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Since I was inspired to build a creative company from reading Creativity, Inc., I decided to read Creative Confidence by Tom and David Kelley and so I can be creative myself. Tom and David Kelley started IDEO, a famous design firm. I’ve been a fan of IDEO since watching the Nightline special on redesigning a shopping cart. The founding of Stanford’s d.school has only made me more of a fan. Creative Confidence We are all innately creative, but school beats the creativity out of you. When you’re afraid of looking stupid, you lose ability to be creative. To teach people how to design well, Tom and David had to show people that they can be creative. By using techniques similar to how people get over the fear of snakes, they guided people through baby steps and let people practice their creativity. Eventually something flips in their head and they realize they were creative all along. This book is about developing your creative confidence. Design Thinking 
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I’ve read books (Theory of Blackjack and Beat the Dealer) on the technical aspects of blackjack, but I hadn’t read books that were devoted to person accounts. It was time to change that with The Blackjack Life recommended to me by a coworker. It was a good read. There is this legend of the MIT blackjack team that makes becoming a professional card counter seem like you need to be a genius. Nathaniel Tilton became a professional Blackjack player without being a genius from MIT. He did it the old fashion way. He spent a lot of time practicing and focusing on perfecting his game. Being a professional blackjack player means you have to treat it like a job. In order to win statistically, you have to play a lot of shoes. That means spending a lot of time going from casino to casino. I think it would be cool to count cards, but I’m probably better off spending my time learning to do something else like curing cancer.
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Instead of reading about startups this week, I read The Start-up of You by Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn and PayPal mafia member and Ben Casnocha, some other guy. Since Reid created LinkedIn, most of the book is about professional development in trying to find your career path through leveraging your skills and professional network. I would have stopped reading the book if it told me to pursue my passion, but I’m glad the book mentions that most people don’t know their passion. Pursuing your passion is a lie. If you want to know the truth about passion I recommend So Good They Can’t Ignore You. Before people used to work at one company until they died, but this is no longer the case because of globalization and technology. You’re either going to be replaced by someone in India or by some piece of software written by someone in India. This book would be a good gift for someone a year or two from graduating college. It takes time for things to sink in and to put things into practice. ABZ Planning Plan A is what you are doing right now. Plan B is what you pivot to from A that is close enough to be an easier transition. Plan Z is when all else fails. Having a Plan Z let’s you tolerate more uncertainty and risk. The worst things could be if you fail. They also make it a point to differentiate uncertainty and risk. Things can be uncertain, but not risky. Some people are bothered by uncertainty, so they don’t jump on opportunities. In the startup world, there are pivots that companies make when the company takes on a new business direction to survive. Netflix went to movie rentals by mail to dvd subscriptions by mail to movies over the internet to producing their own content. Flickr used to be an online social game. Groupon used to be a platform for people to pledge support to social or civic causes. By treating your own development like a startup, you can achieve bigger and better things. Specifics are in the book. Networks
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I was browsing books, when I saw Do Cool Sh*t: Quit Your Day Job, Start Your Own Business, and Live Happily Ever After by Miki Agrawal. Not a book that I would go out of my way to read, but since everything I wanted to read was on hold, I wanted to give it a try. I want to do cool shit too. It was also a quick read. Rules and Limits The book is a composed of stories of how she became a successful entrepreneur. Halfway through the book I figured out out why I disliked her. At first I thought it was jealously, because why is she a successful entrepreneur hanging out with Tony Hsieh and I’m not. That wasn’t the case. It is because I’m was brought up in an educational system that taught me to obey the rules. Entrepreneurs break rules. It’s true. The YC application asks about rules that you have broken. I understand why now. She broke the rules and got away with it. In my naïve mind I considered that cheating and unfair. I didn’t like her, because she cheated and got away with it. Hacking in a sense is rule breaking. Hacking involves taking rigid things and bending them so they work together to accomplish a greater goal. After a few more chapters, I couldn’t hold it against her anymore, because she hustled. You have to respect someone who hustles and doesn’t take no for an answer. She did things that I didn’t have the courage to do. Each step she took and I didn’t take was like compounding interest. Over time that builds up. Most limits are self-imposed. That stops people from achieving until someone comes along and shatters the status quo. An example of this is Takeru Kobayashi who developed better ways to eat hot dogs and shattered the world record. He’s not any more predispositioned to hot dog eating than the average Joe. He thought people could do better, so he developed new techniques. Once other people learned his techniques, they also shattered the previous records. If you already have a predefined barrier in your mind, you will only do as well as the barrier. In the real world, there aren’t rules. You do things and other things happen as a consequence. A successful entrepreneur leverages those consequences to accomplish their goals and ambitions. I went from being annoyed to admiration of Miki. I am going to continue doing cool shit.
