Category: Book Club

Deep Work by Cal Newport poses the idea that “Deep Work” is extremely important in today’s work environment, but also completely underestimated in our nonstop connected world of distraction. Deep work is work that requires focus rather than distraction. I came into the book agreeing with the premise, which makes the beginning half quite unnecessary as it tries to convince you that Deep Work is valuable and necessary. I do wish that part of the book was condensed to a chapter and more time is spent on how best to achieve Deep Work.

In the second half, we get to techniques to achieve deep work. It starts with 4 major approaches. One is the monastic approach where someone truly just goes off and stops interacting with the distractions. The second is bimodal which is basically the monastic approach, but for a limited time. The third is rhythmic, where you set aside time each day for deep work. The final style is called journalistic where you just fit deep work in wherever you can.

For the vast majority of people, I’d say rhythmic is the only realistic option. Journalistic is way too wishful. Everyone thinks they can just fit in some deep work whenever they have spare time, but it takes a massive amount of discipline to do it rather than browse on your phone for the 100th time that day. There are certainly some journalists that are so well practiced in producing content that they can just do it this way (hence the name), but for most people, it ain’t happening.

Monastic and bimodal are way too disconnected from everything for me. There may be some professions where you can get away with it, such as a successful author, but most people need to do a normal job that requires communication. Unsuccessful authors simply can’t afford to disconnect from everything. Maybe they can take a week off and use vacation time as their deep work time, but a single week is rarely enough time to create something significant. Taking a single day each week away from all distractions would also count as bimodal and that seems a lot more possible. If you really want to grind out some deep work, it could be a general method to do it.

Still, for me, rhythmic makes the most sense. Dedicate an hour or two each day to deep work where you will ignore everything else. Most people can afford to be away from distractions for an hour at a time and if you get good at it, you can get into some good flow and get some real work done.

The author also recommends some further ideas to improve your deep work, such as Jerry Seinfeld’s “don’t break the chain” method. Simply put out a sheet of paper with dates on it in an obvious place. Then put an X on each day you do your deep work task. It doesn’t take long before you’ve got a chain that you feel motivated to keep. I’ve done it with exercise and it’s surprisingly effective. That visible chain can really work wonders and you don’t want to lose it.

The author also has other specific methods to improve your deep work, but I’ll let you read the book to get those.

Overall, I’d recommend the book. It should give some general ideas about what you should be doing with your working life and also some specific ideas on how to do it. There’s plenty of good information in a reasonable short book, so well worth the time to read or listen to.

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini was a good listen. It worked quite well as an audiobook as I listened to various anecdotes that spoke to some principles of influence. I will say that if I want to start using it purposefully in my life, I will probably have to go through the book again and really study the principles (or possibly just a summary at that point). However, even a passive listen to it can be quite beneficial.

The benefit of listening to Influence is that it will help you recognize various sales tactics that are being used on you. It’s the, “this is a tactic, not genuine” feeling that you’ll get when someone tries to get you to buy now with Scarcity tactics or by using Authority to promote something. No, that actor wearing a lab coat on TV is not actually a doctor, but your subconscious will still associate him with one even as that little text at the bottom says actor portrayal. Having a better recognition of those tactics in their various forms will help prevent you from making bad decisions.

The only real complaint I’d have is that some of the anecdotes don’t feel real. I doubt the author is really as gullible as he pretends to be… and then learns from it. I don’t believe his story about how a cute sales girl came to his door and asked him some survey questions then turned around and used his answers to get him to buy what she was selling. Is he really lying in the first place just to impress a cute sales girl that he doesn’t know and will probably never see again? It’s not like he’s hitting on a girl at the bar, he’s talking to a door to door saleswoman. I doubt it really happened or at least I hope it didn’t. I might think less of the author if it’s real.

Getting past that, the advice all seems good. He’s got 7 (in the updated version I read) principles and I can’t disagree with any of them. I’d recommend reading this book for anyone. We all are living in a world of sales people and other negotiations where we should be armed with our own weapons or at least recognize the opposing arms and counter them.

