2024 Book List
THE KITE RUNNER
THE LOST SYMBOL
A RANDOM WALK DOWN WALL STREET
STRENGHTHS FINDER 2.0
HARD TIMES
THE DEFINING DECADE
The Fourth Wing - Rebecca Yarros
Read December 2024
Holy Cow - this book is the best one I have read in a very, very long time. I stayed up late every night reading it until I finished it, forcing myself to put it down. The Fourth Wing has Harry Potter-esque elements mixed with lots of sex. Dragons are the star of the books, and humans can wield some magic channeled through their bonded Dragons.
Violet is the main character, and I can see a lot of myself in her. She is clever and powerful, but only so because she thought she was going to be a Scribe - a keeper of history; instead, her General mother forces her to be a Rider (of a Dragon); as a result, she is forced to become both mentally and physically stronger than she ever thought was possible. She accidentally falls in love with Xaden, who is supposed to be her nemesis; together, they lead half of their nation in a revolution over their lying government.
I have already started the second book - Iron Flame - and can’t wait for the third book, coming out in just a month! Back to reading that second book now.
The Four Winds - Kristin Hannah
Read November 2024
I cannot stop reading Kristin Hannah’s historical novels; although they are fiction, the story and characters feel so real!
The Four Winds is another wonderful read by Hannah. I continue to be amazed at how Hannah can write stories taking place during so many different time periods in the last century or so and make each one of them seem so real due to the level of detail. The Four Winds takes place as the Great Depression has gripped America. Elsa was always unloved by her family because she was tall and not very pretty. She ends up marrying someone and having two children with him.
Then, the Dust Bowl hits. The family endures severe hardship as their farm literally disintegrates. Elsa takes her son and daughter West after her husband deserts them to find work. The meat of the story takes place in California as Elsa and her children struggle to survive by picking cotton. Native Californians are incredibly rude to her, calling her and her children ‘Okies’ (although they do not come from Oklahoma). They are treated like filth and every day is a struggle to want to continue on.
The only thing I did not care for with this novel was the title itself; it is unclear to what the title refers to in the novel itself.
The Things We Leave Unfinished - Rebecca Yarros
Read October 2024
What a great read! I absolutely loved The Things We Leave Unfinished - another excellent historical fiction / romance. I learned a lot about what it was like to live in Britain during World War II. Additionally, I liked how the book moved back and forth between the present and past.
The one thing I didn’t particularly care for was how the two main present-day characters, Georgia and Damian, are presented as extremely attractive. Why is it necessary for characters to be super attractive? It would have been nice to relate a bit more with normal-attractiveness people, but this was my only complaint.
Sharp Objects - Gillian Flynn
Read September 2024
A long time ago, I read Gone Girl, also written by Gillian Flynn, and enjoyed it immensely. One of my friends recommended Sharp Objects, and I figured that it would also be a great read. Unfortunately, I did not particularly enjoy Sharp Objects. I could not identify with the protagonist, Camille, well, and I did not find the murder-mystery compellingly written. The narrative did not make me want to stay up late to get to the next chapter, as did Gone Girl or other books I have recently read. It seems as though I am in the minority, as this short book was made into a limited series back in 2018.
I cannot identify with Camille’s cutting herself, scrawling words into her body. That sounds awful and I have never had a desire to willingly inflict pain on myself. Additionally, her family situation where she never knew her Dad and was brought up by her very strange mother who clearly did not love her, was also sad and odd. Overall Camille did not seem to have a lot of character; she was cold and boring. I do not recommend this one.
The Nightingale - Kristin Hannah
Read August 2024
Since I enjoyed reading The Women so much, I decided to read another book by Kristin Hannah. I was not disappointed! The Nightingale, similar to The Women, is a fictional historical story. It takes place during World War two. The story is really about two sisters, Vianne and Isabelle, sisters who had a difficult upbringing after their mother died and father mostly abandoned them. The elder sister, Vianne, has a wonderful life living in the house she grew up in with her daughter and husband, until her husband was shipped out to the war. The younger sister, Isabelle, was shipped off to boarding school after boarding school. Each sister has a role to play in the war, and I loved how Hannah was able to show how brave each sister was, even though the choices each made were different.
Outside of the incredible things each sister did for others during the war, I enjoyed this book because it felt so real, and it opened up my eyes to how awful it was to be a French citizen in the war. I did not realize how Nazis not only took over towns, they even lived with the families there, in their homes, for free, without asking! People’s ration cards were basically useless by the end of the war, as there was no food to have at all. The winters were freezing cold, and Vianne had to wear newsprint in between her clothes to go outside, as her coat was so threadbare, and there were no clothes to purchase (and she had no money left to purchase anything with anyway).
Wow, this is truly an exceptional work of fiction. I highly recommend The Nightingale!
The Women - Kristin Hannah
Read July 2024
It took ten minutes of research to find something exciting to read in July. I found that The Women was a recent Bestseller that had excellent reviews. It was worth the hype - I could not put this down. The first half of the book occurs while Frankie, the protagonist, is a nurse in Vietnam. The second half takes place after she has returned home.
My high school US history was rudimentary at best, so my knowledge of the Vietnam war was next to zero. After reading The Women, I know a bit more. I did not understand how hated the war was back in the U.S. and also how the U.S. government lied about how poorly the war was going for so long. I was so sad to learn about how poorly U.S. citizens treated the vets who made it back home - as if they were to blame for the war.
Although the first part of the book was hard to put down, learning about what being a nurse at the front was like - it was the second part of the book that really made me understand how so many vets must feel when the return home after any war. They can’t get the sounds and feelings of war out of their heads; they don’t feel useful; they try to get help, but are turned away (in this case, Frankie was turned away because the VA didn’t believe women even served in Vietnam!).
The Algebra of Wealth - Scott Galloway
Read June 2024
Galloway is one of my favorite podcasters, and his new book, The Algebra of Wealth, does not disappoint. All of the advice that he provides in the book sounds right to me. Galloway does not necessarily provide advice that one cannot get elsewhere; however, he does convey his wisdom and advice in a way that other authors have not yet done. The way he communicates his thoughts is common-sense and tailored toward smart, educated, ambitious individuals who are looking to get ahead. I would describe myself as a member of this group of people.
I found the non-financial advice more useful than the financial advice, as I have a CFA and an MBA, so the “textbook” type stuff I’ve had on my radar for a very long time. I wish I could make some of my friends read this book; many of these seem to have squandered time in their twenties and early thirties on silly expenses like clothing and constantly going out to eat; I rarely hear about their investment and savings strategies.
I encourage anyone who wants to get ahead in both their personal and financial life to read Galloway’s book (and also one of his other books, which dovetails nicely with this one - The Algebra of Happiness).
The Unexpected - Emily Oster & Nathan Fox
Read May 2024
This was a hard one to read. Not because The Unexpected was poorly written - it was quite well-written - but because of the subject matter. The Unexpected is Emily Oster’s fourth book. In it, she dives into common pregnancy complications and how patients can be better educated to talk with their physicians about them. Nathan Fox is a physician who offers the medical perspective for each of these complications. This is a fantastic read for anyone who has been pregnant and is thinking of getting pregnant again, or who is in the midst of a pregnancy with complications, to get an overview of said complication and how to talk with one’s physician about it.
Burn Book - Kara Swisher
Read April 2024
Once I find an author I like, I want to read all of their books. Such was the case for Stephanie Land, Malcolm Gladwell, Emily Oster, Andy Weir, and Michael Lewis. Although I love Kara as a journalist and a person, I don’t know that I would read another one of her books. I found Burn Book to be interesting, but I am unsure of the purpose behind it. Although it is not an autobiography, Kara does talk a lot about her background and how she got to be in the position of the top tech journalist in the US.
Class - Stephanie Land
Read March 2024
Class is the follow-up to Land’s first book, Maid. I enjoyed this follow up to the original true autobiography. Class seemed to be a little bit more of a “summary” of events, rather than the step-by-step novel-like Maid. I enjoyed the original writing style more, but Class got the point across: It is no easier to be a single mom to a 6-year old than to a baby/toddler; you simply never, ever get a break as a parent, when one has limited friends available to help out. Additionally, Land understandably questioned her choice of getting an English degree, knowing how difficult it would be for her to later have an income; and also that it prevents her from being able to hold a full-time job until the degree is completed. This story is an eye-opening example of how difficult it is to get various government services to work well with each other, especially anything to do with child support. The father of Land’s daughter sounds evil, trying to pay as little child support as possible while also manipulating the child and being emotionally abusive to both her and to Land.
I look forward to the next story in this sequence!
Killers of the Flower Moon - David Grann
Read February 2024
A second historical book in a row this year! I chose to read Killers of the Flower Moon because the film adaptation was recently nominated for an Oscar. While the content was interesting if incredibly sad and depressing, the third person point of view was awkward. I had no idea of this horror that existed in the Osage community in the 1920’s and 1930’s. This mostly read like a horror story, of one killing after another, and very little interest in solving the murders. Even though the FBI got involved eventually, they didn’t actually investigate every murder of the Osage community.
The Boys in the Boat - Daniel James Brown
Read January 2024
I very much enjoyed reading this compelling novel. As I live in Seattle, this non-fiction story, recently made into a film, is particularly relevant. It is the story of one of the boys on the U.S. 1936 Olympics 8-man crew team, and his story of how he got to that moment. I have not read much about what life was like during the Great Depression, so this story was especially eye-opening for me. I do not know anyone who had to work to such an extent in order to afford going to college, yet the protagonist, Joe, had to do so. This was especially tough for him as he had quite a rough life up until this point, with his mother dying when he was extremely young, and his father and stepmother kicking him out of the house to fend for himself when was ten years old - still a child. However, the resilience and resourcefulness that Joe had to learn quickly at this young age are some of the qualities that made him such an excellent rower. Those who had not endured such extreme hardship in their lives found it too difficult to endure the intensity and athleticism that rowing required. This was an excellent, compelling read, and I look forward to viewing the film some time.
Expecting Better | Cribsheet | The Family Firm - Emily Oster
Read March - December 2023
I read all three of these books over the course of this year. These are the only official parenting books I read prior to and since having a baby, and I have found them to be incredibly helpful. Now I recommend this series to all of my friends who are thinking about having children.
The first book, Expecting Better, is written for women who are trying to get pregnant or who are currently pregnant. The author, Emily Oster, is a Brown economist who used to work at the University of Chicago Booth, my alma mater. Throughout Expecting Better as well as Cribsheet and The Family Firm, Oster debunks many myths, such as that women cannot drink any alcohol while pregnant; and that babies who are fed breastmilk are somehow “better” than babies who are fed formula. Oster debunks these myths by examining existing data, such as experiments and research. She also comments on the quality of the available data based on how the experiments were conducted. She is careful not to interject her own opinion, although she does sometimes comment on some of her own decisions. It’s also great that she frequently mentions how so many of the decisions people make regarding children are based on their own preferences and circumstances; often there is no right answer to a decision, just one decision that needs to be made, and each person or couple can have a best decision for themselves; the best decision can change and can be different for different people.
I can’t recommend these books enough to anyone who wants to be a parent or who is a parent of young children!
Number Go Up - Zeke Faux
Read November 2023
I thought Number Go Up was a nice contrast to Going Infinite, and I am glad to have read these two books about cryptocurrency back-to-back. Although Going Infinite was an interesting mini-biography of SBF, I actually prefer Number Go Up, as it portrayed a more holistic view of the cryptocurrency ‘industry’, instead of portraying just one component/person (although it was Michael Lewis’s intention to write only about SBF). I thought Zeke Faux did a great job of talking about how and why the cryptocurrency industry took off and then declined the way that it did.
Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon - Michael Lewis
Read October 2023
As a Michael Lewis enthusiast, I had to read his latest book as soon as it came out. It did not disappoint, although it also was not my favorite of his. I thought he did a great job of explaining all the moving pieces of FTX and SBF, although I still don’t think I fully understand what happened. SBF was clearly a brilliant and weird guy. Going Infinite is told in the typical ML style, like a story, which makes it a lot easier to understand than a documentary-style book. It sound like SBF just couldn’t be bothered with boring administrative type corporate activities, and also was way too trusting of all parties involved in his business. I look forward to following the outcome of his trial.
To Sleep in a Sea of Stars - Christopher Paolini
Read September 2023
This is a long but quite interesting read! To Sleep in a Sea of Stars takes my interest in sci fi to a whole new level. This book was recommended to me by my brother in law, and I thank him for it! We learn the story of Kira, a young woman explorer of space. It’s something like the year 2300 or 2350, and humans now live and explore all over space. Kira’s job is similar to what I think an anthropologist’s job is, except doing so for new places in space where humans have never visited. An accident occurs and she subsequently becomes the sole person who can rectify the damage done as a result. She is required to learn rapidly about herself and about the powers she acquired from the accident to save all of mankind. This was a great read, although it was really long and I thought the end was a bit weird. I’d rate it a solid 8/10.
