Yes to Life – Viktor Frankl

Yes to Life – by Viktor Frankl
Date read: 2/1/23. Recommendation: 8/10.

Based on a series of lectures Frankl gave after his liberation from Nazi concentration camps. It’s a great companion book to Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl explores the three ways to find meaning and purpose in life—through action, love, and suffering.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

3 ways to find meaning and purpose in life:

1. Action: Doing, creating, working (whether it’s art or a labor of love), something that outlasts us. Bringing something into being. 

2. Love: Experiencing something—appreciating nature or works of art—or loving people. The door to happiness always opens outward. 

3. Suffering: How a person adapts and reacts to unavoidable limits on their life possibilities like facing death or enduring concentration camps. This opens itself to a person when finding value in 1 and 2 are closed to them.

“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?” Rabbi Hillel

Each of us has our own purpose in life, our own places where we find meaning, and serving others only elevates this. 

Materialism is an anti-pattern. Mindlessly consuming and always focusing on more things leads to a meaningless life. 

Love:
“It is not only through our action that we can give life meaning—insofar as we can answer life’s specific questions responsibly—we can fulfill the demands of existence not only as active agents but also as loving human beings: in our loving dedication to the beautiful, the great, the good.” VF

Consider when you attend a concert of an artist you love and they play your favorite song and it sends chills down your spine. That moment is meaningful. And it’s born of a deep appreciation.

Suffering:
“How we deal with difficulties truly shows who we are, and that, too, can enable us to live meaningfully.” VF

“What do athletes do but create difficulties for themselves so that they can grow through overcoming them? Of course, it is not advisable to create difficulties for oneself; in general; suffering as a result of misfortune is only meaningful if this misfortune has come about through fate, and is thus unavoidable and inescapable.” VF

“So, fate is part of our lives and so is suffering; therefore, if life has meaning, suffering also has meaning. Consequently, suffering, as long as it is necessary and unavoidable, also holds the possibility of being meaningful.” VF

“It is not a question of either achievement or endurance—rather, in some cases, endurance itself is the greatest achievement.” VF

Perspective:
“Our perspective on life’s events—what we make of them—matters as much or more than what actually befalls us. ‘Fate’ is what happens to us beyond our control. But we each are responsible for how we relate to those events.” Daniel Goleman

“Life is not something, it is the opportunity for something.” Hebbel

“The individual, and only that individual, determines whether their suffering is meaningful or not.” VF

Adaptability:
“In the course of life, human beings must be prepared to change the direction of this fulfillment of meaning, often abruptly, according to the particular challenges of the hour.” VF

Life is motion: “For we have already pointed out that meaning of life can only be a specific one, specific both in relation to each individual person and in relation to each individual hour: the question that life asks us changes from both person to person and from situation to situation.” VF

Frankl’s manuscript:
“Frankl held these insights on the singular importance of a sense of meaning even before he underwent the horrors of camp life, though his years as a prisoner gave him even deeper conviction. When he was arrested and deported in 1941, he had sewn into the lining of his overcoat the manuscript of a book in which he argued for this view. He had hoped to publish that book one day, though he had to give up the coat—and the unpublished book—on his first day as a prisoner. And his desire to one day publish his views, along with his yearning to see his loved ones again, gave him a personal purpose that helped keep him afloat.” Daniel Goleman

Frankl formulated his initial insights and theory on the human orientation towards meaning in a rough manuscript of his eventual book The Doctor and the Soul. This is the same manuscript he brought with him after his deportation, hoping that he would be able to publish it still. When he reached the concentration camp, he was forced to give up his coat with the manuscript sewn into the lining. 

His experience in the camps further refined his ideas: “It turned out, in fact, that those camp inmates who still recognized or at least hoped for a meaning in life were the most likely to find the strength to continue living, or finally to survive. Last, but not least, that was also true of himself: what kept him alive was only the hope of seeing at least some of his loved ones again and bringing the completed draft of his book to publication.” VF

Decoded – Jay-Z

Decoded – by Jay-Z
Date read: 1/25/23. Recommendation: 10/10.

Jay-Z details his own story and deconstructs the lyrics of the most important songs in his career. I couldn’t put this book down—Jay-Z’s rise to become a self-made billionaire is one of the most inspiring stories you will come across. It’s crazy smart and packs a punch. There are great lessons in fundamentals, depth, truth, flow, and motion that are worth reflecting on and instilling in your own life and work.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Origins:
Nine years old, summer of 1978, saw a circle of kids on his way home from playing Little League with his cousin and he moved through the crowd towards the middle, “It felt like gravity pulling me into that swirl of kids, no bullshit, like a planet pulled into orbit by a star…His name was Slate and he was a kid I used to see around the neighborhood, an older kid who barely made an impression. In the circle, though, he was transformed, like the church ladies touched by the spirit, and everyone was mesmerized. He was rhyming, throwing out couplet after couplet like he was in a trance, for a crazy long time—thirty minutes straight off the top of his head, never losing the beat, riding the handclaps…I was dazzled. That’s some cool shit was the first thing I thought. Then: I could do that.” Jay-Z

Natural talent: Started writing rhymes in his spiral notebook that same night. The paper was unlined and he filled every space on every page, writing vertically, horizontally, crowding words together as best he could, scratching out others.

Finding your voice: Jay connected with an older kid and the best rapper in Marcy, Jaz-O. The two would practice their rhymes and record on an old tape recorder with a makeshift microphone attached. “I saw it as an opening, a way to re-create myself and reimagine my world. After I recorded a rhyme, it gave me an unbelievable rush to play it back, to hear that voice.” Jay-Z

Life experiences give you credibility: “I wasn’t even in high school yet and I’d discovered my voice. But I still needed a story to tell.” Jay-Z

Jay wasn’t sure he could get rich from rap, but he knew it would become much bigger than it was before it went away and he leaned into that.

“Manager? That’s a promotion, not a dream.” Jay-Z

Flow:
“From the beginning, it was easy, a constant flow. For days, I filled page after page. Then I’d bang a beat out on the table, my bedroom window, whatever had a flat surface, and practice from the time I woke in the morning until I went to sleep.” Jay-Z

“Everywhere I went I’d write. If I was crossing a street with my friends and a rhyme came to me, I’d break out my binder, spread it on a mailbox or lamppost and write the rhyme before I crossed the street. I didn’t care if my friends left me at the light, I had to get it out.” Jay-Z

“I was good at battling and I practiced it like a sport. I’d spend free time reading the dictionary, building my vocabulary for battles.”

Loved rhyming for the sake of rhyming and the challenge of structuring rhymes in the most effective way possible—moving around couplets and triplets, stacking double entendres, and speed rapping.

Fundamentals:
Jay-Z and his early mentor Jaz-O would go back and forth to each other’s houses and write rhymes for hours. They’d lock themselves in a room with pen and paper. They would test new flows and focus on improving their speed, delivery, and composition.

Putting in the work: “It’s true that I’m able to sometimes come up with songs in a matter of minutes after hearing a track, but that’s a skill that I’ve honed over hundreds of hours of practice and work since I was nine. My earliest mentors in rap taught me that making music is work, whether it was Jaz locking himself in a room working on different flows or Big Daddy Kane taking the time to meticulously put together a stage show. There’s unquestionably magic involved in great music, songwriting, and performances—like those nights when a star athlete is in the zone and can’t miss. But there’s also work. Without the work, the magic won’t come.” Jay-Z

“A tour requires stamina, willpower, and the ability to self-motivate, to hype yourself into game mode night after night….When it comes to signing up new talent, that’s what I’m looking for—not just someone who has skill, but someone built for this life. Someone who has the work ethic, the drive.”

First exposure to the record industry:
When Jay-O got a record deal with EMI in the UK, Jay went along and soaked up all that he could in the recording sessions and meetings.

Producers at EMI convinced Jaz-O to record a pop song with a ukulele on the hook, “Hawaiian Sophie” which tanked. EMI stopped returning his phone calls and instead started courting Jay behind his back. Jay was sick to his stomach and thought the business lacked any sense of honor and integrity. So he buried his rap dreams and went back to hustling.

Hustling:
Got into selling drugs because he was already risking his life by living in the projects, he might as well get paid for it. A friend introduced him to hustling (neither smoked nor used their own supply) and communicated that it required vision and hustle.

“In the mirror, all I saw was a hustler—a hustler who wrote rhymes on corner-store paper bags and memorized them in hotel rooms far away from home—but still, first a hustler. It’s who I’d been since I was sixteen years old on my own in Trenton, New Jersey. I couldn’t even think about wanting to be something else; I wouldn’t let myself visualize another life. But I wrote because I couldn’t stop. It was a release, a mental exercise, a way of keeping sane.” Jay-Z

Find your deep, dark place and create from there:
Jay was interested in the interior of a young kid’s head, his psychology, and bringing that to life through his lyrics. Everything he wrote he wanted to be rooted in the truth of an experience “To tell the story of the kid with the gun without telling the story of why he has it is to tell a kind of lie. To tell the story of the pain without telling the story of the rewards—the money, the girls, the excitement—is a different kind of evasion.” Jay-Z

“I lost people I loved, was betrayed by people I trusted, felt the breeze of bullets flying by my head. I saw crack addiction destroy families—it almost destroyed mine—but I sold it too…But no matter what, it is the place where I learned not just who I was, but who we were, who all of us are.” Jay-Z

Embracing contradiction: “For any image or symbol or creative act to mean something, it has to touch something deeper, connect to something true. I know that the spirit of the struggle and insurgency was woven into the lives of the people I grew up with in Bed-Stuy, even if in sometimes fucked up and corrupted ways….But to have contradictions—especially when you’re fighting for your life—is human, and to wear the Che (Guevara) shirt and the platinum and diamonds together is honest. In the end I wore it because I meant it.” Jay-Z

“The words are witty and blind, abstract and linear, sober and fucked up. And when we decode that torrent of words—by which I mean really listen to them with our minds and hearts open—we can understand their world better. And ours, too. It’s the same world.” Jay-Z

Entrepreneurial mindset:
“You have to make sure the match runs according to your style and rhythm and not get caught up in someone else’s gameplay. You have to be willing to suffer and to make someone else suffer, because only one of you can win.” Jay-Z

A great product and the hustle to move it are the ultimate advantage.

“Success could only mean self-sufficiency, being a boss, not a dependent.”

“I’m also lucky never to have needed the approval of the gatekeepers in the industry because from the start we came into the game as entrepreneurs. That gave me the freedom to just be myself, which is the secret to any long-term success, but that’s hard to see when you’re young and desperate to get put on.” Jay-Z ^ the opposite of this was Jaz-O recording “Hawaiian Sophie” because he trusted producers that got Will Smith airplay even though it didn’t resonate with him.

The depth of hip-hop:
It’s dense with multiple meanings and unresolved layers you might not understand until you’ve listened to it multiple times through. Those layers of meaning help get at complicated truths in a way that straightforward storytelling might not.

“Every hustler knows the value of a feint. It keeps you one step ahead of whoever’s listening in, which is also a great thing about the art of hip-hop. And it makes it all the more gratifying to the listener when they finally catch up.” Jay-Z

Rap is built to handle contradictions: “It doesn’t force you to pretend to be only one thing or another, to be a saint or sinner. It recognizes that you can be true to yourself and still have unexpected dimensions or opposing ideas…The real bullshit is when you act like you don’t have contradictions inside you, that you’re so dull and unimaginative that your mind never changes or wanders into strange, unexpected places.” Jay-Z

The curse of outrage:
“It’s hard to beat the entertainment value of people who deliberately misunderstand the world, people dying to be insulted, running around looking for a bullet to get in front of.” Jay-Z

Life is motion:
“I’ve always believed in motion and action, in following connections wherever they take me, and in not getting entrenched. My life has been more poetry than prose, more about unpredictable leaps and links than simple steady movement, or worse, stagnation. It’s allowed me to stay open to the next thing without feeling held back by a preconceived notion of what I’m supposed to be doing next.” Jay-Z

The truth is always relevant:
“When it seems like I’m bragging or threatening or whatever, what I’m actually trying to do is embody a certain spirit, give voice to a certain emotion. I’m giving the listener a way to articulate that emotion in their own lives, however it applies. Even when I do a song that feels like a complete autobiography, like ‘December 4th,’ I’m still trying to speak to something that everyone can find themselves in.” Jay-Z

“My songs are my stories, but they take on their own life in the minds of people listening. The connection that creates is sometimes overwhelming.” Jay-Z

Empire State of Mind – Zack O'Malley Greenburg

Empire State of Mind – by Zack O'Malley Greenburg
Date read: 1/16/23. Recommendation: 8/10.

An exceptional Jay-Z biography that details his journey as one of the greatest artists and entrepreneurs of our generation. This book aims to answer a simple question: How did Jay-Z rise from a Brooklyn housing project to a position as one of America’s most successful entrepreneurs? It contains great lessons in the power of controlling your own destiny, honing resourcefulness, doing the work, taking risks, and allowing your voice to evolve.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

This book aims to answer a simple question: How did Jay-Z rise from a Brooklyn housing project to a position as one of America’s most successful entrepreneurs? 

The benefits of starting late:
“My first album didn’t come out until I was twenty-six, so I had a bit more maturity….My debut album had all these emotions and complexities and layers that a typical hip-hop album wouldn’t have if you were making it at sixteen, seventeen years old. That isn’t enough wealth of experience to share with the world.” Jay-Z

Control your own destiny:
Record companies had a habit of taking advantage of artists financially. Jay-Z was focused on making great music and controlling the business side too.

Built “an unparalleled commercial hip-hop empire encompassing music, film, liquor, and a clothing company that grew from a few sewing machines into a giant that produced $700 million in annual revenues.” ZG

“Jay-Z’s ability to make money by attaching his name to products is one of his greatest strengths as a businessman, and it was especially important during a period of declining numbers in the record industry, when barely one-fifth of his earnings came from record sales.” ZG 

Jaz-O:
Jay-Z’s early mentor helped him fine-tune his rhymes—his lyrics became wittier, his delivery faster, and his syncopation sharper. Jay-Z would practice his rap skills at school by freestyling to beats pounded out on the cafeteria table.

In 1988, Jaz-O became the first rapper to land a deal with the British label EMI. He brought Jay-Z along to London where he got his first exposure to the broader music industry.

In 1989 after returning to the U.S., Jay-Z talked his way onto the tour bus of Big Daddy Kane (a successful rapper). Would go on stage during intermissions to entertain crowds with his freestyle. Spent four months working unpaid for a place to sleep on the tour bus floor and food. 

