Allen Cheng, Author at Allen Cheng

Summary: The Hacker’s Diet, by John Walker

The Hacker’s Diet was written by John Walker, founder of software company Autodesk. This is an engineer’s approach to weight loss, described in terms of control systems, feedback loops, measurement noise reduction, and practical problem-solving.

With so many contradictory theories of weight loss out there, The Hacker’s Diet cuts out the bull – it’s about calories in and calories out, period. If you’re fat, you’re fat because your eating control system is broken. To you, cutting back calories is intensely painful, but there’s little stopping you from overeating well beyond your daily maintenance calories.

It’s simple. But simple doesn’t mean easy. The key is to execute.

The systems and strategies described in The Hacker’s Diet are eminently practical, in that “I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before” way. In this Hacker’s Diet summary, learn:

How your internal eating control system is broken, causing you to eat way more than you should
The sane way to track your weight to avoid daily fluctuations of 2-4 pounds
Why the first few days of dieting are the hardest that dieting will ever be
What you have to do to maintain your ideal weight for the rest of your life

Best Summary + PDF: Tools of Titans, by Tim Ferriss

In his epic 707-page Tools of Titans, Tim Ferriss shares the habits and beliefs of 101 people at the top of their game, including tech investors like Chris Sacca and Peter Thiel, entrepreneurs like Linkedin’s Reid Hoffman and Evernote’s Phil Libin, superhuman athletes like Amelia Boone and Wim Hof, media figures like Edward Norton and Whitney Cummings, and more.

These are the principles that successful people use to achieve audacious goals, improve themselves, and be happier. If you can apply the lessons from this book, you can be more effective.

The problem with Tools of Titans is its organization – every titan has a separate chapter, leading to over 140 short chapters over 707 pages. For Tim, this makes sense, as he wants to pay homage to the titans and make it easy to find personalities you care about. But when organized this way, it’s hard to see the bigger picture.

What I really wanted to know were patterns of habits across the titans. What do many successful people do that I don’t currently do? I wanted to see the beliefs of titans organized by theme, like how to define your life goals, how to think of good ideas, how to be happier everyday.

That’s what I’ve done in this summary. I’ve extracted my favorite lessons from the book and reorganized them by theme. This way, you can see how 10 titans focus their lives to cut out the noise, and how 9 titans find time to be grateful every single day.

(PDF+Summary) Never Binge Again, by Glenn Livingston

Do you have a behavior that you rationally know is better for you, but you find it too hard to maintain? Do you want to lose weight; stop using social media; exercise more; work harder and longer?

Do you feel like there are two selves to you – the rational planning self, and the greedy self-destructive indulgent self? And sometimes you feel powerless to control the indulgent self? Do you wish your rational planning self could have full control over your behavior?

Never Binge Again presents a wonderful mental framework to help solve these problems. It’s directed toward binge-eating and weight loss, but the concepts are easily analogized to any other impulse or addiction you want to control, like procrastination, social media, or laziness.

The PayPal Wars (PayPal’s History): Summary + PDF

PayPal is now one of the world’s largest payment systems. Its early history was chaotic. Within just 4 years of its beginning in 1998, PayPal signed up millions of users, merged with Elon Musk’s X.com, raised hundreds of millions in funding, had 3 different CEOs, IPO’d, and sold to eBay in 2002. (It spun out as an independent company in 2015 and now has a market cap of $90 billion.)

The PayPal Wars is an account of PayPal’s early history, written by former Director of Marketing Eric Jackson. PayPal Wars describes the staggering hyper-growth and the relentless competition with direct competitors and financial incumbents.

This book is a nice complement to Reid Hoffman’s Blitzscaling. You can see how the crucible of PayPal’s chaos forged Reid’s philosophy of how winner-take-all companies arise and need to “move fast at all costs.”

Best Summary + PDF: Blitzscaling, by Reid Hoffman

Want to know the growth tactics that Uber, Facebook, and Airbnb used to reach massive valuations in record time?

On the other hand, are you confused by companies that bleed billions of dollars and never seem to care about being profitable? “What in the world are they thinking?”

Blitzscaling gives you answers to both. Written by LinkedIn founder and Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling describes the counterintuitive business strategy of putting efficiency and confidence aside for pure speed.

While nominally a business strategy book, Blitzscaling is generally relevant for:

Entrepreneurs who want to build massive companies
VCs and investors who want to discover the next big company
Employees who want to know how to work in a hyper-growth company
Anyone who looks at companies burning money to grow and wants to understand what the heck they’re doing

In this Blitzscaling summary, learn:

Common attributes of today’s most successful tech business models
When it’s appropriate to blitzscale, and when it will fail
The counterintuitive practices of blitzscaling that violate business common sense

Understanding Michael Porter, by Joan Magretta | PDF + Summary

Michael Porter is considered the father of modern business strategy. One of Harvard Business School’s most famous professors, he originated the ideas of “five forces” industry analysis, the value chain, and competitive advantage.

Like fashion trends, most business ideas come and go. Frameworks are shown to be poorly predictive of success, or apply only to a narrow set of situations. That Porter’s ideas are still widely used in management consulting and taught in MBA programs today, 40 years after introduction, are testament to their enduring utility.

