├── README.md ├── htsas.md ├── mans-search-for-meaning.md ├── checklist-manifesto.md ├── zero-to-one.md ├── lean-b2b.md ├── charisma-myth.md ├── book-of-mentors.md ├── hard-thing.md ├── war-of-art.md ├── how-google-works.md ├── joy-on-demand.md ├── search-inside-yourself.md ├── high-output-management.md └── the-master-algorithm.md /README.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | - [How Google Works](how-google-works.md) 2 | - [Zero To One](zero-to-one.md) 3 | - [Charisma Myth](charisma-myth.md) 4 | - [The Checklist Manifesto](checklist-manifesto.md) 5 | - [Lean B2B](lean-b2b.md) 6 | - [Search Inside Yourself](search-inside-yourself.md) 7 | - [The Hard Thing About Hard Things](hard-thing.md) 8 | - [A man's search for meaning](mans-search-for-meaning.md) 9 | - [The War of Art](war-of-art.md) 10 | - [Getting There: A book of mentors](book-of-mentors.md) 11 | - [Thinking Fast and Slow](thinking-fast-and-slow.md) 12 | - [High Output Management](high-output-management.md) 13 | - [The Master Algorithm](the-master-algorithm.md) 14 | - [Sapiens: A Brief History Of Humankind](sapiens.md) 15 | - [Joy on Demand](joy-on-demand.md) 16 | - [Tools of Titans](tools-of-titans.md) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /htsas.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | ### Lecture 14 - How to operate 2 | 3 | The founder is like a task rabbit doing stuff for other people 4 | 5 | Editing metaphor 6 | 7 | - As a founder you are editing other people's work, not writing most of it. 8 | - Consistent voice across company copy 9 | 10 | Simplicity: 11 | 12 | - Complexity is an excuse 13 | - Many great products and companies were based on simple propositions, even if the technology was complex 14 | 15 | 16 | Delegating: 17 | 18 | - People you work with should be coming up with their own initiatives, generally 19 | - Based on task-relevant maturity: How mature is this person doing something? 20 | - Micromanage if the person doesn't have experience doing that kind of task 21 | - Don't micromanage if the person has experience with that kind of task 22 | - If you're not sure about the "right" solution, let other people figure it out and fail 23 | - 2x2 matrix: Conviction vs. Consequence 24 | 25 | Details matter: 26 | 27 | - The food and office matters 28 | - Internal (not customer facing) things matter: How beautiful the system is designed, dashboards, etc. Keep a high standard 29 | - If you don't care about details people will complain and drag down everyone 30 | 31 | Tasks: 32 | 33 | - Only give people 1-3 tasks to work on! 34 | - Do A+ tasks and delegate B tasks (but details matter!) 35 | - Strech people's responsibilities over time until they "break" 36 | - Can't build a company without effort 37 | 38 | Hiring: 39 | 40 | - Ammunition vs. barrel metaphor 41 | 42 | Dashboard: 43 | 44 | - Have a dashboard and make everyone look at it 45 | - For every metric, there should be a countermetric (Frauds <-> False Positives) 46 | 47 | 48 | Transparency: 49 | 50 | - Transparent compensation may work, not sure 51 | - Take notes at every meeting and circulate them 52 | - Glass walls only, no concreate 53 | 54 | Misc: 55 | 56 | - Shared office spaces probably don't work. Startups are like a cult, and you can't do that when you're sharing your space with random people. 57 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /mans-search-for-meaning.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | “Yes, a man can get used to anything, but do not ask us how.” 2 | 3 | The truth — that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. 4 | 5 | The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living. 6 | 7 | A man’s suffering is similar to the behavior of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. 8 | 9 | It is this spiritual freedom— which cannot be taken away— that makes life meaningful and purposeful. An active life serves the purpose of giving man the opportunity to realize values in creative work, while a passive life of enjoyment affords him the opportunity to obtain fulfillment in experiencing beauty, art, or nature. 10 | 11 | Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it. 12 | 13 | “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how,” 14 | 15 | We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life— daily and hourly. 16 | 17 | Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual. 18 | 19 | When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden. 20 | 21 | A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the “why” for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any “how.” 22 | 23 | I told them of a comrade who on his arrival in camp had tried to make a pact with Heaven that his suffering and death should save the human being he loved from a painful end. For this man, suffering and death were meaningful; his was a sacrifice of the deepest significance. He did not want to die for nothing. None of us wanted that. 24 | 25 | That is why man is even ready to suffer, on the condition, to be sure, that his suffering has a meaning. 26 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /checklist-manifesto.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | ### Introduction 2 | 3 | Types of failures: 4 | 5 | - The first is ignorance— we may err because science has given us only a partial understanding of the world and how it works. 6 | - The second type of failure the philosophers call ineptitude— because in these instances the knowledge exists, yet we fail to apply it correctly. 7 | 8 | Getting the steps right is proving brutally hard, even if you know them. 9 | 10 | The first is the fallibility of human memory and attention, especially when it comes to mundane, routine matters that are easily overlooked under the strain of more pressing events. 11 | 12 | Checklists seem to provide protection against such failures. They remind us of the minimum necessary steps and make them explicit. They not only offer the possibility of verification but also instill a kind of discipline of higher performance. 13 | 14 | Three different kinds of problems in the world: the simple, the complicated, and the complex. 15 | 16 | You want people to make sure to get the stupid stuff right. Yet you also want to leave room for craft and judgment and the ability to respond to unexpected difficulties that arise along the way. 17 | 18 | 19 | ### Communication 20 | 21 | The major advance in the science of construction over the last few decades has been the perfection of tracking and communication. 22 | 23 | Independently, each of the researchers seemed to have realized that no one checklist could anticipate all the pitfalls a team must guard against. So they had determined that the most promising thing to do was just to have people stop and talk through the case together— to be ready as a team to identify and address each patient’s unique, potentially critical dangers. 24 | 25 | "That’s not my problem" is possibly the worst thing people can think. 26 | 27 | 28 | ### Best Practices 29 | 30 | They provide reminders of only the most critical and important steps— the ones that even the highly skilled professionals using them could miss. Good checklists are, above all, practical. 31 | 32 | You must define a clear pause point at which the checklist is supposed to be used (unless the moment is obvious, like when a warning light goes on or an engine fails). You must decide whether you want a DO-CONFIRM checklist or a READ-DO checklist. 33 | 34 | The checklist cannot be lengthy. A rule of thumb some use is to keep it to between five and nine items, which is the limit of working memory. 35 | 36 | No matter how careful we might be, no matter how much thought we might put in, a checklist has to be tested in the real world, 37 | 38 | Just ticking boxes is not the ultimate goal here. Embracing a culture of teamwork and discipline is. 39 | 40 | 41 | ### Investing 42 | 43 | Guy Spier called it "cocaine brain." Neuroscientists have found that the prospect of making money stimulates the same primitive reward circuits in the brain that cocaine does. And that, Pabrai said, is when serious investors like himself try to become systematic. They focus on dispassionate analysis, on avoiding both irrational exuberance and panic. They pore over the company’s financial reports, investigate its liabilities and risks, examine its management team’s track record, weigh its competitors, consider the future of the market it is in— trying to gauge both the magnitude of opportunity and the margin of safety. 44 | 45 | In large part, he believes, the mistakes happened because he wasn’t able to damp down the cocaine brain. 46 | 47 | He enumerated the errors known to occur at any point in the investment process— during the research phase, during decision making, during execution of the decision, and even in the period after making an investment when one should be monitoring for problems. He then designed detailed checklists to avoid the errors, complete with clearly identified pause points at which he and his investment team would run through the items. 48 | 49 | 50 | ### Working Together 51 | 52 | Aviators, however, add a fourth expectation, discipline: discipline in following prudent procedure and in functioning with others. 53 | 54 | We’re obsessed in medicine with having great components— the best drugs, the best devices, the best specialists— but pay little attention to how to make them fit together well. 55 | 56 | "Anyone who understands systems will know immediately that optimizing parts is not a good route to system excellence," 57 | 58 | He gives the example of a famous thought experiment of trying to build the world’s greatest car by assembling the world’s greatest car parts. We connect the engine of a Ferrari, the brakes of a Porsche, the suspension of a BMW, the body of a Volvo . "What we get, of course, is nothing close to a great car; we get a pile of very expensive junk." 59 | 60 | 61 | ### Resistance to using Checklists 62 | 63 | There’s something deeper, more visceral going on when people walk away not only from saving lives but from making money. It somehow feels beneath us to use a checklist, an embarrassment. It runs counter to deeply held beliefs about how the truly great among us— those we aspire to be— handle situations of high stakes and complexity. The truly great are daring. They improvise . They do not have protocols and checklists. Maybe our idea of heroism needs updating. 64 | 65 | "Did I think the checklist would make much of a difference in my cases? No. In my cases? Please." 66 | 67 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /zero-to-one.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | ### Intro, Globalization 2 | 3 | The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them. 4 | 5 | I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas. 6 | 7 | In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable. 8 | 9 | If you can identify a delusional popular belief, you can find what lies hidden behind it: the contrarian truth. 10 | 11 | The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself. 12 | 13 | ### Competition & Monopolies 14 | 15 | Creating value is not enough—you also need to capture some of the value you create. 16 | 17 | All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition. 18 | 19 | All Rhodes Scholars had a great future in their past. 20 | 21 | War metaphors invade our everyday business language: we use headhunters to build up a sales force that will enable us to take a captive market and make a killing. 22 | 23 | A great business is defined by its ability to generate cash flows in the future. 24 | 25 | Every monopoly is unique, but they usually share some combination of the following characteristics: proprietary technology, network effects, economies of scale, and branding. 26 | 27 | The clearest way to make a 10x improvement is to invent something completely new. If you build something valuable where there was nothing before, the increase in value is theoretically infinite. 28 | 29 | The perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrated together and served by few or no competitors. 30 | 31 | ### Luck 32 | 33 | Statistics doesn’t work when the sample size is one. 34 | 35 | Finance epitomizes indefinite thinking because it’s the only way to make money when you have no idea how to create wealth. 36 | 37 | ### Secrets 38 | 39 | There are easy truths that children are expected to rattle off, and then there are the mysteries of God, which can’t be explained. In between— the zone of hard truths— lies heresy. 40 | 41 | From an early age, we are taught that the right way to do things is to proceed one very small step at a time, day by day, grade by grade. If you overachieve and end up learning something that’s not on the test, you won’t receive credit for it. 42 | 43 | There are two kinds of secrets: secrets of nature and secrets about people. 44 | 45 | ### Foundations 46 | 47 | A startup messed up at its foundation cannot be fixed. 48 | 49 | The potential for conflict increases over time as interests diverge: a board member might want to take a company public as soon as possible to score a win for his venture firm, while the founders would prefer to stay private and grow the business. 50 | 51 | Equity is a powerful tool precisely because of these limitations . Anyone who prefers owning a part of your company to being paid in cash reveals a preference for the long term and a commitment to increasing your company’s value in the future. 52 | 53 | Since time is your most valuable asset, it’s odd to spend it working with people who don’t envision any long-term future together. 54 | 55 | ### Distribution 56 | 57 | Like acting, sales works best when hidden. This explains why almost everyone whose job involves distribution— whether they’re in sales, marketing, or advertising—has a job title that has nothing to do with those things. People who sell advertising are called "account executives.” People who sell customers work in "business development.” People who sell companies are "investment bankers.” And people who sell themselves are called "politicians.” There’s a reason for these redescriptions: none of us wants to be reminded when we’re being sold. 58 | 59 | Viral Marketing -> Marketing -> Dead Zone -> Sales -> Complex Sales 60 | 61 | One of these methods is likely to be far more powerful than every other for any given business: distribution follows a power law of its own. This is counterintuitive for most entrepreneurs, who assume that more is more. (One distribution channel is usually exponentially better than all others for a given business) 62 | 63 | The press can help attract investors and employees. Any prospective employee worth hiring will do his own diligence; what he finds or doesn’t find when he googles you will be critical to the success of your company. 64 | 65 | ### Man and Machine 66 | 67 | As computers become more and more powerful, they won’t be substitutes for humans: they’ll be complements. 68 | 69 | If humans and computers together could achieve dramatically better results than either could attain alone, what other valuable businesses could be built on this core principle? 70 | 71 | We’re impressed with small feats accomplished by computers alone, but we ignore big achievements from complementarity because the human contribution makes them less uncanny. 72 | 73 | The most valuable companies in the future won’t ask what problems can be solved with computers alone. Instead, they’ll ask: how can computers help humans solve hard problems? 74 | 75 | ### Seven questions that every business must answer 76 | 77 | 1. The Engineering Question: Can you create breakthrough technology instead of incremental improvements? 78 | 79 | 2. The Timing Question: Is now the right time to start your particular business? 80 | 81 | 3. The Monopoly Question: Are you starting with a big share of a small market? 82 | 83 | 4. The People Question: Do you have the right team? 84 | 85 | 5. The Distribution Question: Do you have a way to not just create but deliver your product? 86 | 87 | 6. The Durability Question: Will your market position be defensible 10 and 20 years into the future? 88 | 89 | 7. The Secret Question: Have you identified a unique opportunity that others don’t see? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /lean-b2b.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | A half-baked B2B product shown to a few "early adopter realtors" runs the risk of 1.) Losing that potential customer forever as it would be much more difficult to get in the door again, or 2.) Irreversible reputational loss in Boston (example) if the customer landscape is a tight and chatty one. 2 | 3 | There are three critical areas of differences between B2B and B2C customer development: 4 | 5 | - Return on Investment (ROI) 6 | - Client Relationship 7 | - Decision-Making Process. 8 | 9 | ROI estimation is an essential part of making any kind of sale in B2B. 10 | 11 | B2B is market-first. To succeed in B2B, you have to be a consultant regardless of what your previous occupation was. You need to solve a problem before creating a product or, like Thomas and Michael, you’ll end up creating a great portfolio piece, not a business. 12 | 13 | The following graphic can help explain the sequence of validations a B2B startup must go through: Vision -> Market -> Jury -> Problem -> Solution 14 | 15 | Our objective is to avoid one of these quick dismissals when contacting prospects: 16 | 17 | - This has never been a problem for us (problem is too specific). 18 | - We don’t need to do that (company doesn’t fit the identified process or doesn’t exist). 19 | - You don’t know ABC Inc.? They do just that (comparatives and competitive landscape not understood). 20 | - With the current freeze on expenditures, we don’t have the budget for new technology (timing and company reality not understood). 21 | 22 | 23 | Value propositions bringing in new money by increasing revenue are always the easiest to sell and justify. 24 | 25 | If you understand how money is currently being spent, you can understand your prospects’ priorities. 26 | 27 | For (target customers) who are dissatisfied with (the current market alternative). Our product is a (new product category) that provides 28 | 29 | In total, you’re looking for 50 potential customers you can test your ideas on. 30 | 31 | Pretending that you’re big is a huge mistake; prospects can see straight through that. 32 | 33 | Remember: Personal Credibility, Commitment, Reliability, Passion and References. 34 | 35 | Here are the top ten things you can offer to motivate early adopters to meet with your team: 36 | 37 | - Competitive Edge 38 | - Visibility 39 | - Discussion 40 | - Action 41 | - Intelligence 42 | - Fun 43 | - Networking 44 | - Ownership 45 | - Promotion 46 | - Equity 47 | 48 | 49 | You should be looking for a big pain or a big gain that can be tied to a budget, a problem that will deliver a big ROI. 50 | 51 | A "hair-on-fire" problem is one that a businessperson is aware of without you having to tell them. They want and are actively looking for a solution to that problem, and are willing to overlook switching costs to pay for a solution. 52 | 53 | Sometimes, with a varied set of profiles it can take up to 40 interviews before seeing any patterns emerge. Other times, when the profiles are very similar, it takes only 12. In general, plan for 20 to 30 problem interviews. 54 | 55 | Five ways to score (prioritize) problems: 56 | 57 | - By frequency – Is that pain shared by a lot of early adopters? 58 | - By intensity of pain – Is this a painful problem? Are prospects actively trying to solve it? 59 | - By budget availability – Is this the pain of a buyer? Have budgets already been assigned? 60 | - By impact – What kind of ROI can you expect if you solve this problem? What impact will it have on the organization? 61 | - By market education – Is there competition? Would you need to create a completely new paradigm? 62 | 63 | µarkets are rarely dominated by first-movers. 64 | 65 | It’s hard to get honest feedback. Hearing, "It’s interesting" is not really validating a product. There’s a scale of comments with or without value. Entrepreneurs need to judge if the feedback is valuable and stay skeptical. 66 | 67 | With a good personal network, it is possible to ride relationships and land your first five deals without really learning anything. 68 | 69 | The reason why most startups fail at this stage is that they can’t tell the difference between real and false validation. They might think that they have some traction, but they’re listening to the wrong signals. 70 | 71 | In most cases, free pilots never get activated. Prospects take your product, put it on a shelf and you never find out its real value. 72 | 73 | Don’t start free if your goal is to make money. It’s really hard to charge after you’ve given your product away. 74 | 75 | A complete product is not required to start selling. You need just enough to communicate the vision and benefits of your solution. 76 | 77 | Initially, you must be laser-focused on a single market, a single problem and a single customer profile. Absolute focus is the key to reaching P-M fit in your target market. 78 | 79 | Startups that solve real business problems always have to replace some kind of solution. 80 | 81 | Because most people are visual 57 it’s much harder to get feedback on a feature or an idea if prospects have to imagine how it’s going to work. You need to put something concrete together for validation. 82 | 83 | Your entire success will be based on one or two features, no more. 84 | 85 | In the late 1970s, Japanese professor Noriaki Kano established that there are three main types of features required to develop a product people want to use. 86 | 87 | If you add a great user experience to a product no one wants, they will just realize faster that they don’t want it. 88 | 89 | The right way to approach preparing an offer is to position it as a partnership. Prospects help you develop the product. 90 | 91 | It can be useful to leave a one-pager or a pitch deck with your prospects — especially those who are coaches — for them to share internally. Let them do the selling! 92 | 93 | If revenue is the first form of validation, retention is the ultimate form. 94 | 95 | Your product doesn’t have to be flying off the shelves, but there has to be a pull from the market. 96 | 97 | "Interesting" is a distraction. Watch out. 98 | 99 | We started building the first part of our solution because it felt like we were on the right track, but our solution turned out to be just interesting. Prospects were not lining up to buy our product. In retrospect, the opportunity to learn about a hot topic was probably more enticing than our solution. "Interesting" was a false signal. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /charisma-myth.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | ### Charismatic Behaviors 2 | 3 | Three core elements: presence, power, and warmth. 4 | 5 | Being present means simply having a moment-to-moment awareness of what’s happening. It means paying attention to what’s going on rather than being caught up in your own thoughts. 6 | 7 | The very next time you’re in a conversation, try to regularly check whether your mind is fully engaged or whether it is wandering elsewhere (including preparing your next sentence. Aim to bring yourself back to the present moment as often as you can by focusing on your breath or your toes for just a second, and then get back to focusing on the other person. 8 | 9 | The combination of power and warmth would have been very rare and very, very precious: a powerful person who also viewed us kindly could mean the difference between life and death in critical moments. 10 | 11 | Nonverbal communication is hardwired into our brains, much deeper than the more recent language- processing abilities. 12 | 13 | If your internal state is anticharismatic, no amount of effort and willpower can make up for it. Sooner or later, some of your underlying thoughts and feelings will show through. On the other hand, if your internal state is charismatic, then the right body language will flow forth effortlessly. 14 | 15 | Imaginary situations cause your brain to send your body the same commands as it would for a real situation . Whatever your mind believes, your body will manifest. Just by getting into a charismatic mental state, your body will manifest a charismatic body language. 16 | 17 | ### Obstacles to Presence, Power and Warmth 18 | 19 | Because most of us tend to interpret events— whether they’re personal or impersonal— as relating to us. 20 | 21 | Because this tendency to compare is wired very deeply in our brains, trying to fight it can take a lot of effort. Instead, notice when you’re making comparisons and use the responsibility transfer technique to alleviate any internal discomfort it may have caused. 22 | 23 | ### Overcoming the Obstacles 24 | 25 | Skillfully handling any difficult experience is a three-step process: destigmatize discomfort, neutralize negativity, and rewrite reality. 26 | 27 | You see, shame is the real killer. Of all the emotions that human beings can feel, it is one of the most toxic to health and happiness. Shame researcher Brené Brown defines it as "the fear of being unlovable: Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging." 28 | 29 | And in basic survival terms, if the tribe rejects you, you die. It is a life-and-death situation. The brain equates social needs with survival; being hungry and being ostracized activate similar neural responses. Somewhere in the back of our minds is the fear of being so disapproved-of that we’d be excluded by those who matter to our survival. 30 | 31 | One of the main reasons we’re so affected by our negative thoughts is that we think our mind has an accurate grasp on reality, and that its conclusions are generally valid . This, however, is a fallacy. Our mind’s view of reality can be, and often is, completely distorted. 32 | 33 | Visual inputs our eyes take in every moment , we consciously perceive very few. The conscious awareness of absolutely everything around us would be overwhelming. 