Welcome to The Open Shelf. This is the podcast where we discuss the many books that has made an impact on our lives. And we try to share that with the rest of the world, our love of the many books that we are going through. My name is Tobias, and with me I have Mehdi. And this episode today is going to be about the different ways that we approach books. So we both very much love going through books, and we go through many, many books every year.
one of us hates to read so that's that's gonna be interesting to talk about today but before we go go into the main topic of today uh i am very interested in to hear meddy about your current reading are you currently into any good books or have you just finished something hi everyone welcome to our first episode of the open shelf yeah i'm uh currently reading uh a skin in the games by nassim nicholas
And it's interesting, right? It's Nassim Nikola Soleb have always really interesting and unorthodox way of bringing new thought into the picture. I like his topics. It's not my most favorite author or anything or his books, but I learned so many things from it. And not every angle that he discussed, I totally agree. But it gives me also a different...
perspective how other people uh look at the words and what they how they contribute to their success uh yeah that is what i'm currently reading how about you Well, with him, I read his Anti-Fragile maybe six years ago or something like that. And I really enjoyed the book. And I've seen some YouTube videos with him before as well. So I enjoy his perspective. Sometimes he's a bit edgy and he tries a little bit too hard. He has this...
principle that he never drinks any liquid that is less than 2 000 years old so he only drinks water and wine and coffee basically yeah so it's funny but i know i think he can get a bit a little bit too much sometimes but i'm really interested in reading skin in the game and his other black swan and these books so i'm gonna add that to my list for myself i just finished one book called the battle of the battle of narva
and i can't remember the author anthony i think something right now where he uh so it's about the battle of narva where swedish forces fought the russian forces and he takes like half of the book he he spends explaining this the political situation in europe at the time so this is in the 1600s the turn into the 1600s
And you get to meet several historical characters. For example, they send a diplomat from France to speak with Charles XII of Sweden. And this diplomat is a close friend to Voltaire, for example. So it's cool to see how small the world was even back then.
And then, of course, the second half of the book is spent explaining the actual battle of Narva. So that was a cool read. I've never read anything like that before. But I've been interested in history for a long time. So I think this could be my little gateway into that world. It'll be fun to explore more of that. That is interesting. That is interesting. Yeah. And now going through our approaches for reading books.
i'm the one that i'm not really big fan of reading but at the same time i go through a lot of books by listening to audiobooks my approach for listening is to utilize the time that i cannot really do anything else like when i'm in the public transport when i'm walking my dog and or cleaning up the house anything that i can use my subconscious to work and conscious on audiobook
I leverage that time. And only leveraging those time, it adds up to 50, 60 books a year. That's how I approach going through the book, although I'm not a real reader. And this is something that maybe other audience that are not really big fan of reading book and they're a good listener, they might enjoy.
uh books by going through the audiobooks and since audio no matter how hard you try you you get distracted so many times minimum i go through each book twice and i usually listen with the higher speed then i'm listening and even the second time i increase the speed a little bit because i already know the most of the book and i just want to see what did i miss
whether the author was trying to convey another message that i was not really listening well or did i miss some point because i was distracted and it turns out usually when i go through the book one more round i gain a lot of uh material especially if it's really good book i think it's a waste uh if you don't go through it a couple of times what is your approach how do you go through the book
So, first of all, I used to listen to all my books in audiobook format. So we both started in the same way. But then I felt that... And I think there's a lot of merit to doing that as well. With everything in life, you need to find something that works for you. Because if you find something that works for you, then you will do it many times. And if you do something many times, you will get good at it. That's the basic recipe of success.
so but for me i found that when i've gone through a book and i was like very excited about it and i it really resonated with me i wanted to tell others about it so i would say like oh i read this really good book and it's awesome and they would ask they would ask me like so what was it about and i i was you know it was very hard for me to formulate what the book was actually about or to give some concrete examples if they raised some statistics or some references to some other books or something i couldn't pull that out of my memory memory so
And I think you solved that by going back and reading the book again, again as an audiobook. And I think that's a very elegant solution. I took a more, I don't know, techno approach. So I'm a developer in my foundation. So I've been programming since 1996. I've been a professional developer since 2004.
naturally fell into like i wanted to build like a system and a process processes and like you know really structure this so what i do now is first of all i have a list long long list of books that i want to read so i think i have 1800 books now on that list versus the 500 plus books that i have read
And it's growing much faster. So I have a little algorithm using Bayesian statistics, if someone is interested, to pick my next book. Either I pick a subject and I use this algorithm to pick books within the subject, or I just want one book to read next, so I use this algorithm to pick it. And then I try to keep three books alive at any one moment. So I have one book.
