👋 Hey friend,

I’m reading the book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, by Scott Adams.

One of my favorite nuggets I got from the book is the idea that in order to progress and be successful at anything, is much more useful to focus on systems rather than goals…

👤 Doers

💡Nugget

🟠 Scott Adams:

Throughout my career, I’ve had my antennae up looking for examples of people who use systems versus goals. In most cases, as far as I can tell, the people who use systems do better. The systems-driven people have found a way to look at the familiar in new and more useful ways.

To put it bluntly, goals are for losers. That’s literally true most of the time. For example, if your goal is to lose ten pounds, you will spend every moment until you reach the goal—if you reach it at all—feeling as if you are short of your goal. In other words, goal-oriented people exist in a state of nearly continuous failure that they hope will be temporary. That feeling wears on you. In time, it becomes heavy and uncomfortable. It might even drive you out of the game.

If you achieve your goal, you celebrate and feel terrific, but only until you realize you just lost the thing that gave you purpose and direction. Your options are to feel empty and useless, perhaps enjoying the spoils of your success until they bore you, or set new goals and reenter the cycle of permanent pre-success failure.

…

Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous pre-success failure at best and permanent failure at worst, if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems in the sense that they did what they intended to do. The “goals” people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at each turn. The systems people feel good every time they apply their system. That’s a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction.

The system-versus-goals model can be applied to most human endeavors. In the world of dieting, losing twenty pounds is a goal, but eating right is a system. In the exercise realm, running a marathon in under four hours is a goal, but exercising daily is a system. In business, making a million dollars is a goal, but being a serial entrepreneur is a system.

For our purposes, let’s say a goal is a specific objective that you either achieve or don’t sometime in the future. A system is something you do on a regular basis that increases your odds of happiness in the long run. If you do something every day, it’s a system. If you’re waiting to achieve it someday in the future, it’s a goal.

Language is messy, and I know some of you are thinking that exercising every day sounds like a goal. The common definition of goals would certainly allow that interpretation. For our purposes, let’s agree that goals are a reach-it-and-be-done situation, whereas a system is something you do on a regular basis with a reasonable expectation that doing so will get you to a better place in your life. Systems have no deadlines, and on any given day, you probably can’t tell if it’s moving you in the right direction.

My proposition is that if you study people who succeed, you will see that most of them follow systems, not goals.

This idea of having systems rather than goals ties well with Paul Graham’s essay “How to Do Great Work”…

🟠 Paul Graham:

Great work happens by focusing consistently on something you're genuinely interested in. When you pause to take stock, you're surprised how far you've come.

The reason we're surprised is that we underestimate the cumulative effect of work. Writing a page a day doesn't sound like much, but if you do it every day you'll write a book a year. That's the key: consistency. People who do great things don't get a lot done every day. They get something done, rather than nothing.

(Source: How to Do Great Work)

I resonated with this idea from Paul Graham because that’s exactly what I try to do: I try to get something done every day, however small. And in order to make sure I do not violate this system, I have a few other systems:

(1) Never drink alcohol before 8pm.

(2) Never say yes to any plans before lunch time (unless it’s an important family event or something extremely necessary).

(3) In the case I get hangover (it’s never planned), at least I’ll spend the morning reading a book and thinking.

Of course all of this is ideal. Sometimes I do violate these systems depending on the circumstances. But it’s rare.

💥 Stuff I Loved

I hope you enjoyed today’s letter!

Talk you soon,

Your nuggets friend Julio :)

The problem is that there are so many audiobook apps out there… Which should I choose ??

So I read a few articles, talked to some very wise friends (yes… ChatGPT and Claude 😂 ), and searched on the App Store for the most popular and highly rated audiobook apps, and finally came up with a list of 9 audiobook apps:

That’s still a big list. So I personally tried each of them to find out which is the best audiobook app in 2026.

In this article I share my experience with each app, and at the end I tell you my favorite one. So if you are in a similar situation like me, I guarantee this will save you a ton of research time.

(Note: I wasn’t able to try Libby and Spotify Audiobooks, because they had country restrictions🥲. But I still mention them in the list because you might have access.)

1. LibriVox (free audiobooks)

This is the best app if you’re interested in listening to books that are in the public domain (all books published before 1931 are considered to be in the public domain, at least in the US).

The app is free because it only includes books in the public domain, and narrations are made by volunteers. On the flip side, the app is ads-supported and some narrations might not sound as professionally as narrations on a paid app such as Audible or Apple Books.

Twelve Years a Slave (narration sample):

The app has a library of over 45,000 audiobooks, so if you’re looking for a classic (or any book in the public domain), odds are you’ll find it here! And you can download any audiobook to listen offline.

2. Audible

This is the giant in the Audiobook space. They claim to have 1M+ audiobooks, exclusive Audible originals (audioboooks exclusive to Audible), and podcasts.

I’m currently listening to an audiobook of the novel The Great Gatsby. This is a classic I’ve been wanting to listen and the reviews on the quality of the narration where really good, so I decided to give it a try. I’m already on chapter Five and I love the book and narration style!

The Great Gatsby (narration sample):

On the Audible app, you can also change the marketplace (inside settings), so you can see all the audiobooks listed in Brazil, Canada, France, Spain, etc. If you’re learning a new language, this feature can be really valuable!

In terms of pricing, there are two options:

(1) You can buy the subscription, which costs $8.99/month. The subscription gives you access to one audiobook per month (from their entire library of 1M+ titles). The only caveat here is that if you cancel the membership, you won’t be able to access previous titles you picked with the membership.

(2) You can purchase audiobooks directly. After exploring some titles, it looks like prices range from $7 (typically classics and short books, such as Animal Farm) to $30.

P.S. You can also use both options. You can buy the subscription to get the monthly audiobook, and purchase individual titles if you want more audiobooks in the same month.

3. Apple Books

If you’re an Apple user, this app is a great choice. The app is called “Books” inside Apple, and it comes by default in all Apple devices — so it’s very convenient if you’re in the Apple ecosystem.

They mention (in the App Store) they have “millions of books and audiobooks.” And they have a list of 100 free books (mostly classics in the public domain), but the audiobook version is never free :(

The Brothers Kamarazov (narration sample):

One thing I hate (yes… hate!) about Apple Books is that if you want to make any changes in your settings, these changes are also made to your Apple ID. I live in Spain, so Apple Books only shows me titles in Spanish. If I want to see titles in English (or listed in the US), I’d have to change my residence in Apple ID!! (which by they way I tried to do and is not possible, because Apple tells me I first need to cancel the phone insurance I bought in Spain 😅 ).

In terms of pricing, audiobooks are priced individually — there are no subscription plans.

I also compared the prices of a few audiobooks with the other audiobook apps, and Apple Books was by far the most expensive! I guess Apple wants to keep their high margins even in selling audiobooks 😂

4. Google Play Books & Audiobooks

This app comes by default in all Android devices, so it’s a convenient option if you are on Android. But even if you’re not on Android, you can download the app on your iPhone and it’s still convenient because it’s linked to your Google account.

They claim to have “millions of ebooks, audiobooks, comics, and manga.”

Reality Is Not What It Seems (narration sample):

Similar to Apple Books, I can’t change the marketplace and see titles in other countries. But in curated lists such as “Top Selling” I do see titles in English.

There are no subscription plans. Audiobooks are priced individually.

5. BeFreed (the AI player)

BeFreed turns books into podcast-style audio lessons that you can listen in 10 minutes (if you choose the quick version) or around 30 minutes (if you choose the deep dive version). So it’s not exactly an audiobook app… it’s more like an audiobook summary app.

The audio lessons are built with AI, and you can talk to an AI tutor to help you solve any doubt during a lesson. So the app relies heavily on the use of AI.

They claim to have over 10,000 titles.

(Note: The founder, Jisong Liu, was an AI engineer at Pinterest and Google.)

Eleven Minutes, by Paulo Coelho (narration sample + synced transcript):

I love this app for discovering new books. For instance, I discovered the novel Eleven Minutes by Paulo Coelho, which I’m planning to listen on Audible once my Audible subscription lets me get the new monthly audiobook (I already got The Great Gatsby a few days ago).

👉 I talked to the team at BeFreed and they agreed to give us a 20% discount by signing up with this link!

6. Libro.fm (the Ethical player)

Their mobile app is not the most polished (compared to the other apps), nor the most convenient (you can only manage your account and payments from the website), and audiobooks are not the cheapest.

So… why is this app so popular (with 36K ratings on the US App Store) and included in my list ??

I think it deserves a mention because it might be the most ethical player. They have partnerships with local bookstores (all over the world, but mainly in North America, UK, Australia, and New Zealand) where they share a percentage of their profits with them. And when you sign up, you can actually pick the local bookstore that you want to support (if it’s listed in their directory of local bookstore partners).

Greenlights (narration sample):

P.S. I loved that the author of the book, Matthew McConaughey, is also the narrator. This audiobook is available on all audiobook apps listed here (except LibriVox).

Libro.fm also offers a wide selection with more than 600,000 titles (according to them).

But personally, I won’t be using Libro.fm for three reasons:

• They do not disclose what percentage of profits they actually share with the local bookstores.

• I live in Barcelona (Spain), and I see there are only two listed local bookstore partners — neither of which I’ve ever been.

• Since a few years ago, I just read everything on my Kindle device. Because…

  • (1) I can travel anywhere with my full library of books,

  • (2) I can buy a book and start reading it right away,

  • (3) I’m a fan of highlighting apps (if you wanna learn more about highlighting apps, I wrote a review of my favorite one: Readwise).

Now let’s get into pricing.

They have two options:

(1) Subscription-based memberships:

• Monthly membership with one credit → You can choose one audiobook per month, and you get a 30% discount on additional audiobooks. The subscription goes for $14.99/month (or €12.99/month).

• Monthly membership with two credits → You can choose two audiobooks per month, and you get a 30% discount on additional audiobooks. The subscription costs $23.99/month (or €21.99/month).

• Annual membership → You can choose 12 audiobooks per year (which you can get immediately), and you get the 30% off on additional audiobooks. The subscription goes for $169.99/year (or €154.99/year).

(2) You can also skip the subscriptions and just purchase audiobooks directly.

7. Chirp Books (the “Best Deals” player)

I was only able to try Chirp Books on the website (which is available anywhere in the world), since the mobile app is restricted to US and Canada.

In Chirp Books, you’ll find a selection of audiobooks with steep — sometimes very steep — discounts. They do not say how big is the library of discounted audiobooks, but it looks pretty large. And they say that new deals are added every day (which can also be sent to your email).

The Art of War (narration sample):

You buy the audiobooks directly, and listen on the website (from anywhere in the world) or the mobile app (if you live in the US or Canada).

Other Audiobook Apps (which I haven’t tried)

These are audiobook apps that I was not able to try — because of country restrictions — but I still list them here because they are highly recommended and you might be able to access depending on your country.

8. Libby & Hoopla (free audiobooks from your Public Library)

If you live in the US or Canada, Libby might be a great free alternative to check out.

It has partnerships with most public libraries (+90% of public libraries in North America, according to them), so you can sign up on Libby with your library card and then you get access to your local library’s digital catalog — where you can borrow ebooks and audiobooks.

They have a mobile app, and you can download the ebooks and audiobooks to read or listen offline.

Another popular app that connects with public libraries (in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) is Hoopla. So if Libby is not a partner of your local library, Hoopla might be!

9. Spotify Audiobooks

If you live in one of the eligible countries (see the list below) and you already use Spotify, this might be an interesting alternative.

The library size depends on your country, but they generally offer a catalog of 600K - 700K audiobook titles.

The pricing depends on your country and type of subscription (Free account / Premium Student / Premium Individual / Premium Duo / Premium Family).

Click on your country of residence to see the full details…

(🌎 Eligible countries as of July 2026: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States)

Conclusion: Which is The Best Audiobook App in 2026?

My favorite audiobook app was Audible with the subscription plan, for three reasons:

1. A subscription of $8.99 per month that gets you one audiobook every month is a great deal when most audiobooks cost much more than $8.99.

2. They have a wide selection of 1M+ audiobooks.

3. The mobile app works flawlessly and it has both the best rating and the highest number of ratings on the App Store (4.9/5 from 5.5M ratings).

In the case I wanna listen to more than one audiobook in a given month, I’d have to purchase audiobooks directly. In that case, I’d compare prices between Audible (it typically runs discounts if you are a paying member) and Google Play Books & Audiobooks (I found it to offer cheaper prices than Apple Books and Libro.fm). If I lived in the US or Canada, I’d look into Chirp Books too!

And of course, if I’m interested in a book that is in the public domain, I’d check on LibriVox to see if it’s available there for free. If it’s available and I like the narration style, then I listen to the audiobook on LibriVox for free!

I’m also using BeFreed (audiobook summaries) to explore new audiobooks and discover interesting ones to then go deeper on Audible. If you wanna check out BeFreed, here’s a 20% discount you can use on all subscription plans!

And thank you for reading my blog post ❤️

P.S. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

This book is full of great ideas to prepare oneself against uncertainty.

You’re fragile when uncertainty can harm you more than benefit you. But you’re antifragile when uncertainty can benefit you more than harm you. And you can learn how to become antifragile in practically all domains in life:

• Emotional (see Idea 10—Seneca’s Antifragility),

• Educational (Idea 13—The Survival of Ideas + Idea 14—The Lindy Effect),

• Financial (Idea 9—Always Have Redundancies + Idea 11—The Barbell),

• Lifestyle (Idea 3—Adopt a Mindset of Necessity + Idea 5—Touristification)

• Honor & Integrity (Idea 15—Heroism)

• Business (Idea 7—Pseudo-stabilization + Idea 12—The Green Lumber Fallacy)

Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire. Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind. This summarizes this author’s nonmeek attitude to randomness and uncertainty.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile.

(Above… the mythological Hydra. When one head is cut off, two grow back. The Hydra is Taleb’s symbol of Antifragility — discussed in Idea 2).

💡 Idea 1 - Measure fragility, not risk

🖍️ Highlight 1

… We can estimate, even measure, fragility and antifragility, while we cannot calculate risks and probabilities of shocks and rare events, no matter how sophisticated we get. Risk management as practiced is the study of an event taking place in the future, and only some economists and other lunatics can claim—against experience—to “measure” the future incidence of these rare events, with suckers listening to them—against experience and the track record of such claims. But fragility and antifragility are part of the current property of an object, a coffee table, a company, an industry, a country, a political system. We can detect fragility, see it, even in many cases measure it, or at least measure comparative fragility with a small error while comparisons of risk have been (so far) unreliable.

You cannot say with any reliability that a certain remote event or shock is more likely than another (unless you enjoy deceiving yourself), but you can state with a lot more confidence that an object or a structure is more fragile than another should a certain event happen. You can easily tell that your grandmother is more fragile to abrupt changes in temperature than you, that some military dictatorship is more fragile than Switzerland should political change happen, that a bank is more fragile than another should a crisis occur, or that a poorly built modern building is more fragile than the Cathedral of Chartres should an earthquake happen. And—centrally—you can even make the prediction of which one will last longer. Instead of a discussion of risk (which is both predictive and sissy) I advocate the notion of fragility, which is not predictive—and, unlike risk, has an interesting word that can describe its functional opposite, the nonsissy concept of antifragility.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile.

[📝 Note]

Taleb also mentions that there is a certain class of people that is attracted to the prediction of risks, and another class of people that focus instead on the estimation of fragility. The first class of people are academics and non-risk takers, while the second class are the doers—the people that take risks and have skin in the game.

🖍️ Highlight 2

… And in that strange profession of people who work with volatility, there were two types. First category, academics, report-writers, and commentators who study future events and write books and papers; and, second category, practitioners who, instead of studying future events, try to understand how things react to volatility (but practitioners are usually too busy practitioning to write books, articles, papers, speeches, equations, theories and get honored by Highly Constipated and Honorable Members of Academies). The difference between the two categories is central: as we saw, it is much easier to understand if something is harmed by volatility—hence fragile—than try to forecast harmful events, such as these oversized Black Swans. But only practitioners (or people who do things) tend to spontaneously get the point.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile.

💡 Idea 2 - Please behead me

🖍️ Highlight

In a Roman recycled version of a Greek myth, the Sicilian tyrant Dionysius II has the fawning courtier Damocles enjoy the luxury of a fancy banquet, but with a sword hanging over his head, tied to the ceiling with a single hair from a horse’s tail. A horse’s hair is the kind of thing that eventually breaks under pressure, followed by a scene of blood, high-pitched screams, and the equivalent of ancient ambulances. Damocles is fragile—it is only a matter of time before the sword strikes him down.

In another ancient legend, this time the Greek recycling of an ancient Semitic and Egyptian legend, we find Phoenix, the bird with splendid colors. Whenever it is destroyed, it is reborn from it own ashes. It always returns to its initial state. Phoenix happens to be the ancient symbol of Beirut, the city where I grew up. According to legend, Berytus (Beirut’s historical name) has been destroyed seven times in its close to five-thousand-year history, and has come back seven times. The story seems cogent, as I myself saw the eighth episode; central Beirut (the ancient part of the city) was completely destroyed for the eighth time during my late childhood, thanks to the brutal civil war. I also saw its eighth rebuilding. But Beirut was, in its latest version, rebuilt in even better shape than the previous incarnation—and with an interesting irony: the earthquake of A.D. 551 had buried the Roman law school, which was discovered, like a bonus from history, during the reconstruction (with archeologists and real estate developers trading public insults). That’s not Phoenix, but something else beyond the robust. Which brings us to the third mythological metaphor: Hydra. Hydra, in Greek mythology, is a serpent-like creature that dwells in the lake of Lerna, near Argos, and has numerous heads. Each time one is cut off, two grow back. So harm is what it likes. Hydra represents antifragility. The sword of Damocles represents the side effect of power and success: you cannot rise and rule without facing this continuous danger—someone out there will be actively working to topple you…

…

Black Swans will be out there to get you as you now have much more to lose, a cost of success (and growth), perhaps an unavoidable penalty of excessive success…

…

To counter success, you need a high offsetting dose of robustness, even high doses of antifragility. You want to be Phoenix, or possibly Hydra. Otherwise the sword of Damocles will get you.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile.

[📝 Note]

So we have the story of Damocles as representative of fragility, the Phoenix as the robust, and the Hydra as the antifragile.

And just to expand a bit more on the story of the Phoenix, I think there’s also another important meaning to this story. Which is that every day you start fresh and you don’t let dogma or the past dictate what you’re gonna do next. You constantly reinvent yourself. As Naval Ravikant put it: “The greatest superpower is the ability to change yourself.” This is also part of the philosophy of Jeff Bezos when he talks about Day One Thinking…

[Day One thinking] It’s really a very simple and I think age old idea about renewal and rebirth. Every day is day one. Every day you are deciding what you’re gonna do. And you are not trapped by what you were or who you were, or any self-consistency. Even Self-consistency can be a trap. And so day one thinking is kind of… We start fresh every day. And we get to make new decisions every day about invention, customers, about how we’re going to operate, even as deeply as what our principles are (it turns out we don’t change those very often, but we change them occasionally).

And when we work on programs at Amazon, we often make a list of tenets (they’re a little more tactical than principles, kind of the main ideas that we want this program to embody). And one of the things that we do is we put: “These are the tenets for this program”. And, in parentheses, we always put: “Unless you know a better way”. And that idea “Unless you know a better way” is so important… Because you never wanna get trapped by dogma. You never wanna get trapped by history. It doesn’t mean you discard history or ignore it— there’s so much value in what has worked in the past—but you can’t be blindly following what you’ve done. And that’s the heart of day one… is you’re always starting fresh.

— Jeff Bezos, The Lex Fridman Podcast. (Resurfaced using Readwise Reader).

Note I left to myself here: Be antifragile like the Hydra, and fluid like the Phoenix.

💡 Idea 3 - Adopt a Mindset of Necessity

🖍️ Highlight

… In spite of the visibility of the counterevidence, and the wisdom you can pick up free of charge from the ancients (or grandmothers), moderns try today to create inventions from situations of comfort, safety, and predictability instead of accepting the notion that “necessity really is the mother of invention.” Many, like the great Roman statesman Cato the Censor, looked at comfort, almost any form of comfort, as a road to waste. He did not like it when we had it too easy, as he worried about the weakening of the will.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile.

