Readings, week of July 18th

I had the opportunity to get some reading done this last week. I finished three books and started a fourth, which will take a bit longer to get through as its about 3 times thicker than the other three.

First off is Talent is Overrated, What Separates World Class Performers from Every day People by Geoff Colvin. Colvin writes about a topic that I first read about in a chapter of Malcolm Gladwells book Outliers: The Story of Success, which I read earlier this year, about the 10,000 hour rule, which is that it takes about 10,000 hours, or five years of daily work to become a master of any subject. Colvin expands on this idea and talks about how it takes about 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to attain this mastery- meaning that people who just do something repetitively every day and don’t consciously focus on what they do don’t always become masters at it. It takes constantly analyzing and increasing the effectiveness of every bit of what it is you are doing on a specific subject to become a master of it. In a lot of ways this book has made me think about the direction i’ve taken in life and where I go from here, as it made me think about the things I have been doing and how I can do them better, and if I really want to stay with certain subjects or not. My only regret about this book is that I did not have access to this concept or topic when I was much younger.

The second book I finished this week was Switch: How to change when change is hard, by Chip and Dan Heath. The previous book I read by the Heath Brothers was Made to Stick, about how ideas become sticky in people’s heads and gather steam. Switch was a decent book with a simple message. In a lot of ways it mirrors another book I read about four years ago called Mentored by a Millionaire: Master Strategies of Super Achievers by Steven k Scott, which basically took the same approach to teaching you how to perform. Switch uses a similar metaphor that the Millionaire book took which is to liken your life to a rider on top of an Elephant going down a path. The rider has to learn how to manage the Elephant (your emotional state) and how to steer it down the path of his choosing (the Millionaire book uses a similar sports car metaphor). The book is a good, short read but a solid one that I recommend. Also check out the Mentored by a Millionaire book if you’re wanting to learn more on the subject of control of your life.

Third, and quite possibly the best, was one that I hadn’t gotten around to for some time and glad that I finally did. in Primal Branding: Create Zealots for Your Brand, Your Company, and Your Future by Patrick Hanlon, we get a process by which we can develop brands for who and what we are. This may sound cheep and superficial, however, I assure you it is not and hit home in a ton of ways for me. It made me focus in a much more tight, controlled way on concepts and ideas that I know are missing on my other website (festivalagogo) but could not articulate properly. This will prove to be one of the most powerful books I’ve read in quite some time, as it has instantly actionable ideas that I will begin to roll out in the next week, and a grip of case studies and examples of how some companies and individuals have gotten the idea of branding down solidly, and others have not, and have paid the price. Im very grateful that I ran into this one. If you’re an entrepreneur or someone who is interested in becoming something of a celebrity or a master of a subject, you must read this.

Fourth up is Napoleon’s Wars: An International History, 1803-1815 by Charles Esdaile. This one is as long as the previous three combined. Im only one chapter into it and have learned a ton about Napoleon’s upbringing and the context of the world he was born into. This is more of a recreational read than anything for myself but I have a feeling it’s going to prove fruitful in my study of history. More on it later.

Education Gradients

The last few day’s I’ve been monkeying around with my entire collection of classes/books/lectures and I think I’ve come down with a system to using itunes in the most effective way possible to manage the “overwhelm” – information overload.  I’m probably at  a point where I should start thinking about writing this all down and set it free as a tool for others to use.  I think my experience over the last two years of self educating has at least reached a level of competence verging on mastery- I’ll save that mastery label to after the point i can write the software/app that i need to make this all work smoothly.

In my journey of  self educating I’ve come across several gradients of knowledge and education that are available out there in the internet, which is more and more like deep sea exploring every day.  Every web page is like a position in the ocean. Some of these positions are prime- like, say, the UC Berkley page on iTunes U, which has some of the best information for free out there- and others are like deep abysses in the ocean, hidden from sight by normal eyes and dimly illuminated by the automated engines that crawl and categorize them. Every web page is a point on that ocean.

Its in that vein of thought that I’ve come to see that learning comes in gradients- different shades which disperse in respect to detail and reliability. Towards the top you have college and university lectures, which are pieced together by experts, doctors, PhD’s who have studied their fields for years. These tend to be the most reliable and most well thought out- however- nothing is ever written in stone and often we find research that can turn these fields on their heads.

The next level of gradient sits in a strange underbelly of education which is like a secondary market to the snobbery of the college level class, which I’ve dubbed the lecture series. This can range anywhere from study material produced to help people pass things like the Cisco or Microsoft certification tests to The Teaching Company’s broad range of educational material that cover a subject well enough to introduce a learner to the subject but are short enough to where I wouldn’t consider them the equal in length to a semester long college class.   And when I say snobbery, I mean it- some of the shit I’ve heard by professors from big Ivy League schools to their students about other universities that might not be quite as good- let alone about these kinds of classes- is pretty damn disappointing but not all that surprising. It’s good to hear it come out of their mouths in class. It’s easier to know who they really are from what they speak rather than to be dazzled by the facade they try to deal out later. (If you have a degree from ASU, don’t go telling anyone from, say, Yale, about it. ASU was often used as an example of suck.)

