This is a reasonable good listen, though it’s hard to follow exactly on audiobook with so many details and there is no book version. This was more a coaching seminar than a book. Summary is below:

“Hidden” from the non-academic world. There were shrunk down to 7 to be achievable within the shortest amount of time. Criteria: can survive in 7 days in a strange city. Motivation: a compelling reason why – reason – will – and emotion: determined, disturbed (arouse). Deconstruct and Re-construct.

1. Reason why – big enough reason to change (not enough to appeal to emotion). Facts gives us the reason to justify our decision – reality check. Head can’t go with the heart without reason – rationalization. Disturbing questions to ask – use logic to create cognitive dissonance – demolish old beliefs. Exercises: track a journal of reality. Practice shift to long-term goal – zoom in/out. Taking elevator of emotion down: take note of the emotions. Track the opportunity costs of taking no actions – danger of being naive.

2. Changing the belief, attitude (expectation, and value). If we don’t expect success, we’re not getting it. “Impossible is over-rated.” “Change your though and you change the world.” Have I tied my top goals to my believes and values? 3 Kinds of beliefs: probability, social (expectation of others), and ability (our capability to actually achieve our outcome. Realistic feasible plan helps to increase the probability. Detailed plan, scenario analysis help with the ability belief.

6-5-4 strategies: 6 major world views: (Types of Men) aesthetic, life philosophy, reason (hunger for intellectual knowledge) power (personal power), practical, humanatarin. 5 motives behind motivation: who (social), what (sub goals), when and where, why, how. 4 motivation environments: dominant, inducement ,submission and compliant. 1. adventurer, 2. motivator (needs recognition), 3. harmonizer (needs appreciation and control), 4. planner (needs security, definition and follow instructions).

8-step processes:
1. Uncovering your unconscious limiting beliefs – belief assessment – Aristotle treatment. Limiting beliefs: in terms of permanent or temporary. Pervasiveness (universal or specific), hopeless or hopeful. Ask yourself: “What would you lose or what could go wrong if you get what you want?” “What sort of negative things would they say about you if you get what you wanted?” ” What prevents things from changing?” “What blockages cause things to stay the same old ways?” “What past experiences could be spilling over to your presence and future?” “What things are stopping you from getting what you want?” “What appears to be almost impossible to get what you want?” “What seems to always prevent you from reaching your outcomes?” “What are things that would never change for you?” “What the skills or abilities that would prevent you from reaching your outcome?”
2. putting the limiting beliefs to a logical format: premise-> Conclusion.
In view of this fact ______, I conclude that _____.
If _____, then ______.
Because _______, as a result _________.
For the following reasons _______ , consequently _____ .
If we assume ______ , then we can infer ______ .
Since ______ , leads to the ________ .
Assuming that _______ , proves that _________ .
3. re-frame the limiting belief.
4. belief assess. Probability: This goal seems impossible ___ because ____. What could have been if it’s easy? Social: Relation impact? Because? What voice? Ability: What ability do you lack? I need the following skills _____? Decision making process: What assumption am I making? What are my options? What criteria? How do I make progress?
Success language declaration: Base on the probability, I will _________. Based on my positive support system, I will ________. Based on my partnership _____. Based on my detailed plan, I will _____.
5. paradigm shift: What __ , if ___, then ___. What is my current belief. But if it’s possible, then ____.
6. Align your personality.
7. Align with you top two attitudes.
8. Increase your desire to achieve your goals. Crank up the meaning purpose 100 times. What would you have to lose in the attitudes? Visualize a short movie in 30 days in the following areas: beliefs, emotions, social, spiritual, financial, habits, will power, thinking, focus.

3. Clear focus on key issues: Pull, intentionality, effortlessness. Intention is a powerful predictor. Narrow cast – seeing opportunities that others do not see. Do I easily get distracted from my goals? We are what we focus on all day long. Am I following through on my goals? Train our mind to not see the distractions – pure motive (what you’re becoming not just wealth). Baseball analogy: Clear focus on 1st base, beliefs on 2nd base, attitudes on 3rd base, actions on home plate.