[📝 Note]

As Machiavelli states, necessity is what impels men to take action, and once the necessity is gone, only rot and decay are left.

…

Having no need to increase his store of power, Louis XV inevitably succumbed to inertia. Under him, Versailles, the symbol of the Sun King’s authority, became a pleasure palace of incomparable banality, a kind of Las Vegas of the Bourbon monarchy. It came to represent all that the oppressed peasantry of France hated about their king, and during the Revolution they looted it with glee. Louis XV had only one way out of the trap awaiting the son or successor of a man like the Sun King: to psychologically begin from nothing, to denigrate the past and his inheritance, and to move in a totally new direction, creating his own world.

— Robert Greene, The 48 Laws of Power. (Resurfaced using Readwise).

As a leader, necessity is, as Livy calls it, the last and greatest weapon because it is going to change every aspect of your culture. How motivated people are, how meritocratic your hierarchy is, how little petty politics people are willing to entertain. Necessity seems like the poison, it is the cure.

— Jonathan Bi, Lecture on Niccolo Machiavelli. (Resurfaced using Readwise Reader).

Michael Dell also has a great line: “If you don’t have a crisis, make one.”

💡 Idea 4 - Overcompensation

Taleb says that the reason for why necessity make us better is that there is a mechanism of overcompensation to an obstacle, where you do not just rise to the level of the obstacle but actually rise higher. So beyond compensating for an obstacle, we overcompensate, we become stronger than we were before we encounter the obstacle. And this process of overcompensation towards a stressor or an obstacle is of course antifragile—because you get better out of overcoming the stressor.

One simple illustration of this notion of overcompensation we can find it in weight-lifting: every-time you are able to lift more weight than your previous maximum, your body’s physical condition will change to accommodate for even heavier weights in the future (of course, up to a biological limit).

Love is another dimension where overcompensation kicks in…

🖍️ Highlight

If antifragility is what wakes up and overreacts and overcompensates to stressors and damage, then one of the most antifragile things you will find outside economic life is a certain brand of refractory love (or hate), one that seems to overreact and overcompensate for impediments such as distance, family incompatibilities, and every conscious attempt to kill it. Literature is rife with characters trapped in a form of antifragile passion, seemingly against their will. In Proust’s long novel La recherche, Swann, a socially sophisticated Jewish art dealer, falls for Odette, a demimondaine, a “kept” woman of sorts, a semi- or perhaps just a quarter-prostitute; she treats him badly. Her elusive behavior fuels his obsession, causing him to demean himself for the reward of a bit more time with her. He exhibits overt clinginess, follows her on her trysts with other men, hiding shamelessly in staircases, which of course causes her to treat him even more elusively. Supposedly, the story was a fictionalization of Proust’s own entanglement with his (male) driver.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile.

[📝 Note]

Romeo and Juliette also has this notion of overcompensation. Their love seem to be fueled by the fact that their families are eternal enemies.

“Absence diminishes minor passions and inflames great ones, as the wind douses a candle and fans a fire.” — La Rochefoucauld

“Love never dies of starvation, but often of indigestion.” — Ninon De L’Enclose (Resurfaced using Readwise).

💡 Idea 5 - Touristification

🖍️ Highlight 1

What a tourist is in relation to an adventurer, or a flâneur, touristification is to life; it consists in converting activities, and not just travel, into the equivalent of a script like those followed by actors. We will see how touristification castrates systems and organisms that like uncertainty by sucking randomness out of them to the last drop—while providing them with the illusion of benefit. The guilty parties are the education system, planning the funding of teleological scientific research, the French baccalaureate, gym machines, etc. And the electronic calendar. But the worse touristification is the life we moderns have to lead in captivity, during our leisure hours: Friday night opera, scheduled parties, scheduled laughs. Again, golden jail. This “goal-driven” attitude hurts deeply inside my existential self.

Which brings us to the existential aspect of randomness. If you are not a washing machine or a cuckoo clock—in other words, if you are alive—something deep in your soul likes a certain measure of randomness and disorder. There is a titillating feeling associated with randomness.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile.

[📝 Note]

While I was reading this passage it immediately came to mind something I heard from the famous novelist Lee Child — which I think is an excellent analogy to this idea of “touristification”:

A lot of people assume that a book needs planning. They assume that you write out an outline or at least a hit list of plot points — some kind of a synopsis or outline or plan. And I’ve never ever done that. Because writing per se (making it with words) is not really the issue for me. [The issue] is the story that I want. And if I were to plan a story — and I’ve got friends who do huge outlines, you know, 300-page outlines — Even if I did a two-page outline with two lines per proposed chapter, then I’ve told myself the story, and I’m bored with it at that point. I want the next story. So I can’t afford to tell myself the story ahead of time. I have to just improvise it as I go along. So, it’s about starting somewhere which is defined by location and then see what happens. It really is that simple.

— Lee Child (interview w/ David Perell)

So Lee Child doesn’t plan his writing in advance, instead he picks a location and then the location sets the motion of the story…

Do you want it to be the West of Texas where it is baking hot and arid? Do you want it to be on the Atlantic coast of Maine in April, where it’s gray and cold and misty? So, that’s how I start with the sense of place, and then it’s just constructing it around that. In a way, the place and the temperature kind of dictates the story in a way.

— Lee Child (interview w/ David Perell)

This is also very similar to how Stephen King writes his novels. I confess I’ve never read any of his novels, but I read his first and only non-fiction book where he talks about his process of writing.

I distrust plot for two reasons: first, because our lives are largely plotless, even when you add in all our reasonable precautions and careful planning; and second, because I believe plotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren’t compatible. It’s best that I be as clear about this as I can – I want you to understand that my basic belief about the making of stories is that they pretty much make themselves. The job of the writer is to give them a place to grow (and to transcribe them, of course). If you can see things this way (or at least try to), we can work together comfortably. If, on the other hand, you decide I’m crazy, that’s fine. You won’t be the first.

…

Plot is, I think, the good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice. The story which results from it is apt to feel artificial and labored.

— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.

So just like Lee Child and Stephen King dont follow a plot for writing their novels, maybe we should also free ourselves from the slavery of following some grand project or masterplan in our lives. Maybe we should make our lives more open to adventure and randomness, while less predictable and boring.

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If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead.

…

There exist the kind of people for whom life is some kind of project. After talking to them, you stop feeling good for a few hours; life starts tasting like food cooked without salt. I, a thrill-seeking human, have a b***t detector that seems to match my boredom detector, as if we were equipped with a naturalistic filter, dullness-aversion. Ancestral life had no homework, no boss, no civil servants, no academic grades, no conversation with the dean, no consultant with an MBA, no table of procedure, no application form, no trip to New Jersey, no grammatical stickler, no conversation with someone boring you: all life was random stimuli and nothing, good or bad, ever felt like work. Dangerous, yes, but boring, never.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile.

[📝 Note]

You have a calibrated life when most of what you fear has the titillating prospect of adventure.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes.

💡 Idea 6 - Antifragile at the expense of others

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There is a different, stronger variety of antifragility linked to evolution that is beyond hormesis—actually very different from hormesis; it is even its opposite. It can be described as hormesis—getting stronger under harm—if we look from the outside, not from the inside.

This other variety of antifragility is evolutionary, and operates at the informational level—genes are information. Unlike with hormesis, the unit does not get stronger in response to stress; it dies. But it accomplishes a transfer of benefits; other units survive—and those that survive have attributes that improve the collective of units, leading to modifications commonly assigned the vague term “evolution” in textbooks and in the New York Times Tuesday science section.

So the antifragility of concern here is not so much that of the organisms, inherently weak, but rather that of their genetic code, which can survive them. The code doesn’t really care about the welfare of the unit itself—quite the contrary, since it destroys many things around it. Robert Trivers figured out the presence of competition between gene and organism in his idea of the “selfish gene.”

In fact, the most interesting aspect of evolution is that it only works because of its antifragility; it is in love with stressors, randomness, uncertainty, and disorder—while individual organisms are relatively fragile, the gene pool takes advantage of shocks to enhance its fitness.

So organisms need to die for nature to be antifragile—nature is opportunistic, ruthless, and selfish.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile.

[📝 Note]

Taleb also gives the example of the Economy, where entrepreneurs are fragile in the sense that most of them end up failing on their business, but the few that survive are able to make the economy thrive and evolve. This is diametrically different from the Soviet Union, where government-controlled companies were supposed to exist forever—and of course this removed antifragility from the system, and ultimately the system collapsed.

Another good example is aviation safety. Every time there is a crash, there is an investigation on it which draws new safety guidelines and procedures, which ultimately makes aviation safer. So in this sense, the aviation industry is antifragile thanks to the fragility of each of the tens of thousands of flights that go on every day. And every crash—while disastrous for that specific flight—is valuable information for the aviation industry as a whole…

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Every plane crash brings us closer to safety, improves the system, and makes the next flight safer—those who perish contribute to the overall safety of others.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile.

[📝 Note]

We can generalize from this and say that for the antifragile, errors are not just errors, they are also potent information to improve.

And we can definitely apply this lesson to our own lives. That’s what learning from mistakes is about. Or actually, as Chamath Palihapitiya said, mistakes are learning—at least for the type of person who actually wants to make progress…

In terms of your mistakes… Society tells you: “don’t make them.” Because we will judge you and we will look down on you. And I think the really successful people realize that actually no... it’s the cycle time of mistakes that gets you to success. Because your error rate will diminish: The more mistakes that you make (you observe them, you figure out where it’s coming from... Is it a psychological thing? Is it a cognitive thing?) and then you fix it.

…

“Mistake” is maybe a bad proxy but it’s the best proxy I have for learning. But I’m using the language of what Society tells you. Society tells you that when you try something and it doesn’t work it’s a mistake. So I just use that word because it’s the word that resonates most with most people. [But] The real thing that it is… is learning!

— Chamath Palihapitiya The Lex Fridman Podcast (Resurfaced using Readwise Reader).

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…My characterization of a loser is someone who, after making a mistake, doesn’t introspect, doesn’t exploit it, feels embarrassed and defensive rather than enriched with a new piece of information, and tries to explain why he made the mistake rather than moving on. These types often consider themselves the “victims” of some large plot, a bad boss, or bad weather.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile.

[📝 Note]

You can also learn from other people’s mistakes…

Learning from other people’s mistakes is the best way to learn.

— Jensen Huang, Conversation with Patrick Collison. (Resurfaced using Readwise Reader).

My prescription for misery is to learn everything you possibly can from your own experience, minimizing what you learn vicariously from the good and bad experiences of others, living and dead. This prescription is a sure-shot producer of misery and second-rate achievement.

— Charlie Munger, Poor Charlie’s Almanack. (Resurfaced using Readwise).

💡 Idea 7 - Pseudo-stabilization

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In the markets, fixing prices, or, equivalently, eliminating speculators, the so-called “noise traders”—and the moderate volatility that they bring—provide an illusion of stability, with periods of calm punctuated with large jumps. Because players are unused to volatility, the slightest price variation will then be attributed to insider information, or to changes in the state of the system, and will cause panics. When a currency never varies, a slight, very slight move makes people believe that the world is ending. Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system.

Indeed, confusing people a little bit is beneficial—it is good for you and good for them. For an application of the point in daily life, imagine someone extremely punctual and predictable who comes home at exactly six o’clock every day for fifteen years. You can use his arrival to set your watch. The fellow will cause his family anxiety if he is barely a few minutes late. Someone with a slightly more volatile—hence unpredictable—schedule, with, say, a half-hour variation, won’t do so.

Variations also act as purges. Small forest fires periodically cleanse the system of the most flammable material, so this does not have the opportunity to accumulate. Systematically preventing forest fires from taking place “to be safe” makes the big one much worse. For similar reasons, stability is not good for the economy: firms become very weak during long periods of steady prosperity devoid of setbacks, and hidden vulnerabilities accumulate silently under the surface—so delaying crises is not a very good idea.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile.

[📝 Note]

I stood up and told the company that five years from now we will have a new competitor. And that new competitor is going to be in every business that we are in, except they’re gonna be faster, more efficient, and more capable. And they’re gonna put us out of business.

And the only way that we’re gonna prevent that is we are going to become that company. It’s gut wrenching stuff to reinvent and reimagine your business, but if you don’t do it, you go out of business.

— Michael Dell, Source. (Resurfaced using Readwise Reader).

💡 Idea 8 - Naive Interventionism & Iatrogenics

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Probably the best example to illustrate this is when you get slightly sick, the doctor will tend to prescribe you some drug to make you feel better. But in reality, there’s no free lunch. These pills can have negative side effects which you’ll pay in a few decades. This is what’s also known as iatrogenics, which happens when the healer is the cause of harm. And this issue of iatrogenics in the medical field is very real, just think that until the discovery of penicillin the track record of medicine has been negative—they’ve caused more harm than good…

… Medical error still currently kills between three times (as accepted by doctors) and ten times as many people as car accidents in the United States. It is generally accepted that harm from doctors—not including risks from hospital germs—accounts for more deaths than any single cancer.

The methodology used by the medical establishment for decision making is still innocent of proper risk-management principles, but medicine is getting better. We have to worry about the incitation to overtreatment on the part of pharmaceutical companies, lobbies, and special interest groups and the production of harm that is not immediately salient and not accounted for as an “error.” Pharma plays the game of concealed and distributed iatrogenics, and it has been growing. It is easy to assess iatrogenics when the surgeon amputates the wrong leg or operates on the wrong kidney, or when the patient dies of a drug reaction. But when you medicate a child for an imagined or invented psychiatric disease, say, ADHD or depression, instead of letting him out of the cage, the long-term harm is largely unaccounted for.

Iatrogenics is compounded by the “agency problem” or “principal-agent problem,” which emerges when one party (the agent) has personal interests that are divorced from those of the one using his services (the principal). An agency problem, for instance, is present with the stockbroker and medical doctor, whose ultimate interest is their own checking account, not your financial and medical health, respectively, and who give you advice that is geared to benefit themselves. Or with politicians working on their career.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile.

[📝 Note]

During residency, one of my best friends was a cancer surgeon. During the meeting with my mom’s doctors [Casie’s mother had pancreatic cancer], words my friend spoke years before rang in my head: If you walk through the doors of this surgical oncology department, you are going to get an operation, whether you need it or not.

— Casey Means, Good Energy. (Resurfaced using Readwise).

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There is an element of deceit associated with interventionism, accelerating in a professionalized society. It’s much easier to sell “Look what I did for you” than “Look what I avoided for you.” Of course a bonus system based on “performance” exacerbates the problem.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile.

[📝 Note]

As Charlie Munger says: “To a man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” So depending on your profession, you are biased to perform according to your profession because that’s the only thing you can see; and of course on top of that you are incentivized to intervene because typically you get pay on what you do, not on what you avoid.

Taleb also talks about his experience discussing this idea of iatrogenics in other fields such as economics, political science, education, and other domains…

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Not one of the consultants and academics in these fields with whom I tried discussing it knew what I was talking about—or thought that they could possibly be the source of any damage. In fact, when you approach the players with such skepticism, they tend to say that you are “against scientific progress.” But the concept can be found in some religious texts. The Koran mentions “those who are wrongful while thinking of themselves that they are righteous.” To sum up, anything in which there is naive interventionism, nay, even just intervention, will have iatrogenics.

…

Let me warn against misinterpreting the message here. The argument is not against the notion of intervention; in fact … I am equally worried about underintervention when it is truly necessary. I am just warning against naive intervention and lack of awareness and acceptance of harm done by it.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile.

💡 Idea 9 - Always Have Redundancies

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What makes life simple is that the robust and antifragile don’t have to have as accurate a comprehension of the world as the fragile—and they do not need forecasting. To see how redundancy is a nonpredictive, or rather a less predictive, mode of action, let us use the argument of Chapter 2: if you have extra cash in the bank (in addition to stockpiles of tradable goods such as cans of Spam and hummus and gold bars in the basement), you don’t need to know with precision which event will cause potential difficulties. It could be a war, a revolution, an earthquake, a recession, an epidemic, a terrorist attack, the secession of the state of New Jersey, anything—you do not need to predict much, unlike those who are in the opposite situation, namely, in debt. Those, because of their fragility, need to predict with more, a lot more, accuracy.

…

In spite of their bad press, some people in the nuclear industry seem to be among the rare ones to have gotten the point and taken it to its logical consequence. In the wake of the Fukushima disaster, instead of predicting failure and the probabilities of disaster, these intelligent nuclear firms are now aware that they should instead focus on exposure to failure—making the prediction or nonprediction of failure quite irrelevant. This approach leads to building small enough reactors and embedding them deep enough in the ground with enough layers of protection around them that a failure would not affect us much should it happen—costly, but still better than nothing. Another illustration, this time in economics, is the Swedish government’s focus on total fiscal responsibility after their budget troubles in 1991—it makes them much less dependent on economic forecasts. This allowed them to shrug off later crises.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile.

[📝 Note]

And so the essential trait of the successful man is not only perseverance but almost a perverse expectation of how difficult it is going to be. It is having redundancies on top of redundancies, so you can absorb the losses you eventually incur. One must not just steel one’s heart but also one’s spirit so that there is no such thing as an obstacle—just information.

— Ryan Holiday, Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue.

Though few companies last forever, all of them should be built to last a long time, says Munger. The approach to corporate control should be thought of as “financial engineering.” Just as bridges and airplanes are constructed with a series of back-up systems and redundancies to meet extreme stresses, so too should corporations be built to withstand the pressures from competition, recessions, oil shocks, or other calamities. Excess leverage, or debt, makes the corporation especially vulnerable to such storms.

— Janet Lowe, Damn Right! Behind the Scenes with Berkshire Hathaway Billionaire Charlie Munger.

💡 Idea 10 - Seneca’s Antifragility

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Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain. You are hence fragile... When you become rich, the pain of losing your fortune exceeds the emotional gain of getting additional wealth, so you start living under continuous emotional threat. A rich person becomes trapped by belongings that take control of him, degrading his sleep at night, raising the serum concentration of his stress hormones, diminishing his sense of humor, perhaps even causing hair to grow on the tip of his nose and similar ailments. Seneca fathomed that possessions make us worry about downside, thus acting as a punishment as we depend on them. All downside, no upside. Even more: dependence on circumstances—rather, the emotions that arise from circumstances—induces a form of slavery.

Seneca’s practical method to counter such fragility was to go through mental exercises to write off possessions, so when losses occurred he would not feel the sting—a way to wrest one’s freedom from circumstances. It is similar to buying an insurance contract against losses. For instance, Seneca often started his journeys with almost the same belongings he would have if he were shipwrecked, which included a blanket to sleep on the ground, as inns were sparse at the time (though I need to qualify, to set things in the context of the day, that he had accompanying him “only one or two slaves”).

…

Seen this way, Stoicism is about the domestication, not necessarily the elimination, of emotions. It is not about turning humans into vegetables. My idea of the modern Stoic sage is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile.

[📝 Note]

Sudden Gains or Losses Sudden success or winnings can be very dangerous. Neurologically, chemicals are released in the brain that give a powerful jolt of arousal and energy, leading to the desire to repeat this experience. It can be the start of any kind of addiction and manic behavior. Also, when gains come quickly we tend to lose sight of the basic wisdom that true success, to really last, must come through hard work. We do not take into account the role that luck plays in such sudden gains. We try again and again to recapture that high from winning so much money or attention. We acquire feelings of grandiosity. We become especially resistant to anyone who tries to warn us—they don’t understand, we tell ourselves. Because this cannot be sustained, we experience an inevitable fall, which is all the more painful, leading to the depression part of the cycle. Although gamblers are the most prone to this, it equally applies to businesspeople during bubbles and to people who gain sudden attention from the public. Unexpected losses or a string of losses equally create irrational reactions. We imagine we are cursed with bad luck and that this will go on indefinitely. We become fearful and hesitant, which will often lead to more mistakes or failures. In sports, this can induce what is known as choking, as previous losses and misses weigh on the mind and tighten it up.

The solution here is simple: whenever you experience unusual gains or losses, that is precisely the time to step back and counterbalance them with some necessary pessimism or optimism. Be extra wary of sudden success and attention—they are not built on anything that lasts and they have an addictive pull. And the fall is always painful.

