Book Summaries Archives - Page 16 of 19

Best Summary + PDF: Deep Work, by Cal Newport

When you’re trying to be productive, are you easily distracted by wandering thoughts or urges? Do you mindlessly open up your favorite website or app, craving novelty or fearing you’re missing out? Do you wish you could focus better, spending hours more per day driving toward your most important goals?

These are laughably universal problems. Internet apps are engineered to deliver hits of novelty and trigger cravings so strong you don’t even realize you’re under their control. If you examine your behavior, you’d likely find elements of drug addiction.

(My drug of choice is Reddit. Like an addict, I get sudden impulses out of nowhere to check it, fearing I’ll miss something hilarious or provocative. Also like an addict, I have an efficient sequence of delivery – “Ctrl+T” to open a new tab, “RE” to get reddit as the top choice in the search bar, “Enter” to load the page. I didn’t realize how ingrained this habit was until I tried to stop.)

It’s common knowledge that today’s media is addictive – yet ultimately unsatisfying, providing little more than frivolous amusement. What’s less common knowledge is how to overcome these distractions so you can focus on the goals you really care about.

Deep Work teaches you how to develop your focus and resist distractions. Focus is like a mental muscle – you need to structure training sessions and push yourself to your mental limit to increase your focus capacity. Implement the strategies in this Deep Work summary, and you’ll be more productive than you’ve ever been.

In this Deep Work summary, learn:

Why deep work is critical to your success as an information worker
How to set up your work environment to maximize focus
How to send effective emails that cut down on dreaded back-and-forth email chains
How to memorize the sequence of a pack of cards – and why this will improve your focus

Best Summary + PDF: The Smartest Guys in the Room (Enron Book), by Bethany McLean

The failure of Enron in the early 2000’s is one of the largest bankruptcies in US history (with Lehman Brothers in 2008 as the largest). Its accounting scandal led to Enron’s bankruptcy as well as the dissolution of Arthur Andersen, one of the big five accounting firms. Shareholders were wiped out, and tens of thousands of employees left with worthless retirement accounts.

Today the name “Enron” still evokes a reflexive repulsion, a feeling that these were simply bad people doing illegal things. But, we think, that’s in the past. Surely we’ve evolved as a society, and by thinking hard enough, you or I can avoid these problems.

In reality, when you dig into the details, Enron’s downfall is the predictable mixture of human greed, poorly structured incentives, and lack of sanity checks when everyone has their fingers in the pie. You might be surprised to learn that most of Enron’s accounting tactics were not technically illegal at the time – they were actually publicly celebrated for being financial innovations. Shareholders, employees, investment bankers, and accountants all benefited from the situation and enabled Enron for years. They only stopped when it became untenable.

The Smartest Guys in the Room, by former Fortune reporter Bethany McLean, is a fantastic recounting of the rise and fall of Enron. It shows how, layer by layer, the fragile house was constructed until it became impossible to sustain.

In smaller ways, we too are subject to the same pulls as Enron managers and employees. The warning – if we were put into the same situation, we might not have behaved any differently.

In this Smartest Guys in the Room summary, learn:

The key conditions that enabled Enron’s corruption and allowed stakeholders to look the other way
The financial maneuvers that allowed Enron to disguise its fundamental financials
Practices to avoid in your own life

Best Summary + PDF: Win Bigly, by Scott Adams

During the 2016 elections, Dilbert creator Scott Adams predicted that Donald Trump would win primarily because of his persuasive power. According to Adams, what looked to outsiders like blunders or mere accidents – his “Rosie O’Donnell” debate response, nicknames like “Crooked Hillary,” the repetition of building “the wall” – were instead examples of a Master Persuader channeling a nation’s energy to his will.

Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter describes the persuasion strategies Trump used throughout the campaign; how Hillary’s campaign fell short in comparison; and how you can apply these strategies to be persuasive yourself.

If you’ve read books like Cialdini’s Influence, Charlie Munger’s Almanack, and Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, you’re already aware of the biases that block you from rationality. I consider these “defensive” books – you learn how to improve your internal thinking to become more objective.

