Reddit mentions: The best strategy & competition books

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Great_Classical_Novels

These are great reads, particularly Romance of the Three Kingdoms and the Water Margin. There is a modern martial arts film called Chi Bi, or Red Cliff that you might have heard about that is based on RotTK. That book is about 2,000 pages long, but there is an abridged 500 page one that is pretty good. One of the characters in that book, Zhuge Liang, also known as Konming, is one of the best military strategists who has ever lived. He wrote a commentary based on the book The Art of War, which a lot of martial artists read.

You should definitely check out The Art of War by Sun Tzu and
Mastering the Art of War by Zhuge Liang http://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Art-Shambhala-Dragon-Editions/dp/0877735131

Another good book is 100 Unorthodox strategies http://www.amazon.com/One-Hundred-Unorthodox-Strategies-Tactics/dp/0813328616/

It contains many stories about famous battles in ancient China and how various warlords tricked or outmaneuvered others in battle in very creative ways.

There is also a series of comic books translated from the Chinese that deliver certain ancient texts or biographies of ancient China in a great format http://www.amazon.com/Confucius-Speaks-Tsai-Chih-Chung/dp/0385480342

The author is Tsai Chih Chung and he has written over 100 of these books.

The literature of ancient China is useful because it was highly influential on Chinese and indirectly Japanese martial arts. Principles of Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism can be found in martial arts philosophy.

Some books, like the 4 classics I mentioned above, were so widely written that there are huge elements found in every aspect of the modern day. Romance of the Three Kingdoms is sort of how the English view Robbin Hood and King Arthur. It basically defines their culture. The glaring example of how Journey to the West has modern influence is that the popular Japanese Anime Dragon Ball Z is loosely based on a Japanese version of the same story.

Water Margin is notable because certain forms of kung fu described in that book are still practiced today like Poking Foot Kung Fu also known as Water Margin Bandit Style https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gq8GIdVumFo

The best book ever written on typography is called The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst. I can't say enough about how important those lessons are.

Beyond that, I like two type books for InDesign: Adobe InDesign CS4 Styles and InDesign Type. If you are interested in InDesign to do type layout, these books will give you the shortcut and power user skills so you're not wasting tons of time. They focus on Paragraph and Character Styles and GREP. Pass on them if you're not interested in that aspect of design.

I also like a book called Vector Basic Training, which is less about learning Illustrator and more about developing a workflow where illustrating by hand and digital work complement each other.

I'm less excited about branding in general, but the book I sharpened my teeth on is called Integrated Branding, which does a good job of taking you through the entire process, and keeping the visual design aspects off the table until the more important work has been done. It's a solid 101 overview, though there may be better books published more recently.

Jeremy Irons' The Courage of Their Convictions is a fascinating read. Many stories of folks who fought for various rights/liberties that are more-or-less accepted today. It's sort of a compendium of back stories to major Supreme Court cases.

Worth your time, for sure.

In general compound exercises will do a good job of hitting what you need.

Don't neglect squats and split squats to increase your leg power. Remember or look up the physics behind punching and kicking, something I find is very well explained in Complete Kickboxing

Personally I found that after I started adding split squats in my routine my kicking and punching power increased dramaticly. (I had allready developped a reasonable technique before)

Between sets you should rest and hydrate, your muscles need to recover. If you really want to "maximize" the usefulness, read something related to what interests you, whether this is purely mma or sports, or biochemistry.

What I would like is irrelevant in this context.

Governments everywhere are talking up the virtues and "inevitability" of globalisation, mainly because it serves their interest. In the last 20 years there has been a bit of globalisation, and a lot of (deliberately ignored by the media) balkanisation of power, in cyberspace.

imagine if cryptocurrencies gain a stronger foothold... governments would be severely diminished by inability to steal from everyone (i.e. tax).

new communities are springing up in cyberspace, freed from the "tyranny of geography" e.g. reddit.

people are shinning "broadcasting" and traditional information sources in favour of "narrowcasting" i.e. selecting for themselves where they will seek out the truth.

cryptography, cyber privacy and such technologies are empowering the individual to protect their assets from the nanny state, hence the massive push by global spy agencies to up their game, and denegrate the whole concept of privacy as the reserve of "pedos, criminals and terrorists", ha! believe that and you'll believe anything.

empowerment of the individual will mean exactly that, and it will weaken anything that is based on centralisation and totalitarianism; that includes socialism, western welfare states, and all other flavours of collectivism.

If you're genuinely interested in this, I'd urge you to read this. You can get a used copy for peanuts.

This should be right up your alley. I read it in high school and found it really interesting. It's nice because each chapter covers a different case, and all the events leading up to each, so it's extremely digestible.

No problem. If you want to read something closer to where some of us think things might go, you might also look at The Sovereign Individual. Like "The Road Ahead" the authors skip saying how things will Happen, but almost all of the book is about the consequences of that Happening, and from a more viewpoint Bitcoiners find more sympathetic.

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