“Things A Little Bird Told Me” is Twitter co-founder Biz Stone’s autobiography. It focuses mostly on his career, starting from designing book jackets to working for Blogger with Evan Williams. It talks about his time at Odeo, why they failed, and how Twitter was born out of a hackathon at Odeo as the company was looking for a buyer. Most of the book is about early days of Twitter, from initial traction at SXSW to getting a $500 million acquisition offer from Facebook and power plays at Twitter’s board of directors about previous CEOs Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams.

Romanda anlatılanlar kadar, kullanılan dil ve üslup da keyif verdiği için Türkiye’deyken anlatımından zevk alabileceğim Türkçe bir roman arayışına giriştim. Masumiyet Müzesi’nden çokça memnun kaldığım için havaalanından Orhan Pamuk’un “Benim Adım Kırmızı” kitabını alarak ayrıldım.

İnsanların kitapları ilk satırlarını okuyarak satın almaya karar verdiğine olan inancından mıdır bilinmez, Orhan Pamuk’un giriş cümlelerine özel bir dikkat gösterdiğini düşünürüm. Benim Adım Kırmızı da, “Şimdi bir ölüyüm ben, bir ceset, bir kuyunun dibinde.” cümlesiyle başlıyor. Detaylı tasvirler ve uzun anlatımlar barındıran 500 sayfalık bu kitap kolay okunuyor diyemem ama hikayedeki merak öğesi insanın heyecanını korumaya yetiyor ve hızlıca bitirilmesine yardımcı oluyor.

Ben Horowitz is a successful figure in tech industry, I was curious to read what he had to say without even knowing what his book was about. Turns out, it’s meant to be a guide for CEOs. Nevertheless, it helped me understand why certain things are the way they are in my current company. It contains lessons he learned from his time at Netscape and Opsware. Here are some highlights:

I first learned about Positive Psychology when a class on this subject became the most popular course among undergraduate students at Harvard University seven years ago. Since then, this subject gained popularity in the media and there have been many books written about it due to its appeal to a wide audience.  I’ve been reading and learning more on this subject through the years because my goal in life is to be happy.  I found it interesting that this field in psychology only started 15 years ago, before then psychology focused on mental illnesses instead of finding ways to make normal life more fulfilling.

Humans of New York  is a project by Brandon Stanton to capture New Yorkers and tell their stories, apparently this book is the result of 3 years of work for that project.

In the beginning of the book, Brandon briefly tells his story. When he was fired from his job as a bond trader, he decided to try being a photographer.

I had enjoyed my time as a trader, but the end goal was always money. Two years of my life were spent obsessing over money, in the end I had nothing to show for it. I wanted to spend the next phase of my life doing work that I valued as much as the reward.

I like 37signals’s opinionated and provocative style, they like to preach the way they work and try to influence others. Remote is their new book on advocating working remotely. The book approaches working remotely both from an employee’s perspective and from a business owner’s perspective. It starts off by advocating the advantages of working remotely, tries to rebut arguments against it, gives tips on working remotely, and explains how to hire and manage remote employees.

I love movies, photos, products or cafes that can create an emotional connection and make me feel in a different way.

This video that tells the story of Street Etiquette blog is one of them. Here’s my favorite quote from the video:

“Best advice, I would say is: Learn the rules and break them.”

Scott Adams, creator of the comic Dilbert, tells his story while offering random assortment of life tips in his book “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life”.

A big theme and takeaway from this book was the emphasis on personal energy: “We humans want many things: good health, financial freedom, accomplishment, a great social life, love, sex, recreation, travel, family, career … So how do you organize your limited supply of time to get the best result? I make choices that maximize my personal energy.” It was enlightening to have a framework you can use when making choices. Jeff Bezos’s Regret Minimization Framework  is another one that I really like.

I mostly read non-fiction, but every once in a while the fiction lover in me wakes up. “The Little Prince is a book for grown-ups, I don’t recall much from the time I read it as a kid.” I said. “If I read it this time, I will understand it all”, I thought. Oh boy, I have to revisit this book again when I get wiser. It’s a philosophical story that has a lot of criticism about us grown ups.

My long history of exercise has painfully thought me that getting in shape is 70% what you eat and 30% what you do. I’ve done a good job at exercising regularly, but never got around to maintaining a healthy diet. That’s why I decided to read Michael Pollan’s book on nutrition. Food Rules tries to answer three main questions:

• What should I eat?
• What kind of food should I eat?
• How should I eat?

I found the last section to be the most interesting. Here are some tips on how to eat: