What Makes a Good Book Review?
I came across this post by Brian Ball and it really made a light bulb glow in my brain. Brian posed a question on what makes a good book review.
I heavily rely on book reviews and recommendations. I wish we had a much better version of Goodreads, I would gladly pay for it.
I am not a big fan of Amazon reviews. I know Goodreads is owned by Amazon, but Amazon reviews are a different beast compared to Goodreads. I have seen people give a 1-star review and write praising comments about it. These are the ones who are confused about the system. There are people complaining about delivery issues or damaged copies or some pesky things and give 1-star reviews. So I don’t fully trust the Amazon reviews.
Coming to the Goodreads reviews, I find the following patterns:
People who just collect books in their “Want to Read” queue. This is a medium-quality signal. It just tells me that people heard about the book and they want to read it. It’s good but that alone is not enough. It is good because you can discover new or interesting books through this.
People who just give star ratings alone. They are quite consistent and no-errors in understanding how it works. In this area, ratings are a high-quality signal. I trust these reviews based on their previous recommendations and reviews.
People who give one-or-two line reviews and star ratings. This kind of review always has my attention, because people have not alone spent time to read and rate a book, they have also taken pains to write about it. This is a high intent, very high-quality signal. I better pay attention to it. This helps me to weed out bad books and keep good books in my queue and reading list.
People who write more 100 words of review (along with rating). These are a delight. There are a few in my network, whom I blindly trust on this. People like Gwern, Jason Furman, Manu. They have done a lot of hard work in reading as well as writing about it.
I really don’t have any qualms over the content of the review. I like people tagging spoiler warnings but that doesn’t really matter to me. I am more interested in the above-mentioned signals than the actual content itself.
Upside of Stress
I recently discovered a funny thing called Parkinson’s Law. It says that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. If you give a conservative deadline, we will make sure we have enough work till the deadline is over. It is applicable for an aggressive deadline too. We are quite funny in that way.
I realised that in a recent project at work in a vivid manner. We released a beta version of our product. The beta was released a few weeks ago. A customer was impressed by the beta of our product. This customer is a huge enterprise company. We were very confident about the architecture and scalability of our product. Because right from day one, our engineering team had this kind of customers in mind. The product was engineered and designed with scalability in mind. But we had not released the product yet.
We always have this dilemma as a product team. Should we release the product and let the customer use the beta version immediately? Or should we quash those pesky bugs and polish the rough edges. We all knew that we could not keep on shining the product. We also knew, when the rubber hits the road, that is when the customers start using it, we will start discovering the unknown-unknowns.
And that is what exactly happened when this big enterprise company started to use our product. They signed up knowing it is a product in beta and were quite patient in giving feedback. Many things that we never thought will be a problem started to breakdown. Luckily, we expected, and our team were in stand by mode to get it fixed quickly.
But it was such an intense and rewarding experience. The stress was quite fun. The customer was very patient, but we knew how precious their time was. So the accountability was always there for us. We need to know we have to get things done. But we had our high moments when our product/fixes got the job done for our customers. The feedback loop kicked in and made our product much robust.
Choosing Struggles for Having Fun in Life
Today I read two different essays, but they happen to be in the same theme. What is fun? How much struggle do you want to take for that fun?
This essay by Mark Manson was excellent. I specifically like this quote:
If I ask you, “What do you want out of life?” and you say something like, “I want to be happy and have a great family and a job I like,” it’s so ubiquitous that it doesn’t even mean anything.
Isn’t that very true? Everyone wants to be happy, wealthy, have a great family. But the most critical thing is what are we willing to struggle. More importantly, what pain can we endure for getting that important thing. The author says:
What we get out of life is not determined by the good feelings we desire but by what bad feelings we’re willing and able to sustain to get us to those good feelings.
We all want to have a fantastic body. But if we don’t take the pain of eating right or working out, we can never have it. We all want financial independence and enough money in the bank. But if we don’t survive the unpredictable and risk-filled roller coaster ride of entrepreneurship, we can never be independent. You get the drift.
The final point Mark Manson makes is: Our struggles determine our successes. Choose your struggles wisely.
The second article I read is a nice segue into how to endure the struggle. It is written by James Stuber, a fellow student of the Write of Passage. He has written this series of articles as part of the capstone essay project in WoP (I am still due on the capstone front 😞).
Yes, there are things that we have to endure in our life. It may sound boring, and it may not be fun. But how do you tackle it?
There is a better way to motivate ourselves. With the right mindset, with the right framing, we can learn to enjoy the boring fundamentals, and even find them fun.
This is the key. How do you frame things in the right manner and get fun in doing that? An excellent example is from another blogger, Tynan, who enjoys washing the dishes. But look at the way he frames it:
“I could appreciate the warm water on my hands and the shine in the pot when it was clean…it was so enjoyable that I actually found myself looking forward to washing the dishes the next day.”
We all think fun is “fun”. Like watching Netflix, eating doughnuts and just bumming around. Sure, it is fun. But not all fun is created equal. Fun can also be categorised as Type 1 and Type 2 fun.
