Bob's Books

Why this book: Widely read by SEAL candidates and includes great advice for life for anyone, and especially for young men aspiring to be SEALs. I lead a reading group for SEAL candidates and we agreed on this book.

Summary in 3 sentences:  There is only one way to getting better at anything: Discipline. There are no easy ways, no hacks – getting better means having the discipline of focus and daily practice, and with it you can become better, stronger, smarter, faster, healthier and it will set you free.  He also addresses his philosophy on where and how to apply discipline in physical training, diet and nutrition, sleep, martial arts, humor, death, compromise, negative talk, and more – it is a compendium of Jocko’s recipe to become and be a warrior.

My impressions:  This was my second time reading this book and I enjoyed it and learned from it again. Reflecting its author, this book is direct, intense, and unpretentious.  It is a high-testosterone, aggressive, uncompromising,  no-nonsense prescription for developing and maintaining a warrior mindset. It is written in brief, simple, almost aphoristic style – two page chapters that grab you by the throat, tell you to quit whining and get on with it.  Develop and strengthen your Will. Develop and strengthen your self-discipline.  Embody a positive, aggressive attitude, with no apologies, and no excuses.

Though I think he misses some important nuances, I love it.  It is Aristotle’s prescription for erring in the direction where you are weakest in order to find that “golden mean” of virtue that works for you, between excess and deficiency. I’m not sure Jocko has a “golden mean” and he certainly doesn’t spend time defining it in this book – this is a prescriprion for how to stay focused and aggressively pursuing your own best self, always, every day, without pause, without question, without apology.

It It is a solid Stoic philosophy of total responsibility, no excuses – it doesn’t matter what got you here, it only matters what you do now.   Don’t wonder, don’t wring your hands, and go back and forth.  Prioritize and act.  You choose, you own it.  It is Nike’s “Just Do It” on steroids.

Though he does hint at nuance and judgment in this book, these are qualities that really only come with experience.  His default is “Just Go For It!”  In my discussion with young SEAL candidates, I suggested that this is the formula to get ready to get thru SEAL training, and I recommended that they keep a copy by their bed and read a piece of it every night, like Jim Stockdale did with Epictetus’s  Enchiridion.

Notes on a few of the short chapters in Discipline Equals Freedom:

In “Stress” he tells us to gain perspective from what others have gone through before us, and if the stress is something you can’t control, embrace it. You might as well.   Use the stress to make you a better you. 

In “Compromise“, he notes that we do have to compromise when working with other people – find common ground.  But with yourself, hold the line on your values your goals, the things that are important to you.

In “Default Aggressive” he advocates for an always positive and aggressive stance – a mental attitude with the will to win, succeed, a focus on winning, fighting smart to win.

In  “The Darkness” he admonishes us to know it will come, but don’t let it consume us.  Just keep fighting.  Feed your Will and determination.

In “Remain Vigilant” he warns us to fight the tendency to back off, to cut corners, to slack off our program, back off from our goals. Hold the Line he says, on the seemingly insignificant little things that shouldn’t matter, but do.

In  “Good” he describes the Growth Mindset approach to disappointment and disaster. When you get the flat tire, you don’t get the promotion, you get turned down for something you have set you heart on – Good.  That opens up new opportunities to develop resilience, be creative in dealing with the setback, learn, and to work harder.

In “Fear”  he says it is normal, but we should “step aggressively toward your fear-that is the step into bravery.” Be aggressive.

In “Fear of Failure” he says we should use that fear to work harder, plan better, to make success more likely.  BUT we should be horrified at the possibility of sitting on the sidelines and not taking risk, not doing anything.  THAT should be the greatest fear.

In  “Weakness,” he admits to many weaknesses, and he accepts that, but uses them to motivate him to strive to be a little less weak, a little stronger every day.

In “Staying Motivated” he tells us that motivation is fickle – don’t count on it – it is over-rated.  Count on Discipline – make yourself do what you know you need to do, what you have chosen to do it – whether you feel like it or not!

In “Death”  he says let us cry no more…let us not dwell on it. Instead let us laugh and love, and let us embrace life…let us live for those who live no more, let us live to honor them.   

In “Regret” he reminds us that the most important thing to learn from regret is that we have so much to learn and that the only thing valuable in regret is the lesson you learned.  So learn and move on.

In “Nature vs Nurture” Jocko says it is neither. Doesn’t matter.  What matters is what you choose.   Life is about choice.

In “Destroyer Mode” (I particularly liked this chapter) he says use both emotion AND reason.  When one fails you , you need to rely on the other.  Fight weak emotions with the power of logic; fight the weaknesses of logic with the power of emotion. 

In “Me vs Me” he talks about the battle within himself to become as good as he can be.  Becoming as good as you can be doesn’t happen in a stadium or at an awards ceremony. It happens in the heart – every day, in the darkness of the early morning.   

In “Laughter Wins,”  he reminds us that life is tough, but it gets a lot easier when you are laughing at it.  Suffering and hardship can’t stand it when you laugh – so laugh at them all!

The book concludes with additional chapters with specific advice on building the home gym, where and how to train, martial arts, diet and fasting, how to get started, and advice for how to work out for beginners, intermediate, and advanced athletes. 

I like his conclusion.    He tells us: Don’t just read, listen, watch, study, plan, talk, think, dream – none of that matters. What matters is what you DO.  So DO it!

My criticisms – I agree with about 90% of Jocko’s approach, but I am willing to give myself a bit more slack – which, according to his philosophy, is caving in to weakness.  But I am also not so focused on being among the hardest core warriors in the world.  I listen to my body and sometimes cave into it.

I find joy and pleasure in the occasional creme filled donut, chocolate chip cookie, or piece of key-lime pie. Jocko describes these as poison, and eating them a sign of weakness that one must fight to overcome.  Got it – but I also think there are things to be savored, that may not be good for us in excess, but yes, occasionally….I’ve also heard that it’s harder to be moderate than to be extreme – enjoying things in moderation requires constant decisions, whereas the  extreme all-or-nothing decision is made only once.

That said, I believe his message is very powerful and his model is worth considering and adapting to one’s own needs and ambitions.  As he says, it is a recipe for becoming faster, stronger, smarter, better – and there is no doubt: Discipline does equal freedom when it means that with discipline and will, we can decide and then do – whatever we want.

Why this book: Strongly recommended to me by my friends Auny, Di, and Liz.  Pulitzer Prize winner 2019.  A very different theme that peaked my curiosity.

Summary in 3 sentences: The book begins with a series of eight short-story biographies of very different people,  whose lives then converge in unexpected ways over the rest of the book.    The common theme that brings these people’s lives together is trees, and the different ways in which each of them came to realize the importance of trees to their own well-being and the well-being of the planet.   There is a story here, but in the drama that unfolds throughout the book, we learn how trees communicate with each other and other organisms, how they influence our environments, and how in industrial society, humans have become alienated from our natural environment and how that is subtly, slowly, insidiously, but definitely hurting ALL of us – which includes all of Life.

My impressions: An amazing book!  Unlike anything I recall ever having read – regarding message, story, structure, and style.  As I got into the book, early on I realized that this is indeed a classic.  It got a bit un-tidy at the end, and it didn’t wrap up with a bow on it.  But as clear-sighted as the author clearly is, I assume that was intentional – life and nature can be complicated and untidy, and it remains to be seen whether we as a civilization will find a connection to the larger nature we are part of, or remain tragically disconnected from the rest of life on this planet.   The stories in this novel are very human, but the context  is very much about LIFE  – of trees, plants, animals insects, fungi – nature – and where we humans fit into a much larger eco-system.

The first section of the book is entitled “Roots” and we are treated to the introductory background biographies, of the eight very different people who we will read about in the rest of the book. Each person gets his/her own chapter.   Thes are eight very different people who at the outset, are not connected in any social way.: A Vietnam war veteran, a Chinese immigrant, an Indian immigrant, a woman botanist, a yuppie couple in the midwest, a party- girl in a midwestern college, a geeky young high school kid trying to get into college.  These are fascinating short stories  in their own right, and they tee-up the rest of the book.

The second section of The Overstory is entitled “Trunk,” and here is where we find the meat of the book.  In this section, we watch the the slow connecting of the  lives of those very different people progress from where their stories had left off in Roots.  The paths of these characters begin to converge in unexpected ways – in ways that remind one of how organically and seemingly without structure, a forest can evolve.   The common theme that brings these people together and connects their lives is trees. Yes, trees – how they interact with each other and their environment.  And the insight that each of the characters has, earlier or later, to greater or lesser degree,  that they as individuals and we as humans are connected to and have more to learn from trees than they had previously realized.

The organic and seemingly haphazard connections between these seemingly unconnected people create a tapestry similar to the connections that happen within an organically evolving forest.  This book takes that simple little bromide – “We are all connected” – to a much deeper and more profound level.

An important part of the drama is the convergence of several of the characters in the movement to save the old-growth redwood forest in the Northwest of the United States. Though a few of them deliberately become activists in this movement, others are drawn in almost inadvertently and are won over to the importance of saving these ancient trees from being cleared by a rather rapacious logging company.  Then after several rather dramatic confrontations with industrial society,  the individuals go their separate ways, significantly transformed by their experience.

And meanwhile, on the periphery, one of the characters represents Richard Powers’ own fascination with AI and the movement that gives increasing priority to a rich “virtual” life.  One of the characters becomes a mega-successful silicon valley computer gaming executive whose goal is to create a computer game that as closely as possible simulates life and living in all its complexity.   In fact it seems that this wheel chair-bound genius seeks to develop a computer “game” that include so many of life’s variables and becomes so “real” to those who play it, that it can eventually become a quasi-legitimate substitute for the actual lived experience it simulates.  As his computer game integrates more and more of the pieces of our world, our genius gamer achieves a type of spiritual awakening regarding the connectedness that trees have with each other, with humans, and with all of life.   The pursuit of one (impossible) holy grail led him to another greater insight –   similar to the wisdom attained by some medieval alchemists.

There are also some semi-mystical pieces to this story, as at least two of the characters are driven by visions and spirit-beings that seem to direct their actions, and advise them on how to deal with crises.  This would seem to reinforce Roberts’ point that there is a dimension of reality that most of us don’t see or understand, levels of communication that are below our normal consciousness, and that indeed are part of an “unseen order of things.” These strange, paranormal experiences of some of his characters are not dissimilar to the hard-to-believe communication he describes between trees, and between trees and other living organisms, including humans – well below the consciousness of most of us.

The book concludes with a mixed message.  Our civilization continues to march into the future along the path of increasing growth and industrialization that got us here – with little understanding of the greater natural world of which we are a part.  On the more positive side,  the characters portrayed in The Overstory represent those who have had the important epiphany that we live in the midst of a much more interconnected eco-system that impacts us in ways the most of us can hardly imagine.

