Feineigle.com

2024-07-12

Tags: Business

A short, entertaining, and easy read that can be finished in only a few hours while still drinking in all of its advice. Each chapter tells a story where there is a takeaway lesson in financial literacy. The stories are set millennia ago in and around a prospering Babylon, but the lessons are as at home in the modern (then 1926, now 2024) setting. The lessons are explicitly stated and often restated (spend less than you earn!) so they leave little to interpretation. The stories themselves are very entertaining and told in mostly dialog format.

Atomic Habits

2024-07-08

Tags: Habits

Habit building (or destruction) is framed in a modified stimulus/response theory as promoted by the likes of Watson and Skinner that is (1) cue, (2) craving, (3) response, and (4) reward. Trying to exercise self-control, while useful, is not a winning strategy compared to modifying your environment to include less temptation (cues) in the first place. The reward following the habit (later explained to be fix or variable interval) is not actually what motivates the behavior; it is the anticipation of the reward that moves us to action. If you want to build a certain type of habit, it is very effective to surround yourself with people that are part of that habit's culture. An extreme example of this is given where a pair of Hungarian parents trained their three daughters to be chess masters by immersing them in the habit of practicing and playing chess.

100 Million Dollar Leads

2024-07-01

Tags: Business

Overall the book focus on getting leads through various methods including warm and cold outreach, free content, and paid adds. These methods can be leveraged through customers' word of mouth, employees, agencies (tread carefully, treat this as education), and affiliates. All of these methods, channels, and tactics can be applied both to aquiring customers as well as finding employees. These employees can be then used to find both more customers or more employees as a way to scale up and "build your team". The main takeaways for me were that you should take care to not stop too soon when advertising, aim for a 3:1 return on your ads so that your ads are profitable, and if you find a better return you should ramp it to the moon until it breaks.

100 Million Dollar Offers

2024-06-20

Tags: Business

All in all it was an easy read and mostly clear with actionable advice. The first few chapters are a little rough around the edges and some of the pricing concepts are not really fleshed out and certainly not explained as well as the rest of the book. After you get past the weak pricing chapter, the other chapters are typically presented with step-by-step reasoning on how and why you would want to structure your offer one way or another. The last section on enhancing the offer you've built (by following along) is the longest and ends with a number of ways to take your offer to the next level by customizing them with scarcity, urgency, bonuses, and guarantees. The last part of the final section on naming was particularly interesting; in particular I found the section on national vs local marketing and the pros and cons of each enlightening.

Million Dollar Weekend

2024-06-13

Tags: Business

A lot of stories and inspirational filler in my opinion; that doesn't mean it is bad, but it might not be for everyone. It also assumes that you don't necessarily even have an idea for a business. There are plenty of useful tips and advice like: get started NOW, follow up and be a squeaky wheel, stick with it for 100 reps (whatever it is), and start building an e-mail list before basically anything else. The pacing and stories are at least interesting and entertaining, but I was hoping for more concrete advice (though there is still some useful information). Overall I wouldn't suggest this if you have some idea of what you want to do and have even taken a few steps (or started and failed a few businesses), but I would suggest this to someone that has never even explored starting a business.

The Millionaire Fastlane

2024-06-08

Tags: Business

The book starts out with a dissection of the roads people follow through life: the paycheck-to-paycheck sidewalk, the IRA/401K get rich slow land, and the build an asset/business fast lane (that shouldn't be confused with easy, it is not). Next it touches on consumerism and how it will keep you forever poor, chasing that next purchase that you think will bring you happiness (it won't) and how you need to learn both financial literacy (more money won't solve this problem) and how to shift from the consumer mindset to the producer mindset. Once you make that shift, you can start to disconnect the idea that you trade your time from money. Your time is far more valuable than money (you can always get more money, you can never get more time) and that the best way to reach financial freedom is by growing a 'money tree' (a business that can run on autopilot or be sold as an asset). A few final tips include: never stop learning, how to use a decision matrix when you aren't sure what to do, and that instead of trying to make money you should focus on providing value.

Game AI Pro 1

2024-03-13

Tags: Ai · Game · Programming

The first few chapters of the book talks about the human body and how neurology and signals within your body for things like reflexes are analogous to AI processes. Then the rest of the book jumps around and covers a lot of ground but never goes into the nitty-gritty details of any of the topics. This is fine and the book was a great primer on what kinds of AI is available and what the strengths, weakness, or use-cases for the different varieties of AI you might use in games. Some of the information might be a little dated - they talk about the advanced GPUs having hundreds of pipes - but the core concepts are perfectly applicable today (10 years after publication). If you are interested in general game AI and want to get a feel for the options available, then this is probably a pretty good place to start; if you are interested in a particular type of AI, there are probably better options.

Game Balance

2024-01-27

Tags: Games · Math

A long, detailed, and in depth look at every (?) facet of game balance; a one-stop-shop for all your game balance needs! The first half of the book talks about different ways a game can be/feel balance/unbalanced and how each different genre has its own balance requirements. The second half of the book offers up concrete advice on how to actually test and implement balance from a mostly mathematical perspective. At the end of the book there is a good overview of some of the more powerful spreadsheet capabilities that can assist in balancing your game. Overall, this is a great read for anyone wanting to know more about game balance (surprising I know) in general (the first half) and how to crank the numbers to make it happen (the second half).

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