34 | 35 | "I decide to interpret everything favorably toward myself. It’s not just that I’m optimistic, I’m actually conveniently deluded." 36 | 37 | ### Creating Charismatic Mental States 38 | 39 | There is good evidence that imagining oneself performing an activity activates parts of the brain that are used in actually performing the activity. 40 | 41 | Next time you’re feeling anxious, you might want to imagine being wrapped up in a great big hug from someone you care about. 42 | 43 | Every night… [Napoleon Hill] held an imaginary council meeting with this group whom [he] called my ‘Invisible Counselors.’ 44 | 45 | We all know that few things will ruin someone’s chances more than giving off an impression of desperation, whether they’re on a job interview or on a date. Gratitude is a great antidote to all of these negative feelings because it comes from thinking of things you already have—from material items or experiences to cherished relationships. 46 | 47 | No matter whom it is you’re talking to, find three things to appreciate or approve of— even if these are as small as "their shoes are shined" or "they were on time." 48 | 49 | In any interaction, imagine the person you’re speaking to, and all those around you, as having invisible angel wings. 50 | 51 | Neuropsychologist Rick Hanson asserts that humans are by far the most empathetic species on the planet. 52 | 53 | Displaying confident body language will actually make you feel more confident; these feelings will in turn affect your body language, which will adapt accordingly, displaying yet more confident signals. This will give you yet another feeling boost, and the cycle will build upon itself. 54 | 55 | Willpower is a bit like a muscle that fatigues depending on how much we use it. If we draw on our willpower to resist a temptation or to put up with a certain annoyance, it will be weaker when we need it for another activity soon after. In fact, exerting willpower physically fatigues us. It is a finite resource, so be strategic about where and when you expend it. 56 | 57 | ### Different Charisma Styles 58 | 59 | Why is visionary charisma so effective and powerful? Because of our natural discomfort with uncertainty. In a constantly changing world, we crave something solid to cling to. 60 | 61 | ### Charismatic First Impressions 62 | 63 | Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof. 64 | 65 | Good question to ask when meeting someone for the first time: "What was it like growing up there?" 66 | 67 | As the MIT Media Lab studies showed, what impacts people isn’t the words or content used. Rather, they remember how it felt to be speaking with you. You might not remember the exact content of conversations you had a week ago, but you probably do remember how they felt. It’s not the words but the conversation’s emotional imprint that remains. 68 | 69 | ### Speaking and Listening with Charisma 70 | 71 | Even if what you’re thinking about is what you want to say next, your lack of presence will be written all over your face. 72 | 73 | It takes confidence to bear silence, both because of the awkwardness you may feel and because of the uncertainty of not knowing what they’re thinking during those two seconds. 74 | 75 | You can make more friends in two months by becoming truly interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you. 76 | 77 | One classic exercise to hone your projection skills is to imagine that your words are arrows. As you speak, aim them at different groups of listeners. 78 | 79 | ### Charismatic Body Language 80 | 81 | When you consciously mirror someone’s body language, you activate deep instincts of trust and liking. 82 | 83 | Keep eye contact for three full seconds at the end of your interaction with someone. 84 | 85 | High-confidence body language is characterized by how few movements are made. 86 | 87 | ### Difficult Situations 88 | 89 | This technique has become known as the Ben Franklin Effect. Having lent Franklin the book, the opponent had to either consider himself as inconsistent (having done a favor for someone he disliked) or rationalize his action by deciding that he actually rather liked Franklin. "I did something nice for this person, so I must like him. 90 | 91 | Asking for someone’s opinion is a better strategy than asking for their advice, because giving advice feels like more effort. 92 | 93 | For instance, instead of "Great job," you could say, "You did a great job," or, better yet, "The way you kept your calm when that client became obnoxious was impressive." 94 | 95 | If you’re having trouble pausing, try color-coding your speeches. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /book-of-mentors.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | In graduate school you learn all this complicated stuff, but what’s really 2 | 3 | You have lived a successful life if, as you grow older, the people who you hope love you actually do. 4 | 5 | you should never work for people who make your stomach churn or who keep you up at night. If you are in a situation like that, think about changing it. 6 | 7 | Qualities of good character and integrity make an enormous difference in achieving success. I urge students to conduct various forms of Ben’s exercise. Most behavior is habitual. 8 | 9 | The triumphs in life are triumphs because you know that not everything is going to be one. 10 | 11 | Most people go through life using up a very, very small part of their potential. 12 | 13 | If you don’t take care of your mind and body now, by the time you are forty or fifty you’ll be like a car that can’t go anywhere. 14 | 15 | Rejection enrages me, but that “I’ll show you!” feeling is an extremely powerful motivator. 16 | 17 | The most defeatist thing I hear is “I’m going to give it a couple of years.” You can’t set a clock for yourself. If you do, you are not a writer. You should want it so badly that you don’t have a choice. You have to commit for the long haul. There’s no shame in being a starving artist. Get a day job, but don’t get too good at it. It will take you away from your writing. 18 | 19 | When someone rejects your work, register the fact that they don’t like it, but don’t listen to the reason why. 20 | 21 | A great idea is worthless; execution is everything. 22 | 23 | If your mind starts to wander to past events, the only advice I can give you is don’t go. Just stop it! 24 | 25 | Be the first one in and the last one out. If you are there early and stay late, you get a chance to talk to people who would not otherwise take your call. 26 | 27 | People want recognition and respect. When I walk into a building, I always make a point of shaking the hands of the security people at the door. 28 | 29 | I wanted to do something that had a purpose. I wanted to lead an interesting life. I wanted to learn new things every day. I wanted to travel. But even though I was in touch with what I wanted, I had trouble taking a first step. I felt that any move I made would close off other opportunities, and I became obsessed with the notion of keeping my options open. This turned into a kind of paralysis that took me almost a year to get over. 30 | 31 | There was no place I wouldn’t go. I didn’t let risks get in the way and I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. I know this sounds irrational, but I literally felt as if I had no other options. It wasn’t as if I were dabbling in this. I felt as if I didn’t have a choice. It had to work out. There was no Plan B. 32 | 33 | Most people sweat it out for years and encounter some degree of humiliation and failure along the way. 34 | 35 | 36 | I tell journalism students that there are three main steps to take: First, figure out what gets your adrenaline going. Next, figure out a way to make a career out of your passion. And finally, outwork everyone around you. 37 | 38 | But you’re only going to be able to outwork others if you’re genuinely passionate about what you are doing. 39 | 40 | It’s important not to be either too encouraged or too discouraged by what’s happening at any particular moment. 41 | 42 | I see that all the time: people not having the patience to stay with something that could have been successful. 43 | 44 | The average life of an encyclopedia salesman was three days, but I did it for three years! I was able to last so long because I truly believed that everyone needed a set of these books and that I was doing something good for my customers. 45 | 46 | I have started so many businesses over the years, from diamonds to solar energy to manufacturing boats and pet supplies. The common thread among them is that they were each exciting to me at the time. The key is to be passionate about what you are doing— and then meticulous about the quality of what you produce. You don’t always know what you want to do in life, but you sure know when something isn’t right. My advice is that once you realize you don’t want to pursue something get out. The sooner you exit a situation that’s not meant to be, the sooner you can move toward your ultimate destiny. 47 | 48 | Success unshared is failure. If you’ve “made it” and don’t help others out along the way— if you don’t do something to make the planet a better place— you’re not successful at all; you are a failure. But remember that you can’t help everybody out. You have to focus and contribute in ways that you think are most beneficial. 49 | 50 | The difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is that successful people do all the things unsuccessful people don’t want to do. 51 | 52 | This phenomenon, unfortunately, is not unique to science. Life is about competition. Certain people intensely dislike others because they’re either successful or do things differently. Politicians get this all the time for picking one party over another. It’s discouraging that people work at this basic level, but that’s part of humanity. You really need to believe in yourself and not let others’ opinions define you. 53 | 54 | Success comes from doing something extraordinary with passion and intensity. 55 | 56 | The harder I worked, the more successful I became. I was greatly relieved. 57 | 58 | Don’t automatically be intimidated by people who have achieved more professional success than you, and don’t let your own insecurity bog you down. 59 | 60 | One of them relates to how climbers differentiate between objective and subjective risks. An objective risk is something that can kill you. A subjective risk is something that just frightens you. The two are often extremely different, but, unfortunately, things that frighten you are often not the real dangers, and the real dangers are often things that don’t frighten you. As a result, our instincts don’t always work effectively. 61 | 62 | The objective risk was wasting years of my life stuck in something that appeared attractive but that I really didn’t enjoy. A lot of entrepreneurship and innovation seems perilous, but it’s not. And a lot of things that seem safe and comfortable are, in fact, profoundly risky. That’s subjective versus objective risk. 63 | 64 | When Disney did his animation in the 1920s, the same techniques were available to everybody else— he just did it in a magical way. Same with Jobs. Other people were producing technologically advanced computer devices when he was, but the way he put his products together had a certain spark. You don’t have to completely reinvent the wheel to be successful— the key is to do whatever you do in an imaginative, original way. 65 | 66 | I do believe that one of the most important things you can do for your children is to not overschedule them. Children need time to be bored and daydream; it’s an important part of life. My daydreams motivated me and shaped my future. 67 | 68 | The greatest lottery of life is where you’re born. 69 | 70 | One day I just decided to be assertive and inject myself into the conversations. I discovered that if I was proactive in participating and shaping the discussion people would talk to me. From that experience I learned that I could influence how people interacted with me. 71 | 72 | When you are generous, you will always feel good about yourself. If life ends up being generous in return, as it usually does with giving people, then you will have greater joy. 73 | 74 | It’s important to put the idea of dying in your daily life because it helps you to appreciate your existence on this planet. 75 | 76 | The excitement was still mostly in the interaction with other people. 77 | 78 | I thought being a successful business leader was all about smarts and the ability to have a perfect view of the future. But I came to realize that while you need a decent view of the future what’s most important is being able to inspire your troops to be passionate, to believe what you believe, and to help you march in that direction. 79 | 80 | I tell everyone who is charting new territory or pursuing big ideas that the best way to think about getting support is to view it as a search for allies. 81 | 82 | Selling is kind of like fishing: To be successful, you have to be persistent and patient. It felt great to do well and being a good salesman is definitely a useful skill, but what I enjoyed most was communicating and interacting with people. 83 | 84 | Authority is a short-lived phenomenon. It’s who is in charge now, but that doesn’t mean that they are right. 85 | 86 | If I hadn’t allowed myself to venture off the beaten track, I wouldn’t have discovered an enthusiasm for something unexpected. 87 | 88 | It’s important to be able to present your ideas well, especially in writing. 89 | 90 | My big ideas frequently come at the very last moment, when a deadline is beating me up like crazy. I think we all have some fear of failure in us, and it’s a great motivator. 91 | 92 | No matter what business you are in, remain focused on what you like and become very knowledgeable about it. If Ralph Lauren, for example, had been all over the place with his designs, he never would have been able to build what he has. Instead, he focused on something very specific and did it well. 93 | 94 | It enabled me to dismantle the wall I had built around myself and connect more with people. 95 | 96 | There are times when you know that you need to believe in yourself, be bold, and not go forward with something that doesn’t feel right. 97 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /hard-thing.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | There are no shortcuts to knowledge, especially knowledge gained from personal experience. Following conventional wisdom and relying on shortcuts can be worse than knowing nothing at all. 2 | 3 | No matter who you are, you need two kinds of friends in your life. The first kind is one you can call when something good happens, and you need someone who will be excited for you. Not a fake excitement veiling envy, but a real excitement. You need someone who will actually be more excited for you than he would be if it had happened to him. The second kind of friend is somebody you can call when things go horribly wrong— when your life is on the line 4 | 5 | An early lesson I learned in my career was that whenever a large organization attempts to do anything, it always comes down to a single person who can delay the entire project. 6 | 7 | Figuring out the right product is the innovator’s job, not the customer’s job. The customer only knows what she thinks she wants based on her experience with the current product. The innovator can take into account everything that’s possible, but often must go against what she knows to be true. 8 | 9 | No, markets weren’t "efficient" at finding the truth; they were just very efficient at converging on a conclusion— often the wrong conclusion. 10 | 11 | Note to self: It’s a good idea to ask, "What am I not doing?" 12 | 13 | Startup CEOs should not play the odds. When you are building a company, you must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it. You just have to find it. It matters not whether your chances are nine in ten or one in a thousand; your task is the same. 14 | 15 | You won’t be able to share every burden, but share every burden that you can. 16 | 17 | As a result, like playing three-dimensional chess on Star Trek, there is always a move. 18 | 19 | My single biggest personal improvement as CEO occurred on the day when I stopped being too positive. 20 | 21 | In my mind, I was keeping everyone in high spirits by accentuating the positive and ignoring the negative. But my team knew that reality was more nuanced than I was describing it. And not only did they see for themselves the world wasn’t as rosy as I was describing it; they still had to listen to me blowing sunshine up their butts at every company meeting. 22 | 23 | Three key reasons why being transparent about your company’s problems makes sense: 24 | 25 | - Trust 26 | - The more brains working on the hard problems the better 27 | - A good culture is like the old RIP routing protocol: Bad news travels fast; good news travels slow. 28 | 29 | In any human interaction, the required amount of communication is inversely proportional to the level of trust. 30 | 31 | As a corollary, beware of management maxims that stop information from flowing freely in your company. For example, consider the old management standard: "Don’t bring me a problem without bringing me a solution." What if the employee cannot solve an important problem? For example, what if an engineer identifies a serious flaw in the way the product is being marketed? Do you really want him to bury that information? 32 | 33 | If you run a company, you will experience overwhelming psychological pressure to be overly positive. Stand up to the pressure, face your fear, and tell it like it is. 34 | 35 | I asked him why all the other startups failed. He replied that the layoffs inevitably broke the company’s culture. After seeing their friends laid off, employees were no longer willing to make the requisite sacrifices needed to build a company. 36 | 37 | In other words, the wrong way to view an executive firing is as an executive failure; the correct way to view an executive firing is as an interview/integration process system failure. 38 | 39 | There is no such thing as a great CEO, a great head of marketing, or a great head of sales. There is only a great head of sales for your company for the next twelve to twenty-four months. 40 | 41 | The good of the individual must be sacrificed for the good of the whole. 42 | 43 | Use appropriate language. Make clear with your language that you’ve decided. As previously discussed, use phrases like "I have decided" 44 | 45 | It probably won’t be lost on the employee that you are just as underskilled for your job as he is for his. Don’t dodge this fact. 46 | 47 | But despite perhaps the most massive and public early warning system ever, each CEO reiterated strong guidance right up to the point where they dramatically whiffed their quarters. He said they were not lying to investors, but rather, they were lying to themselves. Andy explained that humans, particularly those who build things, only listen to leading indicators of good news. 48 | 49 | "Ben, those silver bullets that you and Mike are looking for are fine and good, but our Web server is five times slower. There is no silver bullet that’s going to fix that. No, we are going to have to use a lot of lead bullets." 50 | 51 | There comes a time in every company’s life where it must fight for its life. If you find yourself running when you should be fighting, you need to ask yourself, "If our company isn’t good enough to win, then do we need to exist at all?" 52 | 53 | I learned about why startups should train their people when I worked at Netscape. People at McDonald’s get trained for their positions, but people with far more complicated jobs don’t. It makes no sense. 54 | 55 | If you don’t train your people, you establish no basis for performance management. As a result, performance management in your company will be sloppy and inconsistent. 56 | 57 | I found that there were two primary reasons why people quit: They hated their manager; generally the employees were appalled by the lack of guidance, career development, and feedback they were receiving. They weren’t learning anything: The company wasn’t investing resources in helping employees develop new skills. 58 | 59 | The most important thing to understand is that the job of a big company executive is very different from the job of a small company executive. 60 | 61 | In the second example, I managed the team to a set of numbers that did not fully capture what I wanted. I wanted a great product that customers would love with high quality and on time— in that order. 62 | 63 | It’s important to supplement a great product vision with a strong discipline around the metrics, but if you substitute metrics for product vision, you will not get what you want. 64 | 65 | MANAGING STRICTLY BY NUMBERS IS LIKE PAINTING BY NUMBERS 66 | 67 | At HP, the company wanted high earnings now and in the future. By focusing entirely on the numbers, HP got them now by sacrificing the future. 68 | 69 | Like technical debt, management debt is incurred when you make an expedient, short-term management decision with an expensive, long-term consequence. 70 | 71 | "That is not the priority" is radically weaker than "That is not the fucking priority." When the CEO drops the F-bomb, it gets repeated. 72 | 73 | Sometimes an organization doesn’t need a solution; it just needs clarity. 74 | 75 | What do I mean by politics? I mean people advancing their careers or agendas by means other than merit and contribution. There may be other types of politics, but politics of this form seem to be the ones that really bother people. 76 | 77 | Build strict processes for potentially political issues and do not deviate. 78 | 79 | For a complete explanation of the dangers of managers with the wrong kind of ambition, I strongly recommend Dr. Seuss’s management masterpiece Yertle the Turtle. 80 | 81 | While it may work to have individual employees who optimize for their own careers, counting on senior managers to do all the right things for all the wrong reasons is a dangerous idea. 82 | 83 | For any title level in a large organization, the talent on that level will eventually converge to the crappiest person with the title. 84 | 85 | If it makes people feel better, let them feel better. Titles cost nothing. 86 | 87 | The proper reason to hire a senior person is to acquire knowledge and experience in a specific area. 88 | 89 | Perhaps the CEO’s most important operational responsibility is designing and implementing the communication architecture for her company. 90 | 91 | The key to a good one-on-one meeting is the understanding that it is the employee’s meeting rather than the manager’s meeting. 92 | 93 | Some questions that I’ve found to be very effective in one-on-ones: If we could improve in any way, how would we do it? What’s the number-one problem with our organization? Why? What’s not fun about working here? 94 | 95 | Who is really kicking ass in the company? Whom do you admire? If you were me, what changes would you make? What don’t you like about the product? What’s the biggest opportunity that we’re missing out on? What are we not doing that we should be doing? Are you happy working here? 96 | 97 | The primary thing that any technology startup must do is build a product that’s at least ten times better at doing something than the current prevailing way of doing that thing. 98 | 99 | the following things that cause no trouble when you are small become big challenges as you grow: Communication, Common knowledge, Decision making 100 | 101 | Think of the organizational design as the communications architecture for your company. 102 | 103 | The process of scaling a company is not unlike the process of scaling a product. Different sizes of company impose different requirements on the company’s architecture. If you address those requirements too early, your company will seem heavy and sluggish. If you address those requirements too late, your company may melt down under the pressure. 104 | 105 | If CEOs were graded on a curve, the mean on the test would be 22 out of 100. 106 | 107 | When people in my company would complain about one thing or another being broken, such as the expense reporting process, I would joke that it was all my fault. The joke was funny, because it wasn’t really a joke. 108 | 109 | On the other hand, talking to your board and outside advisers can be fruitless. The knowledge gap between you and them is so vast that you cannot actually bring them fully up to speed in a manner that’s useful in making the decision. You are all alone. 110 | 111 | People who watch you judge you on what you do, not how you feel." 112 | 113 | Social credit matrix p211 114 | 115 | Over the past ten years, technological advances have dramatically lowered the financial bar for starting a new company, but the courage bar for building a great company remains as high as it has ever been. 116 | 117 | When it comes to CEO succession, internal candidates dramatically outperform external candidates. The core reason is knowledge. 118 | 119 | The very next day I informed the head of Sales Engineering and the head of Customer Support that they would be switching jobs. 120 | 121 | Technical founders are the best people to run technology companies. All of the long-lasting technology companies that we admired— Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook— had been run by their founders. 122 | 123 | It was incredibly difficult for technical founders to learn to become CEOs while building their companies. I was a testament to that. But, most venture capital firms were better designed to replace the founder than to help the founder grow and succeed. 124 | 125 | As a CEO, there is no such luxury. As CEO, I had to worry about what everybody else thought. In particular, I could not show weakness in public. 126 | 127 | 128 | 129 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /war-of-art.