An amazing book, beautifully written with a message that should be taken seriously – and when we do, it is – should be – life changing.

Some quotes that struck me while reading the book. Page numbers from the Norton & Co paperback edition.

p 15. But for a moment each spring, the pale green catkins and cream-colored flowers put thoughts into Frank Jr’s head, thoughts he doesn’t know how to have….His pointless photographic ritual gives Frank Jr’s life a blind purpose that even farming cannot give.

p. 54 Patterns reveal themselves as he watches (the ants), and they’re wild.  Nobody’s in charge of the mass mobilization, that much seems clear. Yet they port the sticky food back to the nest in the most coordinated way. Plans in the absence of any planner. Paths in the absence of a surveyor…. The colony possesses something; Adam doesn’t know what to call it. Purpose. Will. A kind of awareness – something so different from human intelligence that intelligence thinks it’s nothing.

p. 61 The book shows how so-called homo-sapiens fail at even the simplest logic problems.  But they’re fast and fantastic at figuring out who’s in and who’s out, who’s up and who’s down, who should be heaped with praise and who must be punished without mercy.  Ability to execute simple acts of reason?  Feeble.  Skill at herding each other? Utterly, endlessly brilliant.

p. 61 Humans carry around legacy behaviors and biases, jerry-rigged holdovers from earlier stages of evolution that follow their own obsolete rules.  What seems like erratic irrational choices are, in fact, strategies created long ago for solving other kinds of problems.  We’re all trapped in the bodies of sly, social-climbing opportunist shaped to survive the savanna by policing each other.

p. 84 In fact, it’s Douggie’s growing conviction that the greatest flaw of the species is its overwhelming tendency to mistake agreement for truth.

p. 110 He rolls from planter to planter, touching the beings, smelling them, listening to their rustles.  They have come from hot islands and desiccated outback, from remote valleys in Central Asia, breached only recently. Dove tree, jacaranda, desert spoon, camphor tree, flame tree, empress tree, kurrajong, red mulberry; unearthly life, waiting to waylay him in this courtyard while he was searching for them on distant planets.  He touches their bark and feels, just beneath their skins, the teeming assemblies of cells, like whole planetary civilizations, pulse and hum.

p. 115 As certain as weather coming from the west, the things people know for sure will change.  There is no knowing for a fact.  The only dependable things are humility and looking.

p. 122 A secret suspicion sets her apart from the others. She’s sure, on no evidence whatsoever, that trees area social creatures.  It’s obvious to her: motionless things that grow in mass mixed communities must have evolved ways to synchronize with one another.  Nature knows few loner trees.  But the belief leaves her marooned.

p. 138  A person has only to look, to see that the dead logs are far more alive than living ones.  But the senses never have amuch chance, against the power of doctrine.

p. 162  She must still discover that myths are basic truths twisted into mnemonics, instructions posted from the past, memories waiting to become predictions.

p. 183  The smell grips her brain stem until she and the dead man are fishing side by  side again under the pine shade where the fish hide, in the soul’s innermost national park.

p. 244 This man tried to save her pines. Put his body between the saws and the trees. She wouldn’t  be out here, even in this endangered paradise, without him. But for her money, he’s more than a little wacked. His rangy gameness for anything scares her. The twinkle he fixes on the forest ahead has that look of the not entirely housebroken. His head swivels, marveling at the crowd, happy as a puppy to be let back in the house.

p. 282  A dead tree is an infinite hotel.

p. 332 At the corner he leans on a streetlight.  A fact struggles to escape him, one he has felt for a long time but has never been able to formulate. Almost every part of need is created by a reflex, phantasmal, and democratic committee whose job is to turn one season’s necessities into the next’s yard sales.  He stumbles on  into the park full of people dealing in excitement and night. The air stinks a little of Wet-Naps, weed, and sex.  Hunger everywhere, and the only food is salt.

p. 374  We are not, one of Adam’s papers proves, wired to see slow, background change, when something bright and colorful is waving in our faces.

p. 382-3 The books share a core so obvious it passes for given. Every one imagines that fear and anger, violence and desire, rage laced with the surprise capacity to forgive – character – is all that matters in the end. It’s a child’s creed, of course, just one small step up from the belief that the Creator of the Universe would care to dole out sentences like a judge in federal court.  To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.

p. 386 The pen moves; the ideas form, as if by spirit hand. Something shines out, a truth so self-evident that the words dictate themselves. We’re cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling.  And what Douglas Pavlicek wants to know is why this is so easy to see when you’re by yourself in a cabin on a hillside, and almost impossible to believe once you step out of the house and join several billion folks doubling down on the status quo.

p. 422 Wealth needs fences. But fences need wood. Nothing left on the continent even hints at what has gone. All replaced now, by thousands of miles of continuous backyards and farms with thin lines of second growth between them. Still, the soil remembers, for a little while longer, the vanished woods and the progress that unmade them. And the soil’s memory feeds their backyard pine.

p. 423   No one sees trees. We see fruit, we see nuts, we see wood, we see shade. We see ornaments of pretty fall foliage. Obstacles blocking the road or wrecking the ski slope.  Dark, threatening places that must be cleared. We see branches about to crush our roof. We see a cash crop.  But trees  – trees are invisible.  

p. 424 Trees know when we’re close by.  The chemistry of their roots and the perfumes their leaves pump out change when we’re near….When you feel good after a walk in the woods, it may be that certain species are bribing you. So many wonder drugs have come from trees, and we haven’t yet scratched the surface of the offerings.  Trees have long been trying to reach us.  But they speak on frequencies too low for people to hear.  

p. 456 These people need dreams of technological breakthrough. Some new way to pulp poplar into paper while burning slightly fewer hydrocarbons. Some genetically altered cash crop that will build better houses and lift the world’s poor from misery. The home repair they want is just a slightly less wasteful demolition. She could tell them about a simple machine needing no fuel and little maintenance, one that steadily sequesters carbon, enriches the soil, cools the ground, scrubs the air, and scales easily to any size. A tech that copies itself and even drops food for free. A device so beautiful it’s the stuff of poems.  If forests were patentable, she’d get an ovation.

Why this Book: Strongly recommended by my friend Jay Hennessey and also a selection by the Next Big Idea Club to which I belong.  After Jay recommended it, I realized the NBI club had already sent me a copy – a sufficient confluence of events (synchronicity) to get me started. Glad I did.

Summary in 3 Sentences: SO many big ideas in this book, but the main point is that in order to make the best decisions in any context, one needs a broad range of experience, including experience OUTSIDE the specific problem area one is considering.  Epstein doesn’t dismiss specialists, but insists that specialists need to get out of their specialty for at least  two reasons: First, to best apply their specialist knowledge to the broader world, and second, to learn from the broader world lessons that may apply to their area of specialty.  He also provides insights from this theme against specializing early – he recommends playing the field and trying several possibilities before deciding on a life’s profession.

My Impressions:  One of the most interesting and insightful leadership, self-development books I’ve read in recent memory.  I had lots of Ah Ha! moments in reading this book, as Epstein pointed out trends and phenomena that I had observed with implications that I had never considered.   The fact that Range changed Malcolm Gladwell’s mind, or at least his perspective on his “10,000” hours rule is telling – not only about the cogency of his arguments against over-specialization, but also about Gladwell’s openness to have his mind changed. Gladwell and Epstein debated this book in public, and Gladwell’s mind was changed, and he strongly endorses this book and its message.

Epstein challenges conventional wisdom on the advantages of getting a head start in life, specializing early, the value of experts, the value of consistent “block” training.  He also argues for the advantages of “desirable difficulties” in training and learning, how expertise can inhibit creativity and so on.

Epstein  doesn’t dispute that we need specialists or experts, but argues that to deal with complex problems in the “wicked world” (complex, unpredictable, uncertain rules,) the specialists must serve the generalists who will have a much broader and wiser perspective.  He argues that the very best generalists are those who were once specialists but then broadened their knowledge and continued to feed their curiosity, explored other unrelated areas and became generalists.  Epstein argues we need both, but the big decisions need to be made by generalists. And this book tells you why.

I got this book through the Next Big Idea club which publishes a short pamphlet with each book they send.  Below is a very brief summary of the key points included in the pamphlet that came with Range.  They listed 9 big ideas in Range:

1. The Cult of the Headstart points to how specializing early may not lead to the best results in the long run.  In the short run, yes, but overtime, usually not.   Research has showed that people who had a broad general education more often find what they love to do over the long run and succeed at it better than those who specialize early.  This is a theme that he builds on throughout the book.  People who start out highly invested in a specific path early, change paths much more often than those who try a number of paths before picking the one they will invest in for the long term.  Specializing early, before one truly knows oneself, can be a trap.
2. Winners Quit and Quitters Win is a challenge to people who take Angela Duckworth’s Grit too seriously.  In fact one of the chapter titles is “The trouble with too much Grit”.  This big idea is not new.  Fail fast, fail often – while trying to find that “Match Quality” between what you love and what you do.   This message echos the message in You Are Awesome – “lose more to win more.”
3. It’s a Wicked World distinguishes between “kind” learning environments, and “wicked” learning environments.  “Kind” environments are those with clear rules, similar patterns, predictable challenges, consequences of decisions are readily apparent.  He says that a lot of games or sports are “kind” learning environments – such as chess and golf.  They lend themselves to “deliberate practice.”  In “wicked” environments, the rules aren’t clear, or may change, there are no obvious patterns, and the consequences of decisions may not be apparent for quite some time, and immediate feedback may be inaccurate.   Specialists are most useful in “kind” environments, which are predictable and pretty well understood. Generalists who have a wide variety of experience in different contexts will often be most successful in “wicked” environments. From the pamphlet, “….learning in a wide variety of contexts will prepare you for the wicked environment, where the ability to learn without the benefit of prior experienced is critical.”
4. Cognitive Flexibility comes from an ability to make connections across domains – to take lessons from one context and apply them in a very different context.   He offers a number of examples of how those with deep knowledge in a narrow area are often at a loss when it comes to understanding and applying conceptual schemes in areas beyond their own experience or expertise.
5. The Power of Analogies is highlighted as another strength of the generalist to compare and see common lessons in two very different situations.  Similarities in structure between two very different situations that are not immediately apparent because on the surface they appear very different.  Seeing these similarities requires  “cognitive flexibility” and a broader scope of knowledge and experience than the expert specialist will usually have. He gives an example of how a military strategy helped doctors find the right treatment for a specific cancer problem.
6. He has a chapter entitled “Learning to Drop your familiar tools” which makes the point again, how humans cling to what they know and how they are accustomed to  doing things.  He gives numerous examples of how people have held on to their well-entrenched and well-trained methods, often at great cost when the environment has changed.  He advocates getting used to doing familiar tasks with different tools, and changing the familiar tasks to force learners to ditch familiar tools and adjust to the situation. This section reminded me of the old saw, “Necessity is the mother of invention” – in that when we take away the old tools,  we often come up with new and better ones.
7. Ditch your long term plans. This lesson emphasizes the point that we often make long term plans when we don’t have enough information, and really don’t know ourselves or what we want.  He gives the example of Frances Hasselbein who kept getting distracted from her long term plans by doing other things that really appealed to her,  and ended up being one of the most successful non-profit CEOs in America in the 20th century.  His point is that we learn about who we are and what we like by choosing to learn from each endeavor – and that our long term plans made when we are younger, often will not fit the person we become from new experiences.  Simple truth:  “We learn who we are by doing, not simply by thinking.”
8. Making Learning Difficult enhances learning. This is a lesson from Make it Stick, by Brown, Roediger et al about how struggling to learn, enhances long term learning and retention, whereas easy learning, enhances short term learning and retention.  Here again, he argues against “block learning” – intense and focused deliberate practice – and instead argues for “interleaving” – learning spread out over time, coming back to what was learned before and testing it under different circumstances.  He talks about the “generation effect” in which we struggle to find the answer and how that is much more effective for long term retention of what was learned than when the answer is readily available.
9. His argument for the Outsider Advantage in solving wicked problems is a warning against experts.  Experts and specialists have focused their study and attention on what they know and how conventional wisdom in their field has directed them.  That focus creates a set of blinders that the outsider doesn’t have.  Epstein gives a number of examples of how outsiders with an unbiased curiosity have asked questions that experts weren’t asking, have seen problems that experts didn’t see, and found solutions to those problems that experts often couldn’t envision.  His message:  Don’t overly trust the experts.  A curious and thoughtful outsider may have insights that the expert specialists are not trained to see.  And my own experience is that the designation “expert” can bring with it a bit of arrogance and closed mindedness that is difficult to overcome.