Getting Naked - Patrick Lencioni
Read August 2023
A relevant, quick read. I like the business lessons taught in the form of a story. The thesis of Getting Naked is somewhat obvious from the title: businesses should be brutally honest with their customers: tell them what they really think, not what the customer wants to hear. Do not be afraid to say that you don’t know something. These lessons especially apply to the consulting business, but can likely be applied in other business contexts also. The principles outlined are as follows:
Always consult instead of sell - if you start work without worrying about how it will be paid for, the client is more likely to be sold immediately and you actually will win the business.
Give away the business - related to the above principle; and it also means that you shouldn’t worry so much about fees, because if the client finds you valuable, they probably won’t be as concerned about what they are paying you.
Tell the kind truth - don’t lie to the customer. If there’s an issue in their business, tell them.
Enter the danger - don’t be afraid to get into awkward situations if it is in the best interest of the client.
Ask dumb questions - you may not be the only one thinking it. You’ll look even dumber if you don’t know the answer weeks or months later.
Make dumb suggestions - you never know when a dumb suggestion is one that no one has thought of yet.
Celebrate your mistakes - you’re not going to be right all the time. It’s ok to be wrong sometimes.
Take a bullet for the client - they’ll be grateful you did so later. It’ll come around later.
Make everything about the client - self-explanatory. Don’t talk about your own credentials and your own business. Make everything about the client’s business.
Honor the client’s work - even if their business needs fixing, you should honor all the work that has already gone into it.
Do the dirty work - this may mean fetching coffee at meetings. That’s ok.
Admit your weaknesses and limitations - self-explanatory.
The Algebra of Happiness - Scott Galloway
Read July 2023
The second book I’ve read of Scott’s - super short and full of helpful tidbits. I like that Galloway ensures the reader understands that everything described is based on his personal experiences; it’s not based on research. I agree with so much of what Galloway said around spending time with your family, both your parents and children. I can’t imagine ever regretting spending time with family, but certainly it is possible to regret not spending enough time with them.
Artemis - Andy Weir
Read June 2023
Although not as good as other books written by Weir - The Martian and Project Hail Mary - I still enjoyed Artemis. I like that this genre of science fiction is “realistic” in that it seems plausible enough to actually happen some day. Jazz is a plausible main character - flawed and lovable. It’s interesting that even on Mars, capitalism dominates - there is a hierarchy of rich people and poor people. In addition to capitalism, there is an underground market, and Jazz has excellently cornered it.
I can’t put my finger on what I didn’t love about Artemis. Something about the story just didn’t excite me and want to read the whole book in a day. Worth a read if one is in between books.
Waiting for a Bus - Don Eisenstein
Read May 2023
Super quick read about how to improve buses on loop routes! I liked this book a lot because it clearly conveyed something that could be thought of as technical and challenging in an easy to understand format. This fictional book discussed how to improve the bunching of buses on loop routes with multiple stops. Eisenstein has developed an algorithm for better spacing buses from each other when there are multiple buses operating on a loop route so that the buses are evenly spaced, meaning no one should be waiting too long for a bus. The bus administration can easily add and remove buses within the loop as the number of passengers increases or decreases throughout the day, and the buses automatically space themselves out - amazing! As a frequent user of the public bus system in Chicago as well as Northwestern’s bus system in undergrad, I understand how frustrating it is to wait a long time for a bus that is theoretically operating every few minutes, only to see multiple buses finally arriving at the same time.
An excellent quick read on a solution to a problem nearly everyone has likely experienced!
Lessons in Chemistry - Bonnie Garmus
Read April 2023
This was my favorite read of the year so far! I could not put it down. This is going to be a movie.
Lessons in Chemistry chronicles the story of Elizabeth Zott, a chemist, in the fifties, and her daughter, Madeline. Elizabeth faces incredible sexism for being a single, unmarried mother, who values her career above everything else. My mother was about two decades behind Elizabeth, but has described the sexism she faced in training to become a physician, and I never quite believed it could have been that bad, as I’ve experienced so little sexism myself. Reading this book, I realized how real it was back then. I can’t imagine being raped and then being blamed as the one whose fault it is - and getting kicked out of a PhD program as a result. Talk about unfair!
I really liked that Elizabeth doesn’t tried her daughter Madeline as a child, but as an adult who is capable of learning complex things - she never underestimates her; and in face, she doesn’t underestimate the dog, either. I also liked that unlike so many books, Elizabeth chose not to marry her fellow chemist, with whom she was deeply in love, because it almost certainly would have set back her career. She never gave in to this, despite knowing how difficult it would make her personal life, and how it may have been able to help her career, in some ways. She wanted to ensure any work she did was solely credited to her, and I deeply respect that. I’d like to think that if I was in that position, I’d do the same thing. As someone who has worked so hard for my career, I don’t think I could do anything to jeopardize it without disrespecting myself.
This is an incredible book - easy to get through in a long afternoon, if you’re lucky enough to have a free afternoon this summer!
The Rise & Fall of American Growth - Robert Gordon
Read March 2023
This was one of the most difficult books for me to get through in a long time. The first half was relatively interesting, as it discussed the most important inventions created in the U.S. from the mid-nineteenth century up until the mid-twentieth century and their importance in daily life; creations such as indoor plumbing and the car. However, the second half of the book was a complete drag, and the book stated obvious truths, such as how the internet has changed peoples’ day to day lives. The book was extremely long, probably one of the reasons I found it so difficult to get through. Overall, although this was a non-fiction book, I do not believe I learned much that I did not already know; therefore, I cannot recommend it. It was extremely dry - I recall the Introduction to Macroeconomics lectures by the same Northwestern professor my freshman year in undergrad in a similar way.
The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest - Stieg Larsson
Read February 2023
I am sad that this 3-book series is over! Although the third book was not quite as interesting as the first, typical with series and epilogues, it was still an excellent follow-up to the second book and completion of the series. This book delved deep into exposing the inner workings and secret group that was responsible for the awful murders that occurred in the second book. This secret group was an unofficial part of the Swedish police.
Now that I’ve finished the series, there are a few things I enjoyed about Larsson’s writing style: he sometimes adds specific details or background about characters that aren’t necessary to understand the story but add depth to the characters. He also adds detail both in the story and in the footnotes about the Swedish government.
Overall, such a great series - I’ll be back to my usual non-fiction reading in the next month.
The Girl who Played with Fire - Stieg Larsson
Read January 2023
I enjoyed beginning the year with a work of a fiction. I hope it sets the tone that this will be a fun year!
This second installment of the series was as excellent as the first. I thought it was cool that in this second part of the series, Lisbeth is totally on her own in a very different location than Sweden. The author has showed how she has grown from her experiences in the first book, at a personal level. It goes to show how even people who may come off as extremely self-confidence and unafraid in fact have their own insecurities.
The story itself was mesmerizing. The entire book, I could not figure out who committed the murders, and so it was enjoyable that the details of this were left until the last few chapters.
I will read the final installment of the series while on my honeymoon next month. A perfect book to read while lounging on a beach chair!
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - Stieg Larsson
Read December 2022
This was the first fiction book I have read since October 2021, over a year ago. I binged it in 2 days, it was so compelling! I’ve heard a lot about this book, and it’s been on my list to read for a long time. I plan to read the next book in the series in January 2023 - The Girl Who Played with Fire.
It took a few chapters for me to get into the book. The way that the initial case asked Mikhail was written was confusing. Eventually I got into it as the mystery evolved. I found the characters to be really well-written and interesting; I liked learning more about them. The details of the mystery around Harriett were quite convincing; the details of the mystery around Mikhail and how he was sentenced for libel were more confusing; however, the mystery was still excellent and I look forward to reading the next book in the series.
Blink - Malcolm Gladwell
Read November 2022
Like many of Gladwell’s books, Blink can be summed up in 1 sentence: the ability of the human mind to make split-second decisions can sometimes work in our favor, and sometimes not. The rationale behind many split-second decisions, made in the “blink” of an eye, can be difficult to put into words; one early example Gladwell uses is how an art curator can just know instantly whether a particular piece of art is a fake. This kind of split-second decision making can be helpful to us, as humans sometimes have the right “instinct”. However, sometimes our first instinct can hurt us; for example, associating different words with white and black faces.
The Blind Side - Michael Lewis
Read October 2022
I loved this book! It was fascinating to understand how the left tackle position began to have such importance in football through the specific example of one person, Michael Oher - a real NFL player. Although I love sports, including football, I am not very familiar with the different positions, and so it never occurred to me how valuable the offensive line positions are relative to the quarterback position. Of course, it makes sense that if the quarterback is the most valuable position, that the person who most closely protects the quarterback is the second-most valuable position. Another fantastic Michael Lewis read!
Zero to One - Peter Thiel
Read September 2022
A quick useful read. It’s been on my list for so long, I’m glad I finally got to read it. The main takeaway comes from a list Thiel has created which should help a potential founder address whether or not they have a viable business:
The engineering question - Can you create breakthrough technology instead of incremental improvements?
The timing question - Is now the right time to start your particular business?
The monopoly question - Are you starting with a big share of a small market?
The people question - Do you have the right team?
The distribution question - Do you have a way to not just create but deliver your product?
The durability question - Will. your market position be defensible 10 and 20 years into the future?
The secret question - Have you identified a unique opportunity that others don’t see?
The Book of Lost Names - Kristin Harmel
Read August 2022
I loved this book! It was an interesting take on a small piece of World War II. The main character, Eva, has had to flee Paris with her mother as Jews are being rounded up. Her father has already been taken. She simultaneously hopes to save him as well as her mother and herself. They flee to a small town in the south of France, where Eva’s artistic skills from hers and her mother’s fake identity cars are quickly recognized. She ends up working to make fake identity cards for people fleeing France, and in the process, meets a man she grows to love.
Although fictional and so not my usual reading, I am so glad my Dad recommended this to me!
We Should All Be Feminists - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Read July 2022
Although a very quick read - this is an essay, not a book - it was an excellent read. It was interesting how Adichie described people’s thoughts of what a feminist was compared to what her own thoughts of being a feminist were. Those views are still true today. One can be a feminist and also like to dress up; one can be a feminist and still take a husband’s last name. I believe feminism is about choice; give women the freedom to have the same choices as men, and do not judge them for making certain choices that may appear feminist or anti-feminist.
There is one example that resonated with me: “I often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is just as obvious to everyone else”. Adichie goes on to describe how a male friend believed that women had the same rights as men, when she told him how things were harder for women. Her friend could not have been more wrong!
The Undoing Project - Michael Lewis
Read June 2022
This is where my Michael Lewis streak comes to an end. I found myself kind of slogging through The Undoing Project. It may be that it was written well and the content itself was not so interesting. While both Kahneman and Tversky have interesting backgrounds and their relationship with each other is exceptional, I think a chapter’s worth of reading would have been enough.
The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy - Michael Lewis
Read May 2022
I enjoyed The Premonition so much, I had to read another Michael Lewis book. I was as impressed with The Fifth Risk as I was with The Premonition. The Fifth Risk describes at a high level all of the various risks that the United States faces - and how those risks increase exponentially when the people who are in charge of mitigating them do not know what they are doing.
The outcome of the 2016 election was so unexpected that there was no transition team put in place; thus, the new administration set itself up for failure early on. It took the new administration many months to set up leadership within key U.S. government agencies such as the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Energy. The risks that these agencies faced due to inadequate leadership were enormous: children could starve. The U.S. energy grid could be attacked. And on and on.
I really enjoyed this and look forward to yet another Michael Lewis book up next: The Undoing Project.
The Premonition - Michael Lewis
Read April 2022
If you are interested in learning about the dysfunctions of the CDC, this is the book for you. I have generally thought about government as extremely bureaucratic but functional when it has to be. At the beginning of the pandemic, I was personally overwhelmed with having been laid off as well as my immediate family getting COVID; I was hardly paying attention to the government response to the pandemic. Reading about the government response the pandemic and how inadequate it was through The Premonition was eye-opening: although extraordinarily tragic, based on the data provided in the book, it is no surprise that over one million Americans (and many more non-Americans) have died since the beginning of the pandemic based on the lack of response from the government.
I enjoyed learning about specific people who tried so hard to prepare the federal government for the possibility (and inevitability) of a pandemic, such as Carter Meechum and Charity Dean. These people, amongst many other mentioned at length in the book, worked through incredible bureaucracy for the good of the American people - and I had never heard their names until now. Their stories deserve more credit than the media has given them; they are the reason the pandemic response wasn’t even worse than it was.
Speaking of an awful pandemic response - it is clear that the Trump administration did an even worse job than expected due to several reasons; one of these reasons being out of its control: the CDC seems like a mostly useless organization headed by political people who are so scared to say something that could get them fired, that they don’t provide anything useful (such as health recommendations) until it’s too late. The second reason the Trump administration did a poor job is somewhat related to the first: people in the administration cared much more about optics and pretending everything was going fine, and the pandemic wasn’t a big deal, than in actually saving people’s lives. Both of these things are incredibly sad and have lowered by confidence in the government generally to be able to provide things it should be able to provide (like a decent pandemic response).
