[AUGUST BOOK CLUB PICK](https://preview.redd.it/j87ll19mvdgf1.jpg?width=1149&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=9b8cc6e1ec478aa1096015a4fc8592c92131aea5)
*Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game* has more to do with life than it does a "head game" that’s played inside a diamond. But as a collegiate pitcher, I learned quickly that there was always someone who was better, threw harder, had more movement, or the kind of hitting skills that could absolutely obliterate anything near the strike zone—no matter how many times I failed to learn. And despite the assurance of one’s ego, nothing would get a mediocre pitcher killed faster than playing the same game as a superior opponent.
Same goes with investing.
And that’s why I like *Moneyball*, because it is a David-versus-Goliath story that forced a group of misfits to trust the science and exploit the aspect of the game where they had the true advantage.
So ask yourself, how did the Oakland Athletics play a 150-year-old game differently than the way it had always been played? What was the result? And how has that changed the game forever?
How did they use statistics and Excel spreadsheets to predict their performance over an entire season versus a single game? And how can you apply these same lessons to investing and life?
I know for me, *Moneyball* forced me to become obsessed with efficiency. And in trading, that meant, “How can I score the most runs, the fastest, with the fewest amount of trades?”
And when my livelihood depended on how much firewood I could cut and sell in a single day when the daylight hours of winter were limited, I learned little tricks to improve my output and physical endurance.
For example, I always carried multiple chains and two saws, so I never burned daylight sharpening a chain or trying to get a pinched bar unstuck. I did my sharpening at night on a bench vise, where I manually changed the pitch of each tooth and filed the drags down so the chain would cut itself through the log. This prevented me from having to burn calories using physical strength to push the saw through the wood.
It did the cutting. All I had to do was let the throttle scream.
Also, I rotated between cutting and splitting, because I learned that my body could only manually split firewood in short bursts over a 10-hour day. So I would burn one tank of gas in the saw. Split what I had just cut, and went back and forth, back and forth, so I could physically last all day, which doubled my output—a difference of $300 in daily wages versus $150.
Sorry for all the wood-cutting jargon, but you get the point….
How can we all be more efficient?
[Click here to return to the CountryDumb reading list.](https://www.reddit.com/r/CountryDumb/comments/1hlhrnn/countrydumb_book_club_mustreads_for_newbies/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)