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Book of the Week: Stumbling on Happiness
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. -
Book of the Week: How to Stop Worrying and Start Living
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. -
Book of the Week: So Good They Can't Ignore You
This week’s book is So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love by Cal Newport. Rule #1 Don’t Follow Your Passion “Don’t Follow Your Passion” is something you write to sell your book. Most people give the opposite advice and tell you to follow your passion. People such as the experts in 30 Lessons for Living tell you to pursue passion and purpose instead of taking the job that pays the most. Sounds nice, but the problem with following your passion is that most people don’t know what their passion is. This leads to uncertainty and mind wandering when you’re supposed to be focused on the here and now. -
Book of the Week: 30 Lessons for Living
My friend recommended 30 Lessons for Living to me. I wish I had read this book sooner. The book is composed of 5 lessons multiplied by 6 topics covering marriage, career advice, parenting, aging, living without regrets and happiness. I’ll ignore the parts on marriage and parenting since I’m not ready to learn those lessons. These lessons were complied from many interviews with experts on life, old timers. The grandpa of one of the old timers was around during the civil war. Hard to imagine, but the math works out. Think about the knowledge amassed from these many years of collective experience. Career Advice I’d rather read accounts from a primary source than to read one of those articles on a webpage that makes you keep clicking to see the next piece of advice. The first piece of advice is: Don’t choose a job because it pays more. I’ve heard this before, many times. If I wanted to be paid a lot, I probably would have chosen a different profession. Money is very tempting, but you’re going to trading your time, which is your most valuable resource. People are pleased when they pursue passion and purpose. If you can’t do that, then you should at least make the most of your situation and learn. End Game Life is short. You live and you die. Don’t forget to live. You also live when you’re old, so remember to take care of your body. Living Stop worrying. An idle person worries. There’s no point in worrying about something that you can’t control. If you can control it, then you should be doing stuff instead of worrying. Worrying is just a waste of time. No more worrying and whining. Say yes to challenges and opportunities for a more interesting life, a life with less regret. Travel Apparently travelling is very important. When you’re old it becomes harder to travel. It’s not material possession, but experiences that make people happy. Travel is full of experiences and stories to share. I should make a list of places I want to visit and so should you. This book makes you feel better about life. Every day is a gift. Purchase 30 Lessons for Living on Amazon.com or check it out from your local library. -
Book of the Week: Willpower
Willpower is a good book to read after reading Getting Things Done and Predictably Irrational. Throughout the book it keeps referring to Baumeister’s research. I didn’t remember that he was one of the authors of the book in addition to John Tierney. This book answers a lot of questions about how willpower works. There is a finite resivor of willpower, which gets depleted over time. Making many decisions eventually exhausts your willpower. Increasing your blood sugar can give you a lift. Since willpower is limited, we have to learn how to conserve our willpower and use tricks to make it last longer. Knowing more about willpower should help you reach your goals. Purchase Willpower from Amazon.com or check it out from your local library. -
Book of the Week: I'm Feeling Lucky
I’m Feeling Lucky chronicles the early days of Google from the eyes of employee #59, Douglas Edwards. His point of view was more relatable since he wasn’t an engineer. Here are a few highlights from the book. Definitely worth a read for an inside view of a unique company. Getting Lucky -
Book of the Week: Getting Things Done
Getting Things Done was recommended to me. The key to getting things done is relaxing. Your brain needs to take a dump. Once you’ve taken a dump, you can work without feeling constipated. Constipation leads to stress. Getting Things Done is not just about work, but about leading a better life. Need to trust your system. Need to be empty, embrace the void. What I like about David Allen’s book is that it mentions why, but leaves the how up to you. Everyone probably has systems which work for them, but it is what the system tries to achieve that is important. As more people shift from doing manual labor into creative work, the problem of getting things done is going to affect more people. Robots are going to take care of all the manual labor, so what will be left is creative work. For me to be productive, I need to get things out of my head and into a system I trust and can rely on. If I can’t rely on something, then I won’t be able to get these things out of my head. Things that may be important, but they aren’t important right now. In a way, this can be thought of as creating your own personal super executive assistant, who you can trust to keep you notified of important things that need your consideration. The other half of getting out of your head is to actually do some processing of your projects into next actions to take. You know where you want to be, so you need to identify all the steps you need to take to get closer to your goals. If these are unclear, then you need to spend some quality time thinking about it. Maker’s Time This is probably related to maker’s time. It takes a while for someone to process things and attain a relaxed state. This relaxed state is when a maker can make and get things done. Tickler File Every time there was a mention of the “tickler” file, I kept thinking of Phil’s BBQ Tickler menu item. Thinking about food and reading don’t mix. I have a Pavlovian response to “ tickler”. Purchase Getting Things Done on Amazon.com or check it out from your local library. -
Book of the Week: Beautiful Data
The kiwi book, Beautiful Data, is a collection of articles about different data topics. My favorite chapter is about how the image processing software on the Phoenix lander works. Cloud technologies are the hottest thing right now, but there is something very gritty and down to the core about writing software for the lander. The amount of constraints on processing, bandwidth and memory cause you to think a bit differently. I was surprised to find out there is no dynamic memory allocation allowed to protect against software bugs. It’s not if someone can just press reset on a Mars lander. Purchase Beautiful Data on Amazon.com or check it out from your local library. -