Quotes from the book – not exact, but a good review for me:  (page numbers from Riverhead Books hardback edition 2019)

P 21 In wicked domains the rules of the game are often unclear or incomplete, there may or may not be repetitive patterns or they many not be obvious, and feedback is often delayed, inaccurate, or both.

22 Marvec’s paradox: machines and humans frequently have opposite strengths and weaknesses.

P. 25 Chunking helps explain instances of apparently miraculous, domain specific memory, from musicians playing long pieces by heart to quarterbacks recognizing patterns of players in a split second and making a decision to throw.

P. 29  The bigger the picture, the more unique the potential human contribution.  Our greatest strength is the exact opposite of narrow specialization.  It is the ability to integrate broadly.

P. 33 But when the rules are altered just slightly, it makes experts appear to have traded flexibility for narrow skill.  …example:  When the order of play was altered experts had a more difficult time adapting to new rules than did non-experts.  – this is “cognitive entrenchment.”

P. 33 The scientist inducted into the highest national academies are much more likely to have avocations outside of their vocation.  And those who have won the Nobel Prize are more likely still.  The most successful experts also belong to the wider world.  Creative achievers tend to have broad interests. “this breadth often supports insights that cannot be attributed to domain specific expertise alone.”

P. 47 so long as they remain in the desert, the nomad is a genius.  …”The ability to freely shift from one category to another, is one of the chief characteristics of ‘abstract thinking.’

P. 53 Like chess masters and firefighters, premodern villagers relied on things being the same tomorrow as they were yesterday. They were extremely well prepared for what they had experienced before, and extremely poorly equipped for everything else.  …And that is what a rapidly changing, wicked world demands – conceptual reasoning skill that can connect new ideas and work across contexts.  …The ability to apply knowledge broadly comes from broad training.

P. 88 Struggling to retrieve information primes the brain for subsequent learning, even when the retrieval itself is unsuccessful.  The struggle is real, and really useful .  “like life, Kornell said “retrieval is all about the journey.”

P. 89 For a given amount of material, learning is most efficient in the long run when it is really inefficient in the short run.  If you are doing too well when you test yourself, the simple antidote is to wait longer before practicing the same material again, to that the test will be more difficult when you do. Furstration is not a sign you are not learning, but ease is.

P. 91 the professors who caused short-term struggle but long -term gains were facilitating ”deep Learning” by making connections.

P. 92 “Desirable difficulties.” “ Above all, the most basic message is that teachers and student must avoid interpreting current performance as learning.  Good performane on a test during the learning process can indicate mastery, but learners and teachers neeed to be aware that such performanc will often index, instead, fast but fleeting progress.”

P. 94 Practicing the same thing repeatedly, each problem employing the same procedure is “blocked” practice.  It leads to excellent immediate performance, but for knowledge to be flexible, it should be learned under varied conditions, an approach called varied or mixed practice, or to researtchers, “interleaving.”  Interleaving has been shown to improve inductive reasoning.

P. 95 The feeling of learning it turns out is based on before your eyes progress, while deep learning is not.” When your intuition says block, you should probably interleave.”   Interleaving is a desireable difficulty that frequently holds for both physical and mental skills.

P. 94  Deisrable difficulties slow down learning and make performance suffer in the short term.  That can be a problem because we all reflexicvely assess our progress by how we are doing right now.  .

P. 97  A head start comes fast, but deep learning is slow.  Learning deeply means learning slowly.  The cult of the head start fails the learners it seeks to serve.

P. 98 “Far Transfer” – When a knowledge structure is so flexible that it can be applied effectively even in new domains or extremely novel situations.

P. 102  Deep alnalogical thinking is the practice of recognizing conceptual similarities in multiple domains or scenarios that may seem to have little in common on the surface.    Analogical thinking takes the new and makes it familiar, or takes the familiar and puts it in a new light and allows humans to reason through prooblems they have never seen in unfamiliar contexts.

P. 104  A kind world is based on repeating patterns.  It’s perfectly fine if you stay in the same village or the same savannah all your life. The current world is not so kind; it requires thinking that cannot fall back on previous experience.

P. 110 Focusing narrowly on many fine details specific to a problem at hand feels like the exact right thing to do, when it is often exactly wrong.

P 112 Evaluating an array of options BEFORE letting intuition reign is a trick for the wicked world.  …. Just being reminded to analogize widely made the business students more creative.

P. 113 Like the venture capitalists, their intuition was to use too few analogies and to rely on those that were the most superficially similar.  “That’s usually exactly the wrong way to go about it,  regardless of what you’re using analogy for.”

P.115 An interdisciplinary team of scientists came to a pretty simple conclusion:  Successful problem solvers are more able to determine the deep structure of a problem before they proceed to match a strategy to it…. For the best performers, problem solving begins with the typing of the problem… a problem well-stated is half solved.

p. 128 Match quality is a term economists use to describe the degree of fit between the work someone does and who they are – their abilities and proclivities.

P. 129 If they sampled early, and focused later, they entered the job market with fewer domain specific skills, but a greater sense of the type of work that fit their abilities and inclinations

P 130  Learning stuff was less important than learning about oneself.  Exploration is not just a whimsical luxury of education; it is a central benefit.

P 136 Seth Godin disparages the idea that quitters never win – he argues that winners quit fast and often when they detect that a plan is not the best fit, and do not feel bad about it.  ….knowing when to quit is such a big strategic advantage that every single person, before undertaking an endeavor, should enumerate conditions under which they should quit.  The important trick he said, is staying attuned to whether switching is simply a failure of perseverance, or astute recognition that better matches are available.

P. 143 Finding a goal with high match quality in the first place is the greater challenge, and persistence for the sake of persistence can get in the way.

P 157 (chapter title:  flirting with your possible selves.)  Adults tend to become more agreeable, more conscientious, more emotionally stable, and less neurotic with age, but less open to experience.

P 161 We learn who we are only by living, and not before…..We maximize match quality throughout life by sampling activities, social groups, contexts, jobs, careers, and then reflecting and adjusting our personal narratives.  And repeat…..  precisely the opposite of a vast marketing crusade that assures customers that they can alight on their perfect matches via introspection alone.   Ibarra, in a clever inversion of a hallowed axiom,  “First act.. then think… We discover the possibilities by doing, by trying new activities and building new networks, finding new role models.”  We learn who we are in practice, not in theory.

p. 163  “ Who do I really want to become?”  It is better to be a scientist of yourself, asking smaller questions that can actually be tested – “Which among my various possible selves should I start to explore now?  How can I do that?”  Be a flirt with your possible selves.   “Test and learn,” Ibarra told me, “not plan and implement.”

p. 163  You’re supposed to be bound by some plan you made early on. The computer world has a name for this: “premature optimization”…Instead of working back from a goal, we should work forward from promising situations.  This is what most successful people actually do anyway.,

p173  Bingham calls it “outside-in” thinking:  Finding solutions in experiences far outside of focused training for the problem itself. History is littered with world-changing examples.

p. 177  Einstellung Effekt – the tendency of problem solvers to employ only familiar methods, even if better ones are available.

p. 178  Our research shows that a domain-based solution is often inferior. Big innovation most often happens when an outsider who may be far way from the surface of the problem reframes the problem in a way that unlocks the solution.

p. 179. “Knowledge is a double edged sword.  It allows you to do some things, but it also makes you blind to other things that you could do. “

p. 181 Sometimes the home field can be so constrained that a curious outsider is truly the only one who can see the solution.

p. 193  Lateral thinking is a term coined in the 1960s for the re-imagining of information in new contexts, including the drawing together of seemingly disparate concepts or domains that can give old ideas new uses.

p. 198 There is, to be sure, no comprehensive theory of creativity.  But there is a well-documented tendency to consider only familiar uses for objects, an instinct known as functional fixedness.

p. 200-201. We need both hyper-specialists and lateral thinking generalists… both frogs in the swamp and visionary birds.  The work is both broad and deep.

p. 210 Individuals are capable of more creative integration of diverse experiences than teams are.

p. 210 In kind environments, where the goal is to re-create prior performance with as little deviation as possible, teams of specialists work superbly.

p. 213 Facing kind problems, narrow specialization can be remarkably efficient.  The problem is that we often expect the hyper-specialists, because of their expertise in a narrow area, to magically be able to extend their skill to wicked problems.  The results can be disastrous.

p. 221  The narrow-view hedgehogs, who “know one big thing,: and the integrator foxes, who know many little things….Hedgehog experts were deep but narrow…The foxes, meanwhile, “draw from an eclectic array of traditions, and accept ambiguity and contradiction,..Where hedgehogs represented narrowness, foxes ranged outside a single discipline or theory and embodied breadth.

p. 221 Incredibly, the hedgehogs performed especially poorly on long-term predictions within their domain of expertise. They actually got worse the more information they had to work with  –  the more they were able to fit any story to their world view.

p. 225  Often if you’re too much of an insider (subject matter expert) it’s hard to get good perspective….Narrow experts are an invaluable resource, but you have to understand that they may have blinders on.

p. 227 A hallmark of interactions on the best teams is what psychologist Jonathan Baron termed “active open-mindedness.”