“After the tour, Jay-Z found himself between worlds. Nearly twenty years old, he’d gotten a taste of the good life with Jaz-O in London, and he’d rubbed elbows with the biggest names in hip-hop on Big Daddy Kane’s tour. But he’d dropped out of high school, and his own musical career hadn’t gotten to a point where he could make serious money as an artist. So he picked up where he left off as a hustler.” ZG

Hustling:
Childhood friend DeHaven Irby introduced Jay to the lucrative opportunities offered by drug dealing. At 18, Jay started taking the train to Trenton on weekends where Irby taught him everything he knew about the local drug market. 

Jay-Z saw music as a side hustle, his first album was supposed to be his only album. But selling drugs was what he saw as the most lucrative path. But in 1994, in an ambush by rivals, Jay-Z was shot at multiple times before a gun jammed, which saved his life. At that point, he got out of the drug trade in the mid-90s. He knew he couldn’t run the streets forever and the only way out was likely death or prison. 

Natural talent:
“What set Jay-Z apart as an artist was the sharpness and rapidity with which he delivered his lyrics; that verbal dexterity earned him some attention in the underground scene.” ZG

Memorization:
Jay-Z is famous for memorizing all his verses instead of writing them down. Early in his career (1992), Clark Kent (A&R department at Atlantic Records) wanted Jay to lay down a song with rapper Sauce Money. Producer, Patrick Lawrence, was in charge of booking studio time for them. After three hours of Jay and Sauce laughing and talking, Lawrence got on them for wasting studio time. Jay asked to hear the song. “Lawrence played the track. Jay-Z began mumbling along to it, then picked up a pen and a notebook and seemed to write several lines. He placed the pad on the sofa and started pacing back and forth, muttering half-formed words. After five minutes, he glanced once more at the pad and told Lawrence he was ready. While Jay-Z was in the sound booth recording his verse, Lawrence went over to see what he’d written in the notebook, still sitting on the couch. ‘I walk to the pad, and there’s fucking nothing on it,’ Lawrence recalls. ‘He was doing it as a fucking joke, like just to show people.’” ZG

Recording Brooklyn’s Finest with Notorious B.I.G.—Big saw Jay do his part without having anything written down. He had to go home to do his part and fill in the blanks and only after he saw Jay do that, he also stopped writing down his rhymes. 

Debut Album:
Thanks to connections, Jay-Z landed tracks from well-respected producers for his debut album, Reasonable Doubt. With his debut album nearly complete, he shopped it to all major record labels but no one was interested. 

Seize creative control: After getting rejected by every major label, Jay-Z and his business partner, Damon Dash, pooled their resources to start their own record label, Roc-A-Fella Records. 

Resourcefulness and doing whatever it takes: They pressed their own records, their CDs, their T-shirts, their stickers, their flyers. Pedaled music from the backs of their cars. Traveled across the five boroughs distributing tracks in clubs, barbershops, and street corners. Went to open mic nights. 

Creating their own brands:
One of Dash and Jay’z primary tenants was that they shouldn’t let other people make money off of them or give free advertising—meaning they should always be compensated for endorsements or create their own brands. 

During the late 90s, Jay and Dash would often wear Iceberg (Italian knitwear designer). His fans started wearing it and Iceberg’s sales took off. They approached the brand about a partnership and were shrugged off. Jay and Dash then went on to start Rocawear. 

Rocawear was started in the back of the Roc-A-Fella Records office with three sewing machines where they stitched a Roc-A-Fella logo on the front of a T-shirt. But they barely knew how to sew and realized they had no idea what they were doing so they started working with Russell Simmons when founded Phat Farm for advice and partners. Within 18 months, Rocawear was doing $80 million in revenue. 

Transcending mentors and business partners:
“Just as he honed his lyrical skills with Jaz-O’s help as a teenager in Brooklyn and developed his hustler’s sense selling crack with DeHaven Irby in Trenton, he learned legitimate entrepreneurialism from Damon Dash. In each case, Jay-Z absorbed the best qualities of his mentor, applied his own considerable talents to the subject at hand, quickly surpassed said mentor, and moved on to the next one.” ZG

Taking over as president at Def Jam:
When he started at Def Jam, he found people who had been living off one act for the past 20 years, there was no excitement, nothing fresh. During a retreat, he went around the room asking employees to share their reasons for getting into the record business to revitalize their sense of meaning and connection to their work. “We got people to go back to that inner kid and the joy of being in the record business.” Jay-Z

The key to staying on top is to treat everything like it’s your first project—stay humble and curious. 

In December of 2007, his three-year contract was nearing an end and he had launched the careers of Rihanna, Kanye West, and Ne-Yo. His musical career was again on the rise and he immersed himself back into that. 

Blazing the trail for hip-hop at rock festivals:
Headlined Glastonbury in UK in 2008. Many, including Noel Gallagher (Oasis), spoke out against a rapper playing a traditionally rock-focused show. Critics thought Jay would be booed off the stage. Jay came out with a parody of the Oasis song “Wonderwall” and the crow erupted. 

Allow your voice to evolve:
“But the most remarkable aspect of 4:44 was its reflection of an artist who’d evolved from a closed-off adolescent to victory-obsessed hot-head to overly stoic dad to middle-aged sage finally in touch with his emotions and vulnerability.” ZG

Let My People Go Surfing – Yvon Chouinard

Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman – by Yvon Chouinard
Date read: 1/10/23. Recommendation: 10/10.

A wonderful autobiography that details Chouinard’s early days as a climber and the origins of Patagonia. Most of the content in the book was originally intended to act as a philosophical manual for employees of Patagonia. But Chouinard makes this captivating for any reader through stories that explore his own life lessons, the trials of building an enduring company, and the trap of short-sighted decisions. The book contains powerful insights on simplicity, disrupting yourself, communicating with customers, seeking inspiration from unlikely sources, and the lifelong search for your guiding principle.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Chouinard Equipment:
Origins: “In 1957 I went to a junkyard and bought a used coal-fired forge, a 138-pound anvil, and some tongs and hammers and started teaching myself blacksmithing. I wanted to make my own climbing hardware, since we were starting to climb the big walls in Yosemite on multiday ascents that required hundreds of piton placements.” 

At the time all climbing gear was European and the pitons used were soft iron—meant to be hammered in once and left in position (and if you tried to take these pitons out and reuse them, they would often break). The prevailing European attitude was to conquer the mountain and leave all gear in place to make it easier for the next person to reach the summit. American climbers modeled themselves after transcendental writers like Emerson, Thoreau, and Muir, and believed in leaving no trace. 

Chouinard made his first pitons from an old chrome-molybdenum steel blade. They were stiffer and stronger, which made them easier to drive into cracks in Yosemite, and they could be taken out and reused. 

“I made these Lost Arrow pitons for myself and the few friends I climbed with; then friends of friends wanted some. I could forge only two of my chrome-molybdenum steel pitons in an hour, and I started selling them for $1.50 each. You could buy European pitons for twenty cents, but you had to have my new gear if you wanted to do the state-of-the-art climbs that we were doing.” 

In 1964, Chouinard put out his first catalog—“a one-page mimeographed list of items and prices, with a blunt disclaimer on the bottom saying not to expect fast delivery during the months of May to November.” 

As demand grew, “We redesigned and improved just about every climbing tool, making each one stronger, lighter, simpler, and more functional.” 

Quality as a top priority: With climbing tools, it is a matter of life and death, and they were often the heaviest users of their own products. 

Despite the volume of sales doubling year over year, Chouinard Equipment showed only about a 1 percent profit at the end of the year because they were constantly coming up with new designs. By 1970 they were the largest supplier of climbing hardware in the U.S. 

Simplicity:
“In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away…” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“Good design is as little design as possible.” Dieter Rams

“An illustrator becomes an artist when he or she can convey the same emotion with fewer brushstrokes.”

“I believe the way toward mastery of any endeavor is to work toward simplicity; replace complex technology with knowledge. The more you know, the less you need.”

Disrupt yourself:
By the 1970s, the popularity of climbing had skyrocketed. Particularly on well-known routes in primary climbing areas like El Dorado Canyon near Boulder, the Shawangunks in New York, and Yosemite Valley. On these routes, the repeating hammering of hard steel pitons during placement and removal in the same cracks was beginning to severely disfigure the rock. “After an ascent of the Nose route on El Capitan, which had been pristine a few summers earlier, I came home disgusted with the degradation I had seen. Frost and I decided we would phase out of the piton business. This was the first big environmental step we were to take over the year. Pitons were the mainstay of our business, but we were destroying the very rocks we loved.”

Chouinard started looking into aluminum chocks that could be wedged by hand rather than hammered in and out, designed his own versions called Stoppers and Hexentrics, and piloted them in small quantities until they appeared in the Chouinard Equipment catalog in 1972. “The catalog opened with ‘A word…,’ an editorial from the owners on the environmental hazards of pitons and a fourteen-page essay on clean climbing and how to use chocks by Sierra climber Doug Robinson. 

“Within a few months of the catalog’s mailing, the piton business had atrophied; chocks sold faster than they could be made. In the tin buildings of Chouinard Equipment, the steady pounding rhythm of the drop hammer gave way to the high-pitched, searing whine of the multiple drill jig.” 

Underwear: Wearing quick-drying insulation layers (e.g. pile jackets) over cotton underwear defeated the purpose of outer shells. In 1980 they tested making underwear out of polypropylene, a synthetic fiber that absorbs no water. It was originally intended to manufacture industrial commodities like marine ropes which float. Then it started being used in the lining of disposable diapers for its wicking ability to keep babies dry by carrying moisture away from the skin and transferring it to more absorbent outer layers in the diaper. “Using the capabilities of this new underwear as the basis of a system, we became the first company to reach the outdoor community, through essays in our catalog, the concept of layering. This approach involves wearing an inner layer against the skin for moisture transport, a middle layer of pile for insulation, and then an outer shell layer for wind and moisture protection.” 

But polypropylene had a very low melting temperature. Customers who went to commercial laundromats (much hotter dryers than home) would melt their underwear. When Chouinard was at 1984 sporting goods show in Chicago watching a demonstration of polyester football jerseys being cleaned of grass stains. He realized that the material in combination with the etched jersey worked to wick away moisture. Polyester also had a much higher melting temperature. They then introduced their Capilene polyester underwear. Sales soared.

Know your shit: “Some people think we’re a successful company because we’re willing to take risks, but I’d say that’s only partly true. What they don’t realize is that we do our homework. A few years back when we switched midstream from polypropylene to Capilene for our underwear fabric, we had done our fabric development, we had done our testing in the fabric lab. We made tops and bottoms with half the garment Capilene and half polypropylene and extensively tested them in the field. We knew the market, and we were absolutely confident that it was the right thing to do.” 

Other companies started introducing rip-offs and had to scramble to keep up. They repeated the same move in the early 1980s when they realized how bland all outdoor products were (tan, forest green, gray). So they drenched the Patagonia line in color (cobalt, teal, French red, mango, sea foam)

By disrupting themselves, they set the tone for the entire market. Whereas if they had focused on competitors instead, they would have been locked in a reactive state rather than forging ahead with bold decisions and new ideas. 

Switching to organic cotton: “After several trips to the San Joaquin Valley, where we could smell the selenium ponds and see the lunar landscape of cotton fields, we asked a critical question: How could we continue to make products that laid waste to the earth in this way? In the fall of 1994, we made the decision to take our cotton sportswear 100 percent organic by 1996. We had eighteen months to make the switch for sixty-six products, and less than a year to line up the fabric.” 

Seek inspiration from unlikely places:
Chouinard’s first idea for clothing: “In the late sixties, after crag climbing in the Peak District in England, I stopped by an old Lancashire mill that contained the last machine left in the world that still made a tough, superheavy corduroy cloth…Back then, before denim, workmen’s pants used to be made of corduroy because its tufted wales protected the woven backing from abrasion and cuts. I thought this durable cloth would be great for climbing. Ordering up some fabric, I had some knickers and double-seated shorts made. They sold well to our climbing friends, so I ordered some more.”

Rugby shirts: In the late sixties, men didn’t wear bright clothes. Active sportswear was often a gray sweatshirt and pants. On a winter climbing trip to Scotland in 1970, Chouinard bought a regulation rugby shirt to wear, thinking it would be good for climbing since it was built to withstand scrums in rugby and had a collar to keep hardware slings from cutting into his neck. The basic color was blue with two red and one yellow center stripe across the chest. When he returned home his friends started asking about it so he ordered some from Umbro and sold out immediately. They couldn’t keep them in stock. 

Pile sweaters becoming an outdoor staple: “At a time when the entire mountaineering community relied on the traditional, moisture-absorbing layers of cotton, wool, and down, we looked elsewhere for inspiration—and protection. We decided that a staple of North Atlantic fisherman, the synthetic pile sweater, would make an ideal mountain sweater because it insulated well without absorbing moisture…We sewed a few seaters and field-tested them in alpine conditions. The polyester fabric was astonishingly warm, particularly when used with a shell. It insulated well but also dried in minutes, and it reduced the number of layers a climber had to wear.” 

Entrepreneurship:
“If you want to understand the entrepreneur, study the juvenile delinquent. The delinquent is saying with his actions, ‘This sucks. I’m going to do my own thing.’”

“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.” L.P. Jacks

Generalist:
“I’ve always thought of myself as an 80 percenter. I like to throw myself passionately into a sport or activity until I reach about an 80 percent proficiency level. To go beyond that requires an obsession and degree of specialization that doesn’t appeal to me. Once I reach that 80 percent level I like to go off and do something totally different; that probably explains the diversity of the Patagonia product line—and why our versatile, multifaceted clothes are the most successful.” 

Search for guiding principle:
During a period of extreme growth when scale was shaking the company, Chouinard sought advice from Dr. Michael Kami who had run strategic planning for IBM and had turned Harley-Davidson around. 

“Before he could help us, he said, he wanted to know why we were in business. I told him the history of the company and how I considered myself a craftsman who had just happened to grow a successful business…We told him about our tithing program, how we had given away a million dollars just in the past year to more than two hundred organizations, and that our bottom-line reason for staying in business was to make money we could give away. Dr. Kami thought for a while and then said, ‘I think that’s bullshit. If you’re really serious about giving money away, you’d sell the company for a hundred million or so, keep a couple million for yourselves, and put the rest in a foundation. That way you could invest the principal and give away six or eight million dollars every year…So maybe you’re kidding yourself about why you’re in business.’” 

Stick with what you know: “The sooner a company tries to be what it is not, the sooner it tries to ‘have it all,’ and the sooner it will die.” 

As a recession hit the company had to reset, they were growing at an unsustainable pace. They redefined their values and mission statement. And while managers solved for the sales and cash-flow issues, Chouinard led weeklong employee seminars on the company’s revitalized philosophy. The goal was to teach every employee their business and environmental ethics and values. 