Win Bigly is an “offensive” book – it focuses externally, showing how to leverage people’s biases and irrationality to persuade on your point of view. (Obviously this should be done for moral purposes.)

Regardless of your politics, you probably want to get better at persuading people to see your point of view. As you read this summary, put your political leanings aside, and focus on how you can be more persuasive.

In this Win Bigly summary, learn:

The ranking of the most effective persuasion methods (fact-based reasoning is lower than you might think)
Why visual imagery is so much more powerful than words
How to come up with killer slogans, and why Clinton’s nicknames for Trump never worked
How to neutralize a criticism by taking the high ground everyone can agree on

Best Summary + PDF: Mindfulness in Plain English

Do you get irritated, angry, anxious, or emotional more easily than you would like? Do you find yourself drawn into vicious cycles of negative emotions and wish you could extricate yourself on demand? Are you essentially dissatisfied with what you have and feel like you’re in a constant rat race to nowhere? Do you wish you could let go of negative attachments and be at peace for more of your life?

Mindfulness meditation may be worth trying. With roots in Buddhism, mindfulness meditation has gained traction in the Western world, showing a surge in popularity in the past few years. Randomized scientific experiments have shown some psychological benefits of meditation.

Mindfulness in Plain English is an approachable introduction to mindfulness and meditation. Written by Buddhist monk Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, Mindfulness in Plain English is practical, mostly secular, and truly written in plain English. Here are practical tips on how to start meditating and deal with common problems.

The practical goal of meditation is to create mindfulness in your everyday conscious life. You observe your thoughts and emotions as they arise, without succumbing to your typical kneejerk reactions. You discover the roots of your anger, greed, and selfishness, and you learn to banish these psychic irritants. Ultimately, you become more at peace, and friendlier to other people.

If this sounds like a valuable goal to you, then give this Mindfulness in Plain English summary – and meditation itself – a try.

Best Summary + PDF: How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie is a classic that needs little introduction. It’s one of the best-selling books of all time and a major developer of the “self-help” book genre. Many principles written in How to Win Friends and Influence People have been repackaged and articulated in different forms.

Published 80 years ago, it contains universal principles of interacting with other people that ring true even today. Since its publishing, much has changed about the way we access information, work, and communicate – but little has changed about human nature and what we crave from other people.

In this How to Win Friends and Influence People book summary, learn:

How to be a great conversationalist while saying barely anything
What people crave from others as much as food or water
Why you fish with worms, not cheesecake, and what this means for people interaction
How to influence people to see your way of thinking, without arousing their anger

Best Summary + PDF: Why We Sleep, by Matthew Walker

If you’re like me, you sometimes try to get by with just 5 to 7 hours of sleep (or even less). You hope that you’ll make it up in the extra hours of productivity, or by catching up on sleep on the weekend. There are plenty of excuses for being sleep deprived – a big deadline coming up, too much work, too binge-worthy of a TV show, social events you can’t miss out on.

The book Why We Sleep argues this is totally short-sighted. More people are chronically sleep-deprived than they realize, and the punishments for this are severe – reduced productivity and happiness, and increased risk of a panel of diseases. Except for very rare genetic freaks (<1% of population), the standard sleep you should be getting every night is 8 hours, without fail.

This helpful New York Times bestseller covers how sleep happens, its major benefits, its frightening downsides when deprived, and the best ways to get better sleep.

In this book summary of Why We Sleep, learn:

Why your insane dreams are incredibly helpful for your problem-solving
The 5 major reasons you’re getting less sleep than you should – and how to fix it
How being a night owl is determined by genetics – and why night owls are punished by society
How chronic sleep deprivation destroys your body, from weight gain and heart disease to Alzheimer’s
A very rare inherited disease that causes incurable insomnia, then certain death, within 10 months
How a cocaine-addicted surgeon started the insanely sleep-depriving medical residency program

Best Summary + PDF: Bad Blood, by John Carreyrou (Theranos’s Failure)

Founded in 2003 by 19-year old Stanford dropout Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos raised over $700 million in investment at a $9 billion valuation. It promised to run hundreds of common blood tests with just drops of blood. Holmes was celebrated as the youngest self-made female billionaire in the world and put on magazine covers.

