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• 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.

• Book of the Week: Principles

  This week, I read Principles by Ray Dalio. Why? Because he’s $15.4 billion dollars worth of rich and I want to be too. Ray Dalio is the founder of Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund in the world. Some people may be familiar with his 30 minute video explanation of How The Economic Machine Works. The video is definitely worth watching. His principles document is also worth reading. The document is divided into 3 parts. The first part talks about principles in general, the second part talks about his life principles and the last part talks about his management principles. The bulk of it is 55 pages, which covers the first two parts and an outline of the third section. If you understand his life principles, the rest should follow. You can read it in one sitting, but it is pretty dense. It was very hard to summarize the book. You should just read it. Ray probably poops gold bricks. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHe0bXAIuk0&w;=560&h;=315]

• Book of the Week: The Proteus Framebuilding Book

  Last week I read about road bike maintenance thinking about how nice it would be to ride a bicycle across America. I thought some more. It would be even nicer to ride across America on a bicycle you built with your own hands. When I heard about the Stanford ME 204 Bicycle Design course, where students build their own bicycle, I felt I had missed out. This week I read The Proteus Framebuilding Book: A Guide for the Novice Bicycle Framebuilder from Proteus Design to learn more about framebuilding so I can build my own bicycle. This book was published in 1975, so the contents are a little dated, but it is short enough for a starting place. The pages look like came out of a typewriter. I wonder if people know what a typewriter is anymore. Construction Methods There 3 main construction methods for making bicycles: TIG, Lugged and Fillet. TIG welding, which melts the filler metal and the frame requires more technique, but less time preparing and sanding joints. Lug and fillet both use brazing, where a metal is melted to join the frame without melting the frame. A lug, which cans like a sleeve for the tubes can be brazed to connect it to the frame. In fillet bikes, there is not lug, so it results in a smoother interface between the frame tubes after you sand it down. The steps for brazing are

• Book of the Week: Zinn & The Art of Road Bike Maintenance

  If you’re planning to ride your bike across america, you should know how to repair and maintain your road bike. This week I read Zinn & The Art of Road Bike Maintenance By Lennard Zinn. I already have the Big Blue Book of Bicycle Repair from Park Tool, but I wanted to expand my knowledge from a non-branded book. This isn’t a book that you read cover to cover. You read the first few chapters on basic stuff and emergency repairs and skim the rest of the hefty book. That way when it comes to fix things, you have a map of where to go. Knowing how to repair and maintain your road bike can be fun and rewarding.

• Book of the Week: Workbenches

  This week I read Workbenches: From Design And Theory To Construction And Use by Christopher Schwarz, an editor of Popular Woodworking magazine. The book describes the parts of a workbench and how each part is used to hold wood firmly in place, so a workworker can work on the wood. There are also detailed designs for two workbenches: the English workbench and the French workbench. Do you need a workbench if you want to work on wood? Probably not. You can get by with 2 sawhorses and a door. But the different ways to hold wood and the heavy base makes thing easier.

