The Mamba Mentality – Kobe Bryant

The Mamba Mentality: How I Play by Kobe Bryant
Date read: 4/5/23. Recommendation: 7/10.

Kobe Bryant’s firsthand account of his career, his work ethic, and his commitment to the game of basketball. Beautiful, coffee table book with incredible photography. I found Kobe’s perspective on preparation, playing the long game, and bouncing back from failure to be the most useful sections.

Check out my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Preparation:
“More often than not, by the time I pulled in, Kobe would already be parked in the car next to my designated spot, taking a nap. He would be in the gym well before that, maybe by 6 AM to get his pre-practice workout done before anyone else showed up. That was the trademark of the final 10 years of his career.” Phil Jackson

“If I started my day early, I could train more each day.” Started at 5 AM and went until 7 AM, again from 11-2, and 6-8. By starting earlier he could set himself up for an extra workout each day.

“I never thought about my daily preparation. It wasn’t a matter of whether it was an option or not. It was, if I want to play, this is what I have to do, so I’d just show up and do it. My routine was grueling. It involved early mornings and late nights. It involved stretching, lifting, training, hooping, recovery, and film study. It involved putting in a lot of work and hours.” Kobe

Play the long game:
“I wasn’t scared of missing, looking bad, or being embarrassed. That’s because I always kept the end result, the long game, in my mind. I was always focused on the fact that I had to try something to get it, and once I got it, I’d have another tool in my arsenal. If the price was a lot of work and a few missed shots, I was OK with that.” Kobe 

“The mindset isn’t about seeking a result—it’s more about the process of getting to that result. It’s about the journey and the approach. It’s a way of life. I do think that it’s important, in all endeavors, to have that mentality.” Kobe

Dedication to family:
“At the same time, starting early helped me balance basketball and life. When my kids woke up in the morning, I was there, and they wouldn’t even know I had just finished at the gym. At night, I’d be able to put them to bed, then go work out again during my own time, not theirs.” Kobe

“There’s a fine balance between obsessing about your craft and being there for your family.” Kobe

How you respond is what matters:
“At the end of my first season in the NBA, we had made it to the Semifinals, up against Utah. But in the deciding fifth game, I let fly four airballs, and we lost our chance at the title. Those shots let me know what I needed to work on the most: my strength. That’s all the airballs did for me. In that game, nerves weren’t the problem. I just wasn’t strong enough to get the ball there. My legs were spaghetti; they couldn’t handle that long of a season. How did I respond to that? By getting on an intense weight-training program. By the start of the next season, my legs and arms were stronger and I was ready to get it on. In the immediate aftermath, I was never concerned by how the franchise or fans would react. I knew I would put in the work, which is what I did. In fact, as soon as we landed I went to the Pacific Palisades high school gym and shot all night long. I went back the next day and worked. And I worked and worked and worked. In my mind, it was never a matter of, ‘Oh no, I’ll never get another shot at this.’ I felt that my destiny was already written. I felt—I knew—that my future was undeniable and no one, not a person or play, could derail it.” Kobe

The Stock Horse and the Stable Cat – Phil Van Treuren

The Stock Horse and the Stable Cat by Phil Van Treuren
Date read: 3/12/23

Such an awesome concept—illustrated Stoic fables that appeal to both young readers and old—and it’s executed quite well. The story, characters, and illustrations are wonderful. The main lesson of the book is that events themselves are neither good nor bad, but it’s our judgment of those events that influence our perception. Since it’s a short read, I don’t have my typical notes listed below. But it’s well worth grabbing a copy for yourself and keeping it on your coffee table as a constant reminder.

Check out Stoic Simple to see more details or grab your own copy.

Boyd – Robert Coram

Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War by Robert Coram
Date read: 3/10/23. Recommendation: 9/10.

The story of one of the greatest fighter pilots and military strategists in history. John Boyd was such an entertaining character—he never backed down, he didn’t operate according to conventions, and he lived life on his own terms. He was the first man to codify maneuvers, tactics, and strategies of air-to-air combat, changing the way every air force in the world fights and flies. He was a founder of the military reform movement, challenging the careerists and bureaucracy in the Pentagon to reconsider their outdated mental constructs. After retirement, he immersed himself in the study of philosophy, theory of science, military history, and psychology, packaging everything he knew about all forms of conflict into a briefing called “Patterns of Conflict.” Entertaining cover to cover and a book that will help hone your own strategic thinking.

Check out my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Background:
“He was first, last, and always a fighter pilot.” Wore the Air Force uniform for 24 years. Career spanned the last half of the 20th century. 

Childhood interests: During third grade, Boyd showed a strong interest in aviation, drawing airplanes after he finished working on class assignments. Rummaged through magazines at a friend’s house after school looking for stories or pictures of airplanes. In fifth grade, he rode in a small airplane with a local Erie man who owned a chain of drugstores that he knew through his sister.

In high school, he took a series of tests that told him he had an IQ of 90. He refused to retake the test and always cited his low IQ to bureaucrats so they would underestimate him. “I’m just a dumb fighter pilot. I don’t know any better. I had an IQ test in high school and they gave me a ninety.” 

Legacy:
Ideas greatly influenced the Gulf War in 1991. Became the first man to codify maneuvers, tactics, and strategies of air-to-air combat in 1959—the “Aerial Attack Study” which was the equivalent of the Bible of air combat. Changed the way every air force in the world flies and fights. At Georgia Tech, established the Energy-Maneuverability (E-M) Theory. Then founded the “military-reform movement” after retiring from the Air Force in 1975. Then immersed himself in the study of philosophy, theory of science, military history, and psychology, packaging everything he knew about all forms of conflict into a briefing called “Patterns of Conflict.” 

Greatest military theoretician since Sun Tzu: “The academics who know of Boyd agree he was one of the premier military strategists of the twentieth century and the only strategist to put time at the center of his thinking.” 

Self-perception:
Even from his earliest years, Boyd saw himself as “the man of principle battling superiors devoid of principle; the idealist fighting those of higher rank who have shirked their responsibilities; the man who puts it all on the line, and after receiving threat of dire consequences, prevails.” 

Fighter pilots:
“Aerial combat favors the bold, those who are not afraid to use the airplane for its true purpose: a gun platform. There is nothing sophisticated about sneaking up on someone and killing him. Aerial combat is a blood sport, a knife in the dark. Winners live and losers die. Boyd instinctively knew this and his flying was, from the beginning, that of the true fighter pilot.” 

“Fighter pilots fly with their fangs out and their hair on fire and they look death in the face every day and you ain’t shit if you ain’t done it.” 

Codifying aerial combat:
Pilots were intrigued by his handling skills and ideas. They asked him to write his tactics down and prepare diagrams of various tactical maneuvers. 

“American pilots believed that both they and the enemy had such an infinite number of maneuvers at their disposal that aerial combat could never be codified. Air combat was an art, not a science. After simulated aerial combat, a young pilot would be defeated and never know why. Nor could his instructors tell him.”

“When Boyd said he was going to “tweak up the tactics,” what he meant was that he was going to develop, and codify, for the first time in history, a formal regimen for fighter aircraft. He went about the job with a passion. He worked far into the night devising a series of briefings on fighter versus fighter and began to develop his skills as a lecturer.” 

In February of 1956, he published an article in the Fighter Weapons Newsletter entitled ‘A Proposed Plan for Ftr. Vs. Ftr. Training.’ Focused on teaching pilots a new way of thinking, illustrated maneuvers and results of those maneuvers. What were the effects on airspeed? What countermoves were available to an enemy pilot? How do you anticipate those counters?

Boyd became a legend for his skills as a fighter pilot, as well as his abilities as a teacher. 

Created a 150 page single spaced manual that he called the “Aerial Attack Study.” This became the official tactics manual for fighter aircraft. “For the first time the high-stakes game of aerial combat was documented, codified, and illustrated. While all other fighter pilots used their hands, Boyd used mathematics.” The first 600 copies disappeared almost overnight and although it was a classified document, pilots would hide them and take them home to study.

“Within ten years the ‘Aerial Attack Study’ became the tactics manual for air forces around the world. It changed the way they flew and the way they fought.” And it was written by a 33-year-old captain—Boyd. 

Thermodynamics + E-M Theory:
Boyd was studying at Georgia Tech studying mechanical engineering after his time working on the aerial attack study and his time here would seed his eventual E-M Theory. 

“The E-M Theory, at its simplest, is a method to determine the specific energy rate of an aircraft. This is what every fighter pilot wants to know. If I am at 30,000 feet and 450 knots and pull six G’s, how fast am I gaining or losing energy? Can my adversary gain or lose energy faster than I can?”

“When people looked at it, they invariably had one of two reactions: they either slammed a hand to their forehead and said, ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ Or said it had been done before—nothing so simple could have remained undiscovered for so long. 

Realized that if E-M could quantify the performance of American aircraft, it could do the same for enemy aircraft. And eventually use it to design a fighter aircraft. 

“Boyd’s Energy-Maneuverability Theory did four things for aviation: it provided a quantitative basis for reaching aerial tactics, it forever changed the way aircraft are flown in combat, it provided a scientific means by which maneuverability of an aircraft could be evaluated and tactics designed both to overcome the design flaws of one’s own aircraft and to minimize or negate the superiority of the opponent’s aircraft, and finally, it became a fundamental tool in designing fighter aircraft.” 

Drawdown period:
E-M Theory: “He added more notes, more thoughts, more equations. And then he put it away and went into what he called his ‘draw-down period,’ thinking, ‘Oh, hell. Somebody has already done this.’ If what he had discovered was work done by someone else, he did not want to waste more time….Then it registered: if someone had reached the same conclusions he had reached and applied it to tactics, he would have known about it when he was at Nellis….He became excited all over again. The enormity of what he was in the process of discovering would change aviation forever.” 

Retired from the Air Force on August 31, 1975. He was 48 years old. Drove back to his hometown of Erie, PA. “For several weeks Boyd stayed, walking the beach, thinking about his new project and how he would go about researching and writing it. He let the ideas bubble, mulled them over, turned them back and forth, and examined them from all angles and then discarded most of them and began again. By the end of his visit he was rejuvenated. The Peninsula did that for him. He was overflowing with thoughts about the books he wanted to read and the ideas he wanted to explore. And then he returned to Washington. Even though he arguably had more influence on the Air Force than any colonel in Air Force history, his greatest contributions were yet to come. He was about to enter the most productive and most important part of his life.” The next chapter would focus on his learning theory.

“If you want to understand something, take it to the extremes or examine its opposites.” John Boyd

“He practiced what he preached. He considered every word and every idea from every possible angle, then threw it out for discussion, argued endless hours, restructured his line of thought, and threw it out for discussion again. Creativity was painful and laborious and repetitive and detail-haunted.”

Focusing on solutions, not problems or use cases:
Too big, too expensive: “Boyd had done some preliminary E-M calculations on the F-111 and knew what a terrible mistake the Air Force was making. Boyd knew that, left to its own devices, the bureaucracy always came up with an aircraft such as the F-111. The Air Force looked at technology rather than the mission.” 

Know your audience:
E-M charts: Boyd had to determine how to present his E-M theory and its implications to Air Force brass. He decided to take the data and map it on graphs that showed the differences between American fighter’s energy rate and the energy rate of its Soviet counterpart. Blue areas were where differences favored American fighters, red showed where Soviets held an advantage. “Blue is good. Red is bad. Even a goddamn general can understand that.” 