Book of the Week: The Black Swan
This week, I read The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. As I started reading the book, I got the feeling that the author is a guy that likes to hear himself talk. Not to say it is a bad thing, but I was trying to read the book as fast as I could to extract the gold nuggets. If I had more time and education, I would probably enjoy reading more about history and philosophy. What is a Black Swan? -
Book of the Week: Predictably Irrational
Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational explores the behavioral psychology behind why humans make irrational decisions. Each chapter is a self contained nugget of information, so here are some summaries/thoughts I had about each chapter. Chapter 1 The Truth about Relativity(Why everything is relative, even when it shouldn’t be) People’s perceptions and decision are made by comparisons. Your new iPhone is awesome when it comes out, but when a newer iPhone comes out, it no longer is as awesome even though it is the same phone. A person can be making a lot of money, but if they are making less money than their peers, then they are not as happy. Taking a step back and appreciating what we have will make us happier. Chapter 2 The Fallacy of Supply and Demand(Why the price of pearls and everything else is up in the air) Once people have an anchor, the decisions they make will be compared to the anchor. Subsequent decisions are made with the anchor in mind. To avoid failing victim to this, you need to revaluate old decisions to see if they are still valid. One thing would be reevaluating your current job. Chapter 3 The Cost of Zero Cost(Why we often pay too much when we pay nothing) People would do things for free stuff that they wouldn’t do for things that cost 1 cent. Free is in a category of its own for pricing. We don’t take into account other opportunity costs when factoring for free things. Chapter 4 The Cost of Social Norms (Why we are happy to do things, but not when we are paid to do them) People are more willing to volunteer their time for free than at a reduced rate. Need to appeal to values to truly motivate people. -
Book of the Week: The Innovator's Dilemma
The Innovator’s Dilemma was the perfect book to read after Crossing the Chasm. While Crossing the Chasm was about users, The Innovator’s Dilemma is about product. The book was first published in 1997, so we know what happened in the future with solid state drives replacing hard drives and the electric car. Knowing the future only reinforces the central thesis in the book. I liked this book. This book is about how being a good company sets up for failure. My point of view is that of the disrupter rather than the manager at a big company. This book like so many of the others I have read is split into two parts. If I had a dollar for every book that was split into two parts, I’d be wealthy. The first part of the book is about “Why Great Companies Can Fail”. This consists of examples to support the central thesis. The second part of the book is about “Managing Disruptive Technological Change”. Examples are given of companies that have successfully managed and those that have not. There are two types of technologies: sustaining and disrupting. Sustaining technologies make the existing product better for the mainstream customer. Disrupting technologies start up worse for the mainstream customer, but eventually get good enough to supersede the previous technology thereby screwing the companies that only invested in sustaining technologies. Being a leader in sustaining technology doesn’t make much a difference in the long run, but being a leader in disruptive technologies can pay huge dividends. When I was almost done reading the book, I realized this is a bit analogous to investing. Warren Buffett can’t invest in small companies now since they don’t make a dent in comparison to Berkshire Hathaway’s market cap. The opportunities may be greater with the small companies, but he has to play in a different league because of his size. The same can be said with companies. Established companies have an established customer base with certain needs and demands. Great companies provide things that the customer needs. Sustaining technologies are suited to taking care of those needs. Disruptive technologies start out unable to compete on the mainstream needs, but offer a different value set. The problem with big companies is that the value set of the disruptive technology does not match up with the value set of their existing customers. New entrants need to find new customers and create new markets for their disruptive technology. The company goals are aligned with the customer needs in this case. As the technology matures, it starts to gain mainstream customers, because old product and new product can fulfill their needs, but new product offers added value. Each disruptive technology is like a startup looking for a market and customer. Big established companies aren’t good at being startups, so a possible course of action is to spin out a separate entity that has separate goals from the parent company. If you decide the rules of the game you’re playing, you can win. A company with a disruptive technology should not play in established markets. They need to create new markets where they can win. A point where great companies failed is that they tried to play in their established market with their new disruptive technology. It seems to mean to succeed at this, you need a two-headed beast. One head to keep existing customers happy and another head to search for new opportunities. This is why there will always be startups that succeed where big companies fail. Purchase The Innovator’s Dilemma at Amazon.com or check it out from your local library. -
Recovering From MacBook Pro Hard Drive Failure
My computer kept freezing when I was using the Chrome browser. Just recently Chrome was updated to a new version, so I thought the new version was buggy. Turns out the new version of Chrome wasn’t buggy, my hard drive was dying. Recently it made an unhappy noise after I moved it while in bed. I should have known then, but I wasn’t paying enough attention. If I was more vigilant in my backups I would not have to recover the hard drive. I’ve been pretty busy with the Insight Data Science Fellowship that I neglected my backups. It seems like OSX wants to finish writing the journal entry to the hard drive, but when it does that it encounters an error. I know windows is F8 during boot, but I had to look up the startup key combinations for the mac. Command-v | Verbose Mode
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C | Start up from a bootable CD, DVD, or USB thumb drive
I popped in my Ubuntu CD and copied my user directory to a Windows network share. Create Mount Point ` $ sudo mkdir /mnt/MOUNT_POINTMount Share Drive$ sudo mount -t cifs -o guest //LOCALHOST/SHARE_NAME /mnt/MOUNT_POINTTar user directory$ sudo bash