By Jon Saints - 20 Mar 2010
I have greatly enjoyed each of the books I have read so far in 2010. Here is the list so far, and my few sentence take-away from each.
Every time I read this book I feel inspired and love it. ”What other path was there?”
Wonderfully written characters immerse you in the recent history of Afghanistan.
As an entrepreneur, make it your goal to decrease the amount of time you need to run your business. If you start working 12 hour days make it the point of your business to find efficiencies and ways to do the same in 4 hours. Its a great mentality that can lead to profitability, new ideas, and a healthy life style.
The more I think about this book, the more I see running as a metaphor for life. We are endurance animals meant to persistently peruse solutions to our problems wearing them down not with bursts of sped or luck but with persistence and presence over time.
I love when the book talks about building endurance… getting to know the Beast (fatigue). Fatigue is not something you can beat in one training run or out sprint or out luck. As you train for endurance races, each time, its a chance to get to know the Beast to spend a little bit long time in its presence to wear it down just a little bit and build up your tolerance/comfort to it. So many things in life are endurance races.
The final thought from the book: “We do not get old because we run. We get old because we stop running” Find ways… any way… to stay patiently and persistently active.
The best summary of this wonderful take on business is a review in the introduction: “This book’s assumption is that an organization is like a piece of software. Editable. Malleable. Sharable. Fault-tolerant.” Businesses, the smart ones, stay nimble and simple. Organizations have versions and features and milestones. When I stumbled into business, the only proven way I knew to build things was following the software development model. I have said, though not as clearly as this book, that the principles of good software development often apply to good business development. Release early and often. Create and Celebrate bite-sized milestones. Under do the competition. Planning is Guessing. Half but not Half Assed. This book presents an eloquent philosophy for business.
Next on the reading list is Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual by Michael Pollan.