Teaching the classes to his employees on Patagonia’s philosophies finally gave Chouinard his answer to Dr. Kami’s question. “I knew, after thirty-five years, why I was in business. True, I wanted to give money to environmental causes. But even more, I wanted to create in Patagonia a model other businesses could look to in their own searches for environmental stewardship and sustainability, just as our pitons and ice axes were models for other equipment manufacturers…I realized how much Patagonia as a business was driven by its high-quality standards and classic design principles. The products we made, each feature of every shirt, jacket, or pair of pants, had to be necessary.” 

“The history of Patagonia from the crisis of 1991-92 to the present day doesn’t make for such interesting reading, fortunately…The story is really about how we are trying to live up to our mission statement: ‘Make the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, and use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.’”

“We never wanted to be a big company. We want to be the best company, and it’s easier to try to be the best small company than the best big company.”

Make the best product:
“Having high-quality, useful products anchors our business in the real world and allows us to expand our mission. Because we have a history of making the best climbing tools in the world, tools that your life is dependent on, we are not satisfied making second-best clothing.” 

Product design principles: Functional, multifunctional, durable, repairable, simple. “As individual consumers, the single best thing we can do for the planet is to keep our stuff in use longer.” 

Non-obvious application of Occam’s Razor and simplification to establish fewer points of failure: “The best-performing firms make a narrow range of products very well. The best firms’ products also use up to 50 percent fewer parts than those made by their less successful rivals. Fewer parts means a faster, simpler (and usually cheaper) manufacturing process. Fewer parts means less to go wrong: quality comes built in.”

“When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.” Richard Buckminster Fuller

Communicating with customers:
“Since the publication of the 1972 Chouinard Equipment catalog that contained the ‘Clean Climbing’ essay, we have seen that the primary purpose of our catalogs is to serve as a vehicle to communicate with our customers—whether it is by trying to change climbing philosophy, by rallying them to register and vote for the environment…or just by relating stories.” 

The ‘Clean Climbing’ essay not only encouraged climbers to climb clean but was also the first piece ever written about how to use the new chocks. “As a result, Chouinard Equipment’s piton business dried up, and its chock business exploded, nearly overnight. To show its impact, far beyond a business tool, that catalog was reviewed as a mountaineering book in the American Alpine Journal.”

“Just as Patagonia makes products for a deeper, less distracted experience of the world and its wild places, our image has to convey refuge from, and offer an alternative to, a virtual world of fast-moving, mind-skimming (and numbing) pictures and sound.” 

The Responsible Company – Yvon Chouinard and Vincent Stanley

The Responsible Company: What We’ve Learned from Patagonia’s First 40 Years – by Yvon Chouinard and Vincent Stanley
Date read: 1/4/23. Recommendation: 8/10.

A quick read that operates like a handbook for how to build an enduring, responsible company. Chouinard and Stanley detail—across decades of experience—how doing the right thing and focusing on sustainable growth is actually what’s good for business. Every entrepreneur should read this. There are tremendous lessons in doing hard things, anchoring in truth, disrupting yourself, and investing in meaningful work.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Patagonia origins:
“Yvon created Patagonia as an offshoot of the Chouinard Equipment Company, which made excellent mountain-climbing gear recognized as the best in the world, but very little money. Patagonia was intended to be a clean and easy company.” 

“At Chouinard Equipment we were used to a life-or-death standard of product quality: you did not sell an ice axe without checking it closely for a hairline fracture or any other fault. Although we applied the same standard to rugby shirts (they had to be thick and tough to survive the skin-shredding sport of rock climbing), we knew that seam failure was unlikely to kill anyone. Patagonia was to be our irresponsible company, bringing in easy money, a softer life, and enough profits to keep Chouinard Equipment in the black.”

We are part of nature:
“As men and women we are part of nature. If we were to have no experience of wild nature, or no way to know of it, we would lose entirely our sense of human scale. We derive our sense of awe from our ability to feel nature’s force. We better know ourselves when we come face to face with the magnificence of the unknown. Emerson, Thoreau, and other transcendentalists learned and taught these lessons in New England in the 1830s through 1860s. They showed us that we can learn directly from nature about who we are and how to live.”

Not everything can be quantified: “We don’t think a speech from John Muir on the need for ecosystem services would have swayed Teddy Roosevelt to preserve Yosemite Park nearly as much as a night in the redwoods under the stars.”

Reducing environmental harm:
“Know your impacts, favor improvement, share what you learn.” Daniel Goleman

“Responsible behavior, as it becomes cumulative, also makes a company smarter, more nimble, and potentially more successful.”

Making it everyone’s job: “It is important to note that Patagonia’s dedicated environmental staff for products numbered all of two. The small size of the department was deliberate: we wanted the reduction of environmental harm to be part of everyone’s job. We did not want to create a separate bureaucracy that might clash unproductively with our product-quality or sourcing staff, or give that staff a reason to make environmental considerations secondary because someone else would handle them in their stead.”

Verify before trust: “Before placing an initial order with a factory, Patagonia has a member of its social/environmental responsibility team visit to verify conditions. This team member can break the deal. Our quality director has similar veto power over the sourcing department’s decision to take on a new factory.”

Win/win: “Companies that recognize the opportunity to use the intelligence and creative capacity of their people to do less harm, certainly less harm that serves no useful purpose, will benefit. The company that wreaks less environmental harm will at the same time reduce its sharply rising costs for energy, water, and waste disposal.”

Meaningful work:
“At its heart, to have meaningful work is to do something you love to do and are good at doing for a living. Most people don’t know, at first, what they love best. What they become best at develops by trial and error or by accident. We’re all good at something: with words or numbers, or we work with our hands, or we work best outside.”

“Meaningful work is doing things you love to do, often, though not always, with other people. No responsible company can function well without a lot of different people doing things they love to do in concert with others. Doing what you love to do makes work meaningful. Doing the right thing, with others, makes work meaningful.”

“We have made the choice to do better and not accept the status quo. This is how our work has become more meaningful: we’re not just making clothes, we’re making long-lasting clothes that do less damage.”

Disrupting yourself:
“In 1972, Chouinard Equipment was still a small company (about $400,000 a year in sales), but it had become the largest supplier of climbing hardware in the U.S. With the increased popularity of climbing, and its concentration on the same well-tried routes (in Yosemite Valley, El Dorado Canyon, the Shawangunks, etc.), our reusable hard-steel pitons had become environmental villains. The same fragile cracks had to endure repeated hammering of pitons during both placement and removal, and the disfiguring was severe. After an ascent of the degraded Nose route on El Capitan, which had been pristine a few summers earlier, Yvon and partner Tom Frost decided to phase out of the piton business. It was a huge risk: pitons were the mainstay of the business. But the change had to be made for reasons both moral and practical: the routes were beautiful and satisfying and shouldn’t be ruined; and to ruin them would put an end to, or greatly reduce, the possibilities for climbing in the most popular areas, and thus eventually hurt our business.”

“There was an alternative: aluminum chocks that could be wedged in and removed by hand without the use of a hammer. Hexentrics and stoppers made their first appearance in the Chouinard Equipment catalog in 1972.”

“That catalog opened with an editorial from the owners on the environmental hazards of pitons. A fourteen-page essay by Sierra climber Doug Robinson on how to use chocks began with a powerful paragraph: ‘There is a word for it, and the word is clean. Climbing with only nuts and runners for protection is clean climbing. Clean because the rock is left unaltered by the passing climber. Clean because nothing is hammered into the rock and then hammered back out, leaving the rock scarred and the next climber’s experience less natural. Clean because the climber’s protection leaves little trace of his ascension. Clean is climbing the rock without changing it; a step closer to organic climbing for the natural man.’”

“Within a few months of the catalog’s mailing, the piton business had atrophied; chocks sold faster than they could be made. In the tin sheds of Chouinard Equipment, the steady pounding rhythm of the drop hammer gave way to the high-pitched whine of the multiple-drill jig.”

“At Chouinard Equipment, we learned that we could inspire our customers to do less harm simply by making them aware of the problem and offering a solution. We also learned that by addressing the problem we had forced ourselves to make a better product: chocks were lighter than pitons and as or more secure. We might not have risked the obsolescence of our piton business just to sell something new. But doing the right thing motivated us—and turned out to be good business.”

Retention:
“It costs Patagonia roughly $50,000, on average, to recruit, train, and get up to speed a new employee; if we want to make any money, it’s a good idea to keep the ones we have happy and fully engaged.”

“How to gain a customer and keep one? First, make something or offer a service someone can use, for which satisfaction endures. Second, your company should romance, but not bullshit, the people whose business it solicits.”

Navigating downturns:
“Our emergency plan for a downturn of any magnitude now is to cut the fat, freeze hiring, reduce travel, and trim every type of expense except salaries and wages.”

Anchor in truth:
“A company needs to present itself well to the customer; it may even preen a little, the way a lover might take care to dress for a date. A life story, or product story, told just this side of myth-making is okay when it fairly represents the real. But beware of conjuring a false image of your company’s goods or services. Mystification will no longer work in a world where stage fog can be quickly dispersed by a competitor, activist, or regulator.”

“Transparency is the primary contemporary virtue for all responsible businesses.”

“For a company to set goals or assess progress toward meeting them it needs freely flowing, transparent information. No transparency: no accountability.”

Do the hard thing:
“Patagonia was not always an especially transparent company, nor were we eager to learn about problems that seemed beyond our control. We collectively groaned when we learned how harmful conventionally grown cotton was. We had no idea when we decided to switch to organic cotton how much work would be involved; we knew only that it was possible, and that we had no compelling reason to continue to use harmful, chemically dependent cotton.”

“Over time, your company will become healthier as a benefit of knowing your business more intimately—and more fully engaging your workforce and community.”

In the Shadow of Man – Jane Goodall

In the Shadow of Man – by Jane Goodall
Date read: 12/18/22. Recommendation: 8/10.

Jane Goodall’s account of her life and lessons learned living among the chimpanzees of Gombe National Park. This book focuses on her first ten years in the field. Her beginnings—how she found her way to Gombe and met Dr. Louis Leakey are truly inspirational. And the stories she tells of her time in Africa with the chimps, how she got to know them, the behaviors she observed, and what that taught her about our own humanity will open your mind and ground you in something real.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Childhood:
Lived in a red-brick Victorian house in Bournemouth where she dreamed of one day going to Africa, living with animals, and writing books about them.

Books that inspired her: Doctor Dolittle, Tarzan, Beatrix Potter, and The Wind in the Willows.

“The years covered in this book were, perhaps, the happiest of my life, when I was immersed in the forest world I had dreamed of as a child.” JG

Fascinated with animals from an early age: One of her earliest memories (age four) was when her family went to a farm for a holiday. Goodall was asking questions about how hens lay eggs but she wasn’t getting a satisfactory answer. So she crawled into a henhouse and sat quietly for five hours in the corner just to see for herself. The entire house was searching for her and her mother called the police during that time. 

When she was eight years old, she decided she would go to Africa and live with wild animals when she grew up. 

Reaching Africa:
When she left school at eighteen, she took a secretarial course and two different jobs. When a school friend invited her to come stay at her parent’s farm in Kenya, she handed in her resignation the same day. She left a fascinating job at a documentary film studio in order to earn her way to pay for travel to Africa (it was difficult to save money in London) by working as a waitress during the summer in her hometown of Bournemouth. 

A month after arriving in Africa, a friend suggested she should meet Dr. Louis Leakey—if she were interested in animals. She had already started an office job. But she went to see Leakey at the National Museum of Natural History in Nairobi where he was the curator at the time. It just so happened that his secretary recently quit so he offered the job to Goodall. 

While at the museum she learned from the other naturalists and shared in their enthusiasm for animals. Soon after, Leakey offered Goodall a chance to join him and his wife, Mary, on their annual paleontological expedition to the Olduvai Gorge on the Serengeti plains. 

Towards the end of their time at Olduvai, Leakey had seen how hard she worked and how much she loved interacting with the animals, so he mentioned a group of chimpanzees living near the shores of Lake Tanganyika in present-day Tanzania. He described their habitat and how rugged and remote it was. He emphasized the patience and dedication that would be required to study them. 

Leakey asked Goodall if she would be willing to tackle the job of observing the chimpanzees at Gombe. Despite not having an official degree or scientific background to study animal behavior. Leakey wanted someone who was unbiased by current scientific schools of thought. He wanted someone who understood and connected with animals and was eager to learn. 

After Goodall agreed to go, Leakey worked on raising the necessary funds. “He had to convince someone of the need for the study itself, and also that a young unqualified girl was the right person to attempt it. Eventually, the Wilkie Foundation in Des Plaines, Illinois, agreed to contribute a sum sufficient to cover the necessary capital expenses—a small boat, a tent, and airfares—and an initial six months in the field.” JG

Patience + Perseverance:
After arriving at Gombe to conduct her research, Goodall spent almost half a year trying to overcome the chimpanzees’ inherent fear of her. Whenever she accidentally got close, the chimps would run off into the undergrowth in a panic. In the early days, they wouldn’t even let her within 500 yards of them. 

There were days and weeks she saw no sign of the chimpanzees at all. “Nevertheless, those weeks did serve to acquaint me with the rugged terrain. My skin became hardened to the rough grasses of the valleys and my blood immune to the poison of the tsetse fly, so that I no longer swelled hugely each time I was bitten. I became increasingly surefooted on the treacherous slopes, which were equally slippery whether they were bare or eroded, crusted with charcoal, or carpeted by dry, trampled grass. Gradually, too, I became familiar with many of the animal tracks in the five valleys that became my main work area.” JG

As the months went by, Goodall knew they were close to running out of funds and she didn’t have much observational evidence to keep the study alive. She was running out of time. 

Three months in, she hiked to an open peak about 1,000 feet above the lake that had a good vantage point over one of the valleys. That morning a group of chimps appeared to feed on some fig trees near the stream in the valley. They were in plain sight, about 80 years away, the closest she had been which allowed her to better observe the chimps. This day was a turning point in her study. She began to recognize individuals and give them names. She was able to get her first glimpse of social behavior and how they made their nests. 

One day from the peak she saw a small group of chimps just below her in the upper branches of a thick tree and noticed the chimps were eating meat—one of those chimps was David Graybeard who was always the least afraid of her and because of his comfort, the rest of the chimps became more comfortable around Goodall. This was the first groundbreaking discovery because previously it was believed that chimps were primarily vegetarians and fruit eaters. No one knew they would hunt and eat larger mammals. 