p. 246-7  Weick: “It is the very unwillingness of people to drop their tools that turns some of these dramas into tragedies.”…Experienced groups became rigid under pressure and regress to what why know best.

p. 248  Dropping familiar tools is particularly difficult for experienced professionals who rely on over-learned behavior. That is, they have done the same thing in response to the same challenges over and over until the behavior has become so automatic that they no longer even recognize it as a situation-specific tool.

p. 248  Overlearned behavior. That is they have done the same thing in response to the same challenges over and over until the behavior has become so automatic that they no longer even recognize it as  situaption-specific tool.

p. 248  “Hunches held lightly”  should be weighed against the need for data. Data is important, but hunches are not to be ignored (consistent with Daniel Kahneman’s  Thinking Fast and Slow)

p. 249 When you don’t have any data, you have to use reason.

p. 255 Congruence is a social science term for cultural “fit” among an institution’s components -values, goals, vision, self-concepts, and leadership styles – this is a long time pillar of organizational theory.

p. 255 Congruent institutions did have an easier time classifying the culture when asked, but there was no impact at all on performance….the most effective leaders and organization had range; they were, in effect, paradoxical.  They could be demanding and nurturing, orderly and entrepreneurial, even hierarchical and individualistic, all at once.  A level of ambiguity, it seemed, was not harmful.

p 257  The experiments showed that an effective problem-solving culture was one that balanced standard practice –  whatever it happened to be – with forces that pushed in the opposite direction…. The trick was expanding the organization’s range by identifying the dominant culture, and then diversifying it by pushing in the opposite direction.

p. 258 A paper written on the Challenger disaster had the subtitle:  “Balancing the Risks of Mindless Conformity with Reckless Deviation.”

p. 259  Effective leaders go looking for problems, hunches, and bad news, even rewarding those who exposed problems.

p. 260  Strongly congruent cultures often fail to learn.

p. 262  The chain of communication has to be informal, completely different from the chain of command.

p. 264 This difference between “chain of communication” and “chain of command” represents a healthy cross-pressure.  (One leader said) “I warned them that I’m going to communicate with all levels of the organization down to the shop floor, and you can’t feel suspicious or paranoid about that.”

p.273 An enthusiastic, even childish, playful streak is a recurring theme in research on creative thinkers.  

p. 275  He arrived in a workspace that treated mental meandering as a competitive advantage, not a pest to be exterminated in the name of efficiency….That kind of protection from the cult of the head start is increasingly rare (though) at some point or other, we all specialize to one degree or another.

p. 278 He compared the current system to a medieval guild, designed to maintain and protect specialized skills and trades….Training and professional incentives are aligning to accelerate specialization, creating intellectual archipelagos.  

p. 280  New collaborations allow creators “to take ideas that are conventions in one area and bring them into a new area, where they’re suddenly seen as invention,” … Human creativity is basically an “import/export business of ideas.”

p. 281  Living/working overseas creates “arbitrage” opportunities, the chance to take an idea from one market and bring it to another where it is more rare and valued – to bring new skills to an old problem, or a new problem to old skills. 

p. 282 Casadevall:  “I always advise my people to read outside their field, everyday something. And most people say, ‘Well, I don’t have the time to read outside my filed.  I say, “No, you do have time, it’s far more important.’ Your world becomes a bigger world, and maybe there’s a moment in which you make connections.”

p. 283  The further basic science moves from meandering exploration toward efficiency, he believes, the less chance it will have of solving humanity’s greatest challenges.

p. 284 Casedevall’s overarching point is that the innovation ecosystem should intentionally preserve range and inefficiency.  He is fighting an uphill battle.

p. 286  At its core, all hyper specialization is a well- meaning drive for efficiency – the most efficient way to develop a sports skill, assemble a product, learn to play in instrument, or work on a new technology.  But inefficiency needs cultivating too.  The wisdom of laser-focused, efficient development is limited to narrowly constructed, kind learning environments.

p. 288  Creativity researcher Dean Keith Simonton has shown that the more work eminent creators produced, the more duds they churned out, and the higher their chances of a supernova success.

p. 288 Original creators tend to strike out a lot, but they also hit mega grand slams – every once n a while when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs.

Why this Book:  Selected by my literature reading group as our selection for September 2019. One of our members had read Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize winning The Underground Railroad, and so liked it that he’d begun this book. We were looking for something not too long and we accepted his recommendation.

Summary in 3 sentences:  Nickel Boy is the story of Elwood Curtis, a particularly intelligent and idealistic young black teenager who in the early 1960s in Tallahassee Florida, listened to Martin Luther King’s speeches on the radio and in recordings, and believed in the ideals he was hearing Dr King espouse.  He was a good student on track to be the first in his family to go to college, when he was given a ride in what turned out to be a stolen car, and though innocent of any wrong doing, was sent to reform school.  The book is about his experiences as a thoughtful young black man in a brutal reform school in Florida in the Jim Crow South, where racism was a fact of life and black men could expect little justice or concern from the white establishment.

My Impressions:   Though uncomfortable to read, Nickel Boys was a well written book and very much worth my while.  The protagonist of the story is Elwood Curtis, an intelligent young black man, a senior in high school in Tallahassee Florida in 1962 who has been inspired by Dr Martin Luther King and aspires to get a college education and pursue Dr King’s ideals.   Then, he happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, is associated with a crime he had nothing to do with, and is sent to the Nickel Academy for boys, a reform school run by southern authoritarian white men who essentially act with impunity.  Arriving at the Nickel Academy, he enters a cruel new world, with  even more draconian rules and punishments than he had ever experienced living in Tallahassee.  And in this new world, he struggled to accept that getting ahead, going to college, living his dream had to take a back seat to the imperatives of survival.

It is hard to grasp what the impact on me would be of being forced into a world where one has no power, no status, justice is arbitrary or doesn’t exist at all, and one is completely at the mercy of merciless authorities who regard you as little more than an animal.  It sounds a bit like the selection phase of basic Navy SEAL training – which is meant to test one’s resilience under the harsh and arbitrary environment of the battlefield.   The Nickel Academy however was actually much worse than SEAL Training, in that Navy SEAL candidates CHOOSE to be there, they know that the injustice and harshness are meant to test their suitability for duty they have volunteered for, and they are there for limited time.   The harshness and cruelty have a larger purpose, and those who are going through it know that.  To paraphrase a famous Nietzsche quote, “He who has a why, can bear almost any how, if he so chooses.”

At the Nickel Academy, the cruelty was senseless and arbitrary, and indeed the stakes were much higher than in harsh military basic training programs. The experiences of the boys at the Nickel Academy remind me more of those of US prisoners in North Vietnamese or Japanese POW camps, where injustice and cruelty were the norm, prisoners had no rights, lives were not valued, and those in authority demanded timidity, a cringing compliance, and surrender of one’s dignity and identity.   In the case of Elwood and the other characters in this novel, the only way out of the school was to draw little to no attention to themselves,  never complain, quietly endure the beatings and injustice, and stay out of the way of the whites who ran the school.   Furthermore, the black kids at the school knew that the injustice and cruelty at the Nickel Academy were only a more severe version of what awaited them on the outside if and when they were allowed to leave.   I say “if” because serious infractions, or displeasing those in authority resulted in severe beatings that that could be, and often were, fatal.

Though the Nickel Academy portrayed in Nickel Boys is fictional, Whitehead based it largely on the Dozier School for Boys that actually existed in the panhandle of Florid as a reform school for over half of the 20th century.  The story of the cruelty and murders at Dozier didn’t come to the public’s attention until 2014 when it was revealed that upwards of 80 bodies were discovered buried on the grounds of the school.  Reports from former students of  almost unspeakable cruelty of beatings, rape, and murder had been ignored or hushed for decades.  The story was brought to the public’s attention after archeology students found the buried bodies of students, and a reporter did an in-depth investigation of the school and published an expose.   Local community and government leaders had covered up evidence of criminal brutality and murder, and were indeed the beneficiaries of kickbacks and unpaid forced labor provided by the boys in the reform school.   In his acknowledgements at the conclusion of the novel, Whitehouse offers a good account of the backstory upon which he based this novel.

Back to Whitehouse’s novel.  The story of Nickel Boys is set in the early 1960s, when the United States was beginning to address and deal with institutional racism.  The armed forces had only recently been integrated, the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision on Brown vs the Board of education was still new, and the nationwide movement toward a Civil Rights Act was gaining momentum.  Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and demonstrations in southern cities against the treatment of black Americans were gaining national attention.  But the civil rights movement was still young and it was widely resisted in many parts of America, especially in the South, where the old Jim Crow establishment was still in power.   This is the setting for Nickel Boys.  Elwood Curtis’s experience of some of the worst abuses of white racism informs the reader of a story that was not unique in America’s past.

Elwood Curtis is the primary protagonist in Nickel Boys, but there are a number of other  compelling character, most notably, his friend and mentor “Turner.”   Turner was more worldly-wise and cynical than Elwood, knew the rules of the “game,” and had figured out how to play them to his own advantage.  While he admired Elwood’s principles and courage, he felt he had to protect Elwood from the potentially brutal consequences of his naive idealism.  Turner embodies the “slow moving’ cagey prisoner” that Solzhenitsyn referred to in A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich  and that Adm Stockdale said he had to become in order to survive as a POW in North Vietnam.  The Elwood – Turner partnership is a fascinating part of the story, and has a surprising twist at the end which serves to reinforce many of the points Whitehead is making in his novel.

Nickel Boys is a well written novel that exposes the reader to aspects of American history and culture that might be, but should not be forgotten.  It is a well-crafted slap-in-the-face reminder that in our past and to a lesser extent today as well, racism and injustice have made it very hard for some Americans to take advantage of opportunities to enjoy the fruits of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness that our country promises its citizens.   We also see the impact that arbitrary cruelty and injustice can have on the hopes and aspirations of young men.   Perhaps because reading this book can be disturbing, it is a worthwhile read – the best literature is supposed to make us somewhat uncomfortable.

Nickel Boys is worth getting into, and staying with all the way to the end, and learning from the experience of this fictional character under circumstances that unfortunately were anything but fictional.

Why this book: Selected by my literature reading group, based on recommendation from my son, and our general appreciation for Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day.

Summary in 3 sentences: Set in post-WWII Japan, a Japanese artist Musaji Ono is living in retirement as a widowed grandfather, enjoying being with his daughters, family, friends and colleagues.  He is looking back on his life and assessing how decisions he made while younger, during the aggressive and turbulent pre-war years in Japan have  impacted his family after the war is over and during allied occupation.  One of his daughters intends to be married, and in the Japan of that time, arranged marriages were preceded by investigations of the families of the betrothed before the parents would agree, and Mr Ono is concerned about whether his associations prior to and during the war might undermine his daughter’s chance for marriage.

