Book examples: In the Plex, Masters of Doom, Steve Jobs, Founders at Work, Coders at Work

He would go around to people and say "I heard Joe sucks". If the people strongly defended Joe, he was probably pretty good. If nobody stuck up for him, Joe might indeed suck.

I knew Steve, I happen to agree, but de mortuis nil nisi bonum, as they say. :)

The best? Probably Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, but I can't say all the other books (most non-fiction) weren't great

It goes way in depth about the journey surrounding Steve Jobs.

Have a look http://blog.kaipakartik.com for the books I enjoyed reading

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs_(book)

Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
by Richard Feynman

Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance

My Life and Work by Henry Ford

My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla by Ben Johnston and Nikola Tesla

The Autobiography of Charles Darwin by Charles Darwin

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin

The challenge was to massage the numbers of the deal so he could see his 30% and approve it.

Also the 30% is often the budget for the Sales and Marketing operation in a typical organization.

Jobs was constantly called by HR for meetings during late 80's due to his behavior. Source - Steve Jobs book

Children of Time - (Tchaikovsky)

Steve Jobs (Isaacson) - as an aside, I've started reading his daughters (Lisa) book Small Fry

The Colour out of Space - (Lovecraft)

iWoz (Wozniak)

The Design of Everyday Things (Norman)

The Hard Thing about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

Strategy Rules - Five Timeless Lessons from Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs by David B. Yoffie, Michael A. Cusumano

These are all timely books and recently written.

- Reamde, by Neal Stephenson. What a let down, very formulaic.

- Vortex, by Robert Charles Wilson (sequel to Spin and Axis). Spin is a must-read, Vortex was quite pleasant and brings a satisfying closure to the series.

- Permanence, by Karl Schroeder (re-read). Lots of awesome tidbits (property, rights, AR, anthropocentrism) scattered through an entertaining semi-hard sci-fi space opera.

- La Zone du Dehors, by Alain Damasio. A spiritual sequel to 1984.

- Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury (finally!)

- The Affinities, by Robert Charles Wilson

- La Horde du Contrevent, by Alain Damasio (in progress). A fantastic, ontologic, poetic story about the wind.

As well as a couple non-fiction:

- Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! This is made of pure awesomesauce and perfectly captures the kind of spirit at the root of hackerdom.

- Pale Blue Dot, by Carl Sagan (in progress). Humbling.

- Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson. Surprised me in many ways.

- Vagabonding (Potts): made me travel more than ever

- Steve Jobs (Isaacson): amazing life story, beautifully described

- The Mom Test: required reading for any young founder/PM IMO, I've gifted this more than any other book

- It doesn't have to be crazy at work (DHH/Fried): best advice on how to run a company in a sustainable way to maximize team happiness & output

- Masters of Doom: epically entertaining, super nostalgic

If you read the iPad chapter in Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, you would see that Intel was Jobs original pick for the iPad CPU. They fell out over a few issues, power consumption and control of the chip design being but two of them.

Barbarians Led by Bill Gates is an older book, but interesting to get a sense of MS was like in earlier times.

Isaacson's Steve Jobs is obviously focused on Job, but gives a good sense of the companies he ran while he was there.

Revolution in The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made is a good view into the Mac specifically.

* Boomerang by Michael Lewis

* Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

* The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

* The Thank You Economy by Gary Vaynerchuk

Having your factory retool weeks before you launch an unproven product because you don't like the glass? Not very pragmatic.

Steve Jobs - Walter Isaacson (recommended)

Modern Romance - Aziz Ansari (audiobook recommended)

Boomerang - Michael Lewis (great if you have a light interest in macroeconomics)

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (recommended)

Outliers - Malcolm Gladwell (recommended)

Joyland - Stephen King (great, short read)

Creativity, Inc. - Ed Catmull (Parts on the history of Pixar were interesting)

Without an iPad, I wouldn't understand touch interface design and UX. I probably wouldn't have read Steve Jobs biography, or Mark Cuban's ebook. But I did, and they inspired me to create. I successfully learned to program through Xcode and my iPad, because making something that you can touch right before your eyes is amazingly delightful and encouraging. Sometimes I read fantastic articles on Flipboard, or HN, and I get great ideas. Sometimes the first thing I do in the morning is check my app sales from the day before while in bed. I look at my sales graph and rankings. Regardless of whether the number is good or bad, my brain starts firing off on how I can do better, or why such and such is happening.

