Book Notes: Beginning with this post, I’ve decided to read at least one book per month and post my notes here as a concrete deliverable. This is part of a habit I’d like to cultivate to read more books, academic papers, and industry blogs.

Next book: Creativity, Inc.

Summary

A friend recently lent me this book and suggested I should read it–which I was happy to do while serving my 14 day hotel quarantine period in Shanghai.

The book straddles the business, self-help, and time-management genres. Some of the key topics:

  1. Motivation: The world is changing rapidly and success requires more work and personal initiative than before. This message is targeted at a US-based audience, which he asserts has become overly complacent after its WW2 prosperity and is poised for a rude awakening to competition.
  2. Theme: To earn more we should consider ourselves CEOs of a company with ourselves as the sole employee. This means being our own stakeholders, analyzing our competitive advantages, being strategic about what services we sell in which industry to which customers (employers), applying process optimization, investing in R&D (studying), and so on.
  3. Content: Job-hunting tips like conducting informational interviews; time-management advice like doing the hardest thing you need to do as the first thing in your day (i.e. Tracy’s “Eat That Frog!” mantra); project management tools like mindstorms and lists; career advice like dressing well, being proactive, and seeking advice from mentors.

Action Exercises Example: Chapter 1

On the first skim, I didn’t find any of the ideas very groundbreaking (actually I still don’t). However, when I gave it an honest read and dutifully engaged with the “Action Exercises”, I had some useful take-aways. The first chapter was the most useful and I’ll run through the exercises here.

The chapter basically encourages us to think about how our industries are being disrupted by data, technology, and globalization. It’s easy to pass this off as trite–I did. Being in data science and engineering, my work directly engages with these three trends. But these simple-sounding questions can prompt some serious reflection:

Identify the most important area of your work where new information is forcing you to make changes.

Tracy says information here, but I think we can think equivalently of data. Currently I work with map data, which is increasing in coverage and richness every day. But the most important change is probably in imagery (both photos and videos) as it is still underutilized and growing rapidly with the increasing power of mobile devices.

Determine the most significant tech breakthrough that is impacting your current and future income.

Some candidates: continued advances in pretrained neural networks e.g. GPT-3; 5G increasing the data collection pipeline from sensors and phones; increasing privacy and security risks (and public resentment) restricting data usage.

Identify the competition that is having the biggest effect on your industry/income.

Talent competition. Great software engineers and data professionals are everywhere, many of whom are willing to work harder for less pay. The only thing keeping up lofty salaries in the tech world is access restriction, from language/cultural barriers to work visa throttling. As companies become increasingly open to having distributed teams (especially with COVID), this will change.

Decide one key discipline that you need to develop to move ahead faster in your career.

I knew immediately what I wanted to choose here. As an engineer interested in management, my success depends on reading a wide range of both books and technical papers, and lately I’ve been feeling behind on this. I resolved to read more.

I’ve been participating in a book club at work and it has been a great help in motivating me to read and establishing a cadence. We just recently read Atomic Habits (I’d like to write about it later), which really drove home the importance of having great habits (with concrete outcomes) to reach our goals. So I scheduled these in my calendar:

  • Read 1 blog post per week
    • By every Saturday, I will read a blog post and log it with summary
  • Read 1 book per 4 weeks
    • By every 4th Sunday, I will post a (however unpolished) summary of a book and announce a new book.
  • Read 1 academic paper every 2 weeks (or 4 weeks for tough ones)
    • By every 2nd Sunday, I will post a (however unpolished) summary of an academic article and announce a new article.

The first one I’ll just keep in my personal Evernote, but the last two I intend to do publicly on this blog as a commitment mechanism.

Choose one action that you can take immediately to improve your career/income.

Without going into my own specifics, I think in general some form of negotiation is a good choice. Negotiation for role changes, raises, promotions, new job compensation, etc. is high-ROI and fast-acting. I don’t do it nearly as much as I think I should.

Identify the biggest single opportunity for you in your job or industry today.

Honestly, I’ve given this some fair amount of thought and I still don’t have an answer. Instead I resolved to keep more up-to-date about industry trends and keep thinking about it.

Pick one area where you’ll take initiative to improve your work and increase your income.

The book/paper/blog reading discipline mentioned above covers this one.

Conclusion

The content is rather simple and the book is not particularly well-organized. However, engaging seriously with the book and especially its action exercises has led me to some useful insights and may lead to big breakthroughs in my career over the long run. It feels a lot like with fitness: I know that diet and exercise are the way to be healthy, but the problem is not a lack of knowledge but rather a lack of action. Definitely found the book worth a read.

