⭐⭐⭐⭐ Eat That Frog! by Tracy
| Full Title | Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time |
|---|---|
| Authors | Brian Tracy |
| Year Published | 2006 |
| Date Read | November 03, 2018 |
| Rating | 4/5 stars |
Most of this book can basically be boiled down to “focus on the key activities that you believe provide you the most value.” Each chapter tries to look at this goal in a bit of a different light. Some chapters feel really similar to others, but since the book is so terse and to the point this isn’t really as big a deal as it is in most other self-development books. Taking an approach of reviewing the chapter concept and then skipping to another section if it doesn’t seem promising works well.
Some parts of this book are inconsistent - for example, Chapter 4 says “Many people say that they work better under the pressure of deadlines. Unfortunately, years of research indicate that this is seldom true.” but then Chapter 13 encourages you to “Set deadlines and subdeadlines on every task and activity.” I don’t think this is necessarily a huge issue, because to me the book was mostly about providing new ways of thinking about prioritization. Still, it seems weird to put such
diametrically opposed advice into the same volume.
Overall, I’d recommend reading it. I got enough insights that this is worth the ~hour you will spend on it. A few selections that jumped out to me:
* Self-esteem is the reputation you have with yourself.
* zero-based thinking: “If I were not doing this already, knowing what I now know, would I start doing it again today?”
* You’ll never catch up on everything that you want to do. You have to accept that lower-priority tasks will likely never get done, if you are doing a good job prioritizing.
⭐⭐ Thinking in Bets by Duke
| Full Title | Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts |
|---|---|
| Authors | Annie Duke |
| Year Published | 2018 |
| Date Read | October 23, 2018 |
| Rating | 2/5 stars |
Listened to the first third but the book didn’t really grab me. Writing was pretty wordy, and it contained too many pop-sci references to studies in relation to presentation of new ideas.
⭐⭐⭐⭐ The Upstarts by Stone
| Full Title | The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World |
|---|---|
| Authors | Brad Stone |
| Year Published | 2017 |
| Date Read | October 18, 2018 |
| Rating | 4/5 stars |
Well-written book about the rise of Airbnb and Uber, with mentions of Lyft and a short detour to China and Didi towards the end. I found it easy to follow as an audio book. What was most surprising to me was how Stone is able to lay out how all of these companies basically used the same strategies when it came to dealing with local laws/existing companies: ignore, fight, lobby, essentially do anything to allow their service to operate and thrive. This is what you’d expect from a corporation, but it was enlightening to see that the services were near-indistinguishable in terms of tactics. And yet, only Uber was caught in significant / long-lasting bad press (remember #deleteuber?), primarily because of the interactions Kalanick had with regulators and the press. Good lessons here around how people perceive a whole company based solely on the temperament of its founders. In this case, actions didn’t speak louder than words.
⭐⭐ Dreamland by Quinones
| Full Title | Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic |
|---|---|
| Authors | Sam Quinones |
| Year Published | 2015 |
| Date Read | October 12, 2018 |
| Rating | 2/5 stars |
This book struggles to get pacing right. Many titles use the strategy of having multiple story lines that are happening at different points in time, in which the author switches back and forth to keep the reader’s interest. But the handling by Quinones is clumsy and ends up making the book very repetitive, to the point where I had to check my audiobook timestamps to make sure I didn’t somehow accidentally jump back to a chapter I had already listened to. He’s always seemingly introducing concepts that have already been introduced (how many times can you tell me where Nayarit is located?)
I also thought the book could have done a much better job of connecting the reader to individual characters in the story. In some chapters, particularly the ones on drug marketing, Quinones accomplishes this pretty well by giving more backstory to executives, or tracing the use of a specific piece of research through time. Other times, he is not as successful, and the storytelling
suffers.
Ended up listening to ~40% before having to stop.
⭐⭐⭐ Principles by Dalio
| Full Title | Principles: Life and Work |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ray Dalio, Jeremy Bobb |
| Year Published | 2017 |
| Date Read | October 05, 2018 |
| Rating | 3/5 stars |
Stopped after reading 1/2 of both part I and part II.
I didn’t like the structure of the book. The biographical part is too long and contains many mentions to specifics of Dalio’s investing past that I was personally totally uninterested in. The principles part has some reasonable ideas but after listening to a handful, it just starts becoming a list of platitudes without much insight, similar to how some “values” statements are at corporations.
One that I did enjoy is “look to nature to learn how reality works” - the idea there was legitimately unique and Dalio did a good job of explaining why it makes sense to him. That said, it wasn’t enough to get me to read the rest of the book.
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Bad Blood by Carreyrou
| Full Title | Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup |
|---|---|
| Authors | John Carreyrou |
| Year Published | 2018 |
| Date Read | August 23, 2018 |
| Rating | 4/5 stars |
Bad Blood mostly reads like an expanded WSJ article, and it works well for the subject matter. Carreyrou does a good job of giving context and telling an interesting story without getting too bogged down in the details. Some of the background information on the Holmes - Fuisz relationship starts veering a bit too much into gossip territory, but that’s really my only gripe with the book.
Separately, one thing I still don’t really understand is how investors were duped into funding this startup time and again. I buy the argument that Holmes has a reality-distortion field akin to Jobs and that people can become enamored with her. But to not verify the claims of the founder? This seems like basic due diligence any investor should be doing. The argument put forth in the book is that the board was filled with all-stars, but to me the individuals always seemed pretty random - big names, sure, but from areas that are totally unrelated to either medicine or tech. Mostly, it
was just people involved in politics in some fashion - George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, James Mattis are three names that are consistently mentioned as lending credibility, yet to me don’t really have standing to assess a company that produces a medical device. That Holmes & co were able to fake their way to funding of nearly $1bn is wild to me.
I’d say it’s worth a read for people with an interest in Silicon Valley. If you’re interested in the Theranos story specifically, definitely worth a read.