Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

By Robert Pirsig

Robert Pirsig was computer manual creator, professor, and writer. He had an IQ of 170 and suffered a severe mental breakdown in his 30’s. He was diagnosed with Schizophrenia and subjected to electroshock therapy. This book is a slightly fictionalized autobiography.

In the book, the narrator (post-mental breakdown) and his son are on motorcycle road trip from Minneapolis to San Francisco. While riding the narrator performs lectures on motorcycle maintenance, philosophy, and how they blended together. The core narrative behind these lectures is how Aristotelian philosophy has dominated Western culture and how his pre-mental breakdown self created a new system of philosophy which ended up causing his eventual mental breakdown.

I found the book very interesting but since philosophy is not a major interest of mine I’m not sure I really absorbed what Pirsig was putting down. Perhaps I’ll have to come back to this book after doing some more reading and thinking of my own. This book has given me a ton to think about, even if I don’t grasp the whole point of the new system of philosophy Pirsig was describing.

A Master's Secret Whispers

By Kapil Gupta

Book Takeaway

• Avoid prescriptions. Don't ask how questions, instead ask why or what questions. If you want to learn to meditate don't look for a 12 step guide on how to meditate and follow it. Instead seek to learn what meditation and why you would want to do it. If you focus on how to do something you will be subservient to the how and not to the thing. The goal of meditation is not to get good at meditating, it is to be meditative.
• "The refinement is the joy, not that something good will come of it."
• I'll likely never re-read this book but I could see myself checking back to his blog or twitter, siddha performance, occasionally.

The War of Art

by Steven Pressfield

Steven Pressfield is best known for his fiction books The Legend of Bagger Vance, Gates of Fire, and The Afghan Campaign. Gates of Fire (about the Spartan battle of Thermopylae) is supposedly taught at West Point, US Naval Academy, and Marine Corps Basic Training.

Despite being a full time writer since his mid 20's, he didn't have a novel published until he was 52. The first movie he wrote (King Kong Lives) when he was 42, has a 0% on Rotten Tomotoes and has been remarked as possibly the worst movie, ever.

From this it is obvious he knows a thing or two about grinding through tough periods and coming out better on the other side.

The War of Art is a very basic book. It's only about 150 pages and all the chapters range in length from a single paragraph to at most a few pages. The books main theme is about unlocking inner barriers by doing whatever it is you want to be good at, every day. Without fail every day. Every day. Every day. Every day. No excuses, every day.

The book is broken up into 3 parts.

The first part, and to me the most valuable part, is focused entirely on defining what Steven calls Resistance. In order to become truly good at something, you have to do it every day. Resistance is essentially what will try and stop you from practicing your craft each day. It's your self-doubt, it's procrastination, it's your friends wanting to go for a beer. The only way to defeat Resistance is to practice your craft that day. But it will be back again tomorrow, without fail.

I personally have found it quite valuable to personify the resistance you face on a day to day value, and recognize when it's actively trying to stop you from doing what you truly want to be doing.

The second part of the book defines what it means to have a professional vs amateur mind set. Having a professional mindset vs an amateur mindset can help combat Resistance.

The third part of the book kinda sucked to be honest. It started out about praying to angels and muses to unlock your potential and I legit couldn't tell if he was serious or meant something more akin to affirmations or psyching yourself up. I didn't get much value out of it until I got to the section called territory vs hierarchy. Essentially Steven believes you will find greater happiness and success if you pursue your craft because you are interested in the territory (the field you are studying or working in) vs the hierarchy (being better than other people and having other people recognize that you are better). Obviously a completely novel and original idea, but seriously I believe no one (myself included) can hear this concept enough times. As Russ Roberts said "To always be worrying about the gap between me and someone else is, I think, the road to unhappiness at the individual level and the road to tyranny at the national level."

As always here are a few of my favourite quotes from the book.

"So you've taken a few bad blows, that's just the price for being in the arena and not sitting on the sidelines."

"Our job in this life is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it."

"The professional has learned that success, like happiness, comes as a byproduct of work. The professional concentrates on the work and allows rewards to come or not come, whatever they like."

If you are short on time just watch this video by Thorin instead.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMfGnf3xqSA

Originally posted on Facebook August 2, 2017.

How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big

by Scott Adams

This book is one of the most widely applicable and original self-help/success/self-improvement books I have ever read. There's no rehashing of ideas you've seen in 10 other books to fill up the pages so the author can offer up only 1 or 2 unique ideas but still sell books. If you can't find a single piece of advice to immediately implement into your life for the better, you clearly aren't trying hard enough.

This book is only 9 hours long (Audible) but contains around 30 chapters on a number of different subjects. Throughout the book Scott also describes his battle with spasmodic dysphonia which adds a central theme and underlying structure to the otherwise separated chapters.

