Reading

“Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness to yourself. Watch”

“He sees everything; he sees them set the coffin down at His feet, sees the child rise up, and his face darkens. He knits his thick grey brows and his eyes gleam with a sinister fire. He holds out his finger and bids the guards take Him. And such is...”

“Sometimes emotion is rational, like when you feel afraid because you’re in imminent danger. And sometimes thinking isn’t rational, like when you scroll through social media for hours, telling yourself you’re bound to come across something important.”

“Degeneracy in the brain means that your actions and experiences can be created in multiple ways. Each time you feel afraid, for example, your brain may construct that feeling with various sets of neurons.”

Summary: How Jho Low masterminded the multi-billion dollar 1MDB fraud, funding a lifestyle of yachts, art, and Hollywood.

Summary: Michael Lewis tours countries devastated by the financial crisis, revealing how cultural character shaped each nation's unique path to ruin.

“Cities need diversity”

“everything is leaders' responsibility”

“the only measure of success for a leader is whether or not the team succeeds”

Summary: Lewis reveals the hidden world of high-frequency trading and the small group of insiders who tried to expose how the stock market was rigged in their favor.

The rise and fall of Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX.

Hard Drive charts Gates's missteps as well as his successes: the failure of OS/2 and the embarrassing delays in bringing Windows to the marketplace; the highly publicized split with IBM, which then forged an alliance with Apple to battle Microsoft; the public relations fallout over various exploits of Gates; and the investigations by the Federal Trade Commission. Wallace and Erickson also examine the combative, often abrasive side of Gates's personality that has alienated many of Microsoft's rivals and even employees, and led to his being labeled "The Silicon Bully" by Business Month Magazine. They report:

In the early 80's, Microsoft's Multiplan lost out to Lotus 1-2-3 in the marketplace. According to one Microsoft programmer, a few of the key people working on DOS 2.0 had a saying at the time that "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run." They managed to code a few hidden bugs into DOS 2.0 that caused Lotus 1-2-3 to breakdown when it was loaded. "There were as few as three or four people who knew this was being done," the employee said. He felt the highly competitive Gates was the ringleader.

The first two female executives hired at Microsoft in 1985 were recruited to meet federal affirmative action guidelines so that the company could qualify for a lucrative Air Force contract. One source says,"They would say, 'Well, let's hire two women because we can pay them half as much as we will have to pay a man, and we can give them all this other crap work to do because they are women.' That's directly out of Bill's mouth...." Gates treated one of these executives so badly that she asked to be transferred away from him.

Microsoft managers used the company's e-mail system to secretly spy on employee work habits. Only those employees who worked weekends could collect bonuses. In time word got out and some employees logged into their e-mail on weekends with a modem from home so it would appear they had come in.

From Brainchild to Billionaire

Born outside Seattle to socially prominent parents, Gates was a gifted child with a photographic memory. He first encountered computers as a seventh-grader at the prestigious Lakeside private school, and quickly outstripped his instructors in expertise.

As a Harvard student in 1973, he spent most of his time playing with computers--and winning at high-stakes poker--but he never graduated. Instead, education took a back seat to ambition. In 1974, Gates and his friend Paul Allen developed a BASIC language for the Altair 8080, the world's first personal computer. Surviving on catnaps and working on a Harvard computer rigged to mimic the Altair-- a machine they had never seen--their program ran successfully the first time it was tried."It was the coolest program I ever wrote," Gates said, and it set the industry standard.

In 1975, with a vision of a computer in every home and the conviction that the fledgling computer industry was about to soar, the two formed Microsoft.Ironically, it was in collaboration with IBM--a company that dwarfed them in size, represented an entirely different corporate culture, and would later become a bitter rival--that Microsoft hit upon its greatest success to date. When IBM needed an operating system for its new PC, Big Blue turned to Microsoft. Gates turned to Seattle Computer products, a small, local computer company and, in what was one of a long series of brilliant business deals, purchased the rights to DOS for $50,000. Now labeled MS-DOS, it too became the industry standard and generates more than $200 million a year, helping to make Microsoft the most successful start-up company in the history of American business and enabling Gates to proceed with such projects as Word, Multiplan, OS/2 and Windows. When Microsoft went public in 1986, its shares were traded with a frenzy virtually unprecedented on Wall Street, and many of its employees became paper millionaires.

“Science of networks and how they work, done in an accessible way”

“it was a network of humans spreading news and outrage. What was new was how widely and quickly news could spread, and how people were able to coordinate their responses. But understanding what happened still boils down to understanding how news...”

Summary: How Billy Beane and the Oakland A's used statistical analysis to compete against richer teams — and broke baseball's traditional scouting orthodoxy.

Summary: Third Red Rising novel — Darrow leads the Rising's final revolution against the Gold ruling class of the Society.

Summary: First Machineries of Empire novel — a disgraced captain merges with an undead strategist to retake a heretical fortress.

“Openers open the mind directly and mindset”

“Anchors”

“the feel of getting up in a dorm and going down to the baths, and then across the alley to a dining hall.”

Summary: Expanse novella revealing Colonel Fred Johnson's pivotal massacre and transformation into a Belt revolutionary leader.

Summary: Inside WeWork's spectacular rise and collapse under Adam Neumann's charismatic, reckless leadership and SoftBank's enabling billions.