4. Spiritual/religion: lots of religion stuff here. Don’t be overly self-reliant. This is a stretch. Be – Do – Have. Who do I need to become in order to be happy?
8 steps: 1. incorporate opportunities to your goal each day, 2. use pre-rehearsal to set your intention strongly, 3. put out reminder to remind you of your intentions to your goals, 4. pick the right people to train you on your goals, 5. determine your core surrender issue and resolve it (fear of control, social rejection, confrontation, unknown and undefined), 6. reflect the metaphor of raising the sail and let the wind carries you, 7. think of the archetypes of gods and confessions daily (journaling), 8. think through stages of moral.

4. Warrior’s Edge Resistance to temptation. Absence of wanting – negation. Maintain your inner drive by ignoring instead of fighting, when facing difficulty. Watch comedy or humor daily.

5. Behavior Congruent: Use music, smell, touch, exercises, laughter and etc. 4-step STOP process: 1). Startle (disrupt, shock, surprise, grab attention, “warning,” “news alert”). 2). Triggering & Transfer (dis-engage, move and engage: attach a strong biological/philosophical driver, like drinking, waking up, to your higher intention). 3). Originality and ROI: reward seeking (feel pleasure & satisfied). What can do I to add something new/innovative to my process? Why is it better? Which one offers the best ROI? 4). Power and Purpose: being soulful, selfless mission, have a problem to solve, not self-conscious ego. Learn Viola Spolin’s acting techniques. Be well disciplined & being honest to all people. Exercises: Teach and mentor someone, assemble peer groups.

6, 7. Some thing to die for and something to live for: “The biggest problem you have is that you don’t have a bigger problem.” How true! Create a genuine mission, something outside of yourselves to live for and die for.

I picked this book up immediately after seeing Phil Town’s appearance in NBC’s Millionaire show. He’s got a pretty good story of how he turned rich from being a river guide, taught by this guy “Wolf.” Basically, his approach is of the value investing but he made it simpler for lay persons and an experienced investor like me. I definitely would love to spend no more than a few minutes watching over stocks. Of course, Rule #1 is “Don’t lose money” or invest with certainty – buying a wonderful business at an attractive price. In essence, be a good shopper.

The author did a comparison against other types of investments to arrive at the advantage of having 15% return with stocks. I believe the author overlooked the benefits of real estate w.r.t. the tax treatments and tax-free cash flow. But I agreed with him that liquidity of stocks with 15% compounded growth rate are pretty good. The trick is to keep it at 15% or more. That’s the tough part. Another lesson learned from the book is the important of the ROIC growth, not the nominal equity value. “The equity growth rate for any business is defined by growing surpluses, and surpluses are what a business makes that’s valuable… Surpluses gives a business the cash to grow, which is why businesses typically growth at about the rate that their surplus grows, i.e. the equity growth rate.”

I think this book beats all the MBA business classes I have taken. Well worth the time. A quick summary below:

Four simple steps:
1. Find a wonderful business.
2. Know what it’s worth as a business.
3. Buy it at 50 percent off.
4. Repeat until very rich.

The definition of a “wonderful” business: 4 M’s
1. Meaning to you. Buy it only if you’d be willing to make this business the sole financial support of your family for the next 100 years. Become a business owner, not just a stock investor. Employ 10-10 Rule. “I won’t own this business for ten minutes unless I’m willing to own it for ten years.” Start with the intersections of the three circles of your Passion, Talent, and Money.