Culture Hacks - Richard Conrad
Read March 2022
Culture Hacks is an excellent book about the contrasts in American, Chinese, and Japanese cultures. Although written more from a business perspective than from a personal perspective, many of the lessons learned by Conrad can also be useful for personal relationships with Chinese and Japanese people, too.
The most important thing I learned about the Chinese culture is that the Chinese are all about face: it’s ok to lie and cheat, as long as you’re not caught. Once you’re caught, you have “lost face”. When doing business in China, it is important to never let the person you are doing business with lose face. For example, if they offer you alcohol and you do not want to drink it, you cannot simply say “no”: you must think of a suitable excuse that allows the person you are doing business with not to lose face.
By contrast, the Japanese are focused more on dishonoring the family. Under no circumstance should you do anything to dishonor society, your family, or yourself. Hence, everyone follows the rules in Japan - even the unwritten rules, such as not spitting in public.
A great read, and this summary does not do it the justice it deserves!
Liar’s Poker - Michael Lewis
Read February 2022
I’ve read quite a few of Michael Lewis’s books and enjoy his style of writing. Liar’s Poker did not disappoint! I didn’t enjoy it as much as Flash Boys, Moneyball, and The Big Short. I think it’s because the era of IRL trading was so long ago (the book takes place in the mid-eighties, as Lewis was just starting his career) and so I find it difficult to relate. Additionally, every main character is a man (probably white) - another reason it is difficult to relate.
Nonetheless, Liar’s Poker offers a fascinating take on what it was like to be a bond trader at Saloman Brothers at it’s height: traders could make millions per year and did not care which customers or coworkers they had to screw to do it. The culture was extremely cutthroat and masculine and seemed to exude overconfidence. Definitely not my style of workplace!
How to be an Antiracist - Ibram X. Kendi
Read January 2022
Although this was a challenging book to read, I learned so much, and I am glad I read it. It was a hard read because the ideas Dr. Kendi spoke of were so true, and I had never thought about them in the way he presented them. The main ideas include how being an antiracist means to also be a feminist, to be in favor of more equality across upper to working classes, and in general to be against policies and ideas that separate people based on any characteristic. Dr. Kendi wrote most extensively about the intersection of being Black and being poor, and how people make so many generalizations about those two classes, together and separately.
Maid - Stephanie Land
Read December 2021
I kept hearing about this book this year. Then, just before the holidays, I found the short series on Netflix by the same name. After watching half the episodes, I knew that wasn’t enough - I just had to read the story through the author’s own words! Maid is a story of Stephanie’s life as a maid and raising a daughter she had out of wedlock. She and her baby’s father share custody of Mia. Maid has opened up my eyes to how difficult it is to be on welfare, and not just because that one already must have a low income to be eligible.
Getting money from the U.S. government is not easy. One must prove exactly what one’s income is, and if the income is too high (high being relatively not, not actually high), one is not eligible for certain programs such as food stamps and Medicaid. Stephanie summarizes how each of the seven government-funded programs she receives money from require various forms to show eligibility. The most ridiculous situation she found herself in was that she needed housing assistance, as she had left her former partner due to domestic violence issues. She wanted to find a job, but needed to find daycare for Mia. However, she could not receive daycare assistance until she proved she had a job. Unbelievable!
Land describes how she learns secrets from her clients as she cleans their homes: many of them are extraordinarily wealthy, living around the San Juan islands outside of Seattle. Despite their wealth, she can tell that many of them are unhappy. Despite her own extraordinary poverty and stress of mentally subtracting each dollar from her bank account as she shops for groceries or gets gas, Stephanie loves her daughter, and so her home has love.
I could go on - what a great book for all of us to read to make us acknowledge our own luck and be thankful for everything we have.
Delivering Happiness - Tony Hsieh
Read November 2021
I read this book because it is suggested reading for all who work at Zoom. After reading it, I understand why. In fact, “Deliver Happiness” is the corporate mantra at Zoom, and so of course this book is relevant!
Although this is not an autobiography, Hsieh talks about his upbringing and all of the jobs that led him to becoming the CEO at Zappos. Hsieh had been entrepreneurial since he was a small child. This is especially interesting to me because it shows that even at at early age, he did not mind taking risks. He experienced both great success and great failure as a child entrepreneur. I cannot imagine better training to be an entrepreneur than that.
Some of the business knowledge Hsieh shares was excellent, and I don’t know that I have seen it put quite so succinctly in other books I have read. For example, Hsieh compares evaluating market opportunities to poker, of which he was a very good player: Table selection is the most important decision you can make. It’s okay to switch tables if you discover it’s too hard to win at your table. If there are too many competitors (some irrational or inexperienced), even if you’re the best it’s a lot harder to win…My big ah-ha! moment came when I finally learned that the game started even before I sat down in a seat…one of the most important decisions for an entrepreneur or a CEO to make is what business to be in. It doesn’t matter how flawlessly a business is executed if it’s the wrong business or if it’s in too small a market.
Another reason I thought Delivering Happiness was a great read is because the business lessons were so well integrated into the story of Zappos. I could almost feel the knowledge I spent 3 years learning at the University of Chicago Booth coming back to me when reading the following: We think that there is a huge opportunity for us to really accelerate the growth of the Zappos brand and culture, and we believe that Amazon is the best partner to help us get there faster. This sentence sounds like it could have come word for word out of my Merger & Acquisition Strategy class. The process of going through an acquisition as either the target or the parent company involves an incredible number of steps, and the final value offered is jus the last one. That last step is not worth it if the proper cultural and strategic due diligence has not been done beforehand. It is clear that Hsieh and his team did the proper due diligence on Amazon before agreeing to be acquired. I was especially interested that the most explicit reason Zappos agreed to be acquired was that Hsieh had a different growth strategy and timeline that did his board.
I had a great time reading Delivering Happiness!
Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir
Read October 2021
INCREDIBLE. If you enjoyed Andy Weir’s previous book, The Martian, you will love this! Once again, Weir has put together a masterpiece of science fiction. I like this type of science fiction because it’s “realistic” - it’s not Star Wars. Although, I also like Star Wars.
The main character, Dr. Grace, accidentally ends up as the single savior of humanity on Earth after a type of particle is found to be dimming the light emitted from the Sun. On his way to end the crisis, he ends up meeting an alien with the same fate as him from another planet - what a coincidence! Together, the two of them work to solve the puzzle.
I cannot wait until this becomes a movie.
Moneyball - Michael Lewis
Read September 2021
I loved this book! One of the best I have read this year. It combines multiple interests of mine - statistics, finance, and baseball - what’s not to love?! The insight from both the statistics and anecdotal factors around baseball teams is amazing. For example, “poor” baseball teams are more insulated from media attention than “rich” teams; therefore, they can afford to make mistakes, from a media perspective.
The statistics thesis of Moneyball and the key to how Billy Beane created such a successful team is that he was willing to pay for undervalued players and ditch overvalued players, or good players that he could just not afford. He was able to recognize that while players who could hit were great, getting hits is not the most important thing in baseball: The most important thing is to NOT GET OUT. Billy was willing to obtain players who had high on base percentage - meaning that they did not get out. Players with a high walk rate were great. As a result, he also generally did not allow players to steal bases or bunt - both things that had a high out likelihood.
I cannot recommend Moneyball enough!
The Heart of Business - Hubert Joly
Read August 2021
Back to my usual theme of business books this month! The Heart of Business was moderately interesting. I did not think there was anything revolutionary to be uncovered. Joly’s thesis is that “…purpose and human connections constitute the very heart of business.” Each chapter is devoted to supplying evidence to support this thesis.
One piece of evidence that resonated with me was that if one thinks of one’s work as perfect, one can see others as obstacles. I generally tend to believe my work is of high quality, although certainly not perfect. The more people that get involved in a project, I tend to believe the project is getting out of hand and the quality may be lower as a result of miscommunication and inefficiencies, as well as lack of responsibility. I tend to see more people as obstacles. Joly references this in the context of not being able to delegate work, and I have this tendency as well. It’s certainly something I can improve upon.
The other item that resonated with me most was this: “Although profit is vital, it is an outcome, not a purpose in itself.” I firmly believe that if a business supports it’s employees and works to make its product or service better and better, the profit will come - it is the output.
Until the End of Time - Brian Greene
Read July 2021
I slogged through Until the End of Time. I could not figure out what the point of the book was. There was no story, and so I was not captivated. Each chapter discussed an essence of science, such as time or matter, and it’s context in the universe. Outside of getting the reader to better appreciate science and the universe, I am unsure what I should have taken from Until the End of Time.
Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy Seals Lead and Win - Jocko Willink and Leif Babin
Read June 2021
I am a sucker for a solid business book, and Extreme Ownership is an excellent example. I couldn’t wait to read each chapter! One of the reasons I found it fascinating is that not only did I learn leadership strategy, I also learned about how that strategy is applied both in the military and in business.
I have never been a people manager. I hope to be a manager one day. However, my almost decade of work experience has shown me that those in management positions are often not great leaders, and those in individual contributor positions are often excellent leaders. Until I am manager, I want to continue to be an individual contributor with excellent leadership skills. This sentence particularly resonated with me: “Without a team - a group of individuals working to accomplish a mission - there can be no leadership… Effective leaders lead successful teams that accomplish their mission and win… The best leaders are not driven by ego or personal agendas. They are simply focused on the mission and how best to accomplish it.”
I could not agree more with this statement. The initial chapter on what leadership is resonated with me so well because I previously found it difficult to take responsibility for projects that did not go well, when in fact many parts of the project were out of my hands. In my current role, I even find it difficult sometimes to “take the blame” when a stakeholder finds an error in a dashboard or report owned by my team, which I do not own and am not familiar with. I am doing my best to get better about this by taking ownership for the team’s results, regardless of my actual involvement. “All responsibility for success and failure rests with the leader. The leader must own everything in his or her world. There is no one else to blame. The leader must acknowledge mistakes and admit failures, take ownership of them, and develop a plan to win.”
There is one aspect of this that I find especially fascinating: “If an individual on the team is not performing at the level required for the team to succeed, the leader must train and mentor that underperformer. But if the underperformer continually fails to meet standards, then a leader who exercises Extreme Ownership must be loyal to the team and the mission above any individual. If underperformers cannot improve, the leader must make the tough call to terminate them and hire others who can get the job done. It is all on the leader.” After working at several companies, I have found few leaders who are able to do this. I hold myself and my work to high standards, and nothing kills my morale more than seeing coworkers’ unacceptable work be tolerated. I have found that mediocrity is tolerated much more than it should be.
“There are no negative repercussions to Extreme Ownership. There are only two types of leaders: effective and ineffective. Effective leaders that lead successful, high-performance teams exhibit Extreme Ownership. Anything else is simply ineffective. Anything else is bad leadership.”
Americanah - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Read May 2021
I loved Americanah! It’s been on my list of books to read for years, and I wish I had read it sooner. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie does a wonderful job of painting a picture of what the life of the main character, Ifemelu, as she moves from Nigeria, where she was born, to the U.S., for college. Ifemelu is a black woman navigating racism toward Black people from non-black people as well as from within the Black community. Ifemelu navigates the process of understanding who she is throughout Americanah. She faces constant challenges about wanting to fit in with Americans so that she can get the jobs she wants, while later understanding that she doesn’t want to, and doesn’t have to, change for other people.
Interspersed around the story of Ifemelu is the story of her boyfriend in Nigeria, Obinze. He has had different challenges while remaining in Nigeria. I like how Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie does not make Ifemelu’s love interests the most important part of the story, although they are very important.
Until I read Americanah, I had no idea of the symbolism and importance of Black hair. I just never thought about it - and I think about my own appearance only as much as I need to, and not a bit more. Americanah describes how a Black woman’s hair is important to her. I had no idea how much time it could take to properly wash and braid.
I cannot speak highly enough of Americanah.
How to Win Friends and Influence People - Dale Carnegie
Read April 2021
I had heard so much about this book that I finally decided it was time to give it a try! It certainly wasn’t a book I just couldn’t put down - but, that’s probably because I could see so many faults in myself by reading it. With most things, I tend to have a strong opinion or no opinion, although I think I change my opinion when data suggests my original opinion was not right. Therefore, this book, which emphasizes the other person more than oneself, is just what I need to cultivate higher quality relationships in my life - not just professionally.
There are a few pieces of wisdom from Mr. Carnegie that I found particularly useful for me, that I’d like to practice at work and at home:
Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language
This is actually something that I’ve been practicing a lot, ever since I started business school. I try very hard to get someone’s name pronunciation correct as soon as I meet them, so that I don’t have to ask for it later, which is the height of personal embarrassment for me. Then, when I say good-bye to this person, I use their name in the farewell. One reason I mostly stopped drinking alcohol at professional social events was that I found it challenging to remember people’s names whom I met, and that somewhat defeated the purpose of the event in the first place!
The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it
This one is hard for me - not because I like arguing, because I definitely don’t. It is difficult for me to follow this principle because when making major decisions, I want to ensure I have heard all sides of the argument, not just my own, and I feel that without hearing all sides, I may make an incorrect decision.
