There’s no crash course in emotional intelligence. Like getting fit, the goal is reached through unbroken repetition, and can thus never be fully attained. No matter how many client meetings you conduct you’ll still come across people that fall on unfamiliar parts of the spectrum.

Observation of my more experienced 35-70+ year old counterparts has been my primary source material for developing this sort of intelligence. The best golden nuggets I’ve gleaned from my most senior coworker are these: 1) Always be curious, 2) Nobody was born boring, and 3) You can’t understand someone without understanding his motivations. These things resonated with me, and I don’t see a future where their meaning isn’t relevant to my career and life. It doesn’t matter that for decades this coworker’s career didn’t involve him utilizing the internet, the advice still fits. In pondering that very thought, I considered the looming certainty that some of the recommendations and mantras of these older counterparts might be outdated. The more I thought about it, the more obvious it seemed. At 25, I’m right around the youngest age of people who remember what it was like to yell at your big sister to get off the phone while you were trying to friggin’ log on to AOL Instant Messenger. I grew up with the internet, so I’ve always understood technology better than most of my older coworkers.

Whenever we purchased a new technology at my previous firm I would be the beta tester, learning the system so I could be a resource when my coworkers were forced to switch from the outdated program. Learning new commercialized products and platforms is easy for me, which makes sense given the platform designer’s primary goal for a widespread audience is usually intuitive functionality.  Growing up with the internet has made it hard for me to see from the perspective of someone who just doesn’t get how to learn new platforms, but a conversation with my roommates at dinner last night provided me with a healthy dose of empathy. My roommates work for two of the most notable “disrupter” companies in the Bay Area, constantly trying to push the limits of technological development, so I like to think they have some authority on the matters of automation and the imminent transformation of our workforce as we know it. One of my roommates postulated, “We’re probably the last generation that won’t grow up coding as a necessity. It will be a required high school class for our kids, because it’ll be crucial to function in the workforce.” I had always thought it would be cool that when I’m 90 people will be baffled that I once lived without the internet, that is until I realized how far behind I could be not knowing a lick of coding. If you enjoy this kind of thinking, I recommend reading Chuck Klosterman’s “But What If We’re Wrong?: Thinking about the Present as If It Were the Past,” which will challenge your perception and thought processes about the present day and our unknowable future. Computers have become ever-present in our lives (you probably have one in your pocket right now), so theorizing that the human workforce will need to know coding more intimately seems like a reasonable prediction. Klosterman’s book points out though, that we’re often incredibly wrong about predicting the future:

“Irrational trajectories happen all the time. Here’s an excerpt from a 1948 issues of Science Digest: “Landing and moving around the moon offers so many serious problems for human beings that it may take science another 200 years to lick them.” The prediction was off by only 179 years. But the reason Science Digest was so wrong was not technological; it was motivational… when the Soviets launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957, the meaning of the enterprise changed… By the summer of ’69 we were planting flags and collecting moon rocks.”

Our biases prevent us from accurately projecting the future because we see the possibilities through the lens of what we value today. Using Klosterman’s framework in regards to providing financial advice, it’s not whether coding will be essential to function in the workforce, but how will a future with different values affect the “old” way of doing things. We may assume that technology will replace the traditional model of providing financial advice, but it’s likely emotional intelligence will be an even more highly desired skill in such a high-tech world. When 3D printing and coding begin to show up as elementary school classes, the skills children develop in English and at recess will become more scarce, and consequently more valuable. After all, a person’s repertoire of skills is limited by the things they have time to experience. When dealing with money, the gatekeeper to so many of our life goals, emotional intelligence and communication skills will be even more crucial.