Scott Adams has some very interesting ideas in a lot of areas which is why the chapter count is so high. For example one 15 minute chapter on diet (which is never touched on again) contained so much good information that I immediately changed what I purchase at the grocery store.

There's no possible way to do a comprehensive review without quoting the whole book since there is so much information packed into it. Instead I'll just mention Scott's 8 steps to maximize happiness and list a bunch of quotes I found either entertaining or useful.

8 Steps to maximize happiness (don't do them all at once, this is a pyramid, you must get good at #1 before you move onto #2)
1. Exercise
2. Eating right
3. Sleep
4. Imagination (thinking of the future in a positive light)
5. Flexible Schedule (We can generally do all the things we want in a day, but timing is usually more important than the intrinsic value in thing we want to do)
6. Find a hobby or sport you can steadily improve at
7. Help others once you have fully helped yourself
8. Reduce daily decisions to routine

"Your mood and abilities is a function of your body chemistry, stop treating it like magic. Food plays a larger role on your mood than the environment around you. Reprogram your tastes, stock up on convenient healthy food."

"Don't wish for success, decide. If you want success, figure out the price, then pay it."

"Timing is one of the most important factors for determining success. It's also nearly impossible to predict so try a bunch of things and just hope luck eventually finds you on the timing."

"Welcome failure, but don't let it leave till you learn something from it."

"Experts are right 98% of the time on the easy stuff but only 50% on the complicated/complex/new things."

"Maximize personal energy. All you need for success after that is luck. Move from strategies with bad odds to strategies with better odds. Lose your ego and pick strategies that filter out people who fear embarrassment. Stay in the game long enough and luck will have a better chance at finding you."

"Goals are for losers, systems are for winners. Goals only make sense if you have a system constantly moving you in the right direction." Example of a goal is "I want to become a famous cartoonist" where as a system example is "I'm going to continuously try new ideas out on the public. I'll only consider ideas where I can make money without selling my time directly and while also creating something infinitely reproducible. I'll continue trying things until something strikes a chord with the public."

Originally posted on Facebook July 10, 2017.

Watership Down

by Richard Adams

This is no mere kids book. Watership Down is a very engaging story that follows a band of rabbits who decide to leave their home warren and make a new life for themselves. If you love getting lost in works of fiction, this is definitely a book you will enjoy.

Watership Down was Richard Adams first book and wasn't published until he was 54. All of the locations in the book are real places. After finishing the book you will know doubt spend some time (as I did) cruising around the Down on google maps trying to find the various locations.

It also gives me great pleasure to know that Adams spent plenty of time in his remaining years to walking around the Down. https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1n3quw/i_am_richard_adams_author_of_watership_down/ccf425v/

Originally posted on Facebook July 3, 2017.

The Complacent Class

by Tyler Cowen

The complacent class of people grew out of people making decisions that in the short term were in their best interests, but ended up creating a strong force of complacency and risk aversion that will hurt everyone. This book is partly summarized by it's intro into it's last chapter.

"So far I've discussed a number of main elements driving the trend toward a more static, less risk-taking America which are:
- collapse of fiscal freedom and democratic process,
- lower residential mobility,
- lower income mobility,
- less building in America's most productive cities,
- more segregation by income and status,
- a much greater concern with safety and risk,
- the coddling of our children,
- fewer start-ups,
- and slowed growth in living standards.

This leads to a calmer, safer, and more peaceful America in the short run but it also creates an America that is losing the ability to regenerate, reinvent, and create new sources of dynamism."

Some other great quotes of the book that I enjoyed pondering were:
- "In modern America, whenever we argue for doing something virtuous you will find something deeply calming, stabilizing, and risk reducing beneath the surface."
- "A new kind of tyranny will not resemble the diposition of antiquity but rather based on the conformist and mediocrity of future Americans."

The book presents evidence that America has grown more complacent and more risk adverse to change. It shows that Americans move to new places less frequently and we live more segregated lives (by both income, race, and culture).

The most staggering statistics presented are:
- 20,000 toddlers under the age of 2 are on ADHD medication,
- If high productivity cities lowered building regulatory constraints to the level of median cities, GDP would increase by 9.5% (from easier access to workforce and increased productivity from higher mobility).

I can definitely buy the argument that the world is far more complacent and less willing to take risk than before. I've experience NIMBY (not in my backyard) first hand for a basic city infrastructure program.

However, Tyler doesn't believe that this complacency is sustainable and that the power of the Trump and Sanders campaigns, along with the university protests, show a potential first wave of what could be a major reset towards a more chaotic and dynamic society.

I'm still too much of a econ pleb to really form my own opinion, so I enjoyed the insights I gained from this book and didn't really find much to argue with.

Originally posted of Facebook June 5, 2017.

