Today I Learned
I read this book because there was a TV series and I started to see it in the bookshops in the airport. I knew a bit about the plot so I decided to buy it. I didnt know Blade Runner (haven’t seen it but I know it is famous, at least Indiano Jones worked there) was based on one of the author books.
The book is just ok, the idea it is interesting. Most of the book is quite slow, then there is a bit of drama and action, but then it ends.
I finished this ebook a couple of days ago. It was really interesting and easy to digest. It gives you a different point of the current world based on geography and how a game of chess are the international relationships…
Russia: It is the biggest country. Its main weakness is Ukraine as it is plain and the only entry to the Mediterranean. Keep in mind that this book was written on 2016 so it doesnt surprise that Rusia has invaded Ukraine. As well, most of neighbors in the west are in NATO and Rusia/Putin doesnt want missile in his border. But playing with nukes is a zero-sum game? Russians are not europeans neither asians, they are Russians. So interesting that view from a country of that size.
China: I like the intro that China is not a country but a civilization. Its main goal is to build a fleet to match the USA navy. Not much issues inside the continent due to its massive population and borders with other countries. Himalayas with India is the most important. As well, for that reason invaded Tibet to remove the only option from India to attack and take the high grown. China plays India dealing with Pakistan to get access to the Indico. Taiwan is a horn as it is supported by USA. And I wonder, you invade Taiwan and chips production worldwide goes to shit.
USA: Luckiest guy. It has no really enemies in the borders. They bought Louisiana from France with Napoleon was in its worse as it was critical to maintain the Missisipi as it was key for commerce . Texas, New Mexico, California annexed from Mexico. And Alaska bought from Russia. So from east to west is free. North has Canada, an alley and not a threat. And Mexico has a desert between then and it is not match in any sense.
Western Europe: France is the one in best position. Access to North Atlantic and Mediterranean. Good internal routes. Germany main weakness is the east. It has only Poland between Russian and them. As well, the Danube is great as it connect many cities and is suitable for commerce. So Poland gets crashed very often. Spain is not very lucky, it has the Piryness in the north and then the internal communication as not great.
Africa: A mess created by Europe with the artificial borders that means nothing to the people.
Middle East: Another mess created by Europe with artificial borders and the conflicts of different views of Islam: Iran vs Irak/Arabia, etc. Israel in the middle of everything.
India and Pakistan: Mess from England, again due to artificial borders. India is superior in everything. The only issue is Pakistan has nukes too. It is interesting the game between Pakistan-Afghanistan-USA.
Korea and Japan: Neighbors that dont have a good past due to the invasion from Japan (and brutality) but China is a bigger problem. And North Korea.
Latin America: USA playground. Very unlucky region due to geography. Amazon is not good for commerce. Most population is in the coast. Communications with the interior as really bad so moving goods is expensive.
The Arctic: The new eldorado. USA, Russia, China, Denmark, etc claiming things. A lot of resources there but it is a dangerous area (climate) so expensive.
The Space: The new frontier and a lot of politics to agree how to “manage” it that obviously not all agree. I didnt know about Wernher von Braun (from the Nazi Germany to the Apollo XI in the moon). Russia had the lead with Yuri Gagarin, Sputnik, etc. Most space theory came from Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. He calculated the needed space to be able before the technology was available. I didnt know that Laika (Barking) died in her trip to space. Thanks to her, it was proved that humans could travel to space. At the end, USA landed Armstrong in the moon and the game is over. The very expensive business in space was over. Until now with SpaceX and similar wanting to go to Space/Moon/Mars, etc. The book suggest that cooperation is the only way for getting anywhere.
I didnt take notes but there is a lot of info in the book that you wouldnt think of so it gives you a new/different point of view of the current world.
I never connected with the serie Seinfeld (never tried to watch it neither), I knew about it, I knew people who were superfans and took it as nearly religion, but still I never had the curiosity. I remember many years ago that when the show finished, it was a big deal, people launched parties to celebrate the long success of the serie.