• Book of the Week: The Mini Farming Bible

  This week I read The Mini Farming Bible: The Complete Guide to Self-Sufficiency on 1/4 Acre by Brett L. Markham. The book covers a lot in 500 page and provides a good place to start if you want to start growing things. The book begins with the basics of farming, including chickens for meat and eggs and then goes into detail on each type of vegetable. There are some sections on winemaking, vinegar and cheese that I skipped. In terms of calories per dollar, fruit and vegetables are expensive. Your best bet to maximize your calories per dollar is fast food and candy. If you can grow food cost effectively, you can live a healthier life. Also fresh food you grow yourself tends to taste better since you can harvest them when they are ripe, because you don’t need to transport them. Scale and Space For farming to be effective, it needs to be done at a certain scale. When things get bigger, the surface area to volume decreases. Your compost pile needs to be big enough, so it can heat up in the middle to kill pathogens. If it is too small, it’ll stay cold. A greenhouse also benefits from being bigger, providing more thermal inertia. Chicken coups need to stay warm. If you are going to keep 1 chicken warm, you might as well keep a dozen of them warm. To grow enough food for people, you need 1,400 square feet per person, or 4,200 square feet for a family of three. One acre is 43,560 square feet, so a of an quarter acre is 10,890 square feet. Most of the food will be grown in raised beds. About 700 square feet of raised beds per person. A raised bed is typically 4 feet by 8 feet, but it can be longer than 8 feet. That means a person needs 22 raised beds to grow enough food. That’s a lot of raised beds. Since you are trying to grow as much valuable food in a limited space, you should avoid grains, because you can buy them cheaply, they take up a lot of space and it is pain to process them. Yearly Food Requirements Crop | Per-Person Yearly Requirement
  —|—
  Vegetables | 456 lbs
  Fruit | 365 lbs
  Wheat, corn, oats and rice | 250 lbs
  Total lean meats and eggs | 159 lbs
  Average Crop Yields Planted Intensively Crop | Yield in Pounds per 100 Square Feet
  —|—
  Green beans (as a vegetable) | 100
  Green beans (dried, as a protein) | 20
  Beets (just the roots) | 200
  Beets (just the greens) | 200
  Broccoli | 75
  Cabbage | 300
  Cauliflower | 200
  Carrots | 350
  Chard | 550
  Corn (on the cob) | 55
  Corn (dried for corn meal) | 18
  Cucumber | 360
  Eggplant | 100
  Kale | 120
  Leeks | 500
  Leaf Lettuce | 320
  Head lettuce | 180
  Muskmelons | 100
  Onions | 300
  Peppers | 120
  Peas | 100
  Parsnips | 290
  Pumpkins | 120
  Spinach | 130
  Sunflower (shelled seeds) | 6
  Summer squash | 250
  Winter squash | 200
  Tomatoes | 250
  Watermelons | 180
  Barley | 20
  Oats | 10
  Rye | 20
  Wheat | 20
  Self-Sufficiency Farming is really hard work. Just going around and water 22 raised beds is tedious. If it takes 3 minutes each, it’s already over an hour. Not to mention all the time planting and weeding. One of things that set my reading on this track of self-sufficiency was a Wired article about what to grow given different amounts of land ranging from a 3’ by 5’ balcony to a 40’ by 60’ exurban farm. There are things not covered in the book like growing mushrooms and keeping honey bees. Resources

• Book of the Week: Living with a SEAL

  Living with a SEAL is a book about a rich entrepreneur getting an ultra endurance athlete Navy SEAL to live with and train him for a month. The book started out as a him blogging about the experience. This continues the trend of blog to book like The Effective Engineer, Venture Deals and When to Rob a Bank. The book is a quick and enjoyable read, especially if you’re a runner who admires the Navy SEALs. I like the Navy SEALSs so much that I created a website to follow their Navy SEAL training plan. Jesse Itzler Jesse started out his life as a rapper, but when that didn’t work out he started a a private jet company, which was acquired by Berkshire Hathaway. He was also involved in partnering with ZICO coconut water before it got acquired by Coca-Cola (KO). Jesse is married Spanx founder, Sara Blakely, who he met at a charity event. They represent the typical jet-setting power couple running multiple businesses while flying between their multiple homes. He and his wife own a portion of the Atlanta Hawks basketball team. Living this life was not enough for Jesse, he wanted more. He got SEAL to live with him for a month to shake things up after seeing him at an ultramarathon they were competing in. Jesse was on a 6 person relay team and SEAL was doing the whole thing by himself. Navy SEAL

• Book of the Week: The Food Lab

  This week I read The Food Lab by J. Kenji López-Alt, the Managing Culinary Director of Serious Eats. I know the author from two articles: The Science of the Best Chocolate Cookies and The Food Lab’s Definitive Guide to Prime Rib. The cookie article inspired me to look into cookie ingredient substitution and read Flour. The author goes into the why of cooking with recipes and the experiments he did to prove it. This book is more accessible than the textbook On Food and Cooking. Science

• Book of the Week: Good Profit

  After writing about buying elections, I wanted to learn more about Koch Industries, which is the 2nd largest private company in the United States in terms of revenue ($115 billion). Their CEO, Charlie Koch wrote a book about their management philosophy called Good Profit. The first part of the book goes over the history of Koch and Charlie’s father Fred, the founder, and the motivation and background behind Market-Based Management® (MBM). In true corporate fashion, MBM is trademarked. This book reminded me a bit of Zappos’ Delivering Happiness, which mixes corporate culture and company history. After reading this book, I can see why Koch Industries is the 2nd largest private company. Koch Industries