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | Creativity is found on the same plane of reality as Resistance. It, too, is genetic. It's called talent: the innate power to discover the hidden connection between two things — images, ideas, words — that no one else has ever seen before, link them, and create for the world a third, utterly unique work. 2 | 3 | There's a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don't, and the secret is this: It's not the writing part that's hard. What's hard is sitting down to write. What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance. 4 | 5 | Any act that rejects immediate gratification in favor of long-term growth, health, or integrity. Or, expressed another way, any act that derives from our higher nature instead of our lower. Any of these will elicit Resistance. 6 | 7 | We can use this. We can use it as a compass. We can navigate by Resistance, letting it guide us to that calling or action that we must follow before all others. 8 | 9 | Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul's evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it. 10 | 11 | The danger is greatest when the finish line is in sight. At this point, Resistance knows we're about to beat it. It hits the panic button. It marshals one last assault and slams us with everything it's got. The professional must be alert for this counterattack. Be wary at the end. Don't open that bag of wind. 12 | 13 | The best and only thing that one artist can do for another is to serve as an example and an inspiration. 14 | 15 | We get ourselves in trouble because it's a cheap way to get attention. Trouble is a faux form of fame. 16 | 17 | Anything that draws attention to ourselves through pain-free or artificial means is a manifestation of Resistance. 18 | 19 | When we drug ourselves to blot out our soul's call, we are being good Americans and exemplary consumers. We're doing exactly what TV commercials and pop materialist culture have been brainwashing us to do from birth. Instead of applying self-knowledge, self-discipline, delayed gratification and hard work, we simply consume a product. 20 | 21 | What makes it tricky is that we live in a consumer culture that's acutely aware of this unhappiness and has massed all its profit-seeking artillery to exploit it. By selling us a product, a drug, a distraction. 22 | 23 | Who am I? Why am I here? What is the meaning of my life? At more primitive stages of evolution, humanity didn't have to deal with such questions. In the states of savagery, of barbarism, in nomadic culture, medieval society, in the tribe and the clan, one's position was fixed by the commandments of the community. It was only with the advent of modernity (starting with the ancient Greeks), with the birth of freedom and of the individual, that such matters ascended to the fore. 24 | 25 | These are not easy questions. Who am I? Why am I here? They're not easy because the human being isn't wired to function as an individual. We're wired tribally, to act as part of a group. Our psyches are programmed by millions of years of hunter-gatherer evolution. 26 | 27 | The paradox seems to be, as Socrates demonstrated long ago, that the truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery. 28 | 29 | If you find yourself criticizing other people, you're probably doing it out of Resistance. When we see others beginning to live their authentic selves, it drives us crazy if we have not lived out our own. 30 | 31 | Individuals who are realized in their own lives almost never criticize others. If they speak at all, it is to offer encouragement. Watch yourself. Of all the manifestations of Resistance, most only harm ourselves. Criticism and cruelty harm others as well. 32 | 33 | If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends), "Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?" chances are you are. 34 | 35 | Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. 36 | 37 | Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates to the strength of Resistance. Therefore the more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul. 38 | 39 | The professional tackles the project that will make him stretch. 40 | 41 | The opposite of love isn't hate; it's indifference. 42 | 43 | Grandiose fantasies are a symptom of Resistance. They're the sign of an amateur. The professional has learned that success, like happiness, comes as a by-product of work. The professional concentrates on the work and allows rewards to come or not come, whatever they like. 44 | 45 | Not only do I not feel alone with my characters; they are more vivid and interesting to me than the people in my real life. If you think about it, the case can't be otherwise. In order for a book (or any project or enterprise) to hold our attention for the length of time it takes to unfold itself, it has to plug into some internal perplexity or passion that is of paramount importance to us. 46 | 47 | What are we trying to heal, anyway? The athlete knows the day will never come when he wakes up pain-free. He has to play hurt. 48 | 49 | I hadn't written anything good. It might be years before I would, if I ever did at all. That didn't matter. What counted was that I had, after years of running from it, actually sat down and done my work. 50 | 51 | Rationalization is Resistance's right-hand man. Its job is to keep us from feeling the shame we would feel if we truly faced what cowards we are for not doing our work. 52 | 53 | Instead of showing us our fear (which might shame us and impel us to do our work), Resistance presents us with a series of plausible, rational justifications for why we shouldn't do our work. 54 | 55 | The amateur plays for fun. The professional plays for keeps. To the amateur, the game is his avocation. To the pro it's his vocation. 56 | 57 | Principle of Priority, which states (a) you must know the difference between what is urgent and what is important, and (b) you must do what's important first. 58 | 59 | We do not overidentify with our jobs. We may take pride in our work, we may stay late and come in on weekends, but we recognize that we are not our job descriptions. The amateur, on the other hand, overidentifies with his avocation, his artistic aspiration. He defines himself by it. He is a musician, a painter, a playwright. Resistance loves this. Resistance knows that the amateur composer will never write his symphony because he is overly invested in its success and overterrified of its failure. The amateur takes it so seriously it paralyzes him. 60 | 61 | The amateur has not mastered the technique of his art. Nor does he expose himself to judgment in the real world. 62 | 63 | So you're taking a few blows. That's the price for being in the arena and not on the sidelines. Stop complaining and be grateful. 64 | 65 | Remember what we said about fear, love, and Resistance. The more you love your art/ calling/ enterprise, the more important its accomplishment is to the evolution of your soul, the more you will fear it and the more Resistance you will experience facing it. 66 | 67 | The payoff is that playing the game for money produces the proper professional attitude. 68 | 69 | Resistance gets us to plunge into a project with an overambitious and unrealistic timetable for its completion. It knows we can't sustain that level of intensity. We will hit the wall. We will crash. 70 | 71 | So she concentrates on technique. The professional masters how, and leaves what and why to the gods. 72 | 73 | The professional has learned better. He respects Resistance. He knows if he caves in today, no matter how plausible the pretext, he'll be twice as likely to cave in tomorrow. The professional knows that Resistance is like a telemarketer; if you so much as say hello, you're finished. The pro doesn't even pick up the phone. He stays at work. 74 | 75 | The professional is prepared at a deeper level. He is prepared, each day, to confront his own self-sabotage. 76 | 77 | The professional dedicates himself to mastering technique not because he believes technique is a substitute for inspiration but because he wants to be in possession of the full arsenal of skills when inspiration does come. 78 | 79 | He has seated his professional consciousness in a place other than his personal ego. It takes tremendous strength of character to do this, because our deepest instincts run counter to it. Evolution has programmed us to feel rejection in our guts. This is how the tribe enforced obedience, by wielding the threat of expulsion. Fear of rejection isn't just psychological; it's biological. It's in our cells. 80 | 81 | It uses fear of rejection to paralyze us and prevent us, if not from doing our work, then from exposing it to public evaluation. 82 | 83 | Humiliation, like rejection and criticism, is the external reflection of internal Resistance. 84 | 85 | The professional cannot allow the actions of others to define his reality. 86 | 87 | If we think of ourselves as a corporation, it gives us a healthy distance on ourselves. We're less subjective. 88 | 89 | There's no mystery to turning pro. It's a decision brought about by an act of will. We make up our minds to view ourselves as pros and we do it. Simple as that. The moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would not otherwise have occurred. 90 | 91 | This process of self-revision and self-correction is so common we don't even notice. But it's a miracle. And its implications are staggering. 92 | 93 | This is why artists are modest. They know they're not doing the work; they're just taking dictation. 94 | 95 | The moment a person learns he's got terminal cancer, a profound shift takes place in his psyche. At one stroke in the doctor's office he becomes aware of what really matters to him. Things that sixty seconds earlier had seemed all- important suddenly appear meaningless, while people and concerns that he had till then dismissed at once take on supreme importance. What about that gift he had for music? What became of the passion he once felt to work with the sick and the homeless? Why do these unlived lives return now with such power and poignancy? 96 | 97 | The Ego is that part of the psyche that believes in material existence. 98 | 99 | Most of us define ourselves hierarchically and don't even know it. It's hard not to. School, advertising, the entire materialist culture drills us from birth to define ourselves by others' opinions. Drink this beer, get this job, look this way and everyone will love you. 100 | 101 | We humans seem to have been wired by our evolutionary past to function most comfortably in a tribe of twenty to, say, eight hundred. We can push it maybe to a few thousand, even to five figures. But at some point it maxes out. Our brains can't file that many faces. We thrash around, flashing our badges of status (Hey, how do you like my Lincoln Navigator?) and wondering why nobody gives a shit. We have entered Mass Society. The hierarchy is too big. It doesn't work anymore. 102 | 103 | For the artist to define himself hierarchically is fatal. 104 | 105 | An individual who defines himself by his place in a pecking order will: 1) Compete against all others in the order, seeking to elevate his station by advancing against those above him, while defending his place against those beneath. 2) Evaluate his happiness/ success/ achievement by his rank within the hierarchy, feeling most satisfied when he's high and most miserable when he's low. 3) Act toward others based upon their rank in the hierarchy, to the exclusion of all other factors. 4) Evaluate his every move solely by the effect it produces on others. He will act for others, dress for others, speak for others, think for others. 106 | 107 | The artist must operate territorially. He must do his work for its own sake. 108 | 109 | A hack, he says, is a writer who second-guesses his audience. When the hack sits down to work, he doesn't ask himself what's in his own heart. He asks what the market is looking for. The hack condescends to his audience. He thinks he's superior to them. The truth is, he's scared to death of them or, more accurately, scared of being authentic in front of them, scared of writing what he really feels or believes, what he himself thinks is interesting. He's afraid it won't sell. So he tries to anticipate what the market (a telling word) wants, then gives it to them. 110 | 111 | We humans have territories too. Ours are psychological. 112 | 113 | A territory sustains us without any external input. A territory is a closed feedback loop. Our role is to put in effort and love; the territory absorbs this and gives it back to us in the form of well-being. When experts tell us that exercise (or any other effort- requiring activity) banishes depression, this is what they mean. 114 | 115 | The artist and the mother are vehicles, not originators. They don't create the new life, they only bear it. This is why birth is such a humbling experience. The new mom weeps in awe at the little miracle in her arms. She knows it came out of her but not from her, through her but not of her. 116 | 117 | Here's another test. Of any activity you do, ask yourself: If I were the last person on earth, would I still do it? 118 | 119 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /how-google-works.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | ### Intro 2 | 3 | Over time I've learned, surprisingly , that it's tremendously hard to get teams to be super ambitious. 4 | 5 | It's also true that many companies get comfortable doing what they have always done, with a few incremental changes. This kind of incrementalism leads to irrelevance over time, especially in technology, because change tends to be revolutionary not evolutionary. 6 | 7 | Today, three factors of production have become cheaper—information, connectivity, and computing power. 8 | 9 | It used to be that companies could turn poor products into winners by dint of overwhelming marketing or distribution strength. Create an adequate product, control the conversation with a big marketing budget, limit customer choice, and you could guarantee yourself a good return. Things are different today. 10 | 11 | In the old world, you devoted 30 percent of your time to building a great service and 70 percent of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts. 16 The second reason product excellence is so critical is that the cost of experimentation and failure has dropped significantly. 12 | 13 | The primary objective of any business today must be to increase the speed of the product development process and the quality of its output. 14 | 15 | Business plans aren't nearly as important as the pillars upon which they are built. 16 | 17 | ### Culture 18 | 19 | But it wasn't Google's culture that turned those five engineers into problem-solving ninjas who changed the course of the company over the weekend. Rather it was the culture that attracted the ninjas to the company in the first place. This is why, when starting a new company or initiative, culture is the most important thing to consider. What do we care about? What do we believe? Who do we want to be? How do we want our company to act and make decisions? Then write down their responses. 20 | 21 | Product managers need to find the technical insights that make products better. These derive from knowing how people use the products (and how those patterns will change as technology progresses), from understanding and analyzing data, and from looking at technology trends and anticipating how they will affect their industry. To do this well, product managers need to work, eat, and live with their engineers (or chemists, biologists, designers, or whichever other types of smart creatives the company employs to design and develop its products). 22 | 23 | When it comes to the quality of decision-making, pay level is intrinsically irrelevant and experience is valuable only if it is used to frame a winning argument . Unfortunately , in most companies experience is the winning argument. 24 | 25 | If someone thinks there is something wrong with an idea, they must raise that concern. If they don't, and if the subpar idea wins the day, then they are culpable. 26 | 27 | "Your title makes you a manager. Your people make you a leader." 28 | 29 | You should never be able to reverse engineer a company's organizational chart from the design of its product. 30 | 31 | The best cultures invite and enable people to be overworked in a good way, with too many interesting things to do both at work and at home. 32 | 33 | Burnout isn't caused by working too hard, but by resentment at having to give up what really matters to you. 34 | 35 | ### Strategy 36 | 37 | Bet on technical insights that help solve a big problem in a novel way, optimize for scale, not for revenue, and let great products grow the market for everyone. 38 | 39 | Giving the customer what he wants is less important than giving him what he doesn't yet know he wants. 40 | 41 | The best products had achieved their success based on technical factors, not business ones, whereas the less stellar ones lacked technical distinction. 42 | 43 | With open, you trade control for scale and innovation. 44 | 45 | Make it easy for customers to leave. 46 | 47 | ### Notes on Strategy Meeting 48 | 49 | Start by asking what will be true in five years and work backward. Examine carefully the things you can assert will change quickly, especially factors of production where technology is exponentially driving down cost curves, or platforms that could emerge. 50 | 51 | Spend the vast majority of your time thinking about product and platform. 52 | 53 | Don't use market research and competitive analyses. Slides kill discussion. Get input from everyone in the room. 54 | 55 | ### Hiring 56 | 57 | Favoring specialization over intelligence is exactly wrong, especially in high tech. The world is changing so fast across every industry and endeavor that it's a given the role for which you're hiring is going to change. 58 | 59 | A smart generalist doesn't have bias, so is free to survey the wide range of solutions and gravitate to the best one. 60 | 61 | You must work with people you don't like, because a workforce comprised of people who are all "best office buddies" can be homogeneous, and homogeneity in an organization breeds failure. A multiplicity of viewpoints— aka diversity— is your best defense against myopia. 62 | 63 | Experience is important, but in most industries today technology has rendered the environment so dynamic that having the right experience is only a part of what it takes to succeed. 64 | 65 | **Interviewing** 66 | 67 | What was the low point in the project? Or why was it successful? You want to learn if the candidate was the hammer or the egg, someone who caused a change or went along with it. 68 | 69 | "If I were to look at the web history section of your browser, what would I learn about you that isn't on your résumé?" 70 | 71 | The only way to get good at interviewing is to practice. 72 | 73 | **Career** 74 | 75 | When people are right out of school, they tend to prioritize company first, then job, then industry. But at this point in their career that is exactly the wrong order. 76 | 77 | Think about your ideal job, not today but five years from now. Where do you want to be? What do you want to do? How much do you want to make? Write down the job description. By the way, if your conclusion is that you are ready for your ideal job today, then you aren't thinking big enough. Start over and make that ideal job a stretch, not a gimme. 78 | 79 | ### Decisions 80 | 81 | When it comes to making decisions, you can't just focus on making the right one. The process by which you reach the decision, the timing of when you reach it, and the way it is implemented are just as important as the decision itself. 82 | 83 | Slides should not be used to run a meeting or argue a point. They should just contain the data. 84 | 85 | Getting everyone to say yes in a meeting doesn't mean you have agreement, it means you have a bunch of bobbleheads. 86 | 87 | To achieve true consensus, you need dissent. 88 | 89 | The job is to make sure everyone's voice is heard, regardless of their functional role, which is harder to achieve when the top dog puts a stake in the ground. 90 | 91 | The right decision is the best decision, not the lowest common denominator decision upon which everyone agrees. 92 | 93 | This is the most important duty of the decision-maker: Set a deadline, run the process, and then enforce the deadline. 94 | 95 | In a negotiation, for example, Eric's "PIA" rule can help get the best outcome: Have patience, information, and alternatives. P is especially important. You want to wait as long as possible before committing to a course of action. 96 | 97 | You have to analyze data and orchestrate consensus by encouraging debate and then knowing, through some divine skill, exactly the right time to cut off that debate and make the decision. 98 | 99 | When ending a debate and making a decision that doesn't have 100 percent support, remember these three words: "You're both right." To emotionally commit to a decision with which they don't agree, people have to know that their opinion was not only heard, but valued. 100 | 101 | **Meetings** 102 | 103 | Meetings should have a single decision-maker. The decision-maker should be hands on. 104 | 105 | Any meeting should have a purpose, and if that purpose isn't well defined or if the meeting fails to achieve that purpose, maybe the meeting should go away. 106 | 107 | Meetings should be manageable in size. No more then eight people. 108 | 109 | Leadership teams often underestimate how long it takes for revenue from a new product area to ramp up. 110 | 111 | It's not that the coach is better at playing the sport than the player, in fact that is almost never the case. But the coaches have a different skill: They can observe players in action and tell them how to be better. 112 | 113 | ### Communicating 114 | 115 | In this [old] world, information is hoarded as a means of control and power. People were hired to work, in the Internet Century you hire people to think. 116 | 117 | Leadership's purpose is to optimize the flow of information throughout the company, all the time, every day. 118 | 119 | No one wants to be the bearer of bad news. Yet as a leader it is precisely the bad news that you most need to hear. 120 | 121 | After a product or key feature launches, we ask teams to conduct "postmortem" sessions where everyone gets together to discuss what went right and what went wrong. 122 | 123 | Open door works only when people walk through it. 124 | 125 | Start all staff meetings with trip reports. 126 | 127 | At least once per year, write a review of your own performance, then read it and see if you would work for you. 128 | 129 | The manager should write down the top five things she wants to cover in the meeting, and the employee should do the same. When the separate lists are revealed, chances are that at least some of the items overlap. 130 | 131 | ### Innovation 132 | 133 | The business should always be outrunning the processes, so chaos is right where you want to be. 134 | 135 | For something to be innovative it needs to offer new functionality, but it also has to be surprising. 136 | 137 | How do you think the technology in the space will evolve? What is different now, and what further change do you expect? 138 | 139 | "Innovative people do not need to be told to do it, they need to be allowed to do it." 140 | 141 | "The first follower is what transforms a lone nut into a leader." - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GA8z7f7a2Pk 142 | 143 | Focus on the user... and the money will follow. 144 | 145 | Big bets often have a greater chance for success by virtue of their size: The company can't afford to fail. On the other hand, when you make a bunch of smaller bets, none of which are life threatening, you can end up with mediocrity. 146 | 147 | Set the objectives too low and you are obviously trying to make yourself look good by "miraculously" exceeding them at the end of the quarter. 148 | 149 | 70 percent of resources dedicated to the core business, 20 percent on emerging, and 10 percent on new. 150 | 151 | Overinvestment can create a situation wherein willful confirmation bias— the tendency to see only the good things in projects in which a lot has been invested—obscures sound decision-making. 152 | 153 | Creativity loves constraints. A lack of resources forces ingenuity. 154 | 155 | It's also possible that being well funded might have hobbled the project before it could get started. Larry's scrappy digitizing system, built from parts purchased at Fry's, proved to be a lot more cost efficient than the more advanced systems he might have purchased if he had allotted the time and budget. When you want to spur innovation, the worst thing you can do is overfund it. As Frank Lloyd Wright once observed, "The human race built most nobly when limitations were greatest." 156 | 157 | And we have found that when you trust people with freedom, they generally do not waste it on extravagant pies in the sky. You don't get software engineers writing operas - they write code. 158 | 159 | Getting a few of your colleagues to join your project and add their 20 percent time to your 20 percent time is a lot harder. This is where the Darwinian process begins. 160 | 161 | The most valuable result of 20 percent time isn't the products and features that get created, it's the things that people learn when they try something new. 162 | 163 | Forgetting sunk costs is a tough lesson to heed, so in a ship-and-iterate model, leadership's job must be to feed the winners and starve the losers, regardless of prior investment. 164 | 165 | Any failed project should yield valuable technical, user, and market insights that can help inform the next effort. 166 | 167 | If you are thinking big enough it is very hard to fail completely. There is usually something very valuable left over. 168 | 169 | We say we're stubborn on vision and flexible on details. 170 | 171 | So fail quickly, but with a very long time horizon? Huh? How does that work? (See, we told you this was the tricky part.) The key is to iterate very quickly and to establish metrics that help you judge if, with each iteration, you are getting closer to success. 