One day I read about the work behind being a stand-up comedian, and they put as example this book I have just read. The point, the humor/jokes dont come out as art of magic, it is a constant job. The book is about “jokes” since he started in 70s until 2010s so that shows you that there is no magic bullet.
I like some jokes, they made laugh a lot and there were many I didnt get. I guess it is not the same reading a funny line that watching it.
The best ones I remember are the one about security guards and terrorists in airports, Wrestling referees, Fakebook and dual AC in cars, to name a few.
And another point that I realized that is very important and I skip, is the need of humor/laugh. Sometime I think that all is about Stoicism, Buddhism and other ideas but I noticed that missed something. A good laugh, with good friends, and you see the world in a different way.
Hope I dont forget it
I just finished this book. Very interesting life from Toussaint Louverture from a slave to being the first to declare the end of slavery in the Caribbean and triggering the independence of Haiti (he died before that). I think he wouldn’t be proud of what happened to his country after all his efforts though. Haiti reminds me of this movie.
I didnt know Napoleon wanted to establish again slavery in Haiti once Toussaint declared the constitution. I always thought that after the French Revolution, freedom would be given for granted. You know all the “liberte, egalite, fraternite”… it seems only applied to France (and whites). Something we dont learn in Europe.
As well, the Haiti flag is like the French one without the white part. They removed it because they were angry with the French and whites after France tried to invade Haiti.
As well, for being the first colony to declare the end of slavery or trying independence, it is not as well know as the Cuban revolution or Simon Bolivar. Toussaint was ahead of his time and showed the path for the next generation. He declared the Haiti constitution in 1801. The American Civil War started on 1861.
It is interesting his Republican and Catholic credos. His constant show of discipline and how he became a great general winning and fighting battles. And he managed to take over the current Dominic Republic. And deal with the main power of the time: England, Spain, France and USA.
But again, I think power corrupts any soul, and the longer you have it the worse. The last years of Toussaint shows social issues. It is remarkable his view of a equal society, no matter the color of skin. Education and religion for all. Same opportunities for all. But it hit me when in the book mention that most of his generals owned big plantations but the normal black worked had no access to property or not was promoted. It seems workers were paid a 1/4 of the production that is not bad but at the end, you want the chance to be your own boss. He wanted to increase the agriculture production and that made to create laws that look more as dictatorship than anything else.
It is a pitty that he didnt have a (declared) successor that would be at his level.
I am reading this book as part of a book club at work.
The summary for the first part (chapters 1-3)
The software tends to match the organization charts (top-down) and that is not a good approach for software development because that doesnt cover (current) good software practices (devops, agile, lean, etc). This is based on Conway’s law: “Organizations which design systems . . . are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.”
So instead of using org charts, move to a “teams” organization approach that authors call “team topologies”: adaptive model for technology organization design that allows businesses to achieve speed and stability. Focuses on how to set up dynamic team structures and interaction modes that can help teams adapt quickly to new conditions, and achieve fast and safe software delivery.
Cognitive load can be a powerful tool for deciding on team size, assigning responsibilities, and establishing boundaries with other teams.
Dan Pink’s three elements of intrinsic motivation: autonomy (quashed by constant juggling of requests and priorities from multiple teams), mastery (“jack of all trades, master of none”), and purpose (too many domains of responsibility)
Personally, I think the org chart still has a point from HR perspective, at least I want to know who is who.And disagree when they say “there is a strong focus on the more immediate automation and tooling adoption, while cultural and organizational changes are haphazardly addressed”. People dont change tools that easily. And company culture hardly is checked out.
The idea to become a high-performing organization is to reverse Conway law as a team-first software architecture. Then you need things team sized. The size needs to maximizes people’s ability to work with it. Important to define “team interfaces” to set expectations around what kind of work requires strong collaboration and what doesn’t (some type of communications are not needed). Tools selection is important, one doesn’t fit all. Unnecessary re-org (without any proper justification)/cut headcounts are bad (obviously).
Follow: team-first architecture. Examples:
-US Army have adopted the team as the fundamental unit of operation. Based on scaling by Dunbar (5-7 people max)
-google: teams matter more than individuals.
