World Book Day is an event organised by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) that falls on April 23rd each year. It aims to promote reading, publishing and copyright.
Apparently, it's held annually on the first Thursday in March for the UK instead due to the Easter holidays.
I'm Reading...
I'm currently reading Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street, by Sheelah Kolhatkar. Black Edge is about the story of Stephen A. Cohen, billionaire hedge fund manager, who made a name for himself in Wall Street beginning in the 80s. and then went on to start his hedge fund SAC Capital.
SAC Capital was one of the most powerful hedge funds on Wall Street and invested over $15 billion for investors. They were later the target of a large-scale investigation by the SEC for insider trading. Over the course of the 7-years investigation, government prosecutors and agents pored over documents, emails and used every trick in their book to try to indict Cohen for insider trading. It ended up in a partial success. Cohen was never criminally charged, but the company was forced to pay a $1.8 billion fine and to stop taking investor money.
Cohen still had $10 billion of his own money left over, and the company became a family office that invests his own money instead.
Partial success or partial failure? You decide.
Reflecting on My Reading Habits
I'm going to treat the World Book Day as an opportunity to re-center myself in terms of my reading habits. The saying goes, "You are what you eat." If anything, that certainly applies to intellectual content. Your mind is the sum total of the material you consume.
It pains me to admit it, but lately I have been consuming too much subpar content, and on Steemit more than anything else.
The 80/20 rule applies here. Only 20% of content is worth reading, and even then they're usually not that intellectually stimulating. But it's easy to just click on and read because it's easy, like social media addiction and procrastination. Human beings are bad at making the choices that are good for us over the long-run; we tend to settle for short-term gratification even if it's bad for us.
Over the long-term, I know I'll be happier and much more enriched if I rejig my reading habits.
Shout out to 