Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy by Robert H Frank can be summarised that talent, hard work and skills are important but luck plays a huge role too. Interesting insights are that people who feel they’re lucky or have good fortune are more generous in charitable donations and being grateful makes people healthier, happier and more generous again. So start counting your blessings and good fortune. Can you think of a few examples of your good fortune or luck that you’ve experienced over the course of your life? Do it now and notice how you’ll feel.

Watch Robert H Frank summarising his book Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy

Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy by Robert H Frank

Also read: Summary of The Luck Factor by Dr Richard Wiseman and how to boost your luck with practical and scientific principles behind the luck factor

‘I increasingly suspect that the key to success isn’t talent, luck, nepotism or even showing up. It’s getting enough sleep.” Simon Kuper, FT

Research suggests that reading summaries is a valid way of getting quality information and people who read summaries not only get more out of books but also remember the information for longer.

The best collection of summaries

Passing Time in the Loo volume 1, 2, 3 – each volume contains 150 summaries  which is an amazing deal for £5.87 or FREE on Amazon Kindle Prime

Book Summaries: Passing Time in the Loo – 150 summaries of classincs

Passing Time in the Loo Vol 1

contains summaries of more than 200 books, including

Novels and plays, old and new, eg A Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne), A Farewell to the Arms (Ernest Hemingway), For Whom the Bell Tolls (Ernest Hemingway), Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy), Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck), The Faerie Queene (Edmund Spenser), Beowulf, Prometheus Bound (Aeschylus), Tales of King Arthur (Thomas Mallory), El Cid, A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens), The Lady of the Lake (Sir Walter Scott), The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck), The Travels of Marco Polo, The Last of the Mohicans (James Fenimore Cooper), The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Samuel Taylor Coleridge), Moby Dick (Herman Melville), The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway), Don Quixote de la Mancha (Miguel de Cervantes), Peer Gynt (Henrik Ibsen), Great Expectations (Charles Dickens), Silas Marner (George Eliot), Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen), Far from the Madding Crowd (Thomas Hardy), Little Women (Louisa May Alcott), Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte), The Maltese Falcon (Dashiell Hammett), Call of the Wild (Jack London), The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald), King Solomon’s Mines (Sir Henry Rider Haggard), Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe), The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde), Frankenstein (Mary Shelly), The Time Machine (H.G.Wells), The Turn of the Screw (Henry James), The Fall of the House of Usher (Edgar Allan Poe), The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck), To Kill a Mockingbird (Nelle Harper Lee), Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Harriett Beecher Stowe), Candide (Voltaire), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (Mark Twain), 1984 (George Orwell), I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou), One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez), Lord of the Flies (William Golding), Henderson the Rain King (Saul Bellow), Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison), The Joy Luck Club (Amy Tan), The Shell Seekers (Rosamunde Pilcher), The Sound of Waves (Yukio Mishima), Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (Anne Taylor), The Courtship of Miles Standish (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow), The Importance of Being Earnest (Oscar Wilde), Our Town (Thornton Wilder), Death of a Salesman (Arthur Miller) … and plays by William Shakespeare, including Hamlet, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Othello, The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing … and many more

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Das Kapital by Karl Marx (1818-1883) – Summary 

Summary of Das Kapital by Karl Marx

2017 and Das Kapital is in vogue again, as modern Marxists try to keep the revolution permanent. Since the financial crash, people’s thinking has changed and they are trying to understand if the capitalist system is going to destroy itself. Former Greek financial minister Yanis Yaroufakis, has described himself as an ‘erratic Marxist’ and Jeremy Corbyn described Karl Marx as a ‘great economist’ and even the shadow chancellor John McDonnell suggested that there was ‘a lot to learn’ from Marx’s most famous work, Das Kapital. Read this short summary of this classic to join the conversation…

Summary of Das Kapital by Karl Marx
In the mid-19th century when Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital – an exhaustive work of more than a thousand pages – factory conditions were often intolerable, wages were at best barely adequate, and there were few groups or governments who advocated reform. Therefore, Marx took it upon himself to define “Capitalism,” explain and condemn Capitalist methods, predict the inevitable doom of the system, and issue the rallying cry “Workers of the world, unite!”

When Marx simply describes what he sees, his analyses and criticisms appear most lucid. In contrast, his theories become confusing as he attempts to prove even the vaguest point using mathematics. He felt that these elaborate equations and proofs were necessary because his book does not purport to be merely a moral prescription for society’s ills, but a scientific description of the unavoidable course of history. It is, of course, actually not only a “prescription” but a passionate exhortation.

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Summary of Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool

Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool

Get the message / summary of the book from popular highlights
One simple way of getting a quick summary of any ebook is to read the popular highlights on Kindle. Read all the popular highlights below and decide for yourself if that’s enough to get the message of the book and navigate yourself to a greater expertise. Crowd wisdom rocks.

10,000-hour rule
10,000-hour rule was the original Ericsson’s research on expert violinists which was popularised by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers. In short, if you practice for 10,000 hours (about 3 hours a day for 10 years), you will become a world leading expert.

Three types of practice: naive, purposeful, deliberate
According to Ericsson there are three types of practice: naive (generic, with mindless repetition), purposeful ( well-defined, with specific goals) and deliberate (pushes you out of your comfort zone and involves feedback and focus). The key to expertise is deliberate practice: “Deliberate practice is purposeful practice that knows where it is going and how to get there.”