For the most part, Generations by Jean Twenge worked as an audiobook. For each generation, the author did make a long list of famous people and that didn’t work so well, but I’d say everything else did. Still, my feelings on this book are a big meh. It certainly wasn’t bad, but I didn’t find it particularly useful or informative.

One of the biggest issues is that separating people into generations only leads to some very rough stereotypes. Sure, some attitudes are indeed trending in pretty reliable directions, but I feel like those change even within a generation. An early Millennial is not the same as a late Millennial. An early Millennial is likely a lot closer in attitudes to a late Gen Xer than a late Millennial. It’s really much more like a gradient than solid cutoffs and so the whole categorizing of people into generations starts off on shaky ground.

Then we get the issue that it still is very much a generalization. Just because Boomers on average think one way does not mean that the Boomer you interact with thinks that way. So learning a generalization about Boomers may totally throw you off rather than inform you about that person. Again, the book is on shaky ground by basically teaching stereotypes based on how old someone is.

However, the book did have an interesting main thesis. The main thesis is that technology more than distinct events shape generations. 9/11 was less impactful on Millennials and Gen Z than the smart phone. The book makes some arguments for its case and I think does a pretty good job of supporting the thesis. I can certainly believe it, although I’m sure major events also have an impact, just not as much as the day to day interactions people have in their lives.

If you recognize that the book is merely pointing out generally correct stereotypes based on age and that age really is more of a gradient than distinct groupings, then the book can be useful in understanding people. It points out many tendencies of the different generations and where and why they may have friction. It also had some interesting oddity facts that I found amusing. For example, Want Ads in the newspaper used to have separate listings for Women and Men. I never knew that before. Times really have changed.

Overall, I don’t think listening to this book was a total waste of time. However, I only found it mildly interesting and only informative if you keep in mind a few caveats. So, if you’ve got a lot of time to fill, it’s not a terrible choice, but it certainly wouldn’t be my first one either.

I listened to this book and once again, it wasn’t the correct format for absorbing it. The book gives a little intro on things to do which works well enough in the audio format, but then it goes into a 12 week program where you are supposed to follow specific tasks and answer questions each week. By listening to it in my driving time, I was not able to truly utilize the book as it was meant to be used.

The main theme of the book is to help unlock your creativity mostly by healing your wounded inner artist. The main three methods are the Morning Pages, Artist Dates, and looking for Synchronicity.

The morning pages are journaling. The author prescribes 3 pages a day every morning. I believe in journaling every day, but I think her prescription is a little too strict. I personally prefer to do them at night and I think the page count should be very flexible. Having said that, she did at some point mention that you might find a breakpoint in your journal where you have real breakthroughs and that might be around 1.5 pages. Basically, you can fill a page or two every day with random stuff, but if you force yourself to do three pages, something real will eventually start to come through. Maybe? I honestly don’t know, but it’s interesting and I’ll have to try pushing my journal sometime.

The Artist Date is also an interesting concept. The concept is to take your inner creative child to do something fun, just you and your inner child. Nobody else is allowed to join in. For me, this concept resonates more as a little bit of quiet time where all work and social pressures are set aside and you can just enjoy. She recommends one artist date a week, which can be tough to accomplish if you think big, but it really doesn’t have to be big, just something your inner child would enjoy.

The final of the main points it to look for Synchronicity. This concept is where the book gets a bit airy fairy. I do think there’s something to be said about finding the things you’re looking for. We miss opportunities all the time because we don’t realize we’re looking for them, but once our mind is on it, we notice those opportunities. The author seems to believe those coincidences are basically the work of God. She leans quite a bit into God in her book and I’m not totally a fan even with a disclaimer about it in the opening.

There are plenty of details and tasks to do during the 12 week course. I did not do them, so I didn’t get the full benefit of the book. Would they work? Maybe in some ways. I don’t think there was anything outright bad and a lot of things would be worth a shot if I was a blocked artist (I am).

I can’t say I totally resonated with the book, but I wouldn’t mind buying a paper copy and going through the book again to follow the course to some degree. It would be interesting to test it on myself, but I don’t know that I’m motivated enough to ever try.

