“I don’t know anyone who’s wise who doesn’t read a lot. But that’s not enough: You have to have a temperament to grab ideas and do sensible things. Most people don’t grab the right ideas or don’t know what to do with them.”
-Charlie Munger
At Rainy Day we believe that vicarious learning through the experiences of others is one of the more rewarding sources of applicable wisdom.
We share below a list of the books that underpin the work we are doing at Rainy Day. The list is far from exhaustive; it emphasizes subjects, authors and works that we think are underappreciated.
Powerful forces that are poorly understood (recursion, compounding, abstraction)
- Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
- Micromotives and Macrobehavior by Thomas Schelling
- The Alchemy of Finance by George Soros
Applying logic & reason to finance
- The Money Game by 'Adam Smith'
- Poor Charlie's Almanack by Charlie Munger
Understanding risk & uncertainty
- Against the Gods by Peter Bernstein
- Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb
- Fortune's Formula by William Poundstone
People are LLMs, not calculators
- Psychology of Human Misjudgment by Charlie Munger
- Influence by Robert Cialdini
The joy of building & figuring things out
- Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Ben Franklin
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig
- Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard Feynman