Notes

  • Ch 1: The new normal
    • “Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in 3 generations”: The US is too complacent after a prolonged post-WW2 dominance. It’s a Red Queen situation: if you aren’t running ahead, you’re falling behind.
    • We need to keep up with rapid disruption from (Information Explosion) x (New Tech) x (Competition)
    • Success tips:
      • Just launch already, and it will open doors you couldn’t see otherwise (Corridor Principle)
      • Keep momentum because once you stop it’s hard to restart (e.g. plate spinning)
      • Have discipline (do what you should do, when you should do it, whether you feel like it or not)
    • Action Exercises
      • Identify the most important area of your work where new info is forcing you to make changes.
      • Determine the most significant tech breakthrough that is impacting your current and future income.
      • Identify the competition that is having the biggest effect on your industry/income.
      • Decide one key discipline that you need to develop to move ahead faster in your career.
      • Choose one action that you can take immediately to improve your career/income
      • Identify the biggest single opportunity for you in your job or industry today.
      • Pick one area where you’ll take initiative to improve your work and increase your income.
  • Ch 2: Your Personal Service Corporation
    • Metaphor: you are the CEO of a company with one employee.
    • The top 3% earners in each field saw themselves as “self-employed”
    • “Every innovation, discovery, and paradigm shift in modern business is as applicable to you as it is to a multi-billion-dollar corporation”
    • Define your Core Values and Mission Statement by imagining what a Market Research study of you would say. Maintain your reputation.
    • Metaphor: Seven Rs of modern management
      • Rethinking: Ask “Who am I and where am I going?”
      • Reevaluating: Take stock of your current situation; if you’re hitting roadblocks, see if you’re fighting gravity; maybe change jobs, approaches, etc.
      • Reorganizing: Look for ways to improve efficiency in your daily activities.
      • Restructuring: Focus your work on the 80/20 components (cut product lines, services, wasted resources, etc.)
      • Reengineering: Apply process optimization to your work from input to deliverable. Outsource if possible, etc.
      • Reinventing: What if you had to start from zero? What would you do differently?
      • Refocusing: Focus your energy and talent (prioritize to only a few top goals)
    • Action Exercises
      • Determine your 3-5 uncompromisable core values
      • Write your business mission statement
      • Decide on the words you’d like others to use to describe you, then organize your life to live by and practice those words
      • Reevaluate your life: are you consistent with the best life you can be living?
      • Reengineer your life: seek ways to simplify your work, cut the cruft
      • Restructure your work regularly: always work on the most valuable tasks at the time (e.g. daily prioritization?)
      • Refocus your time/talent/energy: reduce to the activities that produce the most results (find your niche?)
  • Ch 3: Increase your earning potential
    • Today, change is discontinuous; IT, medicine, family structure, education, politics, globalization, all happening simultaneously
    • Lifelong employment (1 job) replaced by lifelong employability (6 careers and 14 jobs)
    • Perception of value others have of what you do => Earning ability
    • Zero-based thinking: “is there anything in my life that I am doing that, knowing what I now know, I wouldn’t get into again today if I had to do it over again?”
    • Plan ahead 5 years: “What parts of my knowledge, skills, and work are becoming obsolete? What am I doing today that is different from what I was doing one year ago and two years ago?”
    • Mental cross-training:
      • Determine the 5-7 Key Result Areas (KRAs) needed to be in top 10% of your field
        • E.g. management = planning, organizing, staffing, delegating, supervising, measuring, reporting
      • Identify your weaknesses: Score yourself on them 1-10. You’ll find that the low scores are where you feel stress, frustration, and underachievement. Aim for 7+ across all. Ask a boss to score you separately, or even get 360 feedback from your team.
      • Get feedback on your weaknesses. E.g. get a shadow to monitor you for a day.
    • Knowledge and Skill = Investment: they’re speculative bets. Don’t get good at making trombone oil. “There are jobs with futures and jobs without futures.”
    • How to never be unemployed: (1) change your line of work, (2) relocate, (3) take a pay cut. “There are no traffic jams on the extra mile.”
    • Don’t be the bottom 80%. “You have one year’s experience, twenty times over.”
    • Income growth compounds. 11% raises will double your income in 6.5y.
    • Action Exercises
      • Identify the 5-7 Key Result Areas (KRAs) you need
      • Give 3 answers to “why am I on the payroll”? Answer in measurable results.
      • Determine your weakest KRA and resolve to work on it today
      • Make a list of everything you can start doing immediately to become more competent and valuable at your job.
      • Project 5y and determine the skills you’ll need at that time to earn 2x your current pay
      • Plan to invest ~2h/day into getting better at your KRAs