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

by Robert Heinlein

I didn't expect much going into this book as I got it for free (thanks Lee) and I did zero research into either the book or Heinlein. The premise is simple - the computer that controls all of the services for the human colony on the Moon (Heinlein, like many others, imagined large central computing and not the largely distributed computing we have currently) becomes self-aware. A libertarian resistance group that wants to free the Moon colony from earthly government control decides to use the computer to help reach its goals.

I never really took the book that seriously but rather treated it as a light fun read with some comical scenes with the computer and the occasional knowledge gainz from a character called Prof.

Originally posted on Facebook May 23, 2017.

Meditations

By Marcus Aurelius

This book is best enjoyed like a buffet where you only take what you want or need out of it, and leave the rest for someone else. There are a lot of interesting ideas and quotable sentences.

Trying to stop and ponder every sentence will not only take years but also be a disordered mess as the book provides no real coherent structure (not for lack of trying though). I decided early on to mostly cruise through the book and only occasionally stoping to think about a sentence that really stuck out to me as important.

My favourite Marco quotes I got from the book are:

"It being right that even the smallest things be done with reference to an end."

"Do not disturb thyself by thinking of the whole of thy life. Let not thy thoughts at once embrace all the various troubles which thou mayest expect to befall thee: but on every occasion ask thyself, What is there in this which is intolerable and past bearing? For thou wilt be ashamed to confess.

In the next place remember that neither the future nor the past pains thee, but only the present.

But this is reduced to a very little, if thou only circumscribest it, and chidest thy mind, if it is unable to hold out against even this."

Originally posted on Facebook April 23, 2017.

Catching the Big Fish

By David Lynch

Book Takeaway

There's a whole bunch of books I think are interesting enough to give them a quick blast through but not interesting enough to devote a whole lot of time too and really contemplate heavily on what the book is trying to say. For these books I think a quick takeaway note is better than a full review. 

Book takeaways will generally have 3 elements: a sentence or two that says something I'll takeaway from this book, a quote from the book, and a circumstance where I could see myself benefiting from re-reading this book.

• Transcendental meditation can allow you to sink your hook deeper and capture ideas far below the conscious level. An artist doesn't need to explain/interpret a piece of work because all of the meaning the artist ascribes to it is in the work itself.
• "If you want to get 1 hour of good painting in you have to have 4 hours of uninterrupted time."
• I think it would be a good idea to re-read this book if I ever decided to do something highly creative like write fiction.

Electric Dreams

By Philip K. Dick

This is a collection of 10 Philip K. Dick short stories. The collection is made up of the stories which were adapted (although some were so heavily modified I'm not sure that adapted is accurate) for the 10 episode TV mini series by the same name.

Philip K. Dick is one of the most interesting fiction writers. His writing style has had such a significant effect on me that it actually produces this weird knot feeling of nervousness and confusion in my stomach. I'm not embellishing or joking, his books all seem to produce this odd physical feeling. When I first read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, I got this feeling for the first time. However since it sort of came and went as I was reading the book I didn't actually put two and two together at the time. A few months later I read Ubik and almost immediately that same feeling came back and thats when I realized it was a reaction to his writing. His stories are usually very confusing and theres lots of uncertainty not only in the whats going on but whether what you are reading is even reliable. About 6 months later I was looking for something to watch on Netflix and I saw this movie with a cel shaded Keanu Reeves. I thought it looked pretty cool and I didn't know anything about so I thought I'd give it a try. About 30 minutes into the movie I began feeling that exact same feeling in my stomach. I paused the movie and googled it and lo and behold the movie I was watching, A Scanner Darkly, was based on a Philip K. Dick novel. I swear to god this is all true. His writing is so powerful even when transcending mediums it could produce this strange physical feeling.

I never really felt those same feelings while reading any of these short stories. I'm not sure whether to blame that on the fact I listened to them all while sitting in the middle seat of an airplane or the stories themselves weren't the usual knot of complexity and confusion. Regardless, I'd highly recommend these short stories as a good starting point for people looking to checkout PKD as you'll definitely get a feel for his tone.

The one awful thing about the audible version is that at the beginning of each chapter is a short paragraph written by the person who adapted that particular short story for the TV mini series. Some of the intros are fine as they just talk about the writers love for PKD and get you excited to read the short story. However, some of the intros proceed to spoil the short story plot or project their own ideas onto the story. One writer even used the the short intro to ramble about Trump, yuck.

If you pick it up on audible here is what you do. The intros are done by different voice actors than the people who read the short story so fast forward until you hear a change in voice actors, then rewind once and you'll be close to the start of the story. Then you can go back and listen to the intro once you are finished.

The Courage to be Disliked

By Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga

This book is written as a Socratic dialogue between a student and a philosopher. The books focus is Adlerian psychology and how it can be applied to ones life. A few core tenants of Adlerian psychology is that all problems are inter-personal relationship problems, we are in our current situation because of courage not causes (your past didn't cause you to live this way, you just lack the courage to live any other way), and separation of tasks. Separation of tasks is all about realizing what things are your tasks and what things are others, and never interfering in another persons task. If you write a book, it is not your task to react to that book. So if someone reads your book and reacts negatively and starts insulting you, with separation of tasks you can say that it is that persons task to react to your book and that you should not interfere.