Get the other person to say “yes, yes” immediately
I like the idea of asking initial questions that the other person has no choice but to say “yes” to - obvious responses that the other party clearly agrees with me on, before getting to the question of disagreement. However, I have never used this tactic because I find people have short attention spans, and asking them initial lead-up questions is a sure way not to get around to the question I really want them to answer. I need more practice with this.
Try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of view
I think this actually is one of my strengths. I like to think I am quite empathetic; however, because I try my best to look at a situation from another’s point of view, I quickly get frustrated when that person fails to see my point of view. From this, I suppose I may need to give the other person time to let my point of view resonate, and ensure that I have stated it clearly.
Call attention to people’s mistakes indirectly
This one I feel is so important, and I know I have room to work on it. Being from New York, one of my strongest dislikes is wasting time. In meetings, when someone has got a fact incorrect, I tend to jump in with a follow-up question, asking how they arrived at their fact, and if I disagree, stating the way I arrived at a different fact. It feels like a waste to me to follow up with this person later, and possibly need to have an additional meeting with different facts. However, I try my best to be tactful when correcting others - never saying immediately that they are wrong, but asking them to show how they arrived at their facts.
Finally, I recommend skimming this book for the specific items you may need help with - most of them are self-explanatory.
Think Again - Adam Grant
Read March 2021
Think Again was a fantastic read. Every time I read a work from or listen to Adam Grant on a podcast, I learn something. Think Again was an interesting take on how to develop one’s thinking. Frequently, I hear people say how it’s important to stick to your guns, don’t give in! But, Adam Grant describes how this decision is often unhealthy; it’s ok to change your mind - it does not mean your original opinion was “wrong”, but that your thinking has evolved, and possibly updated with new data. In some sense, thinking again allows one to save face when one has changed an opinion.
This excerpt from the very beginning of the book particularly resonated with me: We go into preacher mode when our sacred beliefs are in jeopardy: we deliver sermons to protect and promote our ideals. e enter prosecutor mode when we recognize flaws in other people’s reasoning: we marshal arguments to prove them wrong and win our case. We shift into politician mode when we’re seeking to win over an audience: we campaign and lobby for the approval of our constituents. The risk is that we become so wrapped up in preaching that we’re right, prosecuting others who are wrong, and politicking for support that we don’t bother to rethink our own views. This is me, to a T. I know it’s hard for me to let incorrect facts lie in the conversation - even if they’re irrelevant to the argument.
Grant advises each of us to “Think like a scientist…be actively open-minded…search for reasons why we might be wrong.” I like this advice a lot because I detest being wrong. I want to continue to evolve my thinking with the most updated data and news so that there is a lesser chance of being wrong. Additionally, when I do find that I am wrong, I prefer to quickly admit it and tell people that I was wrong, rather than have them find me at a later time and tell me I might be wrong.
Think Again goes on to explain ways we can all change our methods of thinking to ensure we’re staying open-minded and empathetic. A fantastic read!
Bad Blood - John Carreyrou
Read February 2021
This book was awesome! I expect nothing less from a Wall Street Journal investigative journalist. Carreyrou so eloquently tells the story of Theranos: a company whose initial mission was well-meaning, but whose founder, Elizabeth Holmes, was so lacking in ethics that she brought the company down with her. While tragic, the story of Theranos is fascinating. It’s terrifying that one person could have the capacity to continuously lie to employees, investors, friends, family, direct customers, and indirect customers.
I don’t want to give away anything, because Bad Blood is too good for that. I have never read a book quite like Bad Blood - essentially, a long-form investigative journalistic article, told in narrative form. I cannot encourage you to read this enough!
Saturday - Ian McEwan
Read January 2021
I enjoyed starting the year with a quick fictional read. I’ve never read a book quite like this one. Saturday is the story of one day in the life of a renowned British surgeon in the current day. One might think that a doctor’s Saturday consists of mostly running errands, catching up on work, and perhaps a dinner party. Some of these things are true - but an incident early in the day changes the shape of the day in an interesting way.
A short summary for a short read - I enjoyed it and recommend it for your Saturday afternoon pleasure.
A Promised Land - Barack Obama
Read December 2020
What a book! While it’s certainly common knowledge that Obama is a fantastic orator, I didn’t know he was just as good of a writer (my understanding is that he wrote A Promised Land himself, without a ghost writer). A Promised Land is not only a well-written history of our nation’s 44th U.S. President (the first two years of the presidency, at least), it’s also personal - not formal. I particularly enjoyed this aspect of the narrative, as it allowed me to more fully understand how difficult it was for President Obama to get things done while in office.
Even during his first two years in office, with a significant (nearly filibuster-proof) majority in the Senate and an overwhelming majority in the House, it was difficult to get legislation passed. As is the case today, the most centrist senators truly controlled what got passed. The Obama presidency was a balancing act of not giving too much up to those centrist individuals, while also ensuring that policy was centrist enough so that it would be able to pass at all. As a result, Obama received complaints from both the Left, who believed he was giving up too much, and from the Right, who believed his policies were far too liberal.
I believe Obama got about as much accomplished with majorities in Congress as one could reasonably hope for. While accomplishing his policy, he ensured transparency of the office and had zero scandals. I am very much looking forward to the next 1-2 editions of A Promised Land - an excellent overviews of Obama’s first two years!
The Third Pillar - Raghuram Rajan
Read November 2020
I chose to read The Third Pillar because Rajan is a professor at the University of Chicago Booth, where I received my MBA earlier this year, and a previous governor of the Reserve Bank of India. I didn’t take his International Corporation Finance class, but I heard great things about it, and figured the next best thing was reading the bestseller. I don’t know if I was wrong or not - I think the class would have been more stimulating - but I still learned a few things from the reading.
The thesis of The Third Pillar is that the community is the vital third pillar of the three pillars of society. The other two are markets and the state (government). Without the community, society cannot flourish and accomplish everything it can. For example: “The more explicit and one-off the transaction, the more unrelated and anonymous the parties to the transaction, and the larger the set of participants who can transact with one another, the more the transaction approaches the ideal of a market transaction. The more implicit the terms of the transaction, the more related the parties who transact, the smaller the group that can potentially transact, the less equal the exchange, the broader the range of transactions and the more repetitive transactions are over time between the same parties, the more the transactions approach a relationship. The thicker the web of relationships tying a group of individuals together, the more it is a community. In a sense, the community and the market are two ends of a continuum.”
I enjoyed the reading because it was 1/3 world & U.S. history, 1/3 political science, and 1/3 economics - together, a fine combination! I learned about the Old Testament and usury (I didn’t know what that usury was at first); about feudalism in the seventh century; and the rise of the State, and how that gave rise to free markets. I learned about why in U.S. South has had a lower GDP per capita than other areas of the U.S., and why markets often fail.
If this next passage sounds interesting, you would enjoy reading The Third Pillar: “Moreover, who will provide the patronage, the jobs and the wedding gifts, while the idealist is fighting the system? So why not stay with the known fixer even if it means the idealist is defeated? Thus the circle is complete. The poor and the underprivileged need the politician to help them get jobs and public services. The crooked politician needs the businessman to provide the funds that allow him to supply patronage to the poor and fight elections. The corrupt businessman needs the crooked politician to get monopoly rights, public resources, and contracts cheaply. The politician needs the votes of the poor and the underprivileged. Every constituency is tied to the other in a cycle of dependence.”
Between the World and Me - Ta-Nehisi Coates
Read October 2020
I’ve never been great at reading books that were not straightforward. Books that practically announce in the first chapter what the book is about and where it’s going to take you. It’s one of several reasons I gave up becoming a French major in college. Between the World in me was therefore challenging for me to read for this reason and another: what black people in the United States have to go through on a daily basis, purely because they are black. While Between the World and Me was challenging to read, I felt that much better when I got to the end.
Between the World and Me is written in the form of a series of experiential stories, from the point of view of a father writing to his son. One of the first comments that stood out to me was early in the book: “…I would hear it in Dad’s voice - ‘Either I can beat him, or the police.’” Ta-Nehisi describes why his father beat him as a child, as a way to prevent him from getting into big trouble with racist police. “To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The nakedness is not an error, nor pathology. The nakedness is the correct and intended result of policy, the predictable upshot of people forced for centuries to live under fear. The law did not protect us. And now, in your time, the law has become an excuse for stopping and frisking you, which is to say, for furthering the assault on your body.”
Ta-Nehisi makes many references to the Black body throughout Between the World and Me, and it is a central theme. Ta-Nehisi weaves this theme together with another one: security. As a Black person, the security of one’s body was of constant concern, especially in public. “…when I was about your age, each day, fully one-third of my brain was concerned with who I was walking to school with, our precise number, the manner of our walk, the number of times I smiled, who or what I smiled at, who offered a pound and who did not - all of which is to say that I practiced the culture of the streets, a culture concerned chiefly with securing the body.”
Until this year, I had no idea of the additional mental stress a Black person goes through each day, just for being Black - let alone additional hardships that Black people are statistically more likely to have. I can only do my best to empathize with what Ta-Nehisi had to go through as both a child and an adult, and do my part to become a better ally by educating myself and encouraging others to educate themselves. I enjoyed Between the World and Me so much, and I hope many others will read it too.
Grit - Angela Duckworth
Read September 2020
Like many books about developing a desirable attribute, the thesis for Grit can pretty much be summed up into one sentence: People who are “gritty” are more likely to be successful. It’s not surprising, and I think that’s why I had a hard time getting through this short read. There were a few interesting examples of how very gritty people became successful, such as Pete Carroll, the coach of the Seattle Seahawks, whose mantra is “Always compete”. There are a few more specific examples of ways one can bring up children to be gritty. All in all, this was not one of my favorites thus far - given the times, I think a fictional book that allows one to be transported out of the current pandemic environment may be more well-suited.
Natural Rivals - John Clayton
Read August 2020
This book was a gift from my mom for Christmas, and I am glad to have finally found time to pick it up. Natural Rivals is a short non-fiction read about how America’s national parks got to be created. Being an avid hiker, this is right up my alley! There are two men who are most responsible for the creation of the first arks: John Muir and Gifford Pinchot.
Muir is the more well-known of the two men. He was a ‘preservationist’ - someone who wanted to preserve America’s natural state as it was. Pinchot, on the other hand, was a ‘conservationist’ - someone who wanted to use the land, but at the some time, ensure that land was not degraded from that use. Despite the name of the book, Muir and Pinchot were not really rivals - they just had different approaches to ensuring America’s land was saved from consistent deforestation, homesteading, and general overuse. I wish there were more of these types of people around today, to prevent the devastating fires occurring so close to Yosemite, Muir’s favorite park.
Kitchen Confidential - Anthony Bourdain
Read July 2020
I’ve always loved watching Parts Unknown, No Reservations and The Layover. So, when Kitchen Confidential showed up in my house, it was a no-brainer read for me. It was especially nice to be reminded that restaurants exist, when I haven’t had a true dining experience in months. I have never worked in a restaurant, although I did work for a restaurant-technology company for a year and a half. Therefore, everything that Anthony Bourdain described was very new to me. Kitchen Confidential shows just how smart and talented he was, and makes his suicide all the more tragic.
Anthony Bourdain begins his book by describing his culinary experiences in his youth, including his time at CIA outside of Poughkeepsie a couple hours north of the city. After describing some of the classes he took there, he continues to describe his many, many kitchen jobs. I can’t begin to count all of the places he worked, but he makes clear that despite the vast number of restaurants in New York, the business itself is small - everyone knows everyone. Many of his favorite sous-chefs accompanied him across town during his stints at his kitchens.
Although the entire book was full of things I didn’t know about working in a commercial kitchen, here are a few of my favorite things:
Side towels are important. When fresh linen arrives, good cooks will scramble to get themselves a stack of clean towels.
Never order fish on Mondays. Chefs generally receive their seafood orders on Thursdays for the busy weekend rush, and chances are, whatever you’re eating on Monday is from their Thursday batch.
Apparently, it is very common to reuse bread, despite its being illegal. I always wondered about this, since plenty of times I see untouched bread on a table, and feel badly that’s it’s going to get thrown out. But I always thought it would be made into breadcrumbs, or sent to a homeless shelter…
If you order a steak well-done (why would you ever do that?!) chances are, that piece of steak is the worst piece of steak of all of them. There’s less flavor with a well-done piece of meat already, and so the chef saves bad pieces for people who order steak well-done.
There is lots of shady s**t that goes on in kitchens. Chefs cut themselves and continue to work through the pain, even while blood is spilling everywhere. Foul language is frequent. Employees are often late and on drugs (certainly Anthony Bourdain took many drugs). These things just seem to go along with the high-stress environment.
I loved Kitchen Confidential, and I encourage those who miss eating excellent, interesting meals at their favorite spots to read this while waiting for the pandemic to end!
Educated - Tara Westover
Read June 2020
This is a fantastic read! I read it in 3 days, and could not put it down. Educated is a memoir, written by Tara, a Mormon, whose family are strong anti-government. Tara’s father is so skeptical of the government that he did now allow his children to receive driver’s licenses or go to the hospital when they were extremely injured or ill. Multiple times, members of the family are severely injured, yet they do not go to the hospital. Tara’s mother is a midwife and later on a medicinal healer, and so she is familiar with many of the herbs used to make the body heal.
