Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Incerto volume 4

Finite games are played to win; infinite games are played to keep playing.

The one pattern of the hero's journey that runs through myths across cultures.

Why some people survive disasters that kill others in the same circumstances.

Six principles of compliance, from reciprocity to scarcity, and how sellers use them.

People have no fixed sense of value, so context and anchors set the prices they pay.

Creativity in humour, science and art as 'bisociation': joining two unrelated frames.

How trauma reshapes the body and brain, and the treatments that help survivors.

The theory that consciousness is learned, arising from a once two-chambered mind.

Why mass movements of every kind draw the same frustrated people and use one method.

Factor investing for asset owners: factors as the nutrients inside assets.

Returns follow the supply of capital: invest where it is leaving an industry.

A six-year short of Allied Capital, and the SEC that investigated the short seller.

Sell-side analysts comparing Boeing, GE, Honeywell and Danaher.

What makes a business high quality and worth owning for years at a fair price.

A process for building portfolios that earns most of active managers' gains, cheaply.

Berkshire's shareholder letters arranged by topic: governance, valuation, mergers.

Markets as a game of crowd psychology, seen through 1960s go-go Wall Street.

Second-level thinking, risk and market cycles, drawn from Oaktree's client memos.

A novel of the young Einstein's dreams of different kinds of time, in 1905.

A novel of a Brahmin's son in ancient India who seeks understanding his own way.

The definitive account of John Boyd and the OODA loop. Boyd's contribution was to show that strategy is fundamentally about time and adaptation: the side that observes, orients, decides, and acts faster keeps the opponent reacting rather than acting. His ideas crossed into business, software, and lean manufacturing.

Paul Farmer, the doctor who co-founded Partners In Health, treating the poor.

How a running-shoe importer became Nike, surviving one cash crisis after another.

Samuel Zemurray rose from selling ripe bananas to taking over United Fruit.

A neurosurgeon diagnosed with lung cancer at 36 asks what makes life worth living.

Seven sources of lasting advantage, each a benefit plus a barrier to rivals.

Traces the method from Graham through Icahn to the acquirer's multiple.

Cost discipline handbook widely used by buyout and turnaround operators

Complex problems yield to trial and error, not expert plans, and how to run it.

Innovation as a learnable discipline, with seven sources of opportunity to search.

Decision rules from building Bridgewater: radical truth and radical transparency.

Enlightened hospitality: put employees first, then guests, community and investors.

Eight CEOs who beat the market by allocating capital, not by running operations.

How shared fictions such as money, nations and gods let humans cooperate at scale.

Recurring patterns drawn from world history: biology, morals, religion, economics.

How science developed, and the discoveries that set humans apart from other species.

Forest ecology as a connected system; background for timberland owners

Marketing happens in the buyer's mind: find an open position there and own it.

Advertising as a measurable discipline: test every element against response.

How the chase for short-term share prices corrupted shareholder value, and fixes.

Why standard finance models understate market risk, from fractal geometry's creator.

Speculation from ancient Rome and tulip mania to the 1990s, and its recurring traits.

The South Sea Bubble re-examined from investors' side: were they rational?

The Dilbert creator's many failures and what they taught him about success.

Knowledge workers must run their own careers by knowing their strengths and values.

The plateau and long practice; mastery as a delayed reward

How television turned public discourse from argument into entertainment.

An academic study of how new ideas spread.

Insider account of Facebook's ads business by a product manager.

Subtitled 'Big Ideas from the Computer Age'; collects early essays

How Pixar kept a creative company working after success, and the habits it used.

Amazon's first two decades, from an online bookshop to selling nearly everything.

Bevelin distilling observation and inference habits from Sherlock Holmes

Meadows wrote this before systems thinking became a popular phrase, and it remains the clearest account of why short-term interventions in complex systems so often backfire. The chapter on leverage points is the conceptual core of what long-term thinking actually requires from decision-makers.

Patagonia's founder on running a business against conventional growth logic

Why startups should build something new and own a small market before growing.

How people learned to measure risk, from early probability to portfolio theory.

Decades of US stock data testing which selection rules have beaten the market.

1997 forecast of digital money weakening the nation state

How ancient Greek heroes' secrets of strength live on in Crete, via a WWII kidnap.

Why readers ignore writing, and how a writer moves from amateur to professional.

Data showing that low-expectation stocks beat popular ones over the long run.

The history of oil from the first Pennsylvania well to the Gulf War.

How to split, stack and season firewood and build a fire, the Scandinavian way.