Damien Soitout
Count the books that exist: two quick guides a reader can hold, in the editions already printed. Then close the list.
A shelf can hold many copies. The count is the books a reader can pick up today.
At the end of 2024 the quick-guide series is a stack you can put on a table. I am writing this on 18 December 2024. On the table there are two volumes. The first is the shorting guide. The second is the time guide. Each of those volumes also exists in more than one language and in more than one form, Kindle and paper. A language is an edition. A form is an edition. The count of the series is two, because a reader who owns the English paperback and the French Kindle of the same text owns one book twice. The rest of this page is what those two books do.
Price a life change before you invent the budget is the same kind of counting in another room. You price the life you can see, with the numbers you can point to: the rent, the tax, the reserve, the bill that already arrived. A series deserves the same manners. You count the volume whose title page you can read. What a public page will never show you is the neighbouring question about an account: the public offer and the private statement are different documents. A bibliography is another kind of document, and this count is the bibliography. 100 Hours is a different book, from an earlier year. It is tools and exercises for a set of working hours. The name on the cover is the same, and the job is different, so it stays on its own shelf. The quick guides are the two volumes below.
The first volume is the shorting guide. The Kindle edition went out on 11 January 2024. You can open it here: A Quick Guide to short selling. The English shop card for the same book is here: A Quick Guide: short selling. French and Spanish editions exist beside the English one. They are editions. They are not extra volumes. A reader who holds the French paperback and the English Kindle is holding one book twice.
What the book teaches is a mechanism, and it is worth saying in plain words because the word shorting collects myths. You borrow an asset, often shares, through a broker and a margin account. You sell what you borrowed. You are betting, on the basis of your own work, that the price will fall. If it falls, you buy the same quantity back at the lower price, return the shares, and the difference, after the cost of borrowing, is the result. If the price rises, the difference runs against you. That direction is the whole strangeness of the tool. A long position hurts when the price falls and is limited by the fact that a price can fall to zero. A short position hurts when the price rises, and a price has no ceiling. The loss can outrun the money you planned to use. A short squeeze, the kind the market has already staged more than once, is what happens when the people who must buy the shares back are forced to buy them from the people who know they must.
I wrote the risks beside the mechanism on purpose. Margin, collateral, the fee to borrow, the timing, the regulator. In the United States that regulator includes the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the rulebook people in the trade actually cite includes Regulation SHO. None of this is a signal to sell a named company tomorrow. It is a map of a tool. The Financial Conduct Authority's InvestSmart pages are the public caution I want next to the map: hype, high-risk investments that advertise themselves with a glittering return, and the plain question of whether you understand what you are buying. Read the guide for the mechanism. Read the regulator for the warning. Do not paste them together into a promise.
The second volume is Time Mastery, the field manual. The English paperback is 8 February 2024, ISBN 9798877044777. The Amazon page is The Time Mastery Blueprint. The same date produced a French Kindle, Maîtrise du temps, and a Spanish edition, Dominio del tiempo, ISBN 9798878302357. Again: editions, not new volumes. Time Mastery is a field manual, not another to-do list. That is the right way to hold it. If you turn it into a list of aspirations, you have left the book and started a poster.
The manual is eleven chapters of questions, not eleven slogans. It begins with the psychology of time: the sentence “there is not enough time,” the way attention stretches or shrinks an hour, the trade-off inside a decision. It goes on to time-wasters, and it is blunt about multitasking and about meetings. A meeting without an agenda, a meeting full of people who do not need to be there, a meeting that exists because nobody wrote the update down: the book treats those as leaks. Later chapters are priority, a workspace you can find things in, focus, the art of saying no, goals, routines, procrastination, and the tools that help only after the habits exist. Strategies to Manage Your Time Efficiently and How to Manage Your Time Efficiently are the habits on the site. The book is the field manual those habits come from. Use the posts to practise. Use the book when you want the questions in order.
What would you do with 86,400 is the small door into the same subject. Eighty-six thousand four hundred is the number of seconds in a day, and it is also a pile of money if you insist on seeing it that way. The time book cares about the seconds. When can I start spending my money? cares about the money. They are neighbours. They are not the same question, and neither of them is answered by the shorting guide. Two guides, two jobs. I have said that before, under its own title. December is a good month to say it again while you can still see both objects on the desk.
So the count, in a reader's hands, at the end of 2024, is this. Volume one: shorting, in English, French, and Spanish, Kindle and paper where those editions were printed. Volume two: time, in English, French, and Spanish, with the English paperback carrying ISBN 9798877044777. If you own three copies of volume two, you own one book. If you own volume one in Spanish and volume two in English, you own the series. You do not own a third volume by intending to.
A shop card is not the count either. The shop is not the company, and a product page is a shelf. Where a card exists, I link the card, as I did for the shorting guide. The count itself is the object, not the furniture it sits on. An old interview that says two guides is, on this date, still accurate. An old interview that sketches a future theme is a sentence from the day it was printed. It does not manufacture a book in December. A sentence about a theme, a sentence about a risk, a sentence about a plan: none of those is an object on the shelf. The shelf holds the two volumes a reader can pick up.
Count with your hands, not with your intentions. Pick up the shorting guide and read the title page. Pick up the time book and read the ISBN on the English paperback, 9798877044777, or the Spanish ISBN 9798878302357 if that is the copy you hold. Notice that a Kindle file and a paper copy of the same text are one volume in two forms. Notice that French, English, and Spanish are one volume in three languages. Then look at the other book that sometimes gets pulled into the pile. 100 Hours to Accomplish the Extraordinary is a different book, already in the shop for years, with its own job: tools and exercises for a stretch of hours. It is not a third quick guide. It does not become one because it sits on the same desk. Two quick guides, plus a separate book about hours, is a clear shelf. Calling all of them one series, because they share an author, is how a count goes soft.
If you are using the shorting guide near your own money, pair it with the regulator's pages and with your own statement, not with a hope. If you are using the time book, pair it with a week you can actually see. When can I start spending my money? remains a personal question about your cash, your debts, and your reserve. The guides do not answer it for you. They give you a tool for markets and a tool for hours. Your statement gives you the rest.
A series is a promise of order, and order includes a last number. Today the last number is two. Describe them by the job they do. Shorting: borrow, sell, buy back, return, and live with a loss that is not capped by zero. Time: questions that turn a week into a field manual, including the meetings you should have replaced with a page. Count the languages as editions. Then stop talking. The next true sentence about this series is a sentence you can say only when another volume is in a reader's hand. Until that day, the shelf is these two, and the notebook stays a notebook.
