Decision-making

Decisive: How to Make Better Decisions

Chip and Dan Heath looks at the four villains of decision making: 1) Narrow framing 2) Confirmation bias 3) Short-term emotion 4) Overconfidence, and show us how to overcome or at least minimize them through real-life situations from business, career to relationship and general life choices. An easy to understand book with plenty of tools and tips that you can apply to investment and life decisions. 

Black Box Thinking

We all know that failure is an invaluable source of learning opportunity, yet the stigma of failure often prevents us from embracing it. Matthew Syed looks into the culture of failure and explains how we can change our mindset and use failures as the stepping stone for success. He emphasizes that success, creativity, and innovation can only be realized through testing, failing, errors and making mistakes. 

The Signal and the Noise: The Art & Science of Prediction

How do we differentiate the signal from the noise in data? If a company decided to venture into a new business, is that an indication of high future growth or is it a sign of management complacency? Silver looks into the nature of weather, earthquake, economics, and disease to understand what makes them unpredictable. In part, they are dynamic systems that can create butterfly effect; a small changes can lead to large effects. And there’s 2 levels of complexity. Weather is complex but we can improve our forecast as our tools get better. That is level 1. The stock market falls under level 2. Similarly, it has many variables but unlike the weather, which doesn’t care about our predictions, market learns and adapts. The act of forecasting it changes the outcome. But there’s hope. Silver offers Bayesian thinking as a way to get closer to the truth by constantly updating our view. Apart from learning how to avoid common mistakes in making a prediction, you’ll come away from this book with an appreciation on uncertainty and the advantage of thinking in systems, which, to me, are essential in investing. 

Risk Savvy

Less is more. Similar to Blink, Gerd Gigerenzer explains why a simple rule of thumb beats complex algorithm when making a decision in an environment that is highly uncertain where information is limited. Gigerenzer then shows us how using a rule of thumb and gut feeling can help us make a better decision in investing, finance, health, and even relationship.

How Not to be Wrong

Jordan Ellsberg examines the simple yet profound mathematical tools for solving problems. Mathematical thinking is more than just numbers or precision, but as a hidden structure to good thinking. You’ll learn how to avoid common sense mistakes such as linear thinking (more is better),  jumping to conclusion (seeing pattern out of randomness), and start thinking in expected payoff, what could have happen instead of what happened, and be more like the fox (knows many things) than the hedgehog (know one big thing).

Thinking in Bets

Life, or investing, is not that different from a game of poker, we are trying to choose the best course of action (out of many) to improve our future payoff, which, of course, is fraught with risk, uncertainty, and luck. Annie Duke shows how we can make a smarter decision by thinking in bets, why relying on the outcome is dangerous, and tools that can help us think in a more rational way.

Thinking in Systems

Systems are like Russian nesting dolls—a system that has its own subsystems is also part of a larger system which is part of another larger system. As an example, a supply chain consists of many different industries where within each industry, sit hundreds of companies. Each of these companies is further made up of multiple business units, which every single unit is again composed of several divisions and so on.

System thinking is about seeing things as a dynamic whole. Instead of studying the events generated by a system i.e raw material cost increase, lower selling volume etc, focusing on the system structure and the behavior it generates will make you a better thinker. You’ll understand why systems work so well (i.e a 100 years old company), why it surprises us (i.e market crash), and how each part of a system interact with one another to create nonlinear behavior.

Superforecasting – The Art and Science of Prediction

A must read for every investor. Tetlock examines some of the best minds in predicting and their thinking process. You will learn some of the great tools such as how to think probabilistically; outside view vs inside view, and be a fox, not a hedgehog.

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Written by a renowned psychologist and winner of Nobel Prize in Economics, Kahneman explores how our mind works and why we are the easiest person to fool. And again, a book that will help you avoid many cognitive biases and improve your decisions and judgments.