The book didn’t disappoint – it was hilarious, and had me giggling quietly to myself in public places. Like Bossypants (Tiny Fey, Amazon) she doesn’t cover the unbelievably hard work it must have been to achieve the level of success she has, but that didn’t bother me the way it did in Fey’s book, because it read more like a series of hilarious anecdotes than any kind of career narrative.
Loved it. LOVED IT! Recommend. And if you haven’t seen the TV show yet, get on that. It’s amazing and season 2 is just starting.
Essentially it lays out a framework for saying “no” that is in fact “Yes! No. Yes?” The first yes is the reason why you are saying no – no to that assignment, because your yes is commitment to quality? No to the overtime, because your yes is commitment to family time? This builds upon an idea from Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Amazon). The second yes, is the (hopefully win-win) proposal that you offer in the hopes of continuing, and even strengthening the relationship.
The only thing that irked me in this book was that it seemed that many of the examples involving women were disciplining children, or asking their husbands to work less. But despite that, I think it’s incredibly relevant – even with the extra issues women face saying no, or even because of them. Having a framework, being clear in commitments, is maybe extra necessary in that context.
The Misogyny Factor, by Ann Summers (Amazon) is AMAZING. Regardless of whether you live in Australia, if you are interested in the plight of women and the long and winding road we are taking to equality (no, we are not there yet), buy it and read it. It’s short – my Kindle estimated less than 90 minutes for me, and it is fascinating.
The political history of women in Australia is really interesting – they enacted a number of processes, especially for measuring, which were subsequently undone. This was easily missed by more people as it just seemed like a bureaucracy change, but how do you fix a problem when you are refusing to measure and acknowledge it?
The other key part of the book is pointing out the systematic inequalities, and the signs that we are yet to reach parity – e.g. in respect to pay. It’s not a matter of women “opting out”, that is only a small factor – 60% is down to other reasons, what the author terms “the misogyny factor”.
Perhaps the most important contribution of this book is that she has named the problem. Even once legal barriers are removed (and there were many! Women being forced to leave jobs in the public service after marriage, for example – until 1966), social barriers remain – this is the misogyny factor.
The book is expanded from a speech she gave (warning – R-rated version, with link to more vanilla version), which discussed the treatment of Julia Gillard, and whether if she was CEO of Australia Inc. rather than a politician, and Prime Minister of the country, she would have recourse to employment law as a result of her treatment. Fascinating, and Gillard’s own comments on the misogyny of the opposition leader (amazing video!) are also covered.
My overall impression of The Education of Millionaires (Amazon) was a bit meh. It conflates getting an arts degree with a university education in general, and many of the examples come from direct marketing, which seems irrelevant to me. I think the calculations on cost/benefit of degrees could have been vastly improved by discounting science and engineering graduates – the average salary of a BA is much lower. And, all these numbers are US-centric, other countries heavily subsidise their degree programs.
One of the people in his case studies suggests that it’s more important that kids learn how to sell than trigonometry – because they will never be stranded without a computer! But who designs and builds the computer (both software and hardware)? I’m going to say – people who have mastered trigonometry! That whole sentence just made me angry!
But, there were bits that resonated more with me – I like the focus on life-long learning, and whilst I found the focus on marketing and sales distasteful he defines marketing as speaking to people’s actual needs, solving their actual problems, which I find more compelling – it’s like the difference between solving actual problems, and made-up-engineer problems.
All the examples were people who bootstrapped their way up – no VC funding, just making things a little bigger each time. I really liked that; the VC funding model that you hear about in the tech world is making bets, looking for big wins – not at all what I would want to do if I went out on my own. Bootstrapping is more appealing to me.
All in all, I would say, don’t bother with this book. It’s a short read, but there are better ways to spend 3-6 hours of your time.
This book on wrongness – Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error (Amazon) – has to be one of the most fascinating I have read lately. It’s a surprisingly long, but very readable, book about why we get things wrong, what it feels like, and how we rewrite history in our heads to make it so that we were always right.
The terror of being wrong, and the feeling of discovering you were so incredibly wrong is covered with some fascinating examples – the deeply religious woman who became atheist and then found herself questioning that too, the woman who was the victim of a horrifying assault, and who later discovered that the wrong man was convicted, and the KKK leader who abandoned the KKK and became an advocate for civil rights.
Really recommend if you’ve ever been wrong about anything, ever.
How people interact with robots, what does “it’s alive enough” mean? Do we want to interact with robots because it is simpler, a robot can give us the illusion of the support and affection we crave, without the demands that other humans place on us?
Having robot carers for the young and old, the benefit is that they can always be there, but what about the downside? “Shouldn’t there be people for that?”.
Avoiding phone calls, because it seems intrusive, and yet feeling left out of one another’s lives. The way we stay in touch has changed. I’ve noticed that people find it weird that I call them – that to me, is something I do when I’m in the same timezone as someone. My “close” friends, I want to hang out with or have a “realtime” conversation with every week – and that means the phone.