I also found one part about feelings of inferiority quite interesting and here is a snippet of my conversation with Lee about it.

---

Most people think inferiority complex and superiority complex are polar opposites but this isn't the case. People have feelings of inferiority. This is natural and helps us excel and exceed. However if we don't have the courage to excel and exceed this leads to an inferiority complex.

Feelings of Inferiority >> inferiority complex.

An inferiority complex is the excuse we give for not having the courage to excel or exceed because perhaps we are fine or comfortable with our situation but don't want to admit it.

"If only I was smart enough to go to school I'd get a real job and move out of my parents basement." When in reality they actually quite like their life playing vidya and meme'in and they don't have the courage to try new things and introduce uncertainty in their life.

Then if you stay in an inferiority complex too long, some people can't handle it. They can't handle the feeling of being inferior and move further down the rabbit hole to the superiority complex.

Feelings of inferiority >> inferiority complex >> superiority complex.

A superiority complex is when you are sick of feeling inferior (despite the fact you don't have the courage to truly excel and exceed) so you create false superiorities to help yourself get over inferior feelings. This can be wearing branded clothes, taking pictures with celebrities to show off that your special, over doing facebook / showing off / boasting.

However these things are bad but the worst offender of all is when you go from boasting about how great you are (but actually aren't) to boasting about your misfortunes.

Feelings of inferiority >> inferiority complex >> superiority complex >> boasting of misfortunes.

Boasting of misfortunes allows you to further express superiority over other people "Oh you have no idea what its like to be short/a minority/fat" etc by boasting that you have a heavier cross to bear than other people. This allows you to not only boast but also control the people around you. And the worst part of the final stage is that its insanely difficult to escape because

"As long as one continues to use ones misfortunes to ones advantage, in order to be special, one will always need that misfortune."

---

Interesting quote I liked.

Do not look at the past and do not look at the future, one lives each complete moment like a dance. There is no need to compete with anyone, and one has no use to for destinations, as long as you are dancing you will get somewhere.

The Rational Optimist

By Matt Ridley

This book is an very interesting compare and contrast to Sapiens.

Earlier this year I gave up on Why Nations Fail a few hours in because the whole book was about how economic prosperity strongly corresponds to the "largest number of people having a say in political and economic decision-making, as opposed to cases where a small group of people control the institutions." I appreciate the effort, but at this point I don't need 15 hours of content to believe that. Why Nations Fail however ended with the conclusion (based on the summary I read) that Democracy is the most inclusive and therefore will have the most prosperity. Weak. If you are going to go over the top with driving your points home at least go all the way.

At first I thought this book was going to be the same of scratching the surface but not actually going deep, as the beginning of the book is all about the wonders of free trade and capitalism.

However, I decided to stick with it because so many interesting people recommended this book and I'm glad I did. In Sapiens, Harari talks about how due to our improved diet, our brains eventually got large enough so that we could learn new things (such as making new tools) by changing our software (in our brains) as opposed to only being able to learn new things by changing our hardware (our genes). He says how there is a big difference between a neanderthal using a bone tool and a human. The neanderthal is essentially showcasing what Dawkins calls the extended phenotype, an external expression of its genes, which is no different than a bird building a nest. Sapiens however were able to learn much faster by modifying our hardware which led to better tools, more free time, more time get ahead, etc, etc the rest is history.

Ridley argues in this book that what started the initial spark was not our ability to learn, but our ability to trade. Chimps can learn sign language but Ridley lists studies where chimps are unwilling to trade some food they kinda of like for a food they really like. They are unable to grasp the fact that you can give something up to get something better. It is not our ability to learn that has set us apart, but our ability to trade. He then proceeds to drive home the point that prosperous societies have little to no restrictions on free trade and how history has shown that the easiest way to torpedo your own economy is to close your borders.

As an aside I like this Naval quote on why blockchains are so interesting and feel its relevant to Ridleys whole trading thesis. "150 neanderthals could coordinate in battle because they had the same genetics. 5,000 humans could coordinate in battle because they all had the shared myth of christianity. Blockchains allow humans who don't know each other, who don't trust each other, and who may not reveal their identities to each other, to transact securely."

Slack

By Tom DeMarco

Tom DeMarco was a co-author on Peopleware which is why I decided to try this book.

I'm hilariously bad at explore-exploit problems. I get stuck in local minima all the time because I'm scared of "wasting time" in case exploring or trying new options yields no or negative results. I cook from a small subset of meals since I'm scared I'll waste my time making something I don't like when I could have just exploited the mediocre option I know. This doesn't make sense in a holistic view but when your living groundhog day, if you don't want to risk a bad meal today, you probably won't tomorrow either (and if nothings changed then even a year from now it won't be more likely). I do this with food, outdoor activities, video games, you name it.