I’ll start off by saying that this book was not meant for audio. It probably would have been a better experience to read this one than to listen to it. There were way too many numbers read off that could easily be glossed over as a reader, but as a listener, I heard every one of them. In this somewhat modern update, I also heard every URL spelled out which had the tendency of making my brain shut off. I was hoping to get a lot of concepts from this book and the format definitely hurt my ability to absorb it.

Some of the content is still quite good and will likely be relevant in perpetuity. Buy low and sell high. That’s the real rub of it. Don’t buy a stock because it’s already gone up, buy one that has gone down for no good reason. The author is a big fan of doing your research and actually understanding the numbers in the financial statements behind the stocks. Those numbers can help guide you to whether or not the company has a good future and if the stock is currently under valued or over valued. He does go through many examples of pitfalls while looking at those statements. It’s certainly not as simple as seeing the earnings per share as that can be easily manipulated.

Having said that, his advice is generally to not play stock picker and instead get funds that track the market as a whole. Major diversification. He’s also generally a fan of some bonds in your portfolio, although he doesn’t typically like rules of thumb about what percentage of your portfolio should be bonds. He’s more of a buy bonds when they’re cheap and buy stocks when they’re cheap. He’d also recommend averaging into stocks by setting aside the same amount of money every X months and putting that into the market. That way you never buy the top on accident and basically always buy at an average price.

The book does go through a lot of examples from the 70s, which felt like it should have been cut and replaced with newer examples. It also included early 2000s examples which were a bit more interesting to me, but still too many examples for my taste and not enough focus on the theory.

I think there’s some good, but very common (at this point), information being given out in this book. However, it’s not like people follow that advice or else there would be no boom and bust cycle or a very muted one. So as a book, it’s a nice reminder about what you really should be looking for in investing. If you’ve been sitting on the sidelines, it might give you that boost of confidence to go in to some relatively safe waters. Just go for the real thing, not the audiobook.

The beginning of this book reminded me a lot of Who We Are and How We Got Here. And now I realize that I didn’t write a review for that one. Whoops. However, whereas Who We Are went deep into tracing DNA around the world through history, Sapiens took a much more anthropological approach while touching on DNA a bit at the beginning. Afterwards, Sapiens went through things like religions and ideologies a lot more. It even ended with some discussion on the future of humanity. Who We Are felt almost like a text book for a class whereas Sapiens remained an interesting discussion of humanity throughout.

The author generally did a good job of presenting the information and sticking to facts or presenting multiple sides to an argument. However, there were a few parts where I think the author jumped to conclusions quite quickly and declared his opinions as truth. If you believe in religion, come into the book understanding that the author thinks your religion is just as wrong as you think every other religion is. So if you’re a devout Christian, you might find him to be very dismissive of your strongly held beliefs. It didn’t bother me personally, but it may bother some of you out there.

One area I’d like to point out is the discussion on quality of life versus pure quantity. The author discusses it relating to both humans and livestock. In some ways, chickens are the second most successful animal in the world, behind only humans. They’re brought everywhere, have massive numbers and are at essentially zero chance of going extinct any time soon. On the other hand, they often live absolutely horrible lives in cramped cages and are often killed as soon as they reach full size. So civilization has greatly improved their quantity of life while destroying their quality of life. The author also makes that point regarding humanity. According to him, in many ways, the agricultural revolution actually decreased the quality of human life while greatly increasing the quantity. Agriculture has caused us to have less diverse and thus less healthy diets while working repetitive jobs and being more at risk to a specific blight. Hunter gatherers had more diverse diets, more stimulating “jobs”, and less risk of a blight wiping them out.

I don’t know that I totally agree with the assessment on that one. It may have been more stimulating to live in a hunter gatherer society compared to an early agricultural one, but the agricultural one also eventually created free time which people used to invent things. Hunter gatherers had to constantly stress over where to find their next bit of food. They often hunted their own game to extinction and had to keep moving to survive. Life must have been extremely stressful for them. That’s a counter-point to the author that I don’t remember being brought up. It also glossed over that hunter gatherer societies would often kill or abandon their own if they were seen as weak. Not exactly a good quality of life if you happen to break your leg. So while the diet was indeed more diverse and generally healthier, I’d suspect most hunter gatherers would gladly trade it for a roof over their head and a society that can take care of them.

