Category: Book Club

This book is much more conversational than a lot of its peers. It’s almost like a friend philosophizing about life while sitting around having a beer. Having said that, I do think it’s quite insightful unlike most drunks sitting around talking. It’s a book that should make you think about how you think about life. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be all that actionable unless you stop and really put in the time to think on what has been said.

There’s no real game-plan, just ideas, but the ideas are often good. For example, it asks, “what are you willing to struggle for?” It’s such an important question, much more important than “what do you want?” People want all sorts of things, but are rarely actually willing to struggle for them. I know plenty of young kids who want to be sports stars, but I know a whole lot less who push themselves to new limits on a frequent basis to get there. It’s the struggle that tells the world what you really want, not just what you say you want and it’s the struggle that really defines us.

People without struggles are not really happy. It’s the people that overcome challenges through struggle that gain happiness. That’s another related topic from the book. It even references the story of Buddha and how a life without struggles does not make one happy. There are quite a few random anecdotes thrown in from the author’s life as well as other people.

Overall, it’s a book that I’d probably read or listen to again. There are some concepts that may be slowly sinking in and another pass through may help them solidify in my mind. I’d also recommend it to others as a reasonably quick read. However, it’s not a book that will greatly affect my life after only the first read.

Back when I reviewed The Power of Now, I wished that someone would write a better book that tackles the “no mind” concept. Well, it turns out that many years earlier, a person did just that in The Inner Game of Tennis. So yeah, I read a “tennis” book, but it’s not really about tennis. It’s about the natural learning process that we suppress and the goal of the book is to help you tap back into that natural learning process by quieting the conscious mind. Tennis is really just a vehicle to help learn how to tap into that process.

Perhaps what surprised me the most about the book is how old it is. It was originally published in 1974. So for my entire lifetime, there has been this reasonably well written book that honestly could have helped quite a bit in my days as a competitive athlete. It would have certainly helped to have some coaches who read it and could distill some of its wisdom. The shame of it is that by labeling it about tennis, it probably turns away a ton of coaches from other sports who really should read it.

Tennis is of course the sport that the author knows best. He was the captain of the Harvard University tennis team and a tennis coach for many years. The book does address tennis quite often and it would be unusual to find a page or two without some reference to a tennis shot, but it’s all just a simple game to use to explore a concept. You don’t have to have any desire to ever play tennis in order to get something valuable out of this book. It was a fellow coach in another sport that actually recommended it to me.

The book leans heavily on tennis for examples of how to do things. For example, to help get the conscious mind to stop trying to micromanage everything, he recommends focusing it on the ball and let the subconscious take over for the actual actions. He even has some stronger methods like focusing on the seams of the ball or the sound that it makes when it hits the racket. However you achieve it, the key is to get that conscious train of thoughts out of the way.

I know that struggle. I have played many sports and have experienced over-thinking way too often. As a coach, I have seen players who are much worse than I am about it. I at least tend to trust my athleticism. This book really explains what’s going wrong with a lot of players who seem to be working so hard and really trying to fix things, but just can’t seem to do it. I’ve felt that over-coaching is an issue and this book really points to it… especially over-coaching oneself. 

So if you have any interest in making improvements in sports, this book holds up quite well even today and can help you. If you have an interest in coaching, make it doubly so.

Don’t get triggered, this book has nothing to do with that. Instead, Triggers is about identifying the behavioral queues in your environment and then learning how to handle them. Fortunately, it goes quite far beyond just triggers and spends a long time on self reflection and asking yourself specific questions to help with improving your life.

I came across this book by listening to an old episode of a podcast called Cortex. The hosts were doing a book club of their own and their reviews came back quite positive whereas they had often dumped on other business or self-help books. In fact, this might be the first self-help style book that actually got a positive review from both hosts. I took it as a sign to give Triggers a try.

I too thought the book was pretty good. One thing that sets this book apart is who it’s coming from. The author, Marshall Goldsmith, is a leadership coach who has worked with a ton of high powered CEOs and other business leaders. With most self-help authors, their crowning achievement seems to be writing a successful book, but I don’t get that impression here. Goldsmith seems like someone who has walked the walk for many years and is now passing on his earned wisdom.

As is common in these types of books, it does spend a decent amount of time trying to convince you why their methods work rather than just telling you what to do. However, this book has believable anecdotes unlike a lot of its book peers who seem to be making things up to build a narrative. It feels grounded and not just theoretical which comes from a place of actually working with a lot of people in the business world and seeing what works.

There’s plenty of “common sense” advice in the book, but that’s almost the point. There’s no real magic and Goldsmith even says it near the beginning that it should mostly sound like common sense. Yet, breaking through that resistance to common sense is key and he’s got a few methods to help, like giving yourself a daily test to keep on track. You even get to write your own questions and the format is pretty interesting. The format for the questions is “Did I do my best to _____” That simple phrasing puts you in command. It tells you that the world is not acting on you, you are acting within it.