It's why I decided to pick up this book as this books primary focus is on efficiency, specifically the elimination and reduction of efficiency in exchange for effectiveness.

Slack

Imagine a secretary who is busy for only 4 hours out of the day. The rest of the time he sits there and maybe wanders the halls looking for something to do. Perhaps one day an engineer walks up as asks if he can enter this data into spreadsheet or make some copies. Then next week a manager asks to book individual meetings with her and all of her staff. Each of these items takes up maybe 2 hours of the secretaries time. This isn't very efficient.

A outside efficiency consultant comes along and notices that there are multiple secretaries for each group that only is busy 4 hours of the day on average. The efficiency consultant advises the company to combine all the secretaries duties so that every secretary is busy for 7.5 hours each day (careful to leave that extra 0.5 hour to handle the 2 hour tasks that seem to pop up once a week) and to fire all the rest. Now the secretary is busy all the time and when an engineer or manager has some work for him to do, they now find that they have to wait 4 days for the 2 hours of work to be finished. 

This is certainly more efficient, but not effective. You have gained efficiency but you have lost responsiveness. Imagine at your job you are 100% busy for a whole year. New technologies arrive or new techniques are invented, but you don't have time to discover or train or use these new advances which could help you do your job, as you are too busy. This is where slack comes in.

A penny saved is not always a penny earned, but it is always a penny not invested. Investing in slack (which can take many forms such as of time, control, or power) may not seem efficient, but it can be effective.

Lost But Making Good Time

You and your manager sit down and open up the latest project planning software as you begin to plan out and schedule the latest project you are responsible for. As you create the project it asks you a question.

Do you want to:
-Minimize time
or
-Minimize cost

"God damnit!" You manager barks out. " I want you to minimize cost and time!"

When a person is told to complete two mutually exclusive goals, the result is stress. Stress is a sign of slack deficiency. If the manager gave you slack on the amount of time you could spend, you could minimize the cost. However giving you no slack in either direction just means at best you'll accomplish some weighted compromise of the two, and at worst the extra stress will cause you to use bad judgement in some other area that in the long run costs you and the company even more.

Most slack averse companies are plagued by a culture of fear. When you realize the root cause of most frustrating corporate decisions isn't stupidity but fear, a whole lot of absurdities (like the one above) begin to make sense.

For example at my current job, I am plagued and drowned by standardized processes. People who are vastly removed from the work are required to sign off on documents or decisions they know nothing about. I have to go through 30 step processes which give me specific guidance on how to do all the mechanically easy stuff but give no guidance on doing the actual core or hard part of the problem. I used to pull at my hair trying to figure how these rules could be created. When you realize its fear driving decisions like this, it all of a sudden makes sense.

Process standardization is a direct result of fearful management. As a defense against failure, a standardized process is a kind of armor. The more worried you are, the more armor and standardization you pile on. But armor has a side effect of reducing your mobility. 

If you're facing your problem head on and its coming right for you, perhaps this isn't so bad. But what if your real threat is an unknown (as it is most of the time) and its to your left, or ten steps to your right. Well if you can't turn and face it in time for it to stab you in the side, then all that armor didn't do you any good.

Change and Growth

If you never allow your employees any slack time to fail, learn, train, and most importantly spend time that could yield no benefit, the best case scenario is your company stays exactly where it is. The more likely case is it regresses.

Who can drive change in an organization? Can it be pushed down from the top executives down onto the plebs? No. Can the front line workers drive change? No, they don't have the power. Change will be primarily driven by the middle managers. Be sure to cut them some slack.

Risk Management

"Best case scenario I will finish this project in a year, however given the risks which will cost a certain amount of time if each risk materializes, peak probability is at 18 months, with the tail falling to 0% probability of taking longer than 24 months."

"Well lets aim for 12 months! I can't wait to tell the higher ups!"

"Remember, 12 months is possible but not probable. Like I said, peak probability is at 18 months."

...
2 days later
...

"Hey boss, listen I found that if I have all my workers spend a month doing this specific training we can reduce the impact if any of the risks end up materializing (think practicing fire drills in school or placing fire extinguisher). If the risks never happen it will have been a waste but it shifts my peak probability to the left quite significantly. However it means that if everything goes well 13 months is now the minimum time to complete the project."

You can guess how that would go over with the boss who just loudly proclaimed 12 months to the higher ups. Attached is a picture showing the probability distributions. Without any slack in the schedule, you can see how a boss would make a decision against the company's interest.

Originally posted on Facebook April 2, 2017.

