Book Summaries

_The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine _takes us inside the madness, corruption, and greed at the heart of the 2007-2008 financial crisis. It tells the story of an eccentric collection of investors who saw the folly of the subprime mortgage-backed securities market—and found a way to bet against it. By focusing on individuals who saw these worthless securities for what they truly were, _The Big Short _explores the complexities and irrationalities of modern capitalism and forces us to seriously question the wisdom (and motivations) of the financial elites who wield so much power over our economy, society, and politics.

Do you want to make your life better? Are you struggling in your personal or professional life, your interactions with other people, your life balance, or your life’s purpose?

_The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People_ provides an inside-out approach to improving yourself and your life. This method entails with examining and adjusting your character, your motives, and how you see the world in order to change how you behave and how you interact with others. Learn how to best focus your time, define your personal mission, and build productive relationships with other people.

Maintaining emotional love and connection in a relationship can be hard. Often, the problem is in the way you are communicating love to your partner, and vice versa. Have you ever demonstrated a gesture of affection, only to not have it appreciated? Does your partner ever say they don’t feel loved enough?

These conflicts happen because every person receives and experiences love differently. **The way you experience love dictates your love language**. There are 5 love languages: Word of Affirmation, Quality Time, Receiving Gifts, Acts of Service, and Physical Touch. Learning to speak your partner’s love language can help you understand how to make them feel loved. And learning your own love language helps you understand what makes you fulfilled in a relationship.

_Talking to Strangers_ is a book about the impossibility of truly understanding a stranger. By breaking down some of the most famous events in recent human history, best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell shows us the strategies we often use when dealing with people we don’t know—and how deeply flawed those strategies are.

In this book, you’ll learn:
* How Hitler fooled so many prominent world leaders
* Why the financial industry failed to stop Bernie Madoff for so long
* What really happened to Sandra Bland

_SPIN Selling_ by professor and consultant Neil Rackham is a practical how-to guide for making big sales. First published over 30 years ago, the book has become a sales classic. Based on pioneering research, Rackham’s sales method of questioning customers about their needs challenged 60 years of traditional sales training in hard-sell techniques. SPIN selling—asking a series of questions about the Situation, Problem, Implication, and Need-Payoff—has proven to be a durable, effective process any sales rep can learn in order to boost sales success.

A third to a half of Americans are introverts, according to author Susan Cain, but they’re often marginalized. In _Quiet_, Cain contends that Western society is designed around an “extrovert ideal” that celebrates those who are bold and charismatic. However, unbridled extroversion can lead to disasters, such as the fall of Enron and the 2008 financial crisis.

By overvaluing extroverts and treating introverts as misfits, society loses out on introverts’ unique strengths—for instance, they’re highly creative, astute observers, and adept at solving complex problems. Cain argues for a balance in society, school, and work that lets introverts be true to themselves and where the two personality types complement each other.

_Peak_ explores how peak performers in music, athletics, and other fields develop their abilities. Through purposeful practice and the development of effective mental representations, nearly _anyone _can become an expert in whatever field they choose. The book shatters many illusions about expertise—chiefly, that it comes from genius or “natural” talent. Instead, it comes from rigorous practice and a willingness to improve slowly over time through a series of baby steps. By embracing these principles, you can become whatever it is you wish to be. Your future is entirely in your hands.

Every day we’re constantly faced with choices—what to order at a restaurant, what clothes to buy at a store, what show to stream when we get home from work. We’re so used to making choices that we’re not even aware of _the way those choices are presented_. If grocery stores didn’t stock candy at the register, would we eat less of it? If we had to “opt out” of being organ donors rather than “opt in,” would the organ donor pool grow?

In _Nudge_, Nobel Prize–winning economist Richard Thaler and renowned legal scholar Cass Sunstein examine how certain choice structures—“architectures,” in their terms—can “nudge” us toward better decisions. You’ll learn how flesh-and-blood humans differ from the humans studied in economics, why people are so bad at saving, and how to revitalize the institution of marriage (hint: abolish it).

_Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game _is the story of the 2002 Oakland Athletics and their general manager, Billy Beane. Beane assembles a winning team on a shoestring budget, by using an analytical and scientific approach to evaluate each player’s contributions. Although the A’s have many players with atypical physical attributes and unusual hitting or pitching styles, they excel in overlooked statistical categories, like on-base percentage, that were typically dismissed by baseball traditionalists. This enables Beane to get maximum efficiency from his team, earning wins at a fraction of the price paid by the rest of the league.

_Minimalism_ offers a formula for how to live a meaningful life by first getting rid of clutter (like excess stuff and debt) and then focusing on five key areas: your health, relationships, passions, growth, and contributing to others.

The authors Millburn and Nicodemus achieved the American dream of corporate success and conspicuous consumption, but it left them unhappy, exhausted, and deeply in debt. They quit their jobs, re-examined their lives, and started the popular website TheMinimalists.com. In this book, they explain how anyone can follow their path of self-examination and how to make small daily changes to achieve a clutter-free, debt-free, and fulfilling life.