I bought this book (Amazon) because I'm a huge fan of Burkeman's column "This column will change your life". He has a knack for taking a large self help book and extracting the one actually useful piece of advice - like the 10-10-10 method for making decisions. And debunking popular myths - like it taking 28 day days ...
Commentary (I didn't have slides) for the talk I gave for UO WISE. I thought I was going to come and have an informal chat about how interviewing at Google is not that scary, and then I saw Krystal's tweet. I freaked out a little, to be honest. Like, woah - I need to be inspiring? I ...
In general, I think I've been reading too much of the same kind of book. And it's starting to be a little repetitive; I'm not getting enough new ideas from them. However it's my birthday next month (May 4th) and the best thing anyone could get me is a Kindle book, especially if it's something weird or ...
Sacha recommended Being Perfect (Amazon). It is a charming, insightful book. I've never been very perfect, but that hasn't stopped me from trying. It's a reminder to look at our motivations, and to dance our own beat. I love it. Probably way too many quotes below - which I've added the emphasis to. Go and read ...
In Good to Great (Amazon), one of the things they found to differentiate great companies is that they confront the brutal facts of reality. It's a question I'm asking myself more often since reading the book - am I being brutally honest with myself? Is this how reality actually is? Am I ignoring anything that will come back ...
I travel completely chaotically. Most of the time I can't remember where I'm staying (yay for free wifi at airports), I almost never exchange currency in advance, and I would never dream of arriving the "recommended" three hours before an international flight. The thing is, I know it will never be as awful as taking the boat from ...
I finally caved and got a Kindle (Amazon). My friend showed me his, and it looked pretty cool, and then I packed up my apartment... and I have a lot of books. And it started to seem stupid that I was carrying around all these large, physical objects. Time to digitize. Ironically I had held off ...
Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software - I had to read and study this for a class, and then we played Design Pattern Poker, where we "played" the design patterns we had in order to solve a problem. Seemed like nonsense at first, but then I read the book. And saw solutions that I'd been ...
The premise of Drive is that "if-then" rewards don't motivate us, and actually what people need are three things - Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose. I.e. you want a higher reason for doing what you're doing, be working towards mastery in the process, and have as much control as possible about when/where/how you do that. The cover of Drive says ...
My mother, a busy GP, has accumulated a stack of newspapers that she has not had time to read. She keeps them in the hope that she will, one day, have more free time. I pointed out that she would be unlikely to want to spend this new free time reading newspapers from ages ago, ...
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