Then it crashed. The technology was fake. As the truth came out, regulators prohibited Theranos from operating; the SEC sued Theranos with fraud. Today the company is limping alone, virtually worthless.

What led Henry Kissinger to join its board, 4-star general Mattis to say Elizabeth Holmes had “one of the most mature and well-honed sense of ethics” he’d ever seen, and pharmacy giant Walgreens to partner in rolling out Theranos in its stores? What led professional investors to invest nearly a billion dollars in a fraudulent company?

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou, the very journalist who first exposed Theranos, covers the known history of how Theranos started, maintained its lies, and fell. The story is an incredible demonstration of the weaknesses of human psychology. Even very sophisticated investors, whose job is to sniff out these exact situations, fell completely for the fraud until it was exposed.

This Bad Blood summary covers three major questions:

How did the deception begin?
How was the deception allowed to continue?
What finally led to Theranos’s downfall?

Best Summary + PDF: Originals, by Adam Grant

In our modern economy, innovation is prized socially and rewarded financially. But how do you generate good new ideas? How do you tell which ideas are good? And how do you execute to make them real?

Wharton professor Adam Grant addresses these questions in Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World. A bestseller like his first book Give and Take, Originals studies the habits of highly original professionals and dispels myths related to originality.

If you’re trying to be innovative, noted originals like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs may be intimidating. They seem like unique forces of nature, born with incredible intellect, creativity, and willpower, while we mere mortals are doomed to follow.

If there’s one message Adam Grant wants to convey in Originals, it’s to dispel this apparent misconception – you too can be original.

In this Originals book summary, learn:

The primary factor in generating more good ideas
Why “first mover advantage” is a myth
How procrastination can actually help you come up with better ideas
Why first-born children are generally less creative than last-born children, and how to encourage originality in your children
Which levels of an organization’s totem pole to target with your new idea

PDF + Summary: Sam Walton, Made in America (Wal-Mart Founder)

Wal-Mart is the largest retailer on the planet. It had $500 billion in sales in 2017 – almost 3x the size of Amazon – and runs 12,000 stores worldwide.

This retail titan began in 1945 with founder Sam Walton managing a single store in Newport, AR, a town of 7,000 people. In this small town, Walton learned the retail and management strategies that became the foundation of Wal-Mart’s staggering worldwide growth. (Amazing that Wal-Mart now has more than one store for every person in the town in which it was founded).

Sam Walton wrote his autobiography Sam Walton: Made in America in the last year before he died, as he struggled with cancer. Made in America is a candid, energetic retelling of the Wal-Mart story and the principles that led Walton and his partners to incredible success.

If you’ve ever read The Everything Store, a deep dive into Amazon, you’ll see Amazon’s core principles reflected in Wal-Mart, half a century before Amazon and the popular internet even existed. No surprise – Made in America is one of Jeff Bezos’s essential must-read books for his management team. If you want to understand the clash of retail titans Amazon and Wal-Mart in the coming years, you have to read these books.p>

In this Made in America summary, learn:

What Wal-Mart did in its early life that every major competitor ignored
How Wal-Mart borrowed its competitors’ best ideas – and did them better
Sam Walton’s favorite management tactics to motivate his team
Why Sam Walton always flew coach

Best Book Summary + PDF: Shoe Dog, by Phil Knight

Shoe Dog is the story of how Nike was founded, written by Nike’s founder, Phil Knight. Nike is now a global brand – go pretty much anywhere in the world, and you’ll see someone wearing Nikes.

But Shoe Dog starts you over 50 years ago in 1962, when Phil Knight is 24 years old, has just earned an MBA from Stanford, and doesn’t know what to do with his life. You travel the next 18 years with Phil Knight, through continuous adversity, self-doubt, and never-ending financial uncertainty.

Shoe Dog is a refreshingly candid entrepreneurial account. Phil is clear about his shortcomings and about how tough it was to keep Nike running year after year. Shoe Dog is also well-written, with poetic phrasings and philosophical musings, unlike the straightforward clip of most business biographies.

Read the Shoe Dog summary here for the main history of Nike and Phil Knight, but read the real book for a visceral account of how one of the world’s biggest companies got started.