This Years Obsession Reveals itself!

For me each year comes with it’s own discoveries and obsessions!

2015 it was Stoicism.

2016 was filled with New Age and miscellaneous woo woo books. (Eckhart Tolle, Bhagavad Gita, Spiral dynamics etc..)

2017 was the year of Buddhist teachings. (Siddhartha, Beginners Mind, Hardcore Zen, Marathon Monks etc..)

2018 looks like it’s going to be the year of Jungian psychology. An interest triggered by Dr. Jordan Peterson’s “12 rules for life” and followed by “Man and His Symbols” by the man himself. And I’m looking forward to it!

What’s your latest obsession? 😀🤔

Thoughts on: “The Expedition: A Love Story” by Bea Uusma

In 1897, three swedish scientists leaves for a polar expedition in a hydrogen balloon. Thirty years later they are found, by accident, dead on a deserted island. What happened to them and why did they die?

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The author, Bea Uusma (@bea_uusma ), gets obsessed by the subject and spends decades trying to find out what really happened. This is her account of what happened and the journey to uncover the last missing pieces of the puzzle.

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What I really loved about this book how each chapter uses very different narrative tools; diary entries from the crew, chart of data, maps, test results and research journals – This makes you feel like you are apart of an ongoing mystery investigation.

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📝 The hydrogen balloon leaked gas from the start. It was expected to last 30 days but it was useless after a day or two.

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📝 Sea charts of the Arctic region are just white. This goes on for page after page. Nothing exists there.

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📝 Eating the lever from of polar bears can lead to vitamin-a poisoning. The crew knew this and avoided it. The same goes for seals…but this they didn’t know!

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📝 After spending two weeks building a hut, the ice cracked underneath it and it had to be abandoned.

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📝 Polar bears can attack unprovoked. They can wander 100km a day on ice and a smell seals form 30km.

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⭐️ TAKEAWAY: Freud mentions 3 main sources of human suffering; The external environment, our aging body and other people. This book reminds me of the relentless and brutish traits of nature untamed. Civilization (and with it; other people.) might be a cheap prize to pay for not having death lurking around every corner.

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4/5

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Thoughts on: ”Creativity, Inc.” by Ed Catmull

Ed Catmull decided to create the first ever computer animated feature film, it took him 20 years, but with the premiere of “Toy Story” he reached he goal. Now he turned to another challenge; to create a sustainable creative work environment.

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This is not a “The 10 Things to Do to Be a Great Manager”-book, instead it tries to describe the enormous complexity and challenges that comes with creative work.

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With creative products, we usually only see the slick final product. In this case with Pixar; a heartwarming and excellently crafted animated movie. This book gives a peak behind the curtains and you will see that chaos and uncertainty rules even there. It’s a part of the process and it’s how you navigate these situations will determine your success.

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📝 When you become a manager you might not see it, but information that was previously available start to disappear. People think more about what they say when you are around and you might not catch those snarky comments about small problems that you used to.

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📝 Cultivate what in Zen is referred to as “Beginners Mind”; An attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions when studying a subject, even when studying at an advanced level, just as a beginner would do.

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📝 During the crunch to get Toy Story 2 ready: An employee forgot to drop his kid of at daycare and went right to work. During the day he suddenly realized the child was still in the car on the broiling parking lot. The child was unconscious, but was saved.

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📝 Inspired by Japanese manufacturing: Everyone was expected to report errors and stop production no matter what position you have.

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⭐️ TAKEAWAY: Create mental models that sustains you and keep your doubts at bay. “so much work, so little time to do it” is a constant problem in creative productions. “One director tells himself that he has time even when he don’t. Because he knows that from that space, he is actually in a position to solve the problem at hand.”

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This book is essential for people working on larger creative teams in the movies or games.

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4/5

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Thoughts on: “Design of Everyday Things” by Don Norman

Sometimes you need something completely different. This was a palate cleanser book for me.

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Engineers are too logical at times, while people are not. As a game developer, you something hear people complaining: “They are playing it wrong!” when you first let people outside your project group play the game for the first time.

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Are the users really at fault? Maybe we have to accept human behavior the way it is and not the way we want it to be? This is the main point of this book; when people fail to follow the products complex rigid rules, the operator are blamed for not understanding. It should be the other way around and it’s the designers job to make sure that’s the case.

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📝 Conceptual model: An explanation, usually highly simplified, of how something works.

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📝 Root-cause analysis: asking “why?” until the ultimate, fundamental cause of the activity is reached.

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📝 Semiotics: the study of signs and symbols.

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📝 Mapping: the relationship between two sets of thing. I.e lights mapped to switches.

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📝 Learned helplessness: Failing several times by accident and thereby start to doubt ones capabilities.

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📝 Skeuomorphic design: incorporating old, familiar ideas into new technologies even though the no longer play a functional role. I.e implementing “old car” sounds into electrical cars.

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📝 “All artificial things are designed.”

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⭐️ TAKEAWAY: It’s not my fault that I can’t turn on my parents oven.