— Robert Greene, The Laws of Human Nature. (Resurfaced using Readwise).

Receive wealth or prosperity without arrogance; and be ready to let it go.

— Marcus Aurelius

💡 Idea 11 - The Barbell

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The barbell (a bar with weights on both ends that weight lifters use) is meant to illustrate the idea of a combination of extremes kept separate, with avoidance of the middle. In our context it is not necessarily symmetric: it is just composed of two extremes, with nothing in the center. One can also call it, more technically, a bimodal strategy, as it has two distinct modes rather than a single, central one.

I initially used the image of the barbell to describe a dual attitude of playing it safe in some areas (robust to negative Black Swans) and taking a lot of small risks in others (open to positive Black Swans), hence achieving antifragility. That is extreme risk aversion on one side and extreme risk loving on the other, rather than just the “medium” or the beastly “moderate” risk attitude that in fact is a sucker game (because medium risks can be subjected to huge measurement errors). But the barbell also results, because of its construction, in the reduction of downside risk—the elimination of the risk of ruin.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile.

[📝 Note]

An example of the Barbell approach in the financial domain would be to put 90% of your funds in cash (assuming is protected from inflation), and the other 10% in maximally risky assets. So the most you can lose here is just 10%, while your upside can be way higher than 10%. You have more upside than downside, a favorable asymmetry against volatility, therefore you are antifragile. Also, your downside is capped and known, so you know you’ll survive no matter what happens. As Warren Buffet puts it: “In order to succeed you must first survive.”

Another example, this one in the entrepreneurial domain, would be to have a safe job during the day, and then some entrepreneurial project after your job is over. So you are not trying to put extra effort in your job to climb the corporate ladder or become employee of the year, instead you put that extra effort in your own entrepreneurial projects. Ideally, it should be a safe job that doesn’t expect you to keep working from home (or in the office) once the official schedule ends, so that you can fully focus on your projects once the day job finishes. This was the strategy followed by Mohnish Pabrai when he was starting his own business. In a recent episode on The Diary Of A CEO podcast, he tells that he didn’t quit his job and went “all in”. He kept his job and made sure he stayed “just above firing level” — so he could allocate all the extra time to his business (and weekends too). After two years, and on his second venture, he made it work (with real clients and real cashflow) and then quit his day job and went all-in in his business.

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With personal risks, you can easily barbell yourself by removing the chances of ruin in any area. I am personally completely paranoid about certain risks, then very aggressive with others. The rules are: no smoking, no sugar (particularly fructose), no motorcycles, no bicycles in town or more generally outside a traffic-free area such as the Sahara desert, no mixing with the Eastern European mafias, and no getting on a plane not flown by a professional pilot (unless there is a co-pilot). Outside of these I can take all manner of professional and personal risks, particularly those in which there is no risk of terminal injury.

…

The barbell is the domestication, not the elimination, of uncertainty.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile.

💡 Idea 12 - The Green Lumber Fallacy

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(This one comes from a talk that Nassim gave at Google, because I found it more concise than his explanation on Antifragile…)

There is a story in both Antifragile and Skin in the Game, of a fellow who lost a million dollars trading green lumber.

He knew everything about green lumber. Everything! The economics, the mathematics, the statistics, collected data, everything…

And [yet] lost a million dollars.

And [he] wrote an account: What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars. And he reports that there’s a fellow, a pit trader — I don’t know if you’ve met pit traders, but they look like pit traders and they act like pit traders. And the fellow is making tons of money with green lumber and had been doing so consistently. Now, the narrator discovers that the fellow [who] made a lot of money on green lumber thought it was lumber painted green. He didn’t know it was freshly cut lumber.

So, is it that that person knew nothing about lumber?

No. He knew a lot of stuff, but not necessarily what you think from the outside is valuable.

So, when you have skin in the game, you tend to know a lot of stuff about business, about things, that you wouldn’t guess you need to know from the outside. And this is very hard to explain. This is why machine learning is successful, because machine learning has no ideas. It learns from the inside, not from the outside.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (talk at Google).

[📝 Note]

So what Taleb is talking about here is that there is an internal logic of things, which is only grasped by practitioners. It can’t be seen by academicians or outsiders because it cannot be grasped through theories and narratives.

Taleb also gives the example of the legendary Jim Simons, founder of the best performing hedge fund in the world Renaissance Technologies, who only hires physicists and mathematicians, and never reads economic reports or listen to economists or finance people. The reason being that economists give you good-sounding narratives but they will never understand or explain the things that actually matter in practice.

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My first conversation with an expert was with a fellow called B. Something-that-ends-with-a-vowel dressed in a handmade Brioni suit. I was told that he was the biggest Swiss franc trader in the world, a legend in his day—he had predicted the big dollar collapse in the 1980s and controlled huge positions. But a short conversation with him revealed that he could not place Switzerland on the map—foolish as I was, I thought he was Swiss Italian, yet he did not know there were Italian-speaking people in Switzerland. He had never been there. When I saw that he was not the exception, I started freaking out watching all these years of education evaporating in front of my eyes. That very same day I stopped reading economic reports. I felt nauseous for a while during this enterprise of “deintellectualization”—in fact I may not have recovered yet.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile.

[📝 Note]

“In theory there is no difference between theory and practice - in practice there is.”

— Yogi Berra

💡 Idea 13 - The Survival of Ideas

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Consider the role of heuristic (rule-of-thumb) knowledge embedded in traditions. Simply, just as evolution operates on individuals, so does it act on these tacit, unexplainable rules of thumb transmitted through generations—what Karl Popper has called evolutionary epistemology. But let me change Popper’s idea ever so slightly (actually quite a bit): my take is that this evolution is not a competition between ideas, but between humans and systems based on such ideas. An idea does not survive because it is better than the competition, but rather because the person who holds it has survived! Accordingly, wisdom you learn from your grandmother should be vastly superior (empirically, hence scientifically) to what you get from a class in business school (and, of course, considerably cheaper). My sadness is that we have been moving farther and farther away from grandmothers.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile.

[📝 Note]

Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for these are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history. A youth boiling with hormones will wonder why he should not give full freedom to his sexual desires; and if he is unchecked by custom, morals, or laws, he may ruin his life before he matures sufficiently to understand that sex is a river of fire that must be banked and cooled by a hundred restraints if it is not to consume in chaos both the individual and the group. So the conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it—perhaps as much more valuable as roots are more vital than grafts. It is good that new ideas should be heard, for the sake of the few that can be used; but it is also good that new ideas should be compelled to go through the mill of objection, opposition, and contumely; this is the trial heat which innovations must survive before being allowed to enter the human race. It is good that the old should resist the young, and that the young should prod the old; out of this tension, as out of the strife of the sexes and the classes, comes a creative tensile strength, a stimulated development, a secret and basic unity and movement of the whole.

— Will Durant, The Lessons of History.

💡 Idea 14 - The Lindy Effect (or Aging in Reverse)

This is the idea that nonperishable things age in reverse compared to perishable or biological entities…

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For the perishable, every additional day in its life translates into a shorter additional life expectancy.

For the nonperishable, every additional day may imply a longer life expectancy.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile.

[📝 Note]

When a person ages one year, it means that his life expectancy also shrinks about a year. But if we consider a book or a technology, when it ages one year it means that its life expectancy is increased by about a year. So the non-perishable ages in reverse, every new day or year that survives makes it more likely to survive in the future. And just to be clear, when Taleb talks about a book he is not talking about a specific instance of the book. He is talking about the intangible idea of the book — such as all the possible copies that exist and will exist on that book. The longer this book keeps selling, the longer it will keep selling — again, aging in reverse (and this process of aging in reverse is also known as “The Lindy Effect.”)

So the best way to predict the future, if you were to engage in such activity, is to look at the past and see what’s still alive. You can be pretty sure that these things will still exist in the future. Chairs and shoes have been around for a very long time, so you can be certain of a future where these objects are still relevant.

And in the domain of ideas, the old (but still relevant) is actually the best place to learn about the human condition—because questions such as “how to be happy” or “how to cultivate a peaceful mind” have existed forever. Naval Ravikant has this great heuristic, it goes: “The older the problem, the older the solution.”

If you’re trying to learn how to drive a car or fly a plane, you should read something written in the modern age because this problem was created in the modern age and the solution is in the modern age.

If you’re talking about an old problem like how to keep your body healthy, how to stay calm and peaceful, what kinds of value systems are good, how you raise a family, and those kinds of things, the older solutions are probably better. Any book that survived for two thousand years has been filtered through many people. The general principles are more likely to be correct.

— Naval Ravikant, The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

This goes back to the survival of ideas.

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Books that are one year old are usually not worth reading (a very low probability of having the qualities for “surviving”), no matter the hype and how “earth-shattering” they may seem to be. So I follow the Lindy effect as a guide in selecting what to read: books that have been around for ten years will be around for ten more; books that have been around for two millennia should be around for quite a bit of time, and so forth.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile.

💡 Idea 15 - Heroism

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Heroism is the exact inverse of the agency problem: someone elects to bear the disadvantage (risks his own life, or harm to himself, or, in milder forms, accepts to deprive himself of some benefits) for the sake of others.

And heroism is not just about riots and wars. An example of an inverse agency problem: as a child I was most impressed with the story of a nanny who died in order to save a child from being hit by a car. I find nothing more honorable than accepting death in someone else’s place.

In other words, what is called sacrifice. And the word “sacrifice” is related to sacred, the domain of the holy that is separate from that of the profane.

In traditional societies, a person is only as respectable and as worthy as the downside he (or, more, a lot more, than expected, she) is willing to face for the sake of others. The most courageous, or valorous, occupy the highest rank in their society: knights, generals, commanders. Even mafia dons accept that such rank in the hierarchy makes them the most exposed to be whacked by competitors and the most penalized by the authorities. The same applies to saints, those who abdicate, devote their lives to serve others—to help the weak, the deprived, and the dispossessed.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile.

[📝 Note]

I was actually listening to a conversation between Steven Pressfield and David Perell, and Steven said that the main trait that all heroes share in common is this capacity to self-sacrifice. To voluntarily take the downside for the sake of another person or the collective. Whereas the core trait that all villains share in common is that they are self-centered, self-absorbed, they only think about their own benefit.

So I think a great mental model in life is to think of your life as a movie, where you are the hero. And thanks to the consistency bias, you’ll start doing things that heroes do — which is, centrally, acts of selflessness and courage.

The measure of success in my life is: “How many useful things can I get done?” On a day-to-day basis, I wake up in the morning and ask, “How can I be useful today?” I want to maximize my utility.

Try to be useful. Do useful things for your fellow human beings and the world. It’s hard to be useful, to contribute more than you consume. Can you have a positive net contribution to society? Aim for that.

I have a lot of respect for someone who puts in an honest day’s work to do useful things. I admire anyone making a positive contribution to humanity. Whether that is in farming, technology, entertainment, or whatever else. To anyone useful to the rest of humanity: I admire you greatly.

A useful life is worth having lived.

— Elon Musk, The Book of Elon.

🖍️ Highlight 2

A lesson I learned from this ancient culture is the notion of megalopsychon (a term expressed in Aristotle’s ethics), a sense of grandeur that was superseded by the Christian value of “humility.” There is no word for it in Romance languages; in Arabic it is called Shhm—best translated as nonsmall. If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is nothing you can do that makes you small; if you don’t take risks, there is nothing you can do that makes you grand, nothing. And when you take risks, insults by half-men (small men, those who don’t risk anything) are similar to barks by nonhuman animals: you can’t feel insulted by a dog.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile.

[📝 Note]

“A great man is hard on himself; a small man is hard on others.”

— Confucius

🖍️ Highlight 3

In the old days, privilege came with obligations—except for the small class of intellectuals who served a patron or, in some cases, the state.

You want to be a feudal lord—you will be first to die. You want war? First in battle. Let us not forget something embedded in the U.S. Constitution: the president is commander in chief. Caesar, Alexander, and Hannibal were on the battlefield—the last, according to Livy, was first-in, last-out of combat zones. George Washington, too, went to battle, unlike Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, who played video games while threatening the lives of others. Even Napoleon was personally exposed to risks; his showing up during a battle was the equivalent of adding twenty-five thousand troops. Churchill showed an impressive amount of physical courage. They were in it; they believed in it. Status implied you took physical risks.

Note that in traditional societies even those who fail—but have taken risks—have a higher status than those who are not exposed.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile.

[📝 Note]

This reminded me a story that the famous actor Matthew McConaughey wrote on his book Greenlights. He was staying in a remote village in Mali, Africa, and he introduced himself as a writer and a boxer.

He says the villagers did not care about his writing career, but were very interested on the boxing part. The word spread about this white man boxer, and the wrestling champion of the village challenged Matthew to a match — which he accepted.

They fought for a few rounds until they were both exhausted. At that point the chief stopped the match and raised both their hands in victory.

Later, Matthew asked Issa — his villager friend — whether he had won or lost. To which Issa said:

“It is not about win or lose, it is about do you accept the challenge. When you did that, you already won.”

He had courage, the most important of all virtues, and its companion, fortitude. These strengths are inborn but they can also be cultivated, and Churchill worked on them all his life. In a sense his whole career was an exercise in how courage can be displayed, reinforced, guarded and doled out carefully, heightened and concentrated, conveyed to others. Those uncertain of their courage can look to Churchill for reassurance and inspiration.

— Paul Johnson, Churchill. (Resurfaced using Readwise).

👋 Hey friend,

Last week I shared Mohnish Pabrai’s mental models for Investing and Starting a Business.

But he also has a list of mental models for life in general (he quickly shared it on a slide in this video).

So in this letter I’m sharing with you this list of 33 mental models to gain an edge in life.

PS: I added some quotes to expand the meaning of these mental models.

👤 Doers

💡Nugget

• Fast is Slow

  I believe in root causes: Finding root causes, fixing root causes… Slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Everything I have ever succeeded at in life is because of that philosophy…

  — Jeff Bezos (source)

• Take the Road Less Traveled

  Following the herd guarantees average results. Whether in your career, relationships, or personal growth, doing what everyone else does yields mediocrity. You must cultivate the courage to be an independent thinker and follow your own path.

  The single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas.

  — Peter Thiel (Book: Zero to One)

• No Calibration in Reciprocation Tendency

  Humans are hardwired to return favors, but the response is rarely proportional. A tiny act of unprompted generosity can trigger a massive, outsized reward in return. This persuasion principle comes out of the book Influence (by Robert Cialdini), which Mohnish Pabrai and Charlie Munger widely recommends.

• Assume everyone is wearing an “I’m important” sign

  Mary Kay Ash once said: “It's so simple, yet makes such a difference. Pretend that every single person you meet has a sign around his or her neck that says: Make me feel important.”

  — Charlie Munger (Book: Poor Charlie’s Almanack)

• Influence from Association Tendency

  Tell me with whom you consort and I will tell you who you are; if I know how you spend your time, then I know what might become of you.

  — Goethe

• Social Proof Tendency

  We view a behavior as more correct in a given situation to the degree that we see others performing it.

  — Robert Cialdini

• Contrast Misreaction Tendency

  Few psychological tendencies do more damage to correct thinking. Small-scale damages involve instances such as man’s buying an overpriced $1,000 leather dashboard merely because the price is so low compared to his concurrent purchase of a $65,000 car. Large-scale damages often ruin lives, as when a wonderful woman with terrible parents marries a man who would be judged satisfactory only in comparison to her parents. Or as when a man takes wife number two, who would be appraised as all right only in comparison to wife number one.

  — Charlie Munger (Book: Poor Charlie’s Almanack)

• Availability Misweighting Tendency

  This mental tendency echoes the words of the song “When I’m not near the girl I love, I love the girl I’m near.” Man’s imperfect, limited-capacity brain easily drifts into working with what’s easily available to it. And the brain can’t use what it can’t remember or what it is blocked from recognizing because it is heavily influenced by one or more psychological tendencies bearing strongly on it, as the fellow is influenced by the nearby girl in the song. So the mind overweighs what is easily available and thus displays availability-misweighing tendency. … An idea or a fact is not worth more merely because it is easily available to you.

  — Charlie Munger (Book: Poor Charlie’s Almanack)

• Focus on being kind vs. being right

  Jeff, one day you’ll understand that is harder to be kind than clever.

  — Jeff Bezos’s Grandfather (source)

• To be interesting, be interested

  When I left the dining room after sitting next to Mr. Gladstone, I thought he was the cleverest man in England. But after sitting next to Mr. Disraeli, I thought I was the cleverest woman in England.

  — Lady Randolph Churchill

• Clone the little things

  Be a shameless cloner!

• 99% of success is just showing up

  I'm convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.

  — Steve Jobs

• Attend as many funerals as you can

• Ask God Google the day you will die and plan accordingly

  Think of your life as a rainbow arcing across the horizon of this world. You appear, have a chance to blaze in the sky, then you disappear.

  The two endpoints of everyone’s rainbow are birth and death. We all experience both completely alone. And yet, most people of your age have not thought about these events very much, much less even seen them in others. How many of you have seen the birth of another human? It is a miracle. And how many of you have witnessed the death of a human? It is a mystery beyond our comprehension. No human alive knows what happens to “us” upon or after our death. Some believe this, others that, but no one really knows at all. Again, most people of your age have not thought about these events very much, and it’s as if we shelter you from them, afraid that the thought of mortality will somehow wound you. For me it’s the opposite: to know my arc will fall makes me want to blaze while I am in the sky. Not for others, but for myself, for the trail I know I am leaving.

  — Steve Jobs (Book: Make Something Wonderful)

• To encounter misfortune and overcome it is good fortune

  Here is a rule to remember in future, when anything tempts you to feel bitter: not “This is misfortune,” but “To bear this worthily is good fortune.”

  — Marcus Aurelius (Book: Meditations)

• What you will do tomorrow, do today; what you will do today, do now

• Your kids will learn from your actions, not what you tell them

  Your actions speak so loudly, I can not hear what you are saying.

  — Ralph Waldo Emerson

• Be an Optimist

• Take a nap every afternoon

• Make no small plans

  The main message of The Magic of Thinking Big: don't overestimate others and underestimate yourself. I still read the first two chapters whenever doubt creeps in. It's not enough to remove life's niggly minutiae that are bothering you—you need a compelling big goal. You need an inspiring, abnormally large objective to chase.

  — Tim Ferriss (source)

• The sky is the limit if you do not care who gets the credit

• Underpromise and Overdeliver

• When you are young, have friends who are older. When you are old, have friends who are younger

• Understand Compounding

• Spend less than you earn

• Play Infinite Games

• Read a lot

  I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up and boy does that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.

  — Charlie Munger

• Only work for and with people you like, admire and trust

  (This comes from Warren Buffet)

• Be a Generous Tipper

• Fish and Guests Stink After Three Days

• Do Not Die at 25 and Get Buried at 75

  (This comes from Benjamin Franklin)

• Get Your Music Out

  The fool, with all his other faults, has this also, he is always getting ready to live.

  — Seneca

• Learn from the Eminent Dead

  Fools say that they learn by experience. I prefer to profit by others’ experience.

  — Bismarck

💥 Stuff I Loved

I hope you enjoyed today’s letter!

Talk you soon,

Your nuggets friend Julio :)

👋 Hey friend,

Today’s letter is a bit different.

As you might know, I’m a fan of the renowned investor and entrepreneur Mohnish Pabrai. On a few recent speeches, he shared his favorite mental models for investing and starting a business. So I saved the list of mental models in a personal file, but it then occurred to me to share it with you!

And for each mental model, I made a short description using Chat-GPT and Gemini — they mostly nailed it (especially Gemini), and I made edits where it needed.

So here’s the full list of Mohnish’s mental models! (one for investing, and the other for starting a business).

PS: Next week, I’ll send out his list of mental models for life in general.

👤 Doers

💡Nugget

30 Mental Models for Investing

(There are two videos where he explains his mental models for investing: The talk at Heilbrunn Center for Graham and Dodd Investing, and The talk at The UNO).

1. The Bedrock
   Take a simple idea and take it seriously. Mental models only work if you truly absorb them, not if you half-believe them. The edge comes when you see a truth most people casually ignore — and then build your investing behavior around it with full conviction.

2. Ben Graham Fundamentals
   (1) Mr. Market is there to serve you, not advise you; (2) always demand a margin of safety; and (3) buy stocks as if you were buying the whole business.