Type 1 fun - It’s effortless, lazy, untarnished by setbacks: Netflix, bumming around, Instagram, others.
Type 2 fun - Suffer now, but fun in retrospect. Running, weightlifting, swimming, writing.
So the critical thing to take away from James’ essay is
Type 2 Fun is real and worth looking for
With the right mindset and right way of framing our fun, we can make boring fundamentals fun!
Performance Coaching - Billions
I have already written about the excellent TV series, Billions. It is a text showcase of how powerful people fight their battles. It is also a practical explanation of the game theory. One of the key protagonists in Billions is named Robert Axelrod. It is also the name of the author who has written an influential and fundamental text about Game Theory.
One of the main characters in Billions is Dr Wendy Rhoades. She is a performance coach working for a hedge fund, Axe Capital. She is a trained and licensed therapist. But what she excels is in performance coaching. She breaks people apart, finds out what drags them and what holds back, fixes it and re-assemble them. She upgrades the minds of the employees of a billion dollar hedge fund. All the people working that company has to make crucial decisions that can swing hard. Wendy is the catalyst in getting the best out of them. Rightfully she is the head of HR at Axe Capital.
I have been awestruck at the writing and the character development of Billions. I have binge-watched all seasons of the show. Every dialogue is embedded with a lot of interest context, which is frustrating, but that is also exciting if you know it. Many interesting real-life celebrities make a cameo role in this. Mark Cuban, Jocko Willink, Anna Kournikova, Tim Ferriss are the few that I recognised and recollect now.
I have been thinking specifically about the Wendy Rhoades character. I wished if every HR team in a company is equipped with these skills. I know it is too much to ask. HR has so many things to run for a day to day business. But just imagine, if there is someone like Wendy in a company. A person who is like a therapist but doesn’t come with that label. A person who can listen actively, understand the context and coach to realise their potential without being pedantic. That person necessarily not be in the HR department. The learning and development department has that vision, but their one size fits for all approach of training might not be the best option. If that quality of coaching is in a manager or team leader, your work can improve exponentially.
We do have life coaches and executive coaches who specialise in consulting and improving the C-Suite execs. I wish we have such a culture or options available for regular folks and employees too.
How to Write Well Online? - Lessons From Visakan
I was wandering in Twitter and bumped into this excellent thread by a prolific Tweeter, Visakan. It has been summarised in this blog as well. I want to highlight on few things and pen down my opinions.
Smart writing requires a dumb mentality
Dumb here means having a blank state of mind. Dumb is having a beginner’s mindset to be curious. The important thing is knowing what is smart writing. But the most important thing is to forget once we know what it is. How do you know what smart writing is? Read next.
Develop your taste
Taste is not some hifalutin thing. You can develop it consciously. You already like something. You have a vague idea about what you want too. Follow your curiosity, playfully and enjoy it. Read wide and weird things. Watch new films of different genre. Learn a craft. Travel. Be part of some interesting community. If you are going to force it upon you, it is not going to work. Important thing is to have fun.
Nothing is original
Remember everything is a remix. What we consider as classic or masterpiece now has been inspired or remixed. Bible or Mahabharatha were compiled and rewritten based on some other stories. There is no pressure from anyone to be original.
Produce a large volume of work. Write stupid, edit smart
You always have a unique angle in anything you read/watch/listen. The angle need not be smart or unique at all. What does that mean to you? How you ingest it? How it is applicable to your life? That alone is worth writing. Remember writing is cheap, almost free. Write things to empty your mind, clarify your thinking or just for fun. Tweet about it. Post it in your blog. Later, you can refine it, edit it.
(Visakan is just 29 years old and his writings are really interesting. He is wise as well as cool. Inspired by some of the threads, I am supporting him in Patreon. Highly recommend you to follow him on Twitter)
Focusing on What Won’t Change
“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!”
Theodore Levitt, a legendary marketing professor from Harvard Business School, said it in a seminal paper titled Marketing Myopia. Theodore also said this:
The railroads did not stop growing because the need for passenger and freight transportation declined…They let others take customers away from them because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business rather than in the transportation business. The reason they defined their industry incorrectly was that they were railroad oriented instead of transportation oriented; they were product oriented instead of customer oriented.
If you are following news related to Uber, they don’t call themselves as a taxi company. They don’t even think of being in a business that moves from Point A to Point B. They are in business moving people and things from one place to another.
This connects to another favourite thread of mine, Amazon. Jeff Bezos always asks his team to focus on things that do not change. No customer is willing to pay a high price for products. No customer wants slow shipping.
In companies that are doing extremely well, I see one of the two (or both) these principles followed diligently:
Understanding the things that don’t change
Know what job a customer is doing with the product/service
In the case of Brunello Cucinelli, he really focused on the 1st principle. Look what he says:
Why cashmere? Because I was using something that theoretically never goes to waste. You never throw away a cashmere pullover. The idea of manufacturing something that you never scrap, you never throw away — I liked it very much.
Tomorrow, I want to write about companies that have understood the principle #2 really well.