172 | 173 | ### Conclusion 174 | 175 | The rate of technology-driven change outpaces our ability to train people in new skills, putting tremendous pressure on entire classes of workers and the economic structure of many nations. 176 | 177 | In the twenty-first century, The Corporation as a hub of economic activity is being challenged by The Platform. 178 | 179 | In contrast [to a corporation], a platform has a back-and-forth relationship with consumers and suppliers 180 | 181 | In a lot of these incumbent businesses, technology is that interesting thing run by that slightly odd group in the other building ; it isn't something that anchors the CEO's agenda every week. 182 | 183 | Technology progress follows an inexorable upward trend. Follow that trend to a logical point in the future and ask the question: What does that mean for us? 184 | 185 | In ongoing companies there are always hard questions, and they often don't get asked because there aren't any good answers and that makes people uncomfortable. But this is precisely why they should be asked— to keep the team uncomfortable. 186 | 187 | Most companies fail because they get too comfortable doing what they have always done, making only incremental changes. 188 | 189 | Are decisions on new ideas based on product excellence, or profit? 190 | 191 | They find that they can have a far greater impact from California than from their home country, and the allure of gathering with other smart creatives of the same ilk often outweighs that of staying close to home. 192 | 193 | Regulations get created in anticipation of problems, but if you build a system that anticipates everything, there's no room to innovate. 194 | 195 | We see most big problems as information problems, which means that with enough data and the ability to crunch it, virtually any challenge facing humanity today can be solved. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /joy-on-demand.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | ## Introduction - How I Learnedto Be Jolly for Fun and Profit 2 | 3 | A 1996 study involving twins suggests that roughly half of our happiness is associated with our genetic makeup. (Location 201) 4 | 5 | Mindfulness is defined as "paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally." (Location 230) 6 | 7 | If you want to become an agent of change, you have to remember to keep your sense of humor. (Location 281) 8 | 9 | What is even better is if we can feel joy independent of sense or ego pleasure. (Location 292) 10 | 11 | Joy that comes from within—from a peaceful mind as a result of taking a few breaths, joy from being kind toward others (which involves other people but does not depend on them), joy from our own generosity, joy from doing the right thing—all this joy is ours to have, independent of circumstances. (Location 345) 12 | 13 | My Asian upbringing had led me to believe that success leads to happiness, that one day, when I am successful, I will be happy. In fact, the opposite is true. Success does not lead to happiness; instead, happiness leads to success. (Location 366) 14 | 15 | The single greatest advantage in the modern economy is a happy and engaged workforce. (Location 372) 16 | 17 | Joy and meditation are another pair of really nice things that form a virtuous cycle with each other. (Location 403) 18 | 19 | 20 | ## Chapter 1 - Joy Becomes You 21 | 22 | Any one of the three basic benefits of mind training — mental calm, mental clarity, and emotional resilience — is, by itself, life changing, and with practice all meditators can acquire all three. (Location 496) 23 | 24 | Creativity seems to happen when random ideas arise and the mind perceives them clearly and, more important, captures the novel, remote, or unexpected associations between these ideas. If the mind is cluttered, noisy, or agitated, it is like dropping pebbles into turbulent water—you don’t see a lot of nice ripples, and you can’t see how the ripples form patterns with each other. (Location 550) 25 | 26 | That is why they know to go for walks, play games, or take a warm shower if they get stuck while solving a problem. (Location 569) 27 | 28 | The biggest difference is that cockiness, unlike confidence, is necessarily fueled by conceit. Another big difference is fragility. Cockiness is very fragile. (Location 588) 29 | 30 | The second source of confidence is confidence arising from equanimity. This comes in part from the ability to calm the mind on demand. (Location 646) 31 | 32 | Focusing on serving the people in front of me, I allowed my ego to be any size it needed to be in order to serve, and I maintained my humor at the absurdity of the situation. (Location 677) 33 | 34 | In retrospect, I realized that I had handled that monk’s question in the most skillful way I could without even thinking. I could have been defensive, offended, angry, or insecure, and I could have acted in a very unskillful way. I learned that if I just focus on service and humor, then I will most likely not screw it up. (Location 688) 35 | 36 | That brings us to the third source of confidence, confidence arising from resilience. One aspect of confidence arising from resilience is the ability to recover: (Location 695) 37 | 38 | This is the willingness to bear witness to our own pain and failure. (Location 722) 39 | 40 | Charisma is the result of specific behaviors: behaviors of presence, behaviors of power, and behaviors of warmth. (Location 771) 41 | 42 | Behaviors of warmth, in my opinion, can be reduced to a single sentence: "I’m so happy to see you." (Location 784) 43 | 44 | I realized the secret of my success can be encapsulated in a single word: luck. I am so successful because I am lucky. (Location 793) 1. Being born into the right circumstances 2. Being in the right place at the right time 3. Being surrounded by good people (Location 797) 45 | 46 | Venturing into the uncomfortable takes two things: the self-confidence to put yourself in very uncomfortable situations, and the self-awareness to clearly know your values, priorities, and purpose in life. (Location 828) 47 | 48 | In life, opportunity knocks fairly often, but if you are unprepared for it or unwilling to jump at it, then it will pass you by. (Location 840) 49 | 50 | The skills you need to do this are the self-awareness that gives you clarity of purpose, the self-confidence to know you are capable of learning anything at any age, the resilience to do outstanding work even in unpleasant situations, and the courage to "fly between trapezes" and put yourself in uncomfortable situations. (Location 844) 51 | 52 | 53 | ## Chapter 2 - Just One Breath? Sure You Jest 54 | 55 | Simply, if you have people to exercise with, for example gym buddies or running buddies, then you’re more likely to do it. The second solution is incorporating exercise into daily life. (Location 891) 56 | 57 | If sports were invented by us engineers, we would have called it "gamified exercise." (Location 905) 58 | 59 | The most important thing about this is self-sustaining momentum. Once a person hits the Joy Point, the virtuous cycle of joy and skillfulness keeps her going. She has the skill to reliably access inner peace and inner joy, which makes her practice joyful, so she practices more and becomes more skillful, which makes her practice more joyful, and so on. (Location 929) 60 | 61 | This is wise laziness. Using insight and wisdom to maximize ease without sacrificing quality of results, (Location 949) 62 | 63 | (Taking breath while you wait) is a wonderful practice with many benefits. First, I never waste any time anymore, because every moment I wait is a moment I get to spend productively, practicing mindfulness meditation. (Location 1120) 64 | 65 | The two short-lived sources of joy are the joy of novelty and the joy of perceived agency. (Location 1150) 66 | 67 | The first highly sustainable source of joy is the joy of momentary relief from affliction. (Location 1173) 68 | 69 | The second highly sustainable source of joy is the joy of ease. (Location 1180) 70 | 71 | 72 | ## Chapter 3 - From One Breath to One Googol 73 | 74 | The first method is anchoring. This means bringing gentle attention to a chosen object, and if attention wanders away, gently bringing it back. If anchoring is too hard for you, here is the second method: resting. Resting means exactly that, to cease work or movement in order to relax, that is all. If resting is still too hard for you, here is the third method: being. Being means shifting from doing to being. It means not doing anything in particular, just sitting and experiencing the present moment. (Location 1258) 75 | 76 | The traditional Sanskrit word for meditation is bhavana, which literally means "cultivation." A key aspect of meditation is the skillful combination of wise effort and letting go. (Location 1352) 77 | 78 | The Buddha taught that a skillful goldsmith does three things while working on a piece of gold: periodically he strengthens the fire, periodically he sprinkles water onto the gold, and periodically he examines the gold closely. Similarly, a skillful meditator periodically does three things: periodically he arouses mental energy, periodically he calms the mind, and periodically he watches the mind with equanimity. (Location 1387) 79 | 80 | I decided I would sit on a chair and literally do nothing. It turned out that nothing was precisely what I needed to do. After just a few minutes of sitting and doing nothing, I became aware of feelings in my body, so I just sat there being aware of bodily sensations. Some minutes after that, I noticed myself breathing. And then I told myself, "Oh, so this is what it is like to know that you are breathing." (Location 1479) 81 | 82 | However, from that one experience, I learned the most important lesson in all of meditation practice: first and foremost, establish relaxation, and if relaxation breaks, reestablish relaxation. (Location 1486) 83 | 84 | I gave myself firm instructions such as, "I will attend to every single in-breath and out-breath, not losing attention to a single breath, for thirty minutes." There was only one rule, the relaxation rule: first and foremost, establish relaxation, and if relaxation breaks, reestablish relaxation. (Location 1499) 85 | 86 | Mental training requires a skillful balance of disciplined effort and joyful relaxation, which means the more joyful relaxation you can already count on, the more disciplined effort you can commit, and the more of both you have, the faster you can establish attentional stability. (Location 1518) 87 | 88 | 89 | ## Chapter 4 - What, Me Happy? 90 | 91 | The more you notice these thin slices of joy, the more they appear to be everywhere, because they have always been there. You just never noticed them before. (Location 1578) 92 | 93 | The Discourse on Proximate Causes (the Upanisa Sutta), states emphatically that "the proximate cause of concentration is joy." In other words, joy is the condition most immediately responsible for (meditative) concentration. (Location 1650) 94 | 95 | There are three sources of wholesome joy in daily activities that we can tap. One source is the type of behavior that uplifts the spirits, such as behavior involving generosity, loving-kindness, and compassion. (Location 1690) 96 | 97 | Ethical behavior is another day-to-day source of wholesome joy. (Location 1692) 98 | 99 | Another source of wholesome joy is attending to pleasant experiences in your normal, everyday activities. (Location 1705) 100 | 101 | One of the biggest hindrances, possibly the biggest hindrance, to perceiving the very many moments of joy in daily life is a phenomenon called habituation, which for our purpose simply means we take things for granted. (Location 1759) 102 | 103 | The third and, possibly, the most powerful way to overcome habituation is with a strong awareness of mortality. Someday, I will die. (Location 1782) 104 | 105 | One study shows that the less time someone feels she has remaining on this earth, the more likely she is to derive happiness from ordinary experiences, and therefore, the happier she is. (Location 1796) 106 | 107 | I spent my life thinking of freedom as the freedom to do stuff, but that freedom turns out to be trivial compared to the much greater freedom from affliction. (Location 1841) 108 | 109 | This practice is, without a doubt, one of the most important meditation practices of all time. Meditation master Shinzen Young said that if he were allowed to teach only one focus technique and no other, it would be this one. Here are the instructions for the informal practice of Just Note Gone, from Shinzen’s article "The Power of Gone." (Location 1877) 110 | 111 | 112 | ## Chapter 5 - Uplift the Mind in Seconds 113 | 114 | It turns out that being on the giving end of a kind thought is rewarding in and of itself. To simply think that I wish for one other person to be happy makes me happy. (Location 1985) 115 | 116 | If that is true, we may have just discovered one of the most important secrets of happiness. All other things being equal, to increase your happiness, all you have to do is randomly wish for somebody else to be happy. That is all. It basically takes no time and no effort. This is another key life-changing insight in this book. You’re welcome. (Location 1995) 117 | 118 | Simply stated, loving-kindness is the wish for self or others to be happy, and compassion is the wish for self or others to be free from suffering. (Location 2052) 119 | 120 | Compassion, in contrast, is significantly harder because it forces us to come face-to-face with suffering. (Location 2078) 121 | 122 | I was shocked. Compassion is the happiest mental state ever measured in the history of neuroscience. (Location 2109) 123 | 124 | When I experience sadness with equanimity, three qualities arise: courage, confidence, and most important, selfless love. (Location 2122) 125 | 126 | He calls healthy sadness "the courage of compassion." He says this is the type of sadness that inspires a loving response in you that compels you to take courageous action to relieve suffering. The difference between healthy and unhealthy sadness is despair. Healthy sadness is sadness without despair. (Location 2138) 127 | 128 | The most surprising thing I have learned about altruistic joy is how hard it is to cultivate. In my experience, altruistic joy is much harder to cultivate than loving-kindness and compassion. (Location 2194) 129 | 130 | As a meditator, it is obvious to me that one’s own mind is always the first beneficiary of any altruistic intention; therefore, it is impossible to commit any act out of true altruistic intent without first benefiting oneself. (Location 2210) 131 | 132 | Hence, one of the few things in my life that can reduce my constant sense of inadequacy is reflecting on my sincere, altruistic intentions, and by extension, the good deeds that result from the intentions and the occasional good outcome of those deeds (on those occasions when my good deeds go unpunished). (Location 2237) 133 | 134 | At the beginning of every meditation session, uplift the mind with altruistic joy. (Location 2253) 135 | 136 | The three qualities in this chapter, loving-kindness, compassion, and altruistic joy, are three in a collection of four beautiful qualities called brahmavihara. The fourth member of that club is equanimity, which is the mind that remains calm and free in the face of eight worldly conditions: gain and loss, honor and dishonor, praise and blame, and pleasure and pain. (Location 2285) 137 | 138 | In fact, I know of meditation masters who use loving-kindness as their main vehicle for arriving at states of perfect meditative concentration. (Location 2311) 139 | 140 | I most strongly recommend practicing compassion, and doing so after some foundation in loving-kindness is firmly established. (Location 2323) 141 | 142 | Loving-kindness has two near enemies, both of which are often dominant in romantic relationships, which is why those relationships tend to go sour over time. (Location 2337) 143 | 144 | - Loving Kindness: Near Enemies are "Addictive Affection" and "Conditional Love". Far Enemy is "Ill Will" 145 | - Compassion: Near Enemites are "Despair" and "Pity". Far Enemy is "Cruelty" 146 | - Altruistic Joy: Near Enemies are "Self-Interested Joy" and "Unwholesome Joy". Far Enemy is "JEalousy" 147 | - Equanimity: Near Enemies are "Disengagement" and "Apathy". Far Enemy is "Agitation" 148 | 149 | 150 | ## Chapter 6 - Happiness is Full of Crap 151 | 152 | In this chapter, we will use inner peace, inner joy, inner clarity, and loving-kindness to work with suffering. I suggest there are three steps in doing that: an attentional step, an affective step, and a cognitive step. (Location 2442) 153 | 154 | First, I learned, as the masters have taught over thousands of years, that peace and joy are the default states of mind. They don’t have to be created—they just need to be accessed. (Location 2508) 155 | 156 | Complementing the willingness to experience joy in the midst of emotional pain is the willingness to experience the emotional pain itself. (Location 2569) 157 | 158 | In summary, the affective step begins with the willingness to experience joy in the midst of emotional pain, allowing the joy to surface whenever and wherever it wants. After that, cultivate the willingness to experience the emotional pain itself. Do this by perceiving the affective experience of the emotional pain in its component parts (bodily sensations, thoughts, and aversion) clearly, just as they are. Then, apply loving-kindness to yourself as much as possible; then sit with whatever bodily sensations and thoughts you experience, doing so in stillness and equanimity, allowing all those bodily sensations and thoughts to come and go, knowing that they are not you. (Location 2625) 159 | 160 | To make things worse, we often unconsciously fill in the missing information with our imagination and then our brains don’t take the trouble to differentiate between imagination and facts. (Location 2644) 161 | 162 | As the comedian Louis C. K. famously said to Conan O’Brien, "Everything is amazing right now, and nobody’s happy." (Location 2663) 163 | 164 | Cognitively reappraise a situation in six ways: (Location 2678) 165 | 166 | The three steps for working with emotional pain (the attentional step, the affective step, and the cognitive step) work best when executed in that order. (Location 2699) 167 | 168 | "When a buddha meets a sad person, the buddha becomes sad for one moment. Why is this? Because if he didn’t, the sad person would have no way to meet the buddha." (Location 2718) 169 | 170 | Only when you can clearly see how you fail will you be able to overcome the causes of those failures. (Location 2781) 171 | 172 | Matthieu and Tania demonstrated scientifically that altruistic love and compassion are antidotes for suffering. (Location 2824) 173 | 174 | 175 | ## Chapter 7 - The Great Mind Is Better than Sex 176 | 177 | That makes sense because when I was growing up, meditation was far from mainstream, so the population that self-selected into meditation had to have very strong motivation to venture that far out, and in almost every case, that motivation was unbearable pain. (Location 2883) 178 | 179 | If you are someone who wants to establish a deep practice in a small number of months, you can’t beat buying a one-way ticket to Thailand and checking yourself into a Buddhist forest monastery in the middle of a thick rainforest with an enlightened, no-nonsense master. (Location 2893) 180 | 181 | "To acquire wisdom is very hard, but to abandon it is even harder. You have obviously accumulated a lot of wisdom, and your wisdom has brought you to this point, which is very good. But to advance further, you need to abandon that wisdom." (Location 2925) 182 | 183 | Suddenly, I saw that the biggest barrier to my progress was my effort. The very effort that had accelerated my progress was holding me back from the next stage of my growth. (Location 2939) 184 | 185 | The meditator only reapplies effort when attentional stability wanes (and withdraws effort again soon after). (Location 2947) 186 | 187 | With effort withdrawn, the mind glides into a deeply calm and quiet state. In the background, there is attention to the breath, but in the foreground, the attention is objectless. (Location 2948) 188 | 189 | Even the breath itself is a concept, a concept made up of many successive moments of sensation that the mind integrates as the experience of breath. (Location 3045) 190 | 191 | When the observer has no identity, the observer gains experiential realization that identity is entirely mind-made. Identity has no substance whatsoever—it is nothing but a mere creation of mind. (Location 3091) 192 | 193 | In fact, I can summarize my entire twenty-plus years of meditation practice in just two words: letting go. (Location 3169) 194 | 195 | The title of the text is Tenzo Kyokun, which literally means "instructions for the monk in charge of cooking meals" (Location 3213) 196 | 197 | 198 | ## Exercises 199 | 200 | INFORMAL PRACTICE: CREATING A HABIT OF TAKING MINDFUL BREATHS (Location 1138) 201 | 202 | FORMAL PRACTICE: SETTLING THE MIND (Location 1306) 203 | 204 | FORMAL PRACTICE: PUPPY DOG MEDITATION (Location 1441) 205 | 206 | FORMAL PRACTICE: NOTICING JOY IN ONE BREATH (Location 1586) 207 | 208 | INFORMAL PRACTICE: NOTICING JOY IN DAILY LIFE (Location 1595) 209 | 210 | FORMAL PRACTICE: INVITING AND ATTENDING TO JOY (Location 1632 211 | 212 | INFORMAL PRACTICE: ATTENDING TO THE JOY OF BLAMELESSNESS (Location 1701) 213 | 214 | INFORMAL PRACTICE: ATTENDING TO THE JOY OF PLEASANT DAILY EXPERIENCES (Location 1716) 215 | 216 | INFORMAL PRACTICE: AWARENESS OF MORTALITY (Location 1807) 217 | 218 | INFORMAL PRACTICE: NOTICING THE ABSENCE OF PAIN (Location 1863) 219 | 220 | INFORMAL PRACTICE: JUST NOTE GONE (Location 1881) 221 | 222 | FORMAL PRACTICE: JUST NOTE GONE (Location 1890) 223 | 224 | INFORMAL PRACTICE: WISHING FOR RANDOM PEOPLE TO BE HAPPY (Location 2011) 225 | 226 | FORMAL PRACTICE: ATTENDING TO THE JOY OF LOVING-KINDNESS (Location 2041) 227 | 228 | FORMAL PRACTICE: CULTIVATING COMPASSION THROUGH PEACE, JOY, AND KINDNESS (Location 2162) 229 | 230 | FORMAL PRACTICE: UPLIFTING AND SETTLING THE MIND WITH ALTRUISTIC JOY (Location 2261) 231 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /search-inside-yourself.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | ## (1-8) Introduction 2 | 3 | Imagine whenever you meet anybody, your habitual, instinctive first thought is, I wish for this person to be happy. 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | ## (9-28) CHAPTER ONE - Even an Engineer Can Thrive on Emotional Intelligence 8 | 9 | EI: The ability to monitor one's own and others' feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one's thinking and actions. 10 | 11 | In the context of the work environment, emotional intelligence enables three important skill sets: stellar work performance, outstanding leadership, and the ability to create the conditions for happiness. 12 | 13 | And that optimal state of being is "a profound emotional balance struck by a subtle understanding of how the mind functions." 14 | 15 | Therefore, happiness may be an unavoidable side effect of cultivating emotional intelligence. 16 | 17 | There is an ability called "response flexibility," which is a fancy name for the ability to pause before you act. 18 | 19 | "Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness." What a mind of calmness and clarity does is to increase that space for us. 20 | 21 | There is a simple technique for self-regulation called "affect labeling," which simply means labeling feelings with words. When you label an emotion you are experiencing (for example, "I feel anger"), it somehow helps you manage that emotion. 22 | 23 | When we are trying to perceive an emotion, we usually get more bang for the buck if we bring our attention to the body rather than the mind. 24 | 25 | Necause emotion has such a strong physiological component, we cannot develop emotional intelligence unless we operate at the level of physiology. That is why we direct our mindfulness there. 26 | 27 | The basal ganglia observes everything we do in life, every situation, and extracts decision rules... Our life wisdom on any topic is stored in the basal ganglia. The basal ganglia is so primitive that it has zero connectivity to the verbal cortex. It can't tell us what it knows in words. It tells us in feelings, it has a lot of connectivity to the emotional centers of the brain and to the gut. It tells us this is right or this is wrong as a gut feeling. 28 | 29 | To just be is simultaneously the most ordinary and the most precious experience in life. 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | ## (29-50) CHAPTER TWO Breathing as if Your Life Depends on It 34 | 35 | By non-doing, all doing becomes possible. 36 | 37 | Meditation: A family of mental training practices that are designed to familiarize the practitioner with specific types of mental processes. 38 | 39 | Mindfulness trains two important faculties, attention and meta-attention. 40 | 41 | When your meta-attention becomes strong, you will be able to recover a wandering attention quickly and often, and if you recover attention quickly and often enough, you create the effect of continuous attention, which is concentration. 42 | 43 | When the mind is calm and clear at the same time, happiness spontaneously arises. The mind becomes spontaneously and naturally joyful! 44 | 45 | happiness is the default state of mind. 46 | 47 | happiness is not something that you pursue; it is something you allow. Happiness is just being. That insight changed my life. 48 | 49 | "Grandmother mind": adopting the mind of a loving grandmother. To a loving grandmother, you are beautiful and perfect in every way. 50 | 51 | Remember that the goal of this practice is not keeping still; the goal is mindfulness. So as long as you maintain mindfulness, anything you do is fair game. 52 | 53 | Yes, we start with training of attention, but attention is not the end goal of most meditation traditions; the true end goal is insight. The reason we create a powerful quality of attention is to be able to develop insights into the mind. 54 | 55 | The Dalai Lama said, "If scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims." 56 | 57 | 58 | 59 | ## (51-78) CHAPTER THREE Mindfulness Without Butt on Cushion 60 | 61 | We take for granted many of the neutral things in life, such as not being in pain, having three meals a day, and being able to walk from point A to point B. In mindfulness, these become causes of joy because we no longer take them for granted. 