Category: Other Books

I recently read “Committed” by Elizabeth Gilbert. Below are the quotes I found most interesting. As always, if you like the quotes, please buy the book here.

It doesn’t take a great genius to recognize that when you’re pushed by circumstance to do the one thing you have always most specifically loathed and feared, this can be, at the very least, an interesting growth opportunity. Page 20

The emotional place where marriage begins is not nearly as important as the emotional place where a marriage finds itself toward the end, after many years of partnership. Peach 41

Marriage becomes hard work once you have poured the entirety of your life’s expectations for happiness into the hands of one mere person. Page 48

When we speak today, then, about “holy wedded matrimony,” or the “sanctity of marriage,” we would do well to remember that, for approximately 10 centuries, Christianity itself did not see marriage is even holy or sanctified. Marriage was certainly not modeled as the ideal state of moral being. On the contrary, the early Christian fathers regarded the habit of marriage as a somewhat repugnant worldly affair that had everything to do with sex and females and taxes and property, and nothing whatsoever to do higher concerns of Divinity. Page 58

So when modern-day religious conservatives wax nostalgic about how marriage is a sacred tradition that reaches back into history for thousands of uninterrupted years, they are absolutely correct, but in only one respect-only if they happen to be talking about Judaism. Christianity simply does not share that deep and consistent historical reverence toward matrimony. Lately it has, yes-but not originally. For the first thousand or so years of Christian history, the church regarded monogamous marriage as marginally less wicked than flat out whoring-but only very marginally. Page 58

The big romantic white weddings that we now think of as “traditional” didn’t come into being until the 19th century-not until a teenaged Queen Victoria walked down the aisle in a fluffy white gown, thereby setting the fashion trend that has never gone out of style sense. Before that, though your average European wedding day wasn’t all that much different from any other day of the week. Couples exchanged vows in impromptu ceremonies that generally lasted only a few moments. Witnesses became important on wedding days only so that later there would be no argument in the courts as to whether or not this couple had really consented to marriage-a vital question when money, land, or children were at stake. Page 62

The churches strict new prohibitions against divorce turned marriage into a life sentence-something it had never really been before, not even in ancient Hebrew society. Page 64

It wasn’t until the year 1975 that the married women of Connecticut were legally allowed to take out loans or open checking accounts without the written permission of their husbands. Page 66

A love-based marriage does not guarantee the lifelong binding contract of a clan-based marriage or an asset-based marriage; it cannot. Page 81

Maybe divorce is the tax we collectively pay as a culture for daring to believe in love-or at least, for daring to link love to such a vital social contract as matrimony. Page 83

Research shows that the more unsettled and unbalanced we feel, the more quickly and recklessly we are likely to fall in love. Page 100

When you become infatuated with somebody, you’re not really looking at that person; you’re just captivated by your own reflection, intoxicated by a dream of completion that you’ve projected on a virtual stranger. Page 101

Real, sane, mature love-the kind that pays the mortgage year after year and pick up the kids after school-is not based on infatuation but on affection and respect. Page 102

Most affairs begin, Glass wrote, when a husband or wife makes a new friend, and then an apparently harmless intimacy is born. Page 109

We were just experienced enough to recognize that relationships do sometimes end, and it seemed willfully childish to pretend that such a thing could never happen to us. Page 115

If you think it’s difficult to talk about money when you’re blissfully in love, try talking about it later, when you are disconsolate and angry and your love has died. Page 116

Mutual meekness can make for a successful partnering strategy, if it’s what both people want. Conflict averse couples prefer to let their grievances dissolve rather than fight over every point. Page 118

Noble urges notwithstanding, if you really cannot tolerate living with somebody, not even a terrorist attack can save your marriage. Page 120

The age of the couple at the time of their marriage seems to be the most significant consideration. The younger you are when you get married, the more likely you are to divorce later. Infact, you are astonishingly more likely to get divorced if you marry young. You are, for example 2 to 3 times more likely to get divorced if you marry in your teens or early 20s than if you wait until your 30s or 40s. Page 123

Anybody can love the most wonderful parts of another person. But that’s not the clever trick. The really clever trick is this: can you accept the flaws? Can you look at your partners faults honestly and say, “I can work around that I can make something out of that.”? Because the good stuff is always going to be there, it’s always going to be pretty and sparkly, the crap underneath can ruin you. Page 130