“Summary: not about individualism or nation, but the middle layers that let us have cohesion and individuality; let's fracturing work for us”

“We are blinded by nostalgia - think we had the right approach before and need to 'return' to that”

Summary: How social network structures shape behavior, inequality, financial crises, political polarization, and the spread of ideas and diseases.

“Billy nodded. —I got a hundred and five percent on my geography”

“Around Sun Moon, blossoms opened, the petals spreading wide to reveal hidden pollen pots. Commander Ga dripped with sweat, and in his honor, groping stamens emanated their scent in clouds of sweet spoor that coated our lovers’ bodies with the sticky...”

Summary: A group of elite classics students at a Vermont college commit murder and unravel under the weight of their secret.

“Western people are very different psychologically”

“In part driven by literacy, which changes brain development in a major way”

Summary: How a small group of commodity traders amassed enormous power and wealth reshaping global markets and geopolitics.

“I don’t think the systems way of seeing is better than the reductionist way of thinking. I think it’s complementary, and therefore revealing. You can see some things through the lens of the human eye, other things through the lens of a microscope,...”

“An important function of almost every system is to ensure its own perpetuation. System purposes need not be human purposes and are not necessarily those intended by any single actor within the system. In fact, one of the most frustrating aspects of...”

Summary: A Culture novel: the mercenary Cheradenine Zakalwe runs missions for Special Circumstances, told in two interleaved timelines — one moving forward, one backward — that converge on a devastating revelation about a chair.

Summary: Second Stormlight Archive novel — Shallan and Kaladin's paths converge as ancient Knights Radiant powers reawaken on Roshar.

“The key to successful communication is to take the imaginative leap of stuffing yourself right into your listener’s shoes to know what they are thinking and feeling in the deepest recesses of their mind and heart. How that person perceives what you...”

“Words that work, whether fiction or reality, not only explain but also motivate. They cause you to think as well as act. They trigger emotion as well as understanding.”

“Makers vs. Managers schedules (Deep Work)”

“Niches & Focus”

“Like HTTP created the World Wide Web and linked the world's information, what I call "flow" will create the World Wide Flow and link the world's activity.”

“If flow was in place before this pandemic started, we might have seen a different response. Once contact tracing data was captured, it could have easily been shared with anyone who was authorized to use it. Real-time data from different brands of...”

Success for stickiness: (1) Simplicity (proverbs, exclude all possible) (2) Unexpectedness (open gaps in knowledge) (3) Concreteness (imagery, specifics) (4) Credible (5) Emotional appeal (people not abstractions) (6) Stories. The villain — the curse of knowledge.

Simple

Unexpectedness

Concreteness - able to visualize and make sense to a novice for whom abstractions make no sense

“Commanders intent. Single objective that's the north star to align everyone's focus. Can't have multiple. Must exclude all but most critical”

“About getting to the core, not dumbing down. Southwest as “the low fair airline””

“It requires levels of courage and discipline—and emotional energy—that even the most driven executives don’t always possess.”

“Members of great teams trust one another on a fundamental, emotional level, and they are comfortable being vulnerable with each other about their weaknesses, mistakes, fears, and behaviors. They get to a point where they can be completely open with...”

"we were so in love with the convenience, nobody bothered to read the terms and conditions"

Not as good as his others but still great

“Most successful originals and entrepreneurs aren't actually big risk takers. They have stability and security and caution in all areas, which frees them to be very risky and original in one area”

“Most keep day jobs while founding, etc”

Summary: Insider account of working at Meta revealing how the company prioritized growth over safety and misled the public.

Summary: Bill Browder's account of fighting Russian corruption after his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was killed in state custody.

Summary: Fourth Red Rising novel — a decade after revolution, multiple narrators reveal the costs of war and fractured idealism.

Joanna Lord NOTION_PAGE

"With" not "on" - Making your stack work

Questions

Community

Opportunistic channels (clubhouse)

fragmented brand and transitions

[https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HdLw7ps2WX8eGpglLFLWbaTFyKJ8UTM/view](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HdLw7ps2WX8eGpglLFLWbaTFyKJ8UTM/view)

“Distinguish and differentiate ”

“distinguish - separate from others”

“Memory used to be a core part of intelligence. It's not rote, it's the start of internalization”

“Memory is stored based on the web of concepts it connects to”

“Be patient and wait to find the right price, don't rush into the apparent choice before you”

“Having a clear mental map and a willingness to put it to the test in the real world and update it”

“Be remarkable”

“We used to satisfy needs, now it's all wants”

“Staying well hydrated, cutting back on salt,”

“women who had one to three servings of chocolate each week—especially in the first and third trimesters—“had a 50 percent or greater reduced risk of preeclampsia than”

Scary book about what actually is required to run government and what it does and how Trump's admin has failed...but also about bloat

Summary: Best: The book offers sharp and insightful details that provoke thought and encourage deeper understanding of the subject matter. Worst: Many reviewers find that the core idea, while important, becomes repetitive and less engaging as the book progresses.

Summary: Michael Lewis-curated collection examining the often-invisible people and institutions that make government function and serve the public.

“Truman wanted to be remembered for America's concessions not victories. Others too”

Summary: Fifth Red Rising novel — the revolution's darkest hour across multiple POVs on different worlds.