3. Do Not Overdose on Ben Graham
   Take the three Ben Graham fundamentals, but that’s it. Don’t take anything else from him. Instead, overdose on Philip Fisher and Charlie Munger to capture high-quality compounders.

4. Buffett’s Lifetime 20-Punch Card
   Imagine you only had 20 investment decisions for your entire life. You would become extremely selective, patient, and serious. This model reminds you that great ideas are rare, so don’t waste capital or attention on average opportunities.

5. Stay in the Epicenter of Your Circle of Competence
   Size does not matter; depth does. Like billionaire John Arrillaga, who only bought real estate within a one-mile radius of Stanford, you must remain an inch wide and a mile deep to maintain your edge.

6. A High Error Rate is Guaranteed
   Investing is an imperfect science. Even Buffett admits that only 12 great decisions drove 60 years of Berkshire’s success—a roughly 4% hit rate. Accept that you will frequently be wrong and size your bets accordingly.

7. Circle the Wagons: The 4% Rule
   Because of that 4% hit rate, you must ruthlessly protect your crown jewels. When you finally capture an exceptional business, put it in the center of the wagons and fiercely defend it against the urge to sell.

8. Do Not Cut the Flowers and Water the Weeds

   Never sell a compounding machine. Pabrai admits selling Ferrari and Goldman Sachs were massive errors. Great companies can compound for decades. Let your winners ride. Pulak Prasad’s mindset of being a “permanent owner” helps here.

9. Be a Shameless Cloner
   There are no points for originality. Sift through 13F filings, Dataroma, or the Value Investors Club. If a brilliant capital allocator finds an exceptional business you understand, proudly copy their homework.

10. History Does Not Repeat Itself, But It Does Rhyme
    Markets change, but human behavior repeats: fear, bubbles, forced selling, and mispricing keep appearing in new places. Studying history helps you recognize when an unloved market today (e.g./ Turkey) resembles a past opportunity before others notice.

11. Explain Your Thesis to a 10-Year-Old
    If you cannot explain the investment in 3–4 simple sentences, you probably do not understand it well enough. A great thesis should be so simple that a 10-year old can understand it.

12. You Always Need a Rope to Get Out of the Deepest Well
    Every investor will face moments of despair when the portfolio collapses or the future looks dark. In those moments, you need a “rope”: an anchor that helps you hold on. For Pabrai, that rope was estimating the intrinsic value of his investments, and focusing on that instead of the market value of his investments at that time.

13. Pursue Quality Intensely
    Inspired by Nick Sleep and the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, this rule demands concentrating capital into exceptionally high-quality compounders. When you find apex businesses like Costco or Amazon, buy them and let them run to escape velocity.

14. Thou Shall Not Use Excel
    If an investment requires a complex, multi-tab spreadsheet to justify the valuation, pass immediately. True value should be so obvious that you can do the simple math in your head.

15. Develop and Use a Pre-Investment Checklist
    A checklist protects you from repeating known mistakes. Before investing, review the common causes of failure: leverage, weak moats, bad management, poor incentives, and hidden risks. The checklist slows you down before emotion or excitement takes over.

16. Be Singularly Focused Like Arjuna
    Like the mythical archer who saw only the exact center of the bird’s eye, you must shut out all macroeconomic noise and market chatter. Focus entirely on the specific microeconomics of the business: read every footnote, turn every page, and ignore the rest.

17. Enjoy Hunting for Needles in Haystacks
    Warren Buffett spent his youth sifting through discarded racetrack tickets and thousands of pages of Moody's manuals. Finding rare, mispriced bets requires relentless labor. If you do not genuinely love the grueling, tedious hunt itself, you will fail.

18. Your Deepest Desire Is Your Destiny
    Borrowing from the Upanishads, Pabrai notes that you find exactly what you genuinely seek. If your deepest, singular desire is to find exceptional compounders trading at massive discounts, your mind and actions will naturally align to uncover them.

19. Have Someone to Discuss Your Investment Ideas With
    Our brains naturally trick us into falling in love with our own ideas. You must have a trusted, highly intelligent peer to bounce ideas off of—someone perfectly willing to objectively tell you why your "brilliant" new thesis is actually flawed.

20. The Mistress Always Looks Hotter Than the Wife
    Your brain will constantly tempt you with new, shiny investment ideas (the mistress) that seem far more exciting than the great compounding businesses you already hold (the wife). Resist this psychological trap; be extremely reluctant to trade what you own.

21. Neither a short-term borrower nor a long-term lender be

    Do not put yourself in a fragile financial position. Borrowing short-term can kill you if conditions change suddenly, and lending long-term can trap your capital at poor rates.

22. Introduce randomness in your life

    Leave room for serendipity. Pabrai’s entire investing career started simply because he randomly bought a Peter Lynch book at an airport. Rigidly planning every moment blinds you to unexpected opportunities. Embrace unstructured exploration to let massive luck enter your life.

23. Be a Swiss Army knife

    Be adaptable. Sometimes you’ll have to violate some of these mental models.

24. Focus on spinoffs

    Corporate spin-offs are a fertile hunting ground for severe mispricing. Institutional investors often blindly dump the shares of the newly spun-off entity because it doesn’t fit their mandate, creating forced selling and massive, temporary discounts for observant value investors.

25. Focus on the uber cannibals

    Look for businesses that aggressively and consistently buy back their own stock when it is cheap. By drastically reducing their outstanding share count, these “uber cannibals” mathematically multiply the remaining owners’ stake in the underlying earnings without requiring any operational growth.

26. Focus on the spawners

    Target companies with the unique DNA to incubate and launch entirely new businesses internally. Giants like Alphabet or Amazon use their earnings to continuously fund asymmetrical, adjacent bets. When just one of these internal experiments hits escape velocity, it creates colossal, unexpected wealth for shareholders.

27. Arbitrage is wonderful

    Arbitrage is one of the small blades in the investor’s Swiss Army knife. It lets you make money from clear price gaps — often in mergers or special situations — while waiting for the true no-brainers. It is not the big game, but it is a wonderful little game.

28. Heads I win, tails I don’t lose much!

    Look for asymmetric bets where the upside is large but the downside is limited. The best investments do not require certainty; they require downside protection. If things go right, you can make a lot. If things go wrong, the balance sheet, assets, or cash flows keep you from losing much.

29. Focus on low-risk, high uncertainty bets

    Wall Street hates uncertainty and will aggressively discount stocks facing unpredictable near-term news. If you find a business with fundamentally low economic risk but high optical uncertainty, you can buy it at a steep discount. The market’s confusion creates your margin of safety.

30. Do not skim off the top

    (Applies if you’re a fund manager) Avoid standard Wall Street fee structures (like taking 2% of assets regardless of performance) that guarantee the manager gets rich even if clients lose money. Align your incentives perfectly. By only taking a cut of the profits above a high hurdle, you build absolute, lifelong trust with your partners.

15 Mental models for starting/growing a business:

(Mohnish explains these mental models on his speech at SXSW).

1. The Bedrock
   Take a simple idea and take it seriously. Most people hear great principles, nod, and move on. The entrepreneur’s edge comes from building the whole business on one obvious truth and executing it with unusual intensity.

2. Truth vs. Trust
   Truth is the raw material; trust is the compound interest. If customers, employees, and partners learn that you don’t distort reality, even in small things, trust builds over time — and that trust becomes a business advantage.

3. Your Deepest Desire is Your Destiny

   The world is a very malleable place. If you know what you want, and you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion, the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would think.

   — Marc Andreessen

   Belief comes before ability.

4. Heads I win; Tails I don’t lose much
   Look for asymmetric bets: situations where the upside is large but the downside is survivable. In business, that means testing ideas cheaply, avoiding fatal risks. As Elon Musk said “Failure is irrelevant unless is catastrophic.”

5. Be a Shameless Cloner
   Don’t worship originality. Study what already works, and adapt it to your context.

6. Use Hacks to Improve Yourself
   Don’t rely only on willpower. Design your environment, habits, relationships, and incentives so they pull you upward.

7. Hiring Hacks

8. Incentives are More Powerful than You Think
   People respond to incentives more than speeches, values, or intentions. If the rewards are wrong, behavior will drift in the wrong direction. Great businesses design incentives so customers, employees, and partners win by doing the right thing.

9. Do Not Raise Capital

10. Pursue Quality Intensely
    Quality is not a detail; it is the business. Better products, better service, better writing, better hiring — all of it compounds. When quality becomes an obsession, customers notice, trust grows, and the company becomes harder to compete with. Mohnish recommends reading Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

11. Focus on Durable Moats
    A moat is a structural competitive advantage that protects your business from rivals over time. Whether it is immense brand loyalty, high customer switching costs, network effects, or an unbeatable low-cost structure, you must build a fortress around your profit margins so competitors cannot easily steal your market share.

12. The Purpose of Business is Not to Make Money
    A business fundamentally exists to solve a specific problem or fulfill a societal need. If you start a company solely to get rich, you will likely cut corners. Instead, obsess over delivering massive value. If you solve your customers’ problems exceptionally well, immense financial reward will naturally follow as a byproduct.

13. Outsource Everything that Can Be Done by Someone Else for Less than $100/hour
    A founder's time is their most constrained asset. If a repetitive or administrative task can be delegated cheaply, do it immediately. This ruthless prioritization frees you to focus exclusively on high-leverage activities, and the things you are uniquely good at.

14. Go All-In On No-Brainers
    Most opportunities are not worth much attention. But occasionally, you find a bet with huge upside, low downside, and obvious logic — something you can explain to an 8 year old. When a true no-brainer appears, don’t dabble. Concentrate your time, money, and energy behind it.

15. Your Original Business Focus Will Be Wrong — Your Customers Can Help You
    Your initial business plan will rarely survive its first contact with the real market. Instead of stubbornly sticking to your original idea, listen intensely to your early users. Pay attention to what they actually use and what they are willing to pay for, then pivot your operations to serve that exact, proven demand.

💥 Stuff I Loved

I hope you enjoyed today’s letter!

Talk you soon,

Your nuggets friend Julio :)

At the time, I was reading almost all my books on Kindle rather than physical books, so the idea of having all my highlights in one place — where I could search, revisit, and rediscover them — was very appealing.

I ended up buying a subscription and connected it to my Kindle account. All my highlights were imported and neatly organized in the app, and any new highlights I make are automatically imported every day.

(Note: You can connect to many other sources: X bookmarks, Apple Books, PDF uploads…)

Three years later, I’m still subscribed to Readwise.

So yes… for me, the app is worth the time and money.

But here’s the important thing: I don’t think Readwise is worth it for everyone. It depends on your reading habits, personal goals, and even the tools you use.

By the end of this article, you’ll know whether Readwise is actually worth it for you — or whether you’re better off skipping it.

Index

To make this review super clear and easy to follow, I’ve organized it into six parts:

1. Importing Your Highlights

2. What You Can Do With Readwise

3. Exporting Your Highlights

4. User Interface (Website and Mobile App)

5. Pricing

6. Alternative Apps

And at the end, I share my conclusion as to whether Readwise is truly worth your time and money.

1. Importing Your Highlights

To get value from Readwise, you first need to get your highlights into the app.

Readwise currently lets you connect 24 different sources…

Once connected, these sources sync daily with Readwise, so any new highlights you make are automatically added to the app.

You can also import from 13 other sources, but these require manual uploading…

Most of my highlights come from two sources: Kindle and Readwise Reader.

Kindle doesn’t need any introduction, so I’ll talk a bit about Readwise Reader…

Readwise Reader

Readwise Reader is a separate app built by the same team. It lets you save and highlight things from the web — like articles, YouTube transcripts, and emails.

It also comes with a browser extension, so you can highlight directly on a webpage or save it to Readwise Reader, where you can read (or watch) and highlight it later.

(Note: To save articles or videos from your phone, just share them with the Readwise Reader mobile app — the same way you’d share something with a friend on WhatsApp.)

Readwise Reader is included in the Readwise subscription — more on that in the Pricing section.

I talked to the team at Readwise and they agreed to give us one extra month free by signing up using this link!

2. What You Can Do With Readwise

Okay, so Readwise brings all your highlights into one place.

But once they’re there, what can you actually do with them?

There are six core features that will help you get the most out of your highlights:

• Daily Review

• Highlights Feed

• Chat With Your Highlights

• Search

• Similar Highlights

• Favorites List

2.1 Daily Review

This is one of my favorite features on Readwise.

With Daily Review, you get a selection of highlights delivered to your email inbox every day — and you can choose how many you want to receive.

Personally, I get 8 highlights delivered every day (plus a book recommendation based on my highlights)…

It’s a tiny habit — it takes me less than 5 minutes a day — but doing it consistently has made a huge difference in how much I remember from the books I read (and also articles and videos, thanks to Readwise Reader).

You can also do your Daily Review directly on the Readwise website…

Or in the mobile app…

(Note: For each highlight, you can share it, edit it, leave a note, save it as a favorite — more on that later — or add tags to keep it organized. And if you don’t want a specific highlight to show up again, you can just hit “Discard.”)

You can also listen to your Daily Review — either on the website or in the mobile app. Here’s a sample of what it sounds like…

2.2 Highlights Feed

Think of it like an X feed, but the tweets are actually your highlights!

I think this feature is especially useful when you have a few minutes to kill. I often use it when I’m waiting for my food at a restaurant, or when I’m commuting by bus or train — the best way to get around Barcelona!

So instead of watching reels on Instagram or reading news on X, I can use that time to review a few highlights in the Readwise mobile app. And the cool thing is that small habit changes like this compound over time. After a year, it makes a big difference.

One thing I really like is that the feed feels surprisingly fresh. Every time I open it, I see different highlights, so it never gets boring or repetitive.

2.3 Chat With Your Highlights

Imagine ChatGPT, but with the context of everything you’ve highlighted.

That’s exactly what this feature is.

Ask it anything — it answers from your highlights.

(Note: This feature is also available on the website version.)

2.4 Search

You can search through all your highlights and notes on Readwise.

I use this feature quite often when I’m writing for my newsletter.

For example, when I was writing Living a Plotless Life, I searched for “planning” and found a passage from Stephen King’s On Writing that fit the piece perfectly…

So if you’re a writer or content creator, this feature is a great research tool.

You can also browse your highlights by category: books, articles, tweets, and tags. I often go through my books and pick one I want to revisit.

(Note: The Search feature is also available on the website version.)

2.5 Similar Highlights

This is a relatively new AI-powered feature.

For any highlight, it finds you other highlights that are conceptually similar — even if they use completely different words.

It helps me discover patterns and see how everything connects.

“Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.”

— Leonardo da Vinci

(Note: This feature is also available on the website version.)

2.6 Favorites List

Not all highlights are created equal. So Readwise lets you save your best ones in a list called “Favorites.”

As you can see in the picture, I barely use this feature — I only have 7 highlights saved in my Favorites list (I suspect a few by mistake 😂 ).

(Note: This feature is also available on the website version.)

I talked to the team at Readwise and they agreed to give us one extra month free by signing up using this link!

3. Exporting Your Highlights

This is entirely optional, but you can export all your highlights out of Readwise.

There are 16 apps that you can connect (and sync automatically) to export your highlights…

You can also manually export your highlights to CSV or Markdown…

I’ve tried exporting to a few apps, but the only one I found useful is Obsidian.

Next, I talk a bit about the Readwise - Obsidian integration, but feel free to skip this section if you’re not interested :)

Readwise - Obsidian Integration

Obsidian is a popular note-taking app. It’s ideal for offline use, searching your notes quickly, and keeping everything organized.

So I thought Obsidian would be the perfect place to keep my highlights available offline, search through them easily, and keep everything organized. And it’s free!

Readwise and Obsidian sync automatically, and you can choose the frequency. In my case, I have it set to once a week (I don’t need it faster than that).

If you are interested in setting up this integration, this is the official tutorial I followed — it’s from 2021, but I tested it in 2026 and it still works!

4. User Interface (Website and Mobile App)

Readwise has a simple and intuitive website…

The mobile app is also great. I use it more often than the website — especially for the Daily Review and Highlights Feed.

(Note: You can also switch to dark mode on the website and mobile app)

5. Pricing

Readwise offers two subscription plans:

• Readwise Plan → It offers the full Readwise experience, without any limitations. It also includes their brother app Readwise Reader — to help you save and highlight things from the web.

  • If you choose the yearly billing, it goes for $119.88 (equivalent to $9.99 per month).

  • If you pick the monthly billing, it costs $12.99 per month.

• Readwise Lite Plan → It’s cheaper, but it comes with a few limitations: You can’t create tags and write notes on your highlights, you can’t export your highlights (unless you’re exporting to CSV or Markdown), and it doesn’t include Readwise Reader.

  • The yearly billing goes for $67.08 (equivalent to $5.59 per month).

  • The monthly billing costs $6.99 per month.

Readwise has a 30-day free trial. But I talked to them and they agreed to extend it to 60 days for readers of my blog! Just sign up with this link.

6. Alternative Apps

Readwise (Alternative Apps)

There are two main Readwise alternatives: Screvi and Glasp. Although these aren’t as consolidated as Readwise.

Here’s a quick comparison of their ratings on the App Store (in the US), as of July 1st 2026:

• Readwise → 4.8 (1.5K ratings)

• Screvi → 4.6 (19 ratings)

• Glasp → 4.5 (14 ratings)

I haven’t tried Screvi or Glasp. They look like new entrants in the market, so I prefer to keep using Readwise since it has been around for longer and it has better reviews (and many more ratings).

Readwise Reader (Alternative Apps)

There are two main competitors to Readwise Reader: Instapaper and Matter.

They both do pretty much the same job: save and highlight things from the web. They are also called “read it later” apps, because many people use them to save articles to read later (or save videos to watch later).

I haven’t tried Instapaper or Matter, because I’m a Readwise subscriber and the Readwise Reader app comes for free (and syncs perfectly with the Readwise app).

But here’s a quick comparison of their ratings on the App Store (in the US), as of July 1st 2026:

• Instapaper → 4.6 (3.5K ratings)

• Matter: Reading App → 4.6 (1.2K ratings)

• Readwise Reader → 4.6 (563 ratings)

Is Readwise Worth Your Time and Money?

As I mentioned at the beginning of this review, Readwise is worth it for me for two main reasons: (1) I use Kindle frequently and I like to highlight articles and videos (with Readwise Reader), and (2) I get value from most of Readwise’s core features.

Overall, Readwise has helped me remember much more of what I read. And it’s nice to have a library of all the things you find interesting.

Buuut... Is Readwise worth it for you?

Here are two questions to help you decide:

• Do you use (or plan to use) at least one app that connects to Readwise? If it’s only one, you’ll want to be a frequent user of that app — otherwise there may not be enough highlights to make Readwise worthwhile.

• Of the six core Readwise features we covered, is there at least one you think you’ll use consistently?

If you answered Yes to both questions, there’s a good chance Readwise will be worth your time and money.

But you don’t have to commit immediately. I talked to the team at Readwise and they agreed to give readers of my blog a 60-day free trial by signing up with this link. The usual trial is 30 days, so this gives you extra time to try the app risk-free and see whether it works for you.

And thank you for reading my blog post :)

In this blog post, I share 12 key ideas — with direct quotes from the book — I learned from reading the book Never Enough: From Barista to Billionaire, by Andrew Wilkinson.

This book is Andrew’s personal journey from growing up in a middle-class family to becoming one of Canada’s richest people in his 30s.

I wasn’t thinking of doing a blog post on this book, but I got sooo many great insights that I thought it would be useful to others if I make it.

The ideas are listed chronologically, following Andrew’s journey as he grows up.

By the way, I also made it into a 🎧 podcast episode (with synced transcription on-screen). So if you prefer to listen, open any of the following links to listen on your favorite podcast app → YouTube / Spotify / Apple Podcasts (alternatively, you can directly search the podcast show “Julio’s Almanack.”) P.S. The podcast has only 11 insights because I accidentally skipped insight #2 😂

👤 Andrew Wilkinson

💡Idea #1: The Advantage of Being Lazy

In this part of the book, Andrew is a kid living with his two brothers in his parents’ house in Vancouver, Canada.

🟠 Andrew Wilkinson:

We were expected to do some basic chores. Nothing crazy, but I hated chores and I’d do almost anything to avoid them.