There is hardly a more gracious gift that we can offer somebody and than to accept them fully, to love them almost despite themselves. I say this because listing our flaws so openly to each other was not some cutesy gimmick, but a real effort to reveal the points of darkness contained in our characters. Page 130

The marital kitchen can become something like a small linoleum temple where we are called up daily to practice forgiveness, as we ourselves would like to be forgiven. Page 132

In the end, it seems to me that forgiveness may be the only realistic antidote we are offered in love, to combat the inescapable disappointments of intimacy. Page 133

We must not automatically assume that matrimonial endurance is always a sign of matrimonial contentment. Page 148

She was so happy because she knew that she was indispensable to somebody else’s life. She was happy because she had a partner, because they were building something together, because she believed deeply in what they were building, because it amazed her to be included in such an undertaking. Page 165

Widespread childlessness is not quite so modern a development as we tend to believe. Page 191

I have written many pages already describing marriage s a repressive tool used against women, but it’s important to remember that marriage is often used as a repressive tool against men, too. Marriage is a harness of civilization, linking a man to set of obligations and thereby containing his restless energy. Page 197

If there is one thing I have learned over the years about men, it is that feelings of powerlessness do not usually bring forth their finest qualities. Page 205

I do forget sometimes how much it means for certain men-for certain people-to be able to provide their loved ones with material comforts of protection at all times. I forget how dangerously reduced some men can feel when that basic ability has been stripped from them. I forget how much that matters to men, what it represents. Page 210

A surefire indication that flooding is imminent is when you start using the words “always” or “never” in your argument. The Gottmans call this “going universal” as in: “you always let me down like this!” Or “I can never count on you!”. Such language absolutely murders any chance of fair or intelligent discourse. Page 214

Out of respect, we must learn how to release and confine each other with the most exquisite care, but we should never-not even for a moment-pretend that we are not confined. Page 226

Traveling through Cambodia with a Cambodian, I decided, must be something like exploring a house that had recently been the scene of a grizzly family mass murder, guided along on your tour by the only relative who managed to escape death. Page 220

It may have been a messy and botched experience, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have gone. Sometimes life is messy and botched. We do our best. We don’t always know the right move. Page 231

This is intimacy: the trading of stories in the dark. 239

What my friends and family really wanted was to be able to move on with their lives knowing with certainty where everybody stood in relationship to everybody else. Page 249

Like clockwork, the powers that be will now try to co-opt the notion of matrimony, going so far as to pretend that they invented marriage in the first place. This is what conservative Christian leadership is been doing in the Western world for several centuries now-acting as though they personally created the whole tradition of marriage and family values when in fact their religion began with a quite serious attack on marriage and family values. Page 263

Suddenly, legal matrimony starts to look less like an institution (a strict, immovable, hidebound, and dehumanizing system imposed by powerful authorities on helpless individuals) and starts to look more like a rather desperate concession (a scramble by helpless authorities to monitor the unmanageable behavior of two awfully powerful individuals). Page 264

As always, if you liked the quotes, please buy the book here.

I recently read “Billion Dollar lessons: What you can learn from the most inexcusable business failures of the last 25 years” by Paul Carroll and Chunka Mui. Below are the quotes I found most interesting. As always, if you like the quotes, please buy the book here.

If a company followed one of these seven strategies it was far more likely to flop: synergy, financial engineering, roll ups, staying the course, adjacencies, riding technology and consolidation. Page 4 to 5

We found that companies that fail often do so because they overestimate the loyalty of customers. Page 6

Most analysis goes to support a decision that’s already been made, rather than to see whether it’s really a good idea in the first place. Page 8

It’s hard to explore options that attack core assumptions and values, such as those about what customers are actually buying, where profit comes from, the business model, and the very notion of being an independent, growth oriented company. Page 87

In 1986, Kodak produced the first working version of the type of sensor that is at the core of today’s digital cameras. But despite having a solid decade following 1981, Kodak did not take advantage of its early warning and did little to ready itself for the onslaught of digital technology because it consistently tried to hold onto the profits from its old technology and underestimated the speed with which the new would take hold. Page 93

There’s a long history in the technology world of people moving up the learning curve and doing things for themselves that they used to pay others to do for them. Page 95

As Kodak demonstrated ably, companies that face looming threat of makes three mistakes: They tend to see the future as a variant of the present and can’t bring themselves to imagine truly radical threats, the kind that might wipe out their whole market.

