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Zero to One is based on the notes taken by Blake Masters during Peter Thiel’s startup class at Stanford. Chapter 3 of the book and Blake’s notes are available online. Zero to one is about how to impact the future and be financially rewarded doing so. It is easier to go from 1 to N, than from zero to one.
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I read Jim Collin’s prequel, Good to Great a few months ago. It was time to read the book he published first, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies. Companies To determine what the successful habits are, Jim and team looked at what was different between the visionary company and the comparison company. Visionary | Comparison
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3M | Norton
American Express | Wells Fargo
Boeing | McDonnell Douglas
Citicorp | Chase Manhattan
Ford | GM
General Electric | Westinghouse
Hewlett-Packard | Texas Instrumetn
IBM | Burroughs
Johnson & Johnson | Bristol-Myers Squibb
Marriott | Howard Johnson
Merck | Pfizer
Motorola | Zenith
Nordstrom | Melville
Proctor & Gamble | Colgate
Sony | Kenwood
Wal-Mart | Ames
Walt Disney | Columbia
The Myth of the “Great Idea”
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How Google Works is part business book, part storybook on Google. The problem is that there are better business books and better storybooks on Google. If you’re a Google fan, then it is worthwhile read. Slides If you don’t want to read the book, you can just flip through these slides. [slideshare id=40175706?rel=0&w;=427&h;=356&style;=border: 1px solid #CCC; border-width: 1px; margin-bottom: 5px; max-width: 100%;≻=no]
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As a follow-up to Happier, I read The Pursuit of Perfect. The book is structured in the same way as Happier. It has 3 sections with embedded exercises. This book expands more on the perfectionist who lives the rat race rather than looking at the world as an optimalist. The second section talks about how pursuing perfect can affect education, work and love. If you’re a parent, the education section is a good read. If you got messed up by the school system, it would also be a good read. Tal references Jim Collin’s Built to Last for the work related ideas. Patterns emerge on what is required to be happy and genuinely good at something after reading many books on happiness, creativity and greatness. The hard part is internalizing those patterns and incorporating them into your everyday life. Perfectionist vs Optimalist The Perfectionist | The Optimalist
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Journey as a straight line | Journey as an irregular spiral
Fear of failure | Failure as feedback
Focus on destination | Focus on journey and destination
All-or-nothing thinking | Nuanced, complex thinking
Defensive | Open to suggestions
Faultfinder | Failure as feedback
Fear of failure | Benefit finder
Rigid, static | Adaptable, dynamic
The perfectionist is the person who has big goals and relentless pursues them, working themselves into the ground. They head from milestone to another milestone never being happy. When they reach their first failure, they get hit hard and breakdown. They can’t enjoy the journey, because they are rushing toward the destination. They make their decisions around avoiding failure instead of doing what they really want. Safe Place In in a study about organization behavior, Hospitals that had better teamwork had more reported medical errors. This was because those who had better teamwork were more likely to report errors. While the others were more likely to cover up errors. When you analyzed errors that you can’t cover up, like deaths, then the hospitals with better teamwork came out on top. As repeated in books I’ve read about creativity and successful companies, you need to create a place where people feel that they can fail safely. If you never fail, you will never achieve great things. How you deal with failure can change your life a lot.
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Continuing my positive psychology binge, I read Happier by Tal Ben-Shahar, the Harvard professor who teaches the happiness class. The book is divided into three parts. The first part is about happiness. The second part is about happiness applied to education, work and relationships. The third part are thoughts about the nature happiness and its place in our lives. I’ll focus on the first part. Hamburger Model 
Tal likes food analogies. He mentions the Hamburger Model and Lasagna Principle. In the hamburger model, there are four types of hamburgers.