All these things inherently require me to consume, but lead to some form of productivity. Most HN'ers don't channel surf or watch TV for the sake of killing time. We're productivity freaks, so we only watch things we're really interested in, or things we think we can learn from. Consumption on the iPad seems to be exactly the same.

* Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep)

* Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4806.Longitude)

* Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Chris Voss (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26156469-never-split-the...)

* Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25852784-evicted)

* Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11084145-steve-jobs)

PSA: if you use an e-reader or like audiobooks, check out Libby: https://meet.libbyapp.com/

I'm not affiliated with them. Nice app for borrowing ebooks and audiobooks from your local library.

> An early showdown came over employee badge numbers. Scott assigned #1 to Wozniak and #2 to Jobs. Not surprisingly, Jobs demanded to be #1. “I wouldn’t let him have it, because that would stoke his ego even more,” said Scott. Jobs threw a tantrum, even cried. Finally, he proposed a solution. He would have badge #0. Scott relented, at least for the purpose of the badge, but the Bank of America required a positive integer for its payroll system and Jobs’s remained #2.

Isaacson, Walter (2011-10-24). Steve Jobs (p. 83). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

For this reason I avoid reading books for the most part, and probably read one book a year at best. My to-read list is short and highly scrutinized - I probably spend days making sure a book is worth the time and memory investment. Once I apply that logic, every book I've read has been extremely rewarding and I can at least write a few thousand word summary of each. I also constantly find instances in real life when I can use anecdotes from these books and people are surprised that I remember them. It also helps that for almost every book I deliberately sought out the best tome in the topic I wanted to learn more from.

My reading list from the past 5 years or so:

1. Making of the atomic bomb by Richard Rhodes
2. Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman
3. On Writing by Stephen King
4. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaccson
5. The Logic of Chance by Eugene Koonin
6. GEB (gave up on this one though)

I am no Apple fan, as a matter of fact I don't like the look and feel of their product but I gained a great admiration for Steve Jobs because he seemed like a man in immense suffering. I'm not talking about the obvious physical pain of cancer and all his crazy diets ( we share something in common ) but mentally he seemed like a sad sad person. I don't want to do bar stool psychology but it seemed pretty obvious that he was missing something in his life and he probably never found it.

But he's the paragon of the self made man, in the Ayn Rand sense and people ( especially here, where there's something approaching a cult ) look up to that and as soon as they encounter problems they imagine themselves in the shoes of this man and try to act tough... or act Steve Jobs.

If there's one paradoxical lesson that should be taken from his biography it is that you should never to listen to anybody that tells you how to act, don't try to fit in a mold, even in the mold of a great man, because you fundamentally don't have the same substance and thus you won't come out the same way: ie successful nor happy. Be your own man, forge your own mold and challenge the statu quo.

I was looking for deeper analysis of what made Steve Jobs' tick, and how he approached building products. Walter Isaacson didn't have a technological understanding of Apple's products of the time, so I found his history pretty superficial.

I learned much more about Steve Jobs approach from listening to the interviews he did over the years.

This one in particular, though, was a human enough perspective that it would have been interesting to read if every single mention of the particular terrifying-and-respected-CEO were redacted. So I'm glad I read it.

Steve Jobs - Walter Isaacson. I thought it was interesting; an honest attempt at cataloguing the life of a fascinating and complex person.

How To Win Friends And Influence People - Dale Carnegie. I'd skimmed through it in high school, and decided it was full of obvious/cheesy platitudes, but was somehow convinced to take another look this year and I'm very glad I did. It is mostly full of very basic "don't be an ass" advice, but I needed it.

Never Eat Alone - Keith Ferrazzi. I'm not sure what to think of this one. It's pretty low on actionable advice, but it did help me (together with HTWFAIF, above) reframe the way I approach interpersonal relationships.

The Cat's Table - Michael Ondaatje. I haven't finished this one yet, but it's part of a recent concerted effort to read more fiction. I've always loved Ondaatje's work, and this latest novel is no different.

Freakonomics - Steven Levitt & Stephen Dubner. I just started reading this last night, and I'm already 100 pages in. It's an addicting read, and is already causing me to re-evaluate the incentive systems that are everywhere.

Napoleon Bonaparte - Alan Schom. I've been reading this one slowly for a while (it's a hefty book). It's a very well written account of Napoleon's entire life story--highly recommended.

Crossing the Chasm - Geoffrey Moore. Just started this one last night as well (Christmas presents!) and so far it seems like it will live up to the hype.