Porter’s seminal works are two tomes, Competitive Strategy and Competitive Advantage, covering 1,000 pages of business strategy. This book, Understanding Michael Porter, is an accessible distillation of the core principles by Joan Magretta (Porter collaborator and former Bain partner).

When I started my first business, Understanding Michael Porter revolutionized my conception of what successful businesses do and what strategy is. It’s not an understatement to say that it gave me an entirely new lens to look at leading businesses and understand how they operate.

In this Understanding Michael Porter summary, learn:

Why “aiming to the best” is a stupid business strategy
The five forces that tell you how profitable an industry is
Why choosing what not to do is as important as what to do
How IKEA and Southwest Airlines built master strategies that have endured for decades

Best Summary+PDF: Thinking Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman

We’re so self-confident in our rationality that we think all our decisions are well-considered. When we choose a job, decide how to spend our time, or buy something, we think we’ve considered all the relevant factors and are making the optimal choice.

In reality, our minds are besieged by deep-rooted evolutionary biases. Where they once enhanced survival, they now lead to poor decision making.

Thinking, Fast and Slow is a masterful book on psychology and behavioral economics by Nobel Prize laureate Daniel Kahneman. You might already be aware of biases, from books like Poor Charlie’s Almanack or Cialdini’s Influence. Thinking, Fast and Slow exceeds these books by presenting an overall framework of cognition that explains why the biases exist and how they work.

This is a book to take your time and chew on. You should apply each learning to mistakes you’ve made and decisions you’re mulling over. The rewards are important: you’ll make better decisions and maximize your happiness.

In this Thinking, Fast and Slow summary, learn:

How something as simple as reordering a list can change your decision
Why most pundits and stock analysts are worthless
Why losses are more painful than gains, and when you inappropriately take on risk
Why we fantasize about hail-mary shots at big wins (lottery tickets and investments), while also obsessing about tiny chances of bad outcomes (disasters)
Why 90% of drivers state they’re above average drivers

Best Summary + PDF: How to Read a Book, by Mortimer Adler

When you read a book, do you find yourself forgetting what you read? Do you regret wasting time on books that you should have skimmed instead?

If you read a lot of books a year, then it makes sense to spend a few hours learning how to read better and double the value from your reading. That’s the point of How to Read a Book, a classic by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren.

The argument is compelling: after you learn phonics as a child and go through high school English, no one really teaches you how to read intelligently. College courses rarely touch on this, and the workforce even less so.

As a result, plenty of adults read at an elementary level – not in the sense of having a limited vocabulary, but in absorbing the value of a book efficiently. See if any of these problems apply to you:

You don’t really know what a book is about until you start reading it.
You read at the same pace, regardless of whether it’s a good book or a terrible book.
You don’t critique your books, articulating exactly why you liked or disliked it.

In this How to Read a Book summary, learn:

Tactics to understand what a book is about, in minutes
How you should read a novel differently from a nonfiction book
How to intelligently critique a book
The highest possible level of reading

Best Summary+PDF: Perennial Seller, by Ryan Holiday

If you’re a creator of anything (music, tech products, writing), you probably hope to have a large impact. You hope to break through so thousands/millions of people can use the product you poured your soul into.

But have you thought about creating something enduring? Have you ever thought about how to ensure your creation is still being used and loved 10 years from now?

That’s the question Perennial Seller is trying to answer. Ryan Holiday, an author and marketer, tries to articulate what distinguishes works that last, from works that fade into obscurity.

How is 4-decade old band Iron Maiden still selling records and concerts? What distinguishes works with followings, like Star Wars, from similar blockbusters like Avatar that have faded from public memory?

In this Perennial Seller summary, learn:

How good your creation needs to be to have a chance at longevity
How to position your product so that people will actually care
How to get influencers and press to cover your creation without asking for it
How to build a loyal following of people who will buy every single thing you create

Best Summary+PDF: Cognitive Behavior Therapy, Basics and Beyond (Beck)

Do you ever find yourself in situations causing you stress/anxiety/fear, rationally knowing you shouldn’t be stressed/anxious/afraid? Have you stopped wishing you’d think self-defeating thoughts, mustering yourself to do the things you’ve wanted to do? You might find elements of cognitive behavioral therapy to be useful.

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a standard first line of treatment for improving mental health disorders such as depression and anxiety. CBT has been found to be as effective as medication in treating many mental disorders.

Cognitive Behavior Therapy: Basics and Beyond, written by clinician Judith S. Beck (daughter of CBT’s inventor Aaron Beck), is the leading text for CBT practitioners. This CBT basics summary covers the principles of mental disorders and treatment.

Even if you aren’t formally diagnosed with a mental health disorder, you likely face situations that evoke more negative emotions than you’d like – nervousness talking to your boss, road rage, anxiety in social situations, stress that you won’t get everything done, or fear of failure in trying something new. This CBT summary will show tactics that are broadly applicable to your daily life, helping you overcome anxiety, sadness, anger, frustration, and stress.

In this CBT: Basics and Beyond summary, learn:

Questions to ask yourself to get distance from stressful thoughts
Types of cognitive distortions that are self-defeating
How to address traumatic events earlier in your life, so that they have less hold on your thinking today
Key ways to build rapport as a cognitive behavior therapist