62 | 63 | "Listening is magic: it turns a person from an object outside, opaque or dimly threatening, into an intimate experience, and therefore into a friend. In this way, listening softens and transforms the listener." 64 | 65 | Do less than you can: This lesson came from Mingyur Rinpoche. The idea is to do less formal practice than you are capable of. For example, if you can sit in mindfulness for five minutes before it feels like a chore, then do not sit for five minutes— just do three or four minutes, perhaps a few times a day. The reason is to keep the practice from becoming a burden. 66 | 67 | The better you are at letting go, the better you are at both meditating and falling asleep. 68 | 69 | Using joy as an object of meditation, especially the type of joy with a gentle quality that doesn't overwhelm the senses. For example, taking a nice walk, holding hands with a loved one, enjoying a good meal, carrying a sleeping baby, or sitting with your child while she is reading a good book are great opportunities to practice mindfulness 70 | 71 | In my opinion, the best translation of sukha is its most technical translation: "non-energetic joy." Sukha is a quality of joy not requiring energy. 72 | 73 | There are two complementary qualities of attention: focused attention and open attention. 74 | 75 | It's like my daughter plateauing at two steps for months and then suddenly, in the space of two days, becoming able to walk. To the casual observer, it may look like she learned to walk in just two days, but in reality, she did it over three months. It is her constant practice over three months that enabled the last two days of sudden progress and mastery. 76 | 77 | 78 | 79 | ## (79-102) CHAPTER FOUR All-Natural, Organic Self-Confidence 80 | 81 | The moment you can see an emotion, you are no longer fully engulfed in it. 82 | 83 | I am able to project that confidence not because I make the effort to look confident, but because I have a sense of humor about my ego, or my own sense of self-importance. 84 | 85 | In my engineer's mind, I think of it as understanding two important modes I operate in: my failure mode and my recovery mode. If I can understand a system so thoroughly I know exactly how it fails, I will also know when it will not fail. I can then have strong confidence in the system, despite knowing it is not perfect, because I know what to adjust for in each situation. 86 | 87 | Journaling: My engineer's way of looking at it is an unfiltered brain dump— dumping your mind-stream onto paper. A more poetic way of looking at it is seeing your thoughts as a gently flowing stream and trying to capture that flow on paper. 88 | 89 | We usually think of our emotions as being us. This is reflected in the language we use to describe them. For example, we say, "I am angry" or "I am happy" or "I am sad," as if anger, happiness, or sadness are us, or become who we are. To the mind, our emotions become our very existence. 90 | 91 | In meditative traditions, we have a beautiful metaphor for this insight. Thoughts and emotions are like clouds— some beautiful, some dark— while our core being is like the sky. Clouds are not the sky; they are phenomena in the sky that come and go. 92 | 93 | 94 | 95 | ## (103-130) CHAPTER FIVE Riding Your Emotions like a Horse 96 | 97 | While we cannot stop an unwholesome thought or emotion from arising, we have the power to let it go, and the highly trained mind can let it go the moment it arises. 98 | 99 | The key is to let go of two things: grasping and aversion. Grasping is when the mind desperately holds on to something and refuses to let it go. Aversion is when the mind desperately keeps something away and refuses to let it come. These two qualities are flip sides of each other. Grasping and aversion together account for a huge percentage of the suffering we experience, perhaps 90 percent, maybe even 100 percent. 100 | 101 | The key insight here is that grasping and aversion are separate from sensation and perception. They arise so closely together that we do not normally notice the difference. 102 | 103 | The second important opportunity is the possibility of experiencing pleasure without the aftertaste of unsatisfactoriness. The biggest problem with pleasant experiences is that they all eventually cease. The experience itself causes no suffering, but our clinging on to them and our desperate hoping that they do not go away cause suffering. 104 | 105 | Four very helpful general principles for dealing with any distressing emotions are: 1. Know when you are not in pain. 2. Do not feel bad about feeling bad. 3. Do not feed the monsters. 4. Start every thought with kindness and humor. 106 | 107 | we cannot stop monsters from arising or force them to leave, but we have the power to stop feeding them. 108 | 109 | So every time I fail, it is a comedy. And since I fail so often, my life is a great comedy. 110 | 111 | Dealing with Triggers: 1. Stop 2. Breathe 3. Notice 4. Reflect 5. Respond 112 | 113 | Ultimately, self-regulation is about making friends with our emotions. 114 | 115 | 116 | 117 | ## (131-158) CHAPTER SIX Making Profits, Rowing Across Oceans, and Changing the World 118 | 119 | He describes three types of happiness: pleasure, passion, and higher purpose. 120 | 121 | Interestingly, we instinctively chase after pleasure believing it to be the source of sustainable happiness. Many of us spend most of our time and energy chasing pleasure, sometimes enjoying flow, and once in a while, we think about higher purpose. Tony's insight suggests we should be doing precisely the reverse. 122 | 123 | The best motivators are what he calls "intrinsic motivators"— motivation we find within ourselves. The three elements of true motivation are: 124 | 125 | When you know yourself at a deep level, you begin to understand your core values, purposes, and priorities. 126 | 127 | Things like values and higher purposes are fairly abstract topics, and the act of verbalizing them forces us to make them clearer and more tangible to ourselves. 128 | 129 | Envisioning is based on a very simple idea: it's much easier to achieve something if you can visualize yourself already achieving it. 130 | 131 | If everything in my life, starting from today, meets or exceeds my most optimistic expectations, what will my life be in five years? 132 | 133 | One is to write your own obituary, as Roz did, and if you like, write two versions like Roz did. Another is to visualize this scene: You are attending a talk as part of a large audience. Everybody in the audience, including you, is deeply touched and inspired by what the speaker is saying. That speaker is your future self twenty years from now. 134 | 135 | We can train resilience on three levels: 1. Inner calm: Once we can consistently access the inner calm in the mind, it becomes the foundation of all optimism and resilience. 2. Emotional resilience: Success and failure are emotional experiences. By working at this level, we can increase our capacity for them. 3. Cognitive resilience: Understanding how we explain our setbacks to ourselves and creating useful mental habits help us develop optimism. 136 | 137 | What distinguishes successful people is their attitude toward failure, and specifically, how they explain their own failures to themselves. 138 | 139 | We naturally pay much more attention to negative than positive occurrences in our lives. 140 | 141 | The first step to learning optimism is becoming aware of our own strong negative experiential bias. 142 | 143 | When experiencing failure, focus on realistic evidence suggesting that this setback may be temporary. 144 | 145 | 146 | ## (159-192) CHAPTER SEVEN Empathy and the Monkey Business of Brain Tangos 147 | 148 | Empathy works by having you physiologically mimic the other person. 149 | 150 | The more kindness you offer to people, the better you can empathize with them. 151 | 152 | Empathy also increases with perceived similarity. 153 | 154 | Hence, to become more empathetic, we need to create a mind that instinctively responds to everyone with kindness and an automatic perception of others being "just like me." In other words, we need to create mental habits. 155 | 156 | "Whatever one frequently thinks and ponders upon, that will become the inclination of his mind." 157 | 158 | For example, if every time you see another person, you wish for that person to be happy, then eventually, it will become your mental habit and whenever you meet another person, your instinctive first thought is to wish for that person to be happy. After a while, you develop an instinct for kindness. You become a kind person. Your kindness shows in your face, posture, and attitude every time you meet somebody. People will become attracted to your personality, not just your good looks. 159 | 160 | In other words, kindness is a sustainable source of happiness— a simple yet profound insight that can change lives. 161 | 162 | Empathy helps us build trust. When we interact with empathy, we increase the likelihood that people feel seen, heard, and understood. When people feel those things, they feel safer and more likely to trust the person who understands them. 163 | 164 | When team members trust the intentions of each other enough that they are willing to expose their own vulnerabilities because they are confident their exposed vulnerabilities will not be used against them. Hence, they are willing to admit issues and deficiencies and ask for help. 165 | 166 | When establishing trust, I find that my cognitive brain is usually easy to deal with— the hard part is placating my emotional brain. To placate the emotional brain, I must recognize that the other person is a human being just like me. 167 | 168 | Specifically, there are four things we can do to strengthen our ability for empathic listening. 1. Mindfulness: With mindfulness, we become more perceptive and receptive. 2. Kindness: When we are kind, we can listen better to feelings. 3. Curiosity: Practice wondering what someone might be feeling when you hear their stories. 4. Practice: Just do a lot of empathic listening. The more you do it, the better you become, especially when you practice it in conjunction with mindfulness, kindness, and curiosity. 169 | 170 | Begin the conversation by thinking to yourself, "I want this person to be happy." 171 | 172 | It turns out that you can undermine people by praising them, even when you are doing it with the best of intentions! 173 | 174 | In contrast, when a person is given process praise, it reinforces a "growth mind-set," or the belief that our qualities can be developed through dedication and effort, and therefore that success comes from dedication and effort. This creates a love of learning and resilience that is essential for great accomplishment. Thus, when giving feedback, it is best to do so in a way that encourages a growth mind-set. Simply put, it's better to praise people for working hard than for being smart. 175 | 176 | It is entirely possible for both sides to be 100 percent correct and 100 percent reasonable and still have conflict. 177 | 178 | Chief among those mental habits is kindness. Having the mental habit of kindness means that every time you interact with a human being, the thoughts in your mind that arise habitually and effortlessly are, "This person is a human being just like me. I want him or her to be happy." 179 | 180 | Another mental habit is being open to understanding how other people can seem reasonable, at least from their own points of view, even when you disagree with them. 181 | 182 | 183 | ## (193-228) CHAPTER EIGHT Being Effective and Loved at the Same Time 184 | 185 | "You can make more friends in two months by becoming really interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you. Which is just another way of saying that the way to make a friend is to be one." - Dale Carnegie 186 | 187 | The most effective naval commanders are also the ones with higher emotional intelligence and who are most liked. 188 | 189 | Compassion is also the cause for the highest level of happiness ever measured, and it's a necessary condition for the most effective form of leadership known. 190 | 191 | There has to be a combination of seclusion from the world (to deepen the calmness) and engagement with the world (to deepen the compassion). 192 | 193 | Compassion is a mental state endowed with a sense of concern for the suffering of others and aspiration to see that suffering relieved. 194 | 195 | [Jinpa] defines compassion as having three components: 1. A cognitive component: "I understand you" 2. An affective component: "I feel for you" 3. A motivational component: "I want to help you" 196 | 197 | I tell all my friends that if they only read one business book in their entire lives, the one to read is Good to Great. 198 | 199 | Collins calls them "Level 5" leaders. These are leaders who, in addition to being highly capable, also possess a paradoxical mix of two important and seemingly conflicting qualities: great ambition and personal humility. 200 | 201 | Five domains of social experience that the brain treats as primary rewards or threats: These five domains form a model which David calls the SCARF model, which stands for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness. 202 | 203 | The good news is there is a good way to increase your own status without harming others, and that is what David calls "playing against yourself." When you improve a skill (such as improving your golf handicap), you activate a status reward relative to your former self. This is perhaps why mastery is such a powerful motivator (see Chapter 6). When you gain increasing mastery over something that matters to you, you activate a status reward, at least when compared against your former self. 204 | 205 | Humans are the only animals known to voluntarily injure their own self-interests to punish the perceived unfairness of others. Other primates are known to punish unfairness, but not at the expense of their own self-interest. 206 | 207 | Empathy is a necessary ingredient for effective communication, but empathy is not always enough. I have seen even empathetic people get themselves into very frustrating conversations. The missing element is insight, specifically insight into the often hidden elements of a conversation, such as the identity issues involved and what impact was caused versus what was intended. 208 | 209 | There are five steps to conducting a difficult conversation. Here is my brief of those steps: 1. Prepare by walking through the "three conversations." 2. Decide whether to raise the issue. 3. Start from the objective "third story." 4. Explore their story and yours. 5. Problem solve. 9 210 | 211 | John, who knows everything that happened but is totally uninvolved, is the third story. The third story is the best one with which to start a difficult conversation. It is the most objective and the one with which you are most likely to form a common ground with the other party. Use this third story to invite the other party to join you as a partner in sorting out the situation together. 212 | 213 | Impact is not the intention. For example, if we feel hurt by something somebody said, we may automatically assume that the person intended to hurt us. 214 | 215 | The second key insight is that beyond the content and emotions in every difficult conversation, there are, more importantly, issues of identity. Very often the identity issues are the most hidden and left unsaid, but they are usually the most dominant. 216 | 217 | When the brain receives insufficient data about others' feelings, it just makes stuff up. 218 | 219 | 220 | 221 | ## (229-238) CHAPTER NINE Three Easy Steps to World Peace 222 | 223 | Think of the mind as a snow globe that is shaken constantly. When you stop shaking the snow globe, the white "snow" particles within it eventually settle, and the fluid in the snow globe becomes calm and clear at the same time. Similarly, the mind is normally in a constant state of agitation. With deep mental relaxation and alertness, the mind settles into calmness and clarity. In this mind, the third quality, inner happiness, naturally emerges. 224 | 225 | Hence, in a serious way that is almost comical, the key active ingredient in the formula for world peace may be something as simple as meditation. It's such a simple solution to such an intractable problem, it is almost absurd. Except it may actually work. 226 | 227 | 228 | 229 | ## EPILOGUE Save the World in Your Free Time 230 | 231 | All these bodhisattvas think of their tireless work for humanity as little more than having fun by doing whatever comes most naturally to them. 232 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /high-output-management.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | ### Introduction 2 | 3 | Ultimately, the losses forced us to do something extraordinarily difficult: to back out of the business that the company was founded upon, and to focus on another business that we thought we were best at— the microprocessor business. 4 | 5 | 6 | We did all this because under this strong attack, we learned that we must lead with our strength. Being second best in a tough environment is just not good enough. 7 | 8 | The consequence of all this is very simple. If the world operates as one big market, every employee will compete with every person anywhere in the world who is capable of doing the same job. There are a lot of them, and many of them are very hungry. 9 | 10 | But between the two is a large group of people— the middle managers, who supervise the shop-floor foremen, or who work as engineers, accountants, and sales representatives. Middle managers are the muscle and bone of every sizable organization, no matter how loose or “flattened” the hierarchy, but they are largely ignored despite their immense importance to our society and economy. 11 | 12 | Teachers, market researchers, computer mavens, and traffic engineers shape the work of others through their know-how just as much as or more than the traditional manager using supervisory authority. 13 | 14 | And when the unexpected happens, you should double your efforts to make order from the disorder it creates in your life. 15 | 16 | “Let chaos reign, then rein in chaos.” 17 | 18 | As a micro CEO, you can improve your own and your group’s performance and productivity, whether or not the rest of the company follows suit. 19 | 20 | The output of a manager is the output of the organizational units under his or her supervision or influence. 21 | 22 | High managerial productivity, I argue, depends largely on choosing to perform tasks that possess high leverage. 23 | 24 | A team will perform well only if peak performance is elicited from the individuals in it. 25 | 26 | You need to plan the way a fire department plans. It cannot anticipate where the next fire will be, so it has to shape an energetic and efficient team that is capable of responding to the unanticipated as well as to any ordinary event. 27 | 28 | Are one-on-one meetings still needed? Absolutely. Can you have them as often with ten direct reports as with five? No. Do you need to? No again, because for the most part, these employees are more aware of what’s going on in their business through their computer network 29 | 30 | As a general rule, you have to accept that no matter where you work, you are not an employee— you are in a business with one employee: yourself. 31 | 32 | The key to survival is to learn to add more value— and that ultimately is what this book is about. 33 | 34 | From my own experience at Intel, I strongly believe that applying the methods of production, exercising managerial leverage, and eliciting an athlete’s desire for peak performance can help nearly everyone— lawyers, teachers, engineers, supervisors, even book editors; in short, middle managers of all kinds— to work more productively. 35 | 36 | 37 | ### Foreword 38 | 39 | “When a person is not doing his job, there can only be two reasons for it. The person either can’t do it or won’t do it; he is either not capable or not motivated.” 40 | 41 | “I have seen far too many people who upon recognizing today’s gap try very hard to determine what decision has to be made to close it. But today’s gap represents a failure of planning sometime in the past.” 42 | 43 | If you only understand one thing about building products, you must understand that energy put in early in the process pays off tenfold and energy put in at the end of the program pays off negative tenfold. 44 | 45 | “CEOs always act on leading indicators of good news, but only act on lagging indicators of bad news.” 46 | 47 | 48 | ### Part 1: The Breakfast Factory 49 | 50 | build and deliver products in response to the demands of the customer at a scheduled delivery time, at an acceptable quality level, and at the lowest possible cost. 51 | 52 | The key idea is that we construct our production flow by starting with the longest (or most difficult, or most sensitive, or most expensive) step and work our way back. 53 | 54 | process manufacturing, an activity that physically or chemically changes material just as boiling changes an egg; assembly, in which components are put together to constitute a new entity just as the egg, the toast, and the coffee together make a breakfast; and test, which subjects the components or the total to an examination of its characteristics. 55 | 56 | Breakfast preparation, college recruiting, sales training, and compiler design are very much unlike one another, but all of them possess a basically similar flow of activity to produce a specific output. 57 | 58 | The point is that whenever possible, you should choose in-process tests over those that destroy product. 59 | 60 | All production flows have a basic characteristic: the material becomes more valuable as it moves through the process. A boiled egg is more valuable than a raw one, a fully assembled breakfast is more valuable than its constituent parts, and finally, the breakfast placed in front of the customer is more valuable still. 61 | 62 | A common rule we should always try to heed is to detect and fix any problem in a production process at the lowest-value stage possible. 63 | 64 | If we compile the cost of the effort that goes into securing a conviction and assign it only to those criminals who actually end up in jail, we find that the cost of a single conviction works out to be well over a million dollars— an absolutely staggering sum. The number is so high, of course, because only a very small percentage of the flow of accused persons makes it all the way 65 | 66 | The number of possible indicators you can choose is virtually limitless, but for any set of them to be useful, you have to focus each indicator on a specific operational goal. 67 | 68 | First, you’ll want to know your sales forecast for the day. How many breakfasts should you plan to deliver? 69 | 70 | Your next key indicator is raw material inventory. 71 | 72 | Finally, you want to have some kind of quality indicator. It is not enough to monitor the number of breakfasts each waiter delivers, because the waiters could have been rude to the customers even as they served a record number of breakfasts. 73 | 74 | So because indicators direct one’s activities, you should guard against overreacting. This you can do by pairing indicators, so that together both effect and counter-effect are measured. Thus, in the inventory example, you need to monitor both inventory levels and the incidence of shortages. 75 | 76 | Because those listed here are all quantity or output indicators, their paired counterparts should stress the quality of work. 77 | 78 | Leading indicators give you one way to look inside the black box by showing you in advance what the future might look like. And because they give you time to take corrective action, they make it possible for you to avoid problems. Of course, for leading indicators to do you any good, you must believe in their validity. 79 | 80 | But even more important, the improvement or deterioration of the forecasted outlook from one month to the next provides the most valuable indicator of business trends that I have ever seen. 81 | 82 | I have found the “stagger chart” the best means of getting a feel for future business trends. 83 | 84 | So even though you would much rather build to order, you will have to use another way to control the output of your factory. In short, you will have to build to forecast, which is a contemplation of future orders. 85 | 86 | What works better is to ask both the manufacturing and the sales departments to prepare a forecast, so that people are responsible for performing against their own predictions. 87 | 88 | The order for the product and the product itself should arrive at the shipping dock at the same time. 89 | 90 | But if we have carefully chosen indicators that characterize an administrative unit and watch them closely, we are ready to apply the methods of factory control to administrative work. 91 | 92 | Without rigor, the staffing of administrative units would always be left at its highest level and, given Parkinson’s famous law, people would find ways to let whatever they’re doing fill the time available for its completion. 93 | 94 | The key principle is to reject the defective “material” at its lowest-value stage. 95 | 96 | While in most instances the decision to accept or reject defective material at a given inspection point is an economic one, one should never let substandard material proceed when its defects could cause a complete failure— a reliability problem— for our customer. Simply put, because we can never assess the consequences of an unreliable product, we can’t make compromises when it comes to reliability. 97 | 98 | As a rule of thumb, we should lean toward monitoring when experience shows we are not likely to encounter big problems. 