They tend to consider whether to adopt a new technology or business practice based on how the economics compare with those of the existing business-not accounting for the possibility that the new technology or approach to business will eventually kill the economics of the existing business and require an entirely new business model.

They tend not to consider all their options. They focus on shoring up the existing business and ignore the possibility that perhaps they should sell that business or at least cut back significantly. Page 100

The worse the current business looks, the more likely a company is to make a bad bet on an adjacent market. Page 123

Look at the differences. Be systematic. How do the sales channels different in the new market? How do the customers differ? How do the products differ? Are the regulatory environments different? Page 139

By the time a company gets to due diligence, it’s hoping to confirm that the strategy is a good one. Page 140

The key mistakes that lead companies to ride the wrong technology into disaster:

They evaluate their offering in isolation or at at a single point in time, rather than in the context of how alternatives will evolve over time.

They confuse market research with marketing, allowing their entrenched interests and hopes to color the analysis of true market potential.

They find false security in competition, incorrectly thinking that the presence of rivals equates to a validation of potential market.

They design the effort as a frontloaded gamble, foreclosing possibilities for adaptation and severely limiting the option stop. Page 153

There’s a saying in Silicon Valley that the worst thing you can do to a start up is to give it too much money. Page 162

Too often, companies fail to realize that, while their technology might be superior at a point in time, an alternative technology is on a clear trajectory to surpass it. Page 164

To get outside of your own biases, look at potential offerings through the eyes of customers. Page 166

The four kinds of issues that can be set a consolidation place:

You may not just be buying the assets you think you’re buying; you may also be buying problems.

While the focus is generally on getting bigger to generate economies of scale, there may also be diseconomies of scale because of increased complexity.

Although companies typically assume that they can hold onto customers of a company they buy, that’s often not the case.

If you’re just thinking about being the industry’s consolidator, you may not be considering all your options. Page 179

A Bain study found 80% of companies thought their products were superior to their competitors’-even though only 8% of customers agreed. Page 213

Even if assumptions have a 95% chance of being right, if you have to make 10 of those assumptions you have a less than 60% chance that all will occur. Page 228

Framing forecasts as personal bets forces those involved to be very clear. Page 248

Surowiecki gives four conditions for wise crowds: diversity of opinion, meaning that each person person should have some private information, even if it’s just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts; independence, meaning that peoples opinions are not determined by the opinions of those around them; decentralization, meaning that people are able to specialize in drawn local knowledge; and aggregation, meaning that some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision. Page 250

Researchers at Intel, which also had success with prediction markets, named three factors that lead to strong performance: anonymity and incentives, which encourage honest, unbiased information; the averaging of multiple opinions, which produces smooth, accurate signals; and feedback, which enables participants to evaluate past performance and learn how to weigh information and produce better results. Patient 250

We often use an exercise we’ve dubbed “being your own worst competitor.” In it, we divide managers into small groups and give them a simple charge: Imagine you know everything you already know about your company and industry. You get a call from an investor with plenty of capital who offers to fund the competitive venture to your current business. Assuming no non-compete restrictions, how could you destroy your current employer and other competition and dominate the industry? We then send them off to develop business plans to do just this. Page 251

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I recently read “Playing For Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made” by David Halberstam. Below are the quotes I found most interesting. As always, if you like the quotes, please buy the book here.

“Jordan was the most gifted athlete in the league, but unlike most other supremly gifted players, he had an additional quality rare among superb artists whose chosen work comes so easily: He was an overachiever as well.” (14)

“At Carolina, the ethic seemed to come from another time: The more you sacrificed for a goal – the higher the price you paid in personal terms – the more it would one day mean to you.” (80)

“What was interesting about the intensity of Jordan’s practice habits, thought Steve Hale, was that they were rare for a player so naturally gifted.” (99)

“It was part of David Stern’s innate wisdom that in the long run if you did the right thing and did not try to take credit for too much of what you did, then people would give you not only the right amount of credit, but perhaps even more.” (121)

“Rob Strasser was a man driven by impulse and faith in his own instincts, and his instinct when he had an idea was to go for it.” (143)

“Jordan turned to Falk and said, “Let’s make the deal.”
“But you never cracked a smile, or showed any enthusiasm,” Falk said to him.
“I had my business face on,” Jordan answered, and with that Falk had a quick sense that he was dealing with more than just another bright, talented athlete, that there were dimensions to this young man that he was still to learn.” (145)