This is the story of a woman with zero formal education, who ended up with a PhD from Cambridge, due to her perseverance and ability to question everything she knew as an undergrad at BYU. I am in awe of this woman, who was too proud to ever ask for help, and managed to do more with her life given her upbringing than so many others, who have far more love and education in their childhoods.
I cannot recommend Educated enough. At a time when Americans are learning more about how Black Americans are faced with everyday challenges someone myself has not ever experienced, Educated is another excellent example of a perspective most of us have never thought about before.
The Phoenix Project - Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford
Read May 2020
I loved The Phoenix Project. It was the perfect book to read as I was finishing up my MBA, as it incorporated much of what I learned in classes like Managing in Organizations and Managing Service Operations with real business problems. I never thought a book about IT and DevOps would be one of my favorite business books, but I was pleasantly surprised! I read The Phoenix Project in 3 days, taking in many lessons while doing so. From The Phoenix Project, I reinforced several learnings:
Don’t compromise your integrity, ever. It’s not worth it.
When working with challenging colleagues, always act professional, and do not write them off.
If at all possible, it is important to have redundant resources. It is never a good thing for one person to have all of the knowledge required to for significant business operations, without other people knowing how to do the same things and the basic processes throughly written out.
Don’t make decisions for the short-term.
Whenever possible, use agile processes! Make feedback & turn-around time quick, so that issues are found early.
In order to ensure your company and your team is operating efficiently, you need to simplify and automate processes as much as possible. This likely means understanding the ultimate goal and requirement of each step in the process, and cutting out unnecessary steps.
The flow up work goes in one direction. When the flow of work reverses, something is wrong - the process is inefficient.
Don’t make promises your business can’t keep, or is extremely likely not to keep.
Think outside yourself and your team and your department. What does your organization need to succeed? How do you fit in that plan?
Brotopia - Emily Chang
Read April 2020
This book was not my favorite - no point in beating around the bush. Brotopia was certainly well-written, and I did enjoy one of the later chapters on sexual harassment in the (video) gaming industry. Brotopia is a collection of stories about how Silicon Valley became such an unpleasant place to work as a woman, and solutions for how that can be rectified. However, with the little free time I have, I did not find reading about something so unpleasant (and that as a woman I can’t imagine ever doing to another woman, or person) a particularly good use of time. It felt like watching a drama on Netflix at the end of a long day full of zoom video calls when all you really want is to watch Parks and Rec or Community - something incredibly stupid and mindless that does not require any brain activity.
I’ve been very fortunate in that I’ve never experienced sexual harassment at work or in my personal life, nor has anyone close to me confided in me that they have experienced it. So, while I can sympathize with the women Chang spoke to, many of whom are top entrepreneurs and VC partners, I can’t empathize.
One aspect of Silicon Valley startups and tech companies that was new to me was the strip club scene. Yep, that’s right - because the culture is so male-oriented, many men prefer to hold meetings at strip clubs. This puts women engineers and entrepreneurs at a disadvantage, because it’s a lose-lose situation for them: if they choose not to go, they miss out on camaraderie and potential opportunities down the road. If they do decide to go, they may be compromising their own values and feel uncomfortable being in such a place with male colleagues. Just to be clear, it is not the case that all men enjoy going to strip clubs, and all women don’t - Chang portrays Silicon Valley men as preferring to go more than women. Learning of this was shocking to me - this must be one of the least professional settings, anywhere!
Since Brotopia came out in 2018, it seems that there have been many positive changes to the software and technology industry in the Bay area. Hopefully, these changes will continue through the rest of the twenty first century.
The Undoing Project - Michael Lewis
Read March 2020
I had no idea what this book was about before reading it. I very much enjoyed “Flash Boys,” another of his books, and so figured that I would like The Undoing Project as well. I am impressed with the breadth of Lewis’s knowledge, as these two topics, as well as those of his many other books, are significantly different from each other. The Undoing Project is a narrative on the history of a friendship: that of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, two Israeli-American psychologist-economists (the economists would call them “behavioral economists”). While friendships are normally beneficial for both parties, this friendship to an astounding degree made both Tversky and Kahneman better psychologists. They made each other so successful because of the way they could talk to each other for hours on end, and did so for several decades, across both Israel and the U.S.
Specifically, the duo enjoyed pursuing questions about the way our minds play tricks on us, and how people form judgements and decisions. An example they studied: They asked students to estimate the size of one of the following numbers, providing them only with a few seconds, so that the students did not have time to compute the correct answer:
8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1
1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5 x 6 x 7 x 8
In theory, people should guess roughly the same number for each of these; however, those who were provided with the first set of numbers guessed a much higher number than those who were provided with the second number - simply because of the order the numbers appeared. Fascinating!
I enjoyed several parts of the book, although the book as a whole was not one of my favorites. I enjoyed learning more about the relationship between these two geniuses, as I have read work by both of them (there is a review of Thinking Fast and Slow by Kahneman below this) and was not aware of the extent of their friendship. I also enjoyed learning more about how our minds fail us, such as in the above example, and many other examples. I always enjoy learning something from what I have read, and The Undoing Project has accomplished that for me.
Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products - Nir Eyal
Read February 2020
This is a short review for two reasons: the book was relatively short, and I did not care for it. There are a few interesting bits of information, such as the idea that consumers like mystery. Not knowing what is going to pop up next in the Facebook newsfeed is the reason users keep going back, many times per day. I also thought that the graphic of how Twitter’s home page has evolved from chaos to simplicity. Steve Jobs really had it right - simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Finally, I thought the discussion about variable rewards was interesting. As an avid stack overflow user, I have not been able to understand why some people dedicate so much time to answering people’s questions without some kind of compensation. However, I now understand: they do it because they live for ‘upvotes’, when users vote their solutions as good, similar to how people post pictures on Instagram and wait for people to like them.
This book was ok, but I don’t want to build a product to get users ‘hooked’ - I want the product itself to be good, without having to build in a hook.
The Lean Startup - Eric Ries
Read January 2020
I had heard a lot about this book from my friends involved in entrepreneurial ventures, and so was eager to read it! I was pleasantly surprised with how helpful the takeaways are not just for startups, but for businesses at all stages of maturity. One of the most important topics discussed in The Lean Startup is the need for learning. “It’s easy to kid yourself about what you think customers want. It’s also easy to learn things that are completely irrelevant. Thus, validated learning is backed up by empirical data collected from real customers.” I could not agree more, and this is similar to what I have been learning in the first half of the New Products & Services class at Booth. While the entrepreneur or businessperson may have a vision of what they believe the customer wants, this does not actually indicate that this is the case. Customers may very well want something totally different, and it is nonsensical for one to produce a product customers do not want - regardless of the initial vision.
Going back to learning: the initial product doesn’t need to be perfect. In fact, the more ‘perfect’ it is, the more likely is it that the company has not done as much learning as it should have. Additionally, it is often helpful to have the actual builders of the product, often engineers, perform interviews with prospective customers, so that they can have a greater impact on the final product.
Finally, a tangible takeaway I learned is to use cohort analysis when measuring product success. This involves looking at the performance of specific groups of users who have come into contact with the product, instead of looking at gross metrics. The example Ries provides is a product funnel, from customer registration all the way through paid user. Over time, more and more customers should pay for the product as the product is improved; if this is not the case, then something is wrong.
There is something for everyone to learn from The Lean Startup - a helpful, short read!
Freakonomics - Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner
Read December 2019
Despite hearing about Freakonomics for many years, as well as listening to the Freakonomics podcast every week for a long time, I never actually read Freakonomics, until this winter break. It reminds me a lot of Malcolm Gladwell- style books, except that this one has no general overlying theme or thesis that unites all of the chapters. Gladwell tends to state his thesis in the first chapter, and then proceeds to provide many examples and research to support that thesis. Levitt and Dubner initially acknowledge that there is no thesis for this book, although the chapters are united in asking interesting, seemingly un-economic questions.
These questions are quite interesting: Why do drug dealers frequently live with their mothers? Is sumo wrestling rigged? What makes a good parent? Freakonomics answers these questions by diving deeper into them than so-called ‘experts’ have done. I especially agreed with the argument that crime dropped in the nineties not necessarily due to tough-on-crime laws, or greater police (although both did likely contribute to the drop in crime), but because the people who would have committed crimes were not born - due to Roe v. Wade, a supreme court decision made in 1973 that legalized abortion across the United States. Because women who want to get pregnant are far more likely to have the resources required to support a child (both emotional and monetary) compared to women who do not have these means, women who did not want to have a child suddenly found it far easier to get an abortion. Thus, children born out of wedlock, or to drug dealers, or to women who were simply not interested in having a baby were suddenly born with significantly less frequency.
If this kind of thing sounds interesting, read on - I enjoyed this quick read!
Radical Candor - Kim Scott
Read November 2019
After hearing so much about this book, I was so excited to learn more about how to provide direct feedback. Radical Candor does a great job at providing useful tools for managers and individual contributors alike, so that we can all get more out of our jobs. The number one lesson I took out of the book is that before providing hard, honest feedback, you need to show that you care personally. That way, when you’re giving the tough feedback, the person receiving the feedback knows that it comes from a good place, and not merely a place of criticism.
I also thought that Scott’s advice on how to coach each person on your team, and how much time to devote to coaching, was useful. I’ve now had seven managers since graduating college in 2013, and only one of them devoted the appropriate amount of time to coaching me (1 hour per week, every week). Additionally, she indicates that not everyone wants to be on a steep career trajectory. As someone who wants to continuously move up and learn more, this idea is (at least for now) foreign to me, but I now understand better how at certain parts of one’s life, one simply isn’t on a steep path, and that’s ok - and your manager should be ok with it too, and coach you appropriately. Just because someone isn’t on a steep path does not mean that their work is bad - it’s just different.
If only I had some direct reports I could provide radical feedback to! I hope that within the next few years I can experience my first management role, now that I’ve almost completed the MBA.
Highly recommend this quick read for all managers!
Great at Work - Morten Hansen
Read October 2019
I found this book on my bookshelf a few weeks ago, and am glad I did! I was looking for another business/work type book and as I have not been feeling my best at work over the last few months (the original company I was working for got acquired in July). The subtitle of the book, “How top performers do less, work better, and achieve more” was extremely appealing to me as I am struggling through the end of my MBA while continuing to work.
Great at Work is based on extensive research - I appreciate that! Instead of guessing how people are more successful, Hansen has actually taken the time and resources to determine seven principles people can follow to increase their possibility of success:
Do less, then obsess
Redesign your work
Don’t just learn, loop
P-squared (passion & purpose)
Forceful champions
Fight and Unite
The two sins of collaboration
The first principle, do less, then obsess, especially resonates with me. Often, I feel like I am attempting to juggle fifty things, and instead of doing ten of them well, I’m scoring at a B- in all areas - work, school, and personal life. Especially at work, I often feel bombarded with requests from people, and therefore do not feel as though I have been able to do a truly great job with longer term more strategic, value-added projects. If I was able to focus on one or two core projects and not worry about smaller interruptions, I would be able to better excel at work.
A good read - great detail, but not too much, and not your usual boring business book!
Hit Refresh - Satya Nadella
Read September 2019
I’ve been a Microsoft stock holder for many years. MSFT has not been particularly exciting - until Satya became the CEO in 2014. Soon after he took the reigns and led Microsoft through its transition to cloud computing (Microsoft’s Azure product), MSFT took off. It was this, along with learning that Satya was a Booth MBA graduate (as I will be in a few months!), that made me want to read his book, Hit Refresh.
Shortly after taking over a position has the head of Microsoft’s cloud division in 2011, Satya says that he “had a very good idea about where we needed to go, but I realized that my real task was to motivate the pride and desire in the STB leaders to go there with me. Sure, I had a point of view, but I also recognized this was a team that care deeply about enterprises, those customers with exacting and sophisticated computing needs. I wanted to build on their institutional knowledge and so I set out first to learn from the team I was to lead, and, hopefully, to earn the team’s respect. Only then could we go boldly together to a new and better place.”
This is spoken like a true leader, and it is no wonder Satya has been so successful. Satya was able to understand that people are not motivated by their leader simply telling them what to do. A leader needs to earn the respect of those under him before the motivation can even begin. It is likely because of his phenomenal leadership skills that Satya’s cloud division was so successful so quickly, and furthermore that this success led him to be chosen as the next Microsoft CEO. As of 2017, Microsoft’s cloud business was earning $20B revenue annually.
While some of the technical discussion in the book was a little over my head, I enjoyed learning about Satya’s background, his love for cricket, and how he motivates his team.
Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies - Jim Collins & Jerry Porras
Read August 2019
This was definitely a more interesting read than Nudge! Although rather outdated by now (it was written in the early nineties), there are several valuable insights to take away. If I ever start my own firm or have achieved a position at an executive level, I would certainly go back to Built to Last to get an understanding of what a mission statement is, why it is important, how to create a good one, and how it differs from a statement of profitability.
