Creative Selection is a book about the product development process and demo culture at Apple. The author shares personal stories about problems he worked on at Apple, such as building Safari browser, supporting HTML editing in email, and developing the iPhone keyboard. It’s an interesting read if you’re curious about Apple’s history or product development process, especially around prototyping and demos. The author summarizes Apple’s product development culture as:

When is a book on perfect timing. It has interesting stories filled with practical advice after each chapter. Here are some tips involving caffeine:

• Don’t drink coffee immediately after you wake up: The moment we awaken, our bodies begin producing cortisol. Caffeine interferes with the production of cortisol. Drink your first cup of coffee an hour or ninety minutes after waking up, once our cortisol production has peaked.
• Nappucino: The most efficient nap is the nappucino. Caffeine won’t engage in your bloodstream for about twenty-five minutes, so drink up right before you lie down for you nap. When you wake up, caffeine will begin to kick in.

This book has a good mix of interesting research and actionable advice, highly recommended if you’re interested in self-improvement.

I was introduced to Bill Burnett at work, where he gave a great talk on creativity. His book is on approaching work life as a design problem and follows on the footsteps of his first book “Designing Your Life”. The chapter that resonated with me the most was on defining the problem and the art of reframing. He talks about two types of problems where people get stuck:

• Anchor Problems: These are when we pose one of the possible solutions as the problem itself. Example: “I want to go sailing every weekend, but I can’t afford a boat.” So the problem I need to solve is: “How do I buy a boat when I have no money?” Here, we’ve anchored to one of the possible solutions for sailing, which is to buy a boat, and we’ve flipped it into the problem we need to solve. However, a broader framing of the problem, “How can I go sailing regularly on a limited budget?” has many possible solutions: join a sailing club, share a boat with friends, volunteer to crew someone else’s boat etc.
• Gravity Problems: These are inactionable problems that don’t have a solution. “I want to be a poet, but poets don’t make enough money to live on in our culture. How can I make a good living as a poet?” Bill argues that it’s a situation, a circumstance, a fact of life, and if it’s not actionable, it’s not a problem that can be solved. A reframing could be “How might I write poetry while making a living doing other things?” or “How can I learn to live on what I’d make working only ten hours a week so I can be an almost full-time poet?”

The chapter on money or meaning was also a good reminder on finding a good balance of different attributes for yourself. Overall, most of the book was low signal for me, but the handful of chapters that I mentioned were amazing and invaluable.

As a kid, Porsche was my dream car. I also liked building legos. One of the themes during COVID was reconnecting with my inner child, so I embarked on a journey to build a 1500 piece lego car. Here are my reflections from this experience:

• You like what you can do well:
  When I first started, I was moving very slowly, having a hard time finding the pieces and understanding the instructions. After completing 20% of the instructions, I became more familiar with the process, started to move faster, and got more engaged. The same phenomenon happened when I got a new job and started working on a new codebase. Initially, things looked unfamiliar, simple things took me a long time. I got frustrated, my enjoyment was low. As my familiarity and competence increased, so did my enjoyment and engagement with the new job. This simple idea is explained by Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow Model as well: there’s a sweet spot of challenge vs skill level that gets you into the flow. I experienced this first hand.

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant contains Naval’s philosophy on wealth and happiness. It’s a collection of his views distilled from interviews and tweets available as a free PDF.

Here are some parts that resonated with me:

On happiness:

• Happiness is there when you remove the sense of something missing in your life.
• The most important trick to being happy is to realize happiness is a skill you develop and a choice you make.
• Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.
• Every time you catch yourself desiring something, say “Is it so important to me I’ll be unhappy unless this goes my way?”
• Happiness is being satisfied with what you have.
• Happiness, love, and passion aren’t things you find, they’re choices you make.
• Jealousy is such a poisonous emotion because, at the end of the day, you’re no better off with jealousy. You’re unhappier, and the person you’re jealous of is still successful or good-looking.
• One day, I realized with all these people I was jealous of, I couldn’t just choose little aspects of their life. I couldn’t say I want his body, I want her money, I want his personality. You have to be that person. If you’re not willing to do a wholesale, 24/7/ 100 percent swap with who that person is, then there is no point in being jealous.
• Working out every day made me happier.
• Don’t spend your time making other people happy. Other people being happy is their problem. It’s not your problem.
• If you don’t love yourself, who will?