But his outspoken nature would always limit his trajectory and promotions in his career. He wasn’t willing to play politics and make people feel good about shitty decisions. 

Hard work and success:
“But hard work and success do not always go together in the military, where success is defined by rank, and reaching higher rank requires conforming to the military’s value system. Those who do not conform will one day realize that the path of doing the right things has diverged from the path of success, and then they must decide which path they will follow through life.” 

“To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often roll call. That’s when you will have to make a decision. To be or to do? Which way will you go?” John Boyd

“All the things that make the Pentagon so prized by careerists make it loathed and detested by warriors. The self-promotion and sycophancy and backstabbing treachery are all anathema to a warrior.” 

Guiding principle:
“Boyd was guided in his work by one simple principle: he wanted to give pilots a fighter than would outmaneuver any enemy. He didn’t become fixated on technology or ‘one-point’ numerical solutions.”

“Boyd was not as interested in his career as he was in the fate of the American fighting man, the man who—as the military says—is at the pointy end of the spear. He wanted these men to have the best possible equipment, whether it was an airplane or a tank. That was his life.”

“Boyd made men believe they could do things they never thought they could do. And most of them were men of integrity and accomplishment even before they met Boyd.”

Learning theory:
Started voracious reading program and his search for the nature of creativity. The next major focus in his life. He was trying to get a grasp on his learning theory. For Boyd, learning didn’t mean studying, it meant creativity. 

Wrote draft after draft of his learning theory on yellow legal pads. Told his friends he didn’t know where he was going with his research and was just letting it carry him along. 

Destruction and Creation: Spent more than four years researching and writing then distilling his work down to 11 pages. Core thesis focuses on “the danger of our mental processes becoming focused on internal dogmas and isolated from the unfolding, constantly dynamic outside world, we experience mismatches between our mental images and reality. Then confusion and disorder and uncertainty not only result but continue to increase.” If you use this to your advantage, you can stoke chaos in the enemy and leave them constantly off balance. Whoever can handle the quickest rate of change survives. This was the beginning of his ‘time-based theory of conflict.’

Four areas drew most of his attention: general theories of war, the blitzkrieg, guerrilla warfare, and the use of deception by create commanders. 

As he studied history, he found that very rarely would victorious commanders throw their forces head to head against the enemy. They didn’t fight wars of attrition. Instead, they used deception, speed, fluidity of action, and tactics that disoriented or confused, causing the enemy to unravel before the fight ever took place. 

O-O-D-A Loop: Observe-orient-decide-act cycle. Speed is the most important element of the cycle. Whoever can go through it the fastest prevails. And once the process begins, it must only continue to accelerate. “The key thing to understand about Boyd’s version is not the mechanical cycle itself, but rather the need to execute the cycle in such fashion as to get inside the mind and the decision cycle of the adversary. This means the adversary is dealing with outdated or irrelevant information and thus becomes confused and disoriented and can’t function.” 

The key to victory is operating at a quicker tempo than the enemy. 

“To take the least-expected action disorients the enemy. It causes him to pause, to wonder, to question. This means that as the commander compresses his own time, he causes time to be stretched out for his opponent. The enemy falls farther and farther behind in making relevant decisions. It hastens the unraveling process.” 

Between Two Kingdoms – Suleika Jaouad

Between Two Kingdoms by Suleika Jaouad
Date read: 3/7/23. Recommendation: 9/10.

A beautiful and inspiring memoir about Jaouad’s diagnosis with a rare form of leukemia in her early 20s and her struggle to survive. Four years later, she had survived. But she was then faced with the question of how she could possibly begin living again. So she borrowed a friend’s car, subleased her apartment, and set off on a 15,000-mile road trip over 100 days. Along the way she visited strangers who had written to her while she was sick in order to uncover her way back to herself. The book is full of thought-provoking sections on mortality, meaning, recovery, and how to reconcile our past with our present in order to find a path forward. Jaouad’s a brilliant writer and her story will steal your heart.

Check out my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Moving to Paris and diagnosis:
“If Manhattan is where people move to jump-start careers, Paris is where they go to live out the fantasy of a different life.”

Itch (first symptom) had lessened since she moved to Paris, but the exhaustion was all consuming. She was drinking up to eight espressos a day. “I started to worry that my deep weariness might be something else. Maybe I just can’t cut it in the real world, I’d written in my journal.” 

Found herself returning to the clinics dreary waiting room multiple times for various colds, bouts of bronchitis, UTI’s. 

After her red blood cell count dropped significantly, she returned to the hospital in Paris, they stabilized her, then she flew back to the US where she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. An aggressive form of cancer that attacks the blood and bone marrow. Only 1 in 4 patients survived beyond five years past diagnosis. Suleika was 22 years old. 

“The diagnosis had formed an irreparable fracture: my life before, and after.”

Treatment:
“How strange to be here, in this depressing room, I thought with incredulity, while my peers were out there, starting careers, having babies, traveling the world, and hitting all the other milestones of young adulthood.” 

Isolation: Suleika was a year too old for pediatrics, but decades younger than most of the other patients in adult oncology. 

One afternoon, after more than five weeks in the hospital, she was going into bone marrow failure. The standard treatments were not working. She was enrolled in a phase II experimental clinical trial, meaning it was not yet known whether the new chemo drug combination was safe and effective.

Planning for the future:
“With mortality in the balance, one of life’s most delicious activities when you’re young—imagining your future—had become a frightening, despair-inducing exercise.”

“Then I howled into my pillow—a deep, blood-vessel-popping howl of frustration and envy directed at Will, at my friends, at everyone else who was out there starting jobs, taking trips, discovering new things—all unencumbered by illness.” 

Alchemize suffering into creative grist:
“Henri Matisse, while recovering from intestinal cancer, had worked on his design of the Chapel of the Rosary in Venice by pretending the ceiling of his apartment was the chapel, and attaching a paintbrush to a long pole, which allowed him to work from bed.”

Frida Kahlo, once a pre-medical student in Mexico City, was in a horrible accident when the bus collided with a streetcar. She suffered fractures of the clavicle, ribs, spine, elbow, pelvis, and leg. She was pierced by the streetcar’s iron handrail which entered her left hip. She was forced to abandon her plans of becoming a doctor. While she was bedridden, she stole oil paints from her father, ordered a special easel, and started to paint. “Kahlo transformed her confinement into a place incandescent with metaphor and meaning.”

“I decided to reimagine my survival as a creative act….If my body had grown so depleted that I now had only three functional hours each day, I would clarify my priorities and make the most of how I spent the time I had.”

Reorganized her bedroom so everything she needed was within reach—pens, notebooks, papers, bookshelves with her favorite novels, a wooden board to act as a desk while she laid in bed. “I wrote when I was home, and I wrote each day that I found myself back in the hospital. I wrote until the anger and envy and pain bled dry—until I could no longer hear the persistent beeping of monitors, the hiss of respirators, the alarms that constantly went off. I had no way of predicting all the place the Hundred-Day project would take me, but what I knew for now, was that I was starting to find my true power.” 

Started a blog: the concept was to create a platform for young adults with cancer who were often misunderstood and overlooked. Eventually, the New York Times caught wind, read her blog, and reached out to her to write for the paper. 

Prior to bone marrow transplant: “I worked around the clock for a month to draft thirteen columns before I entered the transplant unit, fueled by the knowledge that it was going to be a long time before I was well enough to write or walk or do much of anything else again….To this day, I’ve never been more prolific. Death can be a great motivator.” 

“I worked furiously, eager to get as much as I could done before the side effects of the chemo intensified. Inevitably they did, so as I typed, I kept a yellow commit bucket tucked under one arm.” 

Strangers started to write in as her column and blog gained traction. “Though I wasn’t allowed to leave my hospital room, writing had given me a portal through which I could travel across time, space, continents.”

“These strangers and their stories quickly became my conduits to the outside world. I relished the letters I received…”

“Before the transplant, writing had been a refuge for me; now it most often resulted in frustration and tears. But I was determined to do what I could while I could, even if that meant pushing my body beyond the boundaries of what was prudent.”

“Since the launch of ‘Life, Interrupted,’ it had been syndicated in magazines and newspapers and was gaining a sizable following. I didn’t have the stamina to write a new column each week, but I did keep writing, slowly, every day, even if it was only a paragraph.” 

Mortality:
“We are all terminal patients on this earth—the mystery is not ‘if’ but ‘when’ death appears in the plot line.” 

“Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.” Susan Sontag

Meaning:
Meaning is not found in the material realm—dinner, jazz, cocktails, conversation or whatever. Meaning is what’s left when everything else is stripped away.” Howard, a retired art historian from Ohio, who wrote into Suleika while she was sick.

“Grief is a ghost that visits without warning.” 

Recovery:
“It’s where I find myself now, on the threshold between an old familiar state and an unknown future. Cancer no longer lives in my blood, but it lives on in other ways, dominating my identity, my relationships, my work, and my thoughts.”

“After three and a half years, I am officially done with cancer—more than four years, if you start with the itch. I thought I’d feel victorious when I reached this moment—I thought I’d want to celebrate. But instead, it feels like the beginning of a new kind of reckoning. I’ve spent the past fifteen hundred days working tirelessly toward a single goal—survival. And now that I’ve survived, I’m realizing I don’t know how to live.” 

“Even acknowledging this schism feels impossible: I’ve already put my parents through so much, and I don’t want to worry them with the challenges I am facing now…But the contradictions leave me mired in unanswerable questions: Will my cancer return? What kind of job can I hold when I need to nap four hours in the middle of the day…?”

“During my time in treatment, I’d had one simple conviction: If I survive, it has to be for something. I don’t just want a life—I want a good life, an adventurous life, a meaningful one. Otherwise, what’s the point?” 

“Recovering isn’t about salvaging the old at all. It’s about accepting that you must forsake a familiar self forever, in favor of one that is being newly born. It is an act of brute, terrifying discovery.”

“After you’ve had the ceiling cave in on you—whether through illness or some other catastrophe—you don’t assume structural stability. You must learn to live on fault lines.”

Travel:
“My time in India has given me a glimpse into how travel can hurtle you out of old ways of being and create conditions for new ones to emerge.”

Road trip: “It’s becoming clearer and clearer to me that I need to leave the familiar, but I don’t want to do it entirely alone—I want to seek out others who can offer perspective into my predicament, who can help guide my passage. By the time I finally pass my driver’s test, the next step is obvious: I am going to go on a road trip and visit those who sustained me when I was sick.”

Covered 15,000 miles, 33 states, visiting more than twenty people, over the course of 100 days—the maximum amount of time her medical agreed to before her next follow up. 

“I am nothing like the girl who left home nearly fifty days ago. I am a sojourner, an adventurer, a road warrior, crushing the big miles, even if I still go to sleep shattered with exhaustion at the end of each day.” 

When we travel we take three trips. The first is of preparation and anticipation. The second is the trip you’re actually on. The third is the trip you remember. The key is to be present wherever you are in your journey at this moment. 

Threads of past, present, future:
“Maybe the challenge is to locate a thread that strings these selves together.” 

“To be well now is to learn to accept whatever body and mind I currently have.” 

“Healing is figuring out how to coexist with the pain that will always live inside of you, without pretending it isn’t there or allowing it to hijack your day. It is learning to confront ghosts and to carry what lingers. It is learning to embrace the people I love now instead of protecting against a future in which I am gutted by their loss.”

Personal History – Katharine Graham

Personal History by Katharine Graham
Date read: 3/4/23. Recommendation: 10/10.