My brothers and I would rotate dishwashing duties, having to clear the table and wash the dishes one night each week.

Even as a child, I noticed how much time and work it took for one person to clear the table, scrape the plates, load the dishwasher, and hand-wash the remaining pots and pans.

“What if we all just cleared our own plates then stack them next to the sink?” I proposed during one night of dish duty. “It would be thirty seconds of work for everyone, but it would make this go way faster.”

My parents just laughed and refused, thinking I was trying to weasel out of my responsibilities.

It infuriated me. It made no sense. It would make it go twice as fast. A little assembly line. A massive efficiency gain.

Looking back, I realize that the same qualities that made me a lazy brat as a kid ended up being the ones that made me a successful entrepreneur. As Bill Gates put it: “I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”

For as long as I can remember, I wanted to do things the easy way. To have control. To grab the wheel and make things work better. To this day, if anyone tells me what to do—no matter how reasonable—I will dig my heels in and resist, flashing back to being a kid.

And when I read this passage I remembered a great line from Robert Heinlein where he said: “Progress isn’t made by early risers. It’s made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.”

And actually Bill Gates has publicly credited Robert Heinlein’s novels for influencing his thinking. So I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they share the same idea here.

At its core, I think the benefit of being lazy is that it makes you re-think the problem from scratch, in order to find a more simple and efficient way to solve it. Or you might even conclude that the problem is not even worth solving because is not ultimately adding value to the customer. As Elon Musk says: “The most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize a thing that should not exist.”

💡Idea #2: Don’t Rest in Your Laurels

🟠 Andrew Wilkinson:

Dad was constantly encouraging me to start little businesses. When I started a lemonade stand and told him, proudly, about how I’d raked in $40, he asked me, “What’s next?” I’d looked at him, perplexed. “Okay, think about it, let’s say you make $10 an hour selling lemonade. That means you could pay another kid $5 an hour, have them run the stand, and then use your profits to go start another one. And another. And another.”

His constant questions sparked a habit that would benefit me massively in business. After any win, I’d hear Dad’s voice echoing in my head: “What’s next?” Instead of allowing myself to relax and enjoy what I had—to celebrate an achievement or take a vacation after a long sprint at work—I’d instead wonder how to do it again, but bigger and better and more efficiently.

This workaholic but enjoyable habit made me highly adaptive in business but created an inability to relax or run in place. It created a fortune but pushed me into emotional overdraft.

Naval Ravikant captured this beautifully when he said:

“Happiness is being satisfied with what you have.

Success comes from dissatisfaction.

Choose.”

💡Idea #3: Business is About Solving Problems for Other People

Andrew is a twelve-year-old kid and he is obsessed with Apple products.

He hangs around the electronics store and he is sort of an unofficial employee — helping customers decide which computer to take home.

At some point, an elderly woman asks him to come to her house and help her with her newly-bought Mac computer. And she’s willing to pay him $20 an hour.

Andrew accepts and he quickly starts his first company, where he would offer this technical support service to elderly individuals in the electronics store.

🟠 Andrew Wilkinson:

That first company, with its half-a-dozen elderly customers, taught me one of the most important lessons of my life so far: that a business, even one run by a twelve-year-old, was at its core about solving problems for other people. Until then, I thought that a job, or a business, was something that was dictated to you. There were set paths: as a teenager, you could work at McDonald’s, or babysit, or do a paper route. I slowly came to realize that almost any need, problem, or desire can be turned into a business of its own.

Related to this idea, there’s a passage from Paul Graham which complements it very well.

🟠 Paul Graham:

Someone graduating from college thinks, and is told, that he needs to get a job, as if the important thing were becoming a member of an institution. A more direct way to put it would be: you need to start doing something people want. You don’t need to join a company to do that. All a company is is a group of people working together to do something people want. It’s doing something people want that matters, not joining the group.

For most people the best plan probably is to go to work for some existing company. But it is a good idea to understand what’s happening when you do this. A job means doing something people want, averaged together with everyone else in that company.

👉 Book: Hackers and Painters, by Paul Graham.

Brad Jacobs, who has scaled 8 different businesses to over a billion dollars in market cap, also has an interesting take on how problems are actually opportunities to create value.

He learned this lesson while he was having lunch with his mentor Ludwig Jesselson.

🟠 Brad Jacobs:

At one memorable lunch, I arrived burdened with problems that I began to unload on him. Mr. Jesselson listened carefully—he was good at that—and waited until I had run out my string. Then he put down his fork, turned to me, and in his thick German accent said, “Look, Brad, if you want to make money in the business world, you need to get used to problems, because that’s what business is. It’s actually about finding problems, embracing and even enjoying them—because each problem is an opportunity to remove an obstacle and get closer to success.”

In that moment, I learned something invaluable: Problems are an asset—not something to avoid but something to run toward.

👉 Book: How to Make a Few Billion Dollars, by Brad Jacobs.

By the way, if you want a great way to discover new books and learn their key ideas, I use a book summary app called Shortform, which has a library of over 10,000 books.

I’ve been using Shortform for the past 4 years, and I use it often when I don’t have enough time to properly get into a book — for instance, when I only have 20 minutes while commuting somewhere or I’m sitting in a restaurant waiting for the food.

Plus, it helps me spend less time scrolling X and Instagram reels, and instead use that time for learning!

Their summaries cover the big ideas of a book, connect them with ideas from other books (this is great for discovering new titles and expanding your knowledge on the topic), and include interactive exercises to help you apply what you learn.

You can also listen to the summaries (with the audio version) or download them as PDFs to read offline.

Authors like Mark Manson, James Clear, and Sahil Bloom have also recommended Shortform.

Because I use Shortform and it’s a great fit for readers of my blog, I reached out to them and they agreed to give us a 20% discount on the Annual Subscription by signing up with this link! (You also get a 5-day free trial).

💡Idea #4: There’s No Harm in Asking

In this part of Andrew’s journey, he and three other teenagers are running a website where they write about the latest news on Apple products.

🟠 Andrew Wilkinson:

The next summer, I sent a one-line email that would change my life. I had saved up enough money to travel to Mecca for Apple nerds—the Macworld conference in New York—where Steve Jobs usually launched Apple’s new products.

I sent an email to my contacts on the Apple PR team:

“I’m going to be at Macworld next week and was hoping to interview Steve. Possible?”

I knew this was bold. I was a nobody. Interviews were typically doled out to Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal, not tiny websites run by kids.

A few minutes later, I got a reply:

“Steve’s schedule is too hectic, but I can get you in for a group tour of the new Apple Store in Soho?”

I was shocked. I’d expected to get fully shut down or not even get a reply, and now I was getting a behind-the-scenes tour of their first ever Apple Store, which nobody had seen the inside of yet.

While I was upset that I wouldn’t get to meet Steve Jobs, I realized something important. I had asked for something amazing and gotten something great in exchange. If I’d asked for a tour of the Apple Store, I probably would have gotten a “nice try, kid,” but by shooting for the moon and asking for something that was hard to give, I was met with a compromise that was better than I could have hoped for. It’s a strategy I went on to use throughout my career: there’s no harm in asking.

This idea of asking for the moon reminded me a story about Cristopher Columbus that I read on the book The 48 Laws of Power, written by Robert Greene.

(For context, Columbus had just married into an established Lisbon family that had excellent connections with Portuguese royalty.)

🟠 Robert Greene:

Through his in-laws, Columbus finagled a meeting with the king of Portugal, João II, whom he petitioned to finance a westward voyage aimed at discovering a shorter route to Asia. In return for announcing that any discoveries he achieved would be made in the king’s name, Columbus wanted a series of rights: the title Grand Admiral of the Oceanic Sea; the office of viceroy over any lands he found; and 10 percent of the future commerce with such lands. All of these rights were to be hereditary and for all time.

Columbus made these demands even though he had previously been a mere merchant, he knew almost nothing about navigation, he could not work a quadrant, and he had never led a group of men. In short he had absolutely no qualifications for the journey he proposed. Furthermore, his petition included no details as to how he would accomplish his plans, just vague promises.

When Columbus finished his pitch, João II smiled: He politely declined the offer, but left the door open for the future. Here Columbus must have noticed something he would never forget: Even as the king turned down the sailor’s demands, he treated them as legitimate. He neither laughed at Columbus nor questioned his background and credentials. In fact the king was impressed by the boldness of Columbus’s requests, and clearly felt comfortable in the company of a man who acted so confidently. The meeting must have convinced Columbus that his instincts were correct: By asking for the moon, he had instantly raised his own status, for the king assumed that unless a man who set such a high price on himself were mad, which Columbus did not appear to be, he must somehow be worth it.

👉 Book: The 48 Laws of Power, by Robert Greene.

So this idea of shooting for the moon is highly effective because

(1) it raises your own status

and (2) makes the other person compromise in giving you something in-between what you asked and what you actually expected.

This strategy can also be applied to goals in general. As Mathew McConaughey said in The Diary of a CEO Podcast:

“Shooting for an A and making a C, it’s better than shooting for a C and making an F.

So, go for perfection. Reality always comes in under it.”

Let’s go back to Andrew.

Once he graduates from high school, he goes to University to study Journalism. But after a few months and disappointed with the lectures, he drops out.

So he goes back to his parent’s house and starts working in a coffee shop as a barista. There he met two customers who would come to the coffee shop everyday and work from their laptops. Andrew started asking questions about what they did. They tell him they run a small design agency called The Number building websites for local businesses…

🟠 Andrew Wilkinson:

They were more than happy to share the secret of their success, and as they broke it all down, I couldn’t believe my ears. They told me they were able to do three to four projects at a time, and that they charged five to ten thousand dollars per website. By my almost-failed-junior-year math, that was twenty to forty thousand dollars per month in revenue. A veritable fortune compared to my $1,500 a month barista paycheck.

So this motivated Andrew to learn to code and design websites.

At first, he was doing the coding and design all by himself, but as demand grew he set up an agency called Metalab and hired people to do the coding and design, while Andrew would allocate his energy into finding and signing new customers.

Here, we see again his strategy that there’s no harm in asking…

🟠 Andrew Wilkinson:

I started to cold-email CEOs of startups that had just raised ungodly sums from venture capital.

I had a simple insight: most CEOs checked their own emails, and it was easy to guess their email addresses.

What did I have to lose? Whenever I saw a company announce a big raise on TechCrunch, I’d figure out the CEO’s email and contact them.

With the confidence that only a one-line email can convey, I’d send mysterious messages like,

“Hey, big fan of your business. Would love to work together.”

Believe it or not, these random cold emails—most of which took me less than a minute to send out—ended up winning some of MetaLab’s biggest clients and helped me build friendships with some of the most successful people in business.

💡Idea #5: Most People Hate Risk

While Andrew is running his agency Metalab, he secretly wonders why his employees didn’t go and do this themselves — that is, to start an agency selling other people’s time instead of selling their own time for money. And eventually he realized why this was the case…

🟠 Andrew Wilkinson:

I soon realized that it was often due to their desire for certainty. While I’d wanted to shove aside every boss I’d worked for and grab the wheel, I realized that most people abhorred risk. They wanted safety and security. A steady salary and rails—things I had none of. I was perpetually a month away from going broke and constantly pouring my profits into hiring new people, signing scary-looking contracts full of terms I didn’t understand with companies that could sue me into the Stone Age should they so choose, and guaranteeing credit lines personally. Risk, in this case, equaled reward.

💡Idea #6: Be the Only One in Your Category

🟠 Andrew Wilkinson:

I started to set MetaLab apart from other agencies by focusing exclusively on designing digital products like mobile and web apps.

I started calling us an “interface design firm,” which I thought sounded sophisticated. “We’re the top interface design firm in North America,” I would tell a throng of startup founders in a packed bar at the SXSW conference, as I took a swig from my cheap American beer, not mentioning that I had made up this label and we were likely the only interface design firm in North America because there simply weren’t any others.

I hadn’t realized it, but this ability to sell and market is what started to really set me apart from my competition. I had reasonable taste and design sense, but my time as a barista had taught me how to make friends with just about anyone.

Most of my competitors—folks who ran agencies—were nerdy programmers who looked at their shoes when talking to a potential new client. My sales technique was simple: be fun to drink with and ask a ton of questions about whomever I happened to be talking to. It worked surprisingly well. At conferences, I quickly started to learn that the most important business connections were made in bars, gossiping with drunk executives. Buying a round of drinks often generated a huge return on investment. For instance, there was a big Facebook party in Austin, where I got a crowd of startup founders wasted on my credit card. I must have bought a hundred tequila shots that night. It was a monstrous bar bill, but it more than paid for itself a few months later, when they needed design help and one of them (whom I clearly didn’t get drunk enough) remembered my name and reached out to see if my “interface design firm” was accepting new business.

There are two main ideas I took away:

(1) The first has to do with the label that Andrew created. This made his firm look more unique and special, because there was obviously no other firms competing in this niche category of “interface design firm.” I first learnt this idea of being the only one from Kevin Kelly, which he brilliantly captured in this one-liner: “Don’t be the best. Be the only.”

💡Idea #7: Create Goodwill

(2) The second idea is about creating goodwill. When Andrew was inviting the hundred shots of tequila, he was creating a feeling of indebtedness in all of them, which later paid off many times over whatever those tequila shots cost.

Whether consciously or not, reciprocation is a powerful persuasion technique — and it’s one of the seven principles of persuasion that Robert Cialdini discussed on his bestseller book Influence. And as a fun fact, Charlie Munger liked the book so much that he sent a share of Berkshire Hathaway to Cialdini, which he has kept and today is worth over half a million dollars. (After I became aware of this, I immediately bought the book and read it — highly recommended!)

💡Idea #8: Save and Invest

It’s 2008 and the financial crisis had a massive impact on Andrew’s agency MetaLab. He lost all his clients. And Andrew had overspent his income so he was very close to going bankrupt…

🟠 Andrew Wilkinson:

Then, as quickly as it had all come, it was all gone. Almost overnight I went from making seemingly endless profits to making nothing—literally nothing.

A few days later, I went to the grocery store, and after I filled my cart, I had to put items back on the shelf that I couldn’t afford. I left the store that night with a huge bag of potatoes. If I ate a few per day for the next few weeks, I figured those potatoes could get me through bankruptcy. An absurd thought, to be sure, but that was where my head was at.

It was at this point—wandering the fluorescent aisles of a supermarket at night—that I realized how stupid I’d been. I had gotten incredibly lucky, making more money in the past couple of years than I had ever thought possible in a lifetime. I went from mopping the floors of a coffee shop to working with Silicon Valley’s most cutting-edge companies. And yet, I’d somehow spent every single cent I had earned, blowing it on things I didn’t need. I had closets full of clothes I didn’t wear and electronics that were already obsolete. I had shelves displaying fancy liquor I didn’t even like the taste of.

This was my first real slap in the face, the moment I realized that what goes up can also come down and that I had to start learning how to save and invest. I was reminded of my father telling me about the wonders of compound interest as a kid. That if I had just invested all that money instead of buying frivolous nonsense, I could have been set for life.

While many of his competitors went bust, Andrew was able to weather the storm thanks to two things:

The first is an Apple stock that his uncle gave him as a birthday present when he was a kid. He sold it right at the bottom of the crisis for $20,000. If he would have kept it, it would be worth millions today. But he needed the money to keep MetaLab alive.

The second was a new client — a laser hair removal clinic in Arizona. Far from the fancy Silicon Valley clients, but it paid the bills.

🟠 Andrew Wilkinson:

After that brush with death, I vowed that, going forward, I would never spend more than 10 percent of my profits on my lifestyle. Everything else would be saved, invested, or used to start new businesses. I wasn’t going to let this happen again.

And there’s a great line on this from Naval Ravikant, he said:

“People who are living far below their means enjoy a freedom that people busy upgrading their lifestyles can’t fathom.”

💡Idea #9: Anti-goals

At this point, Andrew is running a few businesses and gets an offer from a private equity firm to buy MetaLab for $50 million.

He agrees to sell, and while he and Chris — his business partner — wait for the deal to close, they started reading about Charlie Munger and discovered his mental model of inversion…

🟠 Andrew Wilkinson:

Chris and I had the time and space to reflect on what we wanted our lives to look like going forward. By this time, we had burrowed our way through every book on Warren Buffett and had moved onto his business partner, Charlie Munger. One of his quotes that stuck with us was the constant refrain to “invert, always invert!” Munger said that “problems are often easiest solved in reverse” and explained that it’s much easier to think about what you don’t want than what you do. To think about what you hate, then work backward to optimize your life to avoid the things you disliked being a part of it.

So, we decided to invert. We began by listing our complaints, writing down all the tasks that made us miserable. Long meetings that dragged on. Late-night emails. People who needed constant input and feedback. Packed calendars. Travel that took us away from our kids. The list went on.

We made a list of what we called our “Anti-Goals.” Once Chris and I had itemized everything we hated about our jobs, we spent the next several weeks thinking about how to delegate and structure things so that we weren’t responsible for any of those tasks. Most of our problems were related to issues within our individual businesses. As soon as we hired Brian, it was his job, as interim CEO, to handle all problems relating to MetaLab, and our lives got infinitely easier. So, we figured, we’d hire leaders for each business, and tell them to only call us if it was absolutely necessary. We’d set up a head office, where we’d focus our time on reading, and they could call us only when needed.

My key insight at this time was one that would become the core of how I run my businesses today: It’s not enough to do what you love. You also have to stop doing what you hate. The goal isn’t—as many people think—to not work at all; it’s to only work on things that you enjoy doing. The stuff that you’d do even if you didn’t get paid for it.

One of my favorite authors is Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and in his book Antifragile he has a whole chapter where he talks about this idea that removing is actually more powerful than adding. He calls it via negativa, and the goal is to identify the negative and then avoid it like the plague. The opposite to this is the via positiva, where the goal is to just add new things. Taleb argues that the pros focus on via negativa — on what to avoid — instead of via positiva…

🟠 Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

I have used all my life a wonderfully simple heuristic: charlatans are recognizable in that they will give you positive advice, and only positive advice, exploiting our gullibility and sucker-proneness for recipes that hit you in a flash as just obvious, then evaporate later as you forget them. Just look at the “how to” books with, in their title, “Ten Steps for—” (fill in: enrichment, weight loss, making friends, innovation, getting elected, building muscles, finding a husband, running an orphanage, etc.). Yet in practice it is the negative that’s used by the pros, those selected by evolution: chess grandmasters usually win by not losing; people become rich by not going bust (particularly when others do); religions are mostly about interdicts; the learning of life is about what to avoid.

👉 Book: Antifragile, written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

💡Idea #10: The Best Investors Think in Decades

Going back to Andrew, the 50 million dollar deal ends up not working out, because the private equity firm couldn’t come up with the money.

Meanwhile, he spends his time learning about investing from value-investing icons like Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Mohnish Pabrai, Peter Lynch, and Bill Ackman.

He even bid $57,000 to win lunch with Bill Ackman, who had auctioned off a one-hour lunch with all proceeds going to charity…

🟠 Andrew Wilkinson:

Sitting at the restaurant, I recalled a piece of advice that Bill had given us over lunch. He told us that the best investors think not in weeks, months, or even years, but in decades. It was important to focus on the long term, not day-to-day vacillations.

And I think this is a very important insight for investors, specially investors in the stock market, because every day the market fluctuates and media outlets come up with whatever reason for why a stock is going up or down. But the key is to ignore all that noise and focus on the fundamentals of the businesses that you own and think in decades, as Bill Ackman advised Andrew and Chris.

💡Idea #11: Invest in What You Know

Another piece of advice they picked up, this time from Peter Lynch, was to “invest in what you know.”

For example, if you drink Starbucks every day, you might want to consider buying Starbucks stock.

(I personally have this rule for investing too. If you’re a consumer of the product, you’ll know if the product starts to suck at some point and sell the stock, or buy more if the product improves. The first time I did this (and bought) was with Spotify. But of course this is just one of the many things I consider before buying a business!)

Andrew says: “We took this to heart, scanning our lives for things to invest in.”

Given Andrew’s experience as a barista, he discovered AeroPress and immediately fell in love with the product.

And if you haven’t heard of AeroPress, it’s a coffee maker that makes extremely high-quality coffee and is mostly sold through specialty coffee shops.