I actually have one audiobook that I listen to, and that's usually a biography. So with biographies, I don't feel like I need to take notes or anything like that, so I can just listen to it. And it's not fiction, so I don't feel myself, my thoughts start to wander, but I can just listen to it. And if I miss something, I go back a minute or so. So that worked for me. And then I have a non-fiction book and a fiction book. So those three types of books that I have going at any one moment.
And then when I read it, I take notes, either like something that I want to, a reference that I want to look up or a quote that I want to remember or just, you know, something to remind me for when I finish the book about the message of the book or the narrative of the book or something that, you know, exemplifies the book itself. Because then when I'm done reading it, I add it to my list of books that I have yet to process. And then I pick books from that list and I go through them. I go through the highlights one by one.
And I try to like condense it into one message like this book is about this. Maybe with some supporting quotes. Yeah. So that's basically my process for reading books. It's very structured, but it fits my mindset at least. That's great. Maybe you can just put the link of your algorithm and the post that you have for it for the audience if they're interested in the comments. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, that's a good idea.
I also have one actually suggestion that I think will fit both of our use cases actually. So since a year back or one and a half, I'm using a service called Readwise. So Readwise, they pull quotes from your Kindle reading or Kobo or whatever you use into their service and then they resurface it so you can configure it. So I have it now set to 10.
quotes per day or 10 highlights per day so every day I get 10 highlights I go through them and pick which I want to save and which I want to discard and it just gives me a reminder about the books and the things that I thought you know a week ago 10 years ago that I thought were interesting back then so I get to remember the bookies and it's something it's similar to like spaced repetition I get to
retrain you know what the book was about so that helps me remember the books uh much better and they have a feature where even if you haven't taken any highlights from a book you can still add it to your account and you get highlights from other people who have taken highlights from from that book that you've read so for your audiobooks that that could probably work very well as well that sounds really interesting yeah this is readwise is sounds really interesting uh tool for you to just
keep remembering the books that have really good impact on you and you want to keep it refresh those really good quotes on that book and everything. Yeah, I'll definitely check it out. For me, I have really a simple method to go through some quotes. I use OneNote usually for this kind of stuff. I just wrote down a few quotes from the books that I enjoyed and
I just go to the top of my list and I keep practicing that code for myself. And then that code is like this kind of sinking and I felt like I can re-code it again. I go to the next one. And if I forget it again, it's later on that I come across it again, go to my list. Yeah, that's really good. I like that process.
If anyone, so Mehdi and me, we used to run a series of panel discussions in Stockholm. Was it one year ago, two years ago? A long two years ago, yeah. A while ago. So, and if anyone was attending to that, you will realize, you know, the power of Mehdi's quotation system because he drops quotes left and right. You know, it's very impressive to see. So it's obviously working for you to remember the gifts of the books. That's good.
That was something that also came to me when I wanted to discuss about a really good book that I had a whole moment that, hey, this was a great book. And when I wanted to talk about it, I could not even make a paragraph about that book. And that's also one approach that at least I take one quote from this book. But also when I go through it over and over again, and especially after a long time, let's say after a decade or so, you revisit a book.
it becomes totally different book not only the book is different your person even perception is different you are a different person you uh apply those uh stuff in uh real life and your you had a paradigm mind shift mind shift if you really work on your learning curve and it's when you go through it again you have you are visiting you're revisiting it with whole new eye
And it's have really good impact. Other tools that I use, it's Goodreads. I believe majority of the readers, they're familiar about Goodreads. I keep track of the books that I want to read or I read. I have my own shelf. I must read or I don't know, philosophy, entrepreneurship, leadership. I create my own shelf in Goodreads.
I used Goodreads a lot. And it's one of these apps that I love and I hate at the same time. Because it fills such a big gap in my reading experience and it's very, very useful. But at the same time, the execution of Goodreads, it's not very good. It's so slow and it's clunky to use. It's not very good.