It also emphasizes effort, not results. If you’re familiar with Dweck’s work on Mindset, emphasizing effort is great for improvement. I’ve personally started to use this method and ask myself five questions every night before I go to bed and I’m seeing some results already. However, whether or not the results will be sustainable and build on top of each other is the biggest question of all. If it is, then this book is absolutely amazing. If it’s not, then it’s another well written and somewhat interesting book that doesn’t actually help in the long run.

I’m betting it is a good one that could help a lot of people if they put the effort into following the advice. My plan is to re-read (or listen to) this book about once a year to freshen up on the concepts. I can’t say I’ve ever planned to do that with any other book.

Ding ding ding we’ve got a winner. If coaching or teaching (parenting too) is in your future (or present), this book is for you. Likewise, if you’d like to understand the process of getting really good at something, this book will describe how you can do it from an underlying level. I’m giving this one a solid 5 out of 5 stars for being quite good, but with some caveats.

The Talent Code takes you through “talent hotbeds” and tries to extract what made them into hotbeds. It also cites a lot of good research on the subject from academics like K. Anders Ericsson and Carol Dweck. I was previously familiar with both of them having read Mindset by Dweck and an academic paper on Deliberate Practice by Ericsson, so a lot of the information in the Talent Code was review for me, but it did take them to the next step.

The Talent code likes to call it deep practice, but for all intents and purposes, it’s the same as deliberate practice. The most interesting thing for me is the identification of myelin as the microscopic cause that allows practice to work. Your nerves actually get wrapped by an insulation called myelin. The more it wraps, the better the impulse travels and your system works better. And of course, your body wraps more myelin as you use those nerves. Put simply, do something more and you’ll do it better which is simple enough advice. The book certainly goes into more depth on this area, but most of it should be pretty straightforward and I won’t repeat it all here.

The second segment of the book is about ignition and I found it to be quite useful as a concept. Ignition is about grabbing someone’s attention and really turning them into deep practice machines. Most people understand that deep practice works, but few will actually dedicate the time and mental strain to do deep practice because they are not ignited. Sadly, a lack of ignition has been one of my great weaknesses in life and while the book describes a lot of ways that ignition can happen, it takes it more from a coach or teacher’s perspective. It doesn’t do a great job of showing you how to ignite yourself.

I think this lack could be the great weakness in the book. Perhaps I need a little too much hand holding, but I didn’t really see an action plan develop for myself from this book. I could potentially create an action plan as a coach for a team or as a leader of an organization, but not for myself. Maybe it’s impossible to ignite yourself. If I tried, I’d feel like I was just manipulating myself and it wouldn’t work because I’d know what I was doing and the manipulation wouldn’t work. Perhaps that’s the problem, you really need to get lucky and have someone or something in your environment ignite you.

The last section of the book is about Master Coaches, but really the key to being a master coach is to ignite your players and then help them through Deliberate Practice. Often, it will be separate coaches that ignite versus really dive into deep practice and mastery with the earliest beginner coaches needing to ignite while the ones later on can focus more on deep practice.

One part I found funny in the book was the final chapter about how the Raiders and JaMarcus Russell both went to the same relatively unknown master coach for help. It was meant to be about how some master coaches are relatively unknown, but can have profound impact. To me, it sounded a lot more like Russell had a very smart agent who put Russell in front of that coach to become the number 1 overall pick. It didn’t sound quite so much like the master coach was a great judge of future performance since Russell has since been considered one of the all-time biggest draft busts. Oops. Then again, the Raiders didn’t follow the advice they got from their master coach about how to handle Russell.

Overall, I liked the book. If you plan to become a coach, teacher, or even a parent, it’s a good read (or 6 hour audiobook listen). It may save you a lot of headaches and put your kids on the right path to success. The only problem is that it doesn’t have a plan for self ignition, but that may be impossible without some serious amnesia.

This book was quite a ride. The main point of the book is to teach you to embrace the Now through “no mind”. I actually find the concept to be interesting and helpful.  However, the author goes way too spiritual on the whole idea. Flat out, it seems like he’s trying to start a cult.

Let’s start off with the good. The concept of No Mind is a good one. No Mind is about turning off the conscious stream of thought. You may have experienced it if you’ve tried meditation or if you’ve felt like you’re “in the Zone”. The author argues that the active stream of consciousness (my words) should be reserved for specific tasks, but most people use it almost everywhere. Shut it down and let something else take over.

The key is to observe that conscious stream of thought. When you start to observe your own stream of thoughts, you might realize that the thoughts aren’t “you” or else how could you be observing them? At least, that’s the argument in the book. I would simply say that they’re a part of you, but not the whole you. Your brain is more than the stream of thoughts. You also have a subconscious that is quite powerful. I saw this concept touched on slightly in another book where a well accredited author recommended giving a name to the negative voice when you are having negative self-talk.