The authors design the companies in a way so that there is a set of “visionary” companies and a comparable set of non-visionary companies. These non-visionary companies are not losers - in fact, many of them still exist today. However, they are companies that have not done as well. Several visionary/non-visionary examples frequently utilized here are P&G/Colgate, 3M/Norton, and HP/Texas Instruments.
One of the key lessons learned from Built to Last is that companies should preserve their core values, while continuously innovating. While difficult to do well, this is how all of the “visionary” companies listed in the book have been successful. It is so important for all who work at a firm to understand the mission and the core values so that they can understand the true essence and purpose of why they are there. “Core ideology provides the bonding glue that holds an organization together as it grows, decentralizes, diversifies, expands globally, and attains diversity thin…Core values are the organization’s essential and enduring tenets - a small set of timeless guiding principles that require no external justification.”
Nudge - Richard Thaler & Cass Sunstein
Read July 2019
The Nobel Prize in Economics. That’s what Richard Thaler won as a result of this book & his theory on “nudging”. Despite the prize, I found Nudge so incredibly dry as to have to force myself to continue on with it after the first few chapters. Nudge is centered on the idea of libertarian paternalism: Both private and public institutions can and should affect individual behavior positively, while at the same time respecting freedom of choice. The most common example of this is the 401k: By having the default option set to opt-in, an individual is automatically enrolled into the 401k. The individual must opt-out of saving for retirement, and for most people this is a decision made with at least some guilt. By making the individual choose to opt out, the individual is more likely to leave the default alone as opt-in, and at least contribute some amount to retirement.
Most of the book includes further examples of nudges, such as how to design healthcare plans using choice architecture, organ donations, and the implementation of carbon taxes. These examples helped me to understand how choice architecture can be used to push people to make the right decision without forcing them to do so. However, especially after my previous interesting read, this was unexciting, and I think one can get the gist by reading through the second section (“Money”) only.
Call Me By Your Name - Andre Aciman
Read June 2019
My sister left this book for me read when she visited Chicago over the winter. It is significantly different from the types of books I usually read - business-y, leadership, biography, bestseller types. While a work of fiction, the event depicted could easily happen.
Elio is the son of a university professor in Italy. Over the summers, his father takes in students completing part of their graduate studies abroad, in exchange for their help with translation. One summer, a student from New York is invited. His name is Oliver. Elio quickly discovers that while he has enjoyed physical relationships with women, his fondness for them is small relative to the passion he feels for Oliver. Andre Aciman has an incredible way with words - the descriptions of Elio’s personal thoughts about Oliver are just incredible.
The summer moves on and Elio and Oliver begin to have a relationship. Call Me By Your Name describes the passion and difficulties of falling in love, and how quickly love can go away when circumstances change. Incredibly well written, and worth revisiting.
A small excerpt of the wonderful writing:
I was treading water, trying neither to drown nor to swim to safety, just staying in place, because here was the truth - even if I couldn’t speak the truth, or even hint at it, yet I could swear it lay around us, the way we say of a necklace we’ve just lost while swimming: I know it’s down there somewhere. If he knew, if he only knew that I was giving him every chance to put two and two together and come up with a number bigger than infinity.
The Moment of Lift - Melinda Gates
Read May 2019
I am a sucker for books on the New York Times Bestseller list. When I saw that Melinda Gates had written a book, and also saw that Michelle Obama had promoted it, I knew it just had to be good! And it was. Melinda has created a well-written, thoughtful narrative about how her thoughts about empowering women and girls have evolved, from when the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was first formed, to the current day. I learned so much from this book about poverty at a specific level, and I whole-heartedly agree with the argument she puts forth here: empowering women helps not only them, but also their husbands, brothers, fathers, sons, and daughters.
One of the most important arguments Melinda puts forth is how empowering women to have an option to take contraception if they choose can have a positive effect on the family. So many women have no control over how many children they have, and so they end up having far too many to sustainably feed, clothe, and shelter them. By giving women the option to use a birth control method, women feel empowered to take care of the children they do have.
Another aspect of the book I enjoy is how Melinda talks about how important it was for the leaders of villages she visited to want to make a change, and how it was really up to them if the culture could change, as they were the ones who had the clout to change peoples’ minds. One especially positive story is about how a group of women in one village in Senegal decided over the course of several months that it was not right to cut the clitoris of their daughters, as it caused more difficult births, and that it was not right for their daughters not to have a right to health. Most importantly, these women came to this conclusion on their own. Once they came to that conclusion, they convinced the imam of their village to go to other villages to convince them to abandon the practice of female cutting. If they had not done this, men from other villages would not have married these womens’ daughters, as this act was considered necessary for marriage.
The Moment of Lift is filled with similar stories. It is a book that I intend to pick up and read a chapter of now and again, if I am having a bad day.
The Hidden Life of Trees: What they Feel, How they Communicate - Peter Wohlleben
Read April 2019
A different type of book than what I usually read - and so enjoyable! As you may know if you have looked through some of my pictures, there is not much else in the world I enjoy more than spending time outside, and so reading a book about trees was about as close as I could get while staying inside. I felt so relaxed reading about how trees communicate with each other via their roots and their leaves, and about all of the interactions trees have with the world around them. This was the perfect book to read after AI Superpowers - quite a heavy read.
In case this convinces you to read this short and relaxing novel, here are a few things I learned:
Some trees give off gasses as a warning to other trees that are in danger - for example, an animal is munching on it. Then, these trees pump toxins into their leaves to make them taste bitter, so that other animals are less likely to munch on them.
Some trees such as Beeches help each other to grow at the same rate, so that they all grow equally tall. This is done by equalizing the amount of sugar (food) via the roots.
A break in the bark of a tree is very painful, as bark is the way food gets from roots to leaves.
AI Super-Powers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order - Kai-Fu Lee
Read April 2019
As my career veers more and more into tech (I moved to a software firm 6 months ago, and my position now is ‘Analytics Manager’), I find myself wanting to know everything that is going on in the tech world. Kai-Fu Lee’s book offers a unique viewpoint into a specific area of tech: artificial intelligence. His view is fascinating because he is one of few entrepreneurs who is ‘fluent’ in technology in both the U.S. and China.
Kai-Fu Lee has worked for Apple, Microsoft, and Google, and now owns a venture capital firm in Beijing. He was educated at Carnegie Mellon - a top university for artificial intelligence! Clearly, he is not only brilliant, but incredibly hard-working. This personal side of him comes out in a chapter later in the book, in which he discusses how a cancer diagnosis changed his outlook on life.
Let’s go back to the beginning - to Lee’s thesis: China is quickly overtaking the U.S. as an artificial intelligence superpower. Americans simply do not have the work ethic (9-9-6) of working from 9 to 9, 6 days per week, nor the huge datasets available in China. Additionally, American laws are much more explicit than Chinese laws in that it is difficult if not impossible to copy a competitor’s exact brand and business model. In China, this is completely acceptable - and it is a reason why there is so much innovation. These companies need to constantly innovate in order to be ahead of the hundreds of similar competitors.
I thought the below graphs were particularly interesting, although it looks like my job falls into some combination of human veneer and slow creep… time to learn some more skills!
For anyone remotely interested in how technology is evolving today, I highly encourage this excellent read.
The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger - Marc Levinson
Read April 2019
This is the most historical and specific book I have picked up in some time. That’s not a bad thing, especially when learning about how a new industry sprouts up. This new (not so much anymore) industry is an incredibly important one, but one that most of us take for granted: container shipping. The Box describes in great detail how the container industry sprung up, beginning in the 1950’s, started by Malcom McLean. McLean was instrumental to the container creation process because he was ruthless in cost-cutting and efficiency maximization. He wasn’t afraid to take risks in how ships were built, and how the technology of transporting goods across the world changed.
The most interesting part of the book is the later chapters, where the book delves into the cost of building the ports, and how important it is for ships to sail with as much cargo as possible in order for the fixed cost to be spread out across containers. The logistics of the container industry before the era of computers are unfathomable - and even with computers, it seems like such a challenge!
Another interesting topic The Box addresses in detail is the change in labor over the course of the container revolution. Longshoremen and dockworkers have almost entirely been replaced by machines today; 70 years ago, their presence was the only way cargo could be shipped across oceans. Their jobs were to load and unload cargo, and fit it into tight spaces on ships. Levinson pays particular attention to how these workers were able to keep their jobs for as long as possible in many cities, even as it became more and more clear that those jobs likely wouldn’t last for long.
This 400-page book is throughly interesting if you are interested in history or innovation (or transportation) - otherwise, I’d probably pick up something lighter.
Zucked: Waking up to the Facebook Catastrophe - Roger McNamee
Read April 2019
Whether or not you use social media, it’s easy to see how much it has affected all of our lives, in ways we can and cannot see. It’s easy to acknowledge the positive aspects of social media - easy communication, access to news, the ability to see what your friend had for lunch one second after it’s posted - but it’s more challenging to see the ways that social media impacts our lives negatively.
Those negative aspects of social media, specifically Facebook, are the focus of Roger McNamee’s recent publication, Zucked. This is one of the most negative books I have read in awhile (although I am reading AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order, by Kai-Fu Lee, which appears to have a similar negative outlook). I don’t mean that in a bad way - every once and awhile, we all need a dose of reality. McNamee’s entire career has been in tech, and so he’s not someone to be negative about it without significant knowledge of the field.
The first few sections of the book describe the making of Facebook, and how McNamee first met Mark Zuckerberg. McNamee was the one who introduced Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s #2, to Mark Zuckerberg, and helped convince her to join Facebook from Google. He served as an early adviser to ‘Zuck’ while Facebook was growing ferociously in its early years. By the time of Facebook’s IPO. McNamee was no longer in close contact with Zuck.
McNamee attempts to distinguish between the problem and the problem as it seems: The problem is how social media companies monetize their customers, not the fact that social media itself exists. There are a set of choices that these companies could take that could make their existence more beneficial than harmful; at the moment, their existence is more harmful than not.
Zucked describes the process of attempting to get Facebook to put it’s users first, and how that process was unsuccessful, and still is today. Facebook’s motto of “grow fast and break things” worked so well, that it is difficult for Facebook to follow any other policy. Because so much of how users can negatively use Facebook’s product is not thought out, Facebook still has a long way to go to have the user privacy users deserve. McNamee and several others he worked with were key to bringing Facebook’s poor policies to light with Congress, and has made a lot of progress there. Even after Cambridge Analytica, Zuck’s Congressional testimony was not nearly as bad for Facebook as McNamee had expected - he is still able to wiggle out of poor situations. Without any regulation, and as long as enough users still trust Facebook, the situation will not change.
I can’t say I enjoyed reading this, as the topic is not happy. However, I am glad that I am better informed about Facebook’s choices.
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success - Carol Dweck, Ph.D.
Read March 2019
Mindset was recommended to me by Leadership faculty at the University of Chicago before I started my current position. It was an appropriate business-school like book to read while skiing at the Booth ski trip this week. Dr. Dweck’s thesis explains why people with a fixed mindset are frequently less successful than those with a growth mindset. Someone with a growth mindset wants to learn, and understands that they have nothing to lose by learning. Most importantly, those with growth mindsets are not afraid of failure during the learning process. Those with a fixed mindset are afraid that even the smallest setback will make them appear unintelligent. Because they are afraid of failure, they are unable to grow, and therefore unable to attain the greater achievements of those with a growth mindset.
I found the chapter on where mindsets come from to be particularly interesting. Children are sometimes unintentionally taught that innate talent is more important than the process of learning. Dr. Dweck uses the example: “You’re so brilliant, you got an A without even studying!” The better message is: “You studied so hard for that exam, you must have learned a lot!” Similarly, it is important that parents don’t give the idea to their children that their children are only considered intelligent if they attend Harvard or a similarly elite institution. From a teaching perspective, is it important that teachers don’t give up on students that at first may not appear intelligent. Teachers should have growth mindsets about their students - that their intelligence is not fixed, they have just lacked good teachers earlier in their lives.
This is certainly a must-read for all!
Prisoners of Geography - Tim Marshall
Read February 2019
I very much enjoyed reading this! If I have a lapse in my education, it is definitely history and social studies. In approximately 300 pages, Mr. Marshall conveys a brief history of the world as it relates to world geography. The geographic areas Tim discusses are: Russia, China, the US, western Europe, Africa, the Middle East, India & Pakistan, Korea & Japan, Latin America, and the Arctic.
I was most interested in the India/Pakistan section. Prior to reading it, I assumed that I would learn about the different geographic areas of India, and perhaps the different agriculture produced in these areas, with a few pages devoted to Pakistan. However, this chapter focused most on the relationship between India and Pakistan. I hadn’t known that it was European powers that initially drew the line between the two countries, and how much that line makes no sense. This is the reason why even this week, significant conflict continues in Kashmir, the region in northwest India and Eastern Pakistan that has been contested for decades. The issue is that it doesn’t make sense for Kashmir to be split up, because the region has one identity. Interestingly, unlike the way in which Americans in different states all feel a great sense of being “American”, people in Pakistan feel a greater identity toward their cultural region.