99 | 100 | Because quality levels vary over time, it is only common sense to vary how often we inspect. 101 | 102 | If the manager examined everything his various subordinates did, he would be meddling, which for the most part would be a waste of his time. Even worse, his subordinates would become accustomed to not being responsible for their own work, knowing full well that their supervisor will check everything out closely. 103 | 104 | The productivity of any function occurring within it is the output divided by the labor required to generate the output. 105 | 106 | Here I’d like to introduce the concept of leverage, which is the output generated by a specific type of work activity. An activity with high leverage will generate a high level of output; an activity with low leverage, a low level of output. For example, a waiter able to boil two eggs and operate two toasters can deliver two breakfasts for almost the same amount of work as one. 107 | 108 | Automation is certainly one way to improve the leverage of all types of work. Having machines to help them, human beings can create more output. 109 | 110 | Typically, you will find that many steps exist in your work flow for no good reason. Often they are there by tradition or because formal procedure ordains it, and nothing practical requires their inclusion. 111 | 112 | As we will see, in the work of the soft professions, it becomes very difficult to distinguish between output and activity. And as noted, stressing output is the key to improving productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite. 113 | 114 | 115 | ### Part 2: Management is a Team Game 116 | 117 | individual contributors who gather and disseminate know-how and information should also be seen as middle managers, because they exert great power within the organization. 118 | 119 | My day always ends when I’m tired and ready to go home, not when I’m done. I am never done. Like a housewife’s, a manager’s work is never done. 120 | 121 | But reports also have another totally different function. As they are formulated and written, the author is forced to be more precise than he might be verbally. Hence their value stems from the discipline and the thinking the writer is forced to impose upon himself as he identifies and deals with trouble spots in his presentation. Reports are more a medium of self-discipline than a way to communicate information. Writing the report is important; reading it often is not. 122 | 123 | This is why information-gathering is so important in a manager’s life. Other activities— conveying information, making decisions, and being a role model for your subordinates— are all governed by the base of information that you, the manager, have about the tasks, the issues, the needs, and the problems facing your organization. 124 | 125 | Let’s call it “nudging” because through it you nudge an individual or a meeting in the direction you would like. This is an immensely important managerial activity in which we engage all the time, and it should be carefully distinguished from decision-making that results in firm, clear directives. In reality, for every unambiguous decision we make, we probably nudge things a dozen times. 126 | 127 | In principle more money, more manpower, or more capital can always be made available, but our own time is the one absolutely finite resource we each have. 128 | 129 | Managerial Output = Output of organization = L1 × A1 + L2 × A2 +… 130 | 131 | Leverage can also be negative. Some managerial activities can reduce the output of an organization. I mean something very simple. Suppose I am a key participant at a meeting and I arrive unprepared. Not only do I waste the time of the people attending the meeting because of my lack of preparation— a direct cost of my carelessness— but I deprive the other participants of the opportunity to use that time to do something else. 132 | 133 | Another example is waffling, when a manager puts off a decision that will affect the work of other people. In effect, the lack of a decision is the same as a negative decision; no green light is a red light, and work can stop for a whole organization. 134 | 135 | if a senior manager sees an indicator showing an undesirable trend and dictates to the person responsible a detailed set of actions to be taken, that is managerial meddling. 136 | 137 | The negative leverage produced comes from the fact that after being exposed to many such instances, the subordinate will begin to take a much more restricted view of what is expected of him, showing less initiative in solving his own problems and referring them instead to his supervisor. 138 | 139 | Unless both parties share the relevant common base, the delegatee can become an effective proxy only with specific instructions. As in meddling, where specific activities are prescribed in detail, this produces low managerial leverage. 140 | 141 | avoid the charade of insincere delegation, 142 | 143 | delegation without follow-through is abdication. 144 | 145 | Because it is easier to monitor something with which you are familiar, if you have a choice you should delegate those activities you know best. 146 | 147 | How often you monitor should not be based on what you believe your subordinate can do in general, but on his experience with a specific task and his prior performance with it— his task-relevant maturity, 148 | 149 | In short, if we determine what is immovable and manipulate the more yielding activities around it, we can work more efficiently. 150 | 151 | maximize the use of the mental set-up time needed for the task. 152 | 153 | To gain better control of his time, the manager should use his calendar as a “production” planning tool, taking a firm initiative to schedule work that is not time-critical between those “limiting steps” in the day. 154 | 155 | To use your calendar as a production-planning tool, you must accept responsibility for two things: 1. You should move toward the active use of your calendar, taking the initiative to fill the holes between the time-critical events with non-time-critical though necessary activities. 2. You should say “no” at the outset to work beyond your capacity to handle. 156 | 157 | There is an optimum degree of loading, with enough slack built in so that one unanticipated phone call will not ruin your schedule for the rest of the day. You need some slack. 158 | 159 | Another production principle is very nearly the opposite. A manager should carry a raw material inventory in terms of projects. 160 | 161 | As a rule of thumb, a manager whose work is largely supervisory should have six to eight subordinates; 162 | 163 | As noted, we should try to make our managerial work take on the characteristics of a factory, not a job shop. 164 | 165 | The most common problem cited was uncontrolled interruptions, which in remarkably uniform fashion affected both supervisory and know-how managers. Everyone felt that the interruptions got in the way of his “own” work. 166 | 167 | By analogy, if you can pin down what kind of interruptions you’re getting, you can prepare standard responses for those that pop up most often. 168 | 169 | But you can channel the time needed to deal with them into organized, scheduled form by providing an alternative to interruption— a scheduled meeting or an office hour. 170 | 171 | Thus I will assert again that a meeting is nothing less than the medium through which managerial work is performed. 172 | 173 | As we will see later, the most effective management style in a specific instance varies from very close to very loose supervision as a subordinate’s task maturity increases. 174 | 175 | I feel that a one-on-one should last an hour at a minimum. Anything less, in my experience, tends to make the subordinate confine himself to simple things that can be handled quickly. 176 | 177 | By applying Grove’s Principle of Didactic Management, “Ask one more question!” When the supervisor thinks the subordinate has said all he wants to about a subject, he should ask another question. 178 | 179 | I take notes in just about all circumstances, and most often end up never looking at them again. I do it to keep my mind from drifting 180 | 181 | One-on-ones should be scheduled on a rolling basis— setting up the next one as the meeting taking place ends. 182 | 183 | the subordinate teaches the supervisor, and what is learned is absolutely essential if the supervisor is to make good decisions. 184 | 185 | Staff meetings also create opportunities for the supervisor to learn from the exchange and confrontation that often develops. 186 | 187 | The figure opposite shows that the supervisor’s most important roles are being a meeting’s moderator and facilitator, and controller of its pace and thrust. 188 | 189 | Lack of interest undermines the confidence of the presenter. 190 | 191 | So before calling a meeting, ask yourself: What am I trying to accomplish? Then ask, is a meeting necessary? Or desirable? Or justifiable? Don’t call a meeting if all the answers aren’t yes. 192 | 193 | So a meeting involving ten managers for two hours costs the company $ 2,000. Most expenditures of $ 2,000 have to be approved in advance by senior people— like buying a copying machine or making a transatlantic trip— yet a manager can call a meeting and commit $ 2,000 worth of managerial resources at a whim. 194 | 195 | Once the meeting is over, the chairman must nail down exactly what happened by sending out minutes that summarize the discussion that occurred, the decision made, and the actions to be taken. 196 | 197 | if all goes well, routine meetings will take care of maybe 80 percent of the problems and issues; the remaining 20 percent will still have to be dealt with in mission-oriented meetings. 198 | 199 | I would put it another way: the real sign of malorganization is when people spend more than 25 percent of their time in ad hoc mission-oriented meetings. 200 | 201 | Here a rapid divergence develops between power based on position and power based on knowledge, which occurs because the base of knowledge that constitutes the foundation of the business changes rapidly. 202 | 203 | Put another way, even if today’s veteran manager was once an outstanding engineer, he is not now the technical expert he was when he joined the company. At Intel, anyway, we managers get a little more obsolete every day. 204 | 205 | the faster the change in the know-how on which the business depends or the faster the change in customer preferences, the greater the divergence between knowledge and position power is likely to be. 206 | 207 | Usually when a meeting gets heated, participants hang back, trying to sense the direction of things, saying nothing until they see what view is likely to prevail. They then throw their support behind that view to avoid being associated with a losing position. 208 | 209 | “What’s going on here? You people are talking in circles and getting nowhere.” After the chairman intervened, the problem was resolved in very short order. We named this the peer-plus-one approach, 210 | 211 | In other words, it is legitimate— in fact, sometimes unavoidable— for the senior person to wield position-power authority if the clear decision stage is reached and no consensus has developed. It is not legitimate— in fact, it is destructive— for him to wield that authority any earlier. 212 | 213 | Because the process is indeed onerous, people sometimes try to run away from it. 214 | 215 | Step 1 is to establish projected need or demand: What will the environment demand from you, your business, or your organization? Step 2 is to establish your present status: What are you producing now? What will you be producing as your projects in the pipeline are completed? Put another way, where will your business be if you do nothing different from what you are now doing? Step 3 is to compare and reconcile steps 1 and 2. Namely, what more (or less) do you need to do to produce what your environment will demand? 216 | 217 | You need to focus on the difference between what your environment demands from you now and what you expect it to demand from you a year from now. 218 | 219 | If marketing knew they could sell 100 widgets per month but thought that manufacturing could only deliver ten, and so submitted a demand forecast of ten units, manufacturing would never tool up to satisfy the real demand. 220 | 221 | What do you need to do to close the gap? The second is, What can you do to close the gap? Consider each question separately, and then decide what you actually will do, evaluating what effect your actions will have on narrowing the gap, and when. The set of actions you decide upon is your strategy. 222 | 223 | I have seen far too many people who upon recognizing today’s gap try very hard to determine what decision has to be made to close it. But today’s gap represents a failure of planning sometime in the past. 224 | 225 | I, for one, hardly ever look at the bound volume finally called the Annual Plan. In other words, the output of the planning process is the decisions made and the actions taken as a result of the process. 226 | 227 | We should also be careful not to plan too frequently, allowing ourselves time to judge the impact of the decisions we made 228 | 229 | Because the idea that planners can be people apart from those implementing the plan simply does not work. 230 | 231 | 1. Where do I want to go? (The answer provides the objective.) 2. How will I pace myself to see if I am getting there? (The answer gives us milestones, or key results.) 232 | 233 | For example, if we plan on a yearly basis, the corresponding MBO system’s time frame should be at least as often as quarterly or perhaps even monthly. 234 | 235 | We must realize— and act on the realization— that if we try to focus on everything, we focus on nothing. A few extremely well-chosen objectives impart a clear message about what we say “yes” to and what we say “no” to— which is what we must have if an MBO system is to work. 236 | 237 | If the supervisor mechanically relies on the MBO system to evaluate his subordinate’s performance, or if the subordinate uses it rigidly and forgoes taking advantage of an emerging opportunity because it was not a specified objective or key result, then both are behaving in a petty and unprofessional fashion. 238 | 239 | 240 | ### Part 3: Team of Teams 241 | 242 | Things have become very complicated. Sometimes as I sit behind my big desk at corporate headquarters, I wish I could go back to the early days when I was getting the eggs and toast and pouring the coffee myself. Or if not that, at least back to the days when I was running a single Breakfast Factory, and I knew everybody by name 243 | 244 | “Good management rests on a reconciliation of centralization and decentralization.” Or, we might say, on a balancing act to get the best combination of responsiveness and leverage. 245 | 246 | Intel is a hybrid organization: balancing to get the best combination of responsiveness and leverage. 247 | 248 | What are some of the advantages of organizing much of a company in a mission-oriented form? There is only one. It is that the individual units can stay in touch with the needs of their business or product areas and initiate changes rapidly when those needs change. That is it. 249 | 250 | All other considerations favor the functional-type of organization. 251 | 252 | Here I would like to propose Grove’s Law: All large organizations with a common business purpose end up in a hybrid organizational form. 253 | 254 | If we at Intel tried to resolve all conflicts and allocate all resources at the top, we would begin to resemble the group that ran the Hungarian economy. Instead, the answer lies with middle managers. 255 | 256 | A strictly functional organization, which is clear conceptually, tends to remove engineering and manufacturing (or the equivalent groups in your firm) from the marketplace, leaving them with no idea of what the customers want. 257 | 258 | But we should not expect to escape from complexity by playing with reporting arrangements. Like it or not, the hybrid organization is a fundamental phenomenon of organizational life. 259 | 260 | In her main job, her knowledge affects the work that takes place in one plant; in her second, through what she does in the process coordinating group, she can influence the work of all plants. 261 | 262 | Similarly, our behavior in a work environment can be controlled by three invisible and pervasive means. These are: • free-market forces • contractual obligations • cultural values 263 | 264 | But for lawbreakers we need policemen, and with them, as with supervisors, we introduce overhead. 265 | 266 | You don’t need management to supervise the workings of free-market forces; no one supervises sales made at a flea market. In a contractual obligation, management has a role in setting and modifying the rules, monitoring adherence to them, and evaluating and improving performance. 267 | 268 | Let’s apply our model to the work of a new employee. What is his motivation? It is very much based on self-interest. So you should give him a clearly structured job with a low CUA factor. If he does well, he will begin to feel more at home, worry less about himself, and start to care more about his team. 269 | 270 | 271 | #### Part 4: The Players 272 | 273 | In other words, everything we’ve considered so far is useless unless the members of our team will continually try to offer the best they can do. The means a manager has at his disposal to elicit peak individual performance are what the rest of this book is about. 274 | 275 | When a person is not doing his job, there can only be two reasons for it. The person either can’t do it or won’t do it; he is either not capable or not motivated. 276 | 277 | motivation has to come from within somebody. Accordingly, all a manager can do is create an environment in which motivated people can flourish. 278 | 279 | For Maslow, motivation is closely tied to the idea of needs, which cause people to have drives, which in turn result in motivation. 280 | 281 | when a lower need is satisfied, one higher is likely to take over. 282 | 283 | But people don’t want to belong to just any group; they need to belong to one whose members possess something in common with themselves. 284 | 285 | us to show up for work, but other needs— esteem and self-actualization— make us perform once we are there. 286 | 287 | A friend of mine was thrust into a premature “mid-life crisis” when, in recognition of the excellent work he had been doing, he was named a vice president of the corporation. Such a position had been a life-long goal. When he had suddenly attained it, he found himself looking for some other way to motivate himself. 288 | 289 | Personal Best, captures what self-actualization means: the need to achieve one’s utter personal best in a chosen field of endeavor. Once someone’s source of motivation is self-actualization, his drive to perform has no limit. 290 | 291 | Output will tend to be greater when everybody strives for a level of achievement beyond his immediate grasp, even though trying means failure half the time. 292 | 293 | My first job was with a research and development laboratory, where a lot of people were very highly motivated but tended to be knowledge-centered. They were driven to know more, but not necessarily to know more in order to produce concrete results. Consequently, relatively little was actually achieved. 294 | 295 | So it appears that at the upper level of the need hierarchy, when one is self-actualized, money in itself is no longer a source of motivation but rather a measure of achievement. Money in the physiological- and security-driven modes only motivates until the need is satisfied, but money as a measure of achievement will motivate without limit. 296 | 297 | The most important form of such task-relevant feedback is the performance review every subordinate should receive from his supervisor. More about this later. 298 | 299 | You cannot stay in the self-actualized mode if you’re always worried about failure. 300 | 301 | Is there a systematic way to lead people to self-actualization? For an answer, let’s ask another question. Why does a person who is not terribly interested in his work at the office stretch himself to the limit running a marathon? What makes him run? He is trying to beat other people or the stopwatch. 302 | 303 | society respects someone’s throwing himself into sports, but anybody who works very long hours is regarded as sick, a workaholic. 304 | 305 | when the competition is removed, motivation associated with it vanishes. 306 | 307 | The inevitable conclusion is that high output is associated with particular combinations of certain managers and certain groups of workers. This also suggests that a given managerial approach is not equally effective under all conditions. 308 | 309 | That variable is the task-relevant maturity (TRM) of the subordinates, which is a combination of the degree of their achievement orientation and readiness to take responsibility, as well as their education, training, and experience. 310 | 311 | Specifically, when the TRM is low, the most effective approach is one that offers very precise and detailed instructions, wherein the supervisor tells the subordinate what needs to be done, when, and how: in other words, a highly structured approach. As the TRM of the subordinate grows, the most effective style moves from the structured to one more given to communication, emotional support, and encouragement, in which the manager pays more attention to the subordinate as an individual than to the task at hand. 312 | 313 | The fundamental variable that determines the effective management style is the task-relevant maturity of the subordinate. 314 | 315 | The subordinate did poor work. My associate’s reaction: “He has to make his own mistakes. That’s how he learns!” The problem with this is that the subordinate’s tuition is paid by his customers. And that is absolutely wrong. The responsibility for teaching the subordinate must be assumed by his supervisor, and not paid for by the customers of his organization, internal or external. 316 | 317 | Even if we achieve it, if things suddenly change we have to revert quickly to the what-when-how mode. That mode is one that we don’t think an enlightened manager should use. As a result, we often don’t take it up until it is too late and events overwhelm us. 318 | 319 | If the subordinate is a personal friend, the supervisor can move into a communicating management style quite easily, but the what-when-how mode becomes harder to revert to when necessary. It’s unpleasant to give orders to a friend. 320 | 321 | it is to improve the subordinate’s performance. The review is usually dedicated to two things: first, the skill level of the subordinate, to determine what skills are missing and to find ways to remedy that lack; 322 | 323 | Even the word “argument” is frowned upon, something I learned many years ago when I first came to this country from Hungary. 324 | 325 | Don’t think for a moment that performance reviews should be confined to large organizations. They should be part of managerial practice in organizations of any size and kind, from the insurance agent with two office assistants to administrators in education, government, and nonprofit organizations. 326 | 327 | To make an assessment less difficult, a supervisor should clarify in his own mind in advance what it is that he expects from a subordinate and then attempt to judge whether he performed to expectations. 328 | 329 | “present value” used in finance: how much will the future-oriented activity pay back over time? And how much is that worth today? 330 | 331 | The time offset between the manager’s work and the output of his organization was just about a year. Greatly embarrassed, I regretfully concluded that the superior rating I had given him was totally wrong. 332 | 333 | Finally, as you review a manager, should you be judging his performance or the performance of the group under his supervision? You should be doing both. 334 | 335 | One big pitfall to be avoided is the “potential trap.” At all times you should force yourself to assess performance, not potential. 336 | 337 | the performance rating of a manager cannot be higher than the one we would accord to his organization! 338 | 339 | The old saying has it that when we promote our best salesman and make him a manager, we ruin a good salesman and get a bad manager. But if we think about it, we see we have no choice but to promote the good salesman. Should our worst salesman get the job? When we promote our best, we are saying to our subordinates that performance is what counts. 340 | 341 | There are three L’s to keep in mind when delivering a review: Level, listen, and leave yourself out. 342 | 343 | To make sure you’re being heard, you should watch the person you are talking to. 344 | 345 | All of us have had professors who lectured by looking at the blackboard, mumbling to it, and carefully avoiding direct eye contact with the class. The reason: knowing that their presentation was murky and incomprehensible, these teachers looked away from their audience to avoid confirming visually what they already knew. 346 | 347 | The key is to recognize that your subordinate, like most people, has only a finite capacity to deal with facts, issues, and suggestions. You may possess seven truths about his performance, but if his capacity is only four, at best you’ll waste your breath on the other three. 348 | 349 | Preferably, a review should not contain any surprises, but if you uncover one, swallow hard and bring it up. 350 | 351 | Progress of some sort is made when the subordinate actively denies the existence of a problem rather than ignoring it passively, as before. 352 | 353 | Once responsibility has been assumed, however, finding the solution is relatively easy. This is because the move from blaming others to assuming responsibility constitutes an emotional step, while the move from assuming responsibility to finding the solution is an intellectual one, and the latter is easier. 