So Andrew and Chris reached out to the inventor of AeroPress, Alan Adler — a teacher of Engineering at Stanford University and serial inventor.

They ended up buying AeroPress for $70 million.

They were confident they could significantly grow the brand through its online store — which, at the time, was barely being exploited.

💡Idea #12: No One is Impressed with Your Possessions As Much As You Are

At this point, Andrew has hundreds of millions of dollars and he discovers a truth of human nature…

🟠 Andrew Wilkinson:

There was something that surprised me about this big lifestyle upgrade. The thing that nobody tells you is that nobody is impressed when you drive a flashy car or show off your crazy house on Instagram. My friend Morgan Housel put it well: “People aren’t thinking: ‘Wow, I’m impressed by this person!’ They’re thinking, ‘I wish I had that house.’”

Or more likely: “What a prick.”

Getting impressive things didn’t win me more friends. At least not the kind I wanted. In fact, it made me more insular. It made me gravitate increasingly to my old friends. My world began shrinking inward to people who knew me before the money—whose intentions I knew I could trust.

Paragraph from The Psychology of Money, written by Morgan Housel:

“Be nicer and less flashy. No one is impressed with your possessions as much as you are. You might think you want a fancy car or a nice watch. But what you probably want is respect and admiration. And you’re more likely to gain those things through kindness and humility than horsepower and chrome.”

And I personally couldn’t agree more with Andrew and Morgan here, but of course when you look around you mostly see people trying to gain status through luxurious items, and I think a big part of that is that it’s beneficial to companies that we try to gain status by buying stuff. I mean, no company out there is gonna make any money if you try to gain status by being kind and humble. So they bombard us with their persuasive marketing to make us believe (almost at a subconcsious level) that we need their fancy stuff in order to be happy and get the admiration of others. Many people say that they buy a Louis Vuitton bag because of the quality, materials, etc. But I’m certain that if tomorrow everybody took this truth of human nature to heart, the bottom line of all these luxury companies would be significantly compressed.

One of my role models here is again Charlie Munger, whom Andrew would meet later in his journey. And one of the things that Andrew noticed about Charlie is that, despite being worth billions of dollars, he was living in a modest house and didn’t carry any luxury items with him…

🟠 Andrew Wilkinson:

Decades earlier, when he had made his first million dollars, he didn’t spend a penny, but instead reinvested every dime while he continued to live off his average annual salary. Things hadn’t changed too much. He told us that, up until the last few years, he had flown to each Costco board meeting economy on Alaska Airlines, despite the fact that Berkshire owned not just one, but a fleet of thousands of private jets via their ownership of NetJets.

When I commented on his green shirt in passing, saying how I liked it, he lit up with excitement, then, gesturing to his shirt, remarked, “I’ve been getting these flannel shirts from L.L. Bean for years. But the last time I checked, they were at $59.95 each! I decided to compare prices at Costco and found a nice flannel shirt for $49.99. My nephew then showed me AliExpress, we compared prices, and found that you can get two packs of flannel shirts for only $34.99!” (We later learned that the massive gold watch he was wearing was actually not gold at all, but a $30 “special” he had proudly found online.)

And of course the other benefit of avoiding this expensive pursuit of status through luxurious stuff is that you can save up more money and invest it. Which will give you more financial freedom. And if there’s any truly valuable thing that money can buy, that is freedom. Freedom to choose how you wanna spend your time, with whom, and in what type of projects…

🟠 Andrew Wilkinson:

For years I’d been writing a daily gratitude journal. One evening, I lifted it from my bedside table, flipped through the pages and found page after page of notes like:

“I’m grateful that I didn’t have to wake up and mop the floors of the café at 5 AM,” or “I’m grateful nobody can tell me what to do.”

I remembered what it felt like to have a boss and to be on someone else’s schedule. I was still that same little kid inside who didn’t want his parents to tell him he couldn’t do this or that (aren’t we all still that kid?). To me, the ultimate luxury was having the ability to cancel all my meetings on a whim and hang out with my kids, just because I felt like it.

After a decade of trying all these things—crazy shopping sprees, sports cars, mansions, and ridiculously expensive boats—I came to a fundamental realization. My ultimate goal was freedom of time and freedom from worry. And, ironically, spending and tending to my expensive toys actually ate into my time and stoked my worries. It was a pyrrhic victory: the supposed win cost me massively.

It’s trite to say, but the old adage rings true: “The things you own end up owning you.”

I highly recommend buying the book!

If you buy it with my Amazon affiliate link I’ll earn a small commission at no extra charge to you :)

And thank you for reading my blog post.

👋 Hey friend,

I just finished reading the book Never Enough: From Barista to Billionaire, written by Andrew Wilkinson.

It’s an auto-biographical book, and it’s packed with many lessons on life and business.

In today’s letter, I’m sharing with you one of my favorite lessons: Shoot for the Moon.

👤 Doers

💡Nugget

For context, Andrew was just a teenager when he learned this lesson. At the time, he and three other teenagers were running a website covering the latest news on Apple products.

🟠 Andrew Wilkinson:

The next summer, I sent a one-line email that would change my life.

I had saved up enough money to travel to Mecca for Apple nerds—the Macworld conference in New York—where Steve Jobs usually launched Apple’s new products. I sent an email to my contacts on the Apple PR team:

“I’m going to be at Macworld next week and was hoping to interview Steve. Possible?”

I knew this was bold. I was a nobody. Interviews were typically doled out to Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal, not tiny websites run by kids.

A few minutes later, I got a reply:

“Steve’s schedule is too hectic, but I can get you in for a group tour of the new Apple Store in Soho?”

I was shocked. I’d expected to get fully shut down or not even get a reply, and now I was getting a behind-the-scenes tour of their first ever Apple Store, which nobody had seen the inside of yet. While I was upset that I wouldn’t get to meet Steve Jobs, I realized something important. I had asked for something amazing and gotten something great in exchange. If I’d asked for a tour of the Apple Store, I probably would have gotten a “nice try, kid,” but by shooting for the moon and asking for something that was hard to give, I was met with a compromise that was better than I could have hoped for. It’s a strategy I went on to use throughout my career: there’s no harm in asking.

This idea of shooting for the moon reminded me a story about Cristopher Columbus that I read on the book The 48 Laws of Power, written by Robert Greene.

For context, Columbus had just married into an established Lisbon family that had excellent connections with Portuguese royalty. Here’s the story…

🟠 Robert Greene:

Through his in-laws, Columbus finagled a meeting with the king of Portugal, João II, whom he petitioned to finance a westward voyage aimed at discovering a shorter route to Asia. In return for announcing that any discoveries he achieved would be made in the king’s name, Columbus wanted a series of rights: the title Grand Admiral of the Oceanic Sea; the office of viceroy over any lands he found; and 10 percent of the future commerce with such lands. All of these rights were to be hereditary and for all time. Columbus made these demands even though he had previously been a mere merchant, he knew almost nothing about navigation, he could not work a quadrant, and he had never led a group of men. In short he had absolutely no qualifications for the journey he proposed. Furthermore, his petition included no details as to how he would accomplish his plans, just vague promises.

When Columbus finished his pitch, João II smiled: He politely declined the offer, but left the door open for the future. Here Columbus must have noticed something he would never forget: Even as the king turned down the sailor’s demands, he treated them as legitimate. He neither laughed at Columbus nor questioned his background and credentials. In fact the king was impressed by the boldness of Columbus’s requests, and clearly felt comfortable in the company of a man who acted so confidently. The meeting must have convinced Columbus that his instincts were correct: By asking for the moon, he had instantly raised his own status, for the king assumed that unless a man who set such a high price on himself were mad, which Columbus did not appear to be, he must somehow be worth it.

So this idea of shooting for the moon is highly effective because (1) it raises your own status and (2) makes the other person compromise in giving you something in-between what you asked (“the moon”) and what you actually expected.

This strategy can also be applied to goals in general. As Mathew McConaughey said in The Diary of a CEO Podcast:

“Shooting for an A and making a C, it’s better than shooting for a C and making an F.

So, go for perfection. Reality always comes in under it.” (Source)

💥 Stuff I Loved

My friend Dante just dropped this great vid!

I hope you enjoyed today’s letter!

Talk you soon,

Your nuggets friend Julio :)

It was back in May 2024 when I bought my first MasterClass subscription. I remember I was listening to a conversation between Shaan Puri and David Perell (on the How I Write podcast), and Shaan was explaining all the amazing things he learned from taking Aaron Sorkin’s Screenwriting Class — which mostly focuses on storytelling.

So I became curious and took the class.

I loved it!

But my journey with MasterClass didn’t end there.

I discovered they have a huge catalog of classes (over 200) taught by some of the “world’s best” across many different fields.

So I got hooked on learning with MasterClass. I’d watch the classes on my laptop, listen to them on the mobile app while commuting or doing other things, and even stream them on my TV when I wanted a more relaxed vibe.

But enough of my life story with MasterClass.

Let’s now get into the actual review 🤓

(Disclosure: I earn a commission if you sign up to MasterClass with a link from this article, at no extra cost to you. This helps me keep the site ad-free 🙂 )

MasterClass Review (Structure)

I’ve divided this review into four parts:

1. Class Experience

2. App Experience

3. MasterClass Price & Subscriptions

4. Conclusion: Is MasterClass Worth It in 2026?

1. Class Experience

After using MasterClass for almost two years, I’d say there’s one thing that truly sets it apart from any other learning platform: the teachers.

The teachers on MasterClass aren’t just teachers… They’re first and foremost doers — and extremely successful ones. They earned their success “in the arena” (as Theodore Roosevelt would say) — by actually doing the thing. So their knowledge is vastly more practical (hence, more useful) than that of an academic teacher — whose main activity is teaching.

“In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.”

— Yogi Berra

So for instance, I’d much rather learn about investing from a successful investor — with a proven track record — than from an academic finance professor. And I’d much rather learn about writing from a successful novelist (or nonfiction author) than from a writing teacher at some university — even a prominent one.

“The doers are the major thinkers.”

— Steve Jobs

(Note: The quotes from Yogi Berra and Steve Jobs are not part of the MasterClass platform.)

Now let’s get into the actual experience of a class…

Besides writing and storytelling, I’m super interested in entrepreneurship, investing, philosophy, and food/nutrition. So, to illustrate, I’ll use my favorite class on investing: Mastering The Markets — which gave me a solid foundation for investing in stocks.

This is how it looks on the mobile app…

(Note: MasterClass also has a TV app. So if you wanna make it “cinema-style”, you can watch the classes on your TV! It’s available on Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, and Roku streaming media players.)

The class is divided into four episodes, each taught by an extremely successful investor (with decades of experience)…

If you’re curious about this particular class, click here to watch the trailer 🎬 (once you open the link, just scroll down a bit to find it).

Now let’s see all the features available for the class.

1.1 Bookmarks

You can bookmark any class episode, and you can also bookmark any chapter within a specific class episode.

So in the case of the episode Find Hidden Value in Lesser-Known Places, I can bookmark the entire thing, and I can also bookmark any of its 6 Chapters (or “Moments”, as MasterClass calls it).

These bookmarks are then automatically saved in the list “My Bookmarks” — which you can find in “My Progress” tab.

1.2 Note-taking

🖥️ Only available on desktop

As you watch any class, you can jot down notes on the side 📝

This is great for reflecting on the ideas you’re learning.

Your notes are automatically organized by class (and episode), and saved in the list “My Notes” — which you can find in “My Progress” tab.

1.3 Class Guide (PDF)

Most Classes come with a “Class Guide”, which is a PDF where you can find valuable information to follow along the class or complement your knowledge.

To make things concrete, let’s take the example of Episode four: “Win the Long Game by Managing Risk.” In its Class Guide, you’ll find:

• A short description about the instructor Seth Klarman.

• A Glossary of words for “how to speak as an investor” (e.g. Cashflow, “Buy and hold”, Capital Gains, etc.)

• Graphs and visuals to explain ideas (this is the bulk of the PDF).

• An assignment quiz.

• Seth Klarman’s Reading List.

1.4 Class TA (The AI Assistant)

🖥️ Only available on desktop

If you have any questions while watching a class, you can simply ask the AI assistant “Class TA”…

It feels like it has a solid understanding of the class context. And (almost) every time I’ve used it, it’s been useful!

1.5 Audio-only Mode

📱 Only available on mobile

If you wanna listen to a class on your phone — and you just want to listen (not watch) — you can switch to audio-only mode. This is ideal for whenever you’re on the go or doing other things.

The main benefit of switching to audio-only mode (if you only want to listen) is that, besides the instructor, there’s also an external narrator who mentions the title of each episode and its chapters — so you always know where you are in the class.

Also, if you have a poor internet connection, the audio-only mode will likely load much faster.

And yes… you can listen to the audio even when the phone screen is off (both for video and audio-only mode).

1.6 Downloads

📱 Only available on mobile

You can download any class episode on the mobile app…

This is a feature I truly appreciate because I frequently lose internet on my routinely commutes, and I can’t think of something worse than staring at the phone for minutes waiting for the content to load 😂.

1.7 Other Features: Speed/Subtitles/Quality

You can control the playback speed, select subtitles in many different languages, and choose the video quality…

2. App Experience

MasterClass has a beautiful, easy-to-navigate app on both desktop and mobile.

Let’s go through each of the three sections (Home - My Progress - Library) and see what’s inside them…

2.1 Home

On the Home page, you’ll find the most recent classes, along with a selection of classes picked “for you” based on what you’ve been watching. But if you’re interested in a specific category (such as “Business” or “Writing”), you can also filter by it!

2.2 My Progress

In this section, you’ll see all the classes you’ve interacted with, organized into three different lists:

• Continue Watching → Classes you started but haven’t finished.

  

• My List → Every Class comes with the button “Add to My List”, which means that it’s added to the playlist “My List.” Think of it as a watch later type of list.

  

• Classes You’ve Mastered → These are the classes you’ve finished.

  

Finally, you can also find your bookmarks, your notes (available only on desktop), and all your downloaded classes (available only on the mobile app).

Here’s how “My Progress” looks on the mobile app…

2.3 Library

As the name suggests, this is where you’ll find the full library of classes.

It’s similar to the Home page in that you can filter classes by category (Food, Arts & Entertainment, Music…). But you can also filter by:

• Format — Classes / Playlists / Series / Sessions (please don’t ask me the difference 😅 😂 )

• My Content — It includes the three lists we just saw in the “My Progress” section.

• Duration — Useful when you have limited time to watch something.

3. MasterClass Price & Subscriptions

Their pricing is super transparent. You can see it directly on their website.

So… How much does MasterClass cost?

They offer three annual subscriptions (which they call “memberships”):

• The Standard Membership costs $120 per year (equivalent to $10 per month). You can only watch on 1 device at a time (so it’s hard to share with friends / household), and you can’t download classes.

• The Plus Membership goes for $180 per year (equivalent to $15 per month). You can watch on 2 devices at the same time, and you get unlimited downloads.

• The Premium Membership costs $240 per year (equivalent to $20 per month). You can watch on 6 devices at the same time, and you get unlimited downloads.

There’s no free trial, but all membership plans come with a 30-day money-back guarantee (terms apply — see more information here).

You can also give any MasterClass subscription as a gift 🎁

4. Conclusion: Is MasterClass Worth It in 2026?

Based on my personal experience and research, MasterClass is definitely worth your time and money. And with a catalog of 200+ classes, you’ll likely find plenty that interest you — plus, new classes are added every month.

(Note: If you’re curious to explore all the categories, subcategories, and classes… click here to browse the entire catalog — then just hit “Browse” at the top of the page.)

As I mentioned earlier, the most unique thing about MasterClass is the instructors — who are not academics but actually successful doers in the arena. So their knowledge is experience-tested, and therefore extremely practical and useful.

On top of that, the class (and overall app) experience on laptop, mobile, and TV is amazing! And you get many features to support your learning — my two favorites: Note-taking (to reflect on the ideas) and the Audio-only Mode (for whenever I’m on the go and just wanna listen).

Finally, a quick summary of this review:

And thank you for reading my blog post :)

👉 Try MasterClass

👋 Hey friend,

I’m currently reading The Book of Elon (by Eric Jorgenson) and I’m finding so many nuggets.

One of my favorite (and which I’m sharing with you in today’s letter) is Elon Musk’s “Algorithm” to build a great product. And it’s in Elon’s own words, so there’s no loss in translation.

(New → I just launched my latest 📙 ebook: 14 Short Stories From The World’s Best Founders: Lessons You Don't Have To Learn The Hard Way. 👉 Click here to check it out!)

👤 Doers

💡Nugget

🟠 Elon Musk:

I have everyone at my companies rigorously implement a five-step process for engineering.

I call it The Algorithm.

I’ll list the steps, then explain.

The order is very important.

1. Make your requirements less dumb.

2. Try very hard to delete the part or process.

3. Simplify or optimize.

4. Accelerate.

5. Automate.

STEP 1: Make your requirements less dumb.

🟠 Elon Musk:

The first step is to question the requirements, and make your requirements less dumb. You have to start there, because otherwise you could get the perfect answer to the wrong question. This step makes the question the least wrong possible.

Reminded me these words from Einstein:

“If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”

It shows how important it is to first think deeply about the problem before jumping to solutions, because if you’re solving the wrong question then it doesn’t matter how good your solution is or how fast you go.

And I think that’s what Jeff Bezos meant — at least partly — when he said:

“Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. Everything I have ever succeeded at in life is because of that philosophy.” [Source]

STEP 2: Try very hard to delete the part or process.

🟠 Elon Musk:

Step two: Try very hard to delete the part or process. It sounds obvious, but people often forget to try deleting something entirely.

If you’re not adding deleted things back in 10 percent of the time, you’re clearly not deleting enough. Somewhat illogically, people often feel they’ve succeeded if they are not forced to put anything back in. But actually they have failed in a different way, because they’ve been overly conservative and have left things in there that shouldn’t be.

I tell them this in advance: “Look, we’re deliberately going to delete more than we should. Some of the things we delete, we’re going to put back in. At least one in ten things, we’re going to add back in.” People get a little shook by that. But if you’re so conservative in deleting that you never have to put anything back in, you obviously have a lot of stuff that isn’t needed.

STEP 3: Simplify or optimize.

🟠 Elon Musk:

Then, once you have deleted as much as you can, the third step is to simplify or optimize.

The third step. The third step. Not the first step. Why?

Everyone was trained in high school and college to answer the question in front of them. It’s convergent logic. You can’t tell the professor, “Your question is dumb.” You have to answer the question. Without knowing it, almost everyone has this mental straightjacket on. They’ll work on optimizing a thing that should simply not exist.

Alan Kay talked about this too…

🟠 Alan Kay:

Most people are rewarded in school for solving problems…

When was the last time your child or you were rewarded for finding a problem?

“You found a new problem? We’ve got too many already!”

Whereas in fact, finding what the real problem is is the big deal…

And people fight you every step of the way, they’ll fight your kids in school every step of the way if they’re a “problem-finder” type.

Don’t let the teachers hurt them.

Most problems are bogus — because they come out of the current context. We’re trying to get beyond the current context.

So forget about “problem-solving”. It’s just a bad heuristic. It’s the last thing you do…

Source: Alan Kay, 2015: Power of Simplicity

STEP 4: Accelerate.

🟠 Elon Musk:

Then, and only then, step four: accelerate cycle time. Once you’re moving in the right direction, and moving efficiently… you’re moving too slow. Go faster. You can always make things go faster.

STEP 5: Automate.

🟠 Elon Musk:

Step five, the final step, is to automate.

Always wait until the end of designing a process—after you have questioned all the requirements and deleted unnecessary parts—before you introduce automation.

📙 I just launched my latest ebook: 14 Short Stories From The World’s Best Founders: Lessons You Don’t Have To Learn The Hard Way (click here to check it out)

It’s a collection of 14 personal stories told by some of the world’s best founders (such as Steve Jobs and Patrick Collison), and each conveys an important lesson for entrepreneurs.

check out the ebook!

This quote from Jensen Huang (founder of Nvidia) accurately captures my motivation for making this book:

Learning from mistakes, other people’s mistakes, is the best way to learn.

Why learn from your own mistakes? You know, why learn from your own embarrassment?

You got to learn from other people’s embarrassment. That’s why we have case studies, and isn’t that right?

We’re trying to read from other people’s disasters, other people’s tragedies. Nothing makes us happier than that.