Two weeks after she saw the chimps eating meat, she saw David Graybeard “squatting beside the red earth mound of a termite nest, and as I watched I saw him carefully push a long grass stem down into a hole in the mound. After a moment, he withdrew it and picked something from the end of his mouth.” This was another groundbreaking discovery and was one of the first observations of non-humans using and modifying objects as tools. It demonstrated the crude beginnings of toolmaking. Previously it was believed that humans were the only tool-making animal. 

These observations (meat-eating and toolmaking) gave the study renewed life. Leakey was able to use these discoveries to secure funding from the National Geographic Society for another year of research. 

Other toolmaking observations: 
Stems and stick to capture and eat insects
Leaves to sop up water they can’t reach with their lips
Leaves to wipe dirt from their bodies and dap at wounds
Sticks as levers to enlarge underground bees’ nests

Cambridge: 
Leakey helped Goodall get admitted to Cambridge University in 1961 after her initial research despite her not having an undergrad degree. She would work towards her Ph.D. in ethology (study of animal behavior). Wanted to make sure the scientific community didn’t have excuses to reject her observations and studies. 

During this time, Goodall would spend time at Cambridge pursuing her Ph.D. and return to Gombe when she was finished with each term to continue her observations. 

Differences of degree, rather than kind:
The scientific community informed Jane that it was inappropriate to talk of chimpanzees having personalities, minds capable of thought, or emotions similar to us. “In other words, there was a sharp line dividing ‘us’ from ‘them.’”

Accumulation of observations forced science to rethink its attitude toward animals. “It became increasingly clear that we are part of, and not separated from, the rest of the animal kingdom.” 

Man’s awareness of himself is very different from the dawning awareness of the chimpanzee and this is a very important difference. 

But chimpanzees have the ability to solve complex problems, make and use tools for different purposes, and operate in complex social structures with elaborate communication. 

Three Kings – Zack O'Malley Greenburg

Three Kings – by Zack O’Malley Greenburg
Date read: 12/6/22. Recommendation: 8/10.

The story of Diddy, Dr. Dre, Jay-Z, and hip-hop’s multibillion-dollar rise. Greenburg digs into each icon as an artist and entrepreneur, examining similarities and differences in how they cut their own paths to the top. As the book reveals, Diddy, Dre, and Jay-Z all grew up effectively fatherless, developed a flair for music, started their own record labels, and released classic albums before moving on to become multifaceted moguls. But each legend had his own unique strengths that distinguished him along the way.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Upbringing:
“Diddy, Dre, and Jay-Z all grew up effectively fatherless, developed a flair for music, started their own record labels, and released classic albums before moving on to become multifaceted moguls.” ZG

Jay-Z’s Success:
Legendary lyricist who plays business like a chess game, plotting multiple moves ahead. Most successful recording artist of the three, every album he’s released has been certified platinum (multiplatinum every single year from ’98 through ’03). 

Jay-Z’s Origins:
“A year before the release of ‘Rappers Delight,’ Shawn Carter discovered hip-hop in his own backyard. On a sweaty summer afternoon in Brooklyn’s Marcy Houses, a bleak public-housing project…a nine-year-old boy soon to be known as Jay-Z noticed a group of kids standing in a circle. One of them, a local rapper called Slate, freestyles about everything—anything—that crossed his mind, from the sidewalk to the crowd around him to the quality of his own rhymes. He rapped until dusk fell, spitting lyrics as though possessed.” ZG

When Jay-Z first saw slate he thought, that’s some cool shit, then imagined how he could also do that. He went home and started filling up spiral notebooks with his own rhymes. He would pound beats on the kitchen table and scour dictionaries for new words. 

Jay-Z’s name: childhood nickname (Jazzy) and two subway lines near the Marcy Houses (J and Z), homage to his first mentor (Jaz-O).

Fundamentals:
In 1984, Jay-Z met Jonathan ‘Jaz-O’ Burks who showed him the ropes—metaphor, simile, onomatopoeia, structure for writing songs. 

Hustling:
Jay-Z’s childhood friend and neighbor in the Marcy Houses, DeHaven Irby, pulled him into the drug trade (crack). They would venture to Trenton, New Jersey, or down south to Maryland to deal away from their home. The only thing that pulled Jay off the streets was music. 

First trip overseas:
In 1988, Jaz-O landed a deal with UK-based label EMI. Brought Jay-Z (his then-apprentice) to London with him for two months. EMI ghosted Jaz-O when his record didn’t land, Jay-Z became disillusioned with hip-hop and turned back to the drug trade.

Self-made:
Jay-Z used profits from drug dealing to start a record company since major labels balked at hip-hop and it was the only way to get his music out. Started his own label: Roc-A-Fella Records a play on the world’s first billionaire (John D. Rockefeller) and the draconian drug laws bearing his family’s name. 

Debut album:
Reasonable Doubt: “Jay-Z’s dexterous rhymes and skillful rendering of a hustler’s life went on to sell 420,000 units in its first year. The record established Jay as one of his generation’s premier rappers.” ZG

Seize creative control: Two indie labels were helping with distribution for the first album. When Jay pressed them for unpaid royalties, they couldn’t cover what they owed. Jay then negotiated his release and the rights to his master recording. This allowed him to shop his record to major labels for a second run which Def Jam bought into by purchasing one-third of Roc-A-Fella for $1.5 million. 

Create your own:
During the late ‘90s, Jay was wearing clothes by the European designer Iceberg. Soon many of his fans were doing the same. Damon Dash (Jay’s business partner) negotiated a meeting with the bigwigs at Iceberg to land an endorsement deal. Jay and Dash asked for millions and the use of a private jet. Iceberg offered free clothes. This experience led them to start the clothing company “Rocawear” and take a do-it-yourself approach.

“They hauled sewing machines into Roc-A-Fella offices and hired people to stitch together early Rocawear prototypes. They weren’t anywhere close to building something scalable: shirts took three weeks each to make. Finally, they asked Russell Simmons for advice, and he set them up with his partners at Phat Farm….” ZG

“Soon Rocawear replaced Iceberg in Jay-Z’s lyrics and on his person, and the fledgling brand became a real business. Jay-Z had discovered what would become one of the central tenets of his business; whenever possible, own the products you rap about; otherwise, you’re just giving someone else free business.” ZG

Atlas of the Heart – Brené Brown

Atlas of the Heart – by Brené Brown
Date read: 8/14/22. Recommendation: 9/10.

I dearly needed to read this book when I did. I’ve been struggling to truly understand the nuance between different emotions and experiences and working to hone my own empathy so I’m able to show up in a more helpful way for the people in my life. Brené delivers the perfect book for making sense of our feelings and experiences. she emphasizes the impact of language—it’s not just to communicate emotion, it also shapes what we’re feeling. She digs into 150 human emotions and experiences throughout the book, detailing each. To wrap up the book, she spends time exploring the concept of ‘near enemies’ which I found incredibly helpful. As Brené explains, on the surface, the near enemies of emotions or experiences might look and even feel like connection, but ultimately they drive us to be disconnected from ourselves and from each other.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

The power of language:
“Language does more than just communicate emotion, it can actually shape what we’re feeling. Our understanding of our own and others’ emotions is shaped by how we perceive, categorize, and describe emotional experiences.” BB

Making sense of our feelings and experience:
“Just like a map, the interaction between the layers of our emotions and experiences tells our story. But rather than elevation and roads and water, human emotions and experiences are layers of biology, biography, behavior, and backstory.” BB

1. Understand how they show up in our bodies and why (biology)

2. Get curious about how our families and communities shape our beliefs about the connection between our feelings, thoughts, and behavior (biography)

3. Examine our go-to (behaviors)

4. Recognize the context of what we’re feeling or thinking. What brought this on? (backstory)

Stressed and overwhelmed:
“Feeling stressed and overwhelmed seem to be related to our perception of how we are coping with our current situation and our ability to handle the accompanying emotions: Am I coping? Can I handle this? Am I inching towards quicksand?” BB

Not a setup for successful decision-making: “I’m feeling my emotions at about 10, I’m paying attention to them at about 5, and I understand them at about 2.”

Admiration and reverence:
“Admiration fosters self-betterment, reverence seems to foster a desire for connection to what we revere—we want to move closer to that thing or person.” BB

Resentment:
“Resentment is the feeling of frustration, judgment, anger…It’s an emotion that we often experience when we fail to set boundaries or ask for what we need, or when expectations let us down because they were based on things we can’t control, like what other people think, what they feel, or how they’re going to react.” BB

“Now when I start to feel resentful, instead of thinking, What is that person doing wrong? or What should they be doing? I think, What do I need but am afraid to ask for?” BB

Freudenfreude:
The enjoyment of another’s success.

“Shoy: intentionally sharing in the joy of someone relating a success story by showing interest and asking follow-up questions.” BB

“Bragitude: intentionally tying words of gratitude toward the listener following the discussion of personal success.” BB

Expressing gratitude when others share joy: “Thank you for celebrating this with me. It means so much that you’re happy for me.” BB

Unexamined expectations:
As Brené and her husband were raising their children, they would often find weekends where the other person was out of town were easier, despite having to manage all the kids solo. When they were both parenting together on weekends they would often feel like the other wasn’t unhelpful and didn’t make it easier. What they realized is that when they were solo parenting, they let go of all expectations to get their own stuff done. They each gave up their to-do list and just rolled with the chaos. Now before weekends, vacations, or busy workweeks, they talk about expectations and ask each other, “What do you want this weekend to look like?” Brené might say, “This is going to be a busy weekend. I’m down for whatever we need to do, but I would like to swim at least one day.” 

Awe and wonder:
“Wonder inspires the wish to understand; awe inspires the wish to let shine, to acknowledge and to unite.” Ulrich Weger and Johannes Wagemann

“Wonder fuels our passion for exploration and learning, for curiosity and adventure.” BB

Hope:
“Hope is learned…To learn hopefulness, children need relationships that are characterized by boundaries, consistency, and support. Children with a high level of hopefulness have experience with adversity. They’ve been given the opportunity to struggle, and in doing that they learn how to believe in themselves and their abilities.” BB

“Prepare the child for the path, not the path for the child.”

Empathy:
“Empathy, the most powerful tool of compassion, is an emotional skill set that allows us to understand what someone is experiencing and to reflect back that understanding.” BB

“Cognitive empathy, sometimes called perspective taking or mentalizing, is the ability to recognize and understand another person’s emotions…If someone is feeling lonely, empathy doesn’t require us to feel lonely too, only to reach back into our own experience with loneliness so we can understand and connect.” BB

“We can respond empathetically only if we are willing to be present to someone’s pain.” BB

Empathy is not walking in someone else’s shoes. It’s about learning how to listen to the story you tell about what it’s like in your shoes and believe you even when it doesn’t match my experience. 

“Empathy is not relating to an experience, it’s connecting to what someone is feeling about an experience.” BB

Theresa Wiseman’s attributes of empathy:

1. Perspective taking: What does that concept mean for you? What is that experience like for you?

2. Staying out of judgment: Just listen, don’t put value on it.

3. Recognizing emotion: How can I touch within myself something that helps me identify and connect with what the other person might be feeling. Check in and clarify what you are hearing. Ask questions.

4. Communicating our understanding about the emotion: Sometimes this is elaborate and detailed, and sometimes this is simply, “Shit. That’s hard. I get that.”

5. Practicing mindfulness: This is not pushing away emotion because it’s uncomfortable, but feeling it and moving through it.

“The antidote to shame is empathy…Shame needs you to believe that you’re alone. Empathy is a hostile environment for shame.” BB

Be the learner, not the knower.

Sympathy:
“Sympathy is removed: When someone says, ‘I feel sorry for you’ or ‘That must be terrible,’ they are standing at a safe distance. Rather than conveying the powerful ‘me too’ of empathy, it communicates ‘not me,’ then adds, ‘But I do feel sorry for you.’” BB

Perfectionism:
“Shame is the birthplace of perfectionism. Perfectionism is not striving to be our best or working toward excellence. Healthy striving is internally driven. Perfectionism is externally driven by a simple but potentially all-consuming question: What will people think?” BB

“Perfectionism is a self-destructive and addictive belief system that fuels this primary thought: If I look perfect, live perfectly, work perfectly, and do everything perfectly, I can avoid or minimize the painful feelings of shame, judgment, and blame.” BB

Humiliation:
“Never allow anyone to be humiliated in your presence.” Elie Wiesel

Belonging:
“We have to belong to ourselves as much as we need to belong to others. Any belonging that asks us to betray ourselves is not true belonging.” BB

Love:
“Love is not something we give or get; it is something that we nurture and grow, a connection that can be cultivated between two people only when it exists within each one of them—we can love others only as much as love ourselves.” BB

“We need more real love. Gritty, dangerous, wild-eyed, justice-seeking love.” BB

Trust:
BRAVING tool
Boundaries: You respect my boundaries, and when you’re not clear about what’s okay and not okay, you ask. You’re willing to say no. 

Reliability: You do what you say you’ll do.

Accountability: You own your mistakes, apologize, and make amends.

Vault: You don’t share information or experiences that are not yours to share.

Integrity: You choose courage over comfort. You choose what is right over what is fun, fast, or easy.

Nonjudgment: I can ask for what I need, and you can ask for what you need.

Generosity: You extend the most generous interpretation possible to the intentions, words, and actions of others.

Gratitude:
“Gratitude allows us to participate more in life. We notice the positives more, and that magnifies the pleasures you get from life. Instead of adapting to goodness, we celebrate goodness. We spend so much time watching things—movies, computer screens, sports—but with gratitude we become greater participants in our lives as opposed to spectators.” Robert Emmons

Self-righteousness:
The conviction that one’s beliefs and behaviors are the most correct. Leads to inflexibility, intolerance to ambiguity, and less consideration of others’ opinions. 

Mostly, self-righteousness is a sense of moral superiority and trying to convince ourselves and others that we’re doing the right thing. Shows up as performative moral outrage on social media.

Near enemies:
“Near enemies are states that appear similar to the desired quality but actually undermine it. Far enemies are the opposite of what we’re trying to achieve. For example, a near enemy of loving-kindness is sentimentality—similar but different. A far enemy of loving-kindness is ill will—the opposite of loving-kindness. Similarly, a near enemy of compassion is pity and a far enemy is cruelty.” Chris Gerner

“On the surface, the near enemies of emotions or experiences might look and even feel like connection, but ultimately they drive us to be disconnected from ourselves and from each other. Without awareness, near enemies become the practices that fuel separation…” BB

“The near enemy of love is attachment. Attachment masquerades as love. It says, ‘I will love this person (because I need something from them).’ Or, ‘I’ll love you if you’ll love me back. I’ll love you, but only if you will be the way I want.’ True love allows, honors, and appreciates; attachment grasps, demands, needs, and aim to possess.” Jack Kornfield

“It’s the near enemies of connection—the imposters than can look and feel like cultivating closeness—that sabotage relationships and leave us feeling alone and in pain.” BB

The 33 Strategies of War – Robert Greene

The 33 Strategies of War – by Robert Greene
Date read: 8/1/22. Recommendation: 9/10.