The discussion at the end about the future of humanity is also interesting. We’re on the precipice of genetically modified humans. What happens to humanity when new smarter humans are created? What about when we link up with machines in more and more sophisticated ways? We might become amortal, not immortal as we can still be killed, but not aging and potentially living hundreds or even thousands of years. What will happen to humanity at that point? What will happen to society when rich parents can alter their children’s DNA to make improvements that a poor person cannot afford?

The author doesn’t have answers to those questions as he poses those questions. It’s part of an interesting discussion and I’d recommend this book to anyone that’s interested in politics, religion, history, and pretty much anything related to anthropology.

I don’t usually review fiction books, but this one has enough philosophical discussion that I think it’s worthwhile. So I finally did it. I listened to the entire Atlas Shrugged. 63 hours and even on 1.25 speed, it’s a beast to get through. I’ll give it credit for being mostly interesting and more importantly, making you think (unless you just blindly accept everything the author says).

However, it is also heavily flawed. In structure, there is no way this book had to be 63 hours long. It was very repetitive and some of the plots points could have been totally edited out and we would have the same basic story with the same message.

The book also liked its monologues. Some character would spout philosophy for a huge chunk of time including one towards the end literally for hours. Subtlety was not the author’s strong point as her philosophy is rammed down our throats over and over again by various characters.

It also totally lacked nuance. The good characters are good at everything. Literally everything. If you’re a hero, you’re a titan of business, you’re better looking, a better lover, you’re stronger, you’re smarter, you’re a better shooter and fist fighter. Those highly trained guards or bands of thugs? Nah, the businessman can out shoot them and out fight them. He’s magical.

Likewise, the bad guys are bad at everything. Secretly, they want to see everything die. If you espouse beliefs in the “greater good”, then secretly you want everything to burn. Does the author really believe that people don’t do things altruistically? Can she not accept that some people have actual empathy and it’s not all fake? It seems quite weird. I would think even someone who possesses no empathy, a sociopath, can recognize that other people do truly have empathy and we’re not all faking it.

The bad guys are set up like strawmen so that the author can knock them down. One somewhat early example is where a socialist government nationalized a copper mine and is angry at the prior owner because the mine is worthless. They needed that mine to sustain their way of life and they’re angry that capitalists aren’t cooperating with them. What socialist would actually complain that they can’t succeed because the capitalists won’t cooperate?

The funny thing is that I’ve seen this exact argument during an internet debate on a forum. An avowed socialist blamed Venezuela’s struggles on the lack of cooperation by capitalist countries. I thought it was a crazy belief then and it’s funny to come across it in an old book now. If I hadn’t known that socialist online, I would think the author was purely setting up strawmen. Knocking down strawmen can be entertaining, but not very instructive for real philosophical debates. However, the author may have come across real people like that in her day, but it’s still wild to me that someone could be one of her strawmen for real.

I’ll get a little bit into politics right here and say that I’m mostly a capitalist, but far from the extreme of Ayn Rand. I think capitalism is a race to the top. Unfortunately, it leaves a lot of people behind in the process. I do think that socialism is more “fair”, but only in that it brings everyone down (except the politicians who run the system). Real world socialism creates an economic blight, just on a much slower scale than in the book.

The real key to a flourishing economy is to have it based on capitalism, but to sprinkle in a little bit of socialism to make sure there’s a soft landing for those who get left behind. Things like universal healthcare and food assistance programs are great to make sure that we don’t have people dying in the streets.

I’d also say that Capitalism often rewards a lot of the wrong people, even by Ayn Rand’s standards. I think there’s a lot more James Taggarts than Hank Reardens at the top of businesses. Most of the truly wealthy in the world are mediocre people living off some ancestor’s hard work. Most large businesses in the real world have a huge amount of momentum behind them and can continue on for decades or more even with poor leadership. Very few CEOs are the genius inventors themselves. Even in cases that look slightly more like Ayn Rand’s heroes… like a Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, they still almost all rely on teams of highly skilled, highly intelligent people. Elon can’t build a car and Steve couldn’t put together a circuit board.