It's the best that is out there. And I know there have been several attempts to try to dethrone it, but they have not been very successful so far. There is one. Have you seen... There's an app called Hardcover. No, I've never heard about it. So they've been working on that. I think it's one guy who's working on that. And he's been on it for...
at least a year maybe two or more i don't know maybe it's been working on it for 10 years what do i know but it's uh it's really coming into shape and it's uh it seems very interesting so they are they are doing a lot of what goodreads are doing but like rethinking why to do it so to do it in a better way i don't know how to explain it better but definitely check that out but as well hardcover hardcover i think that could be good i will check it out because
For me, as you mentioned, it's my only things that I could find when I wanted to keep track of the books that I want to read. And I read already. And yeah, I totally agree with you. I don't know why they don't come up with better app or better interface for this. And the interface goes back to what it used to be 10 years ago, I believe. There was not fundamental revamping and good work on this good risk.
given that amazon owned good rates it's really uh for me hard to understand why they don't invest more money uh although they have so many clients maybe it's kind of monolithic application that is not easy to revamp yeah yeah that's true or or maybe they just don't need to neither like they i mean most people are using it so they don't have a need yet
But we'll see what the future has in store. I think you made an interesting point before about how you absorb different things as you reread books. Because this is, again, a fundamental principle of life that you don't see the world as it is. You see the world through your filter. And your filter is not immutable. It changes as you experience the world.
That's like a two-way communication there. So you take in information, that information is used to change the way you take in information, and then you take in new information. So two people who are reading the same news article can see completely different things. And I think that's a valid point for revisiting books. So for myself, I also re-read books, very few of them. So one of them is meditations that I talked about last time. I try to re-read that once every year.
Because every time I find something new that resonates with me, because it's been a year since last time, so now I'm a different person, so I can find new things, or maybe I have new problems that I'm struggling with, or I have overcome problems that I struggled with before, so they are no longer current or whatever. But every time I find something new that...
you know, changes me or improves me in some way. So if you find the right book, you could stick with that and just reread it and still get new stuff all the time. Very true. Because the world is changing at the same time. Not only us. Sure. The world is changing pretty fast. One of my favorite authors is Jovano Harari. And in 21st lesson from 21st century,
He was mentioning that the definition of illiteracy is changed in 21st century. Illiterate people are not those people that they cannot read and write. Illiterate people are those that they cannot learn, they cannot unlearn, and they cannot relearn. Because unlearning and relearning is much more difficult than learning. And Mark Twain also has a quote that...
We are not rephrasing. The problem is not the things that we don't know. The problem are the things that we know and they ain't so. Like we learn it wrongly. And unlearning it is a skill. And going through the books over and over again and look at it from a different perspective, it makes a huge difference. And sometimes...
For some books, if you don't have the quite good background, you might not really get the whole picture. For example, like this trillion dollar coach. If you don't know who's Bill Kamel and who was he, what kind of role he played. And you go through the book, you might enjoy it, but you won't really get the whole...
message that the book went, you know, delivered. But when you go through different books that he have been referenced over and over again, and then you go through that book, it gives you another kick. Yeah, yeah, for sure. It's interesting when you said that, like how to interpret a book depending on the context where it's written in or who has written it. One book that comes to mind is, of course, Anne Frank's diary.
diary from a young girl i think it's called i mean if you just read the book and you don't know the context like it's gonna be a ridiculous book but if you know the context you know about the nazi germany and everything it's it's a whole different book like it's wow that made a huge impact on me as well that's a good one very true so we have one thing that we wanted to go ahead one thing that we wanted to discuss about in this episode also
the books that shape our thought to really go through the books like we both cover over 500 books in last decade and how it keep us going what books give us this mindset to keep doing what we are doing and leverage the time that we have and reinvent ourselves and put time on our self-improvement
The book that I mentioned in last episode was Slight Edge. Slight Edge is a really great book that it's really stick with me. Although I went through it like a decade ago. But still the philosophy that it introduced is stick with me. It's like within this book it's mentioning everything is your philosophy first. Then philosophy is make your attitude.
Your attitude create action and action lead to result. And also in the organization and everything, say paradigm shift is the first things that you need to put your focus on. Then it's create attitude, attitude create action, and action create result. If you just jump into result, you might not be able to go that long or be persistent the way that we were.