Elon Musk

By Ashlee Vance

I felt this book was pretty poorly written in quite a few places. Grammatically there are a number of sentences that are so jarring you have to read them a over multiple times to get what he his saying. There's a few things that Vance mentions that I found quite creepy such as when he introduces Elon's future wife when they first meet as "Talulah Riley, a virgin." No body needs to know that man. Vance also struggles to really grasp some of the basic science Elon talks about and ends up giving cocked up or non-descriptive explanations that make it hard for anyone to understand what he's talking about.

For example, SpaceX flew one of their rockets in a military cargo plane as opposed to the usual method of transporting it by barge in order to save some time. Even though airplane cabins are pressurized, the cabin pressure still drops pretty significantly at cruising altitudes. As the plane started to descend for landing the rocket began collapsing inward on itself. This is because as they were flying at high altitude the pressure inside the rocket slowly dropped to this lower cabin pressure. Then when plane began descending rapidly the pressure outside the rocket began to increase faster than the pressure inside the rocket (as the rocket was more or less sealed). Low pressure inside the rocket and high pressure outside the rocket caused a net force pushing inwards to be exerted all over the rockets body in a manner it wasn't designed for, causing it to crumple. Vance describes this by saying

This would have been a fine idea except the SpaceX engineers forgot to factor in what the pressurized plane would do to the body of the rocket, which is less than an eighth of an inch thick. As the plane started its descent into Hawaii, everyone inside of it could hear strange noises coming from the cargo hold. “I looked back and could see the stage crumpling,” said Bulent Altan, the former head of avionics at SpaceX. “I told the pilot to go up, and he did.” The rocket had behaved much like an empty water bottle will on a plane, with the air pressure pushing against the sides of the bottle and making it buckle.

The pressurized plane helped, not hurt. And comparing the rocket crumpling on a plane to a empty water bottle crumpling on a plane isn't a very helpful analogy. And the air pressure is pushing against both sides of the bottle. If you want to read a great example of a biographer who truly grasps the basic science worked on by the subject, read Isaacson's Einstein biography. That book has my favorite explanation of special relativity.  

That all being said, this is a pretty good book. The amount of research and interviews Vance did to provide mutliple view points to key times in Elon's life is pretty astounding. I do feel I understand Elon much better. Below are the three things I feel made Elon as successful as he is. 

He is a nano-manager. However, he's not the micro-managing type who waits for you to finish your work and then nitpick all the details where he would have made a different decision. Instead he's right there over your shoulder the whole step of the way and he's not afraid to get his hands dirty. If you are on the critical path and you get stuck, he'll come find you personally and try to help. His classic line at SpaceX was "There are five hundred people at this company. What do you need?" He also never tells his employees to do what he himself wouldn't do. He always has his desk in the most visible area of the office so that everyone can see the hours and weekend shifts he's putting in. My favorite story in the book was

An employee could be telling Musk that there’s no way to get the cost on something like that actuator down to where he wants it or that there is simply not enough time to build a part by Musk’s deadline. “Elon will say, ‘Fine. You’re off the project. I will do your job and be CEO of two companies at the same time. I will deliver it,’” Brogan said. “What’s crazy is that Elon actually does it. Every time he’s fired someone and taken their job, he’s delivered on whatever the project was.”

Elon above everything likes for things to be resolved and then moving on. He doesn't like things lingering in limbo. When his marriage with his first wife was rocky, he came home one night and said, "we either decide to stay together or we breakup tonight." She gave him a non-answer saying how she wanted another week to decide. The next day Elon told her he was filing for divorce. At SpaceX there was mutliple times where employees would be weighing two paths of action and Elon would just pick one, and that was final. They could then move on. When he was ousted from PayPal as CEO, he didn't fight it. He knew the board was making a bad decision, he had plenty of grounds to fight it, but he decided to just accept their decision and move on.

He has insanely high intelligence.

Musk initially relied on textbooks to form the bulk of his rocketry knowledge. But as SpaceX hired one brilliant person after another, Musk realized he could tap into their stores of knowledge. He would trap an engineer in the SpaceX factory and set to work grilling him about a type of valve or specialized material. “I thought at first that he was challenging me to see if I knew my stuff,” said Kevin Brogan, one of the early engineers. “Then I realized he was trying to learn things. He would quiz you until he learned ninety percent of what you know.” People who have spent significant time with Musk will attest to his abilities to absorb incredible quantities of information with near-flawless recall. It’s one of his most impressive and intimidating skills and seems to work just as well in the present day as it did when he was a child vacuuming books into his brain.

Bit by Bit

by Jeffrey Tucker

70% Liberty, 30% Bitcoin. Both the liberty part and the Bitcoin part of this book are aimed at a mainstream audience so I gained a few new ways to articulate stuff I already knew but didn't really learn that much new information.