-aws: team of size to feed with 2 pizzas)
Maximize trust between people on a team, and that means limiting the number of team members. Adding new people to a team doesn’t immediately increase its capacity (Fred Brooks – The Mythical Man-Month)
The best approach to team lifespans is to keep the team stable
Every part of the software system needs to be owned by exactly one team: no shared ownership
You need in the team:
– Team-First Mindset
– Diversity
– Rewards teams, no individuals
– Restrict Team Responsibilities to Match Team Cognitive Load more space for germane cognitive load (which is where the “value add” thinking lies).
team needs the space to continuously try to reduce the amount of intrinsic and extraneous load
Measure the Cognitive Load Using Relative Domain Complexity: mastering a single domain -> mission is clear, less context switching.
Limit the Number and Type of Domains per Team: simple, complicated, complex. Complex only one team,
Design the system and its software boundaries to fit the available cognitive load within delivery teams.
To increase the size of a software subsystem or domain for which a team is responsible:
Teams need a team API and well-defined team interactions (aws: everything is an API): code, version, wiki/doc, principles, communication/information
As well, provide time, space, and money to enable inter teams collaboration
Explicitly Design the Physical and Virtual Environments to Help Team Interactions: I think the physical site is kind of clear (there are good notes) but for the virtual env they just mention group chats.
physical: office layout, whiteboards, standing desks?, noise, clear desk (lockers)
(squads -> tribes)
Summary: Limit Teams’ Cognitive Load and Facilitate Team Interactions to Go Faster
===
part2
In Part I, we saw the strong pull that Conway’s law exercises on system architecture by mirroring team structures and communication paths in the final product design. We also highlighted that efficient software delivery requires a team-first approach that relies on long-lived autonomous teams achieving fast flow. Part II will focus on how we put these two ideas together in a way that maximizes flow yet respects the cognitive limits of teams.
Summary
Notes:
-SRE Makes Sense at Scale
–The SRE model sets up a healthy and productive interaction between the development and SRE teams by using service-level objectives (SLOs) and error budgets to balance the speed of new features with whatever work is needed to make the software reliable.
–SRE is a dynamic balance between a commitment to operability from the application-development team and expertise from the SRE team. Without a high degree of engineering discipline and commitment from management, this fine balance in SRE can easily degrade into a traditional “us and them” silo that leads to repeated service outages and mistrust between teams.
-Considerations When Choosing a Topology
-Technical and Cultural Maturity
-Quadrant: Organization Size / Software Scale vs Engineering Maturity
-Splitting Responsibilities to Break Down Silos
–highlight the importance of thinking about teams’ capabilities (or lack thereof) and how that causes dependencies between teams.
-Dependencies and Wait Times between Teams
–three different categories of dependency: knowledge, task, and resource dependencies.
–Detect and track interdependencies.
-Detect and track interdependencies.
Summary: Adopt and Evolve Team Topologies that Match Your Current Context
There is no “Ops” team or “support” team in the fundamental topologies,
Summary
Notes
-Stream-Aligned Teams
–A “stream” is the continuous flow of work aligned to a business domain or organizational capability. Continuous flow requires clarity of purpose and responsibility so that multiple teams can coexist, each with their own flow of work.
–The stream-aligned team is the primary team type in an organization, and the purpose of the other fundamental team topologies is to reduce the burden on the stream-aligned teams
“you build it, you run it” popularized by Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon
-Capabilities within a Stream-Aligned Team
–This might mean having a mix of generalists and a few specialists.
-Why Stream-Aligned Team, Not “Product” or “Feature” Team?
–a stream should flow unimpeded.
-Expected Behaviors in an effective stream-aligned team
— several features:
–roduce a steady flow of feature delivery, uses an experimental approach to product evolution, expecting to constantly learn and adapt., minimal (ideally zero) hand-offs of work to other teams., evaluated on the sustainable flow of change it produces, must have time and space to address code quality changes (tech debt), proactively and regularly reaches out to the supporting fundamental-topologies teams (complicated subsystem, enabling, and platform).feel they have achieved or are in the path to achieving “autonomy, mastery, and purpose
-Enabling Teams
–An enabling team is composed of specialists in a given technical (or product) domain, and they help steam-aligned team with improving their capabilties (read, learn, practice new skills). It is a “technical consulting team” – gives guidance, not execution.