These are points where I think Ayn Rand fails. She doesn’t understand business. She doesn’t understand how generational wealth sets some people up for life as giants of business while possessing minimal skills and other people who could be absolute geniuses are using that genius to simply survive in bad circumstances. Her mythical man, John Galt, would likely end up as a successful engineer working under a whole corporate structure somewhere in the real world, not the potential savior of the world.

At one point she even criticized Robin Hood, the mythical character. The criticism was so asinine that I wonder what version of Robin Hood she read and how she could misunderstand it so badly.

Still, despite all the criticisms, the book should make you think. I think it makes some really good points about the value that people bring and her basic philosophy, which she espouses in way too many words in the book, is interesting:

“the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”

I think it’s an interesting philosophy that I can mostly buy and makes me re-think my assumptions. Since reading the book, I even realized that I don’t like the Spider-Man philosophy: “with great power comes great responsibility.” (actually a much older concept)

No. Just because someone has power does not mean they have a responsibility to use it. A super hero is good because he does good things. A super villain is bad because he does bad things. If a supe has a responsibility to use his powers, then his good actions are merely neutral. Someone with powers using it for good would be a super-neutral, merely doing what they’re supposed to. We instinctually know that philosophy is wrong and that’s why we call them heroes. He’s good because he does good. We give credit as a hero because we know that doing good is good, not merely a responsibility.

It’s nice to actually question some of the basic assumptions that most people live by and this book definitely pointed me in one direction to ask those questions and challenge assumptions. When I look around at the world today, I see a lot of Ayn’s predictions coming true, just at a much slower scale. So I found the book to be interesting and it truly has made me look at the world differently.

I’d seen multiple recommendations for this book and ended up buying it. The subtitle is “break through the blocks and win your inner creative battles” which is indeed the goal of the book. It’s quite a short book with each chapter typically only being a page or two at most. It comes in three parts and the first part is about the concept of resistance. Resistance is this invisible force that prevents you from completing your task. It comes in many forms, but that’s the main idea. The first part merely identifies resistance and how pervasive it is, but doesn’t really answer why.

Part two of the book is about becoming a pro. Truly, that is the only advice to beating resistance, be a pro. It’s quite simplistic advice as it’s basically taking a different mindset to your work. Simply treat the work like it’s your job. Show up and do it. That’s it. That’s how you beat resistance. No excuses, just get it done.

Strangely enough, part three might be the most interesting. Part three is about the “higher realm”. It gets quite mystical as it talks about muses and God and all that sort of stuff. I’m not really a believer in that stuff, but I can translate a lot of it into something more practical. There is an interesting discussion around Ego and I immediately recognized it as the conscious part of your brain, which isn’t truly that intelligent, versus the subconscious part of your brain which is much more intelligent in a lot of ways. Hearing the muses is really the act of tapping into your subconscious brain.

If you use your Ego, your conscious brain, to focus on something, your subconscious brain will start to focus on that task as well. Your dumb Ego needs have that professionalism to get to a task and allow your smart subconscious to focus on it. If you do that, ideas will start to flow and you’ll break through those blocks.

The author himself goes a lot more mystical. However, he does also touch on purpose. Why are you doing your art? Is it to fit in a hierarchical structure and improve your standing? If so, he doesn’t believe you’ll ever hear your muse. Instead, he suggests finding your territory, or I’d say “your calling”. Something that you’d do if you were the last person on Earth.

Overall, I think the book is quite interesting, though simplistic and too mystical for my tastes. Still, I think the simple advice is quite good and it’s quite short, so I’ll likely re-read this book to let the advice sink in. That’s a pretty good endorsement.

This was a very short book, or in my case, audiobook. It also expected you to fill out a test, which I did not do. Driving while listening was not conducive to taking a test. Having said that, I have a pretty good idea where I’d fit in and it isn’t on the optimistic side.