The best autobiography I’ve ever read. Graham tells her own story with honesty and candor. She reflects on how she built her own strength and self-confidence navigating a business world dominated by men while leading the Washington Post through its crucible moments of the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, and the pressmen’s strike of 1975. The Post not only endured but thrived, elevating its position among the most respected newspapers in the country thanks to Graham’s dedication to serving the public good, her ability to make tough decisions, and her commitment to upholding high journalistic standards.

Check out my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Upbringing:
The children were an afterthought to Katharine’s mother, Agnes. She rarely mentioned them individually. The first time Katharine appeared in her diary by initial was two years after her birth. 

“My difficulties were much more tied to a lack of guiding personal relationships, for I had more or less to bring myself up emotionally and figure out how to deal with whatever situations confronted me. At the same time that I was surrounded by extreme luxury, I led a life structured and in many ways spartan, circumscribed by schools and lessons, travel and study.”

“My mother’s effect on us was often contradictory. We received every encouragement for what we accomplished, yet her ego was such that she trampled on our incipient interests or enthusiasms. If I said I loved The Three Musketeers, she responded by saying I couldn’t really appreciate it unless I had read it in French, as she had.”

Between fourth and fifth grade, she spent the entire summer by herself reading nearly 100 different books on the third floor of Mount Kisco. 

Self-esteem:
Upon graduating high school: “I still felt fairly different and shy and believed I had only a few friends. Apparently my class didn’t see me the way I saw myself. My senior yearbook entry describes a girl known for her laugh and manly stride. My class prophecy read: ‘Kay’s a Big Shot in the newspaper racket.’ But I envisaged no such future for myself or, in fact, any specific future at all. Rather than creating my own way, what I was trying to do all the time was figure out how to adjust to whatever life I found.” 

After departing for college, she read the Post daily and offered feedback: “I found myself deeply involved with the struggle to improve the paper. Somewhat to my surprise, given that I thought of myself during this period as unsophisticated, unworldly, and fairly unopinionated. I seem to have been full of independent appraisals of the paper and what it was printing.”

The Washington Post – beginnings:
In June of 1933, Katharine’s father, Eugene Meyer, bought The Washington Post at a bankruptcy auction. The paper had fallen on hard times and was led by an aimless owner. Five years earlier her father had tried to buy it for $5m, at the auction he got it for $825k. 

Eugene soon realized the newspaper business wasn’t like the other businesses he knew. The space was competitive. The tactics he applied weren’t generating results. The beginning was a struggle. But he always maintained his belief that a newspaper is a public trust, meant to serve the public. And over time, he stuck with it and began to create his own success. See his original principles on page 63.

The Washington Post – Phil Graham years:
Phil, Katharine’s husband, joined the Post as associate publisher in January of 1946 at the age of 30. He would learn an entirely new and competitive business, starting at the top as deputy to Eugene. He was relentless and worked incredibly hard as a close collaborator. By 1947, Phil had established himself as the defacto leader of the paper. He was involved in everything. 

By 1948, circulation had increased from 50k to 180k daily. Advertising had gone from 4m lines to 23m. The Post had been awarded numerous prizes. Eugene decided to officially pass the paper on to Phil and Katharine so it would stay in the family.

Over time, all of Phil’s responsibilities and interests built up—he was stretched thin—and that took a toll on his health and endurance. He suffered from various illnesses, often drank too much, and lashed out in explosions of anger at people who provoked him in the slightest. There were shadows building.

Phil eventually suffered from severe manic depression (bipolar disorder). He grew completely dependent on Katharine, almost like a child. The time between his hyperactivity and despair started growing more severe and occurring closer together. Then he ran off and had a public affair and announce his intention to divorce Katharine. 

Phil was hospitalized for his own safety. But negotiated his own release and went with Katharine to their farm in the countryside. After lunch they went upstairs for a nap, Phil excused himself to lie down in a separate bedroom. A few minutes later Katharine heard a gunshot. Phil had killed himself. She found him in the downstairs bathroom. 

Living in Phil’s shadow: 
“Despite my pleasure in the life I was leading during these years, I can see now that I was having problems I didn’t acknowledge to myself. I was growing shyer and less confident as I got older. I still didn’t know how to look my best or handle myself in social situations. I was afraid of being boring, and went on believing that people related to us entirely because of Phil.” 

“At the same time he was building me up, he was tearing me down. As he emerged more on the journalistic and political scenes, I increasingly saw my role as the tail to his kite—and the more I felt overshadowed, the more it became a reality…The wit he had turned on others he now turned on me. I became the butt of the family jokes. Strangely, I was still so mesmerized by him that I didn’t perceive what was happening, and even played along with it.” 

“I felt as though he had created me and that I was totally dependent on him…The truth is that I adored him and saw only the positive side of what he was doing for me. I simply didn’t connect my lack of self-confidence with his behavior toward me.”

When she and Phil were splitting up, Katharine was intent on keeping the paper in her family until one of her children could run it. Her friend, Luvie Pearson, looked at her and said, “Don’t be silly, dear. You can do it….You’ve just been pushed down so far you don’t recognize what you can do.” This was the first time she ever contemplated the idea that she could actually run the Post.

On her father’s death:
“People react in such complicated ways to any death, but particularly to the death of a parent, because a lot of what one feels is about oneself and the sense that nothing now stands between that self and dying. You have now become the older generation.”

The Washington Post - Katharine’s rise:
After Phil’s death: “It’s hard to remake decisions and even harder to rethink non decisions. Sometimes you don’t really decide, you just move forward, and that is what I did—moved forward blindly and mindlessly into a new and unknown life.”

September 20th, 1963, Katharine was elected president of The Washington Post Company at a board of directors meeting. 

“I naively thought the whole business would just go on as it had while I learned by listening. I didn’t realize that nothing stands still—issues arise every day, big and small, and they start coming at you. I didn’t understand the immensity of what lay before me, how frightened I would be by much of it, how tough it was going to be and how many anxious hours and days I would spend for a long, long time. Nor did I realize how much I was eventually going to enjoy it all.” 

Redefining her role: Comparing herself to her exaggerated idea of Phil’s ability and accomplishments only made things more challenging. “I had to come to realize that I could only do the job in whatever way I could do it. I couldn’t try to be someone else, least of all Phil.”

“What I essentially did was to put one foot in front of the other, shut my eyes, and step off the edge.”

Her devotion to the Post and her overwhelming desire to keep the paper in the family, despite her insecurity and lack of knowledge, she knew she had to make it work. She got down to the job and set out to learn everything she could. 

“Most of all, what I know I did well in these years was to care about the company. I took an inordinate interest in all that we did…I tried to create an atmosphere that gave people the freedom to do their jobs, an environment in which good ideas would always be heard. I think I shared the highs and the lows, the failures as well as the successes.” 

The Pentagon Papers:
The New York Times got a hold of classified documents and started running articles about the secret history of decision-making in Vietnam—the Pentagon Papers. More formally titled, “History of the United States Decision-Making Process on Vietnam Policy.” Secret of Defense Robert McNamara had commissioned the review in 1967 before he had left the Pentagon. This resulted in a year-and-a-half-long study, with a 3000 page narrative history, and 4000 page appendix of documents. It was 47 volumes covering American involvement in Indochina from WWII to 1968 when peace talks began on the Vietnam War began in Paris. The government forced the Times to suspend publication. The Post was the only other paper that was able to get its hands on the raw documents—though it was a 4400 page jumbled mess of unordered pages without page numbers. 

Internal team at the Post was conflicted about publishing and defying court orders. But the company’s soul was at stake. The editors were pushing to publish in solidarity with the Times on the issue of freedom of the press. Their lawyers pushed back. Publishing could destroy the paper. But not publishing and advancing their own cause could do the same thing. Katharine made the decision to publish. 

Supreme Court eventually ruled that the government had not met the burden of showing justification for restraining further publication. 

The Post, as a policy, never published information based on intercepted communications, signal intelligence, or cryptography that endangered national security. This was a pledge they kept even with the Pentagon Papers.

“That was a key moment in the life of this paper. It was just sort of the graduation of the Post into the highest ranks. One of our unspoken goals was to get the world to refer to the Post and New York Times in the same breath, which they previously hadn’t done. After the Pentagon Papers, they did.” Ben Bradlee

Watergate is ultimately what led to the Washington Post becoming a household name.

Integrity:
In 1970, the Post hired an ombudsman whose job it was to receive and review complaints about what appears in the paper—only the second paper to do so.

During Watergate created strict rules to ensure fair coverage and accurate details, despite the abuse Katharine and the paper were facing from the Nixon administration. Every bit of information attributed to an unnamed source had to be supported by at least one additional independent source. They ran nothing that was reported by another newspaper, television or radio station without independently verifying and confirming by their own reporters. Every word and every story was read by at least one senior idiot before it went into print. “No matter how careful we were, there was always the nagging possibility that we were wrong, being set up, being misled.” 

Warren Buffett:
Warren joined the board of The Washington Post Company in 1974 and started mentoring Katharine in business education. During meetings he would bring as many annual reports as he could carry and took Katharine through them, describing different businesses, illustrating his points with real-world companies and case studies, identifying the differences between good businesses and bad ones.

Helped her discover self-confidence: “Warren summed up our learning relationship by suggesting that I seemed to go around as though I were seeing myself through the distorting mirrors of a carnival fun house. He saw it as his task to get me a better mirror that could eliminate the distortions.”

“He later told me that he subscribed to Charlie Munger’s ‘orangutan theory’—which essentially contended that, ‘if a smart person goes into a room with an orangutan and explains whatever his or her idea is, the orangutan just sits there eating his banana, and at the end of the conversation, the person explaining comes out smarter.’ Warren claimed to be my orangutan. And in a way he was. I heard myself talk when I was with him and I always got a better idea of what I was saying.” 

The pressmen’s strike:
Early morning on October 1, 1975, the contracts between The Washington Post and its unions had expired at midnight. Around 4am, the pressmen disabled all nine presses, including setting fire to one and beating the press foreman, Jim Hover. The pressmen walked out, taking the other unions with them, and started picketing. When Katharine arrived there was a foot of water covering the floor, smoke, and chaos. 

Katharine never wanted a strike and told the managers to avoid one if possible. And once it began, she didn’t want it last one second longer than necessary. None of their preparations in case a strike had occurred had planned for the presses being so badly damaged—electrical wiring ripped out, essential operating parts removed, oil drained out to strip the gear, and newsprint rolls slashed, or having all the craft unions in the building out on strike together.

Once they fixed one press, a group of advertising executives and others stepped in to run the press. They were able to print 100k papers that same night. Afterwards, the papers made their way through the mailroom where they were bundled up by another crew of executives and sent down the chutes to the waiting trucks. 

Preparing the mailing for the large Sunday papers was time-consuming and dirty. Katharine worked the mailroom on Saturday nights throughout the strike, as well as several other nights during the week. Went on duty when presses started to run at 930pm, didn’t finish until 3 or 4am. Left them filthy, sweaty, and covered with paste. “We had to roll up each individual paper in a brown wrapper, paste on an address label, seal the whole thing shut, and throw the finished, wrapped package into the big, smelly, heavy, and unwieldy canvas bags at the side of the work table, which we then dragged over to another station from which they were finally hauled off to the post office. 

“The whole job was so tedious and interminable that we came to look on it as our supreme service for the cause, the ultimate sacrifice. Warren Buffett, who spent several Saturday nights in the mailroom with us, said it made him rethink the price of the Sunday paper—no price was sufficient.”

For the first ten days of the strike, they operated at a high level of activity and stress. Facing uncertainties, difficulties, and violence at the picket line. Katharine received threats and personal attacks. Nails and tacks were spread across the alley entrance near the office and resulted in flat tires for those coming into the office. Pressmen began picketing the paper’s advertisers and boycotting their goods. They passed out flyers for consumers to boycott the advertisers goods, went into stores and dumped goods off shelves, and in one instance poured oil into a store’s fish tank, killing all the fish. 

“We had weathered a strike we hadn’t asked for and didn’t control. The Post survived this crucial test, but there was no ‘clean victory’—it was a painful one for the Post, for its guild and craft-union members, and for the Washington community. It divided the paper, creating a false atmosphere of ‘us’ versus ‘them.’ Nearly two hundred people lost their jobs.”

“I never wanted the strike. I know that many people believe I deliberately set out to destroy a union, but that was certainly not the case….I never dreamed it was possible to replace the pressmen, not did I feel it was desirable….Most people at the Post are still represented by unions.”

The Washington Post has lived long and honorably with its unions…Katharine believed that they benefited from strong, healthy trade unionism. She always believed that. But she stands by the choice to go around the union because she had no other choice. The future of the company hung in the balance. The strike was a great tragedy that could have been avoided with wiser union leadership. Many good pressmen were caught in the crosshairs, they either had to resign from the union or remain with leaders who led them so poorly and had done tremendous harm. 

“I felt that the philosophy that any union is right no matter what it does was an odd cause for which to sacrifice one’s career. I wish the pressmen had influenced their union leadership to be responsible in the first place. Failing that, I wish they had returned as individuals. Unfortunately, many followed Dugan over the cliff.”

The strike taught Katharine necessary, but painful lessons about the need for strong and compassionate managers who are knowledgeable about the work, labor relations, and communications. The paper became more efficient, flexible and productive as a result. Went from 17 pressmen on each press before the strike to 8 person crews afterwards. Press speeds increased. Atmosphere improved throughout the building. Katharine focused on establishing better communication within the company and it resulted in a stronger paper.

How I Built This – Guy Raz

How I Built This by Guy Raz
Date read: 3/1/23. Recommendation: 7/10.

Based on Guy Raz’s podcast of the same name, this book shares insights from some of the world’s top entrepreneurs on building, launching, and scaling their ideas. Great chapters on identifying risk, extending your runway, harnessing the power of your story, and being deliberate about your location.

Check out my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Scary versus dangerous:
“One of the things we taught people to do was rappel off a cliff. It is a very scary thing to do, but you are also held by a belay rope, and that rope would hold a car. So walking off the cliff backwards is scary, but it’s not dangerous. Walking across a thirty-five-degree-angle snowfield on a beautiful late May afternoon with bright blue sky, on the other hand, is not scary at all, but it is very dangerous, because the snow is melting, eventually it is going to find a layer of ice, the water will lubricate that ice, and then you have an avalanche. That is dangerous but not scary.” Jim Koch

“In my situation, staying at BCG that was dangerous but not scary. The danger was continuing to do something that didn’t make me happy and getting to sixty-five years old looking back and going, ‘Oh my God, I wasted my life.’” Jim Koch

“Failing is scary. Wasting your life is dangerous.” Guy Raz

Michael Dell on the origins of Dell Computer Corporation: There was nothing dangerous about his idea, he loved working on computers. He knew them inside and out. The reality was the scariest thing about starting the business—the unknown. “The danger for Michael was in relenting to his parents’ demands that he become a doctor, in hating every waking second of it while he watched the personal computing revolution unfold in front of him, and then in resenting his family for the rest of his life because they pushed him down a path that he knew in his heart was wrong for him.” Guy Raz

Safety nets:
Herb Kelleher, co-founder of Southwest Airlines, didn’t give up his law practice until 1981—fourteen years after founding Southwest. Draymond John continued to work at Red Lobster for six years after he started FUBU, only after he secured a multi-million dollar round of financing. Both used their jobs to create runway for their ideas. 

Avoid catastrophe: “By doing things smartly and safely like this, you’ll give yourself more time and more room to operate, while simultaneously reducing the chances that failure can ruin your life.” 

Never be unprepared:
Each founder that Raz highlights in his book has one thing in common: they’ve done their homework. They know their product, business, customers, and industry inside and out. And this gives them a deep confidence in the viability of their ideas. 

“They knew their ideas would work because they knew their stuff.”

The role of research for artists and entrepreneurs is the equivalent of practice for athletes or rehearsal for actors. “It’s deep work and repetition that sear the fundamentals into your muscle memory….so when the lights come on and it’s time to do something for real, you can put all that prep work away and just act or play or build. You can create freely, without reservation or hesitation.” Guy Raz

Relationships:
“My best business decisions really have to do with picking people. Deciding to go into partnership with Paul Allen is probably at the top of the list…Having somebody who you totally trust, who’s totally committed, who shares your vision and yet has a little bit different set of skills, and also acts as a check on you—and just the benefit of sparking off of somebody who’s got that kind of brilliance—it’s not only made it fun, but it’s really led to a lot of success.” Bill Gates

Know your story:
“The story must explain at a fundamental level why you exist.” Ben Horowitz

“The basic story that answers the big ‘why’ questions is the one that creates loyal customers, finds the best investors, build an employee culture that keeps them committed to the venture, and keeps you committed and grinding away when things get real hard and you want to give up (and you will).” Guy Raz

Location matters:
Three different approaches to location: moving in order to break into your industry, moving in order to break out of your industry, or staying put right where you are. What matters is that you’re intentional in that decision. 

Master your craft:
“Whatever you do, do it well. Do it so well that when people see you do it, they will want to come back and see you do it again, and they will want to bring others and show them how well you do what you do.” Walt Disney

Write Useful Books – Rob Fitzpatrick

Write Useful Books: A modern approach to designing and refining recommendable nonfiction by Rob Fitzpatrick
Date read: 2/27/23. Recommendation: 9/10.

The best modern resource that I’ve read for writing a compelling nonfiction book and successfully self-publishing. Fitzpatrick offers advice on effectively scoping your book, adopting an iterative approach, testing with beta readers, navigating a successful launch, and hacking Amazon to optimize for sales and growth. If you’re interested in writing your own book, it’s a go-to resource and quick reference.

Check out my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Positive reviews:
The secret to a five-star Amazon rating is to be clear about what your book is promising so people can decide if they don’t need it. Good books get bad reviews when they make their promise too broad, luring the wrong people into purchasing the book. State who the book is for and what they’re going to get out of reading it. 

Pick your target:
“Nearly every author attempts to include too much stuff for too many different types of readers. But that’s the recipe for writing something mediocre for everybody and mind-blowing for nobody—every chapter that the amateur adores, the expert endures, and vice versa.”

Scope:

1. When someone decides to buy and read your book, what are they trying to achieve or accomplish with it? Why are they bothering? After finishing it, what’s different in their life, work, or worldview? That’s your book’s promise.

2. What does your ideal reader already know and believe? If they already believe in the importance of the topic, then you can skip the sections attempting to convince them of its worth. Or if they already know the basics, you can skip those. 

3. Who is your book not for and what is it not doing? If you aren’t clear on who you’re leaving out, then you’ll end up writing yourself into rabbit holes, wasting time on narrow topics that only a small subset of your readers actually care about. Deciding who it isn’t for will allow you to clip those tangential branches. 

Relevancy:
To stay relevant for years, you need to pick a promise that will remain relevant and important for 5+ years. And avoid overreliance on temporary tools, trends, and tactics. For example, The 4-Hour Workweek feels mostly dated at this point because most of its content relied on tools that are now outdated. 

“To create a book that lasts and grows, the formula is simple: do the best job of solving an important problem for a reader who cares without anchoring yourself to temporary tools, tactics, or trends. That’s partly about good scoping and partly about writing something that delivers real results to the average reader. And to accomplish that second goal, you’ll want to begin testing the book’s foundations with real people, even before it has even been written.” 

Learner’s goals:
“Readers aren’t buying your useful book for its storytelling or suspense. They are buying it as the solution to a problem or a path toward a goal. They’ll stay engaged for as long as you are regularly and consistently delivering on that promise.”

Arrange the content around the learner’s goals instead of your own convenience. That’s what makes it feel easy and engaging. Create rapid, consistent delivery of value in your book. 

Editing:
Deleting entire chapters is mainly about scoping—the reader doesn’t need this. Deleting anything smaller is about a mix of editing and reader experience design.

“Your early drafts already contain plenty of value. The challenge isn’t to add more good stuff. It’s to delete all the fluff that’s delaying readers from getting to it.” 

Front-loading:
“The likelihood of your readers recommending your book is based on the amount of value they’ve received before either finishing or abandoning it. And they’re most likely to abandon at the start.”

• Can you delete or reduce the front-matter (foreword, intro, bio)?

• If your book begins with value-enablers (theory, context, foundations), can you rearrange it to insert pieces of real value far earlier?

• If your whole book is building up toward a grand conclusion, can you simply start with the big reveal?

The faster you can deliver value, the happier and more engaged your readers will be. 

“A strong start can keep folks going through a weaker ending, but a strong ending can’t save a disappointing start.”

Beta-readers:
Find readers who want what you’re creating so badly that they’re willing to endure an early, awkward manuscript to get to it. They offer three types of insights:

1. What they say in their comments (qualitative)

2. Where they begin to become bored, start skimming, stop reading, and stop commenting (quantitative insights)

3. How they apply the book’s ideas in their lives (observational insights)

You’ll receive more helpful feedback by showing a less polished product because people will be less afraid to hurt your feelings. 

Beta reading runs in interactions of 2-8 weeks. First week or two gather feedback. Next six weeks factor that into a major revision. After each iteration, the manuscript will get stronger, and its problems will get smaller. 

Aim for 3-5 deeply engaged readers per iteration. Requires inviting 12-20 people who claim that they would love to read it. Roughly half won’t open it. Another half will submit one comment before giving up. 

Aim for 1-2 full iterations of beta reading (should take 1-4 months, depending on how quickly you can do a rewrite). You should continue iterating until your beta readers have shown you that you’re finished. 

Strong signals that you’re finished with beta-reading phase: It feels easy to recruit new beta readers since they want what you’re offering (desirable). Most of them are receiving the value and reaching the end (effective and engaging). At least some of them are bringing their friends (the recommendation loop is running). 

Tips: move the manuscript into a tool that allows for live feedback, add instructions explaining the most helpful types of feedback that a reader can give. 

Save the most influential readers for last. If an influential beta reader mentions they love what you’ve written, then request a testimonial for your book’s cover or Amazon page. Keep them in the loop on launch timelines and send them a few signed copies once the book is published. 

The best way to detect boredom is to find where readers are quietly giving up. 

Seed readers:
Get your book into the hands and hearts of 500-1000 seed readers before taking your foot off the gas.

Marketing options:

1. Digital book tour via podcasts and online events

2. Amazon PPC advertising

3. Event giveaways and bulk sales

4. Build a small author platform via writing in public

Write in public: Share your writing, drafts, and excerpts. Share your research and references. Share your process and progress. 

Wild – Cheryl Strayed

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed
Date read: 2/25/23. Recommendation: 9/10.