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This books falls very close to being a straight up textbook, but great examples and interesting anecdotes keeps it entertaining all the way. You won’t look at a man-made object the same way again! I learned a lot from this detour into design.

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When was the last time you threw yourself into a book on an unexpected subject? 😀🤔

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4/5

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Thoughts on: “American Kingpin” by Nick Bilton

A failed physicist libertarian created the “Amazon of drugs” on the dark web, banking on the anonymity of Bitcoin and Thor (a web anonymous browser). His name was Ross Ulbricht and the site name was “the Silk Road”.

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He wanted to challenge the government led “war on drugs”, which he saw as a huge failure, and create a safe way to purchase drugs and while doing so, save tens of thousandths of people from prison sentences for minor drug abuse. The goals was to become such a powerful force that governments would understand that legalizing rather than fighting drugs was the solution.

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📝 The first items sold on the page was Ross’s homegrown magic mushrooms.

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📝 It did not take long before vendors started to sell fake passports and money. Lab supplies, forged documents, guns, spyware.

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📝 Then came the next level stuff:

Poisons – cyanide, which kills you in 7 sec was sold with a copy of “The final exit”; An e-book guide to suicide. Soon body parts, like marrow and kidneys, came online.

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📝 Ross and his partner, Variety Jones agreed that selling these things where all good as long as there where where consent between buyer and seller. Except on one point: Heroin.

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📝 Variety Jones had a problem with the Silk Road selling heroin. In prison he had seen what heroin did to people. Prisoners where drug tested randomly – but only Monday – Friday. Pot stayed in your system if you did it during the weekend but Heroin did not… so many took to heroin and nobody smoked pot. Making prisoners take a weeks worth of heroin In a couple of hours just to ride out the withdrawal symptoms for until it was Friday again. Hell!!

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💭 Thought!💭: For me It’s always fun to google the faces of the characters in books like these when you reach the end of the book. They usually look very different from what you expect!

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🔁 Follow up: I need to read about Heroin.

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Anyhow, this is excellent narrative non-fiction of a real world “Breaking Bad”-story. You get to follow the tale of the Silk Road from its inception to its shut down and its one hellauva ride!

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4/5

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Double review: “Good to Great” and “Autobiography of a Yogi”

Good to Great (GtG) lays out the result of a study that was set out to find the universal distinguishing characteristic of companies that went from good to great performance and sustained it for over fifteen years.

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Autobiography of a yogi is the is the life account of Yogananda Paramahansa; the yogi than introduced Kriya Yoga to the western world.

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How do these books have in common? Not much! But let’s do a combo review anyway!

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A reoccurring theme in Yoganandas life what that people materialize out of thin air. This did not happen to the “good to great” companies. On the contrary, a key ingredient for these companies success was to find the right people for the job; following the concept of, “first who, then what”. And “when in doubt, don’t hire”.

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And this is exactly the problem with both these books. GtG states the obvious and Yoganandan’s book is so out there that I have to check from time to time that it’s not a Harry Potter book you’re reading.

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📝 The characteristic “Level 5”-leaders of the GtG companies have a lot in common with Yoganandans guru. Humble, with a stoic resolve and a subdued ego.

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📝 “Put your best people on the biggest opportunities, not you biggest problems”.

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📝 “Continual intellectual study results in vanity and the false satisfaction of an undigested knowledge.” Yoganandans guru about about futility of mere book learning.

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📝 Autobiography of a Yogis Goodreads reviews are some of the most polarizing I have seen so far.

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⭐️ TAKEAWAY:

I need to stop being a completionist when it comes to books. It’s not that these books are bad, I just think there is better ways to spend reading time. It’s okey to throw lesser books aside for better ones. Jump from good to great so to speak. 😎

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2/5

 

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Thoughts & Notes: “Overdiagnosed” by Dr. Gilbert Welch

This time I will focus on the notes! Here we go:

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📝 Overdiagnosis occur when people get diagnosed with conditions that might never cause symptoms or death.

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📝 A overdiagnosed patient can’t be treated, only harmed.

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📝 Overdiagnosis started with the diagnosis and treatment of high blood pressure. Which have helped a lot of people.

“It marked the beginning of treatment for people without syntoms”.

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📝 As we expand treatment to people with to milder abnormalities, their potential benefit from treatment becomes progressively smaller. Severity matters!

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📝 Better equipment find more abnormalities. Famous study found that 10 percent of healthy participants have had strokes without knowing about it.

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📝 “The realities are, with this level of information, I have yet to see a normal patient.” – radiologist who scanned over ten thousand people.

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📝 Overdiagnosis also leads to impressive numbers. 1000 women are diagnosed with progressive breast cancer and 700 survive. That’s 70% survival rate. Add 500 overdignosed patients (diagnoses that never would lead to any syntoms or death). That would make the survival rate go up to 80%!

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📝 Doctors fear lawyers, Love good grades from patients and are punished for not diagnosing = overdiagnosis.

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📝 “Mammography reduce breast cancer deaths AND lead to over-diagnosis.”

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⭐️ TAKEAWAY: If you are a healthy individual with no symptoms, the responsible answer to testing might be “no”. Or you might run the risk of getting treated for an abnormality that would never cause any symptoms. Ever! An options many never consider.