And also, there is another book that I really like. I want to really go through it again. It's The Success Principle. Also, that book was really interesting. The author has been through over 3,000 books, and he put all the gist of all those books within The Success Principle.
it's also really interesting read that can shape your uh you know mindset um yeah how about you i like the the slight edge is also one of my favorite books i really really enjoyed it and like you say it's it's what you do continuously over time that you know amounts and compounds uh over time as well and one big takeaway that i had from the slight edge is that this principle works either for you or against you so if you don't put it to use for you it will most likely be used against you
So if you're not intentional about how you spend your time, for example, then you will spend your time on TikTok or whatever, you know, and with the results that follows from wasting away your life like that as well. So I really enjoyed that. It was a bit scary to read that one, but in a good way, I think. Yes, I agree. Yeah, stick with me that, hey, it's really, really easy to do the things that we are doing, let's say.
Reading a few pages of the book or listening a few minutes in a day, it's really easy to do on a daily basis. And at the same time, it's really easy not to do. Which one you choose, it does not really make direct impact on your life on that moment or that day per se. If you read a few pages, it's not going to evolve your life. And if you don't read...
your life won't get destroyed but after the compound effect kick in after several years you will see the impact and it's then it's the power of the slight edge or compound effect that if you know it works for you and if you don't know the power of it it works against you
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And yeah, I think there's so much to dig into that. But concretely here and now, one thing that we are trying to use this principle for is this podcast. So for example, we decided very early that we're not going to edit anything. So sorry about all the eh and ums.
and all the crappy takings but we're not going to edit anything because we want to keep our threshold down so we actually make the episodes happen and then as we sit down and record we make the episodes happen they are going to improve as well as we do them so that's a practical example of us using the slight edge to to improve our our podcasting for example i also so i have a i had a side business where i did nutrition and diet coaching
And a lot of people are struggling with that. And one thing that I kept coming back to that I would advise my clients is that if you have a baseline, so it's the average that is the interesting part. That's the average that, you know, reflects how you feel and how you perform. And so if you three days out of seven in the week, you.
do really good like you eat your vegetables and you like you keep to your meal plan and everything and then four days a week you don't you go bananas and you order pizzas and have crisps and beers and whatever it's not going to go very well for you but if you shift that to three versus four instead you know it's going to be a little bit better if you shift that to five versus two it's going to be even better you know so and the thing the times when things go bad is when you are feeling like you come home and you're tired and you don't want to deal with it you
But in those times, it feels like a challenge to people. Like it's something that they need to overcome. But if you switch it instead to seeing like, okay, so this is one of those four opportunities that I have this week to make a difference, to move my average. So this is like, I feel tired and I feel shit and I want to do it. But this is an opportunity instead for me to move my average.
for myself and for many of my clients that like mindset shift made such a difference like seeing it as an opportunity instead and again that's the that's the slight edge that's an application of the slight edge so that's that was good for me right right
And we were talking about how, yeah, the previous episode, the books that we mentioned that had made an impact. So again, I keep repeating about this book, but Meditations by the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius. That was my tip. And we had listeners asking us to explain a little bit why we picked the slight edge on meditation. So my explanation then for meditation is that it...
First of all, it's very cool to read the daily thoughts. Like this is a diary of one of the most powerful men in the history of the world. And he writes about very mundane things, about how he struggles with people who are ungrateful and how he struggles with himself wanting to lay in bed and just, you know, being under the cozy blanket when he needs to get up and lead his empire.
It's very cool to read from that perspective. But then it also teaches so many interesting mental models or tools to help you live a better life. So for example, one of the basic premise in Stoicism and which his philosophy is based on is that there's a difference between what you can control and there's things that you can't control. And realizing this difference makes you both stress
Stop stressing about all the things that you can't control, which are the majority parts of your life, if you're being honest. But it also helps you focus your time and effort into the things that you actually can control. So that's a really, really big thing. So you were going to go to the attraction park today, but you can't because it started to rain. You can't control it, but you can control what you're doing instead. So let's cozy up at home with a movie instead. That's a very silly example, but a very concrete one.
yeah that's right and you know the interesting things uh in skin in the game the meditation came up as well a skin in the game the genre is about hey don't get advice that from people that they earn their money from uh giving advice unless they are willing to pay fine for it
Only stick with the people that are having a skin in the game. And one of the books that he was bringing as an example was Meditation. That this is a Roman Empire that he was really making the whole empire and he was ruling the empire. And he had a skin in the game. He had things to lose. And what he mentioned is really valuable to learn from.