I had high expectations and Cheryl Strayed’s memoir still blew me away. She’s such a wonderful writer. She reflects on her own truth and struggles in a way that gives a voice to an experience that so many other people can relate to. The book details her solo three-month hike on the Pacific Crest Trail and the painstaking miles where she was able to reflect on everything that had left her broken and begin to make herself whole again. It’s a wonderful story of letting go, finding yourself, persevering, and choosing gratitude despite it all.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Adventure:
Solo three-month hike on the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT)

“I’d set out to hike the trail so that I could reflect upon my life to think about everything that had broken me and make myself whole again.” 

“But the truth was, at least so far, I was consumed only with my most immediate and physical suffering.” 

“But hiking the PCT was hard in a different way. In a way that made the other hardest things the tiniest bit less hard.”

“I thought it would help me find my center, to come out here.”

“I had only just begun. I was three weeks into my hike, but everything in me felt altered. I lay in the water as long as I could without breathing, alone in a strange new land, while the actual world all around me hummed on.” 

What mattered was utterly timeless: “It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.”

Tragedy:
Her mother was diagnosed with cancer and told she had a year to live. But she only lived 49 days after her diagnosis. During that time, each day was an eternity. 

“It was only after her death that I realized who she was: the apparently magical force at the center of our family who’d kept us all invisibly spinning in the powerful orbit around her. Without her, Eddie slowly became a stranger. Leif and Karen and I drifted into our own lives…we were four people floating separately among the flotsam of our grief.”

Fear:
“Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves…Every time I heard a sound of unknown origin or felt something horrible cohering in my imagination, I pushed it away. I simply did not let myself become afraid. Fear begets fear. Power begets power. I willed myself to beget power. And it wasn’t long before I actually wasn’t afraid.”

Doubt:
“I staggered north toward Kennedy Meadows, furious with myself for having come up with this inane idea. Elsewhere, people were having barbecues and days of ease, lounging by lakes and taking naps….I was going to quit. Quit, quit, quit, I chanted to myself as I moaned and hiked and rested (ten, five, ten, five). I was going to get to Kennedy Meadows, retrieve my resupply box, eat every candy bar I’d packed into it, and then hitch a ride to whatever town the driver who picked me up was going to.” 

Letting go:
“Perhaps the impulse to purchase the PCT guidebook months before had been a primal grab for a cure, for the thread of my life that had been severed. I could feel it unspooling behind me—the old thread I’d lost, the new one I was spinning…”

The void: the place where things are born, where they begin. Black holes absorb energy and then release something new and alive. 

“It was all unknown to me then, as I sat on that white bench on the day I finished my hike. Everything except the fact that I didn’t have to know. That it was enough to trust that what I’d done was true.”

“How wild it was, to be let be.”

Rediscovering yourself:
“Someone was in here. It was me. I was here. I felt it in a way I hadn’t in ages: the me inside of me, occupying my spot in the fathomless Milky Way.”

Perseverance:
“So much of being able to hike the PCT depended upon mind control: the stout decision to move forward, regardless. I covered my wounds with duct tape and 2nd Skin, then I put on my socks and boots and hobbled over to the campground’s spigot to fill up my two bottles with sixty-four ounces of water, which had to last me for fifteen searing miles across Hat Creek Rim.”

“Miles weren’t things that blazed dully past. They were long, intimate struggles of weeds and clumps of dirt, blades of grass and flowers that bent in the wind, trees that lumbered and screeched….The PCT had taught me what a mile was. I was humble before each and every one.”

Gratitude:
“Thank you. Not just for the long walk, but for everything I could feel finally gathered up inside of me; for everything the trail had taught me and everything I couldn’t yet know, though I felt it somehow already contained within me.” 

Brave Enough – Cheryl Strayed

Brave Enough by Cheryl Strayed
Date read: 2/23/23. Recommendation: 8/10.

If you’ve read any of Strayed’s work or heard her speak, you know how compelling her advice, thoughts, and quotes are. The way she structures and communicates her ideas is both memorable and original. Brave Enough is a tiny book that’s a compilation of her most famous quotes about love, compassion, forgiveness, and endurance. It deserves a spot on your desk to act as a constant reminder and reference as you face challenges in your own work and life.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Do the work:
“We don’t reach the mountaintop from the mountaintop. We start at the bottom and climb up. Blood is involved.”

“Stop asking yourself what you want, what you desire, what interests you. Ask yourself instead: What has been given to me. Ask: What do I have to give back? Then give it.”

“You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don’t know what it is yet.”

Live your truth:
“You don’t have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don’t have to explain what you plan to do with your life. You don’t have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards…You have to be kind. You have to give it all you’ve got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that’s all.” 

“Eight of the ten things you have decided about yourself at the age of twenty will, over time, prove to be false. The other two things will prove to be so true that you’ll look back in twenty years and howl.” 

“Trust your gut. Forgive yourself. Be grateful.”

“Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it will.” 

“You can’t fake the core. The truth that lives there will eventually win out. It’s a god we must obey, a force that brings us all inevitably to our knees. It asks, eternally: Will you do it later or will you do it now?” 

“Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true.” 

Allow yourself to evolve:
“Don’t surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn’t true anymore.”

“It’s good you’ve worked hard to resolve childhood issues while in your twenties, but understand that what you resolve will need to be resolved again. And again. You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.” 

“Transformation doesn’t ask that you stop being you. It demands that you find a way back to the authenticity and strength that’s already inside of you. You only have to bloom.”

“If it is impossible for you to go on as you were before, so you must go on as you never have.” 

Kindness:
“We are all entitled to our opinions and religious beliefs, but we are not entitled to make shit up and then use the shit we made up to oppress other people.” 

Roots:
“It’s in the most basic, essential, beginning stories that so much of our lives are written. Who loved you best? What made you finally believe in yourself? From what garden or pot or crack in the pavement did you grow? How did you get your water?”

“Humility is about refusing to get all tangled up with yourself. It’s about surrender, receptivity, awareness, simplicity. Breathing in. Breathing out.” 

Success:
“Success is measured only by your ability to say yes to these two questions: Did I do the work I needed to do? Did I give it everything I had?”

Tiny Beautiful Things – Cheryl Strayed

Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice from Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed
Date read: 2/21/23. Recommendation: 8/10.

The best of Strayed’s advice from her column Dear Sugar in a single collection. The columns cover dozens of topics from relationships and finding yourself to writing and doing hard things. At its core, as Strayed explains, the column has always been about connection and one person writing a letter to another—in pain, courage, confusion, clarity, love, and faith. My favorite columns were those that discussed writing, authenticity, rites of passage, and taking what’s yours.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Origins of Advice from Dear Sugar:
At its core, Dear Sugar has always been about one person writing a letter to another—in pain, courage, confusion, clarity, love, and faith. And about connecting. “It has always been about believing that when we dare tell the truth about who we are and what we want and how exactly we’re afraid or sad or lost or uncertain that transformation is possible, that light can be found, that courage and compassion can be mustered.”

Writing:
“As my thirtieth birthday approached, I realized that if I truly wanted to write the story I had to tell, I would have to gather everything within me to make it happen. I would have to sit and think of only one thing longer and harder than I thought possible. I would have to suffer. By which I mean work.”

“But I’d finally reached a point where the prospect of not writing a book was more awful than the one of writing a book that sucked.” 

“When I was done writing it, I understood that things happened just as they were meant to. That I couldn’t have written my book before I did. I simply wasn’t capable of doing so, either as a writer or a person. To get to the point I had to get to to write my first book, I had to do everything I did in my twenties. I had to write a lot of sentences that never turned into anything and stories that never miraculously formed a novel. I had to read voraciously and compose exhaustive entries in my journals…”

“I’d finally been able to give it because I’d let go of all the grandiose ideas I’d once had about myself and my writing…I stopped being grandiose. I’d lowered myself to the notion that the absolute only thing that mattered was getting that extra beating heart out of my chest. Which meant I had to write my book.”

“I know it’s hard to write, darling. But it’s harder not to. The only way you’ll find out if you ‘have it in you’ is to get to work and see if you do.” 

“So write, Elissa Bassist. Not like a girl. Not like a boy. Write like a motherfucker.” 

Take what’s yours:
“Nobody is going to give you a thing. You have to give it to yourself. You have to tell us what you have to say.” 

“I woke up to the realization that if it was true that my life was going nowhere and the reason it was going nowhere was me, then it was also true that only I had the power to change it. No one could do it for me. I had to do it myself, wildly.”

Authenticity is your now:
“The future has an ancient heart.” Carlo Levi

“Who we become is born of who we most primitively are; we both know and cannot possibly know what it is we’ve yet to make manifest in our lives.” 

“There is absolutely nothing wrong with law school, but don’t go unless you want to be a lawyer. You can’t take a class if taking a class feels like it’s going to kill you.”

“Let whatever mysterious starlight that guided you this far guide you onward to whatever crazy beauty awaits.” 

Rites of passage:
“Difficulty, solitude, and risk, are the three things that all rites of passage have in common. It’s because putting ourselves in situations where we must do hard things that scare us without anyone there to intervene pushes us beyond what we previously thought ourselves capable of. It expands our perception of our own courage, strength, and endurance.”

“I tested myself when I went on my long hike on the Pacific Crest Trail, which I embarked on about nine months after I hacked my braid off in Blue Fourche. I had to do something hard so I could know my strength. I had to do something scary so I could find my courage. I had to do something alone so I could see who I was. I didn’t know that doing those things at twenty-six would change my life in all the ways it has….”

Quench Your Own Thirst – Jim Koch

Quench Your Own Thirst: Business Lessons Learned Over a Beer or Two by Jim Koch
Date read: 2/18/23. Recommendation: 7/10.

Jim Koch’s inspiring story of founding the Boston Beer Company (Samuel Adams) and lessons learned in building a meaningful business along the way. Koch has great sections on risks, the difference between what’s scary and what’s dangerous, charting your own path, and doing the right thing.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Taking risks:
Spring of 1984 decided he was going to leave his job as a management consultant at Boston Consulting Group (BCG) to start his own beer company (the Boston Beer Company, famous for Samuel Adams). His family had a legacy of brewing beer (five generations on his father’s side were brewmasters). His dad thought he was an idiot, leaving a high-paying job. Jim’s response was that he can make a living, but not the living he was currently making. And that was enough, and he’d be happier running his own small brewery than constantly traveling across the country and working for someone else like he was in his consulting role. 

People were perplexed as to why he was leaving a great consulting job for a new unexpected path as a brewer-entrepreneur. He was supporting his wife and two small children. What if he blew up his life? What if it failed? But it wasn’t as scary as it looked from the outside. 

“Most risks aren’t really risky. Isn’t the biggest risk of all that you’ll waste your life doing what you don’t really enjoy doing, making compromise after compromise?”

“By the time I reached my mid-thirties, starting a company didn’t seem fundamentally different from any other practical task I’d attempted. I wasn’t terrified at the prospect of leaving stability and familiarity behind, because I knew things would work out. Even if the solution to a problem didn’t come to me immediately, I knew that if I hung in there, I would find it. I just needed to be in the right frame of mind to see it.” 

Scary versus dangerous:
“At Outward Bound, we taught people to rappel off a cliff—you literally walk off a cliff backward into empty space. That scares the bejesus out of most people trying it, or even watching it, for the first time. In truth, that rope is strong enough to hold a car. But the first time you do it, it’s pretty scary. It’s just not very risky.”

