What is the main characteristic distinguishing top performers from the regulars? Is it talent or effort? That’s the question that Angela Duckworth set up to answer with her book, Grit. Here are some key ideas.
Read MoreV for Vendetta is a cultural phenomenon. The face-mask is one of the most recognized drawings on the planet, the character, and his adapted signature the best symbols for fighting oppression of any kind. V for Vendetta is also a book. That started it all. And while I watched the movie & have a few masks on the walls of my house, I never read the damn thing, although I had a copy lying around for more than a decade. That all changed this weekend when I read it all in one sitting.
Read MoreObviously Awesome by April Dunford is an effective book on marketing positioning. It is short enough to be read in one sitting, makes a few points, and then it’s done. It’s a refreshing take on business books that compensate for a shortage of ideas with filler. She starts making clear what positioning is: the act of deliberately defining how you …
Read More“What we understand we then control. It is like magic, only real.” David Deutsch’s book, The Beginning of Infinity, is an intellectual rollercoaster through all things knowledge related. It’s one of the best books I have ever read and one brimming with ideas. Here are some of my favorites.
Read MoreOne of the short books that I really enjoyed is Understand by Ted Chiang: A SF novel about a brain-damaged person who starts increasing his intelligence to hyper-awareness levels through the use of an experimental drug.
There is one idea that I really liked. About the purpose of knowledge and the ethical implications of intelligence expansion.
Read MoreHow To Take Smart Notes, by Sönke Ahrens, is a book about learning and self-development, disguised as a book about taking notes. He focuses a lot on improving the performance in the academic setting, understandable by the fact that Ahrens is a Lecturer in Philosophy of Education at the University of Duisburg-Essen, but the lessons are clearly translatable to the workplace.
Read MoreVirtues are more important than values. Values are just intellectual aspirations. They represent what you think about yourself & your team. The focus should be on virtues. Virtues are what we do: values in motion. It’s one of the lessons from Ben Horowitz’s new book.
Read MoreFor 50 days I meditated using Sam Harris’s Waking Up app. He focuses a lot on consciousness: his main goal is to make you realize your experience is just an appearance in conciseness. He has tons of mind tricks that I found quite ineffective, but also some practical lessons that took my practice to the next level.
Read MoreIn school we were all “equal”. As pupils, part of mass education program, we had no formal way to organise ourselves into preference based groups. But we did it anyway. I can bet that cool kids formed a very tight band in your school, one where admission was invitation only. You may have been part of one but the majority was excluded from the cool kids club and chose to join geekier ones.
The behaviour does not change after school. Unlike schools, workplaces have very deep formal hierarchies. But the tendency to group ourselves into affinity-driven informal groups remains. In any corporation there are unofficial crowds where decisions are being made. It’s what people mean when they complain that there is too much politics in a company or that decisions are not transparent enough.
Read MoreDid James Cameron read this novel from Ursula Le Guin? Because this short 1972 award-winning novel seems to be the Avatar of science fiction books. I consider myself a fan of the author, but all her books are mixed bags (social justice, tendency towards preservation of nature, vilifying humans, very interesting civilizations created by their different evolutionary paths) and this one is no different. You should pick it up if you are in the mood for a quick SF read.
The story is part of a larger universe, in which humans did not start their existance on Earth, but where, for whatever reason, Terra became just one of the planets where humans, in various forms, lived. One of these worlds is Athshe, where tribal, peaceful green humanoids are being enslaved by terrans to cut all their forests and ship them to a deserted Earth. Why would a galactic civilization, capable of light travel and instantaneous communication, need lumber so much is never answered. But hey, it is not like unobtanium was a brilliant choice either. Anything is good as long as we can paint the story of humans being murderous slave loving monsters. I will not spoil the story, but you can probably guess it in a few minutes.
There is however something that I found quite interesting. Our small green friends had a very interesting characteristic, which consisted of having blurred lines between dreams and the real-world. This allowed them to have a deep connection to their subconsciousness, separating their actions from the narrative illusion we are trapped in by our feelings. This Buddhist like super-power brought in some interesting plot twists. Is this where the author is at her best and this book does not dissapoint.
Le Guin was the best anthropology focused fiction writer and even when she wrote mediocre books like this one, she can have an impact.