“As Jordan smiled, race simply fell away. Michael was no longer a black man, he was just someone you wanted to be with, someone you wanted as your friend. The smile was truly charismatic, Moore reflected in later years. It belonged to a man completely comfortable with himself and therefore comfortable with others.” (146)

“Jordan was the first player at every practice and the last to leave, the hardest-working NBa practice player any of them had ever seen.” (152)

“The love could not be coached or faked, and it was something he always had. He was joyous about practices, joyous about games, as if he could not wait for either.” (153)

“Opposing teams got the killer, and the fans watching the Nike commercials got the charmer, a man of humor and intelligence, someone everyone seemed to like. “We broke i open, and we did it not by brilliance, but by sensing what felt right, and showing him as a human being,” Riswold said years later.” (182)

“Phil Jackson was also very smart, one step ahead of them at almost all times, and they knew they could not con him. The fact that he was not easily predictable was an asset, Rosen thought. It kept the players interested.” (194)

“Winning teams, Isiah Thomas decided, always saw themselves as being apart, taking on the rest of the world. If they did not have enemies who were trying to take away what was rightfully theirs, then they invented enemies in order to help push themselves toward their goals.” (237)

“Daly did not push it that evening, he simply told Isiah to think about it, and take a couple of days before he made up his mind, knowing that the very force that drove Thomas to this point of desperation, the passion to compete and win, would keep him in the game, that his disappointment and depression were the other side of the coin of love of the game and the need to excel.” (240)

“If there was one critical quality to coaching in the NBA, it was the ability to let go, to accept the occasional defeat on nights when you knew your team should have won.” (247)

“Whom the tabloids first inflate, they eventually attempt to destroy, or at least try to diminish.” (322)

“But when his pessimism was at its greatest, he would drive past a playground and watch a bunch of kids playing even as darkness fell, and he could envision the young B.J. Armstrong playing into the night and dreaming of playing in the NBA. Then he would remember tha the had been lucky enough to live out his dream.” (330)

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I recently read “The Education Of A Coach” by David Halberstam. Below are the quotes I found most interesting. As always, if you like the quotes, please buy the book here.

“Belichick’s general defensive philosophy was simple: Find out what the other guys do best – which is what they always want to do, especially under pressure in a big game – take it away from them, and make them do things that they are uncomfortable with.” (3)

“But his ego was about the doing; it was fused into a larger purpose, that of his team winning. It was never about the narcissistic celebration of self that television loved to amplify.” (21)

“Some were completely seduced by fame, a sure sign that they would begin to slip in their chosen professions, and the rewards would quickly be pulled away. You could fall from celebrity in contemporary America almost as quickly as you had achieved it.” (23)

“Years later Bill Belichick would understand what made his father so good a scout: the absolute dedication to his craft, the belief that it was important, and the fact that so many people – the people who paid his salary, his colleagues, and the young men who played for him – were depending on him.” (72)

“What Bill Belichick remembered about his father in those years, perhaps the most important thing of all, something that lasted with him, was that he seemed to come home from work happy each night, a sign that he loved his work, and always seemed eager to go to work, and that the other mean, the men he worked with, obviously respected him greatly.” (80)

“He was saying that most scouts looked at other teams and thought that the most important thing was to find out what their weakness was, but the right way to do it was to search for their strengths and try to take that away from them, and make them do what they don’t want to do.” (82)

“He wanted the grunt work. He understood that the key to success, the secret to it, was the mastery of the grunt work, all the little details.” (110)

“Brady might not have Montana’s sheer natural ability in making reads, but he had driven himself so hard that superior preparation and superior instincts now were blended together.” (227)

“This is what the NFL was all about, that the better you were, the harder you worked.” (229)

“in the end the reward for what he and the staff and the players had done was the right to try and do it again under even more pressure.” (268)

“What sometimes bothered the media was that he was too straight, that he had so little in the way of artifice. “What’s interesting about him, and was judged a weakness in Cleveland,” Richmond said, “was that he did not play any games. There’s nothing fake, and there never was. He is what he is. There is no pretense, and he is utterly authentic in a world where because of television there is more and more which is inauthentic. What is troubling about all this is that a lot of people are more comfortable with the inauthentic, if it is reassuring, than they are with the truth, if it is not reassuring. He doesn’t play the role of the coach. Instead he is the coach.” (271)

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