“Other kinds of situations, however, really are dangerous even if they don’t seem like it. Let’s say it’s a really beautiful early spring day. You’re on the side of a mountain or glacier, walking across a sunlit slope that isn’t too flat or too steep. You think everything is fine, but you’re wrong. The sun is hitting the top layer of snow, causing some of it to melt. The water is trickling down into layers of the snow and ice below. When enough water hits a layer of less-dense snow that had fallen on top of an icy layer months ago, the entire layer begins to slide, and the snow breaks free. All of a sudden, you have an avalanche. Not just an avalanche—AN AVALANCHE! These things can be hideously dangerous. People caught in avalanches tend not to survive. This is real danger, despite the bright sunlight and the sparkling snow.” 

Chart your own path:
When Jim was 24 (1973), he was enrolled in graduate school (a dual J.D./M.B.A. program at Harvard). He felt trapped and decided to drop out. Went to work at Outward Bound, an intensive outdoor program designed to foster mental toughness. Gave him a chance to open his mind and build perspective away from Harvard. Cast aside the weight of people's expectations and came to grips with his true self. 

“It may have seemed like I was a ‘dropout,’ and in a literal sense I was. I was moving in no particular direction, toward no particular goal. To my Harvard classmates, I looked like a loser. But I was also laying the foundation for life as an entrepreneur. I thought of myself as gathering my forces.” 

“When I launched the Boston Beer Company, I knew what I wanted: freedom, personal growth, connectedness with others, and the opportunity to do something that mattered, at least to me. I got all of those benefits long before I realized any financial returns. I have enjoyed the freedom of being my own boss, waking up every morning to decide what I need to do that day, stretching myself to learn new lessons or to find new capabilities.”

Focus on meaningful work:
“If you’re going to work hard, you should find it satisfying and meaningful. Work is too much a part of your life and identity not to.”

Loved the intellectual challenge of consulting, but not the travel and being away from his young family. “I wanted to see more of my family while doing something I enjoyed, something that was meaningful.” 

My idea boiled down to: Make great beer. Give it to people fresh. Find customers.

Ignorance:
“Ignorance can actually be a huge asset, giving you the best vantage point. When I started the Boston Beer Company, I had no serious beer industry experience on my side—only ignorance…” 

Clear goals:
After launching the company, the goal was to get their beer into 100 bars in Boston that they handpicked. They got every single one of them.

Do whatever it takes:
Late summer afternoon in 1985, Jim walked into a Boston bar that he wanted to carry Samuel Adams after the lunch rush. He asked the bartender to see the manager. The bartender said that he wasn’t there during the day, he was only there on Thursday nights. Jim replied he would come back then and asked when a good time would be. The bartender said after 10pm—that was his way of screening out salespeople from a regular beer distributor who wouldn’t ever show up that late after work hours. But Jim did. Because that was his livelihood. 

The right thing is the hard thing:
Beer needs to be fresh to taste its best. After 4-5 months in a can or bottle, the character degrades and it starts to taste stale. But unsold beer sits in distributors warehouses for months. And breweries rarely took beer out of circulation to replace it. In 1988 bottles came with a freshness dating system made up of a series of little notches that corresponded to a secret code and could only be deciphered with a code card. Created an opportunity for the Boston Beer Company (BBC). They decided to print an expiration date in plain English on bottles and cans. And they created an amnesty program for distributors—if they returned expired beer, BBC would reimburse them. Practice of buying back beer was unprecedented. They were destroying about $100k worth of beer (now over $6m). 

Sunk costs and avoiding catastrophic decisions: In 1986, decided it was time to build their own brewery. They didn’t technically need one, they had a contract brewing arrangement that was working well for them. Spent two years designing the new brewery and buying some of the equipment. They raised outside capital ($11m) and estimated the brewery would cost $8m. But the formal bids came back at $15m. Jim was tempted to bet the farm to make it happen, because that’s what entrepreneurs are supposed to do right? A mentor told him “don’t risk what you don’t have to get what you don’t need.” He ended up backing out, selling the equipment they had already purchased at a nearly total loss (roughly $2.5m). 

Mornings on Horseback – David McCullough

Mornings on Horseback by David McCullough
Date read: 2/14/23. Recommendation: 10/10.

The best biography that I’ve read on Theodore Roosevelt—though it only covers his early years from age 10 to 27. These were the years that Roosevelt grew from a fragile child and naive New York assemblyman into a hardened cowboy in the Badlands of North Dakota. McCullough was one of the best biographers and historians we’ll likely ever see. He breathes life into Roosevelt’s coming-of-age, grief, and transformation.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Childhood:
Extremely frail, sickly, undersized, nervous, and timid as a child. Faced chronic stomach trouble, headaches, colds, fevers, and asthma. 

He found joy in adventuring, watching birds and animals, anything to do with nature.

Filled his notebooks with descriptions and observations of ants, spiders, beetles, and dragonflies.

Created his own “Roosevelt Museum of Natural History” in the back hall of the fourth floor of his family home.

Spent childhood summers in houses along the Hudson, riding, swimming, and running barefoot. Went on expeditions with his father to the Adirondacks. It fueled his love for nature and the outdoors. 

Urgency:
Teddy Roosevelt lived his life with urgency, constantly moving and favoring action.

“Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough.” Theodore Roosevelt

“He was a figure of incessant activity, of constant talk, constant hurt, a bee in a bottle.” DM

At Harvard, he busied himself with boxing lessons, dance classes, horseback riding, wrestling, and long hikes. He was always ready to join anything with no questions asked. He held an amazing array of interests. Joined the Rifle Club, Art Club, Glee Club, became president of the Natural History Society, started a Finance Club, was named to the editorial board of the Advocate, the undergrad magazine. 

Purposeful: “The ever-admiring John Woodbury seems to have been alone in his forecast of distinction. Woodbury, as he said later, figured Theodore might amount to something—as a professor of history perhaps—if only because he seemed to know what he wanted. To most others he remained likable but peculiar and much too intense for comfort.” DM

Transforming himself:
Around twelve years old, his father sat him down and said, “Theodore, you have the mind, but you have not the body, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should…You must make your body.”

Teddy started doing daily workouts and built a gym on their own back piazza.

“It was no good wishing to appear like the heroes he worshipped if he made no effort to be like them. Strength had to come first; one must be strong before everything else.” DM

“There was to be a misconception in later years that he conquered his childhood infirmities mainly through willpower and bodybuilding, that he rid himself of asthma by making himself a strong man. But that is not quite the way it happened. First of all, he never would be rid of asthma entirely, and if there was a point at which he clearly found reprieve from suffering of the kind he had known, it came well before he attained anything like rugged manhood. It came when he went to Harvard, when he left home and was on his own in ways he had never been.” DM

“Look out for Theodore. He’s not strong, but he’s all grit. He’ll kill himself before he’ll even say he’s tired.” Doctor Thompson in 1878 cautioning the guides who Roosevelt ventured into the Maine wilderness alongside. 

Skating expedition:
Indomitable will: One bitter winter’s day while he was at Harvard, Roosevelt went with Richard Welling, fellow classmate and future prominent New York attorney, on a skating expedition to Fresh Pond. It was bitterly cold, windy, and the ice was rough. Any sane man would have turned around, but Theodore kept exclaiming in delight as they beat their way across the pond, despite not knowing how to skate very well. “The harder the wind blew, the more miserable Welling felt, the greater Theodore appeared to be enjoying himself.” Welling felt his own grit had never been put to the test as much as it was that day and finally after being out on the pond for three hours and it was too dark to see, Roosevelt suggested they venture back home. 

Early political career:
At 23, he was the youngest member of the New York Assembly (127 members). But nothing seemed to intimidate him, he plunged ahead, deferred to no one. Spent time mingling with the other assemblymen who were farmers, mechanics, liquor dealers, newspapermen, and lawyers.

During his first term in 1882 (five months), he spoke to everyone he could, grilling them for details on how things were done, issues of the day. He was a voracious reader, working his way through stacks of papers every morning. He saw and formed an opinion on seemingly everything. By his second term in 1883, he knew more about state politics than 90% of the members. 

Was relentless in fighting corruption and championing reform. Went to witness and gather information firsthand, as he did with the Cigar Bill. Was willing to change his mind and do the right thing, even if it went against traditional Republican stance. 

“He never doubted the moral virtue of any of his own positions or the need to punish the wicked. (At one point he called for the return of the public whipping post as punishment for any man who inflicted brutal pain on a woman or child.)” DM

Acted as a gentlemen doing his part in the public interest, never signaled that he was a ‘professional’ politician as that would have been the equivalent of calling himself corrupt. “Oddly, for all his quick success in politics, the passion and energy he exuded, he was still unable, or unwilling, to accept politics as his lifework. He never spoke of it as a career or calling.” DM

Tragedy:
On February 12th, Alice (Teddy’s wife) went into labor and had a baby girl, Alice. They telegraphed Teddy who was in Albany the next morning letting him know that mother and child were doing well. A few hours later a second telegram arrived and Teddy rushed for the next train. When Corinne arrived (Teddy’s sister) Elliot (Teddy’s younger brother) famously said ‘There is a curse on this house! Mother is dying, and Alice is dying too.” Mittie (Teddy’s mother) was dying of Typhoid fever and passed away at 3am on February 14th. Alice died at 2pm that same afternoon while Teddy held her in his arms. 

“The sole, overwhelming lesson was the awful brevity of life, the sense that the precipice awaited not just somewhere off down the road, but at any moment. An asthmatic childhood had shown that life could be stifled, cut off, unless one fought back, and all Papa’s admonition to get action, to seize the moment, had the implicit message that there was not much time after all. Father had died at forty-six; Mittie had been only forty-eight; Alice all of twenty-two, her life barely begun. Nothing lasts. Winter waits.” DM

Teddy’s response: Three days later he returned to Albany and was back at work arguing for his Reform Charter Bill. He poured himself into work—writing, writing, delivering speeches, interviewing witnesses, leading inspections. He worked harder, faster, and longer than he ever had before. He was relentless. 

His newborn daughter, Alice, was entrusted to Bamie (Teddy’s older sister). 

On the day Alice and his mother died, Teddy made a large X on the page in his empty diary on February 14th and wrote, “The light has gone out of my life.”

Dakota Badlands:
After the tragedy he faced losing his mother and sister, and losing the fight against deterring the Republican Party from nominating James G. Blaine as the Republican candidate for the presidency in 1884, he left for the Dakota Badlands to go ranching for the rest of the summer and part of the fall. He was still only 25 and despite his defeat in not getting the candidate he hoped for, he left quite the impression. 

In the Badlands, he found a way to unburden himself of the things he couldn’t talk about. Out West, he was able to reinvent himself and be someone entirely different from the man he had been back home in New York. His background, family, education, all the conventions of polite society counted for nothing. Nobody knew him or his family. Everybody was a stranger and preferred it that way. 

“Some days he rode as much as a hundred miles. The dust and heat were terrific. On stifling hot evenings the mosquitoes would rise from the river bottoms in great clouds to make the nights one long torture for men and horses.” DM

“Rugged, bronzed, and in the prime of health, Theodore Roosevelt passed through St. Paul yesterday, returning from his Dakota ranch to New York and civilization.” Pioneer Press as he returned to visit home

Spent close to three years in the badlands and had his own ranch, the Elkhorn, built. During this time, the American public, political allies, political enemies, thought he had disappeared from the public eye and political arena for good. 

