I first read this book in October 2010 while scrambling to learn as much as I could about communication and rhetoric in preparation for marriage. Since then, there have been zero household arguments, which is not a bad thing. Fortunately, the Internet, newspapers, and books provide a steady stream of logical fallacies that let me exercise the skills I picked up from this book.

The insight that stuck with me from this book was that you should repair holes in your opponents’ arguments—argue their case more strongly than they did—before demolishing the strengthened arguments. People rarely do this, but I’ve seen a couple of good examples on the political/feminist blogs I read.

It reminds me of what we need to do in order to help people deal with their concerns to new ideas or technologies. It’s not enough to fight against straw-man arguments. You may need to be more concerned about people’s concerns than they are, before you can help them find a way forward.

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Whenever I want to pick up more tips on how to read better, I turn to How to Read a Book. This is not some speed-reading manual that overpromises and underdelivers. It’s a thoughtful, practical guide to getting the most out of your reading: picking the right speed for a book, taking better notes, building a topical index of books and their relationships with each other… (Still working on that!) The book has plenty of tips for reading specific subjects, and even includes exercises to help you improve your skills.

If you already enjoy reading books, this is probably going to be a fantastic book for you. If you’re working on getting more books into your life, this might have some tips that will help you read more strategically.

How to Read a Book
Mortimer J. Adler and Charles van Doren
New York: Simon & Schuster 1972 Rev. ed.
ISBN: 0-671-21209-5

(Click image for a larger version)

The Start-up of You is a book about networking and career planning using tips pulled from the startup world, sprinkled with hip jargon such as “pivot” and “volatility.” It’s a decent book for people who are new to connecting or cultivating their network and who also like reading about technology and entrepreneurship. If you’re a fan of The Lean Startup and similar entrepreneurship books, The Start-up of You is like seeing those ideas applied to other parts of life. It’s easy to read, and it flows well.

I liked examples such as the “interesting people fund” and the idea of having A-B-Z plans. There are good tips for asking your network better questions (p208), too. If you’ve read a lot of other networking or career growth books, though, you might not come across many new aha! moments here, but it’s a good startup-influenced view at managing your own career.

Are you a visual learner? Check out my other sketchnotes and visual book notes!

(Click on the image to see a larger version, which could be good for reading my teeny-tiny handwriting. If you need a text version instead of an image, leave a comment or e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.)

You know how I was looking for books about people-centered entrepreneurship? Checking the Amazon list of books on new enterprises led me to 6 Secrets for Startup Success by John Bradberry. Its main point is that entrepreneurs tend to fall in love with their ideas and end up ignoring reality. Bradberry points out six common failures associated with being too attached to your idea, and suggests ways to avoid those pitfalls. One of those ways is to focus on people instead of on your product or service idea. This is more of an overview book than a step-by-step guide with concrete tactics, but it’s a good wake-up call if you’re starting to get lost in your own dreams.

In addition to the chapter about focusing on people, I particularly liked the chapter on figuring out your math story. Bradberry points out that companies go through different stages and that your core question is different in each stage. In the first stage, the question is: “Do we have a concept that anyone (other than us) cares about?” After you successfully answer that question through prototypes and experiments, you can move on to the question, “Can we actually make money at this? How?” Validating your business model lets you move on to the next question, “Is this business scalable? How can we create significant value over time?” Many businesses struggle because they get all wrapped up in the third question before they’ve answered the first. It’s a good idea to keep those considerations in mind, of course, but it’s important to pay attention to the steps that will get you to that point instead of jumping ahead and pretending you’re a huge company.

What I’m learning from this book: Yes, it seems to make sense to focus on people and let them teach you what they want. (The Lean Startup makes this point as well.) There’s room in the world for wildly visionary companies, but it’s perfectly okay (and much less risky) to start by creating something people already want.

Whom this book is great for: Worried that you’re getting too wrapped up in your entrepreneurial vision? This book might help as a reality check. If you like answering questionnaires as a way of learning more about yourself, you’ll also want to check out the appendix, which has a long self-assessment for founder readiness.

You may also be interested in The Lean Startup (Eric Ries, 2011; see my visual book notes), which has lots of good ideas for testing your business and iterating your way towards success. The Lean Startup book will help translate the chapters on the pull of the market and startup agility into concrete terms.

6 Secrets to Startup Success: How to Turn Your Entrepreneurial Passion into a Thriving Business
John Bradberry
2011, AMACOM
ISBN: 978-0814416068

Please feel free to share this! (Creative Commons Attribution Licence)

Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup book is popular, and for good reason. Ries shows people how to make the most of the Build-Measure-Learn loop whether they’re starting a snazzy technology company or creating an intrapreneurial venture within a corporation. Many people get hung up on the idea of launching with a big bang, but if you take this Lean Startup approach, you might learn a lot more by talking to actual customers and by experimenting with with your business. I particularly like the reminder to simulate technology with people first, as it can be tempting to procrastinate getting market feedback because your technology isn’t built yet. Do it by hand. Do it for one person at a time, if needed. There’s plenty to learn, and you don’t have to let development cycles slow you down.

Ries also emphasizes the importance of pivoting, which is what you do when you realize that your original business idea was off the mark. Pivoting is about listening to customers and growing into the business they want you to be, while taking advantage of the things you’ve learned in the past and the assets you’ve already built. Sometimes you should persevere instead of getting distracted by one or two stray opinions, but other times, you should listen to what people (and your experiments!) tell you.

Another key point in this book is that of accelerating this feedback loop. Get faster at building, measuring, and learning from the results. Orient your organization towards it. Practise relentless improvement until your build-measure-learn loop is fast and smooth. Then your company will be an incredible engine for learning!