My Impressions: Interesting book – which I enjoyed reading.  It’s a first person narrative of Masuji Ono – or “Ono-san” – about his life and the awkward implications his career had on his family.  But within his narrative, this book is about personal and social values, Japanese culture, moral courage, the nature of friendship, patronage and mentorship, parenting, teaching, and more.  We see the entire story through Ono-san’s eyes, as if he were relating it to a Japanese journalist.  The points Ishiguro makes are embedded subtly within his narrative.

In Ono-san’s story, as he looks back on his life, we learn much about Japan during a key period of cultural transition, and we learn about the rigid structure of education and career success in a very structured social world.  Those who have read Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day, will recognized the style and structure of this book, but the themes are different.

Ono-san tells us of growing up as a talented and aspiring young artist who takes all the traditionally accepted steps toward achieving recognition and success in his field. But then, when he is on the verge of achieving the success he had been striving for,  he rebels against the strict rules for getting ahead.  He chooses to not obediently follow his master’s path, and in straying beyond the bounds of what his master expected, he was expelled from his master’s school.   He chose to not simply follow accepted formulae for aesthetically pleasing but uncontroversial art, but instead to create art that made a statement that challenged traditional values of Japanese society at the time.  It turned out that his rebellion was in harmony with the message of the rising military class that was advocating a stronger more aggressive Japan on the world stage, and he became an accepted and prestigious member of the class that led the nation to its disastrous war.

Ono-san’s rebellion against traditional Japanese aesthetics and his association with the imperial elite eventually alienated him from most of his former friends, mentors and even students.  At the end of the war, those who had been associated with the imperial military elite were ostracized, and those who hadn’t sided with them were given moral credit for not having embraced the imperialist mood of the time. In retirement,  Ono-san was isolated from his former community.   This was not a matter of any great concern to him, until his reputation as a lackey of those who had taken the country to tragic defeat threatened to undermine his daughter’s chance for marriage.  At which point he felt he had to atone for the consequences of his actions to best serve his daughter’s interests.

Ishiguro’s  Ono-san is a complex character. We are not sure to what degree he is deceiving himself – and to what degree he is indeed a hero who simply took a courageous stand for the wrong cause.  He later admits openly that his service to the imperialist Japanese government was a mistake, but it is unclear whether this admission is truly heart felt, or merely expedient. And when he casually mentions that he served with the Committee of Unpatriotic Activities I can’t help but wonder if indeed there may be some hypocrisy here.  I wonder if  as a government authority, he may have actively repressed freedom of expression and art in others that he took such pride in during his own development.   An Artist of the Floating World is a character study of a complex man living in difficult times and it isn’t clear how much he isn’t telling us, how much self-deception is taking place, and to what degree his pride and self-satisfaction are indeed justified.

“The Floating World” is a term he used to describe  the world of the pleasure district of Japanese cities – the world of frivolity, drinking, geishas, and entertainment – the world from which he eventually rebelled.  His sensei Mori-san had his students painting almost exclusively scenes for that world, scenes that were aesthetically pleasing but very uncontroversial and had little to no social impact.   When Ono-san told Mori-san that he didn’t want to be “an artist of the floating world” and chose instead to paint for greater social impact and to address issues of morality and virtue in the world at large, Mori-san forced Ono-san to leave his school.  Afterward, Ono-san apparently was welcomed and embraced by those leading a movement for social and political change – the movement that eventually led to Japanese imperialism – and his position of influence and celebrity apparently lasted until Japan lost the war.

It was indeed courageous for Ono-san to step out of the tried and true path to success for a talented artist.  But what compromises did he have to make to succeed in that other world?  What price did his integrity pay for his eventual success? We don’t know, for he doesn’t share any concerns about that with us.  There was room for An Artist of  the Floating World to be a  longer book, and for us to have gotten to know more about Musaji Ono.

In the end, it is unclear to what degree he is being completely honest with himself in his descriptions of himself as courageous and free thinking, and to what degree he deserves his rather smug self-satisfaction.  As it was, An Artist of the Floating World is another fascinating and indeed subtly thought-provoking character study by Kazuo Ishiguro.

Some quotes that caught my interest. Page numbers refer to the Vintage paperback edition published in 1989:

Retirement places more time on your hands. Indeed, it is one of the enjoyments of retirement that you are able to drift through the day at your own pace, easy in the knowledge that you have put hard work and achievement behind you. Nevertheless, I must be getting absent-minded indeed to be wandering aimlessly into – of all places – the reception room.  p40-41

(from his son in law) ‘Brave young men die for stupid causes, and the real culprits are still with us.  Afraid to show themselves for what they are, to admit their responsibility… to my mind, that ’s the greatest cowardice of all.’ p 58

So I do not think I am claiming undue credit for my younger self if I suggest my actions that day were a manifestation of a quality I came to be much respected for in later years – the ability to think and judge for myself, even if it meant going against the sway of those around me.  The fact remains, certainly, that I was the only one to come to the Tortoise’s defense that morning.  p 69

‘In my opinion,’ I said, ‘Master Takeda doesn’t deserve the loyalty of the likes of you and me. Loyalty has to be earned. There’s too much made of loyalty.  All too often men talk of loyalty and follow blindly.  I for one have no wish to lead my life like that.’ p72

(recalling speaking to his students) ‘Being at Takeda’ I told them, ‘taught me an important lesson early in my life. That while it was right to look up to teachers, it was always important to question their authority. The Takeda experience taught me never to follow the crowd blindly, but to consider carefully the direction in which I was being pushed.  And if there’s one thing I’ve tried to encourage you all to do, it’s been to rise above the sway of things. To rise above the undesirable and decadent influences that have swamped us and have done so much to weaken the fibre of our nation theses past ten, fifteen years.’ p 73

If one has failed only where others have not had the courage or will to try, there is a consolation – indeed, a deep satisfaction – to be gained from this observation when looking back over one’s life.  p 134

For it is by no means desirable that one be always instructing and pronouncing to one’s pupils; there are many situations when it is preferable to remain silent so as to allow them the chance to debate and ponder. As I say, anyone who has been in a position of large influence will appreciate this.  p 139

You may gather from such recollections that our devotion to our teacher and to his principles was fierce and total.  And it is easy with hindsight – once the shortcomings of an influence have become obvious – to be critical of a teacher who fosters such a climate….His influence over us was not, of course, confined merely to the realms of painting. We lived throughout those years almost entirely in accordance with his values and lifestyle and this entailed spending much time exploring the city’s ‘floating world’  the night-time world of pleasure, entertainment and drink which formed the backdrop for all our paintings.  p 144-145

I suppose I do not on the whole greatly admire the Tortoises (“Tortoise” was a nickname of  one of his fellow painters) of this wold. While one may appreciate their plodding steadiness and ability to survive, one suspects their lack of frankness, their capacity for treachery.  And I suppose in the end, one despises their unwillingness to take chances in the name of ambition or for the sake of a principle they claim to believe in.  p 159

‘Tell me, Tortoise, don’t you have ambitions to one day produce paintings of genuine importance? I don’t mean simply work that we may admire and praise amongst ourselves here at the villa.  I refer to work of real importance. Work that will be a significant contribution to the people of our nation.  It’s to this end, Tortoise, I talk of the need for a new approach.’ p 163

But I am fully aware, of course, that “Eyes to the Horizon,” whatever its artistic merits, is a painting whose sentiments are now outdated.  Indeed, I would be the first to admit that those same sentiments are perhaps worthy of condemnation. I am not one of those who are afraid to admit to the shortcomings of past achievements.  p 169

(Ono-san’s word to his teacher Mori-san as he breaks away) ‘But I now feel it is time for me to progress to other things. Sensei, it is my belief that in such troubled times as these, artists must learn to value something more tangible than those pleasurable things that disappear with the morning light.  It is not necessary that artists always occupy a decadent and enclosed world.  My conscience, Sensei, tells me I cannot remain forever an artist of the floating world.’ p 180

‘I am Masuji Ono, the artist and member of the Cultural Committee of the Interior Department. Indeed, I am an official adviser to the Committee of Unpatriotic Activities. I believe there’s been some sort of mistake here and I would like to speak with whoever is in charge.’  – 182

For as he (Matsuda) pointed out himself, the likes of him and me, we have the satisfaction of knowing that whatever we did, we did at the time in the best of faith.          p 202

The likes of Tortoise – the likes of Shintaro – they may plod on, competent and inoffensive, but their kind will never know the sort of happiness I felt that day,. for their kind do not know what it is to risk everything in the endeavor to rise above the mediocre.  p 204  (Is this Ishiguro’s version of Teddy Roosevelt’s Man in the Arena speech?)

Why this book: I am preparing a blog post on 200 days – what it would mean to know you only have 200 days to live. Well, here is a book by a guy who lived (and died) that experience.  I listened to his “last lecture” on youtube and wanted to read the book.

Summary in 3 Sentences:  Randy Pausch was a professor in Computer Science focusing on Virtual Reality when he was diagnosed with stage 4 Pancreatic cancer and given only 3-6 months to live.  His “Last Lecture” can be viewed on YouTube and this book is his story – about how the Last Lecture came about, how he prepared for it, and in this book he elaborates on the points he makes in the presentation of his lecture. He uses the Last Lecture and this book as frameworks to celebrate the life he has lived, to share his most joyous moments, and to pass on lessons he has learned.

My Impressions: This book is full of joy.  Throughout he shares how lucky he has been in his life, and and he shares stories of his most joyous moments.  He also shares his failures and mistakes from which he gleaned the many life-lessons he has learned in his 47 years.

The book is also a “letter” to his 3 children who he knows, and we know, will grow up without him.  He hopes in this book to pass on fatherly wisdom that may be useful to them when they are older, but for which they are too young and inexperienced to fully appreciate while their father is still on this earth.  He shares how he is trying to be a great father to them in the limited time he has left, and how this book is his attempt to continue to serve them after he’s passed on.

This book is partly an account of how he has dealt with knowing he has a limited time to live, partly a celebration of the life he has been able to live so far, and partly a “What I have learned about living well” to pass on to his kids in the future and to us, his readers now.   He fulfilled each of these goals well, but what was particularly inspiring to me was his exuberance over the various experiences he recounts from his life, and his appreciation for how lucky he has been.

The book is a great reminder of what’s important in life and how to pay attention to it while living it – these are the things that a good, positive man realizes when he is told he only has months to live. And so he passes that on to us.  He shares his dreams as a child and in fact became aware that he had in fact realized his most important child hood dreams – for which he was very thankful.  He has a whole section entitled “Adventures… and Lessons learned.”  He offers us rules about parenting and encouraging children, as well as encouraging others – especially students and subordinates – and helping them fulfill their dreams.  And the longest section is entitled, “It’s about how to live your life.”

