Allen Cheng, Author at Allen Cheng

Best Summary: Expecting Better – Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom is Wrong

Advice on pregnancy is often passed down as conventional wisdom without clear evidence (“Don’t take one sip of alcohol! Don’t clean the cat litter!”).

When the Harvard-trained economist Emily Oster got pregnant, she got tired of the low rigor surrounding most pregnancy advice. She dove into the medical literature and published her findings in Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom Is Wrong–and What You Really Need to Know.

Even if you don’t plan to get pregnant anytime soon, this is still a useful summary to skim through to learn some new angles on pregnancy, like:

When during your period is the best time to get pregnant, and when it’s impossible to get pregnant
Why you can have one drink of alcohol a day and not harm the fetus
Why “eating for two” is a myth

At the least, read my one-page key facts below.

Best Book Summary + PDF: Blue Ocean Strategy

Tired of competing head-to-head with other companies? Do you feel like your strategy differs little from the competition surrounding you?

You may need to redefine the rules of competition by defining a new strategy. In this Blue Ocean Strategy summary, learn:

How blue ocean strategies create more customer value and cut costs at the same time
How Cirque du Soleil broke out of the circus market and created its own category of entertainment
How Apple created multiple blue oceans in quick succession and upended traditional hardware/software markets
The 6 ways you can discover blue oceans in your own industry

Best Book Summary – The Upstarts: Uber and Airbnb History

Curious about how Uber and Airbnb grew from seedlings to internet juggernauts worth tens of billions of dollars?

The Upstarts covers the history of Uber and Airbnb, from their founding in 2008 to present day of 2016. Learn how each company started as just a side project, gathered inexorable momentum, and infiltrated cities around the world. Learn how neither Uber nor Airbnb was the first idea of its kind, but through strategy and will, they came to dominate their industries. Also learn how Uber and Airbnb attracted the ire of government, incumbents, the collaterally damaged, and its own customers.

Best Book Summary + PDF: Drive, by Daniel Pink

Are you feeling unmotivated in your job and life? Are you finding your current goals unsatisfying to work toward?

Drive, by Daniel Pink, believes that your work structure is to blame. Historically, employers have motivated employees through financial rewards and kept workers on a tight leash. These principles worked well when people were primarily working in assembly lines, but today’s creative work demands more: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

In this Drive summary, you’ll learn:

Why financial rewards can lower your motivation and tempt cheating
How every human, including you, is motivated by autonomy, mastery, and purpose
Why some companies give unlimited vacation days and pay you to work on personal projects
Why paying people to donate blood actually reduces donation rate
How to convince your boss to adopt changes and give you more freedom

The ORIGINAL Dropbox MVP Explainer Video

Dropbox is now a technology giant, valued at $10 billion in a 2014 funding round. It’s a very complex product, honed over a decade of development and hundreds of millions of dollars of investment.

But Dropbox didn’t start with the slick, seamless product you use today.

So let’s go back to the beginning, before Dropbox had a polished product and thousands of employees. Back to Dropbox’s original Minimum Viable Product (MVP). If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, be emboldened by the idea that Dropbox started with just about as much as you have right now.

Best Summary + PDF | Carrots and Sticks Don’t Work

Want to motivate your employees and teammates to do a better job? Does your team seem unhappy, unmotivated, and distrustful of your organization?

In Carrots and Sticks Don’t Work, Paul Marciano argues that engagement stems from respect. Employees don’t want to be treated like cogs in a chain. Instead, they want to feel empowered, have autonomy, receive supportive feedback, and be treated considerately. Breaking any of these makes teammates feel disrespected, which causes motivation to plummet.

In this Carrots and Sticks Don’t Work summary, you’ll learn:

the major non-monetary components of what employees want
how to diagnose whether you’re a great or terrible manager
simple actions you can take today to engage your team

Best Summary + PDF: Give and Take, by Adam Grant

Are you a giver, a matcher, or a taker?

People fit into one of three reciprocity styles. Givers like to give more than they get, paying attention to what others need. Takers like to get more than they give, seeing the world as a competitive place and primarily looking out for themselves. And matchers balance and give on a quid pro quo basis, willing to exchange favors but careful about not being exploited.

Of these 3 styles, which do you think tends to be the most successful? When surveyed, most people believe the takers and matchers come out on top. Givers just seem too altruistic to push themselves ahead.

In Give and Take, Wharton professor Adam Grant argues that givers are actually the most successful of the 3 types. Givers build larger, more supportive networks; they inspire the most creativity from their colleagues; and they achieve the most successful negotiations. Givers find ways to grow the pie and take their share of it.

And yet givers also risk becoming spineless doormats. You may know of a pushover who gives in to every demand, at cost to his or her own well-being. There are strong strategies to protect against this.

In this Give and Take summary, you’ll learn why givers are so successful, why takers are punished by society for bad behavior, and how givers can avoid pitfalls that drag them down.

Poor Charlie’s Almanack by Charlie Munger | Book Summary and PDF

Charlie Munger is Warren Buffett’s long-time partner at Berkshire Hathaway. Bill Gates says that Charlie “is truly the broadest thinker I have ever encountered.”

Poor Charlie’s Almanack is a collection of Charlie Munger’s best advice given over 30 years, in the form of 11 speeches given as commencement addresses and roundtable talks. In all his talks, he shows wit, rationality, and incredible clarity of thought.

In this summary of Poor Charlie’s Almanack, I’ve extracted the most important points and organized them by topic. You’ll learn why Charlie considers multidisciplinary learning vital to success, his checklist when making investments, and how to build a trillion dollar company from scratch.

Tim Ferriss’s 17 Questions to Solve Your Life Problems

Feeling stuck in life? Asking extreme questions gets you thinking about your life from a different direction. You might find the solution was obvious all along.

Tim Ferriss’s 17 questions are a great start to questioning what you can improve about your life. These question come from his best-selling book Tools of Titans. I humbly share Tim Ferriss’s questions below, adding my own interpretations and thinking exercises to help you apply them.

25 Cognitive Biases that Ruin Your Life, Explained

Want to practice better decision making?

Unfortunately, your natural brain’s pretty dumb and easily tricked. To save energy and make faster decisions, it relies on cognitive heuristics to make fast judgments.

In prehistoric days when we had to avoid getting devoured by lions, these fast heuristics worked pretty well. Now that life is more complex, the decisions you need to make are more complex, and your cognitive biases trick you into making bad decisions.

These 25 cognitive biases come from “The Psychology of Human Misjudgment,” a talk by Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s partner at Berkshire Hathaway.

By learning these biases, you’ll guard yourself against people trying to exploit you. Even better, you’ll guard against your worst enemy: your own brain.