The United States section included a note on the new potential Panama Canal competitor: China is building another, second, and deeper, canal across Nicaragua, and the largest lake in Central America. China wants to ensure that it can easily access this quick shipping route, and it may be difficult to do so via the Panama Canal in the future, because the U.S. has a very friendly relationship with Panama.
A fascinating read!
Second Nature - Don Thompson
Read January 2019
If you’re looking for an interesting, quick Sci-Fi read, look no further than Second Nature. While a work of fiction, Second Nature would make a good movie, as it includes many of our favorite movie genres as well - a romantic element, a hero-to-the-rescue element, drama, and mystery, all in one! It doesn’t hurt that the expertly described Seattle geography is front and center, too.
Allison is the main character. She lives on a boat, and sells them for a living. Dan is the other main character, and he is a psychiatrist. Allison has always had knowledge that she shouldn’t have - such as the knowledge of a fully-trained doctor, despite having never gone to medical school or received any training. How is this possible? At the request of a friend, she agrees to see a therapist, Dan. The therapy lasts for a very short time, and before Dan has enough time to help Allison, she runs into some trouble. I couldn’t put this book down - read on to find out what happens to Allison, and why she has such knowledge she shouldn’t have.
Becoming - by Michelle Obama
Read December 2018
I don’t know where to begin - this story was incredible. I read the book in 2 days and I can’t wait for the second half in 30 to 40 years. I already admired her, and now I admire her more. This biography showcases how despite being an extremely accomplished person (attending Princeton and Harvard despite coming from a lower middle class background and then immediately landing a job at a top law firm), Michelle essentially ended her career so that her husband could pursue his. I don’t know if I could have done this, and so I admire her so much for doing so. That is the ultimate sacrifice for someone so intelligent and educated.
Something I loved about the book that was that I learned quite a bit about Chicago history and also about the White House. I learned that Harold Washington was the first black mayor of Chicago, and unfortunately died quite soon after taking office. Now I know who the Harold Washington library is named after! I also learned that the First Family pays for much of their food and services in the White House.
The most impressive aspect of Michelle is how supportive she is of Barack and her children, and how she always acts with grace and modesty under the most intense pressure possible. She is the epitome of a role model for all people.
The best book I’ve read all year - so inspiring!
The Right and Wrong Stuff (How Brilliant Careers are Made & Unmade) - by Carter Cast
Read December 2018
I received this book for free while listening to the author, a Kellogg entrepreneurship professor, give a talk about derailment at Northwestern’s 2018 Leadership Symposium in Evanston. Although there is no few earth-shattering information, I thought it was helpful to read about what derails people. This is certainly helpful for people who are not self-aware; however, those are not the type of people who are likely to pick up a book about derailment.
Carter defines derailment as “when a manager or an executive previously deemed to have strong potential is fired, demoted, or plateaus below his or her expected levels of performance.” It is frequently the result of either/or a cultural mismatch or inter-personal issues.
The book begins be describing five “characters”, a way to showcase the five main behaviors people exhibit before derailing:
Captain Fantastic: These are folks who will do anything to promoted. They don’t care who the hurt along the way.
The Solo Flier: Great at working alone, but has poor management skills. They find delegation difficult.
Version 1.0: These people adapt to change poorly. They are cautious, and are behind in industry trends.
The One-Trick Pony: They are unpromotable because they are incredibly skilled in one area, and have very few skills in other areas. They have over-specialized.
The Whirling Dervish: These are often the creative folks. However, they are “yes” people who never say no, and cannot deliver promised results.
Several times, Carter mentions conversations that his managers had with him or that he had with his team members (as a former Walmart.com CEO, I’m sure he’s had enough of these conversations to fill a book on their own) in which he was given or gave extremely direct feedback. Each time, he confirmed how helpful and glad he was to have received such feedback in hindsight, even if at the moment he was in disbelief. It is this such information that I’m glad to have learned from reading this.
One of Carter’s goals is to help the reader gain a better understanding of her areas of vulnerability. I have identified my own areas of vulnerability:
Potential for micromanagement (Solo Flier attribute)
Impatience when other do not understand (Solo Flier attribute)
Talking more than listening (Solo Flier attribute)
A piece of advice I liked regarding measuring skill gaps is to make a list of the required skills of someone in the position one aspires to, and then conservatively grade oneself on those skills. Here’s a list of skills I think a data analyst (my present position) should have and my current grade:
Knowledge of a statistical language such as R or Python - D
Experience with SQL - C
Data Visualization software such as Tableau - F
Analytical mindset - B
Advanced Microsoft Excel - B+
Presentation skills - C+
Something else I plan to do is to get to know and work with as many individuals in different business units as I can. Knowledge of other areas can only help me to make better decisions for the overall organization.
There are several small, helpful tips in The Right and Wrong Stuff - a good read for a four-hour flight.
The Power of Habit - Charles Duhigg
Read December 2018
What is a habit? Broken down, a habit consists of three parts: a cue, a routine, and a reward. Over time, repetition of these experiences creates a habit. Interestingly, habits help our brains to be more efficient. Once we are used to the cue, routine, reward process, the brain no longer needs to think so hard about how to react. The reaction is effortless. To create new habits or to change existing habits, the sequence must be altered in some way. Perhaps the cue is different - for example, setting running shoes next to the bed the night before, may cause someone to wake up and go on a run, instead of leaving the shoes in the closet. The most likely way to successfully change a bad habit into a good one is to change the routine, and leave the cue and the reward intact.
AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) is such a successful program because it helps members to identify cues and rewards, and to find a different routine. Perhaps the cue is stress, the routine is grabbing a beer from the fridge after getting home, and the reward is feeling tipsy and sleepy, enabling one to forget about the stress. A different routine, with a similar cue and reward, could be heading to the gym instead of to the beer. Interestingly, in order for the new habits to be most successful, members of AA need a high degree of belief, such as faith in God. This faith, especially when the faith is shared by a community, makes the habits more likely to stick in times of stress.
In order to break a bad habit, it is important to note why the behavior occurs. If we don’t know why we snack throughout the day, then we are unable to identify how to break the habit.
The book goes on to discuss habits of organizations, as well as some more specific examples, such as gambling addictions and brain neurology. Interestingly, the epilogue of the book discusses several readers who read the book and were successfully able to change their lives for the better by changing a habit, such as smoking, drinking, or snacking. This was a quick read, and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in the psychology of habits, who is trying to change a habit of their own, or that of someone else.
the Four - The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google - Scott Galloway
Read September 2018
As someone who has owned individual stock in all four of these companies for years, I don’t need to be convinced that these firms are incredibly successful cash cows. However, as an equity owner and stakeholder in these firms, I did want to have a better understanding of what it was that made these firms so successful - how did they get that way?
Galloway takes the reader through each firm’s journey, and then follows up with several chapters about the future of these firms. As a serial entrepreneur and professor at NYU Stern School of Business, he is more than qualified to discuss how the four have become so successful.
The first of the four is Amazon. Bezos was able to recognize the e-commerce opportunity far before anyone else did. By the time other retailers realized how much of an impact e-commerce would have on their businesses, it was too late - Amazon had taken over. Amazon has benefited enormously from patient capital - its ability to raise seemingly endless amounts of capital, all with zero to very low profits. Amazon can increase its capex by millions, without investors so much as blinking, while Walmart can do the same and shed the equivalent of the entire market cap of Macy’s in seconds.
The future of retail is omnichannel - brands with presence on all channels - web, mobile, physical, etc. Amazon is likely to dominate this next phase of retail growth too, as it begins to build out several physical stores (with a new one having just opened in Chicago). Amazon has a huge competitive advantage in that its physical stores complement its online and warehouse presence, not the other way around. The physical stores serve as a reminder to those who pass of its dominance.
Apple is not as much a hardware firm as it is a brand. A luxury brand. People want luxury because luxury is exclusive. As Galloway says, luxury makes us feel “closer to God”. This arises from our natural instinct to survive - and the better our goods, the more likely we are to survive. Nicer, more sexy goods make us feel cooler and attractive. Galloway’s argument is new to me. Up until I read this chapter, I mostly thought Apple was successful at making an incredible, beautiful product.
I just learned about scarcity in a Competitive Strategy class last quarter. Scarcity breeds profit. Whenever there are more buyers than there are units to sell, there is a guaranteed minimum price above the marginal cost that the seller will receive. Therefore, Apple’s strategy of generating scarcity for its products makes sense. It is guaranteed profit. Apple’s products are scarce because they are expensive - a little backwards, but again, this is due to the luxury brand.
However, there is an artistic element to Apple products - it is more than the brand. The products are elegant and sophisticated - they just look cooler than Dell or Microsoft products. There is a psychological aspect to the products as well - we even think they work better because they look better (and because we paid more).
Facebook may soon know more about us than even our closest friends. This is true because Facebook can pick up all noise and sounds from a phone’s microphone when the app is open. This data is why Facebook is so successful - it can feed this extremely specific data to advertisers. Facebook has some of the best data of its users compared to other sites. Facebook is also one of the most innovative companies on Earth. It has some of the brightest engineers, and it isn’t afraid to roll out new products quickly, see them fail, and drop them. We’ll see how this year’s data collection incidents affect this data.
When the name of your company is a verb, you know you’re either super successful or very unfortunate. How many days go by when we don’t google something, or use a Google product - I’m looking at you, Google maps (does anyone use Apple maps?). Google helps us survive, in so many ways - it just knows all the answers. Consumers trust Google completely. We type things into the search box that we’d never want our family, friends, or the world to know. This information is incredibly powerful.
The information Google has makes it the most pure monopolist of the Four, and therefore the most vulnerable to regulation, and it has experienced thus far this year and in previous years. I’m sure there will be much more to come regarding regulation of the industry.
I recommend this book for those who are interested in learning more about these incredible companies. I especially like that Galloway inserts his own humor and politics, and isn’t afraid to disagree with the status quo. I’d be interested in the sequel in a few years.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Read March 2018
I saw a copy of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy at the Powell’s book store in Portland. Since I had heard so much about it and had not read it growing up, I decided I’d pick it up. I’ve enjoyed reading sci-fi more and more as I’ve gotten older, and so I was very much looking forward to reading this book. However, I was disappointed. This book was a little too creative for me, and I didn’t quite understand all of the symbolism and character personalities. It is the same reason I gave up on having a French major in college – the subtleties of symbolism and tone are usually completely lost on me. The plot seemed all over the place, from when the Earth was blown up at the beginning to mice trying to take Arthur’s brain. This is just the first of several novels of the series, so perhaps these are better explained later on. At this time, I have no intention of completing the series, and instead have already begun my next non-fiction read.
The Amazon Way - John Rossman
Read December 2017
A short read, there is something to learn for everyone from The Amazon Way. Although I work in the financial services industry, I still found value from some of the more technical principles covered in the book.
The first and most important principle is “Obsess Over the Customer”. The greatest reason Amazon has been so successful is because it has made the customer experience better than that of any other retailer. I recently took a University of Chicago – Booth class called “New Venture Strategy” that emphasized this as well. No matter what the business is, obsessing about the customer is key to having a successful business.
Something unexpected – leaders are expected to write out their ideas in essay form, instead of in a powerpoint. This forces leaders to think more thoroughly about their ideas, instead of putting a few points on a slide. I agree that having to write out ideas forces one to think more about the details of an idea and come to a better understanding of whether it can be successful.
Another principle that resonated with me is that leaders have to take risks – be innovative. However, these risks are calculated risks, and leaders need to be right, most of the time. One can’t take many risks such as launching new businesses and continuously fail. This ties in to the shortest, most important principle – deliver results.
Anyone who wants to succeed in business should read The Amazon Way. The 14 principles are useful no matter if one is an analyst, manager, or executive.
Ready Player One - Ernest Cline
Read November 2017
It’s 2044. The world is not as you and I know it today. The Earth is wrecked, and most people live in “the stacks,” stacks of RV units stacked on top of each other. It’s a desolate, lonely, impoverished life. Thankfully, there’s the OASIS.
The OASIS is a massive online videogame. Students go to school there, instead of physically going to school. James Halliday, a legendary computer programmer, built it before he died, and left his fortune to the player who can successfully navigate his clues to the end of the game. It’s been many years since he died, and no one has even gotten past the first clue – until Wade.
Wade is the first player to complete the first clue, and from there, the sci-fi novel goes on to describe his adventures both in reality and in the OASIS. This dystopian world does not seem to be very far from what could happen to all of us in the next thirty years, so we’d better read this and take note.
I enjoyed Ready Player One very much. By the end, I could not put it down, and had to find out who ended up with the fortune, and therefore more power than even the president of the United States. Sci-fi is not usually a genre I peruse, but as a New York Times bestseller, I had to find out with the hype was all about, and cannot wait for the movie coming out in March 2018.
