This book had a lot of good points around self improvement being the driving factor of life. It also made the point that money should not be an end goal. Money is purely a means to other items. That mantra is in line with one of my personal mantras; it is the use and experience of something that gives it value, ownership or control are simply easy ways to get use. I’m already doing most of what the book recommends, but I should be networking a good deal more. I certainly have enough friends in interesting groups and companies that could introduce me to more interesting people. I have been ok at keeping in touch with my friends and acquaintances, but haven’t used them for introductions as much as I could.
This book had some really amazing points about the processes behind phsychological treatments and practices. The best of which is how they don’t tend to follow the scientific practice, and how anyone can spout nonsense and get others to pick it up. This was especially well demonstrated by the best seller “The Secret.” In The Secret the reader is told that things are attracted to you when you think about them, which is absurd and doesn’t go into edge cases well. The best way in my understanding to know if some process is real or fake is if the edge cases are appreciably addressed. There is also the double blind controlled study, but that is hard to come by when dealing with people.
One of the things I’m taking away from this is that determining the story one thinks about oneself can drastically change the way one behaves. This mantra can be applied to myself, or I can work on others by trying to change their story. I do all the time with Steph to help her see how amazing she really is; that cute, ninja, scuba, sailor, geeky, robot-making, adventurous, kind woman.
This is a book about how to focus on what matters in a Startup. It also changes the definition of startup to include groups inside of larger companies. The processes that it describes touch on several of the books I’ve read before, such as the Toyota Way. I think that the learning that I got at Zynga are very heavily along the lines of this book, with some important differences. The data driven approach is certainly a halmark of the Zynga approach. I hope to have tighter feedback loops, and that means getting things exposed to people that can give the feedback. I will try to keep myself focused on what will matter both long term and short term, and reconcile those as needed.
This is a good book about startups. It is good at pointing out a good number of things that I haven’t done yet and really need to do. I’ll get together with Robert tomorrow to talk about it. I also should make sure that we record more stuff about the things we are talking about. I’d say this book is worth reading for those doing their own startup.
This book didn’t have too many tips or how to’s about bootstrapping. It mainly said that it is a good idea. I admit that I shouldn’t expect much out of a 41 minute listen, but I still expected more than was delivered.
I always love listening to the history of ancient Rome. It was a great book on the subject of Augustus, with some good details before and after his life. I think that if I ever really want to know the history of Rome I’ll need to sit down with a mapped version of the events. All the places and islands and people get really confusing for me. I’ll need a visual basis for it to really sink in.
I liked this walk through the periodic table, and it works well with the book Quantum. I liked some of the smaller facts that they go into about the elements and how they were discovered. I wouldn’t recommend this book to many people, but it is better than Quantum for all of those who aren’t looking for something specifically about physics.
This book had a lot of good tips to keep yourself free of distraction. I was very surprised at how much they pulled on the Buddhist teachings about mindfulness. The entire book is rife with the Buddhist teachings and the practices that are taught in this book are just modernized versions of them. The goal of Buddhism isn’t really brought up, but the practice of mindfulness is key to the core fo the book. The book bases it’s teaching on a story of two people, a husband and a wife. They play out the scenarios in bad ways and then in good ways. The good ways have pretty much everything go right, and many times in serendipitous ways, which bothered me a bit. I think they should have done only outcomes that were resultant of being mindful, and using the techniques, instead of having everything go right even if it was mostly unrelated to the core tenants of the book.
This book goes into the Darwinistic past of religion and how it has changed into what it is today. They start out with prehistoric societal religions that held the groups together, and made them sacrifice themselves for each other. They then go into how early religions built on each other by taking narratives and festivals. They go into how the major religions of today started forming. Finally they get into how the current nationalism is a form of religion without calling out a specific deity (think manifest destiny). I really like the book and it makes me think about how the foundations of religion are group cohesiveness and the ability to drive people to the greater good of the group over the good of the self.
It's an Exciting World 