I have a tendency to avoid hyped books. Sapiens and its sequel, Homo Deus, were definitely part of this category, having been praised by presidents or thought leaders (whatever that means). But an article about the meditative practice of the author, who’s also a jewish gay historian, spiked my interest. So.... I finally read both of them.
Read MoreMarx reminds me of something that I call “armchair strategising”: felling in love with my own thoughts and starting to believe that my grand theory of the world is somehow an accurate representation of it. Rather than the distorted, myopic interpretation that it really is.
Like Marx, there is a large group of workers who are very susceptible to be caught in this narrative fallacy. I am part of this group: Entrepreneurs, product managers, executives. Knowledge workers in general, people working with abstract concepts and shipping equally abstract outputs: plans, strategies, models etc. Like Marx the theories we put forward are not just a hedonistic compressions that we use to entertain ourselves during otherwise boring cocktail parties. Our beliefs are tools in our daily work.
Read MoreGo to school. Prove your worth by getting your diploma. Find a job. Work hard. Don’t break the rules. Cash in your pay-check every month. Enjoy your life after work. The end.
This is the life pattern most of us grew up with and one that still reverberates strongly today as most of the social institutions are set up for this modus operandi. But lots of us can fell the wind of change. We may not be fully capable to put it into words but “times they are a changing”. It is something I have been thinking for a while. I think your Spider senses are tingling too.
Read MoreIt’s quite fashionable for most of the tech elites to preach coding as a required skill for all kids. Tim Cook, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg … all seem to think that the solution to the economic problems faced by million of disenfranchised workers can be solved by turning more people into coders. Thus they are pushing for coding to become part of the common curriculum for to everyone going through the public educational system. However I think Tim Cook (like most of his peers) is short sighted and that his predecessor had much better grip on human value than him ...
Read MoreWhat if most of our instincts about learning are misplaced, incomplete, or flat wrong? This is how Benedict Carey, a science reporter for the New York Times, starts his book, simply called “How We Learn”. And he does a brilliant job proving that our thinking about learning is rooted more in superstition than in science. And boy this book is filled with science. It is extremely evident that the author is a science nerd because this book is 95% filled with studies and experiments on lots and lots of topics related to the learning: memorisation, forgetting, associations, perceptions etc.
Read MoreAre heroes born or made? The answer is surely both and neither, but I think it’s useful to consider the dynamics here for a minute. We tend to save these questions for the late night drinking party when the wine bubbles up our silliest questions. Frivolous or not, the answers to questions like this can put a light on some of our subconscious biases and beliefs that shape our day-to-day activity. Let's take a incursion into this topic: from ancient Greek philosophers to our 2 favourite super-heroes.
Read MoreIf you are a SF fan than you probably heard of the “3 Body” books series. Liu Cixin’s books have brought Chinese SF into the limelight winning numerous awards and critical acclaim (the former US president being amongst the fans). I enjoyed these books tremendously and this review serves as a way for me to bring fwd some of the items that sticked with me.
Read MoreLet’s continue the series on why the A.I. takeover are overblown. This time I would like to talk about our static worldview and our over-reliance on prediction. Peter Thiel defines definite and indefinite optimists and pessimists in his book, “Zero to One”. He remarks that people who look at the future as slightly-altered continuation of today will tend to focus on conservation of status-quo sprinkled with interventions when some random event disturbs the emotional tranquility of the society ...
Read MoreScience Fiction can be seen as an exploration of existing or future problems we are confronting with. There are two types of SF novels that I like. The first kind, practiced by Frank Herbert or George Orwell for example, uses alien, fictional environments as scenes that exacerbate current social issues. Their books serve as fictional laboratories that blow all humans convention out of the water thus allowing them to take current philosophical trends to the extreme. Herbert, for example, does this with religion and cult-building as Dune, his famous sand planet, offers him the perfect environment to isolate the issue for literary exploration ...
Read MoreMy dad, a high-school history teacher, discovered "fake news" in early 2000s. He was always a big believer in self-study and gave his students assignments to encourage this behaviour. The assignment that sparked his observation asked the students to come up with a general characterisation of Mao's regime. He gave this assignment prior to any actual teaching about the period, expecting his pupils to research the period using the Internet. Most of the papers were exactly what you would expect, reproducing the main accepted narrative of communism gone wrong, persecution and death. As with these home-works originality was never a strong mark, a lot of the papers being copy-pasted from various websites.
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