This past weekend I finished listening to In The Plex. This book is just awesome. If you have been in web development since before google existed & been following google, you must read this book. For me, it was like taking a stroll down memory lane, filling the gaps of my knowledge. Whether because it was something that I didn’t have the time to follow or it was very much a behind the door event, it’s pretty much covered.

The book goes over Google’s timeline in multiple passes, from the founder point of view, from the search point of view, from the China point of view and so on. Each time it paints the picture with more details.

My main takeaway is I have worked a few times at really cool places on cool projects and we, myself nor the company, really didn’t understand what we had going on nor the implications of what we were tapping into. More than once in the past month I have been reminded of how incredibly successful some product I worked on were and we didn’t have a clue about it. There is something to be said about sheer perseverance & vision.

While sure by themselves it’s not enough in most cases, when coupled with a basic ability to execute it makes the whole difference in the world.

Also while reading the book it made me think about problems that I worked on and I still believe have not been solved yet among giving a bunch of ideas for businesses.

If you have been curious about anything Google, how they started, how they manage/hire/develop products this is the definite book.

Couple of weeks ago I finished reading “The Black Swan” by Nassim Taleb. I greatly recommend this book, in fact I am now reading Nassim’s previous book.

What is a black swan? Briefly an unknown unknown. Something that is completely out of the blue that it’s practically impossible to plan for. If you planned for it, the black swan would be something else. Not to say that you can’t protect yourself from it.

The book shows a couple of great way to think about your data and how to prove, or better to disprove, your theories. I have found that negative empiricism has served me well in the past few weeks. Negative empiricism is pretty much trying to find data points that disprove your theory. It’s way to easy to find data points that prove your theory, for as long as you create some reasoning around them, some ‘narrative’, you can make sense out of all kind of random events. We humans are quite adept at doing so too. For as many data points as you can find you’ll never be truly 100% sure that your theory is correct.

On the other hand once you have a theory, 1 single data point is all that is need to debunk it. It’s much faster that way to come to a good theory.

I have found myself many times a victim of the narrative fallacy, brought to my attention this writer as well as from Dan Ariely.

Overall lots of great new concepts, ludic fallacy being one of them, highly recommend it.

This weekend I listened to “The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home” by Dan Ariely. Once again Dan writes, with a really witty and friendly prose, an important look at how we make decisions. Although it seemed there weren’t really many upsides I think that some of them were left to us to conjure. He does make some examples but he probably should have done more so in each chapter.

The hope in many cases is either that by knowing our irrational tendencies we’d be able to recognize the pattern and not make the bad calls. Or use the irrational tendencies to architect our decisions in a more constructive matter. I am big on the second strategy, choice architecture.

The best part for me was with regard to how our emotions have a long lasting imprinting on our decision making so that we might not just make a rash, irrational DECISION on the moment, because of our particular, and completely unrelated, state of mind, but later we’d make another bad DECISION based on the previous one. Long after the emotional feelings have faded the decisions are left there to coerce us. Causing an avalanche effect of bad decisions all caused by something completely unrelated.

Bad emotions causing bad decisions causing bad decisions causing bad emotions.

There were plenty of chapters to which I could directly relate and could use immediately. Chapter 2, “The Meaning of Labor”, in particular struck a chord with me because of my previous experiences. I am highly motivated by the meaning of my effort.

The 2 most depressing jobs that I held were at companies where my work would get continuously get discarded or shelved. The second position lasted for 4 years where I’d slave over project after project and they’d all be shelved before launch. In total close to 6 years of R&D with very little to show up for beside experience.

These experiences left me looking for meaning more than anything in my work. In a way I have been scarred for life.

In fact if I don’t see a strong meaning in a particular task given to me, it’s very hard for me to motivate myself and do it, no matter the amount of money you throw at me. If I receive too many, I’ll just quit or facilitate the elimination of my position.

In general I can draw many parallels between the concept discussed in the book and my personal and professional life. How to motivate my kids, myself to do chores. How to market and connect with the visitors to my sites. How to write marketing copy that sells. Ideas for future businesses. How to evaluate what I want to do when I finally grow up.

I give a 4.5 out 5. Buy it, read it, use it.

In the meantime I am going to give a second listening and this time I’ll jot down the ideas when they comes.

A couple of weeks ago I finished reading “Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose” by Tony Hsieh. It’s a great book and I recommend it to anybody curious about Zappos or on how to build a culture within a company.

I found the book refreshing in its honesty. I was surprised with Tony’s poor ethic as an Oracle employee and many more revelations about his character and Zappos’ history.

It clearly explains his journey through life, what influenced him, what occupied his mind and his mistakes. It’s truly a classic 3 act hero story. Throughout the book I really felt for him and his company and recognize that the emerging group, the people made it through the downturns and stuck with it, are really the reason Zappos is such a great company. Their experience must be, emotionally, pretty close to that of war veterans. Those people must have been like a band of brothers/systers. In my mind, without those hard times, Zappos would have not bred the current culture. Fortunately, with the help of this book, you won’t need to go through a long war-like period to breed a culture in your company. You can just gain the wisdom from Zappos’ experience.

My only critique: there is a small section of the book, about 20-40 pages that I though it could have been written differently to seem less like propaganda, but overall the book was outstanding.

It’s a quick read, with lots to learn and I suggest it heartily.