Yeah, it's so cool to read that now or later. And I think, I don't know, so I haven't read Skin and Game. I've read his Anti-Fragile book. But I think it was there he talked about this principle that, I don't know, I'm mixing things up. But he, anyway, he has told this story about how, I think it was Roman...
construction workers or roman architects or something when they built a house they or a bridge when they built a bridge they had to sleep under the bridge with their family for a week or something like that uh so that that's a very good way to incentivize them to build a really good bridge i i forgot the name of the person as well but he mentioned it in this book as uh in uh scanning the game again
that they were this rule if let's say if a person go and die in the house that you build the builder of the house they they need to take their life from it and uh it's it was the philosophy that he wanted to mention that hey you need to have the skin in the game it have it's have three category uh like not a skin in the game
a skin in the game solely in the game which is totally new level it's interesting maybe i should bump it up in my little algorithm so okay get to it sooner yeah that's where i've been meaning to read all these books because i yeah they are usually interesting at least some parts of it so one other thing about the meditations that i took with me from that book is that people will act like people are so meaning that
We often get surprised when we shouldn't by how people, you know, misbehave or act against us. Again, with a silly example, like if my, I have two sons, two children, they're five and almost eight now. And if they, you know, get an outburst and they throw their food and then the kitchen gets all dirty, you know, I could get angry about that. But I mean...
They are two kids and the little one is five years old. These are things that he is supposed to do. He will be doing that. If I expect him not to do that, I am an idiot.
Because this is what children do. So that's also... It's very hard when he throws food in the kitchen to remember this. But it is a very good thing to remind yourself of. That people will act how they are. So you shouldn't be surprised. Very true. And the circumstances also sometimes lead them to act that way. Yeah, for sure. Another really good book that I can recommend is Classic 7 Habits of Highly Affected People.
and the same concept he was like explaining about when he went to a boss and he see two kids they are really disturbing and the the father was not even bothering to control them and then he figured out they lost their mom and it's it was like the way that he bring uh a seven kobe the concept within the story like matter a secret you all the example that he mentioned
Like, although I have been through that book over 10 years ago, I still remember the example and the message that he wanted to deliver. Based on the circumstances, sometimes people, they're acting that if you know the circumstances, you can correlate and you can have sympathy and empathy with that. Otherwise, you want to be judgmental that, hey, why the father does not control the kid, why the kid behaves like that?
But yeah, it's quite interesting, this kind of stuff, if you know the circumstances as well. That reminds me, have you read Predictably Irrational? Dan Ariely, I think it is. The name looked familiar, but I'm not sure I've been through the book. You would like it, and it's about how people sometimes...
seem very irrational when at first glance like in in this case that you're bringing up but there's always there's always an explanation behind it like people are rational even if like the input that they have might be irrational causing them to be act seemingly irrational if that makes sense exactly so there are many topics also surrounded by idiots
It's categorizing people. I don't know whether you have been through that book or not. Oh, I have a pet peeve with that book, actually. So this guy, what's his name? It's a Swedish guy. So basically, like with many personality tests, he has made it up.
I don't know. I haven't read the book, so maybe there are other parts of it. But one part of that book is this, you know, blue, green, red type of people, which is something that he has made up and there has no verification in psychology whatsoever. It's like it's just completely made up like the Meyer Briggs. I will add into that. But and we have actually at work, we had a leadership course that we were, you know, we were invited to.
I really enjoyed the course, but one part of the course was that we were supposed to take this test to see if we were a green person or a red person or something. And yeah, I just refused. I did not want to be a part of that. But they were nice to let me sit outside and not have to participate. It's interesting to read. The book has stuff to say, although it's...
He mentioned at the end of the book, because when I go, I was going through the book, when he was explaining green and say, Oh, I'm green. Then next he started explaining yellow. I said, Oh no, I was yellow. Then he started explaining red. Oh, I am red. Then at the end of the book, he said, there is no one that feed 100% in one bucket. We have each and every of them in some percentage. And I, as a matter of fact, I took that test.