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A very good book, but if your not in the medical practitioner, reading half of it will suffice to get the big picture. I love the nuanced arguments and leave this book with even more admiration for the med. profession.

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3/5

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Thoughts on: “Advice not Given” by Mark Epstein

“When we let the ego have free reign we suffer – but when we learn to let go, we are free.”

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Dr. Epstein explores where psychotherapy and Buddhism can complement each other in the persuit of mental wellness.

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The Buddha and Freud, Dr Epstein says, came to a similar conclusion. Ego is the enemy, the limiting factor in our wellbeing.

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Sure! We can control our egos to a large extent if we put in the effort, but I’m not as convinced as Dr. Epstein, that Sigmund’s Id, ego and super ego – and the “self” of buddhism are too similar – other than that the burden of societal norms increase our suffering – and that breaking free of those bonds is the key to inner

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📝 The Eightfold Path: Right view, right motivation, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.

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📝 “Death is Apart of Life. Don’t make a big deal out of it!”

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📝 Right speech goes for both the external and the internal. Catch loops of bad self-talk!

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📝 We all need to find a way to deal with the truth of impermanence. ”Change is the Only Constant.”

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📝 Freud was a badass, Buddha was a badass!

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Epstein gives you psychotherapeutic case studies and personal stories interwoven with Zen parables – All tied together neatly with each chapter representing one of the 8 fold paths of Buddhism.

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I solid read for winding down and getting over yourself!

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3/5


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Thoughts on: “Deng Xiaoping” by Alexander V. Pantsov

Deng Xiaoping led China through far reaching reforms in the post Mao era and is often credited as the force behind China’s spectacular economic growth. The expansion of the Chinese market and opening up the country to international trade is a part of his legacy, but also less glamorous deeds, such as the massacre on Tiananmen Square.

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This book is thick, meticulously detailed and unfortunately rather boring. I don’t think it’s the authors fault, rather its just the fact that Dengs life is not that exciting.

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The best parts of the books was the descriptions of how the communist party wanted to open up China and introduce elements from market economy within a socialist framework.

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I love the rationalizations used when the Communist party discussed if they where to allow small private businesses in China;

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Someone mentioned that Marxs “Das Capital” tells the story of a capitalist who exploited 8 workers.

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They argued: “If Marx spoke only of precisely 8, then the hiring of seven won’t make one a capitalist. And then if the boss also is working, what kind of possible capitalism could this be?” Going with this interpretation of Marx, the Communist party open the door for small businesses of maximum 7 employees.

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📝 “It doesn’t matter if the cat is back or yellow as long as it catches mice” 🐭 🐱 this famous quote is said to be coined by Deng.

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📝 “Self criticism” sessions: a interesting concept where politicians who have fallen out of favor have to make a detailed statements of ideological errors and affirming their renewed belief in the Party line.

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📝 Family contract system: farmers were given by the government a quota of goods to produce. What food they grew beyond the quota was sold in the free market at unregulated prices. This system became a great success and increased the standard of living In the 1980s.

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📝 Deng Xiaoping was involved in the decision behind the Tiananmen Square Massacre where hundreds of protesters where killed.

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Read it if you love Chinese politics & history. Otherwise a Wikipedia article on Deng will suffice.

 

 

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Thoughts on: “Fables of Fortune” by Richard Watts

“Fable of Fortune – What rich people have that you don’t want.”

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Richard Watts has worked as a legal counsel for the super rich for many years. In his book he shares stories for this hidden world, showing that it might not be all roses after all.

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This is not a psychological study of the wealthy as much as it’s a collection of stories of the often sad faiths of the super rich.

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Who are the super rich? Forbes draws the line when you have a net worth of over 30 mil. That’s not the super rich Watts talks about. He is talking about people worth over a $100 million, the people that never ever have to ask themselves, “Can I afford this?”.

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📝 “A healthy adult will not mature without exposure to difficulty and pain”

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📝 Before Petrov became rich, he was a man of simple means and: “He worked most of his life to get ahead, and in doing so he unintentionally made several generations of Petrovs unhappy, caused divorces, fostered broken relationships between siblings, and left his wife to die frustrated and unappreciated.”

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📝 “Wealth is like snorting cocaine. It seems fun and exciting at first; the rush is addictive. But eventually you can’t recognize when you are high; you become aware of the drug only when you don’t have it. Each time you need a little bit more to feel the same ecstasy”.

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📝 the 1st generation of wealth is usually hardworking and focused. The 2nd entitled. The 3rd generation stands no chance, they have no sense of value of wealth. They have no connection to the sacrifices that made their lifestyles possible.

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⭐️ TAKEAWAY: “The wealthiest person is not who has the most, but who needs the least.”

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The book is quick read and it’s hard to put it down because it’s told through absurd and often sad stories about the lives of the haves. But it’s lacks in depth and nuance, and has a uncomfortable tabloid feel to it as you get to indulge in divorce, greed and misfortunes of the rich and famous.

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3/5

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