“When he got back into the world again, he was husky as almost any man I have ever seen who wasn’t dependent on his arms for a livelihood. He weighed one hundred and fifty pounds, and was clear bone, muscle, and grit.” Bill Sewall

Return:
As soon as he returned to public life, the Republicans asked him to run for mayor of New York. He accepted even though he had no chance of winning. Opponents were Democrat Abram Hewitt and Labor candidate Henry George. Hewitt won, Roosevelt finished third. At 28, he was the youngest man who had ever been a candidate for mayor. 

Presidency:
William McKinley’s assassination in 1901 catapulted Theodore Roosevelt into the presidency and he became the youngest President in history at 42 years old. But well prepared for the job. He had served 6 years as a reform Civil Service Commissioner (under Presidents Harrison and Cleveland), two years as Police Commissioner of New York City, as Assistant Secretary of the Navy on the eve of the Spanish American War, as a colonel in the Rough Riders—and ‘hero of San Juan Hill’—as Governor of New York, and as Vice President. 

Increased the area of national forests by 40 million acres, established five national parks, sixteen national monuments (including the Grand Canyon), 51 national bird sanctuaries, and made conservation a popular cause. 

The Bully Pulpit – Doris Kearns Goodwin

The Bully Pulpit by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Date read: 2/10/23. Recommendation: 8/10.

The story of a remarkable friendship between Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, the way it built up each man, and eventually tore them both down. Goodwill details their upbringing, the events that shaped their lives, and how they came to navigate their political careers. She also discusses the backdrop of the Progressive era where a new vision for the relationship between the government and the people under Roosevelt’s leadership started to set in. I read this mainly for context on Roosevelt so my notes reflect a narrow perspective. But the entire book is captivating and worthy of its Pulitzer Prize.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Reform:
End of Roosevelt’s tenure, mood of reform swept the country, creating a new kind of presidency. Anti-trust suits had been won and legislation passed to regulate railroads, strengthen labor rights, curb political corruption, end corporate campaign contributions, impose limits on the working day, protect consumers from unsafe foods and drugs, and conserve vast swaths of natural resources for the American people.

“Roosevelt would focus the charge of a national movement to apply an ethical framework, through government action, to the untrammeled growth of modern America.” DKG

Square Deal had awakened the country to the need for government action to allay problems caused by industrialization. 

Friendship between Taft and Roosevelt:
Lifelong, mutually beneficial friendship. No man Roosevelt trusted more to carry out his legacy of active moral leadership and progressive reform. 

Initial foray into politics:
When he began inquiring about the local Republican organization, friends and family warned him that district politics were low and the world of saloon-keepers and horse-car conductors. Rough and brutal men. Started attending monthly meetings. Grew close with Joe Murray, thickset, red-haired Irish boss. Roosevelt later credited him with launching his political career. 

Murray determined that the incumbent Republican assemblyman for the Twenty-first District could not hold his seat in the fall elections in 1881, having been linked to corruption, surprised his compatriots by nominating the 23-year-old Roosevelt. TR was elected as the youngest member of the New York State Assembly. Less than two decades later he would become the youngest president in the history of the United States. 

“His three terms in the New York State Assembly had provided Roosevelt with considerable reason for pride and satisfaction in his accomplishments. He had led the fight against Judge Westbrook and had been instrumental in the passage of both the cigar bill and civil service reform…” DKG

“The assembly had proved a great school for Roosevelt. He had learned to cooperate with colleagues far removed from his patrician background…” DKG

“He fought with gusto against fraud and corruption, delivering speeches studded with bold and original turns of phrase.” DKG

Tragedy:
After Roosevelt’s mother and wife passed away on the same day, he was in a dazed, stunned state. Then he decided (as he learned from his father’s death), that frantic activity was the only way to keep sorrow at bay. But he was a changed man, there was a sadness about his face that he never had before.

Systematically suppressed his wife’s memory, failed to even recognize Alice (his first wife and widow) in his autobiography.

Returning to Albany: Upon his return, he immersed himself in long hours of work and daily sessions. The camaraderie of his fellow legislators helped mitigate his misery. In the weeks that followed he led a torrent of dramatic investigations and eventually nine reform bills were reported to the floor. 

Civil Service Commissioner:
“For sixty years, politicians in both parties had been complicit in a spoils system where officials (postal carriers, typists, stenographers, and clerks) were appointed, promoted, or fired according to their politics rather than their merit.” DKG

From the start, Roosevelt understood that public opinion was the best way to hold party leaders in the cabinet and in the Congress accountable. 

In order to change the average citizen’s attitude toward the spot system and current way of business, he had to instill his own outrage into the public…to popularize the reformist cause and initiate change from the bottom up.

Within his first few weeks, he initiated an investigation into the New York Customs House where he found that clerks were leaking examination questions to favored party candidates for a fee. Issued a scathing report demanding the dismissal and prosecution of guilty clerks. This early action served as notice that civil service law was going to be enforced without fear or favor. 

Leveraged a network of progressive journalists and editors to point out infractions of the law in their localities.

Found that Indianapolis Postmaster, William Wallace, had made a number of irregular appointments that violated civil service standards. Exposed this in the newspaper and it chastened Wallace to change. Within a couple of years his administration was deemed a model of fairness and justice. 

“Roosevelt seemed to feel that everything ought to be done before sundown.” President Harrison, dared not remove Roosevelt despite the feathers he ruffled because he had the influential newspapers supporting him and the public behind his cause of violations of the civil service law. 

“He isn’t afraid of the newspapers, he isn’t afraid of losing his place, and he is always ready for a fight. He keeps civil-service reform before the good people and as the case often is, his aggressiveness is a great factor in a good cause.” The Boston Evening News

When Grover Cleveland was elected asked Roosevelt to stay at his post for another year or two despite not being in the same political party. Theodore got along better with Cleveland than he had with Harrison. Cleveland trusted his even hand.

New York Police Commissioner:
Showmanship: As he approached his new headquarters at 300 Mulberry Street in the heart of Little Italy, he energetically greeted the reported as he sprinted up the stairs, and signaled for everyone to follow as he asked where the offices were and what they should do first. 

He was appointed president of the four-man board and drove the other board members crazy. 

Two sides of his role as police commissioner: 1) daily work of managing the police department, 2) the opportunity to use his position, which encompassed membership on the health board, to make the city a better place to live and work for those whom the conditions of life and labor were hardest.

Corruption: Found new police recruits were forced to pay Tammany a fixed fee for their appointments. The fee was well beyond the means of most, but officers understood they would make the money back with plenty to spare over time. Superintendent Tom Bynes had amassed a fortune of $350k, while his chief inspector Alec Williams could not explain the unusual size of his bank account when forced to testify. 

At his first press conference, Roosevelt announced that appointments and promotions would be based on merit alone moving forward. The police force had heard something similar before, but soon felt the weight of Roosevelt’s pledge. Within three weeks he forced Superintendent Bynes and Alec Williams to resign. He would spare no one in his campaign to root out corruption. 

Roosevelt accompanied reporters on a series of unannounced inspections between midnight and sunrise to determine whether officers were doing their jobs. If he found an officer patrolling his beat and doing a satisfactory job, he would pat him on the back. If he found someone sleeping or slacking off, he would summon them to appear before him the next morning. 

Predawn missions attracted press attention across the country. Roosevelt found them to be great fun but they meant he would go up to forty hours without sleep at a time. 

Sunday Law: passed by state legislature four decades earlier to satisfy rural constituents. No one took it seriously, but it warped into a massive vehicle of police and political blackmail and extortion. Saloons could stay open on Sundays as long as they made monthly payments to police and politicians. Roosevelt enforced the law but pissed off the public who later led a giant protest of some 150,000 people in NYC. Roosevelt attended and the crowd ended up cheering his good humor and the way he poked fun at himself. As November 1895 elections approached, Roosevelt stood his ground. His unpopular stance ushered in a democratic wave of votes, Republican bosses were livid at Roosevelt, blaming him for his uncompromising policy. 

1896 presidential contest between McKinley and Brian gave Roosevelt a path out and a way to earn the good favor of the Republican bosses once more. Traveled through the state and country to stump for the Republican nominee. Lent his energetic voice to McKinley’s campaign—represented his best hope for regaining the confidence of the Republican bosses. Gave all his time, energy, and ability to the work of the campaign. McKinley’s victory helped him get appointed as assistant secretary of the Navy, providing a graceful exit from his post as police commissioner. 

Time as police commissioner had deepened and broadened his outlook on social and economic issues. 

Assistant Secretary of the Navy:
McKinley appointed him as Assistant to John Davis Long because he thought Roosevelt was too eager for war.

As tension with Spain escalated in Cuba, Roosevelt did everything he could to prepare the U.S. Navy for war. Ordered the purchase of guns, ammunition, supplies, created war plans, scheduled additional gunnery drills, stocked distant supply stations with coal. 

In January 1898, McKinley agreed to ration the battleship USS Maine in Havana Harbor as “an act of friendly courtesy” to the Cuban people. Resisted mounting pressure for intervention. Then on February 15th, the Maine exploded killing 262 Americans. The cause of the explosion was never determined with certainty, but the blame was affixed to the Spaniards. 

Lieutenant colonel:
The country moved towards war with Spain in 1898, Roosevelt could not pass up the opportunity to go to Cuba and test himself on the field of battle.

Acted as lieutenant colonel under his friend Leonard Wood. 

“The press found the story of the so-called Rough Riders irresistible from the start—a volunteer regiment in which cowboys, miners, and hunters served on an equal footing with Ivy League graduates, Somerset Club members, polo players, tennis champions, and prominent yachtsmen.” DKG

“Up and up they went in the face of death, men dropping from the ranks at every step. The Rough Riders acted like veterans. It was an inspiring sight and an awful one…Roosevelt sat erect on his horse, holding his sword and shouting for his men to follow him until they gained the summit at last.” 

Spanish surrendered thirteen days later, by the middle of August, four months after the war began. Roosevelt and his Rough Riders were on their way to a triumphal homecoming. 

Governor of New York:
Inaugurated as governor of New York on January 2, 1899 in Albany. 

Relentless work ethic: He was unlike any governor New York had known. Arrived in the office well before the usual hour of 9am, sorting through hundreds of letters that arrived each morning. At 10am started his official day, spending an hour with assemblymen and senators, followed by rapid-fire meetings with political delegations, members of his administration, and individual petitioners. Returned home somewhere around 5-7pm. Evening hours were set apart for his literary work, socializing, reading, and spending time with his family. 

Vice President:
Roosevelt was horrified at the thought of spending four years as VP. “His friends were in despair, his enemies triumphed. At last they had him where they wanted him.” Jacob Riis

Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be – Steven Pressfield

Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be – by Steven Pressfield
Date read: 2/7/23. Recommendation: 8/10.

Similar to The War of Art, Pressfield continues his tried and true method of packing concise inspiration into a quick read. The main message of the book is about shifting your creative center of gravity from the superficial and fearful ego to the deep and fearless self. This requires committing for the long haul. Must read for any entrepreneur or artist trying to create something from nothing.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Show up:
“When I sit down to write in the morning, I literally have no expectations for myself or for the day’s work. My only goal is to put in three or four hours with my fingers punching the keys. I don’t judge myself on quality. I don’t hold myself accountable for quantity. The only questions I ask are, Did I show up? Did I try my best?” SP

“Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.” Goethe

“Here’s my frame of mind as I sit down to work: This is the day. There is no other day. This is the day. In other words, I release every thought that smacks of, ‘Maybe we can do this some other time.’ There is no other time.” SP

“Putting our ass where our heart wants to be is the equivalent of Alexander charging into the breach at the Granicus River or at the Issus or Gaugamela. We too are risking it all. We too hold nothing back. We too have hurled ourselves headlong into the unknown.” SP

Location matters:
You must leave the place where you live and move to the hub of the creative world where your dreams are most likely to come true. There’s no substitute for being in the heart of the action. Ernest Hemingway moved to Paris. Bob Dylan moved to Greenwich Village. 