Using online experiences like second life to explore areas of ourselves (example of artist programmer), and to escape – being immersed in a video game, and playing for such long hours, that miss out on life, fail at work etc.
Confessional communities – sometimes people confess rather than make amends, and the “secrets” may not actually be true. People may say that the negative comments aren’t important, but they still effect them. Good discussion about Post Secret, which I personally love to read every week. When I went to the Post Secret show, every seat had a postcard to write a secret on… I bought a card, wrote the pertinent part of my secret, and gave it to the person my secret was about instead. In the end, I felt – why send it a stranger to be maybe posted on a website? That does nothing. Maybe the option I chose did nothing either, but it at least felt less futile.
Anxiety – students experience of 9/11 was of disconnection, as teachers ushered them to the basement (reminiscent of the cold war era), and lack of connectivity (lack of phone) can make them anxious. They don’t really understand the terms and conditions of the sites they use, and have little expectation of privacy – one even talked about going to find a pay phone for conversations he wanted to keep private, and bemoaned them being hard to find. The level of maintenance that goes into profiles is stressful, and the way that online bleeds into offline can be anxiety-inducing.
Idea that online apologies are worthless; they are too easy.
The way people feel about people using cellphones rather than being fully present with them – especially kids around their parents. They are there, yet not.
Things It Made Me Think About
When I started reading this book, I was feeling the disappointment of human relationships that don’t live up to expectations. Breakups. Friends who let you down. People who are less than honest. Robot friends, I wasn’t sure about – (most of) my friends are so amazing, I don’t need an alternative or a backup. But the idea of a robot boyfriend? That appealed. It wouldn’t cancel on me at the last minute, be threatened by my job, make snarky remarks about how much money I must earn, resent business trips. It could do practical things like wait in for the plumber, reach high shelves (maybe?), carry my suitcase up the stairs when the elevator breaks (again), stoke my hair when I come home in tears because I’ve had a crappy day. And, let’s be brutally honest, the other physical aspects that I miss.
The book challenged me in these ways – to reconsider that the other appeal of that, is because it would allow me to have a selfish “romantic” relationship, one where I wouldn’t need to face the fear of being let down, or the difficult negotiations around priorities and time – it would be on my terms.
It made me consider that my ways of keeping in touch – blogging, status updates… the way people might perceive a lack of personalisation there, that they deserve. I could make more effort to be personal. One of my close friends wrote me a letter the other day as part of a project she’s doing. When she told me she was going to write me one I wondered why – we speak every day – but then I found it on my desk, and read it, and it was lovely. Really lovely. That piece of paper is a special thing that I’ll keep.
By the end of the book, I felt like I appreciated my human relationships more. I still see the appeal of a robot – something that wouldn’t let you down – but the special things about humans is when they don’t let you down, they could have. The complexity, the difficulty, and the unpredictability of human relationships is part of what makes them special. A robot replacement might be safer, but we would be the poorer for it.
Having been a foreigner in both China and the US, I found the cultural observations of this book (Amazon, which is only letting me link the Chinese version – the English version is here though), and the insights into the tech industry interesting. Particularly his time at Apple, and the need to create products out of research.
But, I didn’t really enjoy it. I found it far too self-aggrandizing. Which of course people say about Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In (Amazon) but that book is a million miles away from this one. The only negative part was the lawsuit from Microsoft after he took a job at Google, and it read as though he was trying to settle the score there somewhat.
The guy is incredibly smart, works really hard, and has a stay at home wife. I’m sure there’s more to it, but in the end I found nothing to relate to, and nothing that inspired me.
I absolutely adored Sonia Sotomayor’s autobiography, My Beloved World (Amazon). She came from an underprivileged immigrent background, with an alcoholic father and a major health issue (diabetes) and is now on the Supreme Court. It’s an incredible story, really honest – she clearly worked incredibly hard, but there’s stories of failure (like her marriage, and an early internship) and insecurity in their too.
One of my favorite parts was discovering that she worked as a punch card programmer! And actually wrote her thesis on punch cards!
Really, really recommend this book. She’s an incredible woman.
I was reading Tina Fey’s book Bossypants (Amazon) as part of a group of us at work – after reading Lean In (Amazon) and having a discussion group, this came up as one to read next. Then I read an article complaining about her feminism, which I went looking for only to find this article about criticism of her, which I found more compelling so I’ll share that instead.
It’s an amusing book, and one I enjoyed as a memoir. In terms of being a successful woman, little was mentioned, although it was clear she has an incredible work ethic. In fact, I started the book looking for any insight into how she became so successful but there were so many depreciating remarks that I finished the book with the question, is she so uncomfortable with it?
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I bought Mindy Kaling’s “Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?” (Amazon) because I absolutely adore The Mindy Project (Amazon) – a tv series about a smart, funny, curvy woman of colour that I think passes the Bechdel test every episode.
This book on wrongness – 