  • Ch 4: Capitalize on your strengths
    • Get clear about your marketable strengths and competitive advantage; focus on high ROE (return on energy). Be strategic about your specialization.
    • Story: Brian, who failed in English in high school, gets rejected for a copywriter position. After 6 months of studying and asking interviewers what he should learn, he gets a job. Figure out what you need to learn.
    • Hint: What helped you succeed in the past? What comes easy? What do you enjoy?
    • Segment matters: A door-to-door salesman for shampoo vs selling mutual funds.
    • Action Exercises
      • Identify the 3 most important things you do in your work
      • Determine your areas of excellence (you’re in top 10%)
      • Identify which skills have been responsible for your greatest successes
      • Decide what you most love to do in your work. How might you structure your time to do more of it?
      • Identify your competitive advantage. What should it be? How to get it?
      • Segment your market. Where could you earn more using your skills?
      • See yourself as a bundle of resources. What could you do to earn the highest return on energy in today’s economy?
  • Ch 5: Get the right job
    • 85% of all jobs are not advertised.
    • Design your dream job: work, location, company size, people, salary (now and in future), responsibility level
      • Who’s working at such jobs? What have they done that you haven’t?
      • Who do you know who could help you? Give advice, help, etc.
      • Back-from-future thinking: What do you want in 5-10 years? What do you need to do today to make it happen?
    • The Universal Hiring Rule: an employer will hire people as long as the cost to do so is less than the value added by the employees.
    • 3 Cs: Contacts, Credibility, Competence
    • 7 Qualities: Intelligence, Leadership ability, Integrity, Likability, Competence, Courage, Inner Strength
    • Informational interviews: explain you’re doing research with authoritative companies to move into the industry and ask for 10m of advice
    • Uncover the needs of the employer. “What’s in it for me?”, and “How can I be sure that what you say is true?”
    • Action Exercises
      • Imagine you can have any job—what would it be?
      • Determine the 3 most important skills you have
      • Ask who else is doing similar work to you but getting more. What are they doing differently?
  • Ch 6: The future belongs to the competent
    • “Then I did something that changed my life. I went to the most successful man in my company, a sales guy whow as earning ten times as much as anyone else in our business, and I asked him why he was more successful than I was.”
    • Persuasion and Communication
  • Ch 7: Double your productivity
    • “Decide exactly what it is you want. Determine the price you are going to have to pay to get it and then resolve to pay that price!” - HL Hunt
    • Goal formula: Decide, Write it down, Set a deadline, List the steps, Organize into an ordered plan, Take action, Make progress every day
    • Goal setting: Write 10 goals you want in 12 months, in present tense (“I make X/year”). Then pick just 1 and apply the 7 steps. This can be life-changing.
    • Day planning: Proper Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance. 10% planning saves 90% of the time needed. Successful people write things down on paper.
    • Prioritizing from written lists. ABC-DE method (A=serious consequences, B=should do, C=nice to do, D=delegate, E=eliminate). Never do a B item before an A item, etc.. Then use numbers within the categories, e.g. A-1.
    • Quadrant of importance x urgency
    • Eat that Frog! / Single-handling: Do your most important task 1st thing in the morning without interruption, and don’t put it down til it’s 100% done. Avoid context switches.
    • Putting it together: At night, prioritize your day’s activities and identify your A-1. The next morning, do it first thing in the office before anything else.
    • Keep your desk clean. TRAF (Toss, Refer, Action, File)
    • Take advantage of commuting. Listen to educational audio programs. 1h of in-flight work = 3h of office work
    • Get better at your key tasks. E.g. learn how to type correctly.
    • Have a sense of urgency. 2 minute rule. Having a reputation for speed and dependability will open doors.
    • Reengineer your work. Reduce the number of steps in the workflow.
    • Say no. Set clear “Posteriorities”. Things you will stop doing. Drucker’s “Creative abandonment”. Zero-based thinking at a task/work/business level. “All you can do is all you can do.”
    • Balance your life. Put people first. Relationships still responsible for 85% of your happiness. Quantity of time at home and Quality of time at work, not the reverse.
    • Action Exercises
      • Decide exactly what you want (goals + objectives)
      • Make a list of everything you need to do today, Organize it using 80/20 or ABCDE, Select A1, do it 1st thing in the morning, and discipline yourself to focus on it til it’s 100% complete
      • Be action oriented. “Do it now!”
  • Ch 8: Practical project management
    • Project Management = Outsourcing + Synergy + Harmony. It’s how you get leverage beyond work you can do alone.
    • Plan. Be disciplined. Write properly on paper; make lists, sublists, calculate numbers, analyze, keep a system. Begin with the end in mind. Determine Sequential vs Parallel tasks.
