Mikey
I liked ‘Deep Work' more, I don't think the content is bad but it could have been shortened more to focus on the functional aspects of actively managing our attention, good anecdotes but if you're already familiar with managing projects with boards, agile principles, and the need to manage your attention and focus as a knowledge workers I don't think there is a lot of incremental value to read this.
This was an inspiration read, it makes we want to brush up on my algebra and calculus. Despite not following all the mathematics, Hamming shares prophetic wisdom considering it was published in 1996. The book is a collections of essays where Hamming shares his experience as a scientist and researcher that guided his career at Bell Laboratories and work in computing creating error correction codes, among many other projects. Hamming offers advice on managing a career, focusing on doing high quality work solving problems that matter - and to anticipate you will have to constantly learn and reinvent yourself managing through compounding change and technical advancement in your career. I loved Hamming ideas on leadership, and to plan for ambiguity and change as inevitable in your field and career.
But be careful—the race is not to the one who works hardest! You need to work on the right problem at the right time and in the right way—what I have been calling “style.”
This was a tough and thought provoking book - the beginning half covers trauma and PTSD experiences and how it effects the whole bodies response and ability to think. It was hard to read about child abuse and trauma, and all the lasting impacts it can have later into life on many fronts, including incarnation and substance abuse. The second half dives into possible treatments for trauma and is really fascinating exploring how important it is to feel safe, and feel comfortable in our bodies, to process experiences and think & feel clearly. With 2020 causing disruption to so many, and our existing support systems and routines - it was really interesting to read about therapies that help people process and cope.
As we now are raising a toddler(!) and I enjoyed this fast and sensitive grounding in Montessori practices. My partner has already started to adopt some of the principles at home, and this book felt like a good overview to catch up, with references to more and deeper thinking where needed to address an individuals needs. I think the key takeaways for me personally are centered on respecting a toddler as already striving for independence, finding ways to enable problem solving even while so young (rather then jumping in to solve the problem), organizing more practical self-serve access around the house, and to establish more structure in our household ground rules and consistency. I would recommend this book to folks who want an intro to Montessori, and it made me interested enough to dive in to Montessori's published books directly to go deeper with the philosophy.
I will upgrade my review rating - if the advice works - rightfully, the book sets expectations this could take a year so I will be patient. Discovered this from a NYT article about the long journey to improve sleep that I've often shared with people (and refrence myself when I'm in a rut) and decided to read this book as source material the journalist references. The book seems like a light weight bridge between good sleep hygiene advice (common) and an intro to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) for poor sleep. CBT has a bunch of studies that show it works, but I haven't found a program I could access easily to try CBT for my own sleep. I do believe the advice in the book, and identify as a poor sleeper, that by truly reframing myself as a good sleeper may work. Overall - good advice, quick read but could use a tight editor to pull this together more structurally and clean up the writing.
I enjoyed Ride of a Lifetime, it was short and direct which I appreciate in business books - a fascinating look behind the thinking from Iger and team to build Disney into a modern media empire. Amazing to see Iger set the right strategy, and carried forward an ambitious plan over years to grow Disney. Iger recalled some topics he had to address directly, and I would have liked more candor around the emotion and day-to-day of running a company like Disney, and perspectives on closing deals worth billions where they were presented more like dry facts.
Cirbsheet summarized the studies, or lack of studies, that guide the advice we received on a wide range of parenting topics. I like Oster's writing, and her summaries of findings changed my perceptions around some of the early parenting decisions we made (let alone understanding better what science backed up certain recommendations). It's also a good jumping off point to further reading for areas to go deeper.
I want to get back to a creative practice, and thought I would kick it off by reading some of the highly regarded books around creativity. Some of the key themes resonated with me, and will shape how I approach establishing a regular practice. The advice I took to heart was to set aside stereo types about what a creative person is and look for ways to find individual self expression across a diverse set of mediums, to forgo conceptual ideas and instead embrace working in the medium as an exploration of emergent ideas or styles, that repetition is okay - good, and vital to exploring, and to not self identify too strongly with any by products of creative exploration. The book offered lots of ideas and exercises along the way, embedded among more of the philosophical advice, of which I did only a few. Overall, I would recommend ‘Trust the Process' as a worthy read for anyone looking to explore creativity with a wider lens.
This book is a deeply personal proposal of a better way to manage our attention. It proposes finding a third-way of refusal in place to say “I would rather not” to following the defaults that our built into to so much of how we collectively use technology. It speaks to building stronger communities, and focusing on becoming more attune to the bioregion we each live in. The book challenges the popular notion of constant productivity, with looking for a humane and sane way to organize ourselves around the temporal and contextual information instead of the global overload. Odell weaves her personal experiences, with the history and setting of San Francisco Bay which I particularly enjoyed, and learnt more history of the place we're living. I've read a more manuals of managing personal technology use (Deep Work, Make Time) but actually enjoyed more this meandering exploration of how we choose, or not, to focus out attention on the people and world that surrounds us.
I read this about a year-1/2 after reading Oryx and Crake, and would recommend reading them in closer succession so that more of the interweaving of the stories ties up. I enjoyed this parallel timeline of events, and excited to dive into the 3rd book before I loose track of all the details and characters again.
While somewhat too academic, this was an enjoyable read about applying creative approaches from other fields to building more energizing work places. The book explores incorporating thinking from theater, libraries, urban design and high intensity workplaces to create a workplace that better fulfills the human needs for autonomy, connection and comfort. As I've worked in mostly modern open plan offices, I could really see the application of these suggestions working to improve the physical work place.
I read this on recommendation from Marc Leroy's popular online photography class. While I did black and white photography in school, and developed photos in the dark room - this book has the best explanation I've read on how cameras photographic process works, and how the various settings like shutter speed, ISO and aperture work together.
Fascinating look at women's life and careers in early Hollywood, with many coming to a tragic end, and often with exploitive contracts and arrangements with studios. I knew little about Howard Hughes starting this book, and the most uniting thread through all these stories is the obsession, control and deceit of women by Howard Hughes. Insane stories of Hughes hunting for pretty actresses, contracting them to his studio RKO only to ensure they don't work and are in his control, and while having his own detective operations to follow, monitor and report on the goings on of women and business partners in his life.
I was never bored, and while I found the book long and meandering around all the various actresses and their tales, I'm glad I read it. It's a totally different look at early Hollywood, and the experience of being an actress. Very relevant tales still today, and the challenges people face in modern Hollywood.
This book is a fascinating look at decision making, it convinced me my life is much more driven by chance that I would like to admit. Key themes are to be on the look out for for when and how you might substitute an easy question in place of answering a hard question (without knowing it), how decisions are framed can dramatically alter the answer evening with professionals and experts, and that we're very bad at applying fully rational logic to decisions of probability. I highly recommend the book, it made me aware of many potential flaws we make around decisions - but my only compliant is that it offered few tools to improve how we make decisions.
This was a really interesting look at how San Francisco became the city it us today, with a lens on the key people (particularly husband and wife teams) who shaped preservation and urban renewal in the City. The book focused particularly on the Ghirardelli Square, The Embarcadero Center, and the Transamerica Building. It changed my context of understanding the land battles (and giveaways) that shaped the modern downtown, and a different outlook on how law suites have prevailed to force the cities hand due to past dealings which essentially gave away large parts of the cities public lands to for profit developers. I slowed down reading it, but would highly recommend it.
