Management philosophy at Facebook is heavily influenced by the research done by Gallup, all the way from how Pulse surveys are conducted to how managers are coached. There’s a lot of unconventional wisdom in this book, which makes it interesting and high signal. Here are the parts that I found helpful:

• The catalyst role describes what great managers do.
• You can not infer excellence from studying failure and then inverting it. Excellence is not the opposite of failure. The best way to investigate excellence is simply to spend a great deal of time with your top performers.
• Managers do things right. Leaders do the right things. The most important difference between a great manager and a great leader is one of focus. Great managers look inward. They look inside the company, into each individual, into the differences in style, goals, needs and motivations of each person. Great leaders, by contrast, look outward. They look out at the competition, out at the the future, out at alternative routes forward … They must be visionaries, strategic thinkers, activators.
• Define outcomes rather than methods: To focus people on performance, one must define the right outcomes and stick to those outcomes religiously. The hardest thing about being a manager is realizing that your people will not do things the way that you would. Define the right outcomes and then let each person find his or her own route.
• A company’s mission should remain constant, providing meaning and focus for generations of employees. A company’s strategy is simply the most effective way to execute the mission. It should change according to the demands of the business climate.

On talent:

Chaos Monkeys is a memoir, detailing the author’s career starting from Goldman Sachs to the startup world and eventually to Facebook.

It talks about him leaving Goldman Sachs for an ads startup called Adchemy, applying to YCombinator and starting his own company AdGrok, the law suit he faces and how he takes revenge, the process of selling the company to Twitter and him joining Facebook, and navigating corporate politics at Facebook to build an ads exchange.

The Antidote, written by British journalist Oliver Burkeman, comes with the tagline “happiness for people who can’t stand positive thinking”. It is a record of the author’s own journey through the negative path to happiness and his criticism for too much focus on positivity and optimism today.

The author explores three philosophies that share the same idea of returning towards negativity:  Stoicism, Buddhism and Momento mori

Stoicism: He talk about the idea of premeditation of evil. By experiencing the unpleasantness that he’s fearing, he examines how the awfulness compares to his beliefs. An interesting exercise the author tries is to shout names of subway stops at each station, conducting a ritual of deliberate self-humiliation to face his unspoken beliefs about embarrassment, self-consciousness and what other people might think about him.

Internette gördüğüm kadarıyla Orhan Pamuk’un “Kırmızı Saçlı Kadın"ını okuyanların görüşlerini iki grupta toplayabilirim:

1. Orhan Pamuk’un Nobel ödülünü aldıktan sonra en güzel eserlerini yazdığına inanan ve yeni eserlerini kolay okunabildiği ve sade dili için seven kitle
2. Orhan Pamuk’un “Beyaz Kale”, “Kara Kitap” ya da “Benim Adım Kırmızı"daki derinliği bulamayıp hayal kırıklığına uğrayanlar, kitabın aceleye geldiğini düşünenler

Ben ikinci kesime dahilim. Orhan Pamuk’un 14 ay yerine 5-10 yıl emek harcayarak yazdığı, tarihi altyapısı zengin, daha karmaşık ve derin kitapları daha çok hoşuma gidiyor.

The highlight of the book has been this insight:

Ironically, jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one’s work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it. Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is Haruki Murakami’s memoir on running. You get to peek into his life and learn about how he used to run a bar, smoked 60 cigarettes a day, started running at age 33, runs 6 days a week and completed 26 marathons and an ultramarathon. A few tidbits from the book that I’d like to remember are:

• The point is whether or not I improved over yesterday. In long-distance running the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be.
• Raymond Chandler once confessed that even if he didn’t write anything, he made sure he sad down at his desk every single day and concentrated.

Overall, I didn’t learn that much about Murakami, writing or running by reading this book. I would only recommend reading it if you’re a hardcore Murakami fan and interested in his running memoir.

Philip Su is the site lead for Facebook London and is known as an awesome, inspiring individual. His book “Wipeables” is a collection of his posts from Quora and his blog. It’s a quick read and parts about work and career are very high signal. Here are the parts I found useful:

From his goodbye post when leaving Microsoft:

• I don’t listen too carefully when a poor performer tells me how awful their previous manager was. My ears perk up when a star performer constructively criticizes their management.
• For feedback to be useful, you must at least occasionally consider implementing feedback that you don’t initially agree with.
• Look towards the person you admire most at your level. What can you learn from them?
• Do you practice specific skills with repetition and intent? Athletes do drills. Musicians hone difficult passages. What do you do?
• How much soda can a personal steal? Our most interesting profits will come from capitalizing on huge opportunities, not from micromanaging costs.

On  personal goals and metrics:

Yıl sonu yaklaşırken, kendime karşı dürüst olmak adına geriye dönüp baktığımda bu yıl öğrendiğim birkaç fikri paylaşmak istiyorum:

1. İşe başlamayı kolaylaştırarak ertelemenin önüne geçebilirim.
Geçen yıl 735 km koşmuştum. Bu yıl kendime bir hedef koymadım. Bir yarışta koşmak için de hazırlanmadım. Buna rağmen 900 km koşmuşum. Yaşayacağım yere karar verirken, sık yaptığım aktivitelere uygun bir semtte olmasına dikkat ettim. Şehrin en batısında, nehre yakın bir yerde yaşayarak, evden çıkınca bir sokak yürüyerek koşmaya başlayabiliyorum. Koşu yapmak için sarfetmem gereken eforu azaltarak, daha fazla koşmayı başardım.

My growing interest in Japan and its culture lead me to Haruki Murakami. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was my introduction to Murakami’s work - I was surprised to learn that he was running a jazz club before he wrote his first novel at age 29. When I read non-fiction, I usually read to learn or be inspired. When I read fiction, I read to feel and dream. This book was extraordinary in conveying feelings and setting the mood for the reader. It starts as a metaphysical detective story, and continues like a fairy tale or a dream. It hovers so close around the edges of reality, and gradually, gets stranger and stranger as you read. The book doesn’t follow a traditional plot, but the journey is still worthwhile and the whole experience feels like watching a movie.

Talent is Overrated is a book arguing that world class performance is a result of deliberate practice instead of innate talent. The book starts by arguing that talent is less important than we usually think and debunks popular examples like Mozart or Tiger Woods by explaining how much their success is a result of their lengthy training in their field and having parents that were good teachers: Mozart’s father Leopold Mozart was a famous composer or Tiger Woods was born into the home of an expert golfer.