He is very open and personal in his book. He calls himself (and has a chapter entitled) “A recovering jerk” based on his self-centered focus when he was young and ambitious, and how others helped to bring him around.  And then, he shares how he helped bring other ‘jerks” around. Chapters with titles like, “Earnest is better than hip,” and “Don’t complain, just work harder,” and “Don’t Obsess over what people think,” “Look for the best in Everybody,” and “Watch what they do, not what they say.”    Lot’s of homespun wisdom based on his own stories and his own hard-earned life lessons.

It is a near end-of-life testament to a life well lived. We should all be so lucky as to be able to look back with few regrets and mostly joy at the life we have lived, the positive impact we have made, and the legacy we leave to our children and others.  But Randy Pausch’s book reminds us – that is a choice we make while we are alive.

This is a book I could and should read again. And I will.

Why this Book:  The publisher asked me whether, if they sent me an advance copy of this book, I would read it and review it.  I said yes.  They sent it. I read it.   I liked it, and this is the review.

Summary in 3 sentences:  The author advises the reader at the beginning of the book that this book is about resilience – and indeed the first ¾ of the book is about dealing with disappointment, failure, mistakes, and bouncing back.   The practical advice is based on the author’s own  experience as well as his research and reading of many others, and we learn much about the author’s own life as he shares his failures and disappointments and the tools he used to turn those into fuel for his future success.   The last quarter of the book is sage advice about a different kind of resilience – how to deal with success, which can often bring its own challenges, distractions and and opportunities to get off-track and unhappy.

My impressions: I liked this book considerably more than I thought I would.  It is a nice mixture of autobiography and practical wisdom borne of the author’s own hard earned lessons learned, but also based on extensive reading and research into the teaching of others on resilience and happiness.   I realized that part of why I liked the book is I that I like the author as he presents himself in the book – I like his tone, his playfulness, his vulnerability, his self-deprecating humor, and I like his advice.

It’s a short and easy-to-read book.  It is not meant to be “heavy” or laced with psychological jargon.  It is meant to appeal to the everyman in each of us, and does not pretend to offer anything groundbreaking to academic literature on happiness or resilience.    He doesn’t impart any great new wisdom or insights – I’ve heard it all before, from other speakers or authors, or in other books.  It’s common sense practical wisdom repackaged in a very readable and user-friendly book.  And it was good for me to read again.  It reminds me that it’s always good to revisit the basics – in any endeavor, especially in life – and he offers some good practical wisdom for negotiating the challenges of living in our complex society.  His very conversational and unpretentious approach makes his insights accessible and inspiring.

The book is divided into 9 chapters or “secrets” with (sometimes enigmatic) titles like  “Add a Dot-Dot-Dot…” or “Tell Yourself a Different Story” or “Lose More to Win More” or “Find Small Ponds” or “Go Untouchable.”  Each of these chapters includes several short sub-chapters.  It’s enjoyable to read, easy to follow.

I particularly liked how he brought in the stories of his parents – immigrants from India to Canada- and how in their struggles first in India and then later integrating into Canadian culture, they embodied many of the principles he espouses.  He shares how his parents continue to inspire him – his mother first, then his father. Pretty amazing stories of resilience, perseverance, and success.

I feel like I’m pretty good at dealing with disappointments and “failing forward” though I must admit, I’ve never had that assumption truly stress-tested with a monumental failure – largely due to luck, partly due to being fairly practical and resilient by nature.  That said, while I was engaged in reading the book, I became frustrated with a situation at work and retreated into self-doubt and feeling persecuted, unappreciated, and under attack from malevolent forces massing against me.   I had just read how Neil Pasricha had experienced the same, noted that this negative perspective is a common occurrence experienced by almost everyone, and that it is almost always wrong.

So, I took his advice, applied his insights to my own situation, calmed down, and indeed over the next days on further examination, realized that I was way over-exaggerating my issue, and was internally over-reacting.  Situation resolved. No Big Deal. Thanks Neil.  Certainly nothing like getting fired, or divorced, or dealing with the death of a loved one, or rejected and dissed by someone you respect, but still…the principles he offered applied.  To paraphrase Nietzsche: “That which does not kill me can make me stronger, if I so choose.”

His personal story reminded me of another book I recently read: Range by David Epstein.   Epstein recommends that in order to find a “quality match” between what one does for a living, and what one’s passions and interests are, one must often try out a number of different jobs – until finding that quality match.  That’s what Neil Pasricha did.  BUT, as Neil shared, to follow that advice often involves working for years at poor-quality matches, dealing with feeling frustrated and unfulfilled, and being willing to accept an indeterminate number of failures and disappointments until one finds that true, “quality match.”  That is the resilience and perseverance Pasricha’s book is helping us to find.  “Fail More to Win More,” he says.

What I personally found most useful in You Are Awesome were his insights about how to remain positive and resilient in the face of success.  Yes – success.  The challenges he faced when he finally found the work he loved – his own quality match – are challenges I can relate to.   Managing one’s time and attention, staying focused on what truly matters, staying grateful for and not taking for granted what one has, not getting down when good intentions may not blossom, and practicing saying no to the many opportunities for distraction.

Three pieces of advice that truly resonated with me:

• The two minute rule: When somehow I let life get in the way of a daily activity I’ve committed to for myself,  do it for just 2 minutes that day.  Don’t blow it off  – just do it for 2 minutes.  Two minute of yoga, two minutes of working out, two minutes of meditation, two minutes of playing the fiddle, two minutes of writing a letter.  Whatever I commit to…keep the commitment, even if just for 2 minutes.
• Every morning practice: “I grab an index card or a journal and write these three prompts for that day: “I will let go of….  “;  “I am grateful for….”;   “I will focus on….”
• Untouchable time: Regularly block and protect a period of time (preferably a full day, or a half day, or even just a few hours) that I will take no phone calls, not read nor write nor respond to any email or text.  Just time to think, write, or be alone with myself.

(Seem simple? I’m still working on building these in. Simple, but not easy….)

Again, You  are Awesome is not an academic treatment of resilience, and is not meant to compete with Jonathan Haidt’s or Sam Harris’s or Daniel Gilbert’s work on happiness and resilience. But many of Pasricha’s insights and suggestions are the same as theirs – just packaged in a way that is accessible to a wider audience.  As he says in the introduction,  You are Awesome is about resilience, and is meant to complement his previous two books: The Book of Awesome (about gratitude), and The Happiness Equation (about happiness).  

This little book could help a lot of people get out of their own way in their search for happiness, and offers great advice in how to stop playing the blame game, or the “I’m a victim” game, and start playing the  “No Excuses – it’s up to me” game and get on with their lives.    

Some quotes I marked that I thought worth sharing (page numbers from the paperback advanced readers edition):

What’s the spotlight effect?  It’s the feeling that we’re being noticed, watched, observed, and importantly judged much more thane really are.  Because we are the centers of our own worlds, we believe we’re the centers of everyone else’s world too.  p 51

When it comes to predicting the future, we’re all stupid. Each and every one of us.  p74

I’d bump into the former employees again years later.  And what did they tell me? Every single time?  “Getting fired was the best thing that happened to me! If I hadn’t gotten that severance package, I never would’ve had those crucial six months to spend with my dad before he died.” Or “I travelled to Peru and became a nutritional supplement importer and I love what I’m doing now!”  Or….Or….Or…  p75

Sure, you’re going through a failure.  But it’s very possible, and very likely, that what you’re going through is a step toward a future you’ll be happy with. But you just can’t see it – yet.  p 77

Well, the average man will kiss sixteen people, have ten sexual partners, six one-night stands, four disaster dates, four relationships that last less than a year, and two relationships that last more than a year, fall in love twice, be heartbroken twice, cheat once and be cheated on once – all before he finds a lifelong partner. Does that sound like something you want to go through? Me neither, but in a way, isn’t it also relieving to hear? Because it may help shine a light on the invisible steps ahead of you on the staircase you’re climbing on the way to the longterm, committed relationship you may desire.  p 84-85 (note: he offers similar statistics for women)

“I failed my biology exam” is a lot different from “I failed my parents.”  (Ask yourself these) three questions:  Will this matter on my deathbed? Can I do something about it? Is this a story I’m telling myself? p123

Do it for free for ten years p 133

Success blocks future success.  The issue here is that when you’re good at one thing, the world conspires to keep you there. Stay in your lane. stick to your specialty….making it harder and harder and harder to mentally break out and explore new ground and try new things.  p 152

My goal isn’t to tell you how many figures (dollars) you should plan to spend on failures. It’s to give you a mental model you can apply in your life to accelerate your lose rate and therefore accelerate your win rate.  Lose more to win more. p 155

But the truth is when we look at our flops we’re really giving ourselves credit for all the learning and stamina and resilience baked into those moments when we made ourselves  a little stronger.  p 156

Let me share what Untouchable Days look like up close.  I think of them as having two components.

• There is the deep creative work. When you’re in the zone, your brain is buzzing, you’re in a  state of flow, and the big project you’re working on is getting accomplished step, by step, by step.
• There are the little nitros. Little blasts of fuel you can use to prime your own pump or open up your creative centers if you hit a wall.   p 225

Why this book: I’ve read several other Ivan Doig books and really liked them all. Doig is one of the pre-eminent Western writers of the 20th Century.  This is the 3rd book in his Montana Trilogy, behind English Creek and Dancing at the Rascal Fair, both of which I’ve read and reviewed.  I wanted to complete the trilogy, to see what happened to the McCaskill family 100 years after the beginning of the series.

Summary in 4 Sentences:  Jick McCaskill is 65 years old, a widower, and the third generation of McCaskills running a ranch in the fictitious town of Gros Ventre in Northern Montana.  His daughter Mariah, a photographer for the fictitious Montanian newspaper, invites Jick to join her and her ex-husband Riley, to drive his Winnebago on a tour of the state to support her taking pictures and Riley writing feature articles about what they see, as part of the Montanian‘s centennial celebration of Montana’s statehood.  The book is written in Jick McCaskill’s voice as he shares his antipathy toward his former son-in-law, his wonder and amazement at his daughter, his impressions of the work they are doing and in his uniquely Western voice, he describes the state of Montana they are traveling through.   Living together in a Winnebago for over a month, the relationships between these three and a later participant in the journey, evolve, and we get to know the players through their interactions with each other and with the towns and people of Montana, and there are some surprises in the making.

My Impressions:  This book is best read soon after reading English Creek, in Doig’s Montana Trilogy.  English Creek is in Jick McCaskill’s voice, looking back as an older man at a key window in his youth, just prior to WWII.  Ride with me, Mariah Montana is also in Jick’s voice as an older man, but here he is sharing his present day perspectives on himself, his family and friends, and a number of those who appear in English Creek.  There is a sweet continuity to the two books that is not appreciated if they are read separately or with a number of years between them, as I did.

