Monthly Archives: December 2019

Book Report: The Conscious Parent

Reading Time: 2 minutes

This is meant to be more of a book report, than a review.  In particular, I want to highlight three lessons from the book, The Conscious Parent by Shefali Tsabary, that I found impactful.

This is a book that Mrs. SFTE read and highly recommended.  As with most books that require a bit of work, I struggled through it a little bit.  It was more me than the book. However, I found the book to have some concepts worth thinking about and that are really relevant across many situations – not just parenting.

The theme that I appreciated the most is that despite being a little unconventional and promoting concepts such as spirituality, mindfulness, and meditation, etc., the book is most certainly not suggesting that life should be all roses and rainbows.  In fact, a main message within the book is the life is not alway going to be pleasant and a parent must help a child understand that there will be frustrations, boredom, and the just plain “ordinary.” I found this theme welcome in a world full of millenial attitudes and expectations.

  1. Changing Your Behavior – “Matching our emotional energy to that of our children is far more effective than asking them to match their energy to ours.”  Be the grown up in the relationship. Parenting is as much about modifying your behavior to meet the situation as it is modifying your child’s behavior to what you think it should be.
  2. Focus on the Process as Much as the Outcome – This is a sentiment that crosses many disciplines.  And there’s good reason. “When we focus on the achievement of a goal instead of the learning process, our children miss many opportunities to develop their self-esteem.  Rather than telling them, ‘Good job. Here is your gift,’ it’s important to highlight their character development, sharing with them how proud we are that they showed patience, determination, and bravery. … In this way our children discover the joy in learning, quite apart from reaching a destination.”
  3. Allow Your Child to Just Be – In order to allow your child to develop, grow, and flourish, sometimes you need to step back and let them be who they are and figure things out for themselves.  “We are so heavily invested in our children, determined that they not mess up but become a success, that in our desire to be “good” parents, we find it difficult to just be with our children in their as is state, allowing whatever is happening to exist.”

In summary, a good book that certainly inspired some self-reflection.

Influential Reads – November 2019

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Good production in November on both fronts.

Updated stats through November:

Here are my most influential reads – in no particular order:

  1. Tech’s Pioneers Have Been Left Behind. Their Stocks Are Cheap—and Complicated – “Legacy tech has stopped growing, and there are no easy fixes”.
  2. Bernstein Says Stop When You Win The Game – “When you’ve won the game, why keep playing it?”.
  3. Time Machines & Species Failure – “These firms pulled a Robin Hood on the greatest thieves of time in post-WWII America — ad-supported media”.
  4. First Principles: The Building Blocks of True Knowledge – “We’re all somewhere on the spectrum between coach and play stealer. We reason by first principles, by analogy, or a blend of the two.”
  5. From Chaos to Concept – “Life hacks make for good 90 second viral Internet videos but the minutiae will never help you get ahead in life.”
  6. Reflexivity Here In The Yield Curve & Everywhere – “In practice, momentum strategies buy winners and sells losers. Thus, it can create a self-reinforcing loop. … In fact, the same can be said for market-cap-weighted passive investment strategies.”
  7. What’s your big domino? – “we confuse effectiveness over efficiency; and we schedule more meetings to avoid making important decisions.”
  8. Millennials Should Be Happy They Are Stuck Renting – “Most of the rise in single-family house prices over time is due to larger new structures with more marble bathrooms, fancier kitchens, etc. “
  9. How to Prepare Yourself to Be a Great CEO – “The best way to do this is to join the management team of the best start-up that will have you.”
  10. The Obvious Way to Improve Your Career – “Knowing how to draw a detailed and accurate map of your career is the first step. The second is knowing how to navigate it. How to cultivate the skills, assets and signals that will move you forward in the direction you want to proceed.”

Note: This is based on when I read the article, not necessarily when it was first published.  Unfortunately, my backlog of things I would like to read always seems to dwarf the amount of time I can devote to reading.