-Expected Behaviors
— proactivively seeks to understand needs of stream team, ahead of the tech curve, messenger of good/bad news, might act as a proxy for difficult services, promotes learning across teams
— Stream-aligned teams should expect to work with enabling teams only for short periods of time (weeks or months) in order to increase their capabilities around a new technology, concept, or approach.
-Enabling team vs Communities of Practice (CoP)
— Enabling teams and CoP can co-exist because they have slightly different purposes and dynamics: an enabling team is a small, long-lived group of specialists focused on building awareness and capability for a single team (or a small number of teams) at any one point in time, whereas a CoP usually seeks to have more widespread effects,
-Complicated-Subsystems Teams
–A complicated-subsystem team is responsible for building and maintaining a part of the system that depends heavily on specialist knowledge, to the extent that most team members must be specialists in that area of knowledge in order to understand and make changes to the subsystem.
–complicated-subsystem team is created only when a subsystem needs mostly specialized knowledge. The decision is driven by team cognitive load, not by a perceived opportunity to share the component.
–we expect to have only a few complicated-subsystem teams in a Team Topologies–driven organization
-Platform teams
–enable stream-aligned teams to deliver work with substantial autonomy.
–The platform team’s knowledge is best made available via self-service capabilities via a web portal and/or programmable API — Ease of use.
–the platform can provide different levels of service.
-Expected behavior
–strong collaboration with stream-aligned teams to understand their needs.,fast prototyping techniques and involves stream-aligned team members for fast feedback
-Compose the Platform from Groups of Other Fundamental Teams
–ested or “fractal” teams within the platform—what we like to call inner topologies.
-Avoid Team Silos in the Flow of Change
-A Good Platform Is “Just Big Enough”
-Compelling, Consistent, Well-Chosen Constraints: Dev Experience (User experience UX)
-Built On an Underlying Platform (platform layers)
-Manage as a Live Product or Service: using software-product-management techniques
-Convert Common Team Types to the Fundamental Team Topologies
-Move to Mostly Stream-Aligned Teams for Longevity and Flexibility
-Infrastructure Teams to Platform Teams
-Component Teams to Platform or Other Team Types
-Tooling Teams to Enabling Teams or Part of the Platform
-Converting Support Teams: 1) support teams aligned to the stream of changes, and (2) dynamic cross-team activity to resolve live service incidents.
-Converting Architecture and Architects
–The most effective pattern for an architecture team is as a part-time enabling team (if one is needed at all)
–to help them achieve better outcomes and provide them the tools and technologies that will enable these outcomes.”
-Summary: Use Loosely Coupled, Modular Groups of Four Specific Team Types
–stream aligned, enabling, complicated subsystem, and platform.
Summary
Notes
After a bit, I finished this book. I didn’t read the first book that long ago but I felt sometimes it is was difficult to digest this one when he was very “technical”. I don’t remember that from the first.
One of my favourite things is the “Overture” where he gives you a bit of a summary about what has been ongoing with his own health and family health problems. Quite impressive. Then you still have a book.
Still I find quite impressive how much knowledge he can find from Religion (Old testament, New testament, etc), Harry Potter and other fairy tales.
There are rules that look common sense but you realized how easily you skip, ignore or dont notice them. I think it is a good guideline for Living.
1- Do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement:
People depend on constant communication with others to keep their minds organized. We mostly think by talking. We need to talk both to remember and to forget. We outsource the problem of sanity. People remain mentally healthy not merely because of the integrity of their own minds, but because they are constantly being reminded how to think, act and speak by those around them.