There is not a lot of action in this book, and there were times when I wasn’t sure I wanted to finish it.  I wasn’t sure I liked Jick McCaskill’s rather sardonic view of his son-in-law Riley and his daughter Mariah and their friendship with each other and commitment to their work.   The incongruity between the language of Jick’s narrative – earthy and humorous and tied to the land, and Riley’s language in his columns – educated, poetic, and descriptive – represented the differences in their outlook and their generations.  His relationship with his very independent, athletic and attractive daughter Mariah was clearly close, but there were tensions there too – mostly centered around Riley.  Though Mariah and Riley were divorced, they were still close, and there was still chemistry between them.

The language Doig gives to Jick to describe the Montana towns and country-side they are driving through, is beautiful, powerful and authentically Montanan.  The wide prairies, the Rocky Mountains, the small towns, the buffalo, the people – all evoke a Montana that reminds me of Wyoming where I have spent so many happy weeks over the last decade and a half.   But I did get a little bored with the story-line and the Winnebago going from here to there, and Jick complaining about Riley and Mariah – sometimes being a grouchy old curmudgeon about the whole chore of driving them around the state.  We get to know him and his wife Marcella, who had died of cancer not long before, through his many reminiscences, some of which also went to his parents, grand-parents, and other family members who we had gotten to know in the previous two books in the trilogy.

There are a number of subtle and not-so-subtle sub-themes in the book:  The dying out of family ranch life that had settled and made Montana, as farming transitioned from families to agri-business;  the withering of the small towns on the prairie; the challenges of growing old without one’s life partner; the challenges of watching one’s children reject the life you have lived in exchange for one that you don’t understand; the melancholy of seeing generations-old family ties to towns and the land dying out as new generations seek other opportunities elsewhere; the beauty of the land and nature under assault from big business, mining, and agri-business.   To my pleasant surprise, Doig brought these themes together in a satisfying way at the end of the book – as I finished the book, I was glad I had stuck with it.

I  wish I had read it sooner after completing English Creek – as I noted, chronologically the predecessor to this book. The story in Mariah Montana  takes place nearly 50 years after the story Jick relates in English Creek.   Had I read Mariah Montana, sooner after English Creek and Rascal Fair, the stories and people Jick recalls in Mariah Montana would have been fresher to me – it’s been 5 years since I read Rascal Fair and English Creek.  But those stories and people did come back to me – they were powerful to me when I first read them.

Ivan Doig passed away in 2015.  According to Wikipedia, Doig “won the Western Literature Association’s lifetime Distinguished Achievement award and held the distinction of the only living author with works of both fiction and non-fiction listed in the top 12 of the San Francisco Chroncle’s poll of best books of the 20th century.” It was interesting that he dedicated Mariah Montana to Wallace Stegner, another so-called “western” author who wrote one of my all-time favorite books – Angle of Repose.

Some quotes from Ride with me, Mariah Montana  to give you an idea of Doig’s writing style (page numbers refer to the hardback version, published in 1990.)

Before I could point out to her that free stuff is generally overpriced, she was tying the whole proposition up for me in a polka dot bow.  “So all you’ve got to do is bring the motorhome on over and meet the scribbler and me Monday noon.  Is that so tough?” (p 4)

None of us spoke, while the songs of the birds poured undiluted. I suppose we were  afraid the spate of loveliest sound would vanish if we broke it with so much as a whisper. But after a bit came the realization that the music of birds formed a natural part of this place, constant as the glorious grass that made feathered life thrive.  (P 29)

Here he was, as Riley as ever, like whatever king it was who never forgot anything but never learned anything either.  And here I was, half the time aggravated by the two of them fore letting themselves wallow around the countryside together this way, and the other half provoked at myself for being ninny enough to be doing it along with them.  (p 43)

Leona just smiled.  I’d begun to notice, though, that she had different calibres of smiles. The broad beaming expression that seemed to welcome all of life – the Alectric smile, I thought of it as, for I had first seen it on her when she and Alec were sparking each other, that summer of fifty years ago – shined out most naturally. You could read a newspaper by the light of that facial glow.  But there was also a Leona smile that her eyes didn’t quite manage to join in; the smile muscles performed by habit, but there was brainwork going on behind that one. And then there was one that can only be called her fool-killer smile; when you got it, you wondered if you’d been eating steak with a spoon.   (p 240)

(About Eastern Montana)  Grassland with sage low and on it ran to all the horizons – cattle in specks of herds here and there – and a surprising number of attempts had been made to scratch some farming into this bare-bone plain, but what grew here mostly was distance.  Except for an occasional gumbo butte or a gully full of tumbleweeds, out here there were no interruptions of the earth extending itself until bent by the weight of the sky. (p 281)

Why this book: As a boy, I read a number of Jack London short stories as well as his novels The Cruise of the Dazzler, White Fang, and of course Call of the Wild.   I re-read Call of the Wild about 10 years ago and loved it – (reviewed here) the sled-dogs were a great metaphor for a SEAL platoon.  In the meantime, I’ve become something more of an outdoorsman myself, and have spent some time studying Nietzsche who I knew was an inspiration to Jack London.  Jack London was reputed to be a somewhat larger than life but flawed character who died young.   Intrigued, I decided to find out more

Summary in 3 Sentences: Jack London grew up very poor in the San Francisco Bay area in the late 1800s, and with very little support from his family, was largely on his own in a very tough world to survive and get by.  Blessed with an intrepid spirit, he confidently dove into the toughest environments and toughest challenges, and with pluck, grit and an uncanny ability to get along with people, he managed to survive and prevail.   After many amazing adventures, and many false starts as a writer, he eventually became one of the most successful and best recognized authors in the world, but like many other such great adventurers, his toughness and skill at managing physical challenges and adversity did not translate into a well-managed life in the labyrinth of civilization, and his generosity and appetite for always wanting more, eventually were his undoing.

My Impressions: What a life! In his 40 years, Jack London lived more than almost anyone in a lifetime of twice as many years.  His is truly a rags-to-riches story.  His adventurous spirit compelled him to take on one risky adventure after another and his warm and congenial personality helped him to get along easily with people at every level of the social spectrum.  His life included such a wide variety of adventures with such a wide variety of people, he was never at a loss for material for his next story.   He was also blessed with a great imagination which gave him the ability to create a variety of compelling stories based not only on what he experienced, but also stories built with variations on what might have happened.

He was an avid reader and student. When he had no money, he haunted the libraries. When he did have money, he built a great personal library.  What he couldn’t experience himself, he experienced vicariously through the writings of others. He studied their styles. And then created his own.

Among the more amazing things he undertook, and survived, were:  as a 16 year old he was an independent oyster “pirate” with his own boat and live-in female mistress;  when that didn’t work out, he became part of the California Fish Patrol in San Francisco Bay; later he traveled across the Pacific working on an ocean going Seal hunting schooner; during the depression of 1893, he worked at a wide variety of grueling jobs at slave ages; he spent a year riding the rails as a tramp, begging food, living in hobo camps, and just getting by.  At age 20 he came back to the Bay Area and went back to and graduated high school, but as badly as he wanted to,  he couldn’t go to university – he had to work to support his mother.  All this time he was writing and submitting his stories to various magazines.   Eventually, his unique writing style and the amazing stories he wrote began to be noticed, and slowly, he was able to make a living from writing.

His fame grew – from his many short stories and then from his novels, most famously The Call of the Wild.  He and his writing eventually were in great demand, he was paid well for his work, and making a living was no longer a challenge.  But managing his money and resources was.  From the early 1900s until his death in 1916, he published an enormous amount of work, from novels, to autobiographical pieces to a large number of short stories.

London always struggled with money.  In his early years he had none, was often on the verge of starvation, and lived from hand to mouth.  His need for money drove him to write prolifically.  When he eventually became famous and well-paid for his work, he spent considerably more than he made, became recklessly extravagant, and was always in debt, which again forced him to continue writing and submitting work for publication at an amazing pace.   He was by nature trusting and generous, and was taken advantage of not only by unscrupulous dealers, but also by his friends.   He was never able to get himself out from under financial pressure – as soon as he got a significant sum, he paid off his debts, and then took on another hugely expensive endeavor, for which he did not manage costs and expenses well. And so, the debt continued.

This biography by Irving Stone was written in the mid 1930s just 20 years after London’s death, when most of those who knew Jack London well were still alive. Stone was given access to a huge trove of London’s letters and documents, and was able to conduct extensive interviews with many of those closest to Jack London when he lived.  Irving Stone makes clear in his book that he was a great admirer of  Jack London – and indeed there is much to admire about him.  But he also describes London’s foibles and failings, though it does seems he is careful to not too aggressively go after him or some of those who did not serve London well – as many of those were still alive  It was a different time, and London had only been dead two decades.

Who was Jack London?  I’ll share a couple of paragraphs out of Sone’s book  that give you a small taste of Stone’s writing style and a sense for the character he wrote about (w page numbers from my old signet paperback, for my own reference)

He had a strong gregarious instinct, he liked to rub against his own kind, yet in society he saw himself as a fish out of water.  Because of his background, he took to conventionality uneasily, rebelliously.  He was used to saying what he thought, nothing more nor less.  The hard hand of adversity, laid upon him at the age of ten, had left him sentiment but destroyed sentimentality. It had made him practical so that he was sometimes known as hard, stern, and uncompromising; it had made him believe that reason was mightier than imagination, that the scientific man was superior to the emotional man. “Take me this way” he wrote to Anna Strunsky in the early days of their acquaintanceship, “a stray guest, a bird of passage splashing with salt-rimmed wings through a brief moment of your life – a rude blundering bird, used to large airs and great spaces, unaccustomed to the amenities of confined existence.” (p106)

Hargrave records that Jack was intrinsically kind, irrationally generous, a prince of a good fellows to be with.  He had a gentleness that survived the roughest associations.  In argument when his opponent had caught himself in the web of his own illogic, Jack threw back his head and gave vent to infectious laughter.  Hargrave’s parting estimate of Jack is too genuine to be tampered with. “Many a long night Jack and I outlasting the vigil of the others, sat before the blazing spruce logs and talked the hours away.  A brave figure of a man he was…An outdoor man, in short a real man, a man’s man.  He had a mental craving for truth. He applied one test to religion, to economics, to everything: What is truth?  He could think great thoughts. One could not meet him without feeling the impact of a superior intellect.  He faced life with superb assurance, and faced death serenely imperturbable. ” (p 78-79)

He loved Nature tenderly for all the beauties there were in her, but above all, he loved her for her force, the terrific strength with which she dwarfed all mankind. (p 70)

There were four primary periods of London’s life that he turned to, to mine his experiences for his short stories and novels: 1. his time on the waterways around San Francisco as a young sailor, oyster pirate and then as a Fish Patrol official; 2. His time as an Able Bodied Seaman on a sealing schooner in the Pacific; 3. His time as a tramp criss-crossing the United States looking for short term work, food, and hanging out with the other tramps. 4. (perhaps most importantly) his time in the Klondike during the Alaska Goldrush, and 5. his sailing voyage in his sailing ship The Snark to Hawaii, the South Pacific,  and Southeast Asia.