And I was among the people that I had all the color, but different percentage. Right, right. Yeah. And I'm sure if you take it the next day, it will be a different spread as well. Yeah. But at the same time, it gives you a really general sense. It's not a hundred percent. Of course, there is nothing absolute here. But at the same time, the book have messages.
things to say yeah i haven't read through it so uh but i'm sure and i so with that i have a little bit of a pet peeve like i said with this kind of thing so like if if you can't uh reliably say that or reliably assess something so that you consistently get the same assessment like you are a green person you are a green person it's not suddenly that oh now you're a blue person because then you can't really rely on the assessment exactly
And if there's also uncertainty between the connection, if you're a blue person, then you should be handled in this way. Or if you're a red person, you should be talked to in this manner. So then there's like a chain of uncertainty. So it's not useful whatsoever. But if you break it down, like, you know, what makes you green or what makes you blue, what makes you red?
And how does that affect how you should interact with a person? Maybe there could be, like I'm playing the devil's advocate here, but maybe there could be something useful in there. Very true. So we had some feedback. We released our trailer episode where we talked a little bit about the podcast and announcing it. And we got some feedback. I was very happy to see that we got some feedback whatsoever. But we had some nice comments here.
Three of them were, we asked about people's, the books that made an impact on people's lives. And we got three comments here. So one was Extreme Ownership. And the woman who commented that was Leobov, maybe. Sorry for butchering your name. I have no idea how to pronounce that. You can help us out maybe in a future comment. But the book Extreme Ownership by Joko Willings, right?
Have you read that? Yeah, that is really interesting. I like when it's come to military type of books because it's a matter of life and death. And it's really the real leadership to start there. Yeah, for sure. So it's about taking ownership of your team and the results that your team produces as the leader of the team.
Even if you feel that someone has not performed their duties very well or someone has been slacking and because of that it has led to not very good results, you are still responsible for that result. So it was your responsibility to make sure that everyone was on board, everyone had everything they needed, all the obstacles were out of the way, even if you don't do it.
You can still delegate and make sure that other people do it, but it's still your responsibility as a leader to make sure that it gets done. I really like that one as well. Although I always mix his books like Extreme Ownership, Academy of Leadership, and Discipline Equals Freedom.
They all get mixed up in my head, but all three of them are good reads. And especially if you read it with his... Have you seen him on YouTube? He's this badass Navy SEAL guy who speaks the way as well. So if you read the books with his voice in your head, it's an awesome experience. Interesting. Maybe in future podcasts we can discuss further about it and revisit the book per se. Yeah, for sure.
Joko, if you hear this, you're welcome as a guest, of course. Next one we had was The Old Man and the Sea. And I think we both read it a while ago. I read it recently. So that one is about a fisherman who goes out to fish and then catches a really big fish, you can say.
basically and it sounds ridiculous but like the whole book is about his this old guy's internal journey and he's growing old and weak but he still wants to prove that he's strong and capable and while the his village is kind of shunning him there's still this young boy that tries to keep him within society and yeah there's many aspects of it uh ernst hemingway is the author i really really enjoy that one it is interesting read but not one of my favorite
uh but this is something also it's matter of taste sometimes you have a takeaway from a book because the life that you live the journey that you had you can correlate and relate with that story and the impact that have on you not going to have on everyone else that doesn't say the book is the worst or the book is the best the book works for different people in different ways
sometimes you get so many messages from a like normal roman or anything novel and but sometimes you go through a book that have a lot of to say but it's not really relate with you resonate with you it it really depends it's among the books that i see the perseverance the hard work and everything is in the book
And the story is really engaging. But the takeaway for me was not really significant per se. Yeah. But I think it's an interesting point to bring up that we're mainly going to talk about non-fiction books in this podcast. But fiction books can still give you a lot and teach you a lot. Especially about sympathy and empathy with other people and understanding of different people's lives. That's really good.
One book though, like a tangent, but have you read The Little Prince? Of course, this is one of my favorite. Oh, you like it? Oh, that's funny because I was going to bring that up as like, I don't understand how people can rave about that book at all. No, that book is among the book that I mentioned. This is a book that sometimes when you see the message...