The third level of gradient is where things get a bit dicey.  Often these are not trained educators, and even more often these are people marketing their “proven system” or website to whomever will listen. These people may not be the best at what they’re doing, however, they often are on the bleeding edge of what is important and actually *works*, especially when it comes to anything related to the internet. Part of the problem with the way that the educational system (college) is structured is that it only teaches what is really solidly known for some time- things that are changing on a daily basis- like marketing and business on the net- have changed so much in the last 6 months- not even to say the last 6 years- that it is often impossible for first tier educators to teach.  I’d stick magazines like Nature into this level also, however, journals like Nature still only come out monthly.

The fourth gradient level is sketchy at best. I think of it as a primordial pool that feeds the other three levels. You’ll get the stuff on the radio in here- stuff like political and late night talk- that are often hyper biased, uneducated and heavily marketed.  This is where the hypothesis is created and the art of innuendo and mystery abound. Its usually more easy than not to dismiss what goes on at this level as retarded, psycho, or just plain wrong, however, some of the best stuff and biggest mysteries come out of this primordial level into the light of day. In any case, it always makes for good late night talk radio and ghost stories.  I learned how to be skeptical and turn my bullshit meter set on high whenever I talk to anyone about anything from listening to a few years of the conspiracies and crap that’s out there.

That’s all I have for right now. This act of writing these ideas down, I think, have helped me think about how I’m structuring what I’m learning and how I learn it.  I think  I need to start giving some thought to writing down how I’m using iTunes so that I can get a handle on how I write the apps.

Android app developer, Calculus, and the Dow Jones long term chart

I was able to get ahold of a really good series on calculus the other day and have been teaching myself the ins and outs of calculus. I put calculus down when I first started college, mostly because I was burnt out with school but also because the way it was being taught kind of sucked.  I’m at the point now where I see the need to have calculus as a part of the tools i need. Strangely enough Statistics has also become something else that I know I need, and I’m also dabbling in and out with it.   For the calculus I got ahold of  a TTC series where the professor is also describing the history of how calculus came to be is explained, along with the reasons for it-  The cold, hard, mechanical way it was being taught to me in school was so abstract that i couldn’t really keep my attention going as to why any of the shit was relevant to anything at all in the universe.  After taking the three economics classes from Berkley/Yale (sometime in the fall I’ll take an international trade class also) I get why calc is so important- same goes with statistics.  Strangely, both seem, by orders of magnitude, way less intimidating that I thought they would.

the Android developer team at Google has done me (and a lot of other people) a huge service by issuing an app builder program for android. The project I’ve had in my head for some time will be able to get fleshed out, at least in part, now that this tool is available. Big thanks to them.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/12/android-app-inventor-lets-you-be-the-developer-video/

stocks

A long time ago I was a day trader. I was ok at it, and made some money- until i made some basic mistakes and had to take a step back from what I was doing.  I still solidly believe in the process I was using to do a technical analysis on a chart, and still do from time to time.

Everyone is freaking out about the market and the economy, and all i can do is simply say, whoa there Nelly, just calm down. While its true that our national debt is unbelievably out of control, and we have fools in office who are compounding the problem daily with all their well intentioned hand outs, I don’t think the sky is falling- but I do think we’re going back into an extended period of suck- right now we should be educating people on how to be entrepreneurs, how money works, and how to be self sufficient, and instead we are teaching people how to be dependents on the government. This is a generational issue that will not be resolved for a period of time greater than 10 to 20 years.  It’s sad, too, because a lot of people are going to be forced into being completely dependent on the state.

that shit aside, here is how i see the Dow Jones playing out. While its true we do have a pattern forming (a massive head and shoulders pattern) its inconclusive right now how it will play out. If it plays out negatively, we will have a really hard crash that will take the market down to where it was in 1995- around 4000. That should be a solid bottom. If it goes under that, well, fuck, we’re screwed.

I don’t think, however, its going to do that. Even though the head and shoulders pattern is a reversal pattern, meaning that the market has topped out, the degree to which it will drop is what the unknown is.  It will definatley swing back below the 10k mark towards 8,000. My guess is that it will do this in the next 3 years- probably between august and October of those said years. Once it hits that bottom, it will finish out the end of the Elliot wave that its been in since 1995 and will start to form the next series of waves that will last the next 15 to 20 years.

If you don’t know what an Elliot wave is, I’m including a picture of what it is below. You can Google for more information about it, its one of the most important patterns and tools that I’ve ever come across in predicting where things are going. The same goes for a head and shoulders pattern- both are well documented and repeat all the time in almost every stock (they become more discernible as volume increases.)

I wouldn’t bet on the market going anywhere near the 2000 high which was around 12,000.  If i were going to do trades based on this index alone I’d wait till it hit the low end between 9-10k and ride it to as close as 10,500 to 11k as possible. Anything over 11k is just lucky at this point.  Wave 5 is already looking like its giving a down trending direction. it will need to get up towards the 13/14k level to indicate a bullish market, which it is not.  the next 6 months will tell a ton towards the direction of the next 20 years. crazy, no?

basic Elliot waves