Books I Finished In 2024
Books I finished in 2024 with notes.
Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone
- So many notable alumni from Hyderabad Public School (HPS): Shantanu Narayen, the CEO of Adobe; Ajay Singh Banga, the CEO of MasterCard; Syed B Ali, head of Cavium Networks; Prem Watsa, founder of Fairfax Financial Holdings in Toronto; parliament leaders, film stars, athletes, academics, and writers — all came from this “small, out-of-the-way” school. If you check the pictures of HPS, it is not small at all. It has widely been recognized as one of the best lower educational institutions in India.
- The number one thing that you have to do as a leader: to bolster the confidence of the people you lead.
- A leader must see the external opportunities, and the internal capability and culture and all of the connections among them and respond to them before they become obvious parts of the conventional wisdom. It’s an art form not a science and a leader will not always get it right but the batting average for how when a leader does this is going to define his or her longevity and business.
- Culture eats strategy for breakfast. — Peter Drucker
- We need to be willing to lean into uncertainty to take risks and to move quickly when we make mistakes recognizing failure happens along the way to mastery. Sometimes it feels like a bird learning to fly. You flap around for a while and then you run around. Learning to fly it’s not pretty, but flying is.
- Any advice to advocate passivity in the face of bias is wrong. Leaders need to act and shape the culture to root out bias and create an environment where everyone can effectively advocate for themselves.
- Once you become a vice president, a partner in this endeavor, the whining is over you can’t say the coffee around here is bad or there aren’t enough good people or I didn’t get the bonus. To be a leader in this company, your job is to find the rose petals in a field of shit. Perhaps not my best line of poetry but I wanted these people to stop saying all the things that are hard and start seeing things that great, and helping others see them too. Constraints are real, and will always be with us, but leaders are the champions of overcoming constraints. They make things happen.
- There are three expectations, three leadership principles, for anyone leading others at Microsoft:
- The first is to bring clarity to those you work with. This is one of the foundational things leaders do every day, every minute. In order to bring clarity, you’ve got to synthesize the complex. Leaders take internal and external noise and synthesize a message from it, recognizing the true signal with a lot of noise. I don’t want to hear that someone is the smartest person in the room. I want to hear them take their intelligence and use it to develop a deep shared understanding within teams and defined the course of action.
- Second, leaders generate energy, not only on their own teams but across the company it’s insufficient to focus exclusively on your own unit. Shared commitment and growth through times good and bad. They create an environment where everyone can do his or her best work and they build organizations and teams that are stronger tomorrow than today.
- Third and finally, they find a way to deliver success to make things happen. This means driving innovations that people love and are inspired to work on. Finding balance between long-term success and short-term wins, and being boundary-less, globally minded and seeking so.
- You can never understand one language until you understand at least two. — Geoffrey Willans
- E + SV + SR = TT — Empathy plus Shared Values plus Safety and Reliability equals Trust overTime.
- Consistency over time == Trust — Jeff Weiner
The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI
- Science may be an incremental pursuit, but its progress is punctuated by sudden moments of seismic inflection. Not because of the ambitions of some lone genius, but because of the contributions of many, all brought together by shared fortune.
- The IRB or Institutional Review Board is the governing body that oversees clinical research like ours, navigating their expectations to ensure a study is approved, requires finesse, and it kind of diplomatic savvy not to mention deep clinical experience. When conducting computer science education experiments involving college students as part of my PhD research, I also need the IRB approvals.
Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action
- Wilbur and Orville Wright were working on their own flying machine. Their passion to fly was so intense that it inspired the enthusiasm and commitment of a dedicated group in their hometown of Dayton, Ohio. There was no funding for their venture. No government grants. No high-level connections. Not a single person on the team had an advanced degree or even a college education, not even Wilbur or Orville. But the team banded together in a humble bicycle shop and made their vision real. On December 17, 1903, a small group witnessed a man take flight for the first time in history. How did the Wright brothers succeed where a better-equipped, better-funded and better-educated team could not? It wasn’t luck. Both the Wright brothers and Langley were highly motivated. Both had a strong work ethic. Both had keen scientific minds. They were pursuing exactly the same goal, but only the Wright brothers were able to inspire those around them and truly lead their team to develop a technology that would change the world. Only the Wright brothers started with Why.
- We make assumptions about the world around us based on sometimes incomplete or false information. Our behavior is affected by our assumptions or perceived truths. We make decisions based on what we think we know.