2. Moat (wider the better and sustainable): “durable competitive advantage that protects it from attached, like a moat protects a castle.” Five types of moats: a. Brand: a product you’re willing to pay more for because you trust it. b. Secret: a business that has a patent or trade secret that makes direct competition illegal or very difficult. c. Toll: a business with exclusive control of a market – giving it the ability to collect a “toll” from anyone needing that service or product. d. Switching: a business that’s so much a part of your life that switching isn’t worth the trouble. e: Price: a business that can price products so low no one can compete. The Big Five (must be >= 10%/year for 10 years): 1. ROIC (return on invested capital). 2. Sales growth rate. 3. Earning per share (EPS) growth rate. 4. Equity, or book value per share (BVPS), growth rate, 5. Free cash flow (FCF) growth rate. Rule on debt: if it can pay off debt within 3 years by dividing total long-term debt by current free cash flow.

3. Management (great ones)
Look for CEO’s of the following qualities: 1. Owner-oriented and 2. Drive: look for BAG (big audacious goals), check insider trading, look at CEO compensation,

4. Margin of safety (MOS).
Get a dollar of value for only 50 cents.
Calculate the sticker price with the following 4 numbers: 1. current EPS (TTM EPS: trailing twelve-month EPS), 2. Estimated (future) EPS growth rate (using past equity growth rate), 3. Estimated future PE (2x growth rate, worst of default & historical), and 4. Minimum acceptable rate of return from this investment: 15% of Rule #1 investors.

Future PE * Future EPS = Future sticker price. divide by 4 (15% return for 10 years) to get to today’s price.
Divide by 2 again to get to the MOS price. In other words, divide the future sticker price by 8 to get to a reasonable purchase price.

Trading Tools
1. MACD (Moving Average Convergence Divergence): Consisting of slow EMA (exponential moving average: 26-day), fast EMA (12-day), and a trigger/signal EMA (9-day). Use a more responsive model (8-17-9) MACD.
2. Stochastics: Based on Dr. Lane’s research (how the current closing price sit between the high/low range over 14 trading days). Used to identify overbought (above 80%) and oversold condition (below 20%). MSN link here. Buy line crosses up, buy. Buy line crosses down, sell. The author recommends using 14-trading-day for the first number and 5-day for the trigger point. Crosses up through the 20th percentile, it’s a positive signal and when it crossed down through the 80th percentile it’s a negative signal.
3. Moving averages: Author recommends 10-day moving averages for earlier signal. When the price line crosses above the moving average line, buy. When the price line crosses below the moving average line, sell.

When all three signals are saying “buy,” it’s time to get in. When all three are saying “sell,” it’s time to get out.

On “Eliminating the Barriers” chapter:
Advise on debts: don’t take on debt unless the interest rate of the debt is less the 1/3 of the your expected rate of return. And the debt can be paid off within a year.

Bob Newhart is one of my favorite comedians. I watched him on both Newhart shows as a psychologist and as inn owner. This audiobook, narrated by Bob himself, allowed him to stammer as part of the comedy elements. I don’t know how the book reads but it’s probably hard to stammer in the book. From the book, I got to know how he grew up as the only boy in the relatively poor family in Chicago. He chose the accounting professional out of college, thus the title “I shouldn’t even be doing this.” Amazing. Sometimes the best thing that could happen to a person is to lose his job. Doing standby comedy isn’t easy. And based on his description was difficult to a pro like him as well. I guess he stammered through them and gained popularity through his albums, Button Down Mind. At one time, he was selling more albums than Frank Sinatra as he quipped.

I particularly like his “routines”: driving instructor, submarine commander, Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, and others. The last finale episode of Newhart show of the wake-up-from-dream scenes with Emily in bed was genius and was suggested by his real wife, Gini.

Overall, it was a good audiobook, though at times it was a little to listen to his stammer too long. I wonder he speaks like that all the time or just for the comedy effect.

More details about Bob Newhart click here. His official site is here.