I started calling mine Chip. Hahaha. It’s that little voice in my head that tries to tear me down by chipping away. By personifying that negative voice and making it something external to “me”, I do think I experienced significantly less negative self-talk and when it does happen, I can quickly shut it down by simply saying to myself, “hello Chip.” Overall, it has created a nice improvement in my life. However, The Power of Now takes it to an extreme and claims that no part of the inner voice is you at all. And this is where the author loses me.

He claims that the real you is the spirit (oh, and that spirit is part of God, congrats). He claims that people who live in the stream of thought are “unconscious” and that only by learning to turn off that voice will you become “conscious” and that makes you part of God or something like that.

Oh right, Namaste publishing. Yikes.

Whatever good points the book started off with, it wasted them on the hippy dippy airy fairy nonsense that followed. The vast majority of the book is set up as a series of questions and answers where the author stands up his straw men and then tries to knock them down. Even then, his knock downs seem very dubious. Dying of hunger? Don’t worry about it. Just become part of God.

Okay, that’s my own straw man, but it’s not far from what he wrote. Yeah, no thanks. I don’t want to be a part of your religion just because you stumbled on one interesting piece of knowledge. The author also makes wild claims with no proof, like that practicing “no mind” will make you look younger and be healthier. Want proof? Try it and see for yourself says the author. Yeah, that’s not evidence.

He really goes off the deep end by the end of the book and it was hard to get through. If I didn’t plan to do this review, I probably would have dropped it and I almost never drop a book partway through. I wish a different author would take a shot at “no mind” and the power of now with a more practical approach. I feel like there is something there to be explored by someone a bit more competent and a lot less cultish.

The author himself doesn’t seem like a bad guy, but if he was serving cool-aid at a party, I’d have to pass.

Scoring The Power of Now as a 2 out of 5 purely because of the “no mind” concept early on that I have never seen well explored anywhere else. Otherwise it’d be straight to the rubbish bin.

Ah yes, a book review. And what better place to get a book review than on a random website usually dedicated to streaming video games and tech tutorials? Well, I also enjoy self help stuff, especially around the topic of productivity. So there’s that. Mostly, I saw someone recommend Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less and I thought, “that sounds interesting.” Then I thought, “let’s make a review out of it”.

Overall, it was okay. A 3 out of 5 for me.

It starts by building a case for being an “essentialist”, so the title is accurate. I think this book is really geared towards someone who has already accomplished a lot in his life and he is overwhelmed by the demands of his work. He needs to learn to say “no” and make room for himself to enjoy life.

The problem is that almost every example is about someone who got successful by being the guy who took on too much. The successful person was the person who tried to do it all and went above and beyond. Each person may have had some focus in some cases, but took on too much overall and burnt out. Now they need essentialism to find a more enjoyable life.

I’m personally pretty scattered. I’ve got a huge list of projects I want to do and I have a hard time focusing on any of them for any length of time. I mean, it’s only been 6 months since my last entry on this site, not too bad, right? I was hoping that Essentialism could help me get some focus, boil things down to what’s really important and get to task. I really didn’t get that message. The loudest message was the unintended one:

If you want to be successful, work your ass off. Successful people overwork themselves to get where they are.

Then once you get to a comfortable place, you can turn down projects and otherwise say no to things and generally maintain your lifestyle. It’s almost like purposely conforming to the Peter Principle. Use hard work to get promoted up and then essentialism to underperform at whatever role you want to stay at.

Unfortunately for someone in my situation, if I turned down all but the best opportunities, I’d have no opportunities at all. Sorry, nobody is offering me 6+ figures to do some interesting job. I’m usually out there searching for scraps and hoping to over perform by enough to get another shot.

What I did find interesting in the book was the final section. It had a few generally good pieces of advice, but decided that it needed to call them part of essentialism. For example, the book talked about being prepared. Having a buffer to fall back on in case things don’t go according to plan. It’s almost assuredly not an essentialist thing to have huge amounts of redundancy and alternative plans. I mean, the author can include whatever he wants in his own definition of the concept he created, but there’s no logical consistency between being prepared for every possible contingency when your whole message is streamlining things and only doing what’s essential.

He took a good habit and tried to jam it into his supposedly good thing. No, I’m not buying it. Same with things like small wins, another interesting concept that I generally agree with, but certainly not part of being an essentialist. Yet the author tries to jam that concept in as well. It’s like he had to meet a page count and he threw in some nice ideas at the end to meet that count even when it doesn’t really fit or directly contradicts the thesis of his book.

That final part was a bit awkward even if it had good advice. The initial three parts were okay, but only if you’re already where you want to be and want to start coasting. The best thing I got out of the book goes against the thesis of the book.

If you want to be successful in the working world, try to do it all. Try to over perform. Burn yourself out. Get to where you want to be, but without good life balance, and then you can use this book to help find that balance.

So, 3 stars.