Hi <<First Name>>,
I bought a Kindle last month, and have been mostly using that this month. It’s been unusual. For example, I’m figuring out where the best place is to buy books, what the best file format is, and just getting used to reading with it. There’s a lot to like about it, of course, but I do miss analog books. While I read two of these digitally, here are three great books—or ebooks!—for you to check out this month:
Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
I’ve been a fan of Oliver’s work for many years now, and this book was really great. It’s one of the best I’ve read this year. He did a great job writing this for busy people—those wrestling with time scarcity, blocking time, and joysticking their calendars. I really appreciated this book, and Oliver’s incisive observations on how our stresses in dealing with time stem from existentialism and much deeper philosophical and core anguishes. If you’ve ever asked yourself, while checking work emails on your weekend, “Why the hell do I feel like this?!” this is a great book to try out.
Quotes:
On time management: Yet the modern discipline known as time management—like its hipper cousin, productivity—is a depressingly narrow-minded affair, focused on how to crank through as many work tasks as possible, or on devising the perfect morning routine, or on cooking all your dinners for the week in one big batch on Sundays.
On busyness: The problem isn’t exactly that these techniques and products don’t work. It’s that they do work—in the sense that you’ll get more done, race to more meetings, ferry your kids to more after-school activities, generate more profit for your employer—and yet, paradoxically, you only feel busier, more anxious, and somehow emptier as a result. In the modern world, the American anthropologist Edward T. Hall once pointed out, time feels like an unstoppable conveyor belt, bringing us new tasks as fast as we can dispatch the old ones; and becoming “more productive” just seems to cause the belt to speed up.
On the hedonic treadmill: It turns out that when people make enough money to meet their needs, they just find new things to need and new lifestyles to aspire to; they never quite manage to keep up with the Joneses, because whenever they’re in danger of getting close, they nominate new and better Joneses with whom to try to keep up. As a result, they work harder and harder, and soon busyness becomes an emblem of prestige. Which is clearly completely absurd: for almost the whole of history, the entire point of being rich was not having to work so much.
On idealism: The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control—when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life; when nobody’s angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about. Let’s start by admitting defeat: none of this is ever going to happen.
On task orientation: There was no anxious pressure to “get everything done,” either, because a farmer’s work is infinite: there will always be another milking and another harvest, forever, so there’s no sense in racing toward some hypothetical moment of completion. Historians call this way of living “task orientation,” because the rhythms of life emerge organically from the tasks themselves, rather than from being lined up against an abstract timeline, the approach that has become second nature for us today.
On time as an instrument: Once time is a resource to be used, you start to feel pressure, whether from external forces or from yourself, to use it well, and to berate yourself when you feel you’ve wasted it. When you’re faced with too many demands, it’s easy to assume that the only answer must be to make better use of time, by becoming more efficient, driving yourself harder, or working for longer—as if you were a machine in the Industrial Revolution—instead of asking whether the demands themselves might be unreasonable.
On mastering time: The trouble with attempting to master your time, it turns out, is that time ends up mastering you.
The Charisma Machine by Morgan G. Ames
I first read about the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) movement in Wired magazine when I was a teenager. I remembered feeling inspired after reading the ideas, interviews, and the author’s enthusiasm for it. It made an impression on me, which lay dormant in my mind until I recently learned that it was an abysmal failure. In this book, Morgan G. Ames unpacks the reasons for OLPC’s initial momentum, and eventual failure, through the lens of charisma. Its founder and principals, all incredibly powerful and widely-recognized technological luminaries (thought leaders, *ahem*), told a story of every child in the developing world having their own laptop through which they could learn anything. (I also just found out that OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte was Wired’s first investor.) That promise would not be met, and Ames explores what exactly happened in the implementation and roll out of OLPC’s XO-1 laptop. As I write this summary, it reminds me of Fyre Festival, except the founder and principals all distorted the outcome of the situation, told a story of success, and essentially failed up to even greater opportunities and power.
Quotes:
On ideology: When people imbue technologies with charisma, it is because they expect these technologies not only to be able to solve what they see as problems in the world but to do it in a way that agrees with and amplifies their deeply held core beliefs—their ideological frames—about how the world works.
On community: The imaginary of the naturally creative child de-emphasizes the extent to which creativity and play are socially motivated and socially learned. In particular, it ignores the important role that parents and other adults play in structuring a child’s world—by providing toys, environments, activities, role models, and more—to elicit certain kinds of play and creativity.
On school: The incongruities between the reality of a school system that is constantly “tinkering” with reforms and the imaginary of an unchanged and mechanical factory invite the question: why has the social imaginary of the factory model persisted? It turns out that it does cultural work for a certain group of powerful actors. For one, it renders the educational system both in urgent need of fixing and receptive to quick fixes—a site that matches utopian educational reform narratives such as Papert’s and OLPC’s.