Although I believe emotional intelligence will always be valued in providing financial advice, we must recognize the likelihood of a period where no one has authority on the best way to provide said advice, and we must always critically analyze anyone who claims such authority. Much of a financial advisor’s career involves providing answers, which requires a certain level of confidence in the way you operate. Regardless of how sound your advice is, if you don’t deliver it with conviction then clients may begin to second guess your judgement. As such, it's important that we consider the advice and critiques our mentors provide through the lens of someone who's been successful advising to a particular generation, and that the values of future generations are subject to change. In other words, just because advisors have been successful with certain methods doesn't mean those methods will bring continued success in dealing with delivering financial advice in a world that’s sprinting in terms of technological development. As we improve upon our emotional intelligence, we may need to resist certain techniques our mentors implore us to use. This post is a call to attention, we need to consider that many people who have had success with their methods will be hesitant to change. Although Mark Manson was not writing in this context, an excerpt from his book “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life” can be applied to this situation:

“Our mind’s biggest priority when processing experiences is to interpret them in such a way that they will cohere with all of our previous experiences, feelings, and beliefs.”

All you have to do is compare our collective technological strides year over year since the turn of the century and there should be little doubt we’re heading into the future with our foot on the accelerator. Given this exponential growth, we need to take particular care during the inevitable development of the delivery of financial advice. You may have been hoping for specific examples to glean from this post, but I don’t have them. It’s not exactly the smartest career move to publicize the specific ways you disagree with your superiors! Also, I consider myself fortunate to be a part of a firm that is driven to provide the best solutions for our clients. That drive is embedded in our work culture and there’s a conscious resistance to bending to pride or seniority. You should be critically reevaluating your company if superiors respond to your inquiries with “because we’ve always done it that way.”

I welcome you to comment if you have a specific examples where you disagreed with your superiors on these types of matters (perhaps anonymously would be best). Since we’re all subject to present-moment biases, sharing your experience could help other readers to realize their own environments aren’t ideal for adapting to the times.

Our Favorite Books We Read In 2016

Last year we listed our favorite books we read in 2015. We compiled a similar list for 2016. As before, we purposely did not aim for a certain number each, so all the books listed are books we think are excellent. In other words, it is a list focused entirely on quality and not at all on quantity.

Regan

• To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
• On the Road - Jack Kerouac
• Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future - Peter Thiel & Blake Masters
• The Shining - Stephen King
• Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World - Adam Grant

Bryan

• Anything You Want - Derek Sivers

Bryan’s commentary: This book is the story how Derek Sivers accidentally created the online business giant, CDBaby.com, then eventually sold it and decided to donate a healthy chunk of the proceeds to charity.  In the book, you learn why he first started the business, how he managed it, and the lessons and key advice he learned along the way. I took several notes in the book itself and re-read many paragraphs because they resonated with me deeply. It is essentially 80 small pages of straight-to-the-point advice that actually makes sense.  Sivers' attitude towards business is nothing short of refreshing. He was originally a musician, producer, engineer, then started CDbaby.com when he wanted a way to sell his CDs online. He taught himself how to computer program so he could create a 'buy now' button on his website, which was the first time any musician had done this. His friends heard about his ‘buy now’ button and asked him to make one for them too.  He made them for his friends only, who ended up telling their friends about it too. He did it all for free. Several, nice favors led to a multi-million dollar company. Although several tech, venture capitalists offered over the years, he never took investor money (except for his Dad's) because he didn't see the point. He was like “why do I need all of these investors?”  They would respond, “so you can keep growing and making more money.”  His response to that was, “well, I already have a lot of money.”  Within his business, he made a few errors and paid for them dearly, but ultimately, he was in it to help musicians and others he cared about. Best advice from this book: don't create a new business for the sole purpose of making a lot of money, simply start doing favors for others and keep doing what your audience is asking of you. If you’re good, it will become your new business.

Luke

• East of Eden - John Steinbeck 
• The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy 
• Sunny's Nights: Lost and Found at a Bar on the Edge of the World - Tim Sultan
• Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything - Joshua Foer
• The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival - John Vaillant
• Speaker for the Dead - Orson Scott Card

Joe

• When Breath Becomes Air - Paul Kalanithi
• Sunny's Nights: Lost and Found at a Bar on the Edge of the World - Tim Sultan
• Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
• Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything - Joshua Foer
• The Power of One: A Novel - Bryce Courtenay