Robert Greene is a generational talent. He’s my favorite author and fortunately, I haven’t read his entire library of work yet. This is an older book of his that I just read through for the first time and it’s as brilliant as any of his other work. He follows his tried and true template of bringing each strategy to life with historical examples of those who have embodied that strategy, as well as those who have failed to observe its importance. There are countless practical applications in our daily lives and careers.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Strategy:
“Our successes and failures in life can be traced to how well or how badly we deal with the inevitable conflicts that confront us in society. The common ways that people deal with them—trying to avoid all conflict, getting emotional and lashing out, turning sly and manipulative—are all counterproductive in the long run, because they are not under conscious and rational control and often make the situation worse.” RG

“Strategic warriors operate much differently. They think ahead toward their long-term goals, decide which fights to avoid and which are inevitable.” RG

“Strategy makes a better woodcutter than strength.” The Iliad, Homer

“Tactical people are heavy and stuck in the ground; strategists are light on their feet and can see far and wide.” RG

“In this world, where the game is played with loaded dice, a man must have a temper of iron, with armor proof to the blows of fate, and weapons to make his way against men. Life is one long battle; we have to fight at every step and Voltaire rightly says that if we succeed, it is at the point of the sword, and that we die with the weapon in our hand.” Schopenhauer 

Self-sufficiency:
“Being unconquerable lies with yourself.” Sun-tzu

“Dependency makes you vulnerable to all kinds of emotions—betrayal, disappointment, frustration—that play havoc with your mental balance.” RG

Trust yourself more and others less.

Enemies:
“Being attacked is a sign that you are important enough to be a target. You should relish the attention and the chance to prove yourself.” RG

It took Joe Frazier to make Muhammad Ali a great fighter—tough opponents will bring out the best in you.

Allow yourself to evolve and remain fluid:
“Your tendency to fight the last war may lead to your final war.” RG

“Strategy is not a question of learning a series of moves or ideas to follow like a recipe; victory has no magic formula. Ideas are merely nutrients for the soil; they lie in your brain as possibilities, so that in the heat of the moment they can inspire a direction, an appropriate and creative response.” RG

“Apply no tactic rigidly; do not let your mind settle into static positions, defending any particular place or idea, repeating the same lifeless maneuvers. Attack problems from new angles, adapting to the landscape and to what you’re given. By staying in constant motion you show your enemies no target to aim at. You exploit the chaos of the world instead of succumbing to it.” RG

“Water. Adapting its shape to wherever it moves in the steam, pushing rocks out of its way, smoothing boulders, it never stops, is never the same. The faster it moves the clearer it gets.” RG

“The future belongs to groups that are fluid, fast, and nonlinear.” RG

“Anything that has form can be overcome; anything that takes shape can be countered. This is why sages conceal their forms in nothingness and let their minds soar in the void.” Huainanzi

Reality is your friend:
Scout mindset: superior strategists see things as they are. They don’t dwell on the past, the present is far more interesting.

“To remain disciplined and calm while waiting for disorder to appear amongst the enemy is the art of self-possession.” Sun-tzu

Preparation: 
Never allow yourself to be underprepared—calmness and relaxed concentration come from relentless preparation.

Alfred Hitchcock stayed calm and detached during filming because he had prepared so relentlessly leading up to the production. Nothing caught him off guard. 

“Deep knowledge of the terrain will let you process information faster than your enemy.” RG

Grand strategy:
“Ignore the conventional wisdom about what you should or should not be doing….You need to be patient enough to plot several steps ahead—to wage a campaign instead of fighting battles. The path to your goal may be indirect, your actions may be strange to other people…” RG

Grand strategist = calm, detached, far-seeing. 

“The prudent man might seem cold, his rationality sucking pleasure out of life. Not so. Like the pleasure-loving gods on Mount Olympus, he has the perspective, the calm detachment, the ability to laugh, that come with true vision which gives everything he does a quality of lightness—these traits comprising what Nietzsche calls the ‘Apollonian ideal.’ Only people who can’t see past their noses make things heavy.” RG

“We often imagine that we generally operate by some kind of plan, that we have goals we are trying to reach. But we’re usually fooling ourselves; what we have are not goals, but wishes.” RG

“What have distinguished all history’s grand strategists and can distinguish you too, are specific, detailed, focused goals. Contemplate them day in and day out, and imagine how it will feel to reach them and what reaching them will look like.” RG

Clear line of command:
“Better one bad general than two good ones.” Napoleon

“No good can ever come of divided leadership. If you are ever offered a position in which you will have to share command, turn it down, for the enterprise will fail and you will be held responsible. Better to take a lower position and let the other person have the job.” RG

Lead from the front:
“Right from the beginning, your troops must see you leading from the front, sharing their dangers and sacrifices—taking the cause as seriously as they do. Instead of trying to push them from behind, make them run to keep up with you.” RG

LBJ was relentless and demanding, but never asked his staff to do anything he wouldn’t do himself. 

Shift the battlefield:
“The best way to attain control is to determine the overall pace, direction, and shape of the war itself. This means getting enemies to fight according to your tempo, luring them onto terrain that is unfamiliar to them and suited to you, playing to your strengths.” RG

“Your enemies will naturally choose to fight on terrain that is to their liking, that allows them to use their power to best advantage…Your goal is to subtly shift the conflict to terrain of your choice. You accept the battle but alter its nature. If it is about money, shift it to something moral. If your opponents want to fight over a particular issue, reframe the battle to encompass something larger and more difficult for them to handle. If they like a slow pace, find a way to quicken it.” RG

Center of gravity:
“Everyone has a source of power on which he or she depends. When you look at your rivals, search below the surface for that source, the center of gravity that holds the entire structure together. That center can be their wealth, their popularity, a key position, a winning strategy. Hitting them there will inflict disproportionate pain. Find what the other side cherishes and protects—that is where you must strike.” RG

“Power is deceptive. If we imagine the enemy as a boxer, we tend to focus on his punch. But still more than he depends on his punch, he depends on his legs; once they go weak, he loses balance, he cannot escape the other fighter, he is subject to grueling exchanges…” RG

To find the center, it often takes multiple steps to peel back the layers. Scipio first saw that Hannibal depended on Spain, then that Spain depended on Carthage, then that Carthage depended on its material prosperity. Instead of striking Carthage, he struck its fertile farming zone which was the source of its wealth, debilitating Carthage completely. 

“The Wall. Your opponents stand behind a wall which protects them from strangers and intruders. Do not hit your head against the wall or lay siege to it; find the pillars and supports that make it stand and give it strength. Dig under the wall, sapping its foundation until it collapses on its own.” RG

In victory, learn when to stop:
“You are judged in this world by how well you bring things to an end…The art of ending things well is knowing when to stop, never going so far that you exhaust yourself or create bitter enemies.” RG

“The worst way to end anything—a war, a conflict, a relationship—is slowly and painfully.” RG

“Before entering any action, you must calculate in precise terms your exit strategy.” RG

Gambles versus risks:
“Both cases involve an action with only a chance of success, a chance that is heightened by acting with boldness. The difference is that with a risk, if you lose, you can recover: your reputation will suffer no long-term damage, your resources will not be depleted, and you can return to your original position with acceptable losses. With a gamble, on the other hand, defeat can lead to a slew of problems that are likely to spiral out of control.” RG

Build – Tony Fadell

Build - by Tony Fadell
Date read: 7/23/22. Recommendation: 8/10.

Such a great book for entrepreneurs and creators. Fadell, the engineer behind the iPod and iPhone, and founder of Nest, reflects on lessons learned over the course of his career. He offers advice on evaluating opportunities, working with executives, disrupting yourself, managing crises, and knowing when to quit and when to stick it out. Throughout the entire book he ties these themes back into his own experiences and advocates for the importance of having skin in the game.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Evaluating opportunities:
“When you’re looking at the array of potential careers before you, the correct place to start is: ‘What do I want to learn?’
Not ‘How much money do I want to make?’
Not ‘What title do I want to have?’
Not ‘What company has enough name recognition…’” TF

“The only failure in your twenties is inaction. The rest is trial and error.” Anonymous 

Tony spent the dot-com bubble building handheld devices. Instead of going to some internet startup, he went to Philips to make devices, then started his own company to make digital music players. Eventually, that led him to Apple where he made the iPod and iPhone. Wouldn’t have had that opportunity if he didn’t stick with what he wanted to learn and what he cared about building. 

“The way I’ve gotten wealthy is not by accepting giant paychecks or titles to do the jobs I know I’ll hate. I follow my curiosity and my passion. Always.” TF

“What you do matters. Where you work matters. Most importantly, who you work with and learn from matters. Too many people see work as a means to an end, as a way to make enough money to stop working. But getting a job is your opportunity to make a dent in the world. To put your focus and energy and your precious, precious time toward something meaningful.” TF

“Students seek out the best professors on the best projects when getting their master’s or PhD, but when they look for jobs, they focus on money, perks, and titles. However, the only thing that can make a job truly amazing or a complete waste of time is the people.” TF

Characteristics of a successful company:

1. Creating product or service that’s wholly new or combines existing tech in a novel way that competition can’t understand.

2. Product solves a problem—a real pain point that customers experience daily. Large existing market.

3. The technology can deliver on the company vision (product, infrastructure, platform, systems).

4. Leadership isn’t dogmatic about what the solution looks like and is willing to adapt to customer needs.

5. Thinks about a problem or customer need in a way you’ve never heard before but makes perfect sense once you hear it.

Growth:
Company and personal growth: “Either you’re growing or you’re done. There is no stasis.” TF

Grind:
“But if you want to prove yourself, to learn as much as you can and do as much as you can, you need to put in the time. Stay late. Come in early. Work over the weekend and holidays sometimes. Don’t expect vacation every couple of months…” TF

Skin in the game (avoid consulting):
“Just whatever you do, don’t become a ‘management consultant’ at a behemoth like McKinsey or Bain or one of the other eight consultancies that dominate the industry. They all have thousands upon thousands of employees and work almost exclusively with Fortune 5000 companies. These corporations, typically led by tentative, risk-averse CEOs, call in the management consultants to do a massive audit, find the flaws, and present leadership with a new plan that will magically ‘fix’ everything.” TF

“To do great things, to really learn, you can’t shout suggestions from the rooftop then move on while someone else does the work. You have to get your hands dirty. You have to care about every step, lovingly craft every detail. You have to be there when it falls apart so you can put it back together.” TF

Working with executives with strong opinions:
Ask why: “It is the responsibility of a passionate person—especially a leader—to describe their decision and make sure you can see it through their eyes. If they can tell you why they’re so passionate about something, then you can piece together their thought process and either jump on board or point out potential issues.” TF

When to quit and when to stick it out:
“Most people know in their gut when they should quit and then spend months—or years—talking themselves out of it.” TF

Indicators that it’s time to quit: 1) You’re no longer passionate about the mission. If you’re staying for the paycheck or to get the title you want, but every hour feels like an eternity. 2) You’ve tried everything. You’re still passionate about the mission but the company is letting you down.

“Every meeting, every pointless project, every hour stretches on and on. You don’t respect your manager, you roll your eyes at the mission…It is time and energy and health and joy that disappear from your life forever.” TF

“People won’t remember how you started. They’ll remember how you left.” TF

“Quitting anytime things get tough not only doesn’t look great on your resume, but it also kills any chance you have of making something you’re proud of. Good things take time. Big things take longer.” TF

“Too many people jump ship the second they need to dig in and really push through the hard, grinding work of making something real.” TF

Disrupt yourself:
“If you’re experiencing your biggest market share ever, that means you’re on the brink of becoming calcified and stagnant. It’s time to dig deep and kick your own ass.” TF

“We had to make the iPhone, even though we knew it could, probably would, kill the iPod.” TF

Tesla could have fallen into the same trap—made EV cars attractive. Every other carmaker followed. So they focused on innovating charging networks, retail, service, batteries, supply chains to stay ahead.

Three generations of products to get it right:
Make the product (not remotely profitable. Fix the product (get gross margins right). Build the business (reach net profits). 

Managing crises:

1. Keep your focus on how to fix the problem, not who to blame.

2. Don’t be worried about micromanagement. Get in the weeds. During a crisis, your job is to tell people what to do and how to do it.

3. Get advice. Don’t try to solve problems alone.

4. Your job once the initial shock is over is to overcommunicate and listen.

5. Accept responsibility for how it has affected customers and apologize, regardless of whose fault it was.

The Power of Fun – Catherine Price

The Power of Fun – by Catherine Price
Date read: 7/7/22. Recommendation: 7/10.

I picked this up because I needed to establish better balance in my life post-COVID and generally make more room for having fun. I hit a point in 2022 where the only thing I prioritized for the previous two years was my career, working seven days a week for as long as I could remember, and just grinding it out. As a result, all I knew how to talk about was work. I forgot how to channel energy into letting go and having fun. The Power of Fun was a helpful resource for getting things back on track. Price defines true fun as the intersection of playfulness, connection, and flow. She walks through examples and self-guided activities for you to rediscover what this means to you. And she also details fun killers like judgment and distraction that you should avoid.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Components of fun:
“True Fun is the confluence of playfulness, connection, and flow.”

“True Fun helps us tap into a rising current of air that lifts us up.” CP

Playfulness:
Characteristics: Spirit of lightheartedness and freedom. Not caring too much about the outcome. No sense of obligation. Smile frequently, laugh easily. 

“Play and playfulness can help us get back in touch with (or figure out for the first time) who we actually are.” CP

“It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality…the self that emerges through play is the core, authentic self.” D.W. Winnicott and Stuart Brown

Connection:
Characteristics: Special, shared experience with someone (or something) else. Connection to your physical environment, activity you’re participating in, or your own body.

“Our lives are what we pay attention to.” CP

“This is why philosopher Simone Weil called attention ‘the rarest and purest form of generosity.’ If you reflect on your most cherished memories from when you were a child, often they will involve an adult who chose, out of all the things in the world, out of all the other demands on their time, to pay attention to you.” CP

“When it comes to dying early, being socially isolated is thought to be an even bigger risk factor than physical inactivity and health problems associated with obesity.” CP

Flow: 
Characteristics: Fully engrossed or engaged in your present experience to the point that you lose track of time.

Fun killers:
Distraction and judgment (prevent you from entering flow). Passive consumption. Resentment.

