Heavy Book Club Invitation

Back in January of 2015, I started a book club with a few friends & colleagues.

The original idea for this book club came from the fact that…

When I looked at the type of books I was reading between 2002 - 2013 (From the moment I discovered Rich Dad, Poor Dad until quite a few years into my freelance copywriting career)… I discovered what I was reading a lot of were really easy-to-digest how-to, 7-steps-to, inspirational-type books.

I wasn’t really challenging myself, nor expanding my mind, nor going IN DEPTH.

That was the most important thing.

A lot of these “candy-coated” books were just surface. Here’s a strategy to do X. Here’s a few tips to do Y. Here’s a mindset to do Z.

And what’s been really bugging me was the fact that there was a huge stack of books on my shelves that I keep meaning to read but I never got around to because I was intimidated by them. They were either dense, difficult, scary or all three.

And the recurring pattern I noticed in these books was that… They were all practical “hard” stuff like economics, history, politics, science or “sublime” wisdom stuff like literary classics, spirituality, biographies etc.

So I talked to a few friends about it and I was fortunate to find out a few of them felt the same way.

They wanted to read books with more depth and were willing to commit to it.

So since January 2015, we’ve knocked these off our list at a rate of one every 3-4 weeks:

• The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder
• Economics in One Lesson - Henry Hayzlitt
• The True Believer - Eric Hoffer
• Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• Competition Demystified - Bruce Greenwald
• Thinking, Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman
• Surely, You’re Joking Mr. Feynman - Richard P. Feynman
• The Art of Learning - Joshua Waitzkin
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert M. Pirsig
• The Cold War - John Gaddis
• The Age of Spiritual Machines - Ray Kurzweil
• The Three Rules - Mumtaz Ahmed
• When Things Fall Apart - Pema Chodron
• The Audacity to Win - David Plouffe
• The Power of Now - Eckhart Tolle
• Dying Every Day - James Romm
• The Punic Wars - Adrian Goldsworthy
• A Path Appears - Nicholas D. Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn
• Business Adventures - John Brooks
• Gates of Fire - Steven Pressfield

Now the reason I’m reaching out to you is because someone in our group has had to leave the group due to him going back to school.

What I’d like to know is if you’d be interested in a group like this?

• We rotate picking the book (there are 4 of us, 5 if you join us).
• We jump on Skype to chat for an hour after reading the book.
• We usually give the book 4 weeks of reading time. So like once a month.

The next one will be “People’s History of the United States” by Howard Zinn.

Given Bernie Sanders most recent amazing run, showing us that a new generation of leftists are not putting up with the Establishment anymore… I felt it was relevant to read Zinn or Chomsky.

LK’s pick is in August, and it will be Matt Ridley’s “The Origins of Virtue”. This is surprisingly our first official science book. This is also where the 150 argument stems from.

Let me know.