Barry

Much like Ben's other book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, this book is 1/2 story telling and 1/2 advice on running a company.

What's different is the story telling 1/2 in What You Do Is Who You Are focuses on leaders outside of the business realm. This includes deep dives into how Toussaint Louverture, Shaka Senghor and Genghis Khan built cultures with their actions. These sections felt like dragged out history lessons with tenuous connections to the purpose of the book. I struggled for useful take-aways. However... they were interesting, and I appreciate Ben including some different perspectives than you'd usually find in a book about building a business culture.

Be prepared: the structure of this book is messy. It bounces around exploring cultures with no real order. It'd alternate between a chapter or two that didn't connect with me, then a chapter or two that connected strongly.

Where it really shined was the 1/2 of the book telling stories and describing cultural challenges at modern companies: Netflix, Google, Uber, etc. Ben has tremendous insight here and highlights great examples.

This would be a phenomenal book to read while creating cultural principals for a company—it's very geared towards that. I really enjoyed the examples of using principles to counter-balance other principles in order to create a punchy but balanced set.

2 stars to the history lesson part of the book, 4 stars to the practical advice on startup culture.

Stopped reading at 40%. Wasn't enjoying the slow pacing, verbose writing style, and the internal-monologue of the protagonist.

Stopped 1/3 of the way through, wasn't for me. Audiobook didn't feel like the best format, and trying to read on Kindle put me to sleep.

I don't doubt that Bill was an incredible leader, but given the level of people on-hand to contribute to this book, this was a disappointing effort.

A wide range of shallow, generic advice.

It's good advice... but it's generic... with not nearly enough examples of how Bill applied it. The author continuously fills in the blanks with references to studies or harvard business school articles.

This book is Nassim Taleb crossed with Bogleheads.

The story The Lifecycle of Software Objects on raising AI pets was fantastic. I found the other stories less gripping.

I was surprised at how light this book is on vision for America's future. I thought it was going to come in the last chapter, but surprisingly it didn't arrive at all. Instead this book is heavy on details of Buttigeig's day-to-day job as a mayor, running his campaign for mayor, university studies, and his work at McKinsey. The continuous examples of his common-sense, data-driven approach were impressive, and his career trajectory is impressive, but I didn't learn a lot of big, new things about him from this book, just a ton of minor details.

Stand-out chapters for me were the ones where I did glean interesting new info: Chapter 14 and 15 on his deployment to the Afghanistan war, where he gave a detailed view of his day-to-day work in Afghanistan, and the thoughts he wrestled with around the cost of life in war. Chapter 17 on his relationship and proposal(s) with his partner, which was very personal and heartwarming.

TL;DR: of the whole book...

There are hundreds of thousands of government employees who do very important jobs—preventing nuclear disasters, weather disasters, and health disasters. Many of these employees are bi-partisan field experts with decades of experience.

At transition time when Trump took power these experts summarized all of the critical information to onboard Trump's incoming team.

The incoming team didn't arrive for weeks, months, and when they did arrive they: ignored the experts and onboarding material, were completely incompetent pushing simplistic, destructive political agendas, and shutting down important programs. All for private financial gain, harming Americans.

The fifth risk is a long tail of black swan events that could destroy America due to the ignorance of senior leadership in not investing in preventative measures.

The book dives in to lots of examples of these risks in detail. Feels well researched. But is kind of scattered with no call to action (other than, I guess, don't vote for Trump). 80% of the book is spent describing country/state-wide failure scenarios in detail and the widespread waste of opportunities we're missing by disabling government employees from doing great work.

I enjoyed this. 80% of the value was in 20% of the book. Specifically the chapters:

- Escaping The Moses Trap
- Phase Transitions II: The Magic Number 150

Reading those 2 chapters and then the conclusion gets the core value quickly. The rest of the book is long stories providing supporting material, mostly good, but verbose.

My fav of the 37 Signals books.

5 stars for how concise and on point a lot of the chapters are.

I don't agree with everything, but love the strong opinions and perspectives, and the central theme of the book ❤️ Loads of great, practical wisdom.

