Latest Posts

• Book of the Week: The Achievement Habit

  I was listening to the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders podcast and they had on this old fart that I really liked. Turns out he wrote a book, so this week I read The Achievement Habit by Bernard Roth, d.school founder and mechanical engineering professor. This book contains things that Roth has learned throughout his years of teaching. It complements everything I know about and have read very nicely. I really liked the book. Enough to make it worth owning. The book has “your turn” exercises, which are probably modeled after exercises he does in his classes. I advise you to do them. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CR8LQTfLvfw&w;=560&h;=315] After reading this book and The No Asshole Rule, it seems that if you’re a professor for a long time, you eventually will make someone cry.

• Book of the Week: Words and Rules

  This week I read Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language by Steven Pinker. Pinker examines how language and the mind works by examining regular and irregular verbs. On this journey, you learn about how scientist measure activity in different regions of the brain, how children learn language, different linguistic theories, what we can learn from neural network models and just generally about things you take for granted. As a person who works with language, I wish I read this book earlier. Words and Rules A word is a memorized association between a sound and a meaning. Rules are productive, symbolic and combinatorial. It doesn’t specify specific things, but how you bring together different kinds of things. You can combine things in any number of ways as long as they follow the rules. There are 6.4 trillion five-word sentences. Not all of them make sense, but you can generate them all based on your words and rules. The rules let you compute the meaning of a combination from the meaning of the words and how they are combined. Sentences are created by taking a set of memorized words), applying rules that combine words and parts of words into bigger words (morphology) and using rules that combine words into phrases and sentences (syntax).

• Book of the Week: Smarter Faster Better

  This week, I read Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Product in Life and Business, by Charles Duhigg, the author of The Power of Habit. I think everyone wouldn’t mind being smarter, faster and better. The books describes concepts related to being smarter, faster and better, but I didn’t come away with concrete things I need to do to make myself better. It was more about how to think about things. Charles found 8 key concepts repeated in his learnings on productivity. Each chapter describes a concept and jumps between a few stories.

• Book of the Week: Programming Interviews Exposed

  I gave advice to someone seeing an internship to read Programming Interviews Exposed and Cracking The Coding Interview, but I confess I haven’t read those books myself. This week, I read Programming Interviews Exposed to see if I gave bad advice. Personally I hate coding interview questions, but they seem to be the norm if you’re looking for a software engineering job. The only way I can keep it from being the norm is by building a successful software company that doesn’t use these type of coding interview questions. In Silicon Valley, monkey see, monkey do. This is another book that takes an effort to be inclusive and not assume that all programmers are male. Isis Anchalee and Tracy Chou would be proud. The first part of the book describes the job hunt in general, which is great if you’re a new graduate, because you have no idea what to expect and have no idea of what to do. Each chapter on questions first covers the topic before diving into the questions. This gives you the opportunity to learn about the topic. Each question is followed by a detailed solution. List of Topics

• Book of the Week: The Special Operations Nutrition Guide

  I’m about half way through with my navy special warfare training program and started hitting some of the minimum requirements. Hopefully by the end of the program I’ll hit all the minimum requirements across the navy seal physical screen test. I’m starting to feel that my body is not keeping up with training. This keeps me from getting better every day. I was advised to read The Special Operations Nutrition Guide by someone else doing the program. The guide is well-written and starts with an executive summary highlighting all the important points. You probably want to read the executive summary and the 1st half of the guide. The 2nd half of guide is specific to special operation forces. Carbohydrates One of the keys to nutrition is balancing energy intake with energy expenditures. You need to take your age, weight and activity level into account when determining your energy requirements. Running a marathon can easily double my energy requirements for the day. Carbohydrates (CHO) are not bad. Eating more CHO than you need is bad. There are also some CHO than are worst than others like trans fat. The usual CPF (CHO: Protein: Fat) breakdown should approximate: 55% CHO, 20% Protein and Fat 25% in terms of calories.

• Book of the Week: The No Asshole Rule

  It started with an article in Harvard Business Review and ended up as a book, The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t. Tons of people wrote to Bob Sutton about their own personal asshole stories. Turns out there are a lot of assholes in the world. I aspire to smart enough to be one. Bob has been known to be an ass and make women cry. Assholes Before you start talking with assholes, we need to precisely define what is an asshole. Some people can be assholes, but some people are assholes. Asshole Test Test One: After talking to the alleged asshole, does the “target” feel oppressed, humiliated, de-energized, or belittled by the person? In particular, does the target feel worse about him or herself? Test Two: Does the alleged asshole aim his or her venom at people who are less powerful rather than at those people who are more powerful?

• Book of the Week: Understanding Wood

  After reading The Fine Art of Cabinetmaking I knew I had to learn more about wood. This week I read Understanding Wood: A Craftsman’s Guide to Wood Technology. After reading all these books about woodworking, I realize that you need long periods of time to do anything with wood. Jimmy Carter had to retire first before deeply immersing himself in woodworking. Woodworking is a way of life. A way of life I will have to wait till later in life to pursue to the fullest. I can probably start with planting some trees now. This book has more than I would ever want to know about wood. Purchase Understanding Wood from Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.

