I somehow cannot finish this book, Skin in the game.
The title is nice, and the author sounds he is in the game. Naval Ravikant recommended it.
But I really can’t get any value or pleasure of listening.
Any Nassim fans, or book gurus, am I the only one who can’t digest what this book is saying?
Sometimes books are complicated to make them sound more sophisticated. I cannot say the same about this book as I have not read it. Anyways, you can always look up the audio version of it or look for its summary on YouTube, in this way you won’t need to read this.
Can you elaborate why you are not able to digest the book? Is it because you don’t believe in message from the book or do you find lack of evidence supporting it?
The message of the book is
People who sit at decision making position or position of power without enough skin in the game i.e. exposure to the suffering from side-effects/negatives of their decisions, then they often loose the understanding of ground level reality or basic tenets of the game and make decisions and choices that would have severe impact for others.
This is what it seems. I already bought the audiobook from audible.
Audible India doesn’t seem to have any return policy.
The author seems to beat around the bush. I can’t really grasp the gist of what he is talking. But Nassim seems to be a high value author. Just cannot wrap my head around the book.
I am not a book reader though. I 
. The better books i listened to are, atomic habits, unknown market wizards, can’t hurt me, almanacks of naval ravikant.
Don’t have a big library but this book doesn’t go down with me. Which I really wanted too.
This book is not Feel Good type Book or Book that teaches us good habits. Skin in the Game is not counter-intuitive, it saying the same practice/message that many old empires followed i.e. make decision maker accountable for their bad decisions. but it seems we have forgotten this basic message. The author is giving the same citing various fiascos in Economics and Financial World and other examples from historical Mediterranean Stories.
Also since we are new to alien to these historical stories, it takes little time get accustomed to Taleb’s writing.
Never get fooled by or underestimate your own opinion by thinking this while reading any book and listening to opinion of anyone. What matters is the argument must be logical and able to be traversed by any rational being.
Its completely fine to not vibe with a book. Tbh if you vibe with every single book you ever read, its a matter of concern. Books written by NNT are actually not suited for audio I feel. Because a lot of the material actually requires you to ponder over it before moving on to the next page/chapter. Audiobooks in a way ask you to keep going. This is a good way to consume narrative books, but not anything thought provoking. I choose to call this entire genre as “Provocative writing” . Although I’m sure there is a some better term for it already
Thought provoking books by definition are an invitation to thought. So they have different metrics to be judged whether they were worthwhile.
This genre also opens itself to “returning to a book”. As in, many times you are simply not ready or in a state of mind to digest the material. Maybe you are taken up by things, maybe your frame of mind is not open to picking. or you simply have not already acquired a taste for such writing etc. It may turn out that when you return to it say 5 years later and it all suddenly “clicks” or “makes sense”.
So yeah keep it away for now. Read other things in the meantime. Come back to it after a period of time and see if it gets any better. If it doesn’t, drop it entirely. As they say life is too short to read books you don’t like. But then they also say life is too short to read books at all. So idk either/or.
Yeah… This happens a lot.
Many times we lacks some background, tiny detail… nitty-gritty stuff and without which we fail grasp the whole idea and unable to experience that Aha! moment.
@MarginCaller Your answer is spot-on… Thanks
Audible India does accept returns.
https://help.audible.in/s/article/how-can-i-return-an-audiobook
But do read this before initiating the return…
https://help.audible.in/s/article/how-can-i-return-exchange-a-book
