Business Book Club (BBC) with Egor 📈

Hello everyone 👋, We will be starting in couple of minutes. Hope to see you on the meeting. 🔜 🔗 Here is the link for the session.

Hey folks 👋, Super excited for the session today on "The Aviator" starting at 18:00 FET time (Minsk, Moscow, Riga). ✈️ 🎞 What an amazing film it is:

▪️Staring your Leo Dicaprio ▪️Screenwriter John Logan wrote 15 drafts of The Aviator over five years. ▪️The Aviator portrays Howard Hughes’ rise to success. ▪️The film explores Hughes’ struggle with OCD and anxiety ▪️Leonardo DiCaprio learned to fly for The Aviator ▪️The color palette in The Aviator changes as time progresses ▪️ The Aviator went $500,000 over budget.

Please register in advance here. Hope to see you soon!

Hello folks 👋, Excited for a special session this week o the Business Movie Club. The movie in question is: The Aviator. Leonardo Dicaprio plays a businessman Howard Robard Hughes Jr. ✈️ Who is Mr Howard, the protagonist of this film?

▪️ American aerospace engineer, business magnate, film producer, investor, philanthropist, and pilot. ▪️ Hughes was a millionaire at 18. ▪️ His directorial debut, “Hell’s Angels,” was one of the most expensive movies of its time. ▪️ Hughes set an around-the-world flight record. ▪️ His famous Spruce Goose aircraft was flown only once. ▪️ Hughes was part of a CIA plot to recover a sunken Soviet submarine. ▪️ When a Vegas hotel tried to kick him out, he bought the place.

Personal take 😒

Howard Hughes was one of the first of his kind. The Elon Musk of his time. Both climbed to 'richest man' status with their bold visions. Both dominated headlines in their time. But for me his life is a rare case of when a son of a successful father, becomes so successful everyone forgets who the father was. Alexander the great, Hannibal, Maldini... the list is limited, which makes it so much more exclusive and impressive. Btw did I miss anyone here?

Also please register for the event in advance in here 🔗 .

Hey folks 👋, There was one parable about fat Tony and Dr. John within the book "The Black Swan" 🦢 that made me think hard. In the book Taleb compared two imaginary people Tony and Dr. John. Two very different people as outlined in the picture. 💰The coin experiment

Taleb did an imaginary experiment. The coin experiment in the text involves flipping a coin that is assumed to be fair (50% chance of heads or tails). The experimenter flips the coin 99 times, and each time it lands on heads. The question posed is: what are the odds of getting tails on the next, 100th flip? Dr. John, representing a conventional, statistical view, answers that the odds are still 50%, as each flip is independent of the previous ones. Fat Tony, representing a more skeptical and pragmatic view, suggests that the odds are much lower, around 1%, because he suspects the coin is not fair. He argues that getting heads 99 times in a row indicates that the coin is likely biased or "loaded." This illustrates the difference between theoretical probability and practical skepticism

😒 My experience

I have met so manny super succesful people that just were not smarter, not harder working, not more disciplined... they had noting of the traditional values. All this jazz about the successful people being the hardest working. So how the hell are they multimillionaire, have hundreds/thousands people working for them, have so much freedom in their live. I think its this practical skepticism that separates those people. They know that there is a "sucker" and this "sucker" is not them. They focus on "the things that matter" - for the it is the bottom line (i.e. profit). I am going to share a store about one particular gentleman in my next post.

What you think folks? What has been your experience? Are you a practical skeptic?

Hey folks 👋, 🙏 Super excited to share with you a recent interview I done for American Centre Minsk this past week about our amazing community and the Business Book Club in general. 🔗 Here is the link to it. Hope you enjoy!

Hey Folks, could you please support our club in AMC poll? 🤩

THE BLACK SWAN Super excited for the next book, the Black Swan. Here is a simple to follow explanation of key ideas from the book on YouTube. Definition

1. An outlier event 2. An event with extreme impact 3. Explainable only after the fact of happening Example: 9/11, WW1, discovery of penicillin

Explanation

Before the discovery of Australia, people in the Old World were convinced that all swans were white, an unassailable belief as it seemed completely confirmed by empirical evidence. Over the centuries, versions of the phrases “black swan” and “rare bird” became common in several European languages, describing something that defied belief. The expressions made sense because Europeans assumed, based on their observations, that all swans were white. The sighting of the first black swan illustrates a severe limitation to our learning from observations or experience and the fragility of our knowledge. One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of millions of white swans. All you need is one single (and, I am told, quite ugly) black bird.*

My personal experience

I was always a believer that the geopolitical situation in the world and my personal day to day have little in common really. As one person told me "Worry about the micro, and let macro do its thing, that should not be your concern". Since you cannot really control or even anticipate "macro", you want to put your energy into what you can control. Anticipating trends in micro (i.e. your industry), creating new phenomena, borrowing ideas from other industries... the normal day to day. This was until 2022, when my business was flipped upside down and we had to start again. I was like a turkey that was fed everyday by humans, making myself believe I am safe and this is normal, until a black swan event: what felt like the humans cooking me up for the Thanksgiving. I will leave the moral of the story for another day.

📖 And here are the materials for next week. 🔗 Link to the audiobook.