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A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink is about the world shifting from being knowledge worker centered to creatives. Abundance, Asia and Automation Traditional workers are screwed, because of abundance, asian and automation. There are more goods than we know what to do with. Before if you wanted a car, it meant a Ford Model T in black. Now there are a multitude of choices. As things get more abundant, they get cheaper and accessible to a larger proportion of the population. Asia is producing more workers who are willing to do higher skill jobs for cheaper, like reading tax returns, legal research, reading CAT scans, computer programming, financial analysis, etc. If people in Asia aren’t taking your job, then machines will. This paints a bleak picture of the future of workers, but I remember hearing about programming jobs being outsources to Indian after the dotcom bust, yet we have Google, Twitter, Facebook, Dropbox still hiring programmers in these here United States. My stance is that if you need combine both the left brain thinking of the knowledge worker and the right brain thinking of the creatives, you can achieve more. It is not enough for something to work, it must work well in human terms. The Six Senses
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This week I read The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor who goes around the world teaching people how to be happy. It is not success that leads to happiness, but happiness that leads to success. To be more successful, we should strive to be happier first. There is a lot in the book, so I’ll only point out things I found interesting. The Seven Principles
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Change by Design is written by TIm Brown, the CEO of IDEO, a famous design firm. I previously read Creative Confidence by the founders of IDEO, Tom and David Kelley. I’m a fan of design thinking and this book explains what design thinking is in the first part. The second part of the book reflects on designing thinking and impacting societal change. This book was a refresher, because I heard or read many of the stories before. If I were to get a person interested in design thinking, this book would be okay, but I think watching one of the videos of David talking or the ABC Nightline segment about IDEO designing a shopping cart is an easier introduction. Design thinking is better conveyed by seeing someone do it rather than reading stories of people doing it. The book is still a good introduction to design thinking. I’m not going to go into what design thinking is. You can read the book. Three Spaces of Innovation: inspiration, ideation, and implementation Inspiration is the problem or opportunity that needs a solution. Ideation is when you generate, develop and test new ideas. Implementation is taking the solution it to mark. Going between these three spaces is not a linear path. As you learn more things, you may have to go back to see if you are indeed working on the right problem. Culture and Environment You can’t just walk into the office and tell everyone to do design thinking. People must know they can experiment and take risks. You need to give people permission to fail. Rules for Brainstorming
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This week I read The Dip by Seth Godin. It is a book that tells you when to quit and when to stick to it. Previously I read the Purple Cow by Seth Godin. I like his books, because they are short and to the point. He conveys information without wasting my time. Quitting is a very important topic that is not discussed as much as it should be. Quitting is stigmatized. This topic has been tackled by Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt in Think Like a Freak. They have a rebroadcast of The Upside of Quitting on their podcast. I recommend listening to it. The Dip
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This week I read Hacking the Xbox, written by bunnie huang. He hacked the xbox while he was a PhD student in electrical engineering at MIT. After Aaron Swartz took his own life, bunnie made his book free to download in Aaron’s memory. Aaron was threatened by lawsuits from publishing companies trying to protect their copyrights on academic research journals. This would be a book I would give to an eager young mind wanting to get into electronics. Academic Publishing Academic publishing stinks. The government gives grants through the NSF, DoD and NIH to conduct research. Part of the grant budget includes fees that researchers have to pay to get their papers into journals. Academic organizations also pay subscription fees to the journals for access to articles. If they want to make the articles accessible to the general population for free, they need to pay even more fees to the publishing companies. When they download the pdfs of the articles, there are also ads on the page. If this seems broken to you, it is. academic publishing is ripe for disruption. Aaron was trying to free the information that tax dollars paid for. Aaron was trying to set knowledge free. Although that does not make what he did legal. Xbox Security Microsoft went to great lengths to secure the Xbox, so people couldn’t use it as a cheap PC. They even put a fake ROM chip with filled with apparent booting instructions to throw off would be hackers. Ultimately persistence and a community sharing their insights lead to the breaking of Xbox security letting anyone run their own software on the Xbox.
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I picked up Byrne’s New Standard Book of Pool and Billiards to improve my pool game. After an evening reading the book, my game has already improved. There is a lot of book to read, so I think of it more of a reference book for advanced pool playing. He covers the basics and goes into high level play. The book is composed of two books: Pool and Three Cushion Billiards.Three cushion billiards is really hard and is played on a table without pockets. You are probably going to spending most of your time playing pool. I’ve never seen a three cushion table. Bryne goes over many situations for each type of shot and how things change with english. Cue
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