Home · Book Reports · 2018 · It's Not About the Shark

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Thoughts

This is basically a bunch of 1-2 page stories, some interesting, some not-so-much, but all of them, to varying degrees, describe a problem that is overcome, sometimes ingeniously.

It was an absolute breeze to read, interesting enough to keep my attention, and was a nice break from heavier reading. While not terribly insightful, it wasn’t totally worthless either.

Given that you could easily pick it up and put it down at a moments notice without depriving yourself of anything, the book itself could be useful for helping you put down your problems for a little bit. Read this and let your mind take a break from whatever it is your ciphering and, after an hour, who knows, maybe you’ll have a epiphany.

Exceptional Excerpts

“Deci concluded that there is a giant hole in the equation Incentive + Harder Work = Better Outcome. That is, incentives don’t produce harder work, and harder work doesn’t produce better outcomes. An engaged mind beats the best incentive and the hardest worker every time. Engagement is sustaining, he said, while incentives and pure effort are limiting."

“We are twice as likely to stick to a challenge without an incentive."

“Study where participants pick lines based on length. All but one is an actor. The actors pick the wrong line and the one person being studied goes along with the obviously wrong answer 75% of the time."

“Linus Pauling’s advice to anyone trying to do something big amounted to three words: Put it down."

"“Learn to play the violin” was business guru Peter Drucker’s memorable and surprising advice on how to best prepare to run a company."

“With the formation of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, the army assembled a battalion of warriors who fought with their imaginations. Recruited from art schools and ad agencies, architecture firms and movie studios, their job was to conjure a fictional army battalion wherever it might be needed."

“Problems cannot stop you in your tracks if you can see the opposite."

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 01: Imaginary Philip and the Problem of Problems
• 02: Humans, Swamp People, and the Survival Problem
• 03: Power and the Farb Problem
• 04: Don't Come Home for Christmas and Other Lessons on Trying Harder and Making It Worse
• 05: Would You Get on the Bus to Abilene?
• 06: Four Points and the Wrongness of Always Being Right
• 07: Miss Iceland, the Gangster, and the Cat: What Happens When You Burn the First Draft
• 08: The Knowledge Is Like a Toothache: The Value of Taking the Long Way
• 09: Dark, Soft, Smooth, and Slow: The Power of Opposites
• 10: What Are These Bells For? The Art of Listening to Yourself
• Conclusion: What Do You Do with Water?

• Pages numbers from the pdf.

· Introduction

page 9:

• If we look to our problems first, if we let a problem define the entirety of what we do next, more likely than not we will fail. If we set our problems aside and seek solutions, we can succeed beyond all limitations.

· 01: Imaginary Philip and the Problem of Problems

· 02: Humans, Swamp People, and the Survival Problem

page 29:

• Good things, ultimately, are secondary to bad things. Good breaks down over time. We get used to good things, and it raises our expectations. If you spend your lottery winnings on a giant house, at some point it stops being a shockingly large and nice house, and it just becomes your house. And good makes other things seem boring. After you win the lottery, how excited will you be about reading an interesting magazine article or buying a nice pair of pants? Good fades.

• Bad things, on the other hand, are always compelling to us. Bad is so compelling to us that even when we have every incentive to value good over bad, we value bad over good.

· 03: Power and the Farb Problem

page 42:

• This classic experiment is considered a warning about obedience to authority

• Milgram shock experiment, where most of the people (teachers) shocked the learners to death, or so they would have if it were real.

• And it wasn’t a “warning”…

• Milgram’s conclusion: “[O]rdinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.”

page 48:

• Researchers have found that abstract art inspires unease, uncertainty, and a reaction not unlike fright.

• Which is why the oligarchy patronized it, to sow the seeds of uncertainty in our culture. The CIA is “well known” to have had agents in most major artistic movements. See: The Devil’s Chessboard.

· 04: Don’t Come Home for Christmas and Other Lessons on Trying Harder and Making It Worse

page 54:

• Sharon keeps a journal that she fills with great writing advice. One page she’s highlighted and underlined and put stars next to contains a quote from Slaughterhouse- Five author Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut warned: “Good Taste will put you out of business.”

• Sharon knows that Vonnegut went on to advise prospective writers to drop out of school before they could be filled with all that good taste and taught conclusively that they were incapable of demonstrating it. Vonnegut himself considered it a stroke of luck that he studied science and anthropology in college—since he hadn’t studied writing, no one had a chance to teach him that he wasn’t capable of doing it.

page 57:

• Deci concluded that there is a giant hole in the equation Incentive + Harder Work = Better Outcome. That is, incentives don’t produce harder work, and harder work doesn’t produce better outcomes. An engaged mind beats the best incentive and the hardest worker every time. Engagement is sustaining, he said, while incentives and pure effort are limiting.

page 62:

• We are twice as likely to stick to a challenge without an incentive.

• Maximizing effort is a fool’s comfort. We burn out, we make illogical decisions,

· 05: Would You Get on the Bus to Abilene?

page 64:

• A group of reasonable people can make a senseless, unreasonable decision. A group can unanimously support a decision that no individual member of the group would have supported alone. A group is not just the addition of all its members’ capabilities; sometimes it represents a division into something less than what a single member could accomplish.

• We believe bigger is better. We have been taught that bigger is better. No one ever told us that the way to solve something is to put fewer people on the case.

page 70:

• Study where participants pick lines based on length. All but one is an actor. The actors pick the wrong line and the one person being studied goes along with the obviously wrong answer 75% of the time.

page 78:

• You don’t need an echo when you ask a question. Instead, talk to someone who sees everything differently.

· 06: Four Points and the Wrongness of Always Being Right

· 07: Miss Iceland, the Gangster, and the Cat: What Happens When You Burn the First Draft

page 107:

• First drafts are unimaginative, built on the narrow categories provided by our problem. They are the first thing we can grab. As Thomas Ward found, we are twice as creative when the first impulse doesn’t work.

· 08: The Knowledge Is Like a Toothache: The Value of Taking the Long Way

page 113:

• Linus Pauling’s advice to anyone trying to do something big amounted to three words: Put it down.

page 122:

• “Learn to play the violin” was business guru Peter Drucker’s memorable and surprising advice on how to best prepare to run a company.

• Start learning something today that is totally unrelated to your work and family life, and it will teach you something vital about the things that are most important to you.

· 09: Dark, Soft, Smooth, and Slow: The Power of Opposites

page 130:

• Story of Paul Wellstone running for Senate with very little money. He made commercials that were funny and portrayed him as a real person and his opponent as a ‘one of those Washington types’. Focus on what everyone else avoids. He talked about how he had to talk fast in the commercial because he didn’t have much money.

page 133:

• During WW2:

• With the formation of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, the army assembled a battalion of warriors who fought with their imaginations. Recruited from art schools and ad agencies, architecture firms and movie studios, their job was to conjure a fictional army battalion wherever it might be needed.

page 135:

• Problems cannot stop you in your tracks if you can see the opposite

• creative people are 25 percent more focused on opposites.

· 10: What Are These Bells For? The Art of Listening to Yourself

· Conclusion: What Do You Do with Water?