    • Select and Delegate
      • Select the right people: “Most of your problems in business come from attempting to get the job done with difficult or incompetent people.” If you find you’ve made a hiring mistake, it is your chief duty to correct it quickly.
      • Delegate clearly: Set deadlines, objectives, measures, context (why)
    • Make the project visible (whiteboard, dashboard, etc)
    • Action Exercises
      • Pick one project and follow the above approach
      • Determine the ideal outcome if the project were completed perfectly, and write it down.
      • Make a list of every step needed to complete on time and budget
      • Organize by priority and determine which are sequential vs parallel
      • Select your team. Delegate tasks with deadlines.
  • Ch 9: Put people first
    • “Pretend that every person you meet has a sign around his or her neck that says, ‘Make me feel important.’ Not only will you succeed in sales, you will succeed in life.” -Mary Kay Ash
    • Intrapersonal intelligence (self) and interpersonal intelligence (others)
    • Needs: Inclusion, Control, Affection
    • Principles: Trust (build and earn it), Respect (demonstrate it), Communication (invest in it), Courtesy (practice it), Caring (give it), Praise and Appreciation (express it), Helpfulness (live by it)
  • Ch 10: Powerful problem solving and decision-making
    • In crisis, just move on to “What do we do now?”
    • Improve your intuition: Trust it, have a positive mental attitude, and confident expectation, listening
    • Where to use it: Relationships (personal + professional), Choices
    • How to use it: Define the problem, ask if there’s a deeper problem, gather information, ask for advice, try mindstorming 20+ solutions. It it fails, take a break from it and repeat.
  • Ch 11: Get paid more and promoted faster
    • Listen to stress and apply zero-based thinking to shift careers
    • Pick a high-growth industry and company. “Hitch your wagon to a star.”
    • Pick the right boss: High integrity and caring. Do you laugh a lot at work? Would you take this boss again? If not, move.
    • Be positive and work well with others even under stress => paid more and promoted faster.
    • Dress like a person with a future. Groom.
    • Start earlier, work harder, stay later. Win the imaginary hardest-worker contest.
    • Promote yourself. Ask and take more responsibility. Author voluntarily doing the report over the weekend and the boss happened to ask if he could get it early.
    • Ask for what you want. Ask for more pay by building a lawyer-type case. Don’t fear. You have nothing to lose. Asking makes you feel more deserving because you think of why your are entitled to the money rather than why not.
    • Story: Diane the secretary. $800/mo start, increased to $1K after 2mo, and $1.2K after another 2mo. After next 2mo, offered $1.4K, but she asked $1.8K based on her market research. Author relented; she had become very valuable, taking learning courses and building relationships.
    • Most important factor when asking: your character. Truthfulness and loyalty.
    • Make sure your boss is on the same page. “All of the best days of your working life will be when you are working on what your boss considers most important.”
    • Get a Mentor. Borrow wisdom, learn proven success methods.
      • Seek guidance on your character/personality and specific ideas on how to do your job better/faster
      • Choose based on Character + Competence. Be Open to their advice and get them emotionally invested in your success so they are Willing to help.
      • Steps:
        • Set clear goals in your career.
        • Work continually to get better. Mentors only help if they feel it will be of value.
        • Don’t ask for too much time. 10m
        • Express your desire to be more successful. Ask a specific question, or for book recommendation, or specific advice/idea that has been helpful to them. Whatever it is, take action on it immediately.
        • Send a thank-you note and mention you hope to meet again.
        • Each month, drop mentor a note telling how you are doing and progressing. Show that you listened to their advice.
        • Arrange to meet again, perhaps on monthly basis or more.
    • Be X Oriented:
      • Be Future Oriented. Idealize a long-term vision and perform Gap Analysis on where you are vs where you want to be, and where your company wants to be. You’ll make much better decisions and have more impact.
      • Be Goal and Results Oriented.
      • Be Idea Oriented
      • Be People Oriented. 95% of people let go because of personality problems. Practice golden rule
      • Be Growth Oriented. Learn how to learn. Read 1h+ in your field daily. Travel any distance for seminars.
      • Be Customer Oriented. (Your stakeholders (boss, PM, etc.) are your customers.)
      • Be Action Oriented. Sense of urgency and bias.
    • Broaden your network. Join business associations and functions.
    • Think about profits all the time. Help your company increase revenue and cut costs.
    • Gain power: Expert power (you know stuff), Ascribed power (people like you), and Position power (title)
  • Ch 12: Perception is everything
    • Dress well, join professional associations, donate your services
    • Study of ~100 CEOs showed the two top qualities that would put a person on fast track were ability to set priorities and a sense of urgency to get things done fast.