- Jensen Huang [Source: A conversation with NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang]

💥 Stuff I Loved

👉 Highlight resurfaced using Readwise (click here to check it out)

I hope you enjoyed today’s letter!

Talk you soon,

Your nuggets friend Julio :)

It was back in 2022 when I first heard of Blinkist and became interested in book summary apps.

And, after days of research and comparing with the other two popular players in the book summary space: Headway and Shortform, I ended up going with Shortform — because I found their summaries to be more in-depth.

Buuut. It’s now 2026. So, I think it is time for me to make a new research and find out if Blinkist is really worth it, and more specifically if it’s actually the best book summary app on the market. And this time I’m gonna document all my research here! So if you are in a similar situation like me, I guarantee this will save you a ton of research time.

Before the Research

It’s a shame they don’t have a free trial (or even a monthly subscription). So I had to “commit” (at least financially) for a whole year in order to try the app and make the research.

(Note: Alternative apps such as Headway or Shortform are more flexible in their pricing: Headway starts with a monthly subscription, and Shortform offers a 5-day free trial on their monthly and annual subscriptions.)

Below is my full 5-day research — organized by day:

1. Research Day #1: Book Summaries

2. Research Day #2: Beyond Book Summaries

3. Research Day #3: User Interface

4. Research Day #4: Price

5. Research Day #5: Best Blinkist Alternatives

And at the end, I share my conclusion on whether Blinkist is worth it in 2026, and if it’s truly the best book summary app on the market.

1. Research Day #1: Book Summaries

Blinkist summaries are called “blinks”, and after reading a few blinks it’s clear to me they are super high quality, easy to understand, and well structured. Plus, with a library of over 7,000 summaries, you’ll likely never run out of interesting reads!

To illustrate my research, I’ll take the self-improvement bestseller (and a book I personally loved reading) The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, written by Mark Manson.

A summary is structured in chapters. The first chapter is always an introduction, the next chapters are the “Key Ideas”, and the last chapter is a “Final Summary” (sort of a short conclusion).

In their summary of the book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, they have 10 chapters and 8 “key ideas.”

1.1 Downloads

You can also download any summary. And these are automatically saved in the “Downloads” section…

This is a feature I truly appreciate because I frequently lose internet on my routinely commutes, and I can’t think of something worse than staring at the phone for minutes waiting for the content to load 😂.

1.2 Highlights

Another useful feature is that you can create highlights on the summaries, which are then automatically tagged (to the book summary where it belongs) and saved in your Highlights Library.

This feature has an important glitch though… When you make a highlight, it is saved but it misses a few letters at the start and it adds letters (which weren’t part of the highlight) at the end.

Personally, this makes the highlights tool unusable to me — because I can’t clearly read what it says… And by the way, this glitch was also present when I tried the app in previous years, so I don’t think they’ll solve it any time soon!

If you care about making highlights, I recommend you checking out other alternatives such as Headway or Shortform — they both have a flawless highlighting tool! And Shortform even comes with note-taking and bookmarks. (I cover both apps — Headway and Shortform — in Research Day #5: Best Blinkist Alternatives).

1.3 Audio Version

All Blinkist summaries come with an audio version, and I like how it sounds. I wouldn’t say it’s amazing, but I think it is very decent.

Here’s a sample from their book summary of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, so you can also hear it for yourself…

1.4 Other Languages

Blinkist’s summaries are also available in Spanish, German, and Portuguese. I think that’s very cool if you’re learning any of these languages, or (of course) if you’re a native in any of them. Although I couldn’t find their summary of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck in Portuguese.

2. Research Day #2: Beyond Book Summaries

Beyond book summaries, Blinkist offers 6 features:

• Collections

• Guides

• Shortcasts

• Blinkist AI

• Shorts

• Live Events (& Infographics)

2.1 Collections

A Collection is a curated list of book summaries that help you improve a specific skill or learn about a particular topic.

2.2 Guides

These are like mini-courses on many different topics and areas. It’s all audio-based and it’s really cool!

2.3 Shortcasts

Playing with the word Podcasts, Blinkist created Shortcasts — podcast shows that you can only find on Blinkist. There are 16 different shortcasts, each focused on delivering key ideas within a specific area (which is also why episodes are super short — typically around 10–15 minutes).

2.4 Blinkist AI

📱 Only available on mobile

You can share any article or video with this AI tool, and it will generate a summary using AI! These summaries are then saved within the Blinkist app.

2.5 Shorts

📱 Only available on mobile

These are super short insights from their book summaries, podcast shows, and external articles. They are useful for when you have some (very) short time to kill, and also to discover new book summaries, Blinkist podcast shows, and interesting articles (these are linked at the end of the shorts). And I noticed they have three types:

• Text Shorts → These are displayed in a carousel-style format, and they link to a book summary at the end.

  

  

• Audio Shorts → These are audio clips (taken from Blinkist’s Shortcasts) with a synced transcription on-screen. And they link to the respective Shortcast source at the end. (Tip → Expand the video to watch at full size!)

• Video Shorts → It features a person explaining you an insight from a book summary or an article. (Tip → Expand the video to watch at full size!)

The feature is nice, but I don’t like that there’s a cap of 5 shorts per day. After you watch all five, the feed stops and you see this:

2.6 Live Events (& Infographics)

🖥️ Only available on desktop

I think live events are a great complement to the learning experience.

But I see two problems with this feature:

1. There is not a wide offer of events. Today is March 16th, and I see there are four events scheduled for the rest of the month — out of which I’m only interested in one…

2. It’s only offered in their “Platinum” plan (costs €239.99 or $285.85), which is 70% more expensive than the “Pro” plan (which costs €139.98 or $166.72). The only special extra that the Platinum gives you are these live events (and infographics — which are given as “pre-session reading” for the live event). Honestly, I’d rather pick a different subscription plan and save the money, and if I’m interested in an educational streaming platform I would just signed up to Skillshare or MasterClass — their catalogue of classes is much wider, and the instructors are top-notch… For instance, Aaron Sorkin teaches Screenwriting and Story-telling on MasterClass — I watched it and it’s sooo good!

For the example of the live event “Learn Like a Pro: Master Skills Faster & Better”, this is the pre-session infographic:

3. Research Day #3: User Interface

3.1 Mobile Interface

Blinkist has a stunning mobile app and it’s quite easy to use! It looks especially sexy in dark mode 🔥

3.2 Desktop Interface

Blinkist’s desktop interface is great, and it’s almost as feature-rich as the mobile app (it’s just missing Blinkist AI and Shorts).

4. Research Day #4: Price

If you were wondering whether Blinkist is free or not — or if it has a “freemium” or free version — let me tell you right away it is not free (and there’s no free version). And you have to fill out a questionnaire and enter your email in order to see the pricing… so it’s not very transparent. But I did it and finally got to the meat.

How Much Does Blinkist Cost?

Blinkist offers three Subscription Plans:

• The Premium Subscription goes for $95.27 (or €79.99) per year — equivalent to $7.94 (or €6.67). It doesn’t include Blinkist AI or live events.

• The Pro Subscription costs $166.72 (or €139.98) per year — equivalent to $13.89 (or €11.67) per month. It includes Blinkist AI but not live events.

• The Platinum Subscription goes for $285.84 (or €239.99) per year — equivalent to $23.82 (or €20) per month. It includes Blinkist AI and live events (with access to infographics).

They also gave me a 20% discount on my first payment, if I paid in less than 20 minutes.

The Blinkist Platinum paywall only shows up after you become a Premium or Pro subscriber…

As I mentioned at the beginning of this review, there’s no free trial or even a monthly subscription. So you have to (financially) commit for a whole year without first trying the app :(

In contrast, alternative apps such as Headway and Shortform are much better in this regard. Headway offers a monthly subscription (best choice to try the app), and Shortform a 5-day free trial on all their subscriptions (so you can try the app without any commitment!).

And now it’s time to actually explore these alternative apps…

5. Research Day #5: Best Blinkist Alternatives

I think a Blinkist review wouldn’t be complete if I just talked about Blinkist. Because to figure out if Blinkist is worth it or not, we need to also look at the other top alternatives in the book summary space: Headway and Shortform.

5.1 Headway

5.1.1 Headway — Book Summaries

• To illustrate my research, we’re going back to the book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. This is how the cover of the summary looks on Headway:

  

• In the Headway App, a summary consists of a list of “key points”, which are sort of the key ideas of the book. And they also have a list of “insights”, which are basically one-liners that kind of summarizes the key points themselves (exactly… the summary of the summary!).

  

  This is how the summary looks on desktop…

  

• You can download any book summary to read offline.

• You can make highlights — and then these highlights are automatically tagged (to the book summary where it belongs) and saved in your Highlights Library.

  

• You can switch between dark mode / light mode, and adjust the text size.

  

• You can also switch from English to Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, Italian, and Polish.

  

• Finally, all Headway summaries come with an audio version — and you can choose between Paul (male voice), Grace (female voice), and Orion (“bedtime” voice).

  

  This is our friend Paul:

  Now our British friend Grace:

  And finally our mystic (and extremely relaxed) buddy Orion:

  Personally, I think the audio quality is quite good!

5.1.2 Headway — Beyond Book Summaries

Beyond book summaries, the Headway App offers three services. Let’s explore each of them:

• Collections → Similar to Blinkist, Headway offers Collections — curated lists of book summaries to make you more knowledgable on a topic or help you improve a skill, typically containing 8-10 summaries.

  

  

• Growth Plans (mobile-only feature) → These are like Collections on steroids. Similar to a Collection, a Growth Plan gives you a curated list of summaries. But Growth Plans go beyond that — by also offering interactive plans to go through these summaries.

  

  An interactive plan expands on the summaries by offering quizzes, and recaps (which contains highlights and action points)…

  

• Shorts (mobile-only feature) → These are super fun introductions to the book summaries (featuring insights, interesting facts, and stories). They have text shorts and infographic shorts (similar to Instagram posts), and video shorts (similar to Instagram reels). And you swipe vertically to move through them.

  • Text Shorts → These typically feature an interesting fact or an insight from a book summary. And you can check out the book summary source at the end.

    

  • Infographic Shorts…

    

  • Video Shorts → I noticed three different styles: (1) Visual Explanations, (2) Stories (these have a Pixar vibe), and (3) Podcast style. It’s also cool that they are interactive. Here’s an example for the Visual Explanation style…

    (Tip → Expand the video to watch at full size!)

  I think the shorts feature is great for when you have some (very short) time to kill, or as a fun way to discover new book summaries (each short links to related summaries at the end).

  Beyond the book summaries, it is my favorite feature! And now, instead of swiping IG reels, I swipe these Headway Shorts… aaand IG reels 😂 (but less now!)

5.1.3 Headway — User Interface

• Mobile Interface

  The Headway App has a sleek design (especially on dark mode, but honestly… What doesn’t look better on dark mode? 😂 ), and it’s super easy to navigate!

  

• Desktop Interface

  The design is nice, but it’s not as feature-rich as the mobile app. You can’t download summaries or highlight text, and you won’t find features like Growth Plans or Shorts (they’re mobile-only). But maybe my biggest disappointment: there’s no dark mode 💔

  

5.1.4 Headway — Price

Similar to Blinkist, you have to fill out a questionnaire and enter your email before you can see the pricing.

Headway has three subscription plans:

• Monthly Subscription for $38.86 (or €32.84) per month.

• Quarterly Subscription for $70.97 (or €59.97) per quarter — equivalent to $23.66 (or €19.99) per month.

• Yearly Subscription for $153.57 (or €129.77) per year — equivalent to $12.80 (or €10.81) per month.

None of the subscription plans offer a free trial. But you get a 60% discount for being a Little Almanack reader! (If you prefer skipping the quiz, you can go directly to this page and get the same 60% off).

P.S. If the link isn’t working, it might be your VPN or ad-blocker interfering…

5.2 Shortform

As I mentioned at the beginning of this blog post, I’ve been a paid subscriber of Shortform since 2022 because I find their summaries to be extremely high-quality and in-depth.

5.2.1 Shortform — Book Summaries

• To illustrate my research, we’re (yet again) jumping back to the book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.

  

• If I had to point at only one thing that makes Shortform truly special, it would be the depth of their summaries — they’re by far the most in-depth summaries you can find! They even have a chapter-by-chapter breakdown (for classics and bestsellers) — where they summarize each chapter of the book. So I think Shortform’s content feels more like study guides than traditional book summaries — which is fantastic to grasp a deeper understanding of the ideas in the books! And if you want to read something quick, they also have a “1-Page Summary” version.

• They add clarifications, counterpoints, or just helpful notes to the summary. I think this is a great addition because it expands our perspective, and also corrects for potential biases of the book authors. It’s aligned with one of my all-time favorite quotes: “One should not read like a dog obeying its master, but like an eagle hunting its prey.” - Dee Hock (founder of Visa)

  

  This is how it looks on desktop…

  

• They have interactive exercises across the summary (very helpful to reflect on how to apply the ideas into your own life context).

  

• They let you download any summary as a PDF (so you can read without internet and keep your favorite summaries always with you!).

• You can start discussions and connect with other users…

  

• You can easily switch between dark mode and light mode, and also adjust the text format of any summary.

  

• You can make highlights and write notes on your highlights. And you can also make bookmarks — so you always know where you left off in your reading.

  

• Shortform’s summaries are also available in Spanish, German, and Portuguese…

  

• Shortform also offers audio versions for all their book summaries. Here’s a sample from their book summary of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. (recorded at 1x speed):

  (By the way, you can listen to Shortform’s summaries even when the screen is off!)

  Personally, I liked the audio quality!

5.2.2 Shortform — Beyond Book Summaries

Shortform offers a wide variety of services beyond their book summaries. Let’s explore each of them:

• Collections → Similar to Blinkist and Headway, Shortform offers Collections — curated lists of book summaries to make you more knowledgeable on a specific topic.

  

  

• Master Guides → A Master Guide is a compilation of ideas from different books to give you a comprehensive guide on a specific topic for a deeper understanding.

  

  

• Articles → Shortform creates Articles on the latest news and trends. I really like these because each article is based off many sources (like a research paper), which makes it way less biased than an article from any news outlet.

  

  

• Podcast Summaries → They offer summaries on episodes of many different Podcasts.

  

  

• Shortform AI (desktop-only feature) → It’s a browser extension that summarizes everything on the internet, from articles and emails to YouTube videos, at a click of a button. And you can even install it for free! But if you want the premium version (for unlimited summaries) you would need a Shortform subscription.

  

5.2.3 Shortform — User Interface

• Mobile Interface

  Shortform’s mobile app is beautiful and easy to navigate!

  

• Desktop Interface

  Shortform offers a great desktop interface — it’s easy to use and as feature-rich as their mobile app!

  

5.2.4 Shortform — Price

Their pricing is super transparent. You can see it directly on their website. This is different from Headway and Blinkist, which only show you the price after taking a quiz.

Plus, they offer a 5-day free trial, so you can try it without any commitment. That also contrasts with Headway (which requires at least a one-month commitment) and Blinkist (which requires at least a one-year commitment!! 😟).

So… How much does Shortform costs?

• The Monthly Subscription goes for $24 per month.

• The Yearly Subscription costs $197 per year (equivalent to $16.42 per month). But I talked to the team at Shortform and they agreed to give us a 20% off! (just click here to get the discount).

Conclusion: Is Blinkist Worth it in 2026?

Based on my 5-day research, I can say that Blinkist is a great app for learning ideas from popular non-fiction books.

But… Is it really worth it when we have other alternatives such as Headway or Shortform?

Personally, Shortform is still my favorite book summary app. Mainly because their summaries feel more like study guides: they are (by far) the most in-depth, they have chapter-by-chapter breakdowns, helpful notes, exercises, and it also comes with a note-taking feature (which is great for personal reflection). All of this is incredibly helpful for gaining a deeper understanding of the books’ ideas. Plus, authors like Mark Manson (The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck), James Clear (Atomic Habits), and Sahil Bloom (The 5 Types of Wealth) have all recommended Shortform.

Having said that, I also think Headway can be a valuable complement to the learning experience.

In my own “learning funnel” I’ve started to use Headway’s Shorts as a fun way to micro-learn (which is also nice for reducing Social Media time) and discover new books. I also use Headway’s book summaries to get a quick overview of a book’s ideas. Then, if I find a book interesting, I move to the Shortform study guide for a deeper analysis of the ideas and how to put them into practice. And finally, if I’m still hooked, I buy the book!

(Even after reading the book, I occasionally revisit the Shortform study guide to refresh the main ideas and takeaways).

I picked Headway over Blinkist because their Shorts are unlimited (Blinkist caps you at 5 per day) and I found them more interesting/fun. Also, I really enjoy Headway’s user interface — I think it has the sleekest design and it just feels fun to use it.

Here’s a complete list of all the features so you can decide which is the best app for you!

(Note: The green color represents the features of the book summaries, whereas the yellow represents the services beyond the book summaries…)

My Final Verdict…

As I mentioned earlier, Shortform is still my favorite book summary app in 2026. But I think that pairing it with Headway makes it even more powerful: Headway for micro-learning, discovery, and a quick introduction to a book’s ideas. And then Shortform for studying, practicing, and mastering the book’s ideas!

And thank you for reading my blog post :)

👋 Hey friend,

Today’s insight comes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

It’s a contrast to the prevailing idea that it’s a good thing to have some grand project or master plan in your life, where you know with precision what you’ll be doing tomorrow or a year from now. But even if this brings you comfort (since it removes uncertainty — which is a source of discomfort), it makes your life tasteless and boring.

Knowing with exact precision what you’ll be doing in the future (what Taleb calls “touristification”, since it resembles the tourist who strictly follows a travel itinerary) kills your soul. And it doesn’t even remove uncertainty in real life, it just gives you the illusion of certainty.

So let’s get into this fascinating perspective from Taleb!

👤 Doers

💡Nugget

🟠 Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

What a tourist is in relation to an adventurer, touristification is to life; it consists in converting activities, and not just travel, into the equivalent of a script like those followed by actors. We will see how touristification castrates systems and organisms that like uncertainty by sucking randomness out of them to the last drop—while providing them with the illusion of benefit. The guilty parties are the education system, planning the funding of teleological scientific research, the French baccalaureate, gym machines, etc. And the electronic calendar. But the worse touristification is the life we moderns have to lead in captivity, during our leisure hours: Friday night opera, scheduled parties, scheduled laughs. Again, golden jail. This “goal-driven” attitude hurts deeply inside my existential self.

Which brings us to the existential aspect of randomness. If you are not a washing machine or a cuckoo clock—in other words, if you are alive—something deep in your soul likes a certain measure of randomness and disorder. There is a titillating feeling associated with randomness.

👉 Book: Antifragile

This is well captured in this aphorism from Taleb’s Bed of Procrustes…

“You have a calibrated life when most of what you fear has the titillating prospect of adventure.”

When I read this idea from Taleb, it immediately came to mind something I heard from the famous novelist Lee Child — which I think is an excellent analogy to this idea of “touristification”…

🟠 Lee Child:

A lot of people assume that a book needs planning. They assume that you write out an outline or at least a hit list of plot points — some kind of a synopsis or outline or plan. And I’ve never ever done that. Because writing per se (making it with words) is not really the issue for me. [The issue] is the story that I want. And if I were to plan a story — and I’ve got friends who do huge outlines, you know, 300-page outlines. Even if I did a two-page outline with two lines per proposed chapter, then I’ve told myself the story, and I’m bored with it at that point. I want the next story. So I can’t afford to tell myself the story ahead of time. I have to just improvise it as I go along. So, it’s about starting somewhere which is defined by location and then see what happens. It really is that simple.

👉 Video: How to Write Strikingly Well — Lee Child

So Lee Child doesn’t plan his writing in advance, instead he picks a location and then the location sets the motion of the story…

🟠 Lee Child:

Do you want it to be the West of Texas where it is baking hot and arid? Do you want it to be on the Atlantic coast of Maine in April, where it’s gray and cold and misty? So, that’s how I start with the sense of place, and then it’s just constructing it around that. In a way, the place and the temperature kind of dictates the story in a way.