It has a lot to say. It looks like a children's book, but it has multiple layers. And when you decipher those layers and open it up, it has a lot to discuss about. It's among my favorite reads and most reads, per se. That's why, like I was mentioning, sometimes the book gives you a home moment, a kick moment, and when you introduce it to other people, they cannot really correlate with it.
like they cannot resonate with it like because it's uh they they did not hear the message from the perspective of the author or it's something is in their blind side that they cannot see like but i'm not sure i i think i did though and i think like it's it was a bit too obvious like all he traveled to this planets and like
at every planet there's a new lesson like I think it was too obvious and too simplistic like I couldn't like hmm okay I don't know it was I didn't it maybe it went above my head I don't know or under it but I I enjoy that we have different perspective and that we enjoy different books of course no it's it's like matter of days it's there are some some stuff no matter you cannot find two people that they have exact same opinion
We have a lot of books that we both really enjoy and we have in common. But there are books like that sometimes you enjoy it too much. I did not get that message from it sometimes or the other way around. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like it goes back to what you said in the beginning that at different types in your life and different people, they will interpret different things from the same book. And also something else that it really impact your...
perception when you go through the books it depends what a stage in your life you are sometimes yeah for sure you are in a stage that nothing can go through you like if you're listening to audiobook at the end of the audiobook as if you did not listen to it at all because you your mind was occupied with other things with life with anything or
when you listen to the book or read the book, what was the previous book that you went through? If you go through a masterpiece, the next book is set the bar so high that even the book, it was like good book. It sounds like mediocre book because the previous, it was real masterpiece. And it's also, it impact your perspective. Yeah. So a funny story about that or a little anecdote is that
Let's see if I remember all the details about this correctly. But the way I remember is that Amazon had a challenge out to see if you could improve their recommendation engine. So by some point. And many people tried to restructure the algorithm to see can we find...
segments of people and you know correlate them with each other but the team that made the most impact was the team that took this the existing algorithm but then they factored in the previous movie that everyone had watched so if they had watched you know something that they gave a nine and then suddenly they gave a seven to the next movie maybe that seven was actually a seven and a half instead you know because they they saw something really really good so they that was the bar for comparison
Yeah, so by implementing, like factoring in that part, the previous movie that they had seen, the recommendation engine got a lot better. I had it in my own personal experience. I did not know that they take it into consideration for even improving the algorithm, which makes perfect sense. Yeah, right. Yeah. I don't know if it's still in existence or if it's in there now, but it was a challenge that they had and they managed to improve their recommendation. So that was cool. Interesting. Yeah.
This discussion about how to interpret books and which books resonate with you and not, it also helps explain why you see some books...
you know with 300 000 reviews and it's like 4.3 on goodreads and you go through it you're like this was i don't understand i don't understand what they're about so maybe if you return five years later uh you know it was it's awesome or if you had read it 10 years earlier it would have been awesome yeah yeah very true all right so one thing i wanted to bring up that we talked about in the for this episode is that we are releasing it
january 1st so it's a new year and that means you know new year resolutions and reading challenges right so goodreads has this option where you can set up a reading challenges for a number of books per year is that something you use yeah i use it like for i think last almost nine eight years and i usually set my challenge around 60 ish book sometimes i exceed
sometimes i uh cannot really meet it like this year for me like in 2024 it was kind of challenging here moving from one country to another and starting a new job and everything and it was quite challenging i only could cover around 40 book this year and next year hopefully i'm gonna exceed my uh challenge which is 60.
Right. The year of revenge. Yes. That's nice. So I also use it every year. And I said sometimes I do. Like, you know, I want to read one book every two weeks or something like that. So I think this year I was a bit pessimistic. And I set it at 26, I think. So one book every two weeks. But now I'm at 67 books this year. Wow.
overcame that by far but what i think is more interesting is to see how many pages i read because just picking books then it kind of incentivizes you to pick shorter books smaller books and usually the books that i really really enjoy are quite big like right now i'm reading the brother karamazov for example and that is what 700 pages or something and i'm really really enjoying that one or brander sanderson's and his you know fantasy sagas or
whatever else like big books are usually really really good in my experience so i really wish that goodreads would give us the option to set a reading challenge based on number of pages that would be yeah that would make better sense actually right right very true do you do so do you have any a hit list of books that you want to go through the next year
Or this year? Like the way that I'm tackling it, it's coming from Nassim Nikola Stoller. He was mentioning that the things that stay longer, there is a higher chance to stay longer. Also, one of the examples that he was mentioning was mentioning books. Say, let's say the books that have been in last decade or couple of decades, and it's have been read by so many people, there is a high chance that it will...
