Category: Books

I am listening to The Age of Turbulence by Alan Greenspan and in the first few chapters I’ve already learned some interesting things.  On economics:

• The interest rate reflects how much money is available for investing.  Our interest rates are low because people have saved lots of money and are investing it.

About Alan Greenspan:

• He was raised by a single mom.
• He learned math from following baseball statistics.
• His first professional job was playing the saxophone.
• When the 9/11 attacks happened, he was sitting on a plane on the way home from Zurich.  The plane had to turn around and go back to Zurich.

I just finished reading a great book, The Cure: How a Father Raised $100 Million–And Bucked the Medical Establishment–In a Quest to Save His Children.  John Crowley discovers that his two youngest kids are dying from a rare disease – one so rare that nobody has bothered to invest a lot in a cure.  Crowley ends up quitting his job, starting a drug company and finding a drug to treat his kids.  Only to discover that the FDA considers it a conflict of interest to include his own kids in the trials! 

It’s a great heart-warming story of a family’s struggle with a little known disease written by a great writer – Greeta Anand.  The book is mostly about the business side (as opposed to the medical side) of the disease.  It’s a story about the dad’s struggle to find a cure for the disease.  He’s never run a company, never gotten funding, knows little about biology or science, and yet he starts a very successful biotech company and finds a drug that works – all for his kids.

I found the conflict of interest part interesting.  John Crowley brings in people suffering from Pompe to meet the people in the company.  Most of the researchers have never met anyone suffering from the disease they are trying to cure!  And get this, it could be considered a conflict of interest to meet the people they are trying to cure!  That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.  In the computer high tech world we consider it a very good thing to meet your users – you are making the product for them!  In Crowley’s case the visitors helped motivate and empassion his company.

One of my favorite stories is the story of the dog Hachiko.  Hachiko was an Akita who lived in Japan with a professor.  Every day he walked the professor to the Shibuya train station and every evening he met him at the train station to walk him home.  After the professor died, Hachiko continued to go to the train station every evening to wait for the professor.  He went every evening for 11 years!

There’s now a statue called Hachiko at the Shibuya station and two children’s book about the story.  I read one of the books, Hachiko: The True Story of a Loyal Dog (Bccb Blue Ribbon Picture Book Awards), to my son last week and then a wikipedia article showed up about Hachiko.  Hachiko’s story is truly an amazing story of friendship and loyalty.

Picture from Wikipedia.

If you like Heinlein, you have to read Scalzi’s Old Man’s War.  I really enjoyed it.

Amazon had been recommending it to me for some time and I kept skipping it because I’m not a big fan of military fiction – although I don’t mind an occasional military science fiction book.  I finally decided to try Old Man’s War when it came up on Paperbackswap and I have now added all of Scalzi’s other books to my wishlist!

You know that it’s hard to change someone’s mind because they’d have to admit they are wrong and nobody likes to be wrong.  Well, anytime you convince someone to use a new product, they are in some sense admitting that their old solution was wrong.  In All Marketers Are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World Seth Godin gives the perfect example with Acumen.  Acumen is a non profit that wants to invest in third world companies that sell affordable products to people in developing countries – it’s the best way to help their economies grow.  However, traditional philanthropists don’t want to hear that the way they’ve been doing it is wrong – and traditional investors don’t care that the company they are investing in is in a developing country as long as it makes them money.  So Acumen had to tell a different story and reach out to a different market: those philanthropists that are not happy with the way things currently work. 

If you want to convince someone to do it your way or buy your product, don’t tell them that the way they are doing it now is wrong.  Sell them a new, exciting story.

Growing up I had a reputation for being really good.  Because everyone believed I was really good, they would never believe I had done anything wrong.  Honest.  My eighth grade class elected me class delegate (this was Spain) simply because I could deliver the bad news and be the scape goat and I wouldn’t get in trouble for it because everyone believed I was good.  I got to explain all sorts of things that we had done and the teachers would go, yes, yes, I know, and I know you weren’t part of it.  (It only backfired once, when the teacher said she’d dock my grade unless I fessed up some names.  I lived with docked history grades for the rest of the year.)

So I knew intuitively that people hear what they already believe.  (We usually say they hear what they want to hear – but really they hear what they believe.) Seth Godin put it in writing much more clearly in All Marketers Are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World. Marketers can tell any story they like, but the only one you are going to hear is the one you already agreed with in the first place.  You hear you need that special cup of coffee because you are special and deserve it.  They didn’t have to convince you that you were special – they just reminded you of the fact.

I was tempted to send a copy of the book to an ex-friend who looked at me like I was an egotistical smartass when I told her I really liked The Business Plan for the Body because it made perfect sense – the book described weightloss just like I thought about weightloss.  Her response was "You liked it because you agreed with it?"  And I was like, "yes!"  And she decided I was full of myself.  But Seth Godin says we all only hear and like what we agree with.  And I knew that from all the way back in eighth grade – I just didn’t know how to explain it.

Graphic novels are like comic books.  Graphic movies look like comic books – they are real actors in black and white with digitally created backgrounds usually with a little color added.  300, the graphic movie about a Grecian king who is greatly outnumbered by the Persians, is the number one best seller on Amazon and it just released on DVD the day before yesterday.  (And we owned our copy the day before yesterday.) 

Personally, I like any movie that’s well done with a good story line.  However, the "graphic" effect doesn’t do anything for me.  The movie Sin City wasn’t bad because it looked like a comic but it wasn’t any better because it looked like a comic.

(I haven’t watched 300 yet but Frank says it’s good – he watched it after I went to bed and it was good enough to keep him up!)

One of the most important points in Organizing from the Inside Out is that being organized is not the same thing as being neat.  If you want your house to look neat, you can shove everything under the bed and in the closets.  Being organized means knowing where everything is and having it conveniently located to where you need it.  Julie Morgenstern divides the process of getting organized into a few important steps:

1. Sort.  Before you start throwing things away, figure out what all ended up in that drawer or closet.  Put it in piles and put labels on the piles. This will help you figure out how to make a home for everything and/or how to make sure it doesn’t end up there again.  If you just throw all the trash away, that closet will most likely collect trash again.
2. Purge.  Now you can throw away all that junk.
3. Attack.  This is the figure out where it’s all going to go.  Think where it will be most helpful and easiest to keep organized.  If all your books end up by the sofa, don’t put them away in the office upstairs.  Put a basket or a bookshelf next to the sofa.
4. Containerize.  Measure everything, figure out what kind of containers would work best and then go buy them.  Not before!  Put nice labels on everything so the whole family knows what goes where.
5. Equalize.  Spend five minutes every day putting things back in their place.

She makes a good point that people that like to organize usually end up in one of two categories:

• Those that like to purge.  (This would be me.  Learned from my mom.)
• Those that like to containerize.  I know lots of these – they like to buy containers and shelves and things.  More gadgets to hold the junk says the purger.

Skip the chapter on technology.   She is obviously not a heavy computer or gadget user.