However one thing I did learn was a good argument for Bitcoin as money under the Mises regression theorem. Roughly, the expected future purchasing power of money explains its current purchasing power (the reason to collect money now, as opposed to collecting other goods, is the knowledge that you can use the money in the future to buy things you want). This would be a circular argument (it's purchasing power explains its purchasing power) unless by stepping back through time (the current purchasing power is explained by yesterday's purchasing power, and so on) we can find the point where the thing being used as money had some original value. That is it originally provided some value before being used as a means of exchange. I've heard plenty of arguments against Bitcoin strictly because it has never had any value in this sense unlike other forms of money like gold, sea shells, etc. You can't eat Bitcoin, use it in manufacturing, or make cool jewelry out of it, so why should we use it as money?

Tucker claims that Bitcoins original value is its unique payment system. Individual Bitcoins and the blockchain are intrinsically tied. You can't have one without the other. You can have cash without visa or gold without bullion, but you can't have Bitcoin without the blockchain payment system. Tucker points out that in the early days of Bitcoin before it was tied to any monetary value (before the 10,000 BTC pizza transaction) people were testing out sending Bitcoins to each other and begun to see value in the Blockchain payment system before there was any value in Bitcoin. And thus the root of the current purchasing power of Bitcoin is the blockchain payment system tied to it.

Will definitely be my go to recommendation to a future liberty and Bitcoin convert.

Flowers for Algernon

By Daniel Keyes

In this book the main characters IQ goes from 68 to 180. Since I've been interested in IQ recently I decided to pick this up for some relaxing nighttime reading.

This was a fun read which I didn't expect much out of and I got exactly that. The books most interesting parts are at the beginning and at the very end. At the beginning of the book Charlie has the slow burn of his IQ going from 68 to 180. The book is presented at the beginning as a series of progress reports where Charlie free associates and writes all his thoughts down. It's interesting to read his changing thoughts and the author does a really good job of having all the changes act like the minute hand on a clock. At the time your reading you don't notice any change but when you look back or think back you can clearly tell that there has been significant movement.

Once Charlie has a 180 IQ however he does classic smart person trope stuff which I don't find even remotely interesting or realistic. With nothing more than a piano in his apartment he goes from just messing around to writing an amazing symphony in about 2 days. He writes a linguistic paper in a few days and sends it off which he claims will set back the current research a few decades. It's all the typical "super smart just means doing what you would do but 1000x faster or 1000x better" stuff as opposed to doing something completely original. Even Charlies big revelation is the thing every book reader will have guessed not 5% into the book.

Can't really fault the author though as he doesn't have a 180 IQ but it's always nice to see some original thinking. It's a short read so crush it for fun but then follow it up with Understand by Ted Chiang for a story about real IQ gains. 

The Grapes of Wrath

By John Steinbeck

Some books help your mind float into the sky, others ground you. This book is the latter.

Not sure what to do since empathy isn't cool anymore? Come and get a years worth of rational compassion from this book.

Feel like life's problems are paralyzing you and stopping you from being happy? Read this book and gain some perspective on the types of problems your are facing.

Tough times, tougher people.

Originally posted on Facebook March 28, 2017.

Sleep

By Nick Littlehales

Seriously read this book. If you sleep, you should read it, no excuses. 

This book is the ideal self-improvement book to me for a number of reasons including: 

• Providing easily actionable and measurable steps to improve quality of life,
• bullet point summary of every chapter summarizing how you should act (the bulk of chapters is the why), 
• and doesn't break the time bank (I now devote less time to sleep and thinking about sleep than previously). Nothing worse than reading a self-improvement book that requires you to devote 4 hours a day and tons of mental energy to be successful at one specific thing, aintnobodygottimeforthat.jpg.

My new sleep schedule.

• My constant wake time is now 7:45 am. Doesn't matter if I go to bed at 4:30 am, I wake up at 7:45 am, and it really isn't bad.
• I only go to sleep at either midnight (5 cycles), 1:30 am (4 cycles), 3 am (3 cycles). If I'm not in bed ready to sleep (this includes mentally not just physically), I wait for the next cycle time.
• My ideal goal is 35 cycles a week (never going to happen), 30 - 34 is pretty good, and anything below 28 is really pushing it.

I'm more confident about sleep (no need to worry about not getting a full 8 hours before a big day), and I devote less time and mental energy to it as the system he proposes is so simple.

Originally posted on Facebook March 1, 2017.

Black Hawk Down

By Mark Bowden

You've probably seen or at least heard of the movie that is based on this book. The movie captures the essence of battle but theres only so much information that can be conveyed in a 2.5 hour movie. This book is a deep dive into the battle of Mogadishu and is a technical masterpiece given that, with few exceptions, every line of dialogue and event is either corroborated by multiple first hand sources or video / audio evidence.  The only area of the book where I wished there was more information was on the actions of Delta Force. Some of the Delta Force men don't even seem human. Their courage and resolve in battle can only be described as literally incredible (both extraordinary and difficult to believe). With the exception of the thoughts of MSG Paul Howe, all other accounts of Delta are from an outside perspective. The tradition of Delta Force is "silent professionalism" so it's understandable why so few operators were willing to talk to Bowden.