Hillbilly Elegy – J.D. Vance
Read October 2017
Hillbilly Elegy took me back in time, to another world I have never thought about. This world is Appalachia – specifically, the Kentucky/ Southern Ohio border. This world includes drug users and guns, and excludes lasting marriages and education beyond high school. I’m so glad I read this New York Times bestseller, as the insight I have gained will be especially helpful to me as I meet people with that perspective of life. My upper middle-class upbringing is so far from that of J.D. Vance, that I needed this education.
J.D. was born and raised around the Middletown, Ohio area. His grandparents were central to his upbringing, due to his father having walked out on the family at an early age, and his mother shifting between different drugs and boyfriends. His upbringing was unstable at best, and his grandparents and sister provided the emotional support parents would normally have given. In this context, it’s difficult to imagine how someone could graduate high school, let alone college, and move on to graduate from Yale Law School. Vance managed to do all of these things.
I recommend this novel for those who want to go out of their comfort zone regarding what they may usually read. It’s a quick, insightful read, and has inspired me to think of situations from multiple angles, and not to be so quick to judge those who have a different opinion.
Option B – Sheryl Sandberg & Adam Grant
Read August 2017
Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, lost her husband two years ago. As a result of his death, and as a coping mechanism, she wrote “Option B.” Option A is the first-choice option – no death! Option B is the second-choice option – making the best of the terrible situation that happens after the death of a family member.
I read Option B because I had enjoyed Sheryl’s first book, Lean In, so much. I have been lucky enough in my life not to have lost a parent, sibling, or child – yet. I learned a lot from Option B, most importantly that the death of someone so close to you is not the end. Sheryl uses a lot of examples of others who had lost loved ones, and this helped her to cope because they turned out ok. In those terrible situations, that seems to be the most helpful thing – to hear from others that they were able to be happy again.
A quick read, Option B was a useful book for me to read just to gain a better understanding of how to help others cope.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things – Ben Horowitz
Read August 2017
This was my first book about entrepreneurship, and an interesting way to begin learning about the topic. Horowitz describes everything that he went through as CEO of Opsware, from having no cash to hiring the best employees to firing those employees. I have never been in those situations and have never pictured myself as an entrepreneur, so I am glad that I branched out of my usual book-comfort-zone to confirm that running a startup sounds more stressful than what I care for.
Although I am 99% sure that I do not want to start my own firm, I learned a lot from Horowitz that I can apply to future positions:
1. Trust is the most important thing – employees need to trust the CEO, that he or she is doing what is in their best interests. If employees do trust the CEO, they do not require an explanation of his or her actions. If the company is facing issues, tell it like it is – don’t lie to employees.
2. How to fire someone – use decisive language that shows you have made a decision and that you are in charge
3. “People, products, profits – in that order”
Horowitz has a great amount of additional advice from lessons he learned building and then selling Opsware, and if I am ever in an executive position, I may re-read this.
One aspect I did not like about this book was that it seemed particularly helpful for tech startups, but not other kinds of startups. While tech startups make up a large and probably growing percentage of new firms, if I was to form a company, it would not be in the tech field. Horowitz may have further lessons from firms that he has worked with at Andreeson Horowitz, the venture capital firm he co-founded, that are more applicable to me.
The Signal and the Noise – Nate Silver
Read July 2017
I always wondered how earthquakes could be forecasted. Now I know! While learning about how to decipher a “signal” from “noise,” I learned about several other items, including how to forecast earthquakes why certain chess players are so talented. However, the thesis of The Signal and the Noise is that it is challenging to be able to decipher a pattern from large amounts of data. Nate Silver uses several examples to show how data is successfully and unsuccessfully analyzed to determine patterns.
One particularly interesting example is the poker example. Silver explains how poker players can occasionally be very successful. Because he is a past professional poker player, he explains this phenomenon extremely well. In this section, he explains how a player can understand whether the player is actually very good at poker, or whether they have simply been lucky. Poker is a game that involves both high skill and high luck – completely opposite from tic-tac-toe, which involves low luck and low skill.
I liked that Silver used different examples to showcase why it is so difficult to find a trend when given a data set. This is certainly applicable to the investment industry, where many people are employed and paid very well to determine the direction of the market. However, although I understand why it is so difficult to make forecasts, I don’t have any takeaways that I can apply to my own job.
I thought that The Signal and the Noise was an interesting read, and recommend it to those interested in pursuing an interest in data analytics.
Shoe Dog - Phil Knight
Read May 2017
I did not appreciate how difficult it is to start a business until I read Shoe Dog. Phil Knight details the many issues that arose in the process of creating Nike in this fascinating memoir. An especially interesting detail is the original name of the company – not Nike – but Blue Ribbon, as in the ribbon the first-place finisher of a competition receives.
Knight originally got an MBA at Stanford, and then did not know what he wanted to do with himself, and so traveled the world for a year, beginning in Japan, then moving on to Hong Kong, the Philippines, Vietnam, India, Egypt, Israel, Turkey, Greece, Italy, France, Germany, Austria, and England – a trip any adventurer would love to take! Upon returning to Portland, Oregon, he found a job an accounting firm, where he met his wife, Penny. Then, Blue Ribbon slowly began to form. The co-founded of Blue Ribbon was Phil’s college track coach. Other hires were picked up along the way, and then, over a decade later, Nike was formed.
I learned from reading Shoe Dog that the best people to have on your team are those who are passionate. People who love what they are doing will be ok if they are underpaid and if they work long hours, and maybe even having their entire life revolve around their work. These people will give everything they have to the start-up.
I also learned how important business relationships are. While there must be trust on both sides, it is always a good idea to have a back-up plan to be thinking not one, but two or three steps down the road. This was helpful for Phil when his suppliers in Japan were late with their shipments, and were also devious in their plans for Blue Ribbon. Even after opening factories across Japan and Vietnam, Phil knew that eventually, they would need suppliers closer to where most of their initial sales were, in the United States. So, he opened factories in North America.
I have occasionally contemplated starting my own business, and reading this book has certainly made me look at doing so from a new perspective. There are many hardships involved, both on one’s personal finances as well as one’s family. I hope that attending business school will provide direction regarding starting a business. Meanwhile, I encourage anyone interested in Nike to read this memoir.
The Tipping Point - Malcolm Gladwell
Read March 2017
This is the second of Gladwell’s books I have read (the first was Outliers). I was quite disappointed by The Tipping Point, perhaps because the examples used did not seem to support the main point of the work: small changes have the potential to create huge changes in society.
Although the novel attempts to rationalize some events that otherwise seemingly make no sense, the rational seems obvious, and Gladwell writes the book as if an intelligent person would only come to such realizations after reading it.
Additionally, I don’t see exactly how the ideas of “Connectors” and “Mavens” come into play, either. While it makes sense that some people enjoy connecting their friends and colleagues to other friends in colleagues, how exactly does this support that one thing leads to another to become the tipping point of a change?
I prefer Outliers much more than The Tipping Point. Outliers pointed out behaviors and societal events that one would not particularly think of, such as that the reason why winning hockey times are comprised of boys born in November and December is because those boys are the oldest in their age group, and so are likely to be the heaviest and most athletic, and outperform boys born later in the school year.
The examples explained in The Tipping Point were so long, that from end to beginning, I simply couldn’t follow. However, this may be because of my taking over a month to read quite a short novel, which was enough time for me to have forgotten what I had sleepily read right before bed several nights previously.
Hopefully, Blink will be more satisfying than The Tipping Point.
This is How You Lose Her - Junot Diaz
Read January 2017
I have never read a book like this one before. It is a literary piece - not written so much to tell a story or to inform the reader of a topic, but to be written in a different way. I am not familiar with Latino culture, but I feel as though I have gained some insight after reading this New York Times Bestseller Finalist novel. It is a novel written in first-person - already not a type of book I frequently read - and not only is the novel written in first person, but it is extraordinarily vivid and detailed. There are about a dozen vignettes in the book, each told from the perspective of a young Latino man, and how he managed to mess up some kind of relationship he had with a girlfriend or friend. Reading this, I felt sad, as in one vignette, the young man's brother dies from cancer, and in another, he is forced to sleep on a couch while a former woman he has slept with gets pregnant and doesn't realize the baby isn't his until it is born nine months later. Although I am sure these stories happen all of the time, Junot Diaz is able to bring them to life and force the reader to feel emotional. I would highly recommend this quick read to gain insight into a culture one may not know very much about. Additionally, the writing style is different from any you probably have read before, especially because it is interlaced with Spanish phrases, which you may have to look up on your phone or computer, as I did.
Elon Musk - Ashlee Vance
Read December 2016
Wow, what a compelling read! Although I read of Elon Musk’s various business exploits in the news, almost daily, reading Elon Musk helped me to understand how crazy and ingenious he is. Ashlee portrays Elon in a mostly positive light, as a one-of-a-kind, crazy-smart genius, born in South Africa, with a challenging childhood, who was able to overcome numerous challenges to lead three futuristic companies: First, SpaceX. SpaceX is one of two of Elon’s companies he is currently invested in that he built from scratch. SpaceX has changed the way the United States goes to space because SpaceX rockets are drastically cheaper than those of Boeing and Lockheed Martin; SpaceX sources its components from the United States, so there is no need to rely on Russian engines; and, SpaceX has Elon’s drive, and the need to continuously improve technology, including utilizing reusable rockets.
Second, Tesla. Elon’s drive stems from a need to lengthen the life of humanity, by one day making it possible for humans to live on Mars. Until that is possible, Tesla cars enable us to be eco-friendly in our transportation. Tesla, like SpaceX, was on the brink of bankruptcy, when it got a last-minute infusion of cash, and created a car that has better ratings than any other car, ever. Much of this can be attributed to the way an electric car is designed – with the battery at the bottom, center of the car, closer to the car’s center of mass, the Tesla can drive much more fluidly than can any gas-powered car. I was not sold on Tesla prior to reading this book, but I am now, and plan on buying some stock at the next attractive dip, as well as a car, some day.
Third, Solar City. Solar City was built by Elon and two of his cousins. What makes it different from other solar-panel firms is that it started out by building the framework around solar panels – everything except actually making the panels, including installation and monitoring. Later, after it became the largest installer of solar panels in the United States, Solar City opened its own factories to construct solar panels. Again, I was not sold on solar panels before reading Elon Musk, but I am now.
One might think, three companies, that is a lot. However, Elon’s first company was X.com, followed by Paypal. What makes Elon different from other entrepreneurs is that each time he received a large inflow of cash from selling a company, he immediately put it to work in another company. He is someone who feels so strongly about leading the charge to help humanity that he has to continue to think of new ideas to invest in. Musk has a Steve Jobs-esque personality – always striving for perfection, and expecting nothing less from all those who are employed at his companies. However, different from Jobs, Musk does not care for the art of showcasing his works of art, simply because he would rather be working on the many projects, rather than practicing for a presentation. Not only does Musk successfully run three companies, but he knows every detail of his products, too. It is hard to imagine someone more inspirational than Musk, and I look forward to reading the next Musk biography, in twenty or thirty years, and hope that by that point, there are many more Teslas and solar panels, and greater global internet access, via SpaceX.
Thinking, Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman
Read September 2016
Daniel Kahneman’s piece Thinking, Fast and Slow was an interesting read, that tries to convince the reader of the irrationality of humans. I got the drift after getting twenty-five percent into the novel, as Kahneman uses numerous examples to achieve the same thesis. Most importantly, he discusses the two ‘Systems’: System 1, which is quick and emotional – the ‘gut reaction’; and System 2, the slower, more logical system. Together, these systems are responsible for every decision that a person makes.
Overall, I enjoyed the read, and certainly know more about the various cognitive biases that exist in the mind than I did previously. However, I did find the book somewhat laborious to read at the end, possibly because Kahneman unpleasantly reminded me of some probability topics that I had studied in college. (I struggled through a year of Probability). After reading 400 pages delving into human thinking and all the ways in which our minds cause us to do things instantaneously before we can even catch a breath, I would recommend this book to those who wish to gain a broader, unscientific understanding of how one simply thinks.
The Martian - Andy Weir
Read July 2016
Science fiction is not generally been a genre of book that I gravitate towards, but I had heard enough about The Martian that I decided to give it a try.
It was a great decision.
I could not put down this fascinating read, for multiple reasons.
First, the way in which the novel is written is intriguing. Most of the book is written from the viewpoint of Mark Watney, the botanist and engineer on a 6-man expedition to Mars. He is hilarious, cursing and making fun of the other astronauts even when he is in dire situations. He never gives up, even when it seems there is no hope of ever returning to Earth.
Second, the story is particularly unique: an astronaut, stranded on Mars – how would he ever survive? Unless you work for NASA or SpaceX or are just a space enthusiast, you probably have no idea what a Hab or a rover is! I learned more about Mars from this novel than I ever thought I would learn.
Third, since I had seen feature film prior to reading the novel, I knew how the story played out – and I couldn’t help but root for Mark all of the way. To my surprise and pleasure, the film followed the novel extraordinarily well. One always roots for the hero to achieve his goals, and I was no exception.
I am glad I strayed from my typical reading to explore the adventures of Mark Watney in The Martian, and I cannot recommend the novel enough, to anyone with a sense of humor and desire for adventure.