👉 Video: How to Write Strikingly Well — Lee Child

This is also very similar to how Stephen King writes his novels. I confess I’ve never read any of his novels, but I read his first and only non-fiction book where he talks about his process of writing…

🟠 Stephen King:

I distrust plot for two reasons: first, because our lives are largely plotless, even when you add in all our reasonable precautions and careful planning; and second, because I believe plotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren’t compatible. It’s best that I be as clear about this as I can – I want you to understand that my basic belief about the making of stories is that they pretty much make themselves. The job of the writer is to give them a place to grow (and to transcribe them, of course). If you can see things this way (or at least try to), we can work together comfortably. If, on the other hand, you decide I’m crazy, that’s fine. You won’t be the first.

…

Plot is, I think, the good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice. The story which results from it is apt to feel artificial and labored.

👉 Book - On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

So just like Lee Child and Stephen King don’t follow a plot for writing their novels, maybe we should also free ourselves from the slavery of following some grand project or masterplan in our lives. Maybe we should make our lives more open to adventure and randomness, while less predictable and boring.

🟠 Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead.

…

There exist the kind of people for whom life is some kind of project. After talking to them, you stop feeling good for a few hours; life starts tasting like food cooked without salt. I, a thrill-seeking human, have a b***t detector that seems to match my boredom detector, as if we were equipped with a naturalistic filter, dullness-aversion. Ancestral life had no homework, no boss, no civil servants, no academic grades, no conversation with the dean, no consultant with an MBA, no table of procedure, no application form, no trip to New Jersey, no grammatical stickler, no conversation with someone boring you: all life was random stimuli and nothing, good or bad, ever felt like work. Dangerous, yes, but boring, never.

👉 Book: Antifragile

📝 This is How I Take Notes on Podcasts (from my phone)…

How I take notes on Podcasts using the tool Reader/Readwise — this tool boosted my learning from podcasts/interviews, and it absolutely changed my life! If you watch the video below, you’ll understand why (I show you how I saved the previous insight from Lee Child).

(expand the video to watch at full screen)

I typically listen to podcasts on Spotify, but when I want to take notes I simply search it on YouTube (you can always find it there) and then start the process I show in the video above.

If there’s only one tool I recommend to boost your learning from podcasts/interviews, it’s this one! It’s been my favorite learning tool (by far) over the past three years I’ve been using it.

I also talked to the team at Readwise and they agreed to give a 60-day free trial (double the usual trial length) to readers of Little Almanack…

Just go to 👉 https://readwise.io/pickingnuggets-reader

💥 Stuff I Loved

I hope you enjoyed today’s letter!

Talk you soon,

Your nuggets friend Julio :)

It was back in 2022 when I first heard of the Headway App (from a post on Instagram) and became interested in book summary apps.

And, after days of research and comparing with the other two popular players in the book summary space: Shortform and Blinkist, I ended up going with Shortform — because I found their summaries to be more in-depth.

Buuut. It’s now 2026. So, I think it is time for me to make a new research and find out if the Headway App is really worth it, and more specifically if it’s actually the best book summary app on the market. And this time I’m gonna document all my research here! So if you are in a similar situation like me, I guarantee this will save you a ton of research time.

Before the Research

I signed up to the Headway App on their website and chose the monthly subscription (their shortest subscription plan) to try out the app for my research.

Below is my full 5-day research — organized by day:

1. Research Day #1: Book Summaries

2. Research Day #2: Beyond Book Summaries

3. Research Day #3: User Interface

4. Research Day #4: Price

5. Research Day #5: Best Headway App Alternatives

And at the end, I share my conclusion on whether the Headway App is worth it in 2026, and if it’s truly the best book summary app on the market.

1. Research Day #1: Book Summaries

After reading a few book summaries, it’s clear to me that the content is very high-quality. The summaries are easy to understand and I like how they’re structured. Plus, with a library of over a thousand summaries, you’ll likely never run out of interesting reads!

To illustrate my research, I will take the bestselling book (and one of my all-time favorite books) Principles, written by Ray Dalio.

In the Headway App, a summary consists of a list of “key points”, which are sort of the key ideas of the book.

And they also have a list of “insights”, which are basically one-liners that kind of summarizes the key points themselves (exactly… the summary of the summary!).

So, for the book Principles, they have a list of 9 key points (the last key point is usually a Conclusion or a list of practical tips) and 9 insights.

Now, I’ll go through the 3 main features of Headway’s book summaries:

• Downloads

• Highlights

• Remember & Repetition

1.1 Downloads

In the Headway App you can download any book summary. And this is a feature I truly appreciate because I frequently lose internet on my routinely commutes, and I can’t think of something worse than staring at the phone for minutes waiting for the content to load 😂.

1.2 Highlights

Another interesting feature is that you can highlight any text in the summaries. And these highlights are then automatically tagged (to the book summary where it belongs) and saved in your Highlights Library.

I’m personally a big fan of highlighting because it allows me to save the stuff that resonates with me, which I can then revisit in the future — with the ultimate goal that these ideas eventually become second nature to me! (I think an idea becoming second nature is the mark of ultimate learning).

1.3 Remember & Repetition

As I mentioned earlier, every book summary comes with a list of “Insights” that are sort of one-liners that summarize the book summary itself.

These insights come as a list (within the Contents tab), but they are also spread across the summary.

And the interesting thing is that these insights have a “Remember” button, and when you click on that button the insight is automatically saved to both your Repetition library and your Highlights library.

Honestly, having two libraries (Repetition and Highlights) feels a bit redundant, since they pretty much do the same job. I’d probably just stick to the Highlights library and see all my highlights and saved insights from there.

1.4 Style & Size

If you haven’t noticed by now, I’m a sucker for dark mode. But don’t worry if you prefer light mode… Below you can see the difference between both and how you can easily switch between them.

As you can see in the image, you can also adjust the text size.

1.5 Audio

The Headway App has audio versions for all the book summaries in its library.

As you can see, there are two types of voice: Jordan and Claire.

Here’s how Jordan’s voice sounds (at 1x speed)…

And this is how Claire’s voice sounds…

(By the way, you can listen to Headway’s summaries even when the screen is off!)

Personally, the audio sounded decent to me!

1.6 Other Languages

Beyond English, The Headway App offers five other languages: Spanish, German, French, Italian, and Portuguese.

These languages apply to both the User Interface and the book summaries. And after testing for each language, I found that they have a large catalog of summaries in Spanish, German, French, and Italian. However, their Portuguese catalog is much more limited — and I couldn’t find the summary of Principles in Portuguese.

I think this is a great feature if you’re learning — or thinking about learning — any of these languages, and it’s obviously useful if you’re a native speaker too.

1.7 Desktop Version

Headway is definitely a mobile-first app. As their desktop site is quite basic — it lacks features such as downloads, highlights, and “remember and repetition”, and you can’t even switch to dark mode! (if you’re as light-sensitive as I am, good luck reading at night 🫠 ).

Here’s how Headway’s summary of Principles looks on the desktop site…

Personally, I typically read book summaries on my phone, so this is not an issue for me. But if you plan to read frequently on your laptop, you might wanna check out alternative book summary apps such as Shortform or Blinkist — they both have a fully functional desktop interface. In the section Research Day #5: Headway App Alternatives we will dive deep into these alternative apps!

2. Research Day #2: Beyond Book Summaries

Beyond book summaries, the Headway App offers four services:

• Collections

• Growth Plans

• Listen (Audiocasts & Instrumental Music)

• Shorts

2.1 Collections

A Collection is a curated list of book summaries that help you improve a specific skill or learn about a particular topic, typically containing 8-10 summaries.

2.2 Growth Plans

📱 Only available on mobile

These are like Collections on steroids. Similar to a Collection, a Growth Plan gives you a curated list of 8-10 summaries to improve a specific skill. But Growth Plans go beyond that — by also offering interactive plans to go through these summaries.

An interactive plan expands on the summaries by offering quizzes, and recaps (which contains highlights and action points)…

2.3 Listen

📱 Only available on mobile

The Listen feature is basically a big audio playlist with two types of audio: (1) Audiocasts, and (2) Instrumental Music.

1. Audiocasts → An Audiocast is similar to the audio version of a book summary, but the Audiocast seems to be longer and it sounds a bit more conversational-style. Below you can see the Audiocast of the book Principles…

   

   And here’s how it sounds…

2. Instrumental Music → These audios are designed to help you relax, sleep, or focus. They play continuously — there’s no fixed duration — but you can set a specific duration using the “sleep timer” feature…

   

   For the example “Gentle Dreamscape”, this is how it sounds:

(Update — 29th March 2026: Headway changed the location of Audiocasts & Instrumental Music — they are now in the Home tab)

2.4 Shorts

📱 Only available on mobile

This is the newest feature from Headway. Shorts are super fun introductions to the book summaries. They have text shorts and infographic shorts (similar to Instagram posts), and video shorts (similar to Instagram reels). And you swipe vertically to move through them.

• Each Text Short is displayed in a carousel-style format, so you swipe horizontally to move through any specific text short…

  

  

• Infographic Shorts are also displayed in a carousel-style format…

  

• In the case of Video Shorts, I noticed three different styles: (1) Visual Explanations, (2) Stories (these have a Pixar vibe), and (3) Podcast style. It’s also cool that they are interactive. Here’s an example for the Visual Explanation style…

  (Tip → Expand the video to watch at full size!)

I think the shorts feature is great for when you have some (very short) time to kill, or as a fun way to discover new book summaries (each short links to related summaries at the end).

Beyond the book summaries, it is my favorite feature! And now, instead of swiping IG reels, I swipe these Headway Shorts… aaand IG reels 😂 (but less now!)

3. Research Day #3: User Interface

3.1 Mobile Interface

The Headway App has a sleek design (especially on dark mode, but honestly… What doesn’t look better on dark mode? 😂 ), and it’s super easy to navigate!

3.2 Desktop Interface

The design is nice, but it’s not as feature-rich as the mobile app. You can’t download summaries or highlight text, and you won’t find features like Growth Plans, Listen, or Shorts (they’re mobile-only). But maybe my biggest disappointment: there’s no dark mode 💔

4. Research Day #4: Price

It was annoying that I had to fill out a quiz and enter my email in order to see their pricing. But I did just that and finally got to the meat.

How Much Does The Headway App Cost?

• Monthly Subscription for $38.86 (or €32.84) per month.

• Quarterly Subscription for $70.97 (or €59.97) per quarter — equivalent to $23.66 (or €19.99) per month.

• Yearly Subscription for $153.57 (or €129.77) per year — equivalent to $12.80 (or €10.81) per month.

None of the subscription plans offer a free trial. But they are always running time-limited discounts on their website.

5. Research Day #5: Best Headway App Alternatives

I think a Headway review wouldn’t be complete if I just talked about Headway. Because to figure out if the Headway App is worth it or not, we need to also look at the other top alternatives in the book summary space: Shortform and Blinkist.

5.1 Shortform

As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, I’ve been a Shortform subscriber since 2022. And I really love the app!

Here’s my research on Shortform…

5.1.1 Shortform — Book Summaries

I think what makes Shortform truly special is their summaries…

• They offer the most in-depth summaries. And for the classics or bestsellers (such as Principles), they even have a chapter-by-chapter breakdown — where they summarize each chapter of the book. So I think Shortform’s content feels more like study guides than traditional book summaries — which is fantastic to grasp a deeper understanding of the ideas in the books! And if you want to read something quick, they also have a “1-Page Summary” version.

• They add clarifications, counterpoints, or just helpful notes to the summary. I think this is a great addition because it expands our perspective, and also corrects for potential biases of the book authors. It’s aligned with one of my all-time favorite quotes: “One should not read like a dog obeying its master, but like an eagle hunting its prey.” - Dee Hock (founder of Visa)

  

  This is how the summary looks on desktop…

  

• They have exercises across the summary (very helpful to reflect on how to apply the ideas into your own life context).

• They let you download any summary as a PDF (so you can read without internet).

• You can easily switch between dark mode and light mode, and also adjust the text format of any summary.

  

• You can make highlights and write notes on your highlights. And you can also make bookmarks — so you always know where you left off in your reading.

  

• Shortform’s summaries are also available in Spanish, German, and Portuguese…

  

Shortform also offers audio versions for all their book summaries…

Here’s a sample from their book summary of Principles (recorded at 1x speed):

(By the way, you can listen to Shortform’s summaries even when the screen is off!)

Personally, I liked the audio quality!

5.1.2 Shortform — Beyond Book Summaries

Shortform offers a wide variety of services beyond their book summaries.

Let’s explore each of them:

• Collections → Similar to Headway, Shortform offers Collections — curated lists of book summaries that help you improve at a particular skill, or make you more knowledgable on a topic.

  

  

• Master Guides → These are compilations of ideas from different books to give you a comprehensive guide (with differing viewpoints) on a single subject for a deeper understanding.

  

  

• Articles → Shortform creates Articles on the latest news and trends. I really like these because each article is based off many sources (like a research paper), which makes it way less biased than an article from any news outlet.

  

  

• Podcast Summaries → They offer summaries on episodes of many different Podcasts.

  

  

• Shortform AI (desktop-only feature) → It’s a browser extension that summarizes everything on the internet, from articles and emails to YouTube videos, at a click of a button. And you can even install it for free! But if you want the premium version (for unlimited summaries) you would need a Shortform subscription.

  

5.1.3 Shortform — User Interface

• Mobile Interface

  Shortform’s mobile app is beautiful and easy to use!

  

• Desktop Interface

  Shortform offers a great desktop interface. It’s as feature-rich as their mobile app, and it’s very easy to navigate!

  

5.1.4 Shortform — Price

It was nice that they have a direct price page on their website.

Shortform offers two Subscription Plans:

• The Monthly Subscription goes for $24 per month.

• The Yearly Subscription costs $197 per year (equivalent to $16.42 per month).

Both of these plans offer a 5-day free trial!

5.2 Blinkist

Blinkist is another great alternative! Sadly they don’t have a free trial (or even a monthly subscription), so I had to pay right away for a yearly plan to get access.

Here’s my research on Blinkist…

5.2.1 Blinkist — Book Summaries

• Blinkist summaries, which they call “blinks”, are structured in Chapters. The first chapter is always an introduction, the following chapters are what they call “key ideas”, and the last chapter is a “Final Summary”. In their summary of Principles, they have 8 chapters and 6 “key ideas”…

  

  

• Blinkist lets you download their summaries inside the app.

• You can make highlights, although it’s not possible to write notes or make bookmarks :(

  

  (Note: There’s a glitch with the highlighting feature… When the highlight is saved, it misses the first letter. That makes it hard to read. This glitch was also present when I tried the app in previous years, so I don’t think they are solving it any time soon.)

• You can also change the language to German, Spanish, and Portuguese… (although I couldn’t find the summary of Principles in Portuguese).

  

Blinkist also has audio versions for all their book summaries, and honestly they sound really good!

Here’s a sample from their book summary of Principles (recorded at 1x speed):

(By the way, you can listen to Blinkist’s summaries even when the screen is off!)

Personally, I think Blinkist’s audio sounds the most natural and I liked it more than the audio versions of Shortform and Headway (at least for the summary of Principles).

5.2.2 Blinkist — Beyond Book Summaries

Just like Shortform and Headway, Blinkist offers much more than just book summaries. They have many extra services, and all of them are available on both the mobile app and the desktop version (except their Live Events — which is only offered in desktop).

Let’s explore each of these services…

• Collections → Similar to Shortform and Headway, Blinkist also offers curated lists of book summaries.

  

  

• Guides → Blinkist offers Guides to help you improve at a particular skill. It’s all audio-based and honestly… it’s really cool!

  

  

• Shortcasts → Playing with the word Podcasts, Blinkist created Shortcasts — podcast shows exclusive to Blinkist. There are 16 different shortcasts, each focused on delivering key ideas within a specific area (which is also why episodes are super short — typically around 10–15 minutes).

  

  

• Blinkist AI (mobile-only feature) → You can share any article or video with this AI tool, and it will generate a summary using AI! These summaries are then saved within the Blinkist app.

  

• Shorts (mobile-only feature) → Like Headway, Blinkist also has Shorts. I noticed 3 types of shorts:

  1. Text shorts → These are very similar to Headway’s text shorts, and they link to a book summary at the end.

     

     

  2. Audio shorts → These are audio clips (taken from Blinkist’s Shortcasts) with a synced transcription on-screen. And they link to the respective Shortcast source at the end. (Tip → Expand the video to watch at full size!)

  3. Video shorts → It features a person explaining you an insight from a book summary or an external article. At the end of the short, you can check out the respective book summary or article. (Tip → Expand the video to watch at full size!)

     The feature is nice, but I found a major limitation: You only get five shorts per day. After you watch all five, the feed stops and you see this:

     

     This is different from Headway’s Shorts, which doesn’t cap how many you can watch in a day.

• Live Events (desktop-only feature) → This is Blinkist’s newest feature, and I think it’s a useful add-on to complement the learning experience.

  

  But I see two big issues with this feature:

  1. There is not a wide offer of events. I literally just saw 5 events available for this whole month! — out of which I’m only mildly interested in two of them.

  2. It’s only offered in their “Platinum” plan (costs €239.99 or $285.85), which is 70% more expensive than the “Pro” plan (which costs €139.98 or $166.72). The only special extra that the Platinum gives you are these live events (and infographics — which are given as “pre-session reading” for the live event). Honestly, I’d much rather pick a different subscription plan and save me the cost, and if I’m interested in an educational streaming platform I would just signed up to Skillshare or MasterClass — their catalogue of classes is much wider, and the instructors are top-notch… For instance, Aaron Sorkin teaches Screenwriting and Story-telling on MasterClass — I watched it and it’s sooo good!

5.2.3 Blinkist — User Interface

• Mobile Interface

  Blinkist has a stunning mobile app and it’s quite easy to use!

  

• Desktop Interface

  Blinkist’s desktop interface is great, and it’s almost as feature-rich as the mobile app (it’s just missing Blinkist AI and Shorts).

  

5.2.4 Blinkist — Price

Similar to Headway, you first have to fill out a questionnaire and enter your email in order to see their pricing. Again… pretty annoying!

So I did just that and got to their pricing…

Blinkist offers three Subscription Plans:

• The Premium Subscription goes for $95.27 (or €79.99) per year — equivalent to $7.94 (or €6.67). It doesn’t include Blinkist AI or live events.

• The Pro Subscription costs $166.72 (or €139.98) per year — equivalent to $13.89 (or €11.67) per month. It includes Blinkist AI but not live events.

• The Platinum Subscription goes for $285.84 (or €239.99) per year — equivalent to $23.82 (or €20) per month. It includes Blinkist AI and live events (with access to infographics).

They also gave me a 20% discount on my first payment, if I paid in less than 20 mins.

They used to offer a 7-day free trial, but as of March 2026 they have removed it :(

The Blinkist Platinum paywall only shows up after you become a Premium or Pro subscriber…

Conclusion: Is The Headway App Worth it in 2026?

Based on my 5-day research, I can say that the Headway App is great for learning key ideas from popular non-fiction books.

But… Is it really worth it when we have other alternatives such as Shortform or Blinkist?

Personally, Shortform is still my favorite book summary app. Mainly because their summaries are more like study guides: they are the most in-depth, they have chapter-by-chapter breakdowns, helpful notes, exercises, and it also comes with a note-taking feature (which is great for personal reflection). All of this is incredibly helpful for gaining a deeper understanding of the books’ ideas. Plus, authors like Mark Manson (The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck), James Clear (Atomic Habits), and Sahil Bloom (The 5 Types of Wealth) have all recommended Shortform.

Having said that, I also think Headway can be a valuable complement to the learning experience.

In my own “learning funnel” I’ve started to use Headway’s Shorts as a fun way to micro-learn (which is also nice for reducing Social Media time) and discover new books. I’m also using Headway’s book summaries to get a quick overview of a book’s ideas. Then, if I find a book interesting, I move to the Shortform study guide for a deeper analysis of the ideas and how to put them into practice. And finally, if I’m still hooked, I buy the book!

(Even after reading the book, I occasionally revisit the Shortform study guide to refresh the main ideas and takeaways).

I picked Headway over Blinkist because their Shorts are unlimited (Blinkist caps you at 5 per day) and I found them much more interesting/fun. Plus, I really enjoy Headway’s user interface — I think it has the sleekest design and it just feels fun to use it.

Here’s a complete list of all the features so you can decide which is the best app for you!