Ethan
Well structured, not overly verbose, decent content, easy to understand. Seems like a leadership training workshop kind of thing. Calls out different aspects of personality and breaks them down into subgroups, provides relatable example problematic scenarios for each subgroup, and suggests reasonable digestible ways to avoid the problems.
I learned a lot from the book and a discussion group about it in which I participated. However I did not like the writing style. The analogy between war and business was given more attention than it merited. Details about wars obscured the main arguments. The author confusingly created new meanings for existing English words. The author seemed several times to disparage all books that came before his on the topic of business as amateurish, which was annoying.
Has some valid points but overall I didn't love his attitude. Heavy repetition throughout and a lot of repeating his credentials as though he's worried readers won't trust him. As the author says, this is a very personal book about someone with severe childhood trauma that led him to be what some might call a loser. Then his life learnings are presented as a self-help book using “real clients” as examples to serve the points. Presents a philosophy on life that is better than being a “nice guy” but still really validation seeking. Targeted at a certain type of person, someone like Ed Norton in fight club, with that dreary outlook on a lonely life. The redeeming quality of this book is how honest it is on a very personal topic that most people spend their lives shying away from analyzing.
Interesting hot takes on various topics. Brilliant man. Very repetitive. I was repeatedly put off by his attitude where he says he's much smarter than everyone and he's got everything figured out. But then again I think of his track record and it is hard to argue with that. Made me realize I may not want to have him as my pal because he's annoyingly condescending, but it's worth taking the time to listen to what he thinks anyway because he makes a lot of good points.
For me only the beginning was interesting, where it defined capital and had some striking statistics about the size of un-capitalized goods in developing nations. Then it got pretty boring and repetitive on this topic. I'm not familiar enough with Marxism to understand his section on that topic.
What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful
Pretty interesting idea, that the older you get, the more the “annoying” aspects of your personality are what's preventing your personal and career growth. Encourages you to get out of the habit of being annoying.
Finally a book not so much longer than it needs to be. Started out strong with lots of important reminders of effective ways to think about mastery. Then slowly declined into boring and repetitive territory till the end. Lots of potential for a more powerful book to use this as a starting point.
Well written, enjoyed it, learned a lot, I agree to disagree with the author on various aspects of it.
Lots of good points I hasn't thought about:
1. You can't lead a better leader
2. Training leaders rather than followers multiplies your impact
3. Leadership is equivalent to influence
4. Leaders add value by serving others
It's one of those fluffy non-fiction books with a lot of unnecessary details about the author's life and work, but I enjoyed his almost happy-go-lucky attitude and so didn't really mind the verbosity.
Lots of practical non-trivial advice. Lots of parts where I realized I've been accidentally impolite but didn't realize. Or found someone else annoying but couldn't figure out what it was about them. Also I never really thought about the impact this will all have on your daily livelihood.
Enjoyed enough that I should look into more from this author.
Pretty good, for a leadership book. Typical format and message but easy to follow and relate to.
If you want to communicate, you must connect. This involves being warm towards your audience. Knowing, believing in, and enjoying the message you want to convey. Be brief, be lighthearted and good natured. Repeat your message from various perspectives. Understand your listener, and speak to the place they are coming from; this is easier with fewer audience members.
30% fascinating, 50% interesting, 20% boring. Don't let the title mislead you, this isn't a history of the home. This is a series of tangents about daily life in the 16th-19th century in Britain and America. In parts gruesome. Very well researched and written.
Decent idea for the thesis: make yourself indispensable to survive in the current economy. But the book is mostly boring filler as far as I could tell.
This was probably a big deal when it came out but I graduated in 2015 and every job I've had follows most of this stuff already. It's talked about like something that'll blow your mind once you grok it but I think the whole industry has already grokked this book. It did help me understand why no one understands what product we're building and how it mostly doesn't matter because it's ‘agile' to iterate and as long as it's better this year than last year we're all gonna keep our jobs.
I don't really disagree with anything said in the book. But also I don't feel I learned much from the book. It was well written in the sense that they made their points clearly and straightforwardly. However it used a breezy wordy informal writing style. Maybe if I really was a manager I'd find it more insightful ;)
It worked. Life changed. 3 years later and I still don't smoke cigarettes and still think this book was a key part of the journey. The approach the author uses hits hard for a rational-oriented person. You go through his reasoning and realize you no longer want to smoke.
Overly academic tone (which was perhaps the style at that time) made it not a real page turner. But overall I really enjoyed it. He makes it all seem so obvious when he makes his critiques of socialism. But when I talk to about these points to a socialist, they didn't realize this stuff, and they never thought about it that way.
For example, socialists often assume that the state should be run in a way that enforces rules about not exploiting workers and not allowing racism. That requires a lot of “power”. And what kind of people end up typically acquiring roles that have a lot of power? It's not people like you. It's narcissists and sociopaths, naturally; just look at the past 2000 years or so. Sure, there are exceptions. And typically when these people get all that power it's not ending worker exploitation that gets them out of bed in the morning. It's their own ego. So the benefit of capitalism is that it relegates these egomaniacs to set their sights on building electric cars, or functioning within a limited congress, or making feature films, etc. Does it create a perfect egalitarian economy? In many senses it leaves a lot to be desired. But look at where we came from, before capitalism; the divides in society used to be a lot worse. And the societies that have “progressed” the most have often been the most capitalist ones. There are exceptions. But do we really want to hand over responsibility for choosing what's best for us to someone who only ostensibly has our interests at heart, but in reality is a flawed corruptible human being? I'd say no. And this book also spends a lot of time pointing out from direct experience of the propaganda machine, the direct connection between that Marxist line reasoning and the rise of the Nazi state. Conveniently most socialists I know choose not to believe that connection, and I don't blame them, because it would be too embarrassing to admit it.
Another interesting point was about how the heck would “planning the economy” work on a practical level? How can someone else tell you what to do when they don't know you and what you're actually good at? How can someone dictate the prices of bread when they don't know how much grain is available for sale? How can they take in all the numbers and construct all the formulas for setting everything up in a balanced way? And how could we all agree on what a balanced formulas outcome would be? It all would easily devolve into a corrupted power-grab. Maybe we should just let people decide on their own careers and set the prices of the goods that they sell, and consumers can make their own purchasing decisions about whether the price is worth it or not.
Didn't finish it because the first few stories about trying bizarre weight loss plans and training for athletic competitions and living on protein shakes were not relatable or relevant for my lifestyle. The conversational tone was ok. May be worth returning to this book when I'm over 40 yrs old.
Similar but more modern follow up to “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”. My problem with the book is that it seems to claim you can't derive the same sort of satisfaction of doing good work when you're doing knowledge work for an employer with a strong profit motive. In my experience I'm not sure this is true, vs doing a “traditional” craft job where you can easily see the impact on your neighbor of the work you're doing. That said, the book was well written and an enjoyable read. I loved the depiction of the lower-level manager who finds himself caught in the position where he to show his employees that he's really “fighting for them” emotionally while having to turn around and show his higher ups that he's really “getting their goals accomplished” in rational presentations.