Whom this book is great for: Starting a company? Read this book. You’ll get lots of tips from it, and you could save lots of time, money, and frustration along the way.

Interested in making things happen even within a large company? You might be able to use the build-measure-learn loop to make your day job even better, or to create scalable value outside your typical job responsibilities.

What I’m learning from this book: I’m using the concierge approach to help people with Quantified Awesome, because it’s fun building something that’s tailored to the way people work and what people want to measure. My goal is to get to the point where people are happy to pay $1-5 a month for tools to help them ask and answer questions about their life using data. I’m also going to work on using the build-measure-learn approach for entrepreneurship (a meta-experiment!), and using the minimum-viable-product approach to writing a book using LeanPub. Someday I might even use split-tests – or better yet, help businesses use them to set up experiments!

What do you think of this format? Do you want more detail? Less detail? More drawings? More hand-writing? More stick figures? What other books would you like me to visually summarize? I’m near one of the world’s biggest library systems, and I love learning from and sharing good books.

J- brought home her report card this week. She did well in so many subjects that it’s hard to pick which strength to build on first. Her mathematics study group sessions and science projects paid off, as did her personal interest in music.

To celebrate her work, W- and I made a colourful card. She likes making greeting cards for us, and it was fun making one for her.

It’s important to acknowledge good work. One time, W- was reviewing J-‘s answers to the math exercises he gave her. “Very good,” he said. He crumpled the finished piece of paper.

I plucked it from his hands and smoothened it out. “Ahem,” I said meaningfully.

“Oops. I tossed the other one already,” confessed W-. I retrieved the previous paper from the recycling bin and uncrumpled it. W- made a point of scoring both papers and adding smileys. J- beamed.

Ah, behavioural psychology at home. You can influence people’s motivation by acknowledging or devaluing their work. In The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home (Dan Areily, 2010), I read about experiments that explored how motivated people were if they thought their results were meaningless. As it turns out, people are strongly affected by the immediate perception of the usefulness of their work.

In a task involving assembling Lego figures, participants who completed figures and put them into a box did more and enjoyed the task more than participants whose figures were disassembled right after they finished completing them. Another experiment described in the book involved finding pairs of letters on pages, a small payment scheme that stopped at the 10th sheet, and three scenarios where:

• people wrote their names on the papers they completed, and they were positively acknowledged by the experimentr
• people completed and submitted papers with no names and without acknowledgement
• people submitted papers that were then shredded, unread, right in front of them

49% of the people who were acknowledged went on to complete ten sheets or more, while only 17% of the people whose work was immediately shredded completed 10 or more. Only 18% of the people whose work was ignored completed ten sheets or more.

Verbal acknowledgment of good work is good, but could it be at odds with the physical message of tossing the paper into the recycling bin? Best to be coherent. So the paper is celebrated, labeled, and put into a folder.

W- reminds me of this principle too, when I forget. On the way home from work one day, I brought up how he spent some time selecting and copying items from the workbook onto a piece of paper for J-‘s exercises. “Should we get a workbook without explanations, so J- can test herself?” I asked W-.

“No, it’s okay. Besides, it shows her that I value this,” W- said. “If I give her a workbook so that I can do something else, it’s not the same.”

We invest learning with meaning and value, and that helps.

I love research-backed books that help us understand why we do what we do. Paula Szuchman and Jenny Anderson’s Spousonomics: Using Economics to Master Love, Marriage, and Dirty Dishes was no exception. The book takes a look at common marital conflicts and situations, showing the underlying economic principles that influence our actions. For example:

• Division of labour: Splitting chores equally may not result in the most efficient or the happiest of marriages. Specialize, remembering that payoffs can change over time.
• Loss aversion: People hate to lose, which can result in really drawn-out fights. The advice to “never go to bed angry” can backfire. It’s okay to have time-outs.
• Supply and demand: If you want something to happen more often, don’t make it costly or risky.
• Moral hazard: It’s easy to take good things for granted. It’s also easy to end up trying to avoid any sort of conflict. The sweet spot is in the middle, where you’re not taking your relationship for granted, but you’re not paranoid about your spouse quitting.
• Incentives: Think about the incentives you use and if they’re really effective. Trust can be much more useful than nagging.
• Trade-offs: Think at the margin: consider the costs and benefits of small changes. Ignore sunk costs when making decisions. Get over the “it’s not fair” fixation.
• Asymmetric information: Communicate clearly. Don’t play games by hiding or withholding information. Figure out the essentials of what you need to share so that you don’t overload your spouse.
• Intertemporal choice: It’s easy to make good decisions for the future, but hard to stick with those decisions in the present. Use commitment devices to help you stick with your resolutions or good ideas.
• Bubbles: Non-bubbly married life is normal, so don’t stress out if you’re no longer infatuated. Beware of being unduly influenced by groups – just because everyone else seems to be doing something doesn’t mean it’s right for you, too. Don’t get overconfident.
• Game theory: Don’t let the urge to retaliate or overcompensate lead to you to wildly polarized positions. Work together to get optimal results, not just individually-optimal results, and use commitment devices to help you stick with it.

The book goes into far more depth, and is an excellent read. It’s illustrated with case studies (problem couples who usually end up patching things up) and lots of research.

Here are some thoughts I particularly like:

If there are areas you care about but you feel helpless in, put in the time and effort to develop the comparative advantage in at least one of them. The authors tell the story of one economist who put the time into at least learning how to bathe an infant so that his wife wouldn’t end up with all the child-rearing tasks – and so that he wouldn’t get tempted to take advantage of that kind of a division.

Looking for things to read? In terms of marriage research, I’d recommend “Spousonomics” and Susan Page’s “The 8 Essential Traits of Couples who Thrive”. What do you like?