354 | 355 | The stages of problem-solving: The transition from blaming others to assuming responsibility is an emotional step. 356 | 357 | Don’t confuse emotional comfort with operational need. To make things work, people do not need to side with you; you only need them to commit themselves to pursue a course of action that has been decided upon. 358 | 359 | We all have a hard time saying things that are critical, whether we’re talking to a superior employee or a marginal one. We must keep in mind, however, that no matter how stellar a person’s performance level is, there is always room for improvement. Don’t hesitate to use the 20/ 20 hindsight provided by the review to show anyone, even an ace, how he might have done better. 360 | 361 | And under no circumstances should you pretend that you and your subordinates are equal during performance reviews. 362 | 363 | Preparing and delivering a performance assessment is one of the hardest tasks you’ll have to perform as a manager. The best way to learn how to do one is to think critically about the reviews you yourself have received. 364 | 365 | about impossible. The fact is, we managers have no choice but to perform the interview, no matter how hard it is. But we must realize that the risks of failure are high. 366 | 367 | The other tool we have for assessing potential performance is to research past performance by checking references. But you’ll often be talking to a total stranger, so even if he comments freely about the candidate, what he says won’t have much meaning to you without some knowledge of how his company does business and what values it works by. 368 | 369 | 370 | What are the subjects that you should bring up during an interview? A group of managers provided me with what they thought were the best questions. They were: 371 | 372 | Another approach follows that you may want to use while interviewing. The candidate can tell you a great deal about his capabilities, skills, and values by asking you questions. 373 | 374 | 375 | To this day I haven’t a clue about why I didn’t spot the candidate’s considerable flaws. So in the end careful interviewing doesn’t guarantee you anything, it merely increases your odds of getting lucky. 376 | 377 | Make him talk, because after the prepared points are delivered, the real issues may come out. Don’t argue, don’t lecture, and don’t panic. Remember, this is only the opening skirmish, not the war. And you cannot win the war here— but you can lose it! 378 | 379 | Money has significance at all levels of Maslow’s motivation hierarchy. As noted earlier, a person needs money to buy food, housing, and insurance policies, which are part of his physiological and safety/ security needs. As one moves up the need hierarchy, money begins to mean something else— a measure of one’s worth in a competitive environment. 380 | 381 | 382 | But compromises can be set up. We can base a portion of a middle manager’s compensation on his performance. Let’s call this a performance bonus. 383 | 384 | If we want to use such schemes, we have to come to terms with the principle— troubling to many managers— that any merit-based system requires a competitive, comparative evaluation of individuals. Merit-based compensation simply cannot work unless we understand that if someone is going to be first, somebody else has to be last. 385 | 386 | Promotions must be based on performance, because that is the only way to keep the idea of performance highlighted, maintained, and perpetuated. 387 | 388 | 389 | Thus, you’ll find two basic types of “meets” performers. One has no motivation to do more or faces no challenge to do more. This is the noncompetitor, who has become settled and satisfied in his job. The other type of “meets” performer is the competitor. Each time he reaches a level of “exceeds requirements,” he becomes a candidate for promotion. Upon being promoted, he very likely becomes a “meets” performer again. This is the person Dr. Peter wrote about. But we really have no choice but to promote until a level of “incompetence” is reached. 390 | 391 | It is generally accepted that motivating employees is a key task of all managers, one that can’t be delegated to someone else. Why shouldn’t the same be true for the other principal means at a manager’s disposal for increasing output? 392 | 393 | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- /the-master-algorithm.md: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 | ### Prologue 2 | 3 | But learning algorithms are artifacts that design other artifacts. 4 | 5 | Amazon’s algorithm, more than any one person, determines what books are read in the world today. 6 | 7 | Symbolists view learning as the inverse of deduction and take ideas from philosophy, psychology, and logic. Connectionists reverse engineer the brain and are inspired by neuroscience and physics. Evolutionaries simulate evolution on the computer and draw on genetics and evolutionary biology. Bayesians believe learning is a form of probabilistic inference and have their roots in statistics. Analogizers learn by extrapolating from similarity judgments and are influenced by psychology and mathematical optimization. 8 | 9 | On the contrary, what it requires is stepping back from the mathematical arcana to see the overarching pattern of learning phenomena; and for this the layman, approaching the forest from a distance, is in some ways better placed than the specialist, already deeply immersed in the study of particular trees. 10 | 11 | ### Chapter 1 - The Machine Learning Revolution 12 | 13 | (As Richard Feynman said, “What I cannot create, I do not understand.”) 14 | 15 | Scientists make theories, and engineers make devices. Computer scientists make algorithms, which are both theories and devices. 16 | 17 | Learning algorithms are the seeds, data is the soil, and the learned programs are the grown plants. 18 | 19 | The Industrial Revolution automated manual work and the Information Revolution did the same for mental work, but machine learning automates automation itself. Without it, programmers become the bottleneck holding up progress. 20 | 21 | In retrospect, we can see that the progression from computers to the Internet to machine learning was inevitable: computers enable the Internet, which creates a flood of data and the problem of limitless choice; and machine learning uses the flood of data to help solve the limitless choice problem. 22 | 23 | 24 | ### Chapter 2 - The Master Algorithm 25 | 26 | All knowledge—past, present, and future—can be derived from data by a single, universal learning algorithm. 27 | 28 | Thus it seems that evolution kept the cerebellum around not because it does something the cortex can’t, but just because it’s more efficient. 29 | 30 | If something exists but the brain can’t learn it, we don’t know it exists. We may just not see it or think it’s random. 31 | 32 | But if everything we experience is the product of a few simple laws, then it makes sense that a single algorithm can induce all that can be induced. 33 | 34 | Biology, in turn, is the result of optimization by evolution within the constraints of physics and chemistry, 35 | 36 | Humans are good at solving NP problems approximately, and conversely, problems that we find interesting (like Tetris) often have an “NP-ness” about them. 37 | 38 | In 1962, when Kennedy gave his famous moon-shot speech, going to the moon was an engineering problem. In 1662, it wasn’t, and that’s closer to where AI is today. 39 | 40 | To use a technology, we don’t need to master its inner workings, but we do need to have a good conceptual model of it. 41 | 42 | The analogizers’ master algorithm is the support vector machine, which figures out which experiences to remember and how to combine them to make new predictions. 43 | 44 | 45 | ### Chapter 3 - Hume's Problem of Induction 46 | 47 | The rationalist likes to plan everything in advance before making the first move. The empiricist prefers to try things and see how they turn out. 48 | 49 | You could be super-Casanova and have dated millions of women thousands of times each, but your master database still wouldn’t answer the question of what this woman is going to say this time. 50 | 51 | How about we just assume that the future will be like the past? This is certainly a risky assumption. (It didn’t work for the inductivist turkey.) On the other hand, without it all knowledge is impossible, and so is life. 52 | 53 | result, known as the “no free lunch” theorem, sets a limit on how good a learner can be. The limit is pretty low: no learner can be better than random guessing! 54 | 55 | and you have the “no free lunch” theorem. Pick your favorite learner. (We’ll see many in this book.) For every world where it does better than random guessing, I, the devil’s advocate, will deviously construct one where it does worse by the same amount. All I have to do is flip the labels of all unseen instances. 56 | 57 | Tom Mitchell, a leading symbolist, calls it “the futility of bias-free learning.” In ordinary life, bias is a pejorative word: preconceived notions are bad. But in machine learning, preconceived notions are indispensable; you can’t learn without them. In fact, preconceived notions are also indispensable to human cognition, but they’re hardwired into the brain, and we take them for granted. It’s biases over and beyond those that are questionable. 58 | 59 | Newton’s Principle: Whatever is true of everything we’ve seen is true of everything in the universe. 60 | 61 | “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The same is true of individuals. To be happy, you need health, love, friends, money, a job you like, and so on. Take any of these away, and misery ensues. 62 | 63 | Learning is forgetting the details as much as it is remembering the important parts. 64 | 65 | Consider the little white girl who, upon seeing a Latina baby at the mall, blurted out “Look, Mom, a baby maid!” (True event.) 66 | 67 | Bottom line: learning is a race between the amount of data you have and the number of hypotheses you consider. More data exponentially reduces the number of hypotheses that survive, but if you start with a lot of them, you may still have some bad ones left at the end. 68 | 69 | Accuracy on held-out data is the gold standard in machine learning. 70 | 71 | For example, we can subtract a penalty proportional to the length of the rule from its accuracy and use that as an evaluation measure. 72 | 73 | The preference for simpler hypotheses is popularly known as Occam’s razor, but in a machine-learning context this is somewhat misleading. “Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity,” as the razor is often paraphrased, just means choosing the simplest theory that fits the data. 74 | 75 | You can estimate the bias and variance of a learner by comparing its predictions after learning on random variations of the training set. If it keeps making the same mistakes, the problem is bias, and you need a more flexible learner (or just a different one). If there’s no pattern to the mistakes, the problem is variance, and you want to either try a less flexible learner or get more data. 76 | 77 | For each pair of facts, we construct the rule that allows us to infer the second fact from the first one and generalize it by Newton’s principle. When the same general rule is induced over and over again, we can have some confidence that it’s true. 78 | 79 | This contrasts with traditional chemotherapy, which affects all cells indiscriminately. 80 | 81 | Learning which drugs work against which mutations requires a database of patients, their cancers’ genomes, the drugs tried, and the outcomes. 82 | 83 | For these, the symbolist algorithm of choice is decision tree induction. 84 | 85 | Decision trees instead ensure a priori that each instance will be matched by exactly one rule. 86 | 87 | A single concept implicitly defines two classes: the concept itself and its negation. (For example, spam and nonspam.) Classifiers are the most widespread form of machine learning. 88 | 89 | So to learn a good decision tree, we pick at each node the attribute that on average yields the lowest class entropy across all its branches, weighted by how many examples go into each branch. 90 | 91 | The psychologist David Marr argued that every information processing system should be studied at three distinct levels: the fundamental properties of the problem it’s solving; the algorithms and representations used to solve it; and how they are physically implemented. 92 | 93 | Sets of rules and decision trees are easy to understand, so we know what the learner is up to. This makes it easier to figure out what it’s doing right and wrong, fix the latter, and have confidence in the results. 94 | 95 | Connectionists, in particular, are highly critical of symbolist learning. According to them, concepts you can define with logical rules are only the tip of the iceberg; there’s a lot going on under the surface that formal reasoning just can’t see, in the same way that most of what goes on in our minds is subconscious. 96 | 97 | 98 | ### Chapter 4 - How Does Your Brain Learn? 99 | 100 | “Neurons that fire together wire together.” 101 | 102 | brains can perform a large number of computations in parallel, with billions of neurons working at the same time; but each of those computations is slow, because neurons can fire at best a thousand times per second. 103 | 104 | Some neurons have short axons and some have exceedingly long ones, reaching clear from one side of the brain to the other. Placed end to end, the axons in your brain would stretch from Earth to the moon. 105 | 106 | Perceptrons were invented in the late 1950s by Frank Rosenblatt, a Cornell psychologist. 107 | 108 | for example, if one of the memories is the pattern of black-and-white pixels formed by the digit nine and the network sees a distorted nine, it will converge to the “ideal” one and thereby recognize it. 109 | 110 | Boltzmann machines could solve the credit-assignment problem in principle, but in practice learning was very slow and painful, making this approach impractical for most applications. 111 | 112 | Rather than a logic gate, a neuron is more like a voltage-to-frequency converter. The curve of frequency as a function of voltage looks like this: 113 | 114 | When you can’t get the temperature in the shower just right—first it’s too cold, and then it quickly shifts to too hot—blame the S curve. 115 | 116 | Many phenomena we think of as linear are in fact S curves, because nothing can grow without limit. 117 | 118 | When someone talks about exponential growth, ask yourself: How soon will it turn into an S curve? 119 | 120 | Differentiate an S curve and you get a bell curve: slow, fast, slow becomes low, high, low. 121 | 122 | This was part of the reason Minsky, Papert, and others couldn’t see how to learn multilayer perceptrons. They could imagine replacing step functions by S curves and doing gradient descent, but then they were faced with the problem of local minima of the error. In those days researchers didn’t trust computer simulations; 123 | 124 | Better still, a local minimum may in fact be preferable because it’s less likely to prove to have overfit our data than the global one. 125 | 126 | Hyperspace is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the higher dimensional the space, the more room it has for highly convoluted surfaces and local optima. On the other hand, to be stuck in a local optimum you have to be stuck in every dimension, so it’s more difficult to get stuck in many dimensions than it is in three. 127 | 128 | Driverless cars first broke into the public consciousness with the DARPA Grand Challenges in 2004 and 2005, but a over a decade earlier, researchers at Carnegie Mellon had already successfully trained a multilayer perceptron to drive a car by detecting the road in video images and appropriately turning the steering wheel. Carnegie Mellon’s car managed to drive coast to coast across America with very blurry vision (thirty by thirty-two pixels), 129 | 130 | Indeed, the history of machine learning itself shows why we need learning algorithms. If algorithms that automatically find related papers in the scientific literature had existed in 1969, they could have potentially helped avoid decades of wasted time and accelerated who knows what discoveries. 131 | 132 | The nervous system of the C. elegans worm consists of only 302 neurons and was completely mapped in 1986, but we still have only a fragmentary understanding of what it does. 133 | 134 | We don’t build airplanes by reverse engineering feathers, and airplanes don’t flap their wings. Rather, airplane designs are based on the principles of aerodynamics, which all flying objects must obey. We still do not understand those analogous principles of thought. 135 | 136 | Neural networks are not compositional, and compositionality is a big part of human cognition. Another big issue is that humans—and symbolic models like sets of rules and decision trees—can explain their reasoning, while neural networks are big piles of numbers that no one can understand. 137 | 138 | 139 | ### Chapter 5 - Evolution: Nature's Learning Algorithm 140 | 141 | The key input to a genetic algorithm, as Holland’s creation came to be known, is a fitness function. Given a candidate program and some purpose it is meant to fill, the fitness function assigns the program a numeric score reflecting how well it fits the purpose. 142 | 143 | which Holland called classifier systems, are one of the workhorses of the machine-learning tribe he founded: the evolutionaries. Like multilayer perceptrons, classifier systems face the credit-assignment problem—what is the fitness of rules for intermediate concepts?—and Holland devised the so-called bucket brigade algorithm to solve it. 144 | 145 | In 1972, Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould proposed that evolution consists of a series of “punctuated equilibria,” alternating long periods of stasis with short bursts of rapid change, like the Cambrian explosion. 146 | 147 | Once the algorithm reaches a local maximum of fitness—a peak in the fitness landscape—it will stay there for a long time until a lucky mutation or crossover lands an individual on the slope to a higher peak, at which point that individual will multiply and climb up the slope with each passing generation. And the higher the current peak, the longer before that happens. 148 | 149 | Genetic algorithms, in contrast, are full of random choices: which hypotheses to keep alive and cross over (with fitter hypotheses being more likely candidates), where to cross two strings, which bits to mutate. 150 | 151 | Genetic algorithms make no a priori assumptions about the structures they will learn, other than their general form. 152 | 153 | Holland showed that, in this case, the fitter a schema’s representatives in one generation are compared to the average, the more of them we can expect to see in the next generation. So, while the genetic algorithm explicitly manipulates strings, it implicitly searches the much larger space of schemas. 154 | 155 | A genetic algorithm is like the ringleader of a group of gamblers, playing slot machines in every casino in town at the same time. Two schemas compete with each other if they include the same bits and differ in at least one of them, like *10 and *11, and n competing schemas are like n slot machines. Every set of competing schemas is a casino, and the genetic algorithm simultaneously figures out the winning machine in every casino, following the optimal strategy of playing the better-seeming machines with exponentially increasing frequency. Pretty smart. 156 | 157 | One consequence of crossing over program trees instead of bit strings is that the resulting programs can have any size, making the learning more flexible. The overall tendency is for bloat, however, with larger and larger trees growing as evolution goes on longer (also known as “survival of the fattest”). 158 | 159 | Genetic programming’s first success, in 1995, was in designing electronic circuits. Starting with a pile of electronic components such as transistors, resistors, and capacitors, Koza’s system reinvented a previously patented design for a low-pass filter, a circuit that can be used for things like enhancing the bass on a dance-music track. 160 | 161 | None of Holland’s theoretical results show that crossover actually helps; mutation suffices to exponentially increase the frequency of the fittest schemas in the population over time. 162 | 163 | Engineers certainly use building blocks extensively, but combining them involves, well, a lot of engineering; it’s not just a matter of throwing them together any old way, and it’s not clear crossover can do the trick. 164 | 165 | No one is sure why sex is pervasive in nature, either. 166 | 167 | “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” In this view, organisms are in a perpetual arms race with parasites, and sex helps keep the population varied, so that no single germ can infect all of it. 168 | 169 | Christos Papadimitriou and colleagues have shown that sex optimizes not fitness but what they call mixability: a gene’s ability to do well on average when combined with other genes. This can be useful when the fitness function is either not known or not constant, as in natural selection, but in machine learning and optimization, hill climbing tends to do better. 170 | 171 | With or without crossover, evolving structure is an essential part of the Master Algorithm. The brain can learn anything, but it can’t evolve a brain. 172 | 173 | The Master Algorithm is neither genetic programming nor backprop, but it has to include the key elements of both: structure learning and weight learning. 174 | 175 | In Baldwinian evolution, behaviors that are first learned later become genetically hardwired. If dog-like mammals can learn to swim, they have a better chance to evolve into seals—as they did—than if they drown. 176 | 177 | The architecture of the brain may well have similar faults—the brain has many constraints that computers don’t, like very limited short-term memory—and there’s no reason to stay within them. 178 | 179 | 180 | ### Chapter 6 - In the Church of Reverend Bayes 181 | 182 | For Bayesians, learning is “just” another application of Bayes’ theorem, with whole models as the hypotheses and the data as the evidence: as you see more data, some models become more likely and some less, until ideally one model stands out as the clear winner. 183 | 184 | From this thought experiment, Laplace derived his so-called rule of succession, which estimates the probability that the sun will rise again after having risen n times as (n + 1) / (n + 2). When n = 0, this is just ½; and as n increases, so does the probability, approaching 1 when n approaches infinity. 185 | 186 | P(cause | effect) = P(cause) × P(effect | cause) / P(effect). 187 | 188 | Humans, it turns out, are not very good at Bayesian inference, at least when verbal reasoning is involved. The problem is that we tend to neglect the cause’s prior probability. 189 | 190 | I put just in quotes because implementing Bayes’ theorem on a computer turns out to be fiendishly hard for all but the simplest problems, for reasons that we’re about to see. 191 | 192 | each combination of symptoms and flu/not flu. A learner that uses Bayes’ theorem and assumes the effects are independent given the cause is called a Naïve Bayes classifier. 193 | 194 | The economist Milton Friedman even argued in a highly influential essay that the best theories are the most oversimplified, provided their predictions are accurate, because they explain the most with the least. 195 | 196 | It might not seem so at first, but Naïve Bayes is closely related to the perceptron algorithm. The perceptron adds weights and Naïve Bayes multiplies probabilities, but if you take a logarithm, the latter reduces to the former. Both can be seen as generalizations of simple If . . . then . . . rules, 197 | 198 | If the states and observations are continuous variables instead of discrete ones, the HMM becomes what’s known as a Kalman filter. 199 | 200 | A more insidious problem is that with confidence-rated rules we’re prone to double-counting evidence. 201 | 202 | everything is connected, but only indirectly. In order to affect me, something that happens a mile away must first affect something in my neighborhood, even if only through the propagation of light. As one wag put it, space is the reason everything doesn’t happen to you. Put another way, the structure of space is an instance of conditional independence. 203 | 204 | In retrospect, we can see that Naïve Bayes, Markov chains, and HMMs are all special cases of Bayesian networks. The structure of Naïve Bayes is: 205 | 206 | The AIDS virus is a tough adversary because it mutates rapidly, making it difficult for any one vaccine or drug to pin it down for long. Heckerman noticed that this is the same cat-and-mouse game that spam filters play with spam 207 | 208 | You could always construct it from the individual tables, but that takes exponential time and space. What we really want is to compute P(Burglary | Bob called, Claire didn’t) without building the full table. That, in a nutshell, is the problem of inference in Bayesian networks. 209 | 210 | Burglary and Earthquake are a priori independent, but the alarm going off entangles them: the alarm makes you suspect a burglary, but if now you hear on the radio that there’s been an earthquake, you assume that’s what caused the alarm. The earthquake has explained away the alarm, making a burglary less likely, and the two are therefore dependent. 211 | 212 | The trick in MCMC is to design a Markov chain that converges to the distribution of our Bayesian network. One easy option is to repeatedly cycle through the variables, sampling each one according to its conditional probability given the state of its neighbors. 213 | 214 | People often talk about MCMC as a kind of simulation, but it’s not: the Markov chain does not simulate any real process; rather, we concocted it to efficiently generate samples from a Bayesian network, which is itself not a sequential model. 