This book had a lot of good information, but most of it I had heard before in the other books I’ve been listening to. I agree with many of the premises put forward, especially that the leadership style will have be responsive to the situation. I need to work on a basic leadership style laid out in this lecture series, but I’m not too far behind in understanding it. I’m just far behind in implementation.
This book had a lot of great suggestions about leadership and how to get people to do the things you want them to do. This does a lot of good explanations on the how to do it, but the part that I tend to struggle with is the internal conflict of whether what I’m trying to get someone to do something that isn’t good for them. I’ll have to learn to convince myself of the great things that people will get from helping me.
This was a really good overview of the very specific job of trying to be a Startup CEO. It makes me realize that I’m going to have to really step it up on many of the leadership and communication parts that I’m not particularly good at or have experience in. I’m starting to work on it beginning with organization. If you want to be a CEO of a startup this is a must read.
This book is good, but not as good as Founders Dilemma. The book touches on a little bit later in the process, and on business instead of people. The focus is nice and we will be doing this very soon, and are already starting on it now. The book talks a lot about good structures about finding out what you don’t know. There is also a great bit about how you should take lots of risks in the short term, but always have the long term in mind. I need to follow my tenant of not having fear, but looking at things logically.
This was one of the best books about founding companies I’ve read. It has all the basic high level things that one may need. It covers a lot of the topics that I was unsure about, and I am recommending it to the rest of the team. Steph is ready to start it, and I explained most of it to Candice.
This was a very nice listen, but I had to take it in chunks. The fiction books that I listened too at the same time were very nice breaks from the depth and density of this lecture series. The evolution of philosophy as described by this book seems to be full of reactionary thought, with the swings getting wider and wider. I can identify most with the Aristotelian thought with everything being in the pursuit of Eudaimonia, which can be roughly thought of as happiness or well-being in a totally non-hedonistic sense. I would put this as the basis of my thoughts in a utilitarian framework with a hierarchical anthropomorphic view of all life based on level of consciousness and sense. I fully reject some of the later discussed views like reality being perception. These views are wholly unusable for working life, and aren’t even practiced by the people that support them. I very much hold that a philosophical position should be practiced by those that hold it and not just held in theory. There is a funny story of an ancient Greek person (reality unknown) who believed and practiced in the thought being reality school, and his friends would have to constantly save him from being injured by these notions. He would do things like believe that fire wasn’t hot and try to walk through it. Even he didn’t fully follow this thought as he blamed his cook for making a bad meal; wouldn’t it only be bad because he thought it was so in his own philosophy? I liked the thoughts presented here and can use the language to flush out my own ideas further, and discover what great people have thought before on the subjects.
This book was very interesting. It naturally didn’t solve what the meaning of life was, but instead it laid down a number of views based on world traditions. Many of these views overlap in many ways, but there is a defining characteristic about each of them that makes it incompatible with some of the others. I can see my world view a little bit in almost all of the traditions. Some of them choose to focus on one thing and then follow that to it’s final conclusions, like the value of life in Jainism. Some focus on a very broad aspect of if we can even say that reality is real. All of them were nice to learn about, and the arguments for each position were good ones.
This book was good, but didn’t contain as much information and detail as Lifelong Health. I’d say if you had to choose one to listen to, choose Lifelong Health. I have the same problem with this book; that they didn’t support the claim of eating a whole foods diet. This issue most likely arises since there aren’t any good studies on diet (self reporting errors and long term stable groups and whatnot). I also like that both books stressed the importance of working out, something that I should do more often. I get off a bit easy since I bike everywhere, but that still doesn’t excuse the lack of vigorous workouts and weightlifting.
This book was very informative on the goods and bads of health. There was a lot of science based evidence and good advice. The only issue I have is the lack of science based evidence for the whole foods diet that is continually recommended. I’m not saying that the diet is bad, and I agree with the logic they use (in most cases, i don’t care about fooling mother nature), but they don’t support the claims with evidence in this case. I do like the rest of the evidence that is provided, and the caveats they give to each study they mention. I am pretty sure I’m going to give up drinking alcohol altogether for the foreseeable future, as well as cutting out most meat.
It's an Exciting World 