I struggled to understand the title and although I highlight some lines. My take is that socializing is critical for our sanity. And that the social structures we have built during the last couple of millennia has help us to advance and keep sane. So institution is not just a physical building but our social rules
2- Imagine who you could be, and then aim singlemindedly at that:
Everybody requires a story to structure their perceptions and actions in what would be otherwise the overwhelming chaos of being. Every story needs a starting point that is not good enough and an ending that is better. Spirit eternally transcends dogma, truth transcends presupposition, creativity updates society. Those who break the rules ethically are those who have mastered them first and disciplined themselves to understand the necessity of those rules, and break them in keeping with the spirit rather than the letter of the law. The soul willing to transform is the most effective enemy of the demonics of ideology and totalitarianism, in their personal and social forms. Pick the best target you can currently conceptualize, stumble toward it. Somethinig profund, noble and lofty. If you can find a better path along the way, once you have started moving forwards, then switch course. Be careful, with giving up, if the new path appears more challenging, then you are not betraying yourself when changing your mind. You will zigzag forwards (amen), not efficient, but there is no alternative as the goals will change, as you learn what you need to learn while you are disciplining yourself. With will and luck, you will find a story that is meaningful and productive, improves itself with time and provides you with moments of satisfaction.
3- Do not hide unwanted things in the fog:
Do not pretend you are happy with something if you are not, and if a reasonable solution might, in principle, be negotiated, have the damn fight. Unpleasant in the moment, but it is one less straw on the camel’s back. Life is what repeats, and it is worth getting what repeats right. if you keep small things unresolved, as any compound interest, in the long run, it will be a disaster. Even if you try, you can fail. But if you dont try, for sure, you will fail. It is better to see the problems than keeping in the fog, because you can at least sometimes avoid the danger that you are willing to see.
Clean your room, and if possible, beautify it.
It is difficult to win an argument, or begin one, if you have not carefully articulated what you want (or do not) and need (or do not)
4- Notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated:
If you want to be invaluable in a workspace, just do the useful things no one else is doing. Learn more about the business and competition.
Difficult is necessary: It is a strange and paradoxical fact that there is a reciprocal relationship between the worth of something and the difficulty of achieving it.
By taking responsability, we can find a meaningful path, improve our personal lot psychologically and make what is intolerably wrong, better.
If you mistep while doing something, you can learn from it. You must risk something that matters.
You must sacrifice something of your manifold potential in exchange for something real in life. Aim at something. Discipline yourself or suffer the consequence = all suffering of life, with none of the meaning = better description of hell.
The voluntary confrontation with a feared, hated or despised obstacle is curative. We become stronger by voluntarily facing what stops our progress.
It is probable, inevitable, that the adventure of your life will frustrate, disappoint and unsettle you, but that is where the deep meaning that orients you and shelters you is to be found. That is where the life what is worth living is to be eternally found. (if only you are willing)
5- Do not do what you hate:
Part of moving Beyond Order is understanding that your conscience has a primary claim on your action, which supersedes your conventional social duty. If you device to stand up and refuse a command or do something of which others disapprove but your firmly believe to be correct, you must be in a position to trust yourself.
6- Abandon ideology:
Ideology is dead (like God as Nietzsche said).We should address and consider smaller, better defined problems. Start small so you can solve them (and not blaming somebody else), then get to bigger ones. Scale. Take it personally and take responsibility of the outcome.
Have some humility. Clean up your room. Take care of your family. Follow your conscience. Straighten up your life. Find something productive and interesting to do and commit. Rinse and repeat.
7- Work as hard as you possibly can on at least one thing and see what happens
The inability to decide among ten (ie) things, even desirable, is equivalent to torment by all of them. Clear goals limit and simplify the world, as well, reducing uncertainty, anxiety, shame and stress.
To move forwards with resolve, it is necessary to be organized – to be directed toward something singular and identifiable.
Aim. Point. All this is part of maturation and discipline, and something to be properly valued. if you aim at nothing, you become plagued by everything. If you aim at nothing, you have nowhere to go, nothing to do and nothing of high value in your life, as value requires the ranking of options and sacrifice of the lower to the higher.
Commitments with enduring value: character, love, family, friendship and career.
People who do not choose a job or a career commonly become unmoored and drift. The same for not committing to a single romantic partner or being loyal to friends.
If you work as hard as you can on one thing, you will change. You will become one instead of a multitude.
8- Try to make one room in your home as beautiful as possible.