London was an ardent and very outspoken socialist – and seeing how he grew up mostly with the poor and disenfranchised, it is not hard to understand.  He was extremely well read,  and very disciplined in his reading and his writing. It is interesting and ironic that for London, Nietzsche was a major source of much personal inspiration.  Nietzsche was an ardent individualist and hated institutional constraints on the freedom and self-expression of the strong, which characterize the socialism that London advocated for. London was aware of the incongruity but it didn’t seem to bother him.  Perhaps he assumed based on his life up to that point, that with enough bravado and courage, an ardent individualists like himself would always find a way to buck the system.

The last several years of his life read like a tragedy –  he was being consumed by hangers-on, taken advantage of by those he trusted, and there were so many who wanted a piece of him and his wealth. He struggled to maintain his larger-than-life persona and the life-style he enjoyed – the wealthy man of the people, generous to a fault, hail-fellow-well-met, drinker, a visionary for whom no task or project was too great. When one of his great dreams – the building of the Beauty Ranch house in Sonoma County – literally went up in flames just as it was being completed, his spirit seemed broken.  The sparkle left his eye, his drinking increased, his health failed and he seemed to go into a deep depression.  He was already ill and in pain from a variety of causes, his poor health was exacerbated by his alcohol, and he was taking morphine to help him sleep. One morning he didn’t wake up.  There was a long standing rumor of suicide, but most current biographers dispute that.

Irving Stone doesn’t directly address London’s  alcoholism as a major vice – I believe in part due to the sensitivities of the period when he was writing the book .  But subsequent biographies do, and most attribute his decline in large measure to his drinking.  If you see parallels in this regard to Hemingway and even Steinbeck, you are not alone.

After reading the book, I read 4 of his short stories: The King of the Greeks, The White Silence,  Grit of Women, and Love of Life.   Common themes among those four are common themes in much of London’s work: great persistence and struggle in the face of great adversity, courage, loyalty, and the power and beauty of nature.  I would like to read more –  I find appealing London’s love of adventure and adventurous people, his fascination with those who are willing to get outside their comfort zones, take on risk and seek adventure – and become better for it.  His stories explore the toughness and the tenderness of the human spirit.  And I loved his positive tenacity, his playfulness, his vitality, and his exuberance for life.

There are probably more current biographies than this one, but they certainly build on Irving Stone’s research written so soon after London died.  It is my understanding that this was the first of the truly serious biographies of London.  It is a fascinating read and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  If anyone who reads this would like to join me in a further exploration of Jack London, and would like to read more of his short stories or perhaps one of his lesser known novels, please contact me.

Why this book: I listened to Tim Ferriss’s interview with Safi Bahcall and liked him and what he said – it was excellent. Also this book was a pick of The Next Big Idea Club, to which I belong.

Summary in 3 Sentences: The thesis of this book is that our society only makes progress when it adopts new ideas, which are almost always resisted by those with a strong vested interest in the status quo. He provides us many fascinating and surprising historical examples to support his thesis that an organization must be structured to separate those supporting the franchise from those developing creative new ideas.  He also provides other practical steps for how an organization can cultivate break-through ideas to succeed, and minefields that must be avoided – not only by organizations, but also by the creative individuals themselves.

My Impressions:  Fun and fascinating read.  Bahcall was trained as a physicist who then went into business. Bahcall grabs our interest with stories about products we now take for granted, which have changed the world we live in, how they were often strongly resisted by those who found them unnecessary, superfluous or bound to fail.  Such things as radar in the military, movie ideas such as the James Bond series or Star Wars series, commercial jet travel, medical innovations like statin drugs.  In each case the innovator persisted against the nay-sayers and the conventional mindset to eventually succeed in changing the world we live in.

Trained as a physicist and a very astute learner, Bahcall transitioned into business and soon realized that while organizational culture is important to a business success, organizational structure probably is more important when it comes to being creative and innovative.

Loonshots begins by showing how organizational structure can naturally impede creative ideas – what he called and many regard as “loonshots” –  ground breaking or seemingly crazy ideas that can change the world.  An organization that aspires to win through  ground-breaking innovation must separate and shelter radical creative thinkers from those whose job it is to efficiently run the organization.  He says that the “artists” must work separately from, and be protected from the “soldiers” who run the “franchise.”  Soldiers manage risk in order to run the organization as efficiently as possible.  In the short term, radical changes and truly innovative ideas involve risk and accepting failure, and can be very inefficient – anathema to the soldier mentality.

So his first and strongest recommendation is for leaders to structurally, separate the visionary innovators from those who run the franchise.  The leaders must be “careful gardeners (who) ensure that both loonshots and franchises are tended well, that neither side dominates the other, and that each side nurtures and supports the other.” p38  This he calls balanced phase separation.

Bahcall points out, again and again, that “the breakthroughs that change the course of science, business, and history – fail many times before they succeed.” p 37.  The greatest enemy of a truly good idea is what he calls a “false fail” – an idea that is still immature and/or the test or experiment may not take into consideration key affecting variables.  The test/experiment fails or appears to fails not because it’s a bad idea, but because of some other factor that the experiment does not take into account.

He goes on to distinguish between two distinctly different types of loonshots.  First are “P-type” moonshot – referring to a new innovative product or piece of equipment.  The second are “S-type” loonshots – referring to a new strategy, “a new way of doing business, or a new application of an existing product, which involves no new technologies.” p66  Radar, or polaroid cameras, or statin drugs were P-type loonshots.  Examples of S-type loon shots are Walmarts supply chain management and retail system, or how American Airlines creatively managed union contracts, and developed the most efficient computerized reservation system.

He warns against what he calls the “Moses Trap” to which innovative leaders are vulnerable.  It is when a creative individual builds a company based on his/her personal loonshot, and then goes on to think that s/he is a genius who should run everything.  Such creative geniuses are often artists who don’t know how to run a franchise, nor do they understand how to integrate strong franchise management with creative innovation.  He gives several examples of great loonshots that eventually ran out of steam, or failed to capitalize on their wins, because the loonshot creator fell into the “Moses Trap” and failed to adapt with the times and the market –  Steve Jobs during his first period with Apple, Ewin Land of Polaroid, Juan Trippe of Pan Am.

He also shared the opposite of the Moses Trap, which he called the PARC Trap -named for the Palo Alto Research Center developed by XEROX  where great ideas were born and either died, or were hijacked, due to no phase transition to the franchise side of the business. There  was no equilibrium or collaboration between artists and soldiers to permit the business side of the corporation to commercialize and monetize the great ideas.  So the great inventions either died, or sat there until others eventually took them to market, changed the world, and made billions.

The second part of the book is very much about organizational dynamics, and how it is almost a law of nature that a successful business will grow until it transforms itself into a less agile and more bureaucratic, more conservative organization.  Understanding this, and focusing on maintaining an equilibrium between the creative and the franchise sides of the business won’t prevent that, but it will help to manage it.

The section on Phase Transitions is a bit hard for me to follow – the scientist in Bahcall  does analyses of how fires spread, how traffic jams happen, how infectious diseases spread,  tracking terrorist activity.   His point (I believe) is to look at how little ripples can create big waves, and to better understand how small events can have disproportionate effects.  In describing the “axiom of emergence,” he recalls that Sherlock Holmes said that while individuals remain puzzles, man in the aggregate “becomes a mathematical certainty.” p177  He quotes scientist Neil Johnson , “you don’t need to know anything about the individuals,” to detect the patterns in their collective online behavior, and describes this as “the magic of emergence.”  p 184

The follow up to that is the certainty that, inside organizations, as the size of the group grows, incentives shift from focusing on collective goals to focus on career and promotion.  “When the size of the group exceeds a critical threshold, career interests trump.   That’s when teams will begin to dismiss loonshots and only franchise projects…will survive”  p 186

He discusses how as organizations grow, the “return-on-politics” increases – meaning that the career/promotion returns from time and energy spent on managing one’s reputation, one’s network, and how one is perceived in an organization, increase relative to the returns gains from putting time into actually working on a project. p198

Bahcall reaffirms what I’ve read in several other places – that about 150 people is the threshold for a team to stay cohesive around a common project.  After that, he says, “the system suddenly snaps from favoring a focus on loonshots to a focus on careers.”

He offers a couple of solutions to this dilemma and notes how “soft equity” such as recognition from respected peers can almost serve as  “paycheck” to inspire innovation.  He looks at DARPA – and how they have avoided having an overstaffed bureaucracy of people pretending to work, by hiring people for shorter periods and offering no or few promotions – just huge gains in reputation and “soft equity,”  which most can cash-in on later.

“Tilting the rewards more toward projects and away from promotion means celebrating results, not rank.” p218 And it will make larger groups more likely to innovate. The promotion and increase pay system incentivizes low-to-no risk ventures.  He has a great section on changing incentives to increase performance and innovation.

He has a whole section on how span of control is also a factor in facilitating innovation.  The narrower the span, the greater the tendency toward micro-management and risk aversion.  “Wider spans (15 or more direct reports per manager) encourage looser controls, greater independence, and more trial-and-error experiments.  Which also leads to more failed experiments. ” p222..”Which takes us to another reason a wide management span helps nurture loonshots: it encourages constructive feedback from peers….creative talent responds best to feedback from other creative talent. Peers, rather than authority. ” P223.

His penultimate chapter “Why the World speaks English”  answers the question: “Why did loonshot(s) appear and spread rapidly in Western Europe, in the seventeenth century, plus or minus a few years, when the empires of China, India, and Islam led the world in wealth, trade, organized study, and early science and technology for a thousand years?” p239  His answer:  Loonshots flourish in loonshot nurseries, not in empires devoted to franchises.  p257

His concluding chapter “Loonshots vs Disruption” gives fascinating examples of how many of the loonshots that changed the world were creative adaptations to undesired environmental factors.  Many of these were not designed to be innovative or disruptive changes – they were simply creative responses to simple challenges.  He tells why Sam Walton set up in Arkansa which forced him to find a new retail model; why IKEA found cheaper sources, and allowed customers to shop in warehouses, how google searches and transistors were “sustaining” innovations which had already been developed by others.

Conclusion:  For a Loonshot nursery to flourish -inside either a company or an industry -three conditions must be met:

1. Phase separation:  separate loonshot and franchise groups
2. Dynamic equilibrium: seamless exchange between the two groups.
3. Critical mass: a loonshot group large enough to ignite.  To thrive, a loonshot group needs a chain reaction.

He states:  “Leaders well-coached on group dynamics are likely to spend more time with their teams.  It’s fun working with high-performing teams who appreciate you. It’s less fun to spend time with dysfunctional teams who hate your guts.”  p217

“The ability to innovate well is a collective behavior.” p227