On promise: Rather, it is focused on what effects these features were meant to have in the world; what mattered was not the object’s materiality so much as what it promised to do. As OLPC’s mission originally asserted, “OLPC is not at heart a technology program and the XO [laptop] is not a product in any conventional sense of the word. We are non-profit: constructionism is our goal; [the] XO is our means of getting there.
On charisma: Three key themes present in these principles—play, connectivity, and freedom—constitute the key pillars of OLPC’s charisma, and all were built into its laptop.
On community 2: OLPC’s idea of the self-taught learner who disdains school for computers thus discounted the critical role that various institutions—peers, families, schools, communities, and more—play in shaping a child’s educational motivation, technological practices, and identities.
On society: Moreover, by making education an individual experience where everybody (in theory) would have all the tools they needed to succeed, it shifted the burden of failure from the system—a flawed educational model, a corrupt government, an unjust economic structure, a missing or crumbling infrastructure—to the individual.
Further reading: You might also like The Empathy Diaries by Sherry Turkle, who worked at MIT at the same time as OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte and principal Seymour Papert (who was also Turkle’s former husband). In particular Turkle shares a snapshot into Negroponte’s and Papert’s working styles and worldviews.
Eat a Peach by David Chang and Gabe Ulla
The beauty of this book is in its relatability and versatility. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, a leader, an artist, an immigrant, or just a person who really likes food, you’re going to love Eat a Peach. As I wrote before, I had high expectations of this book, and it still managed to exceed it. I have recommended it to many friends and will continue doing so. I originally recommended this in last October’s newsletter, so I figured it was worth signal boosting again.
Quotes:
On food in Japan: After paying rent at the ministry and tuition at school, I was scrounging to make ends meet, but I could still eat like a king. That was the real epiphany. I could eat extraordinarily well in places that weren't punishingly expensive.
On depression: My sole breakthrough was a private one: if nothing mattered—if I wasn’t going to beat this depression and I wasn't going to make it in the fine-dining world—what did I have to lose? Why not at least try to create a world that worked for me?
Thoreau said, “I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.” I took that very much to heart as I contemplated suicide. Elevation through conscious endeavor. Work toward something. Open a restaurant. If it doesn't pan out, there's always the other path.
On the goal: That was the big idea: leave everyone walking out the door of Momofuku happy and surprised and glad to have spent their money.
We weren't even close.
On starting up: On our opening menu were gyoza, a few noodle soups, some snacks, and nothing that could be mistaken for a distinct point of view. Guests filled out sheets of paper with their orders. This was not an affectation but a necessity. Until Quino arrived one week before our opening, I didn't know that I would have anyone on staff, so I needed to make sure the restaurant could work with only one person, the way ramen shops do it in Japan.
On focus: Noodle Bar was going out of business because I was letting myself get pulled in every direction but the most important one. It was as though I were running around, hair out on purpose so that I wouldn't have a free second to stop and face the more difficult questions.
For instance: what the hell is this food we’re serving?
On peers: The reason we were still alive was that cooks liked us.
On being yourself: “YOU'LL ALWAYS LOSE WHEN YOU PLAY SOMEONE ELSE'S GAME.” Speaking of Allan Benton, not only was his bacon the catalyst for many of the culinary epiphanies we had at Momofuku, he also personally bestowed me with this nugget of wisdom. And once he said it, I realized Momofuku couldn't tell anyone else's story. We got rid of the dumplings and everything else that wasn't ours. We dedicated ourselves to making people play our game instead.
By the time we started writing the Momofuku cookbook, other restaurants were already copying our recipes. I was shocked, both by the fact that people were taking our cooking seriously and also that anyone would choose imitation as a strategy—a surefire path to mediocrity.
On eating shit: “Don't laugh,” he said sternly. Marshall told me that my job wasn't to cook food. It wasn't about looking at numbers or commanding people, either. My company would live or die based on my capacity to eat shit and like it. “I am going to watch you eat as many bowls of shit as our time will allow,” he said. We had plenty of time.
Eating shit meant listening. Eating shit meant acknowledging my errors and shortcomings. Eating shit meant facing confrontations that made me uncomfortable. Eating shit meant putting my cell phone away when someone was talking to me. Eating shit meant not fleeing. Eating shit meant being grateful. Eating shit meant controlling myself when people fell short of expectations. Eating shit meant putting others before myself.
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I started Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley, which I enjoyed but have put down. I also started Marshall Goldsmith’s What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, which is full of great common sense reminders for behavioral change. (In a quote I added, Goldsmith makes an appearance as an executive coach in Chang’s Eat a Peach.)
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I hope that some of these passages unlock the hidden doors of your mind. Maybe some will serve as catalysts for change. And remember, they’re signposts. It’s up to you whether you want to apply them or not. Reply to this and let me know which quotes or books resonate with you, what you think of the newsletter, and if there’s anything I can support you with.
Herbert
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