The is a fun book to read and listen to. I enjoyed and learned a few things. Specifically, the chapter on relativity opened my eyes to how people make decisions. The topic on social norm vs. market norm helped me understand how open-source movement worked and their delicate balance. The experiments on how much we’re willing to keep options open sounded silly but realistic. The chapter on the expectations and placebo effect confirmed my belief on many things I encountered in my life like spiritual healing, religious miracle and even use of vitamins. Summary of the book is as follows:

The truth about relativity: We are always comparing one to another (like Economist’ print & web pricing) and we tend to focus on comparing things that are easily comparable (introduction of a decoy) – and avoid comparing things that cannot be compared easily. Comparison causes envies like CEOs’ salaries. To counter this, you can either reduce the circle of comparison or enlarge it. The more we have, the more we want – break the circle of relativity.

The fallacy of supply and demand: Use of anchoring to bring out arbitrary coherence; we tend to stick to the initial price (Social Security number experiment). Anchors we we encountered along the way and were swayed by remain with us long after the initial decision itself. Herding and self herding (habitual, how Starbucks succeeded). We should pay particular attention to the first decision we make in what is going to be a long stream of decisions.

The cost of zero cost: Zero is an emotional hot button – a source of irrational excitement. Most transactions have an upside and a downside, but when something is free, we forget the downside because we humans are intrinsically afraid of loss.

The cost of social norms: vs. Market norms. People tend to be more self-reliant and less willing to help other when operating in the market norms. Market norms takes over social norms if not careful. Money is the most expensive way to motivate people.

The influence of arousal. People turn into monsters (Hyde from Dr. Jekyll) and less cautious when in an arousal state. We systematically under-predict the degree to which arousal completely negates our superego, the way emotions can take control of our behavior as in sexual arousal, driving. We need to explore the two sides of ourselves: the cold state and hot state.

The problem of procrastination and self control: Why we can’t make ourselves do what we want to do.
“Almost everyone has problems with procrastination, those who recognized and admit their weakness are a better position to utilize available tools for precommitments.” Bundling our medical tests, car services so that people remember to do that is far smarter. Author suggests the use of self-control credit card.

The high price of ownership (material or ideas): why we overvalue what we have.
Three reasons: 1. We’re attached to what we have (especially those we have put work into) and we haven’t got yet (eBay or trial ownership) and, 2. we focus on what we may lose (30-day money-back guarantee) rather than what we may gain. 3. we assume other people will see the transaction from the same perspective we have.

Keeping doors open: why options distract us from our main objective.
We have an irrational compulsion to keep doors (opportunities, relationships, jobs, and etc.) open. Choosing two similar options are very difficult (two stacks of hays to a donkey, US Congress) and may be easier to just toss a coin and do away with the opportunity costs.

The effect of expectations: Why the mind gets what it expects
If you tell people up front that something might be distasteful, the odds are good that they will end up agreeing with you because of the expectation. When the coffee ambiance looked upscale the coffee tasted upscale as well. Coke was liked more with the brand was known – the associations were more powerful, allowing the part of the brain that represents these associations to enhance activity in the brain’s pleasure center. We should acknowledge that we are all biased, trapped in our own perspective – may require a neutral third party.

The power of price: Why a 50-cent aspirin can do what a penny aspirin can’t
Two mechanisms shape the expectations that make placebos work: belief – our confidence or faith on the drop, the procedure, or the caregiver, conditioning – the body builds up expectancy after repeated experiences and releases various chemicals to prepare us for the future. Price can change the experience. When it comes to medicines, you get what you pay for.

The context of our character: why we are dishonest and what we can do about it
We care about honesty and we want to be honest. But our internal honesty monitor is active only when we contemplate big transgressions. The only defense we have against this is a rational cost-benefits analysis. Remind people of the 10 Commandments or other vows or honor codes helps to promote honesty. Much of the dishonesty is one step removed from cash. When given a chance, people cheat.

Beer and free lunches: what is behavioral economics, and where are the free lunches?
When people order out loud in sequence (in a restaurant), they choose differently (more varieties) from when they order in private, to convey uniqueness. People are sometimes willing to sacrifice the pleasure they get from a particular consumption experience in order to project a certain image to others.