Cleaning your room is not enough. Making something beautiful is difficult. If you do one thing beautiful in your life, then you can expand to other elements of your life and world. That is a reconnection with the immortality of childhood. Find one that speaks to you and make the purchase. Art is the bedrock of culture of itself. That unites psychologically and establish productive peace with others. “Man shall not live by bread alone” (Matthew 4:4). I always say that I just need bread and water… (and then I say to myself, I need/want company) When we become adults , we see the work differently: we want efficiency, accomplishment and order. A child is focus in the present and gets fascinated by that.
Artists are always transforming chaos into order. That happens a lot in cities where they relocated to rough areas and they transform them to nice places. Then the capitalism throws them away to a new place. Start again. They are the initial civilizing agents.
You are very creative when you are dreaming. Beauty leads back to what you have lost.
9- If old memories still upset you, write them down carefully and completely
Learn from the past. Or repeat its horrors forever. And for that, you need to understand it, and one of the best ways it is to write it down: reduces existential uncertainty, anxiety, improves mental health and boosts immunological function.
Your refusal or even inability to come to terms with the errors of the past expands the source of such error. So you must confess, repent and change (when wrong). You must humbly ask, and knock, and seek.
What is traumatic but remains inexplicable indicates that our “maps” world is insufficient in some vital manner. It is our destiny to transform chaos into order. If the past has not been ordered, the chaos is still haunts us.
10- Plan and work diligently to maintain the romance in your relationship
You need a strategy and that depends of a negotiation. You and your partner must know what the other wants/needs and you both need the will to discuss it. If you dont communicate, the other has to guess: recipe for disaster. Romance requires trust and that is based on truth. Still there will be bad times (and not short in time). So for that reason to you need to have that communication. In the bad moments, you have to past the tears to have a real conversation. Do not foolishly confuse “nice” with “good”. Dedicate team each week to talk to your partner purely about practical and personal matters. Dont skip it and make it count.
Assumptions that are not true: 1) there is somebody out there that is perfect and 2) there is somebody out there that is perfect for you.
The myth of spontaneity (I love this one). You are adults, both have (demanding) jobs, (demanding) family and other (demanding) duties. And you have to sleep, eat, commute, etc. Where do you fit that in that life schedule? And you dont settle for anything less than spontaneity??? Good luck.
Arrange some dates and practice. Negotiate and practice. Bloody communicate.
11- Do not allow yourself to become resentful, deceitful or arrogant
It is difficult to learn (X), because there is no story associated with it. If someone is telling you a story, it attracts your attention immediately (ie periodic table)
Malevolence exists in our hearts, mastering it constitutes the greatest and unlikeliest of individual achievements.
We are built, neurologically, to interpret the world in a dramatic manner due to the hypothalamus, our ancient/reptile brain. It is in charge of self-preservation and exploration. So the hypothalamic story is: drink, eat, reproduce (sex), watch out for monsters and explore to be able to the the beginning. We are driven to explore.
Sacrifice: discovery of the future. abandon impulse gratification (present), obtain something valuable in the long run (future)
Deal with problems is part of living. If you isolate from evil, you will end like the Disney movies. And like Buddha, he escaped a “perfect” life because it was not natural. And in Matrix whole crops of humans were lost because we can’t live in a perfect world…. That avoids resentment because you dont feel like a victim anymore.
We must listen to people who differ from us because they have the ability to see and react to what we can’t see/detect.
Encouragement (see the problems, analyze, divide, make a plan) makes people to face the problems head-on. That is voluntary. You become braver, stronger and more courageous. We have more of that than we think.
The alternative is resentment and that doesn’t make any good.
If you take your turn at the difficult tasks, people learn to trust you, you learn to trust yourself, and you get better at doing difficult things. You can’t get away with avoiding your responsibilities (problem with your partner, at work, etc). This is connected to with disbelief in our own capabilities (Adam blamed Eva for eating the apple….)
The right attitude to the horror of existence (the alternative to resentment, deceit and arrogance) is the assumption that there is enough of you, society and the world to justify existence.