- Not only bad decisions are made on false assumptions. Sometimes when things go right we think we know why, but we really? That the result went the way you want it does not mean you can repeat it over and over.
- A company is a culture. A group of people brought together around a common set of values and beliefs. It’s not products or services that bind a company together. It’s not size and might that make a company strong, it’s the culture—the strong sense of beliefs and values that everyone, from the CEO to the receptionist, all share. So the logic follows, the goal is not to hire people who simply have a skillset you need, the goal is to hire people who believe what you believe.
- Who comes first? Shareholders or employees? Employees always come first. And if employees are treated right, they treat the outside world right. The outside world use the companies product again and that makes the shareholder happy. That ’s really the way it works and it’s not a conundrum at all.
- Energy motivates but charisma inspires. Energy is easy to see, easy to measure and easy to copy. Charisma is hard to define, near impossible to measure and too elusive to copy. All great leaders have charisma because all great leaders have clarity of WHY; an undying belief in a purpose or cause bigger than themselves.
- The school bus test is a simple metaphor. If a founder or a leader of an organization were to be hit by a school bus, will the organization continue to thrive at the same pace without them at the helm? So many organizations are built on the force of a single personality that their departure can cause significant disruption. The question isn’t if it happens. All founders, eventually leave or die. It’s just a question of when, and how prepared the organization is for the inevitable departure. The challenge isn’t cling to the leader. It’s defined effective ways to keep the founding vision alive forever.
- We’re always trying to be better than someone else. Better quality, more features, better service. Always comparing ourselves to others. And no one wants to help us. What if we showed up to work every day simply to be better than ourselves? What if the goal was to do better work this week than we did the week before, to make this month better than last month, for no other reason because we want to leave the organization in a better state that we found it.
Elon Musk
- Falcon one made history as the first privately built rocket to launch from the ground and reach orbit. Musk and his small crew of just 500 employees, Boeing’s comparable division had 50,000, had designed the system from the ground up and done all the construction on its own. Little had been outsourced and the funding had also been private largely out of Musk’s pocket.
- The algorithm:
- One, question every requirement, each should come with the name of the person who made it. You should never except that a requirement came from a department such as from the Legal Department, or the Safety Department. You need to know the name of the real person who made that requirement. Then you should question it, no matter how smart that person is. Requirements from smart people are the most dangerous because people are less likely to question them. Always do so even if the requirement came from me. Then make the requirements less dumb.
- Two, delete any part or process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10% of them, then you didn’t delete enough.
- Three, simplify and optimize. This should come after step two. A common mistake is to simplify and optimize a part or a process that should not exit.
- Four, accelerate cycle time. Every process can be speed it up, but only do this after you follow the first three steps. In the Tesla factory I mistakenly spent a lot of time accelerating processes that I later realized should’ve been deleted.
- Five, automate. That comes last. The big mistake in Nevada and Fremont was that I began by trying to automate every step. We should’ve waited until all the requirements had been questioned. Parts and processes deleted, and the bugs were shaken out.
- The algorithm was sometimes accompanied by a few corollaries:
- All technical managers must have hands-on experience. For example, managers of software teams must spend at least 20% of their time coding. Solar roof managers must spend time on the roofs doing installations. Otherwise they are like a cavalry leader who can’t ride a horse or a general who can’t use a sword.
- Camaraderie is dangerous. It makes it hard for people to challenge each others work. There is a tendency to not want to throw a colleague under the bus that needs to be avoided.
- It’s OK to be wrong. Just don’t be confident and wrong.
- Never ask your troops to do something you’re not willing to do.
- Whenever they are problems to solve, don’t just meet with your managers. Do a skip level where you meet with the level right below your managers.
- When hiring, look for people with the right attitude. Skills can be taught. Attitude changes require a brain transplant.
- A maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle.
- The only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything else is a recommendation.
The Infinite Game
- This is the second book I finished this year that is written by Simon Sinek. The first one is “Start with Why”.
- If we want to be as healthy as possible, the lifestyle we adopt matters more than whether or not we hit our goal on the arbitrary dates we set.
- Any leader who wants to adopt an infinite mindset must follow five essential practices:
- Advance a just cause
- Build trusting teams
- Study your worthy rivals
- Prepare for existential flexibility
- Demonstrate the courage to lead
- Where finite-minded organizations view people as a cost to be managed, infinite-minded organizations prefer to see employees as human beings whose value cannot be calculated as if they were a piece of machinery. Investing in human beings goes beyond paying them well and offering them a great place to work. It also means treating them like human beings. Understanding that they, like all people, have ambitions and fears, ideas and opinions and ultimately want to feel like they matter.