How fun people make others feel in their presence:
Everyone feels included. No one feels judged. Considerate of others’ feelings. They get excited with you. Create wonderful, shared memories. They’re generous, give everyone the benefit of the doubt, and are really open to others. They always have the time and energy to make people feel special.

Shoe Dog – Phil Knight

Shoe Dog – by Phil Knight
Date read: 6/23/22. Recommendation: 8/10.

A memoir by Phil Knight, the creator of Nike, detailing the wonderful story of the perseverance required over the course of decades to build an enduring company. The most interesting aspect of the Nike story is how the same six people (including Knight) built and continually reimagined the company as they adapted to insane obstacles to defy the odds.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

“Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.” Lewis Carroll

Resourcefulness:
In 1964, Knight sold out of his first shipment of Tigers (shoe brand from Japan). Needed to get to California to hire a salesman but couldn’t afford to fly and didn’t have the time to drive. So Knight put on his army uniform from being in the reserves, drove to the local air base, and the MPs would wave him onto the next transport to SF or LA, no questions asked. 

“Happiness can be dangerous. It dulls the senses.” PK

The art of forgetting:
“The art of competing, I’d learned from track, was the art of forgetting, and I now reminded myself of that fact. You must forget your limits. You must forget your doubts, your pain, your past. You must forget that internal voice screaming, begging, ‘Not one more step!’” PK

Athletes:
“Bowerman was forever griping that people make the mistake of thinking only elite Olympians are athletes. But everyone’s an athlete, he said. If you have a body, you’re an athlete.” PK

Nike team (1976):
Us against the world: “Undoubtedly we looked, to any casual observer, like a sorry, motley crew, hopelessly mismatched…Each of us had been misunderstood, misjudged, dismissed. Shunned by bosses, spurned by luck, rejected by society, shortchanged by fate when looks and other natural graces were handed out. We’d each been forged by early failure. We’d each given ourselves to some quest, some attempt at validation or meaning, and fallen short. Hayes couldn’t become a partner because he was too fat. Johnson couldn’t cope in the so-called normal world of nine-to-five. Strasser was an insurance lawyer who hated insurance—and lawyers. Woodell lost all of his youthful dreams in one fluke accident. I got cut from the baseball team and I got my heart broken.” PK

Call Sign Chaos – Jim Mattis

Call Sign Chaos – by Jim Mattis
Date read: 5/16/22. Recommendation: 9/10.

Tremendous book on leadership and what it takes to lead in a chaotic world. Mattis details lessons learned from more than four decades serving in the Marine Corps. He pulls from a wealth of personal and vicarious experience and structures the book around leadership in three distinct capacities—direct leadership, executive leadership, and strategic leadership. Cover to cover there are useful lessons on building exceptional teams, getting the foundation right, relentless preparation, commander’s intent, a bias towards action, and managing up. I would highly recommend this for any managers and those looking to hone their own leadership skills.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Building teams:
“The two qualities I was taught to value most in selecting others for promotion or critical roles were initiative and aggressiveness.” JM

“When tasked with supporting other units, select those you most hate to give up.” JM

General Ulysses S. Grant’s criteria for leaders: humility; toughness of character, so one is able to take shocks in stride; and the single-mindedness to remain unyielding when all is flying apart but enough mental agility to adapt when their approach is not working.

“If you can’t talk freely with the most junior members of your organization then you’ve lost touch.” JM

Foundational skills:
You must have done the thing you’re training others to do if you want respect. If you shortcut this through promotions you haven’t earned, it will come back to haunt you. “Every Marine is first and foremost a rifleman and must qualify on the rifle range. Lieutenants learn that everything they will go on to do in the Corps, no matter the rank or the job, relates back to the private who is attacking the enemy.” JM

“Be brilliant in the basics. Don’t dabble in your job; you must master it.” JM

“As an officer, you need to win only one battle—for the hearts of your troops. Win their hearts and they will win the fights.” JM

Learn the basics so well they become second nature: “We all knew one another’s jobs so well that we could adapt to any surprise. My intent was to rehearse until we could improvise on the battlefield like a jazzman in New Orleans. This required a mastery of instruments of war, just as jazz musician master his musical instrument.” JM

Commander’s intent:
Aggressively delegate tasks to the lowest capable level. Decentralize decision making. 

Bias towards action: “Because a unit adopts the personality of its commander, just as a sports team adopts the personality of its coach, I made my expectation clear: I wanted a bias for action, and to bring out the initiative in all hands.” JM

“Do not bog down once in the attack. If one thing isn’t working, change to another. Shift gears. Don’t lose momentum. Improvise.” JM

“Operations occur at the speed of trust.” JM

Mistakes versus lack of discipline: “There’s a profound difference between a mistake and a lack of discipline. Mistakes are made when you’re trying to carry out a commander’s intent and you screw up in the pressure of the moment…A lack of discipline is not a mistake.”

Bias towards action:
Move with conviction, ambiguity and flip-flopping kills morale. Perspective from war in Iraq (Fallujah): “First we’re ordered to attack, and now we’re ordered to halt. If you’re going to take Vienna, take fucking Vienna.” JM

Resourcefulness: “Any planning construct that strives to provide mechanistic certainty is at odds with reality, and will lead you into a quagmire of paralysis and indecision. As economist Friedrich Hayek cautioned, ‘Adaptation is smarter than you are.’ The enemy is certain to adapt to our first move. That’s why in every battle I set out to create chaos in the enemy’s thinking, using deception and turning faster inside his decision loop, always assuming that he would adapt.” JM

Reading:
“If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you.” JM

“History teaches that we face nothing new under the sun.” JM

Never allow yourself to be unprepared:
“To each there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.” Churchill

“Mastering your chosen vocation means you are ready when opportunity knocks.” JM

When a Marine has survived three fire fights, his chances of survival improve exponentially. During his time at the Marine Corps Combat Development Command (MCCDC) in Quantico, Virginia, Mattis pioneered simulators to train and sharpen cognitive skills until young leaders could swiftly appraise situations without hesitating before taking action. 

“Initiative has to be practiced daily, not stifled, if it’s to become a reality inside a culture. Every institution gets the behavior it rewards.” JM

Managing up:
“When you are engaged at the tactical level, you grasp your own reality so clearly it’s tempting to assume that everyone above you sees it in the same light. Wrong. When you’re the senior commander in a deployed force, time spent sharing your appreciation of the situation on the ground with your seniors is like time spent on reconnaissance: it’s seldom wasted.” JM

Problem solving:
The credit belongs to the man in the arena: “A leader’s role is problem solving. If you don’t like problems, stay out of leadership. Smooth sailing teaches nothing.” JM

The Cold Start Problem – Andrew Chen

The Cold Start Problem – by Andrew Chen
Date read: 4/19/22. Recommendation: 8/10.

One of the best summaries of what the often mythical ‘network effect’ actually is. Chen level sets by providing a clear definition and description of how to tell if your product actually has network effects. Then he breaks down how to harness the power of network effects in your business. I found his concept of an atomic network, tips on attracting the hard side, and breakdown of network effects as three underlying forces—the acquisition effect, the engagement effect, and the economic effect—to be particularly useful. Well worth the read for those building networked products.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Definition of Network Effects:
Classic: “A network effect describes what happens when products get more valuable as more people use them.” AC

“A telephone without a connection at the other end of the line is not even a toy or a scientific instrument. It is one of the most useless things in the world. Its value depends on the connection with the other telephone and increases with the number of connections.” Theodore Vail, AT&T President, annual report in 1900

The ‘network’ is defined by people who use the product to interact with each other. The ‘effect’ part of the network effect describes how value increases as more people start using the product. 

How do you tell if a product has a network effect?
“First, does the product have a network? Does it connect people with each other, whether for commerce, collaboration, communication, or something else at the core of the experience?” AC

“And second, does the ability to attract new users, or to become stickier, or to monetize, become even stronger as its network grows larger?” AC

“Networked products are fundamentally different from the typical product experience—they facilitate experiences that users have with each other, whereas traditional products emphasize how users interact with the software itself. They grow and succeed by adding more users, which create network effects, whereas traditional products grow by building better features and supporting more use cases.” AC

“The richness and complexity of the experience depends on who’s on the network rather than the feature set.” AC

Cold Start Framework:

1. The Cold Start Problem

2. Tipping Point

3. Escape Velocity

4. Hitting the Ceiling

5. The Moat

The Cold Start Problem:
Simplicity: “The most successful network effects-driven apps are also sometimes dead simple. They eschew a long list of features and instead emphasize the interactions among people using the app. Zoom is just such an example.” AC

“When the Cold Start Problem is solved, a product is able to consistently created ‘Magic Moments.’ Users open the product and find a network that is built out, meaning they can generally find whoever and whatever they’re looking for. The network effects kick in, and the market hits its Tipping Point as users start coming to you.” AC

Atomic network:
“Atomic network” = smallest possible network that is stable and can grow on its own.

Atomic network: “The solution to the Cold Start Problem starts by understanding how to add a small group of the right people, at the same time, using the product in the right way. Getting this initial network off the ground is the key, and the key is the ‘atomic network’—the smallest, stable network from which all other networks can be built.”

Slack works with 2 people, but it takes 3 to make it really work. There are long-running 3 person groups that are stable—that’s minimum to be called a customer. Engagement also matters, Slack found that after 2,000 messages, 93% of customers stick around. 

Facebook’s growth maxim, “10 friends in 7 days,” is a similar expression. 

Airbnb’s equivalent is 300 listings with 100 reviewed listings, to see growth take off in a market. 

“How many users does your network need before the product experience becomes good?” AC

Limit your surface area: “In the end, cherry-picking is an enormously powerful move because it exposes the fundamental asymmetry between the David and Goliath dynamic of networks. A new product can decide where to compete, focus on a single point, and build an atomic network—whereas a larger one finds it tough to defend every inch of its product experience.” 

The Hard Side:
“There is a minority of users that create disproportionate value and as a result, have disproportionate power.” Much harder to acquire and retain. For app stores = developers. For ride sharing = drivers. For marketplaces = sellers.

Attracting the hard side: Build a product that solves an important need for the hard side and the other side will follow. 

Come for the tool, stay for the network:
‘“Come for the tool, stay for the network’ is one of the most famous strategies for launching and scaling networks. Start with a great ‘tool’—a product experience that is useful even for one user as a utility. Then, over time, pivot the users into a series of use cases that tap into a ‘network’—the part where you collaborate, share, communicate or otherwise interact with other users.” AC

“A popular strategy for bootstrapping networks is what I like to call ‘come for the tool, stay for the network.’ The idea is to initially attract users with a single-player tool and then, over time, get them to participate in a network. The tool helps get to initial critical mass. The network creates the long term value for users, and defensibility for the company.” Chris Dixon

Examples: Instagram as photo filter app, transitioning into social network. Google Suite with standalone tools for docs, spreadsheets, presentations with added network features around collaborative editing and comments. 

Escape Velocity:
Network effect is actually three distinct underlying forces: “Acquisition effect which lets products tap into the network to drive low-cost, highly efficient user acquisition via viral growth. Engagement effect, which increases interaction between user as networks fill in. Economic effect, which improves monetization levels and conversion rates as the network grows.” AC

Acquisition effect: ability for a product to tap into its network to acquire new customers. Keeps customer acquisition costs low over time (CAC). 

Engagement effect: Denser network creates higher stickiness and usage from its users, ‘the more users that join the network, the more useful it gets.’

Economic effect: Ability for a networked product to accelerate its monetization, reduce its costs, and otherwise improve its business model, as its network grows.

Network Effects as a Moat:
“The key to investing is not assessing how much an industry is going to affect society, or how much it will grow, but rather determining the competitive advantage of any given company and, above all, the durability of that advantage. The products or services that have wide, sustainable moats around them are the ones that deliver rewards to investors.” Warren Buffett

Seeking Wisdom – Peter Bevelin

Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger – by Peter Bevelin
Date read: 3/29/22. Recommendation: 8/10.

A wonderful introduction and summary of ideas from Kahneman, Buffet, Munger, and Taleb, among others. Seeking Wisdom focuses on how our thoughts are influenced, why we make misjudgments, and tools to improve our thinking. Bevelin explains, if we understand what influences us, we can better avoid certain traps and better understand why others act like they do.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Trust:
Your reputation is everything, never make decisions that compromise this because the long-term costs are crippling: “If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem.” Abraham Lincoln

“Good character is very efficient. If you can trust people, your system can be way simpler. There’s enormous efficiency in good character and dis-efficiency in bad character.” Charlie Munger

Incentives:
Incentives act as reinforcers: “The iron rule of nature is: you get what you reward for. If you want ants to come, you put sugar on the floor.” Charlie Munger

Skin in the game: “A decision is responsible when the man or group that makes it has to answer for it to those who are directly or indirectly affected by it.” Charles Frankel

“An example of a really responsible system is the system the Romans used when they built an arch. The guy who created the arch stood under it as the scaffolding was removed. It’s like packing your own parachute.” Charlie Munger

Self-deception:
With a scout mindset, reality is your friend: “Refusing to look at unpleasant facts doesn’t make them disappear. Bad news that is true is better than good news that is wrong.” PB

The hardest person to contradict is yourself: “I can’t behave in a way that is inconsistent with my self-image. I have a reputation to uphold. I don’t want to look weak, dumb or lose face. I want to be seen as nice, smart and in control.”

“We associate being wrong with a threat to our self-interest.” PB

Danger of ideologies: “Heavy ideology is one of the most extreme distorters of human cognition….Warren (Buffett) adored his father—who was a wonderful man. Be he was a heavy heavy ideologue (right wing, it happened to be), who hung around with other very heavy ideologues (right wing, naturally). Warren observed this as a kid. And he decided that ideology was dangerous—and that he was going to stay a long way away from it. And he has throughout his whole life. That has enormously helped the accuracy of his cognition.” Charlie Munger

Assume you never invested in this and it was your first time evaluating, would you invest in it today? “The most important thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is to stop digging.” Warren Buffett 

“A very important principle in investing is that you don’t have to make it back the way you lost it. In fact, it’s usually a mistake to try to make it back the way you lost it.” Warren Buffett

“We want people joining us who already are the type that face reality and that basically (not only) tell us the truth, but tell themselves the truth – which is even more important. Once you get an organization that lies to itself – and there are plenty that do – I just think you get into all kinds of problems.” Charlie Munger

Never be above the work:
“Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do when it ought to be done whether you like it or not.” Thomas Henry Huxley

“The best way to avoid envy is to deserve the success you get.” Aristotle

“What you don’t want yourself, don’t do to others. Reward hostility with justice, and good deeds with good deeds.” Confucius 

“Be happy while you’re living, for you are a long time dead.” Scottish proverb

Social acceptance:
“The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.” William James

If you want to change the game and escape the race that is seeking constant approval or requiring praise to sustain your current efforts, learn to give precedence to internal validation over external. 