The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg. This one, I can't recommend. As always, though, YMMV :)

I believe a big problem for getting a good product roadmap is very fundamental... we don't truly believe on the products we are working on or in the company we are working for. Is just a bunch of people with no real vision trying to influence one another over ego.

And then you have Sales of course who can actually talk smooth and influence better those who aren't sure about why they do what they do...

fraserharris (1) is about bigger vision. That's what I think makes a good product road map. A vision, extreme focus and caring about it.

Dear Sam,

I hope this note finds you well. I noticed that you had tweeted in the past about James Gleick's book "The Information." As it happens, that book inspired a book I've just finished: the first-ever full length biography of the late Bell Labs engineer Claude Shannon.

The book was recently published by Simon & Schuster. I figured I would reach out, given your interest in Bell Labs. We were fortunate to have worked with Alice Mayhew, the editor behind A Beautiful Mind, Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs, and other books in that genre.

I think you'll enjoy the book and hope you get a chance to check it out!

Jimmy

--

--

My new book, A Mind At Play (Simon & Schuster), is available now. It's the story of Claude Shannon, one of the founders of the information revolution—and one of the reasons we can exchange these emails.

The New Solution Selling -- The first sales book I ever read and extremely enlightening. It demystified much of the sales process for me.

The Intelligent Investor -- Timeless ideas on investing.

Steve Jobs -- I had no intention of reading this book but found it incredibly interesting. Very insightful.

The Intelligent Entrepreneur -- This book followed 3 HBS grads from pre-HBS to entrepreneur success, and attempted to draw some overarching conclusions on what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur. Very interesting.

Name of the Wind -- The only fully fiction book I read this year. Great book. Waiting on the 3rd to come out before I read the second in the series.

Dreaming in Code -- I'd heard great things about this book but I felt it was very lacking in insight. Some interesting moments but overall a disappointment. Perhaps it is because I read it after ~6 years of professional programming experience + 4 years of school + a number of other programming books?

Teaching Minds -- Roger Schank's latest book on education. In this one he outlines key cognitive abilities that education should be centered around rather than subjects. Very interesting.

A Concise Guide to Macroeconomics -- I had read very little macroeconomics, and this book provided a very readable and quick guide on the basics.

Bounce (by Matthew Syed) -- Great book about how great performers became great performers. This goes back to the nurture vs nature debate, and sides very heavily on the nurture side. Syed was an olympic ping pong player from the UK.

The Willpower Instinct -- I'm still reading this one (with my wife), and find it to be unbelievably insightful. If you have any desires to change any habits or behaviors, this book is incredible.

The Innovator's Solution -- The book after The Innovators Dilemma. Very insightful, just like the previous one.

-I loved this book for its humor, everyday practicality, how relatable it felt even without having a background in physics or knowledge about the pranks and experiments he conducted. As well as the book being well-written in the sense that it reads as if you're sitting on the couch with him as he's telling you stories about his life, all with a child-like sense of wonder and enthusiasm about the world.

THE $12 MILLION STUFFED SHARK BY DON THOMPSON

-I'm interested in the high-finance and fine-art worlds and this book discussed how they both go together - money and art - in an informative, quick-paced way.

THE BUY SIDE BY TURNEY DUFF

-For its humor, honesty, and how well written it was in terms of it being a page turner while also providing you with an insightful account about the high-finance industry.

MOLLY'S GAME BY MOLLY BLOOM

-It was an entertaining, quick-paced read about the private, high-stakes poker industry with an assortment of participants.

MONEYBALL, LIAR'S POKER & THE BIG SHORT BY MICHAEL LEWIS

-I thought they were all entertaining reads, while also being insightful about their respective subjects.

STEVE JOBS BY WALTER ISAACSON

-It was an illuminating read to me.

- - -

Separately, these books are on my list to read if anyone has opinions about them:

-Ghost in the Wires by Kevin
Mitnick

-Principles by Ray Dalio

-A Man For All Markets by Edward Thorp

"Mr. Bloomfield's Orchard" - a fun book about fungi from a mycologist with a solid sense of humor.

"On the Move" - Oliver Sacks's biography. Insightful and uplifting, especially if you enjoy writing.

"Ready Player One" - a dystopian cyber thriller. Reminded me of Snow Crash. Good stuff.

"The Last Place on Earth" - a good (if labored) summary of the races to the north and south poles and their geopolitical impacts.

"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" - been on my list for years. Long but good.

