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The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey is a popular book. It is not a book you can read quickly and hope to gain anything from it. Habits take conscious effort and time to develop. I was turned off by the book in the beginning, because it was very preachy. It is a book written for managers who aren’t very good at being managers. If you’re good, then you already have these habits. If your manager sucks, then I suggest this book as a gift. Purchase The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People on Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.
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Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge From Small Discoveries by Peter Sims discusses how to achieve greatness by starting with little bets. I didn’t know that the Google PageRank algorithm was originally designed for the Stanford Digital Library Project. It was mentioned as an alternative to the h-index when I was reading about measuring quality of research. No wonder, it was what it was designed for that in the first place. Once something becomes big, you forget that it once started out as something small. Making Bets Bets are a way of getting information, because you have no clue. The more bets you make, the more information you can obtain and the better decisions you can make.
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Reading Setting up a Tropical Aquarium Week by Week, made me think about whether we need books like this anymore. I can read whatever Google shows me about tropical aquariums. Before the internet, if I wanted to learn about tropical aquariums I would have to ask people with tropical aquariums or read books. What I appreciated about the book was that it had lots of pictures with information presented in a logical order. What was lacking was the ability to dive deeper into a topic. The problem with the internet is that there is tons of information, but it is in bits and pieces with some of the information conflicting. It is difficult to aggregate and curate information on the internet. The Aquarium Wiki is good for reference, but not a good introduction. Tropical Fish - A Beginner’s Guide is a community effort to organize information into an ebook. The ebook wins on content, but loses in presentation since it lacks design and layout. If I want to read about another topic it might not have a community-generated ebook. The internet is missing an easy aggregation and presentation layer. Purchase Setting up a Tropical Aquarium Week by Week on Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.
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Before I have something to market, I need a good idea. To tackle this problem, I turn to Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. Johnson discusses 7 patterns that emerged from studying innovation. To save you the time from reading the book, I refer you to a 5 minute youtube video on the subject. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NugRZGDbPFU&w;=560&h;=315] The 7 patterns are the adjacent possible, liquid networks, the slow hunch, serendipity, error, exaptation and platforms. The adjacent possible is why scientist have independently made the same discoveries around same time. The world was ready for the innovation since the framework for it was built. Innovation and creativity is about connecting stuff together. You get a bunch of stuff, some of it good, some of it bad and mix it a bit. It stews and suddenly something triggers and you have a good idea. Johnson makes the argument that cities speed up innovation, because they have enough density to allow for interactions that lead to innovation. Is there an optimal density of people to have? Instead of reading about where ideas come from, how about generating your own good ideas with design thinking. Purchase Where Good Ideas Come From on Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.
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Purple Cow is for the marketing people who were left out of the startup world. The business people read Crossing the Chasm. The Innovator’s Dilemma was a good read for the engineers. These books are all about taking the first step toward creating a remarkable, innovative company. Traditionally hiring marketing and sales people come later. As a founder, you need to go out and do the marketing and sales in the beginning to learn about your customer. Those who hire people to do those roles at the onset are doomed to failure. I would read Crossing the Chasm first.
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This week, I read Unconventional Success by David F. Swensen, the Chief Investment Officer at Yale. This book is targeted toward the individual investor rather than institutions like his previous book, Pioneering Portfolio Management. This is a good book to read if you are getting into investing. I wish I had read it earlier. TLDR : The best advice is to buy an ETF that tracks the S&P; 500 or Wilshire 5000. On foreign equities
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There are art books that go on your coffee table and there are art books that you keep on your bookshelf. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: The Art and Creation of Walt Disney’s Classic Animated Film goes on the bookshelf. Before I went to the Walt Disney Family Museum, I thought Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was just another animated movie. It was the first full-length cel animated feature film that started what we know as Disney animated films today. It was amazing to see how many concepts were developed and what did not go into the final cut of the movie. This isn’t a book you look at for the eye candy, but to learn about the decisions that went into making the film. I would watch Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs again before reading this art book. Purchase Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: The Art and Creation of Walt Disney’s Classic Animated Film on Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.
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New programmers often ask for what books they should read once they start working. Code Complete 2nd Edition is often at or near the top of this list. This book teaches you what you didn’t learn in school. You learn how to code in school, but you don’t learn how to develop software. It is like learning to write in school versus being a novelist. This book is too thick and I am too busy to read this cover to cover, but in the 15 minutes that I took to flip through the book, I already learned something that will change the way I write code. I only wonder how many more gold nuggets are in it. Purchase Code Complete from Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.
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Happiness is hot field of research. If I had to do college over again, I would major in happiness and become a Chief Happiness Officer after getting my Happiness BS. I previously read Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness. Now it is time for Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. What’s happiness and what can I do to get more of it? Like everyone else, I’ve tried to pursue more happiness. It remains elusive. Everyone could use a little more happiness in their lives. Have you ever lusted after something and pictured yourself with the object of your lust, only to find yourself still unhappy? If thinking about the future can be pleasurable, then it would be a good idea to delay gratification in order to enjoy the wait and contemplation. What are we doing while we are waiting? We are picturing ourselves in the future. Am I any happier being able to buy things on a whim rather than saving money for a period of time to finally be able to purchase the item? How much stuff do we actually use? Your thoughts about the future and what actually happens, differs. Imagination can be a very good or a very bad thing. The flip side of an active imagination is worrying about the future, because we project all the negative things that could occur. Control Like we learned in previous books, control makes people happy. Some of the research conducted to figure this out resulted in the deaths of elderly people. Old people are happier when they can decide the time visitors come and chat. People should talk to more old people. They are dying, because people aren’t talking to them. Lotteries use the illusion of control to trick you. People think they have a higher chance of winning a lottery, because they can pick the numbers. People won’t buy a raffle with the same probabilities. What is Happiness? People are happy because they don’t know what they are missing out on. Think about Apple products. People are content with their current iDevices until the next new thing gets announced. People aren’t as happy with what they have if they know something better exists. Going to see a movie with your girlfriend in college can bring you as much happiness as buying a Porsche during your midlife crisis. Your parents playing with sticks and stones when they were little were probably as happy as your kids playing video games now. People don’t know their own hearts. Finding your passion makes you happy, but most people don’t know their passion, so they can’t predict what would make them happy. Happiness may be different for different people. This makes it hard to define and quantify happiness. Memory How our memory works is used as a guide to explain how we perceive happiness. Our memory sucks. Experiments have shown that information after an event can alter our memories of the event. This is how magic works. Our brain tries to connect the dots. Magic is magical, because it clashes with how we connect the dots. We don’t see what’s between the dots. What We Don’t See In choosing something to accept, we look for the best positive features. To choose what to reject, we choose the worst negative features. We don’t think about what’s missing. This is why we an inability to predict an outlier. Machine learning algorithms also suffer from this defect, because they do their predictions based on what has been observed in the past. Our Imagination is limited by current experiences. Diverse experiences should lead to a better imagination. Predictably Irrational Here are some points that were also raised in Predictably Irrational.
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One of the lessons from 30 Lessons for Living is to stop worrying. This week, I divide further into the topic of worry with How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie. The same Dale Carnegie who wrote How to Win Friends and Influence People.