The entire book can be summed up quite quickly. Optimism is better for you than pessimism. Everyone runs into problems, but optimistic people see the problems as temporary and contained rather than permanent and pervasive like a pessimist would. The best way to fight pessimism is to refute the beliefs and if you don’t currently have time to do it, then delay the belief temporarily until you do have time.

There, I saved you the hour of listening to the book. It’s certainly not a bad book and the advice does seem helpful. In part, it’s helpful because it’s so simple. When you have that negative internal voice, you should argue against it. Don’t catastrophize your problems.

So if you do poorly on a test, you might start saying that “this always happens” which is a pervasive thought or you might ask yourself, “why am I so stupid?” which is attributing the problem to a permanent failing. Instead, you should respond that, “no, this doesn’t always happen. I did well on a test last week (or whatever is true)”. It’s not a pervasive problem. To argue against calling yourself stupid, you could say that “doing poorly on one test doesn’t make you stupid. It just means you didn’t study hard enough for it.” You’ve turned a permanent condition into a temporary one.

Overall, I do think it’s good advice with one caveat. There is a risk of making excuses too much in life. The author briefly addresses that risk as well. Personal responsibility is still important and if you’re always making excuses about why everything that goes wrong is someone else’s fault, then you’re not going to grow. The advice in the book is that if you’re scoring really optimistic on the test, you shouldn’t be making any more excuses for yourself. However, if you scored very pessimistic, it’s okay to give yourself a break and make some excuses.

Essentially, find a happy place somewhere in the middle where you can take responsibility for your faults, but realize that they’re not permanent faults and you’ll try to do better.

I have some real mixed feelings on this book. The author, Amanda Palmer, is definitely not my type of person. She’s way too artsy for me and about as artsy as you can get. I can appreciate most art, but I certainly don’t live it and wouldn’t want to. She lives it. Her life is like a piece of art. Not one that I particularly appreciate; however, one good thing to come from this book is that I understand it quite a bit better. I feel like I understand street performers in a way I never did before.

Going into the book blind, having not known who Amanda Palmer was, I was hoping or expecting to find a guide on how to ask for things. Maybe about how to be more assertive and that sort of stuff. Perhaps the message would be told through life stories like The Art of Learning, which is a book I highly recommend, and I can accept anecdotal stories that teach lessons.

However, this book didn’t tackle the issue directly at all. The book is the story of the author’s life and a little bit about how asking fit in. I’ll give it credit for being interesting throughout, she’s lived quite a life. It was also emotional at times. However, I don’t really think I learned much of anything about the art of asking. I guess, just ask. That might be the sum total of the wisdom on that topic.

Okay, there might be a little bit more. There was a small discussion about why it works for some people and not for others. Asking is about building/continuing a relationship, it’s an exchange, it’s not just begging. A musician who has interacted with his fans will be much more likely to get what he asks for than someone who keeps himself separate from his fans.

In one part there was a discussion about being shameless. The author compared it to being fearless and how shameless is seen as bad, but fearless is seen as good and she didn’t understand why. Shame and fear are both negative, right? So why is lacking one bad and lacking the other good. I don’t think shame is bad. Doing shameful things is bad. Shame itself is an internal moral compass telling you that you’re doing something wrong. If you’re shameless, that compass is broken. Of course, fear isn’t all bad either. It usually is a warning of danger and being fearless is probably a sign that you’re not very bright or that you don’t value your own life. Neither is actually good, but I’d still put fearless as better than shameless.

In my circle of acquaintances, I would hesitantly recommend this book to Twitch streamers. I’ve known a few of them who have issues asking for money and they feel awkward taking the money their fans want to give them. This book may put them at ease a little bit more. It can help the streamers understand that it is an exchange and that exchange is a token of appreciation for what they’ve done.

Having said that, the book is all over the place. It doesn’t really follow a timeline and it doesn’t really stick to subjects very well either. In some ways, it feels like an editor really needed to go through this book and do some major re-arranging. However, the messiness does fit the author quite well and maybe it needs to be a messy book if it’s going to be about her life.

I’d also say that Neil Gaiman comes out of the book looking like a saint.