Enjoyed this. Nowhere near as polished, complete, and seminal as Sapiens. But great for hearing more of Yuval's perspectives on how 21st century social, economic and political systems work, and how he expects they might change with the rise of data and AI. Particularly enjoyed the Liberty, Community and Science Fiction chapters.

I don't agree with some of his points, and am certain a number are wrong (e.g. his over the top expectations for AI based on progress in solving games like chess), but he's quick to set expectations that he's not going to accurately predict every detail about the future. It's great that he published such a raw collection of his thoughts, as his historical perspective and ability to explain complex systems is so unique.

It's not really a book of “lessons”, more “considerations”.

Inspiring, personal, and relatable.

Inspiring to see the sheer amount of work that the Obamas put in, both during and before the presidency. Great tales from them working hard and pushing through exhausting, tough times.

Lots of great thoughts on parenting. I enjoyed the details on how Barack worked, and the solitude he demanded.

Thinking in Systems takes a LONG time to get going and deliver its value. All of the super insightful content is buried behind a LOT of lead-up.

The first half of the book is 3 stars. It dives into the fundamentals of systems thinking, describing numerous commonly found systems in detail. It's more of a reference and primer to set up the terminology and concepts for the second half of the book.

The second half of the book is 5 stars. It broadly describes how and why massive complex real-world systems operate the way they do. Using lots of real world examples from politics, economics, the environment, etc to explain common patterns, traps, and thoughts for remedies.

Best sections: Resiliency, bounded rationality, systems traps and opportunities, leverage points—places to intervene in a system, living in a world of systems.

It's worth considering reading these sections first, or jumping forward to them if the first half of the book begins to get tiring. The appendix is really good too, serving as an index to each of the best sections (strange and suboptimal way to structure the book, you almost want to read it backwards).

I'm thankful that the editor was able to pick up the manuscript and drive this book to completion after Donella's unexpected death. Such an incredible, experienced, caring worldview that Donella shared.

This book is a fantastic introduction to western Buddhism. It's now my top recommendation to anyone new to Buddhism—it's just so accessible.

The Dalai Lama describes his worldview and beliefs in a simple and practical way, relating it to western culture. His takes are succinct and powerful. The sections on compassion are particularly great.

Make Time is the best personal productivity book I've read. It's done more to change my habits and attitude towards my productivity than any other book. 2nd place being GTD.

This book is 5 stars because the authors are relatable. The examples are realistic, not idealistic. The tips are designed to be inclusive of priorities like family, passions, and natural oscillations in energy level. It's a light read, with the authors bringing a chill vibe, and a light touch to do things a little better, not shoot for perfection.

The biggest point in the book is the “highlight”. One 30–90 minute task that you decide to get done today that'll make you happy with the result of the day. Along side the highlight concept there are loads of tips. They're short and snack-able, designed to be experimented with—kept or discarded. I loved the chapters on energy levels.

This series is great, it's work so well as a TV series

The exploration of the 4 key metrics of high performance engineering teams was great. The 24 capabilities and sections on leadership were really useful. There was a meaty 30% of this book that was fantastic.

The rest other 70% of the book was very fluffy. The examples never dove to any meaningful level of depth. Lots of surface level, generalized assertions. It felt like it missed that every technology organization is different, with different trade-offs to be made, and gave completely generalized uncontroversial advice.

I do appreciate this book, but it could have been so much better given the data set they had access to. Or it could have easily just been half the length.

This is in the top half of my 5 star rated books.

Phenomenal on multiple levels:

1. I learned a ton. Ta-Nehisi combines shocking, brutal, harrowing storytelling with incredibly well researched data and explanations of systems of discrimination.
2. He comes across as deeply passionate, highly knowledgeable, direct, sensitive, introspective and driven. His attitude is an inspiring example of someone committed to passionate, powerful work.
3. The writing in this book is sublime. It's evident that he's invested a lot of effort researching and honing his writing style, influenced by rap and poetry. There are some breathtaking chapter ending sentences with words carefully selected to hit home powerfully.
4. Surprisingly, the abnormal structure of this book worked really well. There are 8 long-form articles (I think one per year that he wrote for The Atlantic?) deep diving into topics like Reparations, and President Obama. Each article is prefaced with ~10 pages where he gives a quite personal feeling retrospective on where his life was at when he wrote the article, and additional context around it. It provided a nice rhythm and contrast between the carefully written articles and the more personal tone of the retrospectives. Broke the book up nicely into chunks, too.

