⭐⭐⭐ The Conquest of Happiness by Russell
| Full Title | The Conquest of Happiness |
|---|---|
| Authors | Bertrand Russell |
| Year Published | 1976 |
| Date Read | March 09, 2021 |
| Rating | 3/5 stars |
Some interesting ideas here, but in the middle of a bunch of stuff that’s largely forgettable. Two pieces I did remember:
If there’s something that you need to decide on / figure out, we all know how much anxiety can be caused by worrying about it for days/weeks/months. Russell recommends focusing on it extremely intently for a very short period of time (hours/days), and then letting the brain figure it out in the background (and critically, not thinking about it for a long time. Then, upon returning to it, it can often have ‘figured itself out’. I haven’t tried it yet but have never heard of this concept before.
When worrying about how bad things might be if something does/doesn’t happen, consider if you’re assessing it realistically. Would it actually be the worst thing in the world? Almost never is that the case. Interestingly, I’ve found this works better for things that are objectively a bigger problem (“what if I get fired?”) than smaller (“what if this
interaction goes poorly?”).
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ A Promised Land by Obama
| Full Title | A Promised Land |
|---|---|
| Authors | Barack Obama |
| Year Published | 2020 |
| Date Read | January 27, 2021 |
| Rating | 5/5 stars |
At over 29 hours, I think this is the longest book I’ve ever listened to (even longer than the 21-hour The Grapes of Wrath!) I found the time spent to be well worth it. I’m sure this is partially because I’m an unabashed Obama fanboy, but a big part of why the book stayed interesting for me was that I read it less as a memoir and more as a history book focused on his time in office. I was not as informed on politics in Obama’s first term and so I appreciated the explanations of our positions in Iraq vs. Afghanistan or how exactly the Arab Spring was triggered. The author does a great job of setting up the background and then explaining why some actions that can seem outwardly nonsensical actually come from deliberations and negotiations of many competing interests; the decision not to criminally pursue executives from the financial sector comes to mind in particular. I guess I had a vague idea of this being a thing, but to see it with specific examples was
helpful.
One thing on the personal side that surprised me was Barack’s relationship with his wife. Running for president is obviously a difficult and stressful endeavor, and in my conception would work best if you had a supportive partner. The book shows that actually, Michelle was opposed to the idea from the beginning and in general it felt to me as though the author had to continually be working himself, alone, on why it made sense to run. I guess this is just a very different model from what I traditionally think of as a preferred relationship interaction; maybe I’m mishearing, but it didn’t really feel like the Obamas were “on the same team” much of the time.
One other thing to mention is the frustration Obama writes about in regards to his interactions with Republicans. Many of the passages here come off as dismissive of the whole category of Senators, and pretty defensive when addressing complaints from right-leaning media. As someone who feels that our
left-right divide has gotten unnecessarily extreme, I get frustrated with cynical takes like this and hope (perhaps in vain) that we’re all just Americans and we should be able to work together. This is something new for me because one reason I’ve respected Obama so much is his ability to stay out of name-calling like “basket of deplorables.” It makes me question that if even this guy doesn’t think that there’s a cooperative way forward, maybe my hope really is just too idealistic.
Overall I’d recommend this to anyone that is interested in getting a behind-the-scenes look at Obama’s first term, especially if a a bit of a recent history lesson sounds appealing.
⭐⭐ Homo Deus by Harari
| Full Title | Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow |
|---|---|
| Authors | Yuval Noah Harari |
| Year Published | 2017 |
| Date Read | January 20, 2021 |
| Rating | 2/5 stars |
Finished about 1/3. Felt similar to Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, which I really enjoyed, so not sure why I lost interest. Maybe there’s a cap to how much of this style I can listen to from Harari.
⭐⭐ Accelerate by Forsgren
| Full Title | Accelerate: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations |
|---|---|
| Authors | Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, Gene Kim |
| Year Published | 2018 |
| Date Read | October 21, 2020 |
| Rating | 2/5 stars |
Uninspiring. Authors seem pretty concerned about explaining to you why their research uses valid methods (even including a whole section on statistics), rather than delving into the research that the title suggests the book would. Perhaps they felt they needed to prop up the research, because really all that’s here are surveys with a biased sample selection and subsequent correlation investigations. I’m already on board with many of the things this book espouses, but I just couldn’t get behind the way the authors approached it here. For a better treatment that doesn’t try to obscure the fact that there still isn’t really any true RCT-type research in this area, see Kim’s earlier work The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win — a much more readable piece.
⭐⭐ The Righteous Mind by Haidt
| Full Title | The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jonathan Haidt, Simona Drelciuc |
| Year Published | 2012 |
| Date Read | September 28, 2020 |
| Rating | 2/5 stars |
Listened to the first two hours. Lots of pop-sci references, with a heavy focus on self-promotion of studies that the author himself published. Parts of the beginning that discussed morality more from a philosophical point of view were at times enjoyable.
Haidt ends the second chapter with the promise that he would focus more on logic/reason rather than emotion/intuition. Then, the very next chapter starts with him describing a study utilizing hypnosis that had some “interesting results.” Honestly, the juxtaposition of those two was so incongruous that at first I thought it might have been provided as an example of poor science. But I was wrong, and Haidt goes on to use the study to further a thesis.
Not recommended.
⭐⭐⭐ The Machine That Changed the World by Womack
| Full Title | The Machine That Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production– Toyota’s Secret Weapon in the Global Car Wars That Is Now Revolutionizing World Industry) |
|---|---|
| Authors | James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones, Daniel Roos |
| Year Published | 2007 |
| Date Read | September 17, 2020 |
| Rating | 3/5 stars |
Listened to just over four hours of this (~37%). I enjoyed the authors discussing the beginnings of car production through the craftsmanship in the 1880s, the move to mass production in ~1915, and eventually the evolution to lean in the last few decades. The authors really try to make the point that lean production is a ‘step function’, similar to how radically mass production changed things versus craft production, but they didn’t fully convince me. The book itself mentions that the ROIs that Ford saw from his change in production techniques were so insane that he could afford to easily raise wages and still remain enormously profitable. We haven’t seen anything similar for lean production, and although there is plenty of data provided in the book to show that lean can do much better than high-inventory mass-production, it’s not the orders-of-magnitude improvements that were found in the early 1900s at Ford.
The parts of this book focusing on lowered inventories and JIT
delivery reminded me of The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win, and helped underscore to me the idea that minimizing WIP and excess inventory is generally a good thing. But the book never really had good pacing and after a few hours I felt like I was just hearing more about specifics of different factories in Europe vs. US vs. Japan, which couldn’t hold my attention as someone only somewhat interested in the automotive industry. Overall, not a bad use of time and probably a good read for someone with a higher interest level.