It’s hard to say no to almost everything. No as the default. But if you don’t, you can’t say yes to important things.

Catching Fire by Richard Wrangham: Fire arguably made us human. This book talks about how the invention of fire allowed humans as species to outsource our metabolism to the fire and allocate more of our scarce calories to the brain. Fire relaxed an evolutionary constraint and made us smarter. We've been co-evolving with technology for a very, very long time, arguably for evolutionary timescales. Technology is actually what makes us human. It's what distinguishes man from animal.

Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital by Carlota Perez This discusses the fundamental cycle in technology: people get really amped about a technology, then they try to actually do it, they find it's actually hard, most people get demoralized, and they quit. It's those people who stick it out in the trough that make things actually happen. Carlota Perez has a whole theory about how and why that happens.

One of the funny things about the tech industry is if you stay in the game long enough and you take enough swings, some swings will connect much harder than you expect. There are investments I made that took five minutes that have returned more capital than five months of work.