I preferred this to Between The World And Me. The topics of the articles were super interesting and content was fantastic.

P.S. The paperback copy is of very high production quality, lovely feel. And it's set in a beautiful typeface—the fancy custom Qu is cool!

This book is like the movie Inside Job, but for world poverty.

It'll also leave you feeling angry and helpless to fix the problems, as Inside Job did.

A bleak look at the capability of humans to exploit one another on a mass scale. And the systems in place to mask and obscure the exploitation, twisting it into positive PR.

The author does suggest solutions to world poverty and the systematic exploitation of developing countries, but these solutions are not even remotely realistic and he knows it. This is because the aggressive capitalist system that's doing the exploiting has no incentive to change, even in the face of a huge social uprising. It has huge incentives to push even harder on exploitation, especially on developing countries where it can exploit remotely, from a distance, with debt and tariffs.

Those living in poverty in developing countries will sadly keep getting f*&ked.

Learned a lot about world economics, the IMF, world bank, and trade deals like NAFTA.

10x better than Gates's book.

This is the best text I've read on the benefits and process of switching a country from fossil fuels to sustainable energy.

Comprehensive, relevant examples, super practical down to the household level, the data is very well presented and illustrated with diagrams... it's all there.

There are a few good stories and pieces of advice in there, but it's like searching for a needle in a haystack. The ordering of interviews and advice is random, and the quality of advice is hit and miss. Wouldn't recommend this.

Mixed bag of interviews, good overall.

Highlights: Random funny stories, e.g. the toilet snake. 9/11 chapter on the state of journalism was fantastic.

5 stars for shock, suspense, and the journey through the story. Loved the structure of Cora moving through different locations, with characters moving in and out of the story.

3 stars for character development. There was some depth to Ridgeway and Cora, and some good depth to the couple in the house, but I'd have enjoyed more. Cora's feelings could have been conveyed more too.

Fantastic book, strong recommend.

This book is phenomenal on multiple levels. I might go as far as saying if I could only have one book, I'd take this one. It's certainly up there. I'm sure I'll revisit and reference it many times.

On the surface, The Five Invitations is a book describing how to support those who are grieving or dying, and how to grieve yourself. As a hospice founder, Frank Ostaseski sat with over 1000 people as they died, and supported thousands more loved ones in grieving. He tells many stories of those who have died, their feelings, what the process looked like, and lends his experience and wisdom on how to best approach these situations. There's no secret or formula, as individuals and circumstances are so different. He gets exceptionally detailed with the examples; no nuance is missed. I learned a LOT here and found it to be very practical, lots of skills to learn in supporting people.

Under the surface, The Five Invitations delivers a huge amount more value. Frank himself is an inspiration. His patience, kindness, and intellect are remarkable. As you progress through the book he gradually reveals a number of horrific experiences he went through in his own life, and how he dealt with them. Some of the thought processes he developed around forgiveness, compassion and letting go of anger were, for me at least, world-view changing. e.g. it being in your self-interest to forgive, to release the mental burden.

This book isn't just about death and grieving, it's about how to be present, supportive and loving in any challenging life event for someone. It's about how to approach adversity, and how to mentally and emotionally process extremely difficult events. It's about how to live your life with impermanence in mind—knowing that you will die in the future, as will all of your loved ones.

Frank's approach is rooted in Buddhism, quoting Pema Chodron, Thich Nhat Hanh The Dali Llama and other Buddhist teachers throughout the book. One of the things I love most about The Five Invitations is that it's filled with detailed, real-life, applied examples of Buddhist concepts. The examples in typical Buddhist books aren't nearly as gritty and real-life as those in The Five Invitations. Frank isn't perfect, he's doing the best he can, and I found the journey of his own improvement in supporting himself and others to be authentic and remarkable. This book pairs wonderfully with Bhuddist writing on impermanence, e.g. from Pema Chodron or Thich Nhat Hanh.

Amazing plot and vision. Just didn't find it THAT enjoyable to read, not sure exactly why—maybe the lack of character development, maybe audiobook wasn't the best format, or maybe I had too high expectations.