Cause and effect:
“Sometimes we mistake an effect for its cause. There is a story about a man that was walking by a river when suddenly a screaming girl floated by. The man jumped in the river and saved her. After five minutes, another screaming girl floated by. He jumped in again and saved the girl. The same thing happened over and over again. The problem was a little further up the river. There was a man throwing girls from a bridge. Out hero solved the symptoms but not the cause of the problem.” PB

“Humans are pattern seeking, storytelling animals. We look for and find patterns in our world and in our lives, then weave narratives around those patterns to bring them to life and give them meaning.” Michael Shermer

“Mysteries are not necessarily miracles.” Goethe

“Uncertainty, in the presence of vivid hopes and fears is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales.” Bertrand Russell 

Patience:
“It’s not that I’m so smart; it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” Albert Einstein

Relaxed state of concentration: “The best thinking is often done when there is no stress, time limit, threats, or judging. Thinking takes time and the simple truths often reveal themselves when we’re doing something else.” PB

Have patience in waiting for opportunities and resist the temptation to always do something: “Buffett’s genius was large a genius of character—of patience, discipline, and rationality…His talent sprang from his unrivaled independence of mind and ability to focus on his work and shut out the world.” Roger Lowenstein

Reversible decisions:
“A decision we make today that will influence our lives ten years from now is far more important than one that will influence us only today. If we make a mistake in choosing the wrong vacation, the consequences over time will most likely be minor. But if, for example, we choose the wrong spouse, the wrong education, career, friends, or investment, it may haunt us a long, long time.” PB

Past predicting the future:
“Study the past if you would divine the future.” Confucius

Backward thinking:
Avoid what causes the opposite of what you want to achieve: “A lot of success in life and success in business comes from knowing what you really want to avoid—like early death and a bad marriage.” Charlie Munger

Inversion: “Instead of asking how we can achieve a goal, we ask the opposite question: What don’t I want to achieve (non-goal)? What causes the non-goal? How can I avoid that? What do I now want to achieve? How can I do that?” PB

Johnny Carson’s prescriptions for guaranteed misery:

1. Ingesting chemicals in an effort to alter mood or perception

2. Envy

3. Resentment

Charlie Munger’s additions to Carson’s prescriptions for guaranteed misery:

1. Be unreliable

2. Learn everything you possibly can from your own personal experience, minimizing what you learn vicariously from the good and bad experience of others, living and dead.

3. Go down and stay down when you get your first, second, or third severe reverse in the battle of life.

Avoid controversies:
“I rejoice that I have avoided controversies, and this I owe to Lyell, who many years ago, in reference to my geological works, strongly advised me near to get entangled in a controversy, as it rarely did any good and causes a miserable loss of time and temper.” Charles Darwin

Front-page test: “Would I be willing to see my action immediately described by an informed and critical reporter on the front page of my local paper, there to be read by my spouse, children and friends?” Warren Buffett

Perspective and expectations:
“Distance has the same effect on the mind as on the eye.” Samuel Johnson

“Blessed is he that expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.” Benjamin Franklin

“Whenever you think that some situation or some person is ruining your life, it is actually you who are ruining your life…Feeling like a victim is a perfectly disastrous way to go through life. If you just take the attitude that however bad it is in any way, it’s always your fault and you just fix it as best you can – the so-called ‘iron prescription’ – I think that really works.” Charlie Munger

The Scout Mindset – Julia Galef

The Scout Mindset – by Julia Galef
Date read: 2/27/22. Recommendation: 9/10.

If you want to improve your ability to think clearly, there’s perhaps nothing more important than adopting a scout mindset. As Galef describes, a scout mindset is the motivation to see things as they are, not as you wish they were. She describes the concept of updating—revising opinions incrementally over time as new information is gathered, which helps you remain open to evidence against your beliefs. Reality is your friend, not a threat. She emphasizes the importance of this mindset and tools to combat bias along the way.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

What is the scout mindset?
Scout mindset: the motivation to see things as they are, not as you wish they were.

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.” Richard Feynman

Embracing reality:
Soldier fighting behind enemy lines where he doesn’t know the territory will attempt to reach a high point on the hill to see what’s on the other side. They will then assess, “is there a bridge over this river?” Not delude themselves into barreling towards the river if no such bridge exists, no matter how much they might hope it does. 

“The scout isn’t indifferent. A scout might hope to learn that the path is safe, that the other side is weak, or there’s a bridge conveniently located where his forces need to cross the river. But above all, he wants to learn what’s really there, not fool himself into drawing a bridge on his map where there isn’t one in real life. Being in scout mindset means wanting your ‘map’—your perception of yourself and the world—to be as accurate as possible.” JG

“In scout mindset, there’s no such thing as a ‘threat’ to your beliefs. If you find out you were wrong about something, great—you’ve improved your map, and that can only help you.” JG

Soldier mindset:
Counter to the scout mindset. Helps avoid negative emotions like fear, stress, regret. 

Thought experiments to combat bias:

• Double standard test: Are you judging one person (or group) by a different standard than you would use for another person (or group)?

• The outsider test: How would you evaluate this situation if it wasn’t your situation?

• The conformity test: If other people no longer held this view, would you still hold it?

• The selective skeptic test: If this evidence supported the other side, how credible would you judge it to be?

• The status quo (inertia) bias test: If your current situation was not the status quo, would you actively choose it?

Quantifying uncertainty:
“As long as you continue making positive expected value bets, that variance will mostly wash out in the long run. Building that variance into your expectations has the nice side effect of giving you equanimity. Instead of being elated when your bets pay off, and crushed when they don’t, your emotions will be tied to the trend line underneath the variance.” JG

Expand your perspective of time: “Even if a particular bet has a low probability of success, scouts know that their overall probability of success in the long run is much higher, as long as they keep making good bets. They’re motivated by the knowledge that downturns are inevitable, but will wash out in the long run; that although failure is possible, it’s also tolerable.” JG

Evaluating errors + updating:
Revise opinions incrementally over time as new information is gathered—helps you remain open to evidence against your beliefs. View errors as opportunity to hone your skill at getting things right—shifts experience of realizing you were wrong from something painful and embarrassing to something valuable. 

“Most of the time being wrong doesn’t mean you did something wrong.” JG

“Instead of ‘admitting a mistake,’ scouts will sometimes talk about ‘updating.’ That’s a reference to Bayesian updating, a technical term from probability theory for the correct way to revise a probability after learning new information.”

Hold your identity lightly:
See Paul Graham’s, “Keep Your Identity Small” essay. “The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.”

Ideologies are incredibly dangerous and strip you of your ability to think for yourself. Charlie Munger: “Heavy ideology is one of the most extreme distorters of human cognition.” 

“Holding an identity lightly means thinking of it in a matter-of-fact way, rather than as a central source of pride and meaning in your life. It’s a description, not a flag to be waved proudly.” JG

The Great Mental Models: Volume 3, Systems and Mathematics – Farnam Street

The Great Mental Models: Volume 3, Systems and Mathematics – by Farnam Street
Date read: 2/11/22. Recommendation: 8/10.

I love this series. Volume One focuses on mental models from general thinking concepts. Volume Two focuses on physics, chemistry, and biology. And this volume focuses on arming you with mental models from systems thinking and mathematics. It’s a beautifully designed book, just like the others. And they do a wonderful job relating what are often dense, abstract concepts back to real-life applications. My favorite sections discussed feedback loops, margin of safety, emergence, surface area, and global + local maxima.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Systems thinking:
“Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static snapshots.” Peter Senge

Feedback loops:
“The people you spend the most time with are the ones who give you the most feedback on your behavior and thus have the most impact on the choices you make and the ways you change.” FS

Bottlenecks versus constraints:
“A bottleneck is something we can alleviate; a constraint is a fundamental limitation of the system. So a machine that keeps breaking down is a bottleneck, but the fact there are twenty-four hours in the day is a constraint.” FS

Margin of safety:
“A margin of safety is often necessary to ensure systems can handle stressors and unpredictable circumstances.” FS

Drive towards self-sufficiency: “Life will throw at you challenges that require capabilities outside of your natural strengths. The only way to be ready is to first build as cast a repertoire of knowledge as you can in anticipation of the possibilities you might face, and second to cultivate the ability to know what is relevant and useful.” FS

“Knowledge then can be conceptualized as a margin of safety, a buffer against the inevitable unexpected challenges that you will have to face.” FS

Churn:
A certain level of churn is a healthy part of systems, some degree of turnover creates stability and if it’s not occurring, it must be built in. It brings fresh ideas in, allows others to step up, and allows the system to adapt/evolve. 

Sovereign individual: “People being able to leave as they wish places checks on abuses of power. The same is true for countries or companies. People need the freedom to vote with their feet if things get too bad.” FS

Algorithms:
Algorithms turn inputs into outputs: “An algorithm is a methodical set of steps that can be used to make calculations, resolve problems, and reach decisions. An algorithm isn’t a particular calculation, but the method followed when making the calculation.” Yuval Noah Harari

Emergence:
Focus on your starting point—stack the skills that you’re naturally drawn towards—and the way that impacts your trajectory: “You don’t always need to plan things all the way to the end. If you have a simple starting point on the right trajectory, surprising things can pan out through the power of emergence.” FS

Compounding:
“Humans have evolved to be pretty good at using past experience to guide future decisions, so a lot of knowledge compounding happens naturally over time, especially when we are young. But sometimes we get stale. We stop reinvesting that interest because we stop challenging ourselves. We stop compounding our learning. Twenty years of living become the same year repeated 20 times.” FS

Randomness:
“Randomness as a model reminds us that sometimes our pattern-seeking, narrative-building tendencies can be unproductive. Using randomness as a tool can help us get a fresh perspective and lift us out of the ruts we have built.” FS

Surface area:
“Surface area is useful when considering the amount of dependencies or assumptions something has. A program whose code has little surface area is much more likely to age well and be robust than a piece with many dependencies. The same goes for projects. If a project depends on ten teams, it’s much less likely to finish on time than one with less surface area.” FS

Multidisciplinary approach increases your personal surface area, allowing you make more connections and outthink others.

Different situations require different surface areas. 

Global and local maxima:
Sigmoid curve: “Using global and local maxima as a model is about knowing when you have hit your peak, or if there is still potential to go higher. It reminds us that sometimes we have to go down to go back up.” FS

Hill climbing: Requires changing your approach, you have to take a few steps down to reach the peak of a higher hill. This requires perspective and assessing the terrain from different vantage points. This is all about playing the long game, not clinging to the comfort of your current position. 

The Sovereign Individual – James Dale Davidson & Lord William Rees-Mogg

The Sovereign Individual – by James Dale Davidson & Lord William Rees-Mogg
Date read: 1/5/22. Recommendation: 8/10.

Over the past five years, few books have been recommended to me as often as The Sovereign Individual. Somehow I didn’t get around to reading it until now. It’s such a compelling, prescient book—despite having been written more than 20 years ago. The authors detail the transition to the next phase of civilization that’s well underway from the industrial age to the information age. The thesis of the book is that the massed power of the nation-state is destined to be privatized and commercialized. Their assessment of the parallels between the medieval church and the modern nation-state is such an interesting lens to examine history through. And their perspective on political and economic realignment is incredibly relevant to the world that’s unfolding before us today.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

“The thesis of this book is that the massed power of the nation-state is destined to be privatized and commercialized.”

Information Revolution:
“The future is disorder. A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It is the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.” Tom Stoppard

The Sovereign Individual explores social and financial consequences of the Information Revolution. These changes will happen within a lifetime, rather than a millennia as the Agricultural Revolution. “When information societies take shape they will be as different from industrial societies as the Greece of Aeschylus was from the world of the cave dwellers.” 

Nonlinearity:
“Reality is nonlinear. But most people’s expectations are not. To understand the dynamics of change, you have to recognize that human society, like other complex systems in nature, is characterized by cycles and discontinuities. That means certain features of history have a tendency to repeat themselves, and the most important changes, when they occur, may be abrupt rather than gradual.” 

The Dark Ages:
“Feudalism in its various forms was not only a response to ever-present risks of predatory violence. It was also a reaction to appallingly low rates of productivity. The two have tended to go hand in hand in farming societies. Each frequently contributed to the other.”

“The ‘Dark Ages’ were so named for a reason. Literacy became so rare that anyone who possessed the ability to read and write could expect immunity from prosecution for almost any crime, including murder. Artistic, scientific, and engineering skills that had been highly developed in Roman times disappeared.”

During the early stages of feudalism, the church played an important role:

1. “In an environment where military power was decentralized, the Church was uniquely placed to maintain peace and develop rules of order than transcended fragmented, local sovereignties.”

2. “The Church was the main source for preserving and transmitting technical knowledge and information.”

3. “Partly because its farm managers were literate, the Church did a great deal to help improve the productivity of European farming.”

4. “The Church undertook many functions that are today absorbed by government, including the provision of public infrastructure.”

5. “The Church also helped incubate a more complex market…construction of churches and cathedrals helped create and deepen markets for many artisanal and engineering skills.”

Paradise lost in the transition from hunter-gatherer to farmer: “Farming was an incubator of disputes. Farming created stationary capital on an extensive scale, raising the payoff of violence and dramatically increasing the challenge of protecting assets. Farming made both crime and government paying propositions for the first time.” 

Parallels between the Church + Nation State:
“At the end of the Middle Ages, the monolithic Church as an institution had grown senile and counterproductive, a marked changed from its positive economic contributions five centuries earlier.” 

Like the Church then, the nation-state today has outlived the conditions that brought it into existence, imposing high costs and consuming tremendous amounts of society’s resources with minimal returns. “Technology is precipitating a revolution in the exercise of power that will destroy the nation-state just as assuredly as gunpowder weapons and the printing press destroyed the monopoly of the medieval Church.” 

“The nation-state will be replaced by new forms of sovereignty, some of them unique in history, some reminiscent of the city states and medieval merchant republics of the premodern world. What was old will be new after the year 2000. And what was unimaginable will be commonplace. As the scale of technology plunges, governments will find that they must compete like corporations for income, charging no more for their services than they are worth to the people who pay for them.”

“The capacity to mass-produce books was incredibly subversive to medieval institutions, just as microtechnology will prove subversive to the modern nation-state. Printing rapidly undermined the Church’s monopoly on the word of God…The Church found that censorship did not suppress the spread of subversive technology; it merely assured that it was put to its most subversive use.”

