This felt like ’the Game’ for entrepreneurs. I do run a company spending ~4h a week, and I don’t think I’ve read so much bad advice in a single book before. Still, Tim Ferris’ sheer enthusiasm his own genius led to some ideas that actually landed. The good: The Parkinson principle + the Pareto principle. A simple reminder that prioritization is important, and a decent formula to approximate why. Being busy is a form of laziness. ...
How did I not read this book earlier? A rare book that avoids the trap of explaining too much and predicting too little. The foundation of other good books such as ‘superforecasting’ and ‘nudge’, easy to read through and USEFUL. Highly recommended.
The thesis of this book is that cities should be designed around pedestrians and more livable spaces rather than cars and commutes, and that this sort of design would make people happier. I wanted to like this book, and I even agree with the thesis, but the author’s approach was infuriating and left me less convinced than when I started. He often relies on anecdotes about super-commuters who bike through piles of snow and live happy, healthy lives. That may be great, but I can tell you that none of the residents in the 8 properties I own fit this category. The best parts are about acknowledging why people want privacy and want to drive, and I wish the entire book were an honest accounting of why people drive despite the obvious drawbacks, and the right way to think about urban design in a way that can accommodate these desires while improving on our suburban, low-density status-quo. ...
Read this book to help run teams that are split across London and California. instead of any analysis for how to make remote work effective, I got cheerleading about how great remote work is and that everybody should do it. The book managed to convince me of the opposite, now my teams are going to be fully relocated to London.
Neither about startups nor about being lean. This book should be titled ‘The Effective Organization’. Lots of really good insights in here, great terminology for the phenomenon that all organizations face (my favorite: ‘success theatre’), this should be the bible of Silicon Valley. At Facebook, I certainly find myself quoting it more than the King James Version.
I didn’t expect this to be a book about HR (people ops), but I still found it to be enlightening. Working at Facebook, it’s interesting to see how much of our DNA seems to have been copied directly from Google, and I think we are better for it. Whenever I bring guests from the outside in, they marvel at the completely different paradigm of silicon valley companies, and this book does a great job explaining to the outside world why we work the way we do. ...
A dishonest book in every way, but not bad.
Have you ever talked with a stranger about relationships? Sometimes a normal conversation turns into a diatribe about the stranger’s recent divorce and how all relationships are a sham. As you awkwardly pull away, they grab your elbow and plead, spittle landing on your arm, “Promise me you’ll never marry! PROMISE!!” That’s what it felt like to read this book. I wanted to learn more about the housing boom and bust of the 2000s, as part of a larger attempt to understand what it means to own real estate, hoping for a short (if simple) summary of what happened. I previously read the Economist every week during the crisis, and know a little bit about implicit government guarantees, market distortions, and sub-prime mortgages. Judging by my angry dismissals of Jon Stewart diatribes, I probably even have a bit of free market leaning when it comes to macroeconomic issues. ...
Lots of hand waving and overuse of the word ‘increasingly’. The facts are scattershot trivia, nothing unified or edifying here. I’m out.
The best book I’ve read so far about society-level changes that are happening due to internet technology. That would be higher praise if I had read more books, but so far I’ve only covered The New Digital Age and Alone Together, both of which were bad. The conclusion about the pernicious nature of siren servers (Facebook, Google, Napster, Hedge Funds, Wall Mart etc.) controlling our information and shrinking the economy is not entirely convincing. Lanier’s siren servers seem more different than alike, but even the author admits, when all you have is a hammer… ...