On wealth:

Çalışmaya bir yıl ara verdikten sonra Amerika’da iş hayatına geri dönmek istedim. Herkesin çalışmak istediği büyük teknoloji şirketlerine girmek istiyordum. 8 yıldır hiç mülakata girmemiştim. Kullandığım teknolojiler eskimişti, öğrenmem gereken çok şey vardı. Hazırlanmaya başladım. Kodlama soruları çözdüm, konu tekrarı yaptım, online dersler izledim, deneme mülakatlarına girdim. Bir de baktım tam bir yıl iş mülakatlarına hazırlıkla geçmiş. Neden bu kadar uzun sürmüştü ki?

Çünkü korkuyordum. Birkaç gün sonra deneme mülakatım vardı ve şimdiden içimi huzursuzluk kaplamıştı. Gerçek bir mülakat bile değildi, endişelenmem çok saçmaydı. Ama elimde değildi.

The Four Agreements is a popular book among coaching circles. It talks about four agreements that you need to make with yourself:

1. Be impeccable with your word: What resonated with me was noticing the power of the language we use and the words we pick, that it can be self-fulfilling if we speak negatively about ourselves. Being impeccable is not going against yourself, not using words against yourself, not judging or blaming yourself. It’s a powerful agreement to make with yourself.
2. Don’t take anything personally: It’s important to remember that the other person has their own set of beliefs, trauma, mood, things going on in their lives etc. and their actions or reactions are not necessarily because of us.
3. Don’t make assumptions: Noticing that you’re making an assumption is also very powerful. The easiest way to not make assumptions is to ask questions. For me, the challenging part with this approach is in situations where there is a lack of trust or incentive to lie.
4. Always do your best: Knowing that you’ve done your best gives you peace of mind regardless of the outcome.

Overall, these are powerful principles, being able to stick to them requires awareness.

Matt Mochary is a CEO coach and probably one of those unknown heroes of Silicon Valley. He coached CEOs of several Silicon Valley startups, such as Steve Huffman, Sam Altman and Justin Kan. His book, The Great CEO Within, is on how to run a company as a CEO. The information density is amazing, it’s an excellent reference book with 200 pages of pure practical information. It’s been really refreshing to come across a business book without all the story telling and filler fluff.

Scott Gollaway is an entrepreneur and professor of marketing at NYU Stern Business School. The Algebra of Happiness contains his ramblings and life advice on success, love and happiness.

• On success:
  • The trait most common among CEOs is that they exercise regularly.
  • The definition of “rich” is having passive income greater than your burn.
  • Big cities are Wimbledon, even if you aren’t Rafael Nadal, your game will improve by being on the court with him.
• On happiness:
  • Being “in the zone” is happiness.
  • On a balanced scorecard, the happiest people are those in monogamous relationships who have children.
• On love:
  • The most important decision you’ll make is not where you work or who you party with, but who you choose to partner with for the rest of your life.
  • Like someone who likes you.
  • Male monkeys have higher ranks and more mating success if they have more social bonds, rather than being bigger or stronger.
  • Love and relationships are the ends, everything else is just the means. In the end, relationships are all that matters.

What resonated with me was the overwhelming importance of relationships in our happiness. This 10 minute video is a good summary of the main points in the book and will get you 80% there.

Shoe Dog tells the story of Nike from 1962 to 1980. It’s a memoir about early days of Nike by its founder Phil Knight. The book is such a page turner, the moment I picked it up, I couldn’t put it down before finishing. It’s very well written, and the story is exciting as well. The betrayals and attempts for hostile takeovers while doing business described in the book were scary, it reminded me the importance of making things, creating value and not depending on other companies.