12- Be grateful in spite of your suffering
You can’t be really grateful or thankful for what good you have and what bad hasn’t hit you until you encounter the darkness of living. You look in dark places to protect/prepare yourself, because they will come. Human race has been dealing with death forever. We are the descendants of those who managed it. So that is in all of us. You are morally obligated to manifest strength in the face of adversity to indicate to yourself (and whoever is around) that there is something in you enough to face the worst throw to you and still prevail. That can make a bad situation much less dreadful that it might be. And that’s something.
Gratitude is therefore the process of consciously and courageously attempting thankfulness in the face of catastrophe in life (this is something in which you can discover part of the antidote to the abyss and the darkness)
Before moving, I went through some piles of papers and found a couple of pieces with the note “Love is not enough”. I am pretty sure they were notes I took from a book of Mark Manson (likely The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck – I need to re-read) And somehow this morning, I got this video in youtube.
Summary:
Love is not enough:
The only way you can fully enjoy the love in your life is to choose to make something else more important than love.
Friendship > Love
In my case, I dont really think about love but companionship. I think too many times about that “perfect” companion to go through life (good and bad moments). And then I am very solitary person (it gets worse with age). And then you are not sociable, and many things you read tell you that having a strong social support is critical in mental health, life satisfaction, etc. So it is like in the middle of two paths.
Good concert of NIN.
Today I attended a conference from the author of this book. I haven’t read so didnt have much background and didn’t pay full attention to the invitation too…
Some notes:
Change is the norm! Not the exception.
Change is just change (sometimes is good, sometimes is bad. Accept it)
The idea is to move to a mindset of “order -> change -> reorder” instead of trying to get things as they were before.
4 steps about Change: Accept, Embrace, Take proactive action, Move forwards to somewhere new.
The idea is to be “rugged and flexible” in three aspects
When change happens, you core values will keep you floating.
Good talk.
I re-read this book during holidays without remembering that I completed it over 1 year ago, and for the life of me, I didnt notice it. So doesnt leave me or my memory in a good place 🙂 Still I enjoyed (again) and it is something I wanted to do, re-read some good books.
And following the trend, I re-read this one (ebook) as I think I needed it. Again, really good read, it grounds me and put me in my place. And another reason was I tried to read an ebook from Kant and Seneca, and couldnt understand anything… It is annoying that I read a lot of references for them but then you go to the source, and I can’t digest them. Too overcomplicated language. Anyway, I will try other “classics” just in case.
This is another ebook I read during holidays. I reminded me to “Calling Bullshit” as it is about finding the “truth” among the noise.
The autor leads a radio program “More or less” in BBC. Unfortunately, I dont find time for listening radio or podcast.
The start was very interesting about how an expert of a famous Dutch painter failed to spot a fake picture because he was obsessed with one details from the painter. And how the fake painter exploited that weakness (and from the whole Netherlands….)
To be honest, I didnt take notes so I am not going to remember many things.
I liked a lot the personal details about John Maynard Keynes life that I didnt know (I tried to read one of his books in the past and I failed miserably):
When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir? (JMK)
The ten rules from the book:
1- Search your feelings (Johannes Vermeer fake paint and Nazis)
2- Ponder your personal experience (London trains are not busy….)
3- Avoid premature enumeration
4- Step back and enjoy the view
5- Get the back story
6- Ask who is missing:
The power to NOT collect data is one of the most important and little-understood sources of power that governments have… By refusing to amass knowledge in the first pace, decision-makers exert power over the rest of us. (Anna Powell-Smith)
7- Demand transparency when the computes says no: Google’s quest to find flu outbreaks via searches.
8- Don’t take statistical bedrock for granted: The need of an independent Statistics body for the country to help the governments with decisions. Examples in USA (Wilbur Mills, then Congressional Budget Office aka CBO), UK (Office for Budget Responsibility – OBR) and Greece (Andreas Gerogiou troubles)/Argentina (Graciela Bevacqua troubles).
9- Remember that misinformation can be beautiful too (Florence Nightingale)
10- Keep an open mind (John Maynard Keynes)
Summary:
Be curious.