"Steve Jobs" - needs no introduction. Got me interested in Isaacson's other books.

"Hallucinations" (Oliver Sacks) - insightful analysis of the prevalence and for-reaching effects of hallucination. It's a lot more common (and puzzling) than most of us realize.

- Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

- A Briefer History of Time by Stephen Hawking

- The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

- Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

- The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross

- Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss

- Start with No by Jim Camp

- How Google Works by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg

- The Everything Store by Brad Stone

- The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly

"Wisdom is the greatest cleanser."

"Continual intellectual study results in vanity and the false satisfaction of an undigested knowledge"

"In shallow men the fish of little thoughts cause much commotion. In oceanic minds the whales of inspiration make hardly a ruffle."

Other notable books that had an impact on the way I think are:

On The Shortness of Life - Lucius Seneca

Steve Jobs Biography - This was way back before I moved to states and gave me an intro to states as well as S.V

Steve Martin - Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

Kevin Mitnick - Ghost In The Wires

Kenneth Roman - The King of Madison Avenue: David Ogilvy and the Making of Modern Advertising

Walter Isaacson - Steve Jobs

Alan Deutschman - The Second Coming of Steve Jobs

James Wallace - Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire

Alice Schroeder - The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

Richard Branson - Losing My Virginity

"When I invited Jobs to take some time away from NeXT to speak to a group of students, he sat in the lotus position in front of my fireplace and wowed us for three hours, as if leading a séance. But then I asked him if he would sign my Apple Extended Keyboard. He burst out: “This keyboard represents everything about Apple that I hate. It's a battleship. Why does it have all these keys? Do you use this F1 key? No.” And with his car keys he pried it right off. “How about this F2 key?” Off they all went. “I'm changing the world, one keyboard at a time,” he concluded in a calmer voice."
[Steve Jurvetson on Steve Jobs 2011-10-06 By Steve Jurvetson.]

  - The Charisma Myth. It focuses more on meta skills like projecting presence, but is useful to start seeing non-verbal communication as effective as well
  - The Presentation Skills of Steve Jobs. The books is really about presentation skills and then the author layered Steve Jobs on top, but it's a very useful book. 
  - A quick overview of Amazon's approach to written communication. One thing I will say about Bezos, he understands the overhead of communication in a corporation and focused on streamlining it, there are a bunch of articles but this one is useful: https://networkcapital.substack.com/p/the-amazon-way-of-writing
  - I've spent a lot of time reading the sale literature out there and its rough to recommend a book given the way the question is formed but understanding a sales mindset is extremely useful to becoming a better communicator. Zig Zigler "Secrets to closing the sale", Jeffery Gitomer's work, and SPIN selling all come to mind as valuable reads.

* Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson

* Slack, by Tom DeMarco (also re-read Peopleware). Both of these books are fundamental to anyone developing software within an organization.

* Delivering Happiness, by Tony Hsieh. It's not fantastic but it's helpful if you are trying to build a business.

* Tribal Leadership - recommended by the above. Not great but interesting.

* Rework - short read, worth the time.

* Managing Humans by Rands - very entertaining, useful if you manage people.

Other stuff I read is not worth mentioning in a "best books" list.

I am Indian-American and know exactly what you mean. I'm currently writing stuff for my 'science project' that hopes to synthesize Eastern and Western, Ancient and Modern schools of thought.

Is that a problem for you? Does it make your hipster friends angry?

Let's see what I read from the bestseller's list this year, off the top of my head: Quiet, Thinking Fast and Slow, Devil in the White City, Steve Jobs, and yes, 1 or 2 of the Game of Thrones books. I also read The Corrections, which wasn't on the best-seller list this year, but was definitely hyped in its day (Oprah Book Club! How mainstream!)

In fact, I make an effort to read the bestsellers lists for ideas. It makes me more well-read, not less.

"Liar's Poker" by Michael Lewis http://www.amazon.com/Liars-Poker-Michael-Lewis/dp/039333869...

"Reminiscences of a Stock Operator" by Edwin Lefevre http://www.amazon.com/Reminiscences-Stock-Operator-Commentar...

"The Big Miss: My Years Coaching Tiger Woods" by Hank Haney http://www.amazon.com/Big-Miss-Years-Coaching-Tiger/dp/03079...

"The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King: Inside the Richest Poker Game of All Time" by Michael Craig http://www.amazon.com/Professor-Banker-Suicide-King-Richest/...