- Good leaders don’t automatically favor low performers of high trust nor do they immediately dump high performers of low trust. If someone’s performance is struggling or if they are acting in a way that is negatively impacting team dynamics, the primary question the leader needs to ask is are they coachable. Our goal as leaders is to ensure that our people have the skills, technical skills, human skills or leadership skills. So that they are equipped to work to their natural best and be a valuable asset to the team. This means we have to work with the low trust players to help them learn the human skills to become more trusted and trusting and work with the low performers to help them, learn the technical skills to improve their performance. Only when a team member approves uncoachable is resistant to feedback and takes no responsibility for how they show up at work. Should we seriously consider removing them from the team.
- True trusting relationships require both parties to take a risk. Like dating or making friends, the one person has to take a first risk to trust. The other person have to reciprocate at some point if the relationship has any chance of succeeding. In an organization, it is the leaders responsibility to take the first risk to build a circle of safety. But then it is up to the employee to take a chance and step into the circle of safety.
- Ethical fading (道德沦丧): a condition in a culture that allows people to act in unethical ways in order to advance their own interests, often at the expense of others while falsely believing that they have not compromise their own moral principles.
- We choose someone to be our worthy rivals because there is some thing about them that reveals to us our weaknesses, and pushes us to constantly improve, which is essential if we want to be strong enough to stay in the game. Interestingly and suprisingly, the author considered Adam Grant as his worthy rival.
- To parent with an infinite mindset means helping our kids discover their talents, pointing them to find their own passions and encouraging they take that path. It means teaching our kids the value of service, teaching him how to make friends and how to play well with others. It means teaching our kids that their education will continue long after they graduate school. It will last their entire lives, and there may not be any curriculum or grades to guide them. It means teaching our kids how to live a life with an infinite mindset themselves. There is no single greater contribution in the infinite game than to raise children who will continue to grow and serve others long after we are gone.
The Psychology of Money: The Simple Path to Loving Math
- I chose this books mainly because I always could not get a decent grades in math exams. And I don’t want my daughter to be afraid of math.
- Actually all kids are math kids.
- “You may have heard someone assert that a smart phone possesses more power than the mainframe computer that helped astronauts land on the moon. This is an understatement. An iPhone 6, obsolete now, could guide 120,000,000 Apollo aerial spacecraft to the moon simultaneously.” I am curious how the author get that number. Have we considered factors such as network bandwidth, latency, storage?
- How will you calculate 35x18?
- When I first heard this question, my initial thought is 35x(20-2), which is 35x20-35x2, which is 700-70, which is 630.
- Any easier way?
- 35x18, which is 35x2x9, which is 70x9, which is 630.
The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness
- Luck and Risk: We similarly think Mark Zuckerberg is a genius for turning down Yahoos’ 2006 $1 billion offer to buy his company. He saw the future and stuck to his guns. But people criticize Yahoo with its much passion for turning down its own big buyout offer from Microsoft. What is the lesson from entrepreneurs here? I have no idea because risk and luck are so hard to pin down. There’s so many examples of this. The best and worst managers drive there employees as hard as they can. The customer is always right and customers don’t know what they want are both excepted business wisdom. The line between “inspiringly bold” and “foolishly reckless” can be a millimeter thick, and only visible with hindsight. Risk and luck are doppelgängers. This is not an easy problem to solve.
- Not all success is due to hard-work, and not all poverty is due to laziness. Keep this in mind, when judging people, including yourself (responding to Paradigm Shift). Therefore focus less on specific individuals and case studies and more on broad patterns.
- Happiness, as it’s said, is just results minus expectations.
- Getting money and keeping money are two different skills. Getting money requires taking risks, being optimistic and putting yourself out there. But keeping money requires the opposite of taking risk. It requires humility, and fear that what you’ve made can be taken away from you just as fast. It requires frugality and acceptance at least some of what you’ve made is attributable to luck. So past success can’t be relied upon to repeat in definitely.
- Psychologists call it reactance. Jonah Berger, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania, summed it up well: People like to feel like they’re in control—in the drivers’ seat. When we try to get them to do something, they feel disempowered. Rather than feeling like they made the choice, they feel like we made it for them. So they say no or do something else, even when they might have originally been happy to go along.
- TL;DR, the author echos the conclusion made in The Simple Path to Wealth: Your Road Map to Financial Independence and a Rich, Free Life investing index fund: VTSAX + VBTLX.
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