Protection of life and property:
Increasing the security of property: “Now the dagger of violence could soon be blunted. Information technology promises to alter dramatically the balance between protection and extortion, making protection of assets in many cases much easier, and extortion more difficult. The technology of the Information Age makes it possible to create assets that are outside the reach of many forms of coercion. This new asymmetry between protection and extortion rests upon a fundamental truth of mathematics. It is easier to multiply than to divide.”

History is moving towards the sovereign individual:
“Access creates globalism, and globalism disrupts political systems by making the concept of borders obsolete. As borders disappear, the concept of taxation, which supports governments, becomes increasingly fragile…As borders disappear, the concept of entitlement—the belief that because you were born in a particular place, you are entitled to the economic advantages associated with that place—falls apart, and as it falls apart, the perks of nationhood fall apart with it.” Jim Taylor and Watts Wacker

“Ambitious people understand, then, that a migratory way of life is the price of getting ahead.” Christopher Lasch

Humans don’t mind hardship: “For human beings it is the struggle rather than the achievement that matters; we are made for action, and the achievement can prove to be a great disappointment. The ambition, whatever it may be, sets the struggle in motion, but the struggle is more enjoyable than its own result, even when the objective is fully achieved.”

Taxation:
“This habit of charging far more than government’s services are actually worth developed through centuries of monopoly.”

“This new economic dynamic contradicts the desire of the government left over from the industrial era to impose monopoly pricing for its protection services. But like it or not, the old system will be nonviable in the new competitive environment of the Information Age. Any government that insists upon lumbering its citizens with heavy taxes that competitors do not pay will merely assure that profits and wealth gravitate someplace else.”

“Because information technology transcends the tyranny of place, it will automatically expose jurisdictions everywhere to de facto global competition on the basis of quality and price…Leading nation-states with their predatory, redistributive tax regimes and heavy-handed regulations, will no longer be jurisdictions of choice. Seen dispassionately, they offer poor-quality protection and diminished economic opportunity at monopoly prices….The leading welfare states will lose their most talented citizens through desertion.” 

“Governments in the industrial era priced their services on the basis of the success of the taxpayer, rather than in relation to the costs or value of any services provided. The movement to commercial pricing of government service will lead to more satisfactory protection at a far lower price than that imposed by conventional nation-states.”

Local jurisdictions competing to attract talent:
“In the new world of commercialized sovereignty, people will choose their jurisdictions, much as many now choose their insurance carriers or their religions…Competition will therefore mobilize the efforts of local jurisdictions to improve their capacity to provide services economically and effectively.”

The Bitcoin Standard – Saifedean Ammous

The Bitcoin Standard – by Saifedean Ammous
Date read: 12/11/21. Recommendation: 8/10.

If you’re new to Bitcoin or cryptocurrency and you’re seeking a deeper understanding of this space and why it matters, this is the book to start with. Ammous provides a helpful overview of the history of money which serves to anchor your understanding. His perspective is particularly relevant in current market conditions, as he explains how hyperinflation is a form of economic disaster unique to government money. And money supply management is the problem masquerading as its solution. Even if you’re skeptical of digital currencies, I’d highly suggest reading this so you consider another perspective as you further develop your own opinion.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Bitcoin fundamentals:
Definition: “Bitcoin can be best understood as distributed software that allows for transfer of value using a currency protected from unexpected inflation without relying on trusted third parties.” SA

“Bitcoin automates the functions of a modern central bank and makes them predictable and virtually immutable by programming them into code decentralized among thousands of network members, none of whom can alter the code without the consent of the rest.” SA

Bubbles:
Anatomy of a market bubble: “Increased demand causes a sharp rise in prices, which drives further demand, raising prices further, incentivizing increased productions and increased supply, which inevitably brings prices down, punishing everyone who bought at a price higher than the usual market price.” SA

“For anything to function as a good store of value, it has to beat this trap: it has to appreciate when people demand it as a store of value, but its producers have to be constrained from inflating the supply significantly enough to bring the price down.” SA

Gold standard:
A single, sound monetary unit encourages progress: “With the majority of the world on one sound monetary unit, there was never a period that witnessed as much capital accumulation, global trade, restraint on government, and transformation of living standards worldwide.” SA

Outbreak of WWI in 1914 led major economies off the gold standard which governments replaced with unsound government money. Centralization allowed governments to expand money supply beyond their gold reserves (reducing the value of their currency). 

Prior to WWI, governments were limited by the amount of money they had in their own treasuries. But WWI and shift away from gold standard led to disaster. “The ease with which a government could issue more paper currency was too tempting in the heat of the conflict, and far easier than demanding taxation from citizens.” SA

Relationship between unsound money and war:
Three fundamental reasons that drive this relationship: “First, unsound money is itself a barrier to trade between countries, because it distorts value between countries and makes trade flows a political issue…Second, government having access to a printing press allows it to continue fighting until it completely destroys the value of its currency, and not just until it runs out of money….Third, individuals dealing with sound money develop a lower time preference, allowing them to think more of cooperation rather than conflict.” SA

Inflating money supply:
Average annual percent increase in money supply for US between 1990-2015 was 5.45%. But growth at that rate will double money supply in only 15 years. 

“Hyperinflation is a form of economic disaster unique to government money. There was never an example of hyperinflation with economies that operated a gold or silver standard.” SA

“The problem with government-provided money is that its hardness depends entirely on the ability of those in charge to not inflate its supply. Only political constraints provide hardness, and there are no physical, economic, or natural constraints on how much money government can produce….History has shown that governments will inevitably succumb to the temptation of inflating the money supply.” SA

“Central bank planning of the money supply is neither desirable nor possible. It is rule by the most conceited, making the most important ignorant enough of the realities of market economies to believe they can centrally plan a market as large, abstract, and emergent as the capital market. Imagining that central banks can “prevent,” “combat,” or “manage” recessions is as fanciful and misguided as placing pyromaniacs and arsonists in charge of the fire brigade.” SA

No escaping the negative consequences: “If the central bank stops the inflation, interest rates rise, and a recession follows as many of the projects that were started are exposed as unprofitable and have to be abandoned, exposing the misallocation of resources and capital that took place. If the central bank were to continue its inflationary process indefinitely, it would just increase the scale of misallocations in the economy, wasting even more capital and making the inevitable recession even more painful.” SA

Sound money:
Holds value across time (salability), transfers value effectively across space, can be divided and grouped into small and large scales, cannot be manipulated by coercive authorities. 

Attributes of sound money: durability, portability, fungibility, verifiability, divisibility, scarcity, established history, censorship resistance.

Move from money that holds its value to money that loses its value has significant consequences: “society saves less, accumulates less capital, and possibly begins to consume its capital; worker productivity stays constant or declines…civilizations prosper under a sound monetary system, but disintegrate when their monetary system is debased, as was the case with the Romans, the Byzantines, and modern European societies.” SA

Socialism:
“The fatal flaw of socialism that Ludwig von Mises exposed was that without a price mechanism emerging on a free market, socialism would fail at economic calculation, most crucially in the allocation of capital goods.” SA

Owning and controlling the means of production (acting as buyer and seller) stifles the market, making pricing impossible. “Without a market for capital where independent actors can bid for capital, there can be no price for capital overall or individual capital goods. Without prices of capital goods reflecting their relative supply and demand there is no rational way of determining the most productive uses of capital, nor is there a rational way of determining how much to produce of each capital good.” SA

Employment:
“The normal workings of a free market will witness many people lose or quit their jobs, and many businesses will go bankrupt or shut down for a wide variety of reasons, but these job losses will roughly cancel out with newly created jobs and businesses…Only when a central bank manipulates the money supply and interest rate does it become possible for large-scale failures across entire sectors of the economy to happen at the same time, causing waves of mass layoffs in entire industries, leaving a large number of workers jobless at the same time, with skills that are not easily transferrable to other fields.” SA

Money supply management:
“The fundamental scam of modernity is the idea that government needs to manage the money supply.” SA

“Money supply management is the problem masquerading as its solution.” SA

Digital money:
“As bitcoin’s value rises, more effort to product bitcoins does not lead to the production of more bitcoins. Instead, it just leads to an increase in the processing power necessary to commit valid transactions to the bitcoin network, which only serves to make the network more secure and difficult to compromise.” SA

“Bitcoin, and cryptography in general, are defensive technologies that make the cost of defending property and information far lower than the cost of attacking them.” SA

Severely reduces time + costs of sending money: no issues of trading currencies or settlement challenges between institutions or layers of intermediation. Bitcoin eliminates counterparty risk and “makes global processing of payments and final clearance available for anyone to perform at a small cost, and it replaces human-directed monetary policy with superior and perfectly predictable algorithms.” SA

Bitcoin is also neutral, doesn’t give any country privilege of issuing global reserve currency (and along with that the power to manipulate or inflate). 

The Daily Laws – Robert Greene

The Daily Laws by Robert Greene
Date read: 11/10/21. Recommendation: 8/10.

An accessible introduction to Robert Greene’s studies of power, seduction, mastery, strategy, and human nature. The format follows 366 short lessons for each day of the year and sources content from Greene’s previous books. It’s basically his own version of The Daily Stoic. Greene is my favorite author and I cannot recommend his work enough. Whether you’re already familiar with his books and want to revisit the lessons and themes he presents so you can master the ideas or you’re looking for an introduction, this has something for everyone.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Know who you are:
“The first move toward mastery is always inward—learning who you really are and reconnecting with that innate force. Knowing it with clarity, you will find your way to the proper career path and everything else will fall into place.” RG

“In order to master a field, you must love the subject and feel a profound connection to it. Your interest must transcend the field and border on the religious.” RG

“You could have the most brilliant mind, teeming with knowledge and ideas, but if you choose the wrong subject or problem to attack, you can run out of energy and interest.” RG

Assert yourself more, compromise less, care less about what others think of you: “Power lies in asserting your uniqueness, even if that offends some people along the way.” RG

What would you work on if no one was looking?

“Become who you are by learning who you are.” Pindar

Self-sufficiency:
“Depending on others is misery; depending on yourself is power.” RG

To make yourself less dependent, expand your skills and build more confidence in your own judgment so you can begin to trust yourself more and others less, while knowing what small matters are best left to others and which larger matters require your true attention. 

“You cannot make anything worthwhile in this world unless you have first developed and transformed yourself.” RG

Not about recognition. “Retain the craftsman spirit. Keep in mind: the work is the only thing that matters.” RG

Skin in the game and putting your work out there: “What makes the difference between an outstanding creative person and a less creative one is not any special power, but greater knowledge (in the form of practiced expertise) and the motivation to acquire and use it.” Margaret A. Boden

Cornerstones of self-sufficiency: Patience, discipline, self-control, emotional stability.

Goethe’s Ideal of the Universal Man: a person so steeped in all forms of knowledge that his mind grows closer to the reality of nature itself and sees secrets that are invisible to most people.

“Our whole being is nothing but a fight against the dark forces within ourselves. To live is to war with trolls in heart and soul. To write is to sit in judgment on oneself.” Henrik Ibsen

“In this world, where the game is played with loaded dice, a man must have a temper of iron, with armor proof to the blows of fate, and weapons to make his way against men. Life is one long battle; we have to fight at every step; and Voltaire rightly says that if we succeed, it is at the point of the sword, and that we die with the weapon in our hand.” Arthur Schopenhauer 

Boredom:
Boredom does not signal the need for distractions but that you must seek new challenges. This often shows up in one’s career when the problem you’re focusing on loses its appeal and your engagement suffers. 

Expand your perspective:
"The person with the more global perspective wins. Expand your gaze.” RG

The ability to look wider, think further ahead, and consider second-order consequences will allow you to outpace everyone around you. Hone this skill. 

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” F. Scott Fitzgerald

Reputation:
“Reputation is the cornerstone of power. Through reputation alone you can intimidate and win; once it slips, however, you are vulnerable, and will be attacked on all sides.” RG

Always say less than necessary:
“By saying less than necessary you create the appearance of meaning and power. Also, the less you say, the less risk you run of saying something foolish, even dangerous.” RG

“Powerful people impress and intimidate by saying less.” RG

Hide your ambition: George Washington was reluctant to accept his role as commander of the American army and again with the presidency. “People cannot envy the power that they themselves have given a person who does not seem to desire it.” RG

Create value through scarcity:
“The more you are seen and heard from, the more common you appear.” RG

“If I am often seen at the theater, people will cease to notice me.” Napoleon

People today are far too available which means they are too familiar and banal, instead give people room to idealize you by remaining aloof: “Leaders must know how to balance presence and absence. In general, it is best to lean slightly more in the direction of absence, so that when you do appear before the group you generate excitement and drama.” RG

“Love never dies of starvation but often of indigestion.” Ninon de l’Enclos

Appeal to self-interest:
“When asking for anything, uncover something in your request that will benefit the person you are asking, and emphasize it out of all proportion.” RG

“The quickest way to secure people’s minds is by demonstrating, as simply as possible, how an action will benefit them. Self-interest is the strongest motive of all.” RG

“The cause seduces but the self-interest secures the deal.” RG

Enter action with boldness:
“Boldness, on the other hand, is outer-directed, and often makes people feel more at ease, since it is less self-conscious and less repressed. And so we admire the bold, and prefer to be around them, because their self-confidence infects us and draws us outside our own realm of inwardness and reflection.” RG

Strategy:
“Strategy is a mental process in which your mind elevates itself above the battlefield. You have a sense of a larger purpose for your life, where you want to be down the road, what you were destined to accomplish. This makes it easier to decide what is truly important, what battles to avoid. You are able to control your emotions, to view the world with a degree of detachment.” RG

“Strategists are realists if nothing else—they can look at the world and themselves with a higher degree of objectivity than others.” RG

“The essence of strategy is not to carry out a brilliant plan that proceeds in steps; it is to put yourself in situations where you have more options than the enemy does. Instead of grasping at Option A as the single right answer, true strategy is positioning yourself to be able to do A, B, or C depending on the circumstances.” RG

Intuition:
“Presence of mind depends not only on your mind’s ability to come to your aid in difficult situations but also on the speed with which this happens.” RG

Depth matters: “Deep knowledge of the terrain will let you process information faster than your enemy, a tremendous advantage.” RG

Relaxed state of concentration: Thinking will mess you up every time…“The most powerful point you can reach in sports or any other endeavor—when you are no longer thinking, you are in the moment.” RG

Resourcefulness:
“Accept the fact that nothing is certain and no law or strategy is fixed. The best way to protect yourself is to be as fluid and formless as water; never bet on stability or lasting order. Everything changes.” RG

In victory, know when to stop:
“The greatest danger occurs at the moment of victory.” Napoleon

Steady yourself and give yourself room to reflect on what happened, examine the role of circumstance and luck in your success. Do not allow the feeling of invulnerability after victory to consume you.