Commitment:
“The positive face of commitment is self-empowerment. The very act of putting our ass where our heart wants to be makes a profound impression, not just on those we wish to work with or be mentored by, but on ourselves.” SP

“In myth and legend, when the hero commits to an intention by taking bold action, he enacts a Cosmic Overthrow. He ‘crosses the threshold.’ Like Luke Skywalker heading with Obi Wan Kenobi for Mos Eisley spaceport or Dorothy being swept away from Kansas by a cyclone, the hero moves from the Ordinary World to the Extraordinary World. She has gone from the Known to the Unknown.” SP

“The universe responds to the hero or heroine who takes action and commits. It responds positively. It comes to the hero’s aid.” SP

Perseverance:
“For writers and artists, the ability to self-reinforce is more important than talent.” SP

“Resistance is always strongest at the finish.” SP

“Killer instinct is not negative when we use it to finish off a book, a screenplay, or any creative project that is fighting us and resisting us to the bitter end. Steel yourself and put that sucker out of its misery.” SP

Visualization:
“What fascinates me about the character of Alexander the Great is that he seemed to see the future with such clarity and such intensity as to make it virtually impossible that it would not come true—and that he would be the one to make it so. That’s you and me at the inception of any creative project. The book / screenplay / nonprofit / start-up already exists in the Other World. Your job and mine is to bring it forth in this one.” SP

Yes to Life – Viktor Frankl

Yes to Life – by Viktor Frankl
Date read: 2/1/23. Recommendation: 8/10.

Based on a series of lectures Frankl gave after his liberation from Nazi concentration camps. It’s a great companion book to Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl explores the three ways to find meaning and purpose in life—through action, love, and suffering.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

3 ways to find meaning and purpose in life:

1. Action: Doing, creating, working (whether it’s art or a labor of love), something that outlasts us. Bringing something into being. 

2. Love: Experiencing something—appreciating nature or works of art—or loving people. The door to happiness always opens outward. 

3. Suffering: How a person adapts and reacts to unavoidable limits on their life possibilities like facing death or enduring concentration camps. This opens itself to a person when finding value in 1 and 2 are closed to them.

“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?” Rabbi Hillel

Each of us has our own purpose in life, our own places where we find meaning, and serving others only elevates this. 

Materialism is an anti-pattern. Mindlessly consuming and always focusing on more things leads to a meaningless life. 

Love:
“It is not only through our action that we can give life meaning—insofar as we can answer life’s specific questions responsibly—we can fulfill the demands of existence not only as active agents but also as loving human beings: in our loving dedication to the beautiful, the great, the good.” VF

Consider when you attend a concert of an artist you love and they play your favorite song and it sends chills down your spine. That moment is meaningful. And it’s born of a deep appreciation.

Suffering:
“How we deal with difficulties truly shows who we are, and that, too, can enable us to live meaningfully.” VF

“What do athletes do but create difficulties for themselves so that they can grow through overcoming them? Of course, it is not advisable to create difficulties for oneself; in general; suffering as a result of misfortune is only meaningful if this misfortune has come about through fate, and is thus unavoidable and inescapable.” VF

“So, fate is part of our lives and so is suffering; therefore, if life has meaning, suffering also has meaning. Consequently, suffering, as long as it is necessary and unavoidable, also holds the possibility of being meaningful.” VF

“It is not a question of either achievement or endurance—rather, in some cases, endurance itself is the greatest achievement.” VF

Perspective:
“Our perspective on life’s events—what we make of them—matters as much or more than what actually befalls us. ‘Fate’ is what happens to us beyond our control. But we each are responsible for how we relate to those events.” Daniel Goleman

“Life is not something, it is the opportunity for something.” Hebbel

“The individual, and only that individual, determines whether their suffering is meaningful or not.” VF

Adaptability:
“In the course of life, human beings must be prepared to change the direction of this fulfillment of meaning, often abruptly, according to the particular challenges of the hour.” VF

Life is motion: “For we have already pointed out that meaning of life can only be a specific one, specific both in relation to each individual person and in relation to each individual hour: the question that life asks us changes from both person to person and from situation to situation.” VF

Frankl’s manuscript:
“Frankl held these insights on the singular importance of a sense of meaning even before he underwent the horrors of camp life, though his years as a prisoner gave him even deeper conviction. When he was arrested and deported in 1941, he had sewn into the lining of his overcoat the manuscript of a book in which he argued for this view. He had hoped to publish that book one day, though he had to give up the coat—and the unpublished book—on his first day as a prisoner. And his desire to one day publish his views, along with his yearning to see his loved ones again, gave him a personal purpose that helped keep him afloat.” Daniel Goleman

Frankl formulated his initial insights and theory on the human orientation towards meaning in a rough manuscript of his eventual book The Doctor and the Soul. This is the same manuscript he brought with him after his deportation, hoping that he would be able to publish it still. When he reached the concentration camp, he was forced to give up his coat with the manuscript sewn into the lining. 

His experience in the camps further refined his ideas: “It turned out, in fact, that those camp inmates who still recognized or at least hoped for a meaning in life were the most likely to find the strength to continue living, or finally to survive. Last, but not least, that was also true of himself: what kept him alive was only the hope of seeing at least some of his loved ones again and bringing the completed draft of his book to publication.” VF

Decoded – Jay-Z

Decoded – by Jay-Z
Date read: 1/25/23. Recommendation: 10/10.

Jay-Z details his own story and deconstructs the lyrics of the most important songs in his career. I couldn’t put this book down—Jay-Z’s rise to become a self-made billionaire is one of the most inspiring stories you will come across. It’s crazy smart and packs a punch. There are great lessons in fundamentals, depth, truth, flow, and motion that are worth reflecting on and instilling in your own life and work.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Origins:
Nine years old, summer of 1978, saw a circle of kids on his way home from playing Little League with his cousin and he moved through the crowd towards the middle, “It felt like gravity pulling me into that swirl of kids, no bullshit, like a planet pulled into orbit by a star…His name was Slate and he was a kid I used to see around the neighborhood, an older kid who barely made an impression. In the circle, though, he was transformed, like the church ladies touched by the spirit, and everyone was mesmerized. He was rhyming, throwing out couplet after couplet like he was in a trance, for a crazy long time—thirty minutes straight off the top of his head, never losing the beat, riding the handclaps…I was dazzled. That’s some cool shit was the first thing I thought. Then: I could do that.” Jay-Z

Natural talent: Started writing rhymes in his spiral notebook that same night. The paper was unlined and he filled every space on every page, writing vertically, horizontally, crowding words together as best he could, scratching out others.

Finding your voice: Jay connected with an older kid and the best rapper in Marcy, Jaz-O. The two would practice their rhymes and record on an old tape recorder with a makeshift microphone attached. “I saw it as an opening, a way to re-create myself and reimagine my world. After I recorded a rhyme, it gave me an unbelievable rush to play it back, to hear that voice.” Jay-Z

Life experiences give you credibility: “I wasn’t even in high school yet and I’d discovered my voice. But I still needed a story to tell.” Jay-Z

Jay wasn’t sure he could get rich from rap, but he knew it would become much bigger than it was before it went away and he leaned into that.

“Manager? That’s a promotion, not a dream.” Jay-Z

Flow:
“From the beginning, it was easy, a constant flow. For days, I filled page after page. Then I’d bang a beat out on the table, my bedroom window, whatever had a flat surface, and practice from the time I woke in the morning until I went to sleep.” Jay-Z

“Everywhere I went I’d write. If I was crossing a street with my friends and a rhyme came to me, I’d break out my binder, spread it on a mailbox or lamppost and write the rhyme before I crossed the street. I didn’t care if my friends left me at the light, I had to get it out.” Jay-Z

“I was good at battling and I practiced it like a sport. I’d spend free time reading the dictionary, building my vocabulary for battles.”

Loved rhyming for the sake of rhyming and the challenge of structuring rhymes in the most effective way possible—moving around couplets and triplets, stacking double entendres, and speed rapping.

Fundamentals:
Jay-Z and his early mentor Jaz-O would go back and forth to each other’s houses and write rhymes for hours. They’d lock themselves in a room with pen and paper. They would test new flows and focus on improving their speed, delivery, and composition.

Putting in the work: “It’s true that I’m able to sometimes come up with songs in a matter of minutes after hearing a track, but that’s a skill that I’ve honed over hundreds of hours of practice and work since I was nine. My earliest mentors in rap taught me that making music is work, whether it was Jaz locking himself in a room working on different flows or Big Daddy Kane taking the time to meticulously put together a stage show. There’s unquestionably magic involved in great music, songwriting, and performances—like those nights when a star athlete is in the zone and can’t miss. But there’s also work. Without the work, the magic won’t come.” Jay-Z

“A tour requires stamina, willpower, and the ability to self-motivate, to hype yourself into game mode night after night….When it comes to signing up new talent, that’s what I’m looking for—not just someone who has skill, but someone built for this life. Someone who has the work ethic, the drive.”

First exposure to the record industry:
When Jay-O got a record deal with EMI in the UK, Jay went along and soaked up all that he could in the recording sessions and meetings.

Producers at EMI convinced Jaz-O to record a pop song with a ukulele on the hook, “Hawaiian Sophie” which tanked. EMI stopped returning his phone calls and instead started courting Jay behind his back. Jay was sick to his stomach and thought the business lacked any sense of honor and integrity. So he buried his rap dreams and went back to hustling.

Hustling:
Got into selling drugs because he was already risking his life by living in the projects, he might as well get paid for it. A friend introduced him to hustling (neither smoked nor used their own supply) and communicated that it required vision and hustle.

“In the mirror, all I saw was a hustler—a hustler who wrote rhymes on corner-store paper bags and memorized them in hotel rooms far away from home—but still, first a hustler. It’s who I’d been since I was sixteen years old on my own in Trenton, New Jersey. I couldn’t even think about wanting to be something else; I wouldn’t let myself visualize another life. But I wrote because I couldn’t stop. It was a release, a mental exercise, a way of keeping sane.” Jay-Z

Find your deep, dark place and create from there:
Jay was interested in the interior of a young kid’s head, his psychology, and bringing that to life through his lyrics. Everything he wrote he wanted to be rooted in the truth of an experience “To tell the story of the kid with the gun without telling the story of why he has it is to tell a kind of lie. To tell the story of the pain without telling the story of the rewards—the money, the girls, the excitement—is a different kind of evasion.” Jay-Z

“I lost people I loved, was betrayed by people I trusted, felt the breeze of bullets flying by my head. I saw crack addiction destroy families—it almost destroyed mine—but I sold it too…But no matter what, it is the place where I learned not just who I was, but who we were, who all of us are.” Jay-Z

Embracing contradiction: “For any image or symbol or creative act to mean something, it has to touch something deeper, connect to something true. I know that the spirit of the struggle and insurgency was woven into the lives of the people I grew up with in Bed-Stuy, even if in sometimes fucked up and corrupted ways….But to have contradictions—especially when you’re fighting for your life—is human, and to wear the Che (