215 | 216 | This is justified by the so-called maximum likelihood principle: of all the possible probabilities of heads, 0.7 is the one under which seeing seventy heads in a hundred flips is most likely. The likelihood of a hypothesis is P(data | hypothesis), and the principle says we should pick the hypothesis that maximizes it. 217 | 218 | For a Bayesian, in fact, there is no such thing as the truth; you have a prior distribution over hypotheses, after seeing the data it becomes the posterior distribution, as given by Bayes’ theorem, and that’s all. 219 | 220 | If we’re willing to assume that all hypotheses are equally likely a priori, the Bayesian approach now reduces to the maximum likelihood principle. So Bayesians can say to frequentists: “See, what you do is a special case of what we do, but at least we make our assumptions explicit.” 221 | 222 | Bayesians can do something much more interesting. They can use the prior distribution to encode experts’ knowledge about the problem—their answer to Hume’s question. For example, we can design an initial Bayesian network for medical diagnosis by interviewing doctors, asking them which symptoms they think depend on which diseases, and adding the corresponding arrows. This is the “prior network,” and the prior distribution can penalize alternative networks by the number of arrows that they add or remove from it. 223 | 224 | We can put a prior distribution on any class of hypotheses—sets of rules, neural networks, programs—and then update it with the hypotheses’ likelihood given the data. 225 | 226 | The simplified graph structure makes the models learnable and is worth keeping, but then we’re better off just learning the best parameters we can for the task at hand, irrespective of whether they’re probabilities. 227 | 228 | Pandora’s features are handcrafted, but in Markov networks we can also learn features using hill climbing, similar to rule induction. Either way, gradient descent is a good way to learn the weights. 229 | 230 | Markov networks can be trained to maximize either the likelihood of the whole data or the conditional likelihood of what we want to predict given what we know. For Siri, the likelihood of the whole data is P(words, sounds), and the conditional likelihood we’re interested in is P(words | sounds). By optimizing the latter, we can ignore P(sounds), which is only a distraction from our goal. And since we ignore it, it can be arbitrarily complex. This is much better than HMMs’ unrealistic assumption that sounds depend solely on the corresponding words, without any influence from the surroundings. 231 | 232 | Bayesian learning works on a single table of data, where each column represents a variable (for example, the expression level of one gene) and each row represents an instance (for example, a single microarray experiment, with each gene’s observed expression level). It’s OK if the table has “holes” and measurement errors because we can use probabilistic inference to fill in the holes and average over the errors. But if we have more than one table, Bayesian learning is stuck. It doesn’t know how to, for example, combine gene expression data with data about which DNA segments get translated into proteins, and how in turn the three-dimensional shapes of those proteins cause them to lock on to different parts of the DNA molecule, affecting the expression of other genes. In logic, we can easily write rules relating all of these aspects, and learn them from the relevant combinations of tables—but only provided the tables have no holes or errors. 233 | 234 | All of the tribes we’ve met so far have one thing in common: they learn an explicit model of the phenomenon under consideration, whether it’s a set of rules, a multilayer perceptron, a genetic program, or a Bayesian network. When they don’t have enough data to do that, they’re stumped. But analogizers can learn from as little as one example because they never form a model. Let’s see what they do instead. 235 | 236 | 237 | ### Chapter 7: You Are What You Resemble 238 | 239 | Analogy was the spark that ignited many of history’s greatest scientific advances. The theory of natural selection was born when Darwin, on reading Malthus’s Essay on Population, was struck by the parallels between the struggle for survival in the economy and in nature. 240 | 241 | Nearest-neighbor is the simplest and fastest learning algorithm ever invented. In fact, you could even say it’s the fastest algorithm of any kind that could ever be invented. 242 | 243 | class. For instance, we’d like to guess where the border between two countries is, but all we know is their capitals’ locations. Most learners would be stumped, but nearest-neighbor happily guesses that the border is a straight line lying halfway between the two cities: 244 | 245 | Scientists routinely use linear regression to predict continuous variables, but most phenomena are not linear. Luckily, they’re locally linear because smooth curves are locally well approximated by straight lines. So if instead of trying to fit a straight line to all the data, you just fit it to the points near the query point, you now have a very powerful nonlinear regression algorithm. 246 | 247 | If Kennedy had needed a complete theory of international relations to decide what to do about the Soviet missiles in Cuba, he would have been in trouble. Instead, he saw an analogy between that crisis and the outbreak of World War I, and that analogy guided him to the right decisions. 248 | 249 | These days all kinds of algorithms are used to recommend items to users, but weighted k-nearest-neighbor was the first widely used one, and it’s still hard to beat. 250 | 251 | So a simple way to make nearest-neighbor more efficient is to delete all the examples that are correctly classified by their neighbors. 252 | 253 | Nearest-neighbor was the first algorithm in history that could take advantage of unlimited amounts of data to learn arbitrarily complex concepts. 254 | 255 | But nearest-neighbor is hopelessly confused by irrelevant attributes because they all contribute to the similarity between examples. With enough irrelevant attributes, accidental similarity in the irrelevant dimensions swamps out meaningful similarity in the important ones, and nearest-neighbor becomes no better than random guessing. 256 | 257 | It gets even worse. Nearest-neighbor is based on finding similar objects, and in high dimensions, the notion of similarity itself breaks down. Hyperspace is like the Twilight Zone. The intuitions we have from living in three dimensions no longer apply, and weird and weirder things start to happen. Consider an orange: a tasty ball of pulp surrounded by a thin shell of skin. Let’s say 90 percent of the radius of an orange is occupied by pulp, and the remaining 10 percent by skin. That means 73 percent of the volume of the orange is pulp (0.93). Now consider a hyperorange: still with 90 percent of the radius occupied by pulp, but in a hundred dimensions, say. The pulp has shrunk to only about three thousandths of a percent of the hyperorange’s volume (0.9100). The hyperorange is all skin, and you’ll never be done peeling it! 258 | 259 | With a high-dimensional normal distribution, you’re more likely to get a sample far from the mean than close to it. A bell curve in hyperspace looks more like a doughnut than a bell. 260 | 261 | In fact, no learner is immune to the curse of dimensionality. It’s the second worst problem in machine learning, after overfitting. The term curse of dimensionality was coined by Richard Bellman, a control theorist, in the fifties. 262 | 263 | To handle weakly relevant attributes, one option is to learn attribute weights. Instead of letting the similarity along all dimensions count equally, we “shrink” the less-relevant ones. 264 | 265 | This “blessing of nonuniformity,” whereby data is not spread uniformly in (hyper) space, is often what saves the day. The examples may have a thousand attributes, but in reality they all “live” in a much lower-dimensional space. 266 | 267 | each pixel is a dimension, so there are many, but only a tiny fraction of all possible images are digits, and they all live together in a cozy little corner of hyperspace. 268 | 269 | the SVM chooses the support vectors and weights that yield the maximum possible margin. 270 | 271 | we have to maximize the margin under the constraint that the weights can only increase up to some fixed value. Or, equivalently, we can minimize the weights under the constraint that all examples have a given margin, which could be one—the precise value is arbitrary. This is what SVMs usually do. 272 | 273 | SVMs can be seen as a generalization of the perceptron, because a hyperplane boundary between classes is what you get when you use a particular similarity measure (the dot product between vectors). But SVMs have a major advantage compared to multilayer perceptrons: the weights have a single optimum instead of many local ones and so learning them reliably is much easier. 274 | 275 | Despite this, SVMs are no less expressive than multilayer perceptrons; the support vectors effectively act as a 276 | 277 | hidden layer and their weighted average as the output layer. 278 | 279 | Provided you can learn them, networks with many layers can express many functions more compactly than SVMs, which always have just one layer, and this can make all the difference. 280 | 281 | It turns out that we can view what SVMs do with kernels, support vectors, and weights as mapping the data to a higher-dimensional space and finding a maximum-margin hyperplane in that space. For some kernels, the derived space has infinite dimensions, but SVMs are completely unfazed by that. Hyperspace may be the Twilight Zone, but SVMs have figured out how to navigate it. 282 | 283 | If Cope is right, creativity—the ultimate unfathomable—boils down to analogy and recombination. Judge for yourself by googling “david cope mp3.” 284 | 285 | Structure mapping takes two descriptions, finds a coherent correspondence between some of their parts and relations, and then, based on that correspondence, transfers further properties from one structure to the other. For example, if the structures are the solar system and the atom, we can map planets to electrons and the sun to the nucleus and conclude, as Bohr did, that electrons revolve around the nucleus. 286 | 287 | When little Tim sees women looking after other children like his mother looks after him, he generalizes the concept “mommy” to mean anyone’s mommy, not just his. That in turn is a springboard for understanding things like “mother ship” and “Mother Nature.” 288 | 289 | Rules are in effect generalized instances where we’ve “forgotten” some attributes because they didn’t matter. 290 | 291 | As we go through life, similar episodes gradually become abstracted into rule-based structures, like “eating at a restaurant.” 292 | 293 | The problem is that all the learners we’ve seen so far need a teacher to tell them the right answer. They can’t learn to distinguish tumor cells from healthy ones unless someone labels them “tumor” or “healthy.” But humans can learn without a teacher; they do it from the day they’re born. 294 | 295 | 296 | ### Chapter 8 - Learnning Without a Teacher 297 | 298 | If we could revisit ourselves as infants and toddlers and see the world again through those newborn eyes, much of what puzzles us about learning—even about existence itself—would suddenly seem obvious. 299 | 300 | Above all, even though children certainly get plenty of help from their parents, they learn mostly on their own, without supervision, and that’s what seems most miraculous. 301 | 302 | A young baby is not surprised if a teddy bear passes behind a screen and reemerges as an airplane, but a one-year-old is. 303 | 304 | Whenever we want to learn a statistical model but are missing some crucial information (e.g., the classes of the examples), we can use EM. 305 | 306 | You might have noticed a certain resemblance between k-means and EM, in that they both alternate between assigning entities to clusters and updating the clusters’ descriptions. This is not an accident: k-means itself is a special case of EM, which you get when all the attributes have “narrow” normal distributions, that is, normal distributions with very small variance. 307 | 308 | The famous hockey-stick curve of global warming, for example, is the result of finding the principal component of various temperature-related data series (tree rings, ice cores, etc.) and assuming it’s the temperature. 309 | 310 | One of the most popular algorithms for nonlinear dimensionality reduction, called Isomap, does just this. It connects each data point in a high-dimensional space (a face, say) to all nearby points (very similar faces), computes the shortest distances between all pairs of points along the resulting network and finds the reduced coordinates that best approximate these distances. 311 | 312 | Here’s an interesting experiment. Take the video stream from Robby’s eyes, treat each frame as a point in the space of images, and reduce that set of images to a single dimension. What will you discover? Time. Like a librarian arranging books on a shelf, time places each image next to its most similar ones. Perhaps our perception of it is just a natural result of our brains’ dimensionality reduction prowess. In the road network of memory, time is the main thoroughfare, and we soon find it. Time, in other words, is the principal component of memory. 313 | 314 | Humans do have one constant guide: their emotions. We seek pleasure and avoid pain. 315 | 316 | Pleasure travels back through time, so to speak, and actions can eventually become associated with effects that are quite remote from them. 317 | 318 | Children’s play is a lot more serious than it looks; if evolution made a creature that is helpless and a heavy burden on its parents for the first several years of its life, that extravagant cost must be for the sake of an even bigger benefit. In effect, reinforcement learning is a kind of speeded-up evolution—trying, discarding, and refining actions within a single lifetime instead of over generations—and by that standard it’s extremely efficient. 319 | 320 | Gaming aside, researchers have used reinforcement learning to balance poles, control stick-figure gymnasts, park cars backward, fly helicopters upside down, manage automated telephone dialogues, assign channels in cell phone networks, dispatch elevators, schedule space-shuttle cargo loading, and much else. 321 | 322 | Chris Watkins, on the other hand, is dissatisfied. He sees many things children can do that reinforcement learners can’t: solve problems, solve them better after a few attempts, make plans, acquire increasingly abstract knowledge. Luckily, we also have learning algorithms for these higher-level abilities, the most important of which is chunking. 323 | 324 | Pretty much every human skill follows a power law, with different powers for different skills. 325 | 326 | Crucially, grouping things into chunks allows us to process much more information than we otherwise could. That’s why telephone numbers have hyphens: 1-723-458-3897 is much easier to remember than 17234583897. 327 | 328 | A chunk in this sense has two parts: the stimulus (a pattern you recognize in the external world or in your short-term memory) and the response (the sequence of actions you execute as a result). 329 | 330 | In nonrelational learning, the parameters of a model are tied in only one way: across all the independent examples (e.g., all the patients we’ve diagnosed). In relational learning, every feature template we create ties the parameters of all its instances. 331 | 332 | According to Seldon, people are like molecules in a gas, and the law of large numbers ensures that even if individuals are unpredictable, whole societies aren’t. Relational learning reveals why this is not the 333 | 334 | case. If people were independent, each making decisions in isolation, societies would indeed be predictable, because all those random decisions would add up to a fairly constant average. But when people interact, larger assemblies can be less predictable than smaller ones, not more. 335 | 336 | 337 | ### Chapter 9 - The Pieces Of The Puzzle Fall Into Place 338 | 339 | Although it is less well known, many of the most important technologies in the world are the result of inventing a unifier, a single mechanism that does what previously required many. 340 | 341 | As it turns out, it’s not hard to combine many different learners into one, using what is known as metalearning. Netflix, Watson, Kinect, and countless others use it, and it’s one of the most powerful arrows in the machine learner’s quiver. It’s also a stepping-stone to the deeper unification that will follow. 342 | 343 | Bagging generates random variations of the training set by resampling, applies the same learner to each one, and combines the results by voting. 344 | 345 | One of the cleverest metalearners is boosting, created by two learning theorists, Yoav Freund and Rob Schapire. Instead of combining different learners, boosting repeatedly applies the same classifier to the data, using each new model to correct the previous ones’ mistakes. It does this by assigning weights to the training examples; the weight of each misclassified example is increased after each round of learning, causing later rounds to focus more on it. 346 | 347 | As you approach it from a distance, you can see that the city is made up of three concentric circles, each bounded by a wall. The outer and by far widest circle is Optimization Town. Each house here is an algorithm, and they come in all shapes and sizes. Some are under construction, the locals busy around them; some are gleaming new; and some look old and abandoned. Higher up the hill lies the Citadel of Evaluation. From its mansions and palaces orders issue continuously to the algorithms below. Above all, silhouetted against the sky, rise the Towers of Representation. 348 | 349 | 350 | 351 | Representation is the formal language in which the learner expresses its models. The symbolists’ formal language is logic, of which rules and decision trees are special cases. The connectionists’ is neural networks. The evolutionaries’ is genetic programs, including classifier systems. The Bayesians’ is graphical models, an umbrella term for Bayesian networks and Markov networks. The analogizers’ is specific instances, possibly with weights, as in an SVM. 352 | 353 | The evaluation component is a scoring function that says how good a model is. Symbolists use accuracy or information gain. Connectionists use a continuous error measure, such as squared error, which is the sum of the squares of the differences between the predicted values and the true ones. Bayesians use the posterior probability. Analogizers (at least of the SVM stripe) use the margin. In addition to how well the model fits the data, all tribes take into account other desirable properties, such as the model’s simplicity. 354 | 355 | Optimization is the algorithm that searches for the highest-scoring 356 | 357 | model and returns it. The symbolists’ characteristic search algorithm is inverse deduction. The connectionists’ is gradient descent. The evolutionaries’ is genetic search, including crossover and mutation. The Bayesians are unusual in this regard: they don’t just look for the best model, but average over all models, weighted by how probable they are. To do the weighting efficiently, they use probabilistic inference algorithms like MCMC. The analogizers (or more precisely, the SVM mavens) use constrained optimization to find the best model. 358 | 359 | This is what nature does: evolution creates brain structures, and individual experience modulates them. 360 | 361 | It looks like you’ve boiled down the five optimizers to a simple recipe: genetic search for structure and gradient descent for parameters. And even that may be overkill. For a lot of problems, you can whittle genetic search down to hill climbing if you do three things: leave out crossover, try all possible point mutations in each generation, and always select the single best hypothesis to seed the next generation. 362 | 363 | You use accuracy to evaluate yes-or-no predictions and squared error for continuous ones. Fitness is just the evolutionaries’ name for the scoring function; you can make it anything you want, including accuracy and squared error. Posterior probability reduces to squared error if you ignore the prior probability and the errors follow a normal distribution. The margin, if you allow it to be violated for a price, becomes a softer version of accuracy: instead of paying no penalty for a correct prediction and a penalty of one for an incorrect prediction, the penalty is zero until you get inside the margin, at which point it starts to steadily go up. 364 | 365 | Suddenly you see it: an SVM is just a multilayer perceptron with a hidden layer composed of kernels instead of S curves and an output that’s a linear combination instead of another S curve. 366 | 367 | Each rule is just a highly stylized neuron. For example, the rule If it’s a giant reptile and breathes fire then it’s a dragon is just a perceptron with weights of one for it’s a giant reptile and breathes fire and a threshold of 1.5. And a set of rules is a multilayer perceptron with a hidden layer containing one neuron for each rule and an output neuron to form the disjunction of the rules. 368 | 369 | product of factors is now a sum of terms, just like an SVM, a voting set of rules, or a multilayer perceptron without the output S curve. 370 | 371 | Everyone has the flu and If someone has the flu, so do their friends. In standard logic, this would be a pretty useless pair of statements: the first would rule out any state with even a single healthy person, and the second would be redundant. But in an MLN, the first formula just means that there’s a feature X has the flu for every person X, with the same weight as the formula. If people are likely to have the flu, the formula will have a high weight, and so will the corresponding features. A state with many healthy people is less probable than one with few, but not impossible. And because of the second formula, a state where someone has the flu and their friends don’t is less probable than one where healthy and infected people fall into separate clusters of friends. 372 | 373 | On the one hand, assuming the learner is part of the world is an assumption—in principle, the learner could obey different laws from those the world obeys—so it satisfies Hume’s dictum that learning is only possible with prior knowledge. On the other hand, it’s an assumption so basic and hard to disagree with that perhaps it’s all we need for this world. 374 | 375 | Backpropagation is a form of gradient descent, 376 | 377 | The world is not a random jumble of interactions; it has a hierarchical structure: galaxies, planets, continents, countries, cities, neighborhoods, your house, you, your head, your nose, a cell on its tip, the organelles in it, molecules, atoms, subatomic particles. The way to model it, then, is with an MLN that also has a hierarchical structure. 378 | 379 | If you look at it one way, machine learning is only a small part of the CanceRx project, well behind data gathering and human contributions. 380 | 381 | 382 | ### Chapter 10 - This Is The World Of Machine Learning 383 | 384 | The novelty in the world today is that computers, not just people, are starting to have theories of mind. 385 | 386 | If you don’t like a company, click on their ads: this will not only waste their money now, but teach Google to waste it again in the future by showing the ads to people who are unlikely to buy the products. 387 | 388 | In this rapidly approaching future, you’re not going to be the only one with a “digital half” doing your bidding twenty-four hours a day. Everyone will have a detailed model of him- or herself, and these models will talk to each other all the time. 389 | 390 | but what about a model of what makes a hotel good or bad for you? This requires information about you that you may not want to share with TripAdvisor. What you’d like is a trusted party that combines the two types of data and gives you the results. 391 | 392 | These problems all have a common solution: a new type of company that is to your data what your bank is to your money. 393 | 394 | Common sense is important not just because your mom taught you so, but because computers don’t have it. 395 | 396 | ATMs replaced some bank tellers, but mainly they let us withdraw money any time, anywhere. 397 | 398 | We worry that the humanities are in a death spiral, but they’ll rise from the ashes once other professions have been automated. The more everything is done cheaply by machines, the more valuable the humanist’s contribution will be. 399 | 400 | Eventually, we’ll start talking about the employment rate instead of the unemployment one and reducing it will be seen as a sign of progress. (“The US is falling behind. Our employment rate is still 23 percent.”) 401 | 402 | People will seek meaning in human relationships, self-actualization, and spirituality, much as they do now. The need to earn a living will be a distant memory, another piece of humanity’s barbaric past that we rose above. 403 | 404 | Technology is the extended phenotype of man. This means we can continue to control it even if it becomes far more complex than we can understand. 405 | 406 | People worry that computers will get too smart and take over the world, but the real problem is that they’re too stupid and they’ve already taken over the world. 407 | 408 | As a matter of fact, we’ve always lived in a world that we only partly understood. The main difference is that our world is now partly created by us, which is surely an improvement. The world beyond the Turing point will not be incomprehensible to us, any more than the Pleistocene was. We’ll focus on what we can understand, as we always have, and call the rest random (or divine). 409 | 410 | The statistician knows that prediction is hard, especially about the future, and the computer scientist knows that the best way to predict the future is to invent it, but the unexamined future is not worth inventing. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------