Put down the phone!

It’s been a long weekend in China and also a rise in COVID cases in Beijing.

I’ve decided to stop using my phone because I’ve spent far too much time on it in the past few weeks trying to understand the news / changes, and communicating with people and making plans and also just constantly checking various things.

I’ve known I’ve needed to cut down on it and so I’ve had 3 days with no phone and I feel so much better. Here are some of the advantages of going without a phone:

• I can now sleep much better – before I was waking up feeling anxious
• I can think clearer – it feels like a weight has been lifted off me
• I have much more time – I didn’t realise how much of my time was taken by my phone
• I am much more productive

It kind of feels reaching a higher level of abilities like the movie: limitless

I’ve read about 7 books in this time, and made lots of plans for my business growth.

The books I’ve read are:

• One up on Wall Street – a great book about fundamentals of investing. So good I accidentally bought two. One of the main takeaways I got from this – it is that as a consumer we have an advantage in investing because we know the consumer experience of the product vs competitors, and that is normally a leading indicator to the future prospects of the company and stock price.
• Siddhartha – this is a spritual indian journey on the way to enlightenment which gives some interesting lessons and perspectives which reminds me a bit of the Alchemist.
• My Life and Work – Henry Ford – great to learn about his perspective of business which is very simple and logical, about providing low price but high quality service. It’s amazing that there were so many car companies (about 200 companies 100 years ago and Ford was one of the few (3) that were successful and still exist today.
• Winston Churchill – it’s about 900 pages. I read and then skimmed the rest. It goes into too much detail for what I wanted from it and I found myself skipping parts frequently. Very interesting book and interesting to see how he thought about certain battles.
• Warren Buffet – very good to reread this and review his philosophies about investing. Love the simplicity about how he works and thinks.
• China 2050 – there are some free ones online. What will China look like in 2050? This book might give some hints.