uh last for a couple of more decades or centuries per se and that's uh set my expectation because i i will usually wanted to go based on their rating but unfortunately the rating in good rates is not really good if it have only one rate and it's five it bring it on top of your list imdb it does not work like that it also takes into a number of uh ratings and who rated
how what kind of genre it is and it have they have really complex and sophisticated algorithm when it's come to rating and sorting but goodread unfortunately doesn't have it that's why i cannot sort by rating i sort by number of ratings and whatever comes first i'll go and tackle it and the way that i usually tackle it it's
mix category for me. I don't need to choose because the number of ratings choose. Of course, always novel come on top of my list. And I don't have much, a lot of novel and science fiction. And I, whenever it comes, it's come on top of my list and I just go for them. But it depends like what kind of books it's come to my list. I use two platforms for listening to audiobooks.
One of them is Audible, that they have really comprehensive library of all the audio books. And when you purchase the audio book, you have it for life, for lifetime. You purchase that book. But there is another platform called Everend. They used to call Scribe, but now it's they rebranded to Everend. In that platform, when you get the subscription, while you have the subscription, whether a month or a year or so.
you have access to all the ebook and their audiobook while you have the subscription but when your subscription over you have access to nothing it's that's how it's okay okay and actually that was that is my preferred way that i have access to everything and if i wanted you on between different books or see everything it's but the their library is not as comprehensive as audible
yeah yeah so i use audible myself but it works for me because i only use audible for biographies and a biography is takes me i don't know 40 hours maybe to go through or something and i only do it when i go for walks or when i'm in you know commuting to work so it takes me more than a month to go through a book and you get one token
one book every month so for me it's a great pace because then i can shut my subscription for a couple of months and i catch up and then i restart my subscription so and i always have my my books there so i get the premium plan usually for audible it's like 24 credit for one year and uh i i cover all the audiobooks that the title that i want to go through then i change back to ever and like every year i change
Okay, nice. So I, speaking about reading for the coming year, so something that I've been dabbling with the last year and a half or so is to have, to read within a topic. So I, whatever I'm interested in at the moment, machine learning, relationships, mathematics or something, I go deep in that and I fit.
pick five books or something, and then I read those books. And right now, I feel like my topic right now is historical warfare. So I'm going to continue with my battle. My next one will be the Battle of Lützen, I think. So continuing onwards from Narva to Lützen. So that's going to be good to go through. Great. And I think, yeah, I like, again, I think it's interesting to see how we have been
for the same challenges, like being able to rank books on Goodreads to pick the next one and how we picked different solutions. So when I was faced with that, I rank everything and I get 50 books that are five stars on Goodreads. And they're all because they have one or two ratings only from a friend of the author. And then I need to go through them.
Some of them might be good, so I can't just skip through them. So I need to go through them, and then I get to do good stuff, and I can start to go through them. What I did was I studied up, and I learned this Bayesian statistics in order to create my algorithm, which takes into account the number of reviews, the reviews, the number of pages, and so on and so forth, so that I can get a ranked list of my books in my want-to-read list. So I have a blog post about that that I will share as well.
Whereas you just started ranking books by the number of ratings. I mean, our list will probably be very, very similar, but yours were much simpler and faster to implement. So I like that. That's good. Okay. So I think that's it for today. I believe so. And next episode, we are going to discuss about entrepreneurship and leadership, right? Yeah.
Yeah, building and running a business. Yeah. And how successful businesses, what they have in common and what they lead into their success. We're going to discuss about different books and some experience. Yeah. So anyone who's interested in starting, building and or running a business successfully, I think there will be a lot of good stuff in that one for you. And we will release that in one month from now.
Beginning of February, it'll be out. And if you have any questions or input or feedback or experiences that you want to share with us for that episode, we will be more than happy to receive that in a comment. Like if you listen to Spotify or YouTube or wherever you get your podcast, just drop a comment and we will be happy to hear that. I am also personally very interested to hear what other people are planning for their 2025 reading. So be sure to add that in as well. I would be glad to hear that. Great.
And for the next episode or any upcoming episode, if you have anything and you would like to be part of our podcast, please reach out and we can have you as a guest to discuss about the topic or the book that you would like to share your thought and experience with us. For sure. I mean, we love to talk books. Okay. Thank you. Thanks, everyone. See you.