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• 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.

• Book of the Week: Creative Confidence

  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

• Book of the Week: The Blackjack Life

  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.

• Book of the Week: The Start-up of You

  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

• Book of the Week: Do Cool Sh*t

  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.

• Book of the Week: #GIRLBOSS

  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

• Book of the Week: Creativity, Inc.

  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