Entropy, Compound and Game Theory

20210818 - Preface to the First Edition xxvii This book is against most of the other books: our destiny is decided by peer/environment and gene, instead of parenting and education and habit? What's the relationship between gene, environment and habit? Is it possible to push some child who don't like reading to read everyday? 20210819 - Chapter 1. "Nurture" Is Not the Same as "Environment" 1 Nurture is important, but not as important as we thought. Children are not under their parents' control. There are too many thing that children cannot do following their parents, and there are too many words only the parents can say. Instead, the restriction is much less if children want to copy their peers' behavior or speaking. Nurture is a small part of environment. Parents' effect on children could be split into two categories. One is actually depends on children's effect on parents. We may not be able of doing on that, but the other categories is not ...

20210809 - 1. Introduction Distance = Time * Effort Anything we want to achieve, it needs time and effort. Effort always has compound effect, good or bad. "The Power of Now" says, it's all about attention. Attention means effort. When we stop paying attention, we actually suspended our mind, and let the time flow away. That's a bad habit to most of people. I need some good habit to replace it. Darren Hardy said that himself was the living proof of the Compound Effect. This is obvious survival bias. Al achievers believe something, doesn't mean that something is true to all the others. Gene takes huge effect, not just the Compound Effect. Many people get used to the habit that they reject to learn. 20210810 - 2. The Compound Effect in action Why people don't pay enough attention to Compound Effect? Because it's hard to notice it in the first 90% of time. Put $1000 into SP500 Index Fund every year (10% growth per year). For the first 25 years, it's only $...

20210728 - Introduction to the 10th Anniversary Edition xv As a whole, any activity such as buy or sell stock doesn't bring in benefit to our portfolio. On the contrary, we lose money because we need to pay trading fee. All financial advisors just pretend to do something, so they can charge us fees. So, the whole Wall Street are bringing negative effect to economy through trading stocks. The profit from stock market actually means the growth of economy. If we don't need to pay the relative trading fees, then we can take the fair share of it. 20210728 - Chapter 1 A Parable 1 As a whole, "helpers" only reduce the total return. Short term trading is like gambling. The market is so complicated, that no one really know it all the time. Sooner or later, their performance will follow the average return of market. But, because they charge fees for management and trading, the investors get less than the average return of market. Around 10% to 30% less. Trading will also cause ...

20210613 - Why are people? Natural selection has at least three levels: gene, individual, group. Sometimes selfish is critical, sometimes  altruistic let the individual or group survive.  Normally I only notice the competence among individuals and groups, but this book implies that the competence among genes decide everything. 20210614 - The replicators The environment of early stage on earth is cruel. What we did is just guessing based on the theory of current age. We have to say that it is possible that all lives came from the same ancestor. After around 3 billion years of random changes and natural selection, it finally went into multi-cell form. 20210620 - Immortal coils What is gene? It's a biological pattern. This "pattern" can replicate itself, and build better survival machines. We can find this pattern in our chromosomes and cistron. Every creature has a huge gene pool. Only a small part of the genes in the pool take effects. Natural selection decides which group...

We heard the news that El Salvador choose BitCoin as their fiat currency. Unfortunately this is going to fail, because BitCoin transaction is too slow and too expensive. DogeCoin version 1.21 is going to drastically reduce the transaction time and cost soon. That's exciting. Two obvious questions here. 1. Why other crypto coins don't do the same improvement? Because DogeCoin is going to sacrifice one core principle a bit: decentralized structure. This is unforgivable SIN to most of the Blockchain experts, but I like the idea. Of course decentralized structure is still there, but if my understanding is correct, there will be less major nodes on the chain network. Then it will be much eaiser for governments to monitor the DogeCoin transactions. Is this good? Absolutely, in my opinion, because, countries like El Salvador can use it! All shops and people can use it! At the moment, DogeCoin can handle around 40 transactions per second (thanks for LiteCoin and Scrypt), and the transa...

20210607 - Chapter 1 to 7 It's hard to be a good sales man. I guess, apart from grit and optimism, sales man needs to be sensitive and kind. They also need to know a lot about psychology. 20210608 - Chapter 8, The Scroll Marked 1 (How to learn) What is habit? To some extent, it's the pattern of instinct reaction to events, time, etc. With good habit, we can grow effortlessly all the time. This growth will come with compound effect which leads to huge difference to the result. When we memorize some principles again and again, we engraved it into our "instinct reaction". What's failure? Cannot reach the life target in the end. Obviously if there is no "life target", then we would fail for sure. Everyday is a start point. We can choose to go forward, or stay where we are, or go backwards. 20210608 - Chapter 9, The Scroll Marked 2 (Optimistic attitude) Say "I love you" in mind to everyone, especially to strangers. This feels strange, but good idea!...

Part I: What grit is and why it matters 20210505 - Showing up Our potential is decided by gene (IQ etc.), how much of it will be realized is decided by our grit. Which one is more important? Maybe this is a wrong question. Our IQ is (possibly) fixed, so the only thing we can do is to be grit. Then how about curiosity? What's the relationship of curiosity and IQ? 20210508 - Distracted by talent "We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources." - William James. (p22) How to win Nobel Prize? My answer is: 1. The IQ needs to be above 120; 2. Keep the question in mind all the time, and work hard on it for at least 20 years; 3. Luck. How to get rich? My answer is: 1. The IQ needs to be above 90; 2. Keep the desire in mind all the time, and work hard on it for many years; 3. A little bit of luck. Talent is important, but it's not necessary to succeed in life, and it's not necessary to have happy life.  Society/schools/companies/frien...