Popular highlights from Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool
“Purposeful practice requires getting out of one’s comfort zone. This is perhaps the most important part of purposeful practice.” 559 popular highlights (the number of popular highlights at the time of writing this blog summary)

“The right sort of practice carried out over a sufficient period of time leads to improvement. Nothing else.” 1616 popular highlights

“Purposeful practice is all about putting a bunch of baby steps together to reach a longer-term goal.” 1864 popular highlights

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Summary Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
(from Passing Time in the Loo: Volume 1 – Summaries of All-Time Great Books)

Type of work Romantic tragedy
Setting Verona, Italy; 15th century
Principal characters
Romeo, son of the house of Montague
Juliet, daughter of the Capulet household
Benvolio, Romeo’s cousin
Mercutio, Romeo’s friend
Tybalt, Juliet’s cousin
Lady Montague, the clan’s matriarch
Lady Capulet, Juliet’s mother
Juliet’s ribald nurse
Friar Lawrence, a Franciscan Monk

Story overview
For a very long time the Capulets and the Montagues had been feuding. Harsh words often led to violence between the two houses, who were sworn as deadly enemies. Prince Escalus of Verona happened upon one such bloody brawl and angrily pronounced, “If ever you disturb our streets again, your lives shall pay the forfeit of the peace.”

Shortly after this, Romeo and his cousin Benvolio met on the street, and Romeo sadly confessed his unrequited love for an aloof and indifferent young woman. “[Give] liberty unto thine eyes; Examine other beauties,” was Benvolio’s curative. But Romeo was unmoved: “Thou canst not teach me to forget.”

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Summary of Does your Family Make You Smarter?: Nature, Nurture, and Human Autonomy by James R. Flynn 

Summary of Does your Family Make You Smarter?by James Flynn

James R Flynn in his book ‘Does your Family Make You Smarter?: Nature, Nurture, and Human Autonomy’ states that “Intelligence has always been thought to be static. However, the new evidence shows that this is wrong. The brain seems to be rather like a muscle – the more you use it, the stronger it gets. That means you can upgrade your own intelligence all through life.” And your environment, especially your family plays a big part in it. This summarises the whole premise of the book, ie you can improve yourself and your IQ, and the surrounding environment has a significant effect on your intelligence.

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Passing Time in the Loo: Shakespeare – Summaries of Shakespeare’s Greatest Sonnets and Plays (Comedies, Tragedies, Histories) (Passing Time in the Loo: … Glimpse Of His World And Greatest Plays)

“Brevity is the soul of wit.” said William Shakespeare himself. So read summaries of all his works in this compact volume:

Passing Time in the Loo: Shakespeare – Summaries of Shakespeare’s Greatest Sonnets and Plays (Comedies, Tragedies, Histories) (Passing Time in the Loo: … Glimpse Of His World And Greatest Plays)

Read Summary of Macbeth by William Shakespeare

Summary of Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

If you’re watching BBC One drama War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy and want to get a quick overview or summary of the plot (to enjoy it more as research suggests), here it is 587,287 words of the book summarised in just 1,945 words (which is 0.33% of the total book which means you can read this summary in about 5-10 minutes as opposed to an average of 32 hours for the whole book):

WAR AND PEACE – SUMMARY (from Passing Time in the Loo COMPACT CLASSICS – SUMMARIES OF ALL-TIME GREAT BOOKS)
by Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)

Type of work Epic and romantic Russian novel
Setting Russia; the Napoleonic Era
Principal characters
Prince Andrey Bolkonsky, a cynical, intellectual soldier-prince
Pierre Bezuhov, a sensitive nobleman and seeker of truth
Natasha Rostov, Pierre’s beautiful and well-to-do lover
Nikolay Rostov, a soldier, Natasha’s older brother
Sonya, a relative of the Rostovs who falls in love with Nikolay
Anatole Kuragin, a womanizing, high-ranking officer

Commentary
Tolstoy’s purpose in writing his 1600-page War and Peace was to present a historical account of the French invasion of Russia and also to provide himself a forum for his own intellectual and spiritual insights and theories. He accomplishes this through the characters’ searches for identity as well as in the volume’s two extensive epilogues. 

Tolstoy fought in the Crimean War, adding to the realism of his accounts of the Napoleonic struggle. Soon after, he experienced a religious conversion, gave up all his material wealth, and lived out his remaining days in the simple life of a peasant.

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The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts by Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind – Summary of the book in video format

If speed reading there are many ways to get the information in – usually from books but videos and audio presentations are valid ways of getting useful information (TED is a good example). If you don’t want to read the book (Kindle suggests that most non-speed readers will take 7 hours and 14 minutes to read this 362-page book) The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts by Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind watch this presentation (1 hour and 28 minutes – so you’re saving almost 6 hours) for Oxford Martin School and the University of Oxford where they explain the key concepts behind their book.
One-line summary: whatever your profession is – it may not be safe – it can be automated, done by an algorithm or computers much better in the near future. Read about How computers are writing books, articles and PhDs

Summary of The Brand Flip: Why customers now run companies and how to profit from it by Marty Neumeier

Branding is evolving. Marty Neumeier’s new book (and previous ones) is a good testament of that. Marty starts with acknowledging (like all good writers) the function of any factual book – that is to communicate ideas in the most profound, efficient and direct way. To read The Brand Flip, using traditional reading methods, will take you about two hours to get the key messages. Unless you start at the end and read the key messages first – which is always a good idea to prime and give your mind a big picture – you can finish it in about 20 minutes. Read those key messages below. I do recommend going through the whole book though. If you’re new to branding, you’ll get a good understanding of how branding evolved over the last century and what branding is and isn’t. There are practical branding tips – for example, how much your logo is worth (a price of a good car – but you need to decide what kind of car). If you think branding doesn’t apply to your life, think again. We are all personal brands now and social media platforms are our market places.

“Any effort to get customers is marketing. Any effort to KEEP THEM is branding.”

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