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This week I read #GIRLBOSS, written by NastyGal’s CEO, Sophia Amoruso. The book is a tale of how she went from dumpster diving, shoplifting and hitchhiking to opening her own vintage eBay store that grew in one of the fastest-growing retailers. I like the book, because it felt really authentic. She seems like one of the people I met in San Francisco growing up. Schooling
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I couldn’t have picked a better book to follow Good to Great. Since I know what it takes to make a good company great, I can see those same things described in this book. In Creativity, Inc., Ed Catmull, cofounder and the CTO of Pixar, talks about the business side of creating a creative culture and protecting that culture. Ed Catmull is not only a legend in the area of computer graphics, but he also went to school with other people who founded Adobe, Silicon Graphics, and Netscape. When I think of great companies, Pixar is on that list. They made hit movie after hit movie. The worst thing about the company is that nobody quits, so there is no upward mobility. If the worst thing about your company is that nobody quits, things have to be pretty good there. The book is divided into four parts: Getting Started, Protecting the New, Building and Sustaining, and Testing What We Know. Team > Ideas
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What does it take to make a good company, great? Jim Collins and his research team spent 5 years to find out. Good to Great was published in 2001, before the financial crisis of 2008. At the end of each chapter, there is a helpful summary. The things that make companies great should be something that transcends time periods. The Companies Jim and team developed some stringent criteria based on the stock performance of publicly traded companies to identify the great companies. The 11 companies that made the cut are Abbott Laboratories (ABT), Circuit City Stores, Fannie Mae (FNMA), Gillette Company, Kimberly-Clark (KMB), Kroger (KR), Nucor (NUE), Philip Morris (PM), Pitney Bowes (PBI), Walgreens (WAG) and Wells Fargo (WFC). Fannie Mae is surprising, because their greatness caused the financial crisis due to the creation of mortgage-backed securities and trying to manage risk with them. Gillette merged with Proctor and Gamble (PG), who was painted as a nemesis in the book. Circuit City went bankrupt. Greatness doesn’t always last. The topic of maintaining greatness is covered in Jim’s other book, Built to Last. Level 5
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This week I read Flash Boys by Michael Lewis to find out that I’ve been getting screwed in the stock market this entire time. The book seems like an advertisement of IEX, whose value proposition is that they don’t screw you like everyone else. Milliseconds Thousandth’s of a second matter in the high frequency trading world. If you put it a buy order, it gets routed to several exchanges. Someone who gets information and conducts trades faster than you will buy the shares at a lower price and sell it back to you at a higher price since your order will hit one exchange before it hits the other exchanges. One way to prevent this is to add delays such that your orders hit all exchanges simultaneously or trade on exchange only. Due to some laws and the size of the order, you will probably have to hit multiple exchanges to fulfill your order. High frequency traders will do anything to get an edge like physically putting their computers closer to the exchanges. Small Shops vs Big Banks Big banks suck at high frequency trading, which is dominated by companies most people haven’t heard of. Wall street people are bullshit their way to the top. The problem is that they start believing themselves. Part of bullshitting is to bluff to keep people in the dark about their own value and your own weakness. Everyone is out to screw each other so they can make a buck at your expense. Money can only buy so much. If you want to get good people, you need to appeal with them with something other than money. The people who can do that are leaders. They can convince people to give up stability and comfort to join them in the trenches. Russian Mafia Turns out many high frequency coders are Russians who can code well and know how to work the system. Wall Street is all about working the system to your advantage. A lot of the things that banks and exchanges do are to give high frequency traders more of an advantage. High frequency trading converts information to money without taking any risk. They only have to worry about other high frequency trading companies beating them to the punch. IEX The characters in the story form IEX, an exchange designed not to screw the investor. You follow them on their journey of putting the pieces together to find out how investors are getting screwed to getting IEX to be successful. I wonder if I should ask my broker to route all my trades through IEX now.
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I try to practice lean startup methodologies, but I have never read the book behind it. This week, it was time to correct that oversight by reading The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, an entrepreneur who has navigated through failure to success. The lean startup method takes a scientific approach to creating a successful company through validated learning. Minimum Viable Product
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When All Hell Breaks Lose covers surviving the initial days after a catastrophic emergency, but I want more than to just survive. I want to be able to rebuild a civilization. Lewis Dartnell’s The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch goes through the thought experiment of the necessary steps and leaps that one would need to make to rebuild. What shortcuts can we take and what is the bare minimum it takes to get something going again? Chemistry I like the chemistry sections, where he explains how you can extract certain compounds and how you can combine those compounds to do useful things. Like using wood ash and fat to make soap or making ammonia by fermenting pots of piss. Or how to make gunpowder. I wonder why I wasn’t taught chemistry in this fashion. Historical The historical information was also interesting. Like how René Laennec invented the stethoscope, because he was uneasy about pressing his ear and check agains the chest of a buxom woman. Or how wars were fought over islands for their guano. Shit was valuable, because it was hard to get nitrogen in usable form before the invention of the Haber-Bosch process. It is hard to imagine having such a large population without that process. You probably won’t be able to rebuild the world after reading this book, but serves as a guide post to reflect on how we got to where we are as a civilization and the things we take for granted.
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This week I decided to read Road Trip California Highway 1 from Lonely Planet in preparation of my road trip. This book was published in October 2003, so it is a little dated. There was a blurb about the best bookstores. I’d bet money that half of those bookstores do not exist anymore. I found myself wanting more information. There are only bits and pieces of outdated information in the book. For food stuff, I can just pull out a smartphone and check out yelp at the spur of the moment. The only thing I found useful was the price comparison of places of lodgings. It listed places where I can setup a tent for cheap. Another thing of interest is how the ticket prices have doubled in the last decade. We are spoiled by having all this information at our finger tips. Back in the days, people just bought a book and drove. Someone people just drove. After I finished reading the book, I was not any closer to planning my road trip. Maybe a road trip isn’t something you plan, but something you just do. Time to hit the road.
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I found out about Maus from reading lists of top graphic novels. After reading it, I can definitely see why Art Spiegelman won a Pulitzer Prize for it. The subject matter is heavy. The book is about a comic artist’s relationship with his dad who survived Auschwitz. He asks his dad about how he survived as a Jew during World World II in Poland. I would put this book in the same ballpark as Schindler’s List. The writing is great, I kept wanting to read page after page. I didn’t pay attention to the art style as much as I did to the words. Usually people like reading about happy things, but I can’t really say it made me as sad and depressed as an account of the Holocaust could have. It is a much more human story. Maus is worth reading as a reminder. People complain about having 1st world problems. After reading Maus, I think it is hard for anyone to complain about even 3rd world problems. If you’re alive, you already have it pretty good.