I'm bit of a military buff and I went into this book thinking that it would be an easy and familiar read. However, I was quickly floored by the detailed descriptions of death and dismemberment. The description of the lost convey that drove through the city under constant fire from all directions, made me feel on some small level the terror that was experienced by those present. Bowden tried to make the book read like fiction with more emotion than a more historical record keeping approach, and it shows.

Another part of the book that gave the story more teeth is the fact that I'm now older than a majority of those present at the battle. I first watched the movie when I was in my early teens, so it was easy to think that the people in the battle were adults who were more prepared to handle situations like this. Ranger Richard "Alphabet" W. Kowalewski, Jr was only 20 when he died during the battle of Mogadishu. With the exception of a few commanding officers, the Rangers all seemed like kids.

I think this a great book to expand a persons horizon on some of the harsher realities of life. We live in one of the most peaceful times in human history which makes it easy to forget some of things we take for granted. This book doesn't glamorize battle, but it does provide the thoughts and feelings of people not unlike yourself, in one.

Infinite Jest

by David Foster Wallace

Interviewer: Is there no “ending” to “Infinite Book” because there couldn’t be? Or did you just get tired of writing it?

DFW: There is an ending as far as I’m concerned. Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an “end” can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame. If no such convergence or projection occurred to you, then the book’s failed for you.

Reading the quote above (in a chapter on projective geometry in Not To Be Wrong) is what originally got me interested in Infinite Jest. A writer who's enough of a mathematician to know of projective geometry has written a book which has no ending. Sounds like something I would enjoy. And I did enjoy Infinite Jest, just not for the reasons I thought I would.

This book is not only long, but it's deep and dense. 1,000 different people could read this book and come up with a million different explanations of the plot or major themes. The list of things this book isn't about is probably shorter than the list of things it could be reasonably argued to be about. 

It would be very easy for me to write a very aloof review where I just touch the surface of a hundred different points without going into any sort of depth. Instead I'm going to focus on answering just one question. While most of the discussion online is on trying to unravel the plot of the book, I'm going to focus instead on why I believe Wallace wrote Infinite Jest. Then at the end I'll write about what I enjoyed most while reading it. 

It's however impossible to talk about the book without talking about some of the content, so I'm going to spoil things which will be obvious 100 pages (1/10th) into the book.

Why do I believe David Foster Wallace wrote this book?

The plot of the book revolves around an entertaining video tape that once you've seen it, you want nothing more but to watch it again and again. It's so entertaining that you'll forgo water and food and eventually die, eyes glued to the screen. 

Wallace seems to have a bone to pick with television or more specifically passive forms of entertainment consumption. Crutches we use to fill the empty parts of our lives as opposed to actively making things better. With Infinite Jest, Wallace wanted to create something that would require active participation in to enjoy. He wanted to make the reader an accomplice, not just someone who's along for the ride. I believe the book is trying to engage in a conversation as opposed to the one way flow of information from a TV screen.

I read lots of people calling this book pretentious, but I don't really see that at all (it's also hard to believe a truly pretentious author would say things like "fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being" and should help the reader "become less alone inside"). I can see how people mistake the books complexity and lack of a spelled out ending as pretentious though. They think that Wallace used his big brain to tie an immensely complex knot and he wants to see if your brain is big enough to unravel it. Re-read the quote I started this review with. I can certainly see how book could be perceived this way.

However I see it as Wallace tying the knot so that it can be unravelled in a large number of ways. Wallace is trying to encourage you to take an active role in enjoying the book. Notice how he says "the book's failed for you" not you failed to understand the book. When he says the books failed for you, I believe he means the book failed to convince you to take an active roll in enjoying it. I don't think he's telling the interviewer that they failed to piece together what happens between the last chapter of the book and the first. The book failed you because you are passively waiting for the book to give you a nice ending that will be accompanied by an endorphin rush as opposed to actively finding your own enjoyment.

What did I enjoy about / takeaway from the book?

In the end I didn't really care too much about the plot of the book. I mean it was interesting (and so deep that on the 4th re-read you'd still be discovering new aspects of it) but it wasn't what kept me coming back to the book. What I enjoyed about the book was depth to which it conveyed boring old every day life. There aren't really any epic/grandiose moments in this book. There are lots of memorable and hilarious moments, but they are still rooted in everyday life.

An addict attending AA meetings or a teenagers locker room conversation felt not only real but like they had real weight. They felt important but at the same time almost orthogonal to crucial. I'm trying to say that those moments felt like they mattered, but only when put together. Each scene isn't anything special, but when put together with all the others it is. Normal/routine/mundane days make up more of our existence than the grandiose ones.

I found the book made it very accessible to enjoy the seemingly mundane. The added appreciation for the everyday is my main takeaway from the book and if you happen to read it, yours will almost certainly be different.