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• Book of the Week: The Happiness Advantage

  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

• Book of the Week: Change By Design

  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

• Book of the Week: The Dip

  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

• Book of the Week: Hacking the Xbox

  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.

• Book of the Week: Bryne's New Standard Book of Pool and Billiards

  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

• Bryne S New Standard Book Of Pool And Billiards

  

• Book of the Week: Encyclopedia of Ethical Failure

  This week I read the Encyclopedia of Ethical Failure, published by the United States Department. This book was mentioned in Think Like a Freak and the Freakonomics podcast. It details the known ethical failures in the government with what happened, which law they broke and what the punishment was. It was pretty entertaining to flip through. It is nice to know that some of the government wastes are actually being caught. PaySchedule It mentions a lot of pay demotions. The pay grade is denoted by a letter and a number. The letter is the classification and the number is what level. The higher the level, the more you are paid. You can check out what the levels are at U.S. Office of Personnel Management. Things I Learned

• Book of the Week: Think Like a Freak

  From the writers of Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics. They got tired of answering people’s questions, so they wrote a book to teach everyone to Think Like a Freak. Three Hardest Words

• Book of the Week: make space

  I’ve read about creative confidence and making creative companies, but what happens when you already have an organization. How do you house this organization to make to more creative and collaborative? This book, make space, is about how to create spaces for being creative and making stuff. It came of of ideas developed at the Stanford d.school. The book comes across like a coffee table book, where it is a lot of photos and many sections, so you can pick it up, read a few pages, get some ideas and put it down.

• Book of the Week: The Everything Store

  My book club decided to start with The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. It is quite fitting that I read the book on an Amazon Kindle. I’ve heard most of the stories about Amazon (AMZN) before, like how he was adopted and how Amazon has two pizza teams. What I learned most were the people around Jeff in the early days. A lot of the mythology of a company surrounds the founder, but it is nice to learn about the other people too. Things get crazy in the early days of startups when there is explosive growth. One wonders how the company survived. Surviving

• Book of the Week: The Frackers

  This week I read The Frackers, recommended to me by a coworker. It is a good book that tells the background of the people who changed the energy equation in the United States through horizontal drilling combined with hydraulic fracturing. These people were risk takers chasing after oil and natural gas. They saw possibilities where other people previously wrote off. If they weren’t relentless in their pursuit of gas from shale, the technology wouldn’t haven’t advanced. The more promising something looks, the more people jump in and the faster things advance. Moonlighting I learned the term moonlighting came from the oil industry where people tried to dodge royalty payments by using patented technology in the middle of the night. Risks and Rewards The Frackers reminds me of what it means to be an American and what the American dream is. It is also the reason why people are not willing to tax the rich, because they hope to be rich someone day. You are never going to be rich if you don’t put your money on the line to take risks or take on debt.

• Book of the Week: The Tipping Point

  Since I liked Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, I decided to read another one of his books, The Tipping Point. Tipping points are important, because they represent a drastic change that presents opportunities for those about to take advantage. One scientific example of a tipping point is when water under goes a phase change at zero degrees Celsius. It suddenly changes from water to ice. Two vastly different properties of a material with a slight temperature difference.