• Book of the Week: The SaaS Startup Founder's Guide

  This week I read The SaaS Startup Founder’s Guide from Salesforce (CRM). It’s free and Salesforce has almost a $50B market cap, so I figured it was worth a read. I was worried it was full of Salesforce propaganda, but it was good since it covered something I know very little about, how to build a sales team. Many companies are portrayed as overnight successes in the media, but that is usually far from the truth. Slack was actually founded in 2008. It usually takes at least 7 years to get to an IPO. Consumer internet companies can become huge in 2 years. 2 years is the amount of time to just get a SaaS company off the ground. Should I Start a Saas Company? Here are three questions to ask yourself.

• Book of the Week: Insight Out

  This week I read Tina Seelig’s Insight Out: Get Ideas Out of Your Head and Into the World. I previously read inGenius by Tina. This book introduces the invention cycle, which describes the stages that bring an idea to life. This book is about bringing ideas to life, not necessarily companies. At the end of each chapter there are assignments to do, which help reinforce the content. At the end of the book Tina talks about how the invention cycle compares to design thinking and the lean startup methodology. When I started reading the book, I was worried that I heard all the stories already and would feel disappointed. I’m glad that wasn’t the case. If I heard the story already, I would read through it quickly and focus on the point that Tina was going to make. I am worried that if you can only refer to the same stories over and over again, maybe things won’t work for you. It’s like saying you can play basketball, here’s the story of Michael Jordan Nine Dots Puzzle I didn’t know that the origin of the phrase, thinking outside the box, is from the 9 dots puzzle. You need to connect all 9 dots by drawing 4 straight lines without lifting your pen. The phrase is enough to give you a clue on how to solve it. Tina’s criticism of the phrase is that it is not actionable. That’s great advice, but what do I do? The Invention Cycle [caption id=”attachment_4779” align=”aligncenter” width=”566”] https://medium.com/@tseelig/inventure-cycle-e89579b328da#.5n3c123h5[/caption] The book is about the invention cycle. It starts with imagination, which leads into creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship. It’s a cycle, so it keeps going in an endless cycle. The important part is how you move from one part of the cycle to the other. What it takes to make that leap. Imagination

• Book of the Week: CIA Lock Picking

  This week I read the CIA Lock Picking: Field Operative Training Manual to add to my repertoire of useful skills that I hope I never need to use. Lock picking is pretty easy if you know how a lock works.

• Book of the Week: Tartine Bread

  This week I read Tartine Bread by Chad Robertson, the co-owner of Tartine Bakery in San Francisco. I confess I’ve never actually eaten their bread, but I’ve heard great things. The good thing about the book is that I don’t have to go their to eat their bread, because Chad tells you how to do it. If you want to bake your own, you can follow the Tartine Country Bread recipe on New York Times if you don’t have the book. The book has more than 60 pages describing that recipe, which forms the base for everything else. Sourdough Starter San Francisco is known for its sourdough bread. It must be the climate and the salty sea air that creates the ideal environment for sourdough. The difficult thing about baking is that you are dealing with something that is living. You need to coax a symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast (SCOBY) to do what you want. The sourness come from the bacteria and the yeast produces carbon dioxide which helps the bread rise. Bread making starts with having a sourdough starter. You can make one yourself from wild bacteria and yeast from your environment. It takes about 2 weeks of feeding it with flour and water for it to stabilize and be usable in bread making. I tried making one, but it died and I had to start over. Having a starter is like having a pet, you need to check on it and feed it regularly. It is a living thing. Making Bread If you want to make bread, you need a scale. Volume measurements using cups are inaccurate. It can very depending on how you pack the cup. Scales are a necessity. When people come over, they think I’m a crack dealer, because I have scales and white powder everywhere. It is also useful to have a journal. When dealing with something alive, things can vary a lot. The temperature of the room changes through the day. You can pick a period of time when your starter is feeling a bit sluggish. It may take a little bit more time for the dough to rise. As you make more, you can see how to respond to the bread to know when it is ready instead of following a blind formula. There is only so much you can control. Flour is cheap, so you can experiment a lot. Baking Bread One of the secrets of this book is the use of a cast iron dutch oven. You get big holes in your bread and a nice crust by baking in a humid environment. Commercial bakers have ovens that can inject steam to achieve this effect. This is why it is hard to make bread at home that is as good as bread you can buy from a bakery. Chad got around this by baking the bread inside a dutch oven. It provides a large enough enclosed space to retain the moisture to make excellent bread without needing to inject steam. You bake the bread in a seal environment first and then take off the top to finish it off to get that nice crust. Bread is such a staple and essential part of food. I think everyone should know how to bake a good loaf of bread. Purchase Tartine Bread from Amazon.com or check it out from your local library. Resources

• Book of the Week: The Fine Art of Cabinetmaking

  This week, I read The Fine Art of Cabinetmaking by James Krenov. Why did I read it? It was on a list. The book has 3 parts. It starts with a section on wood, then it talks about the workshop and tools (how to make hand planes). Finally it covers the details of cabinetmaking. You would think the majority of the book would be about the details of cabinetmaking from title, but the details are only a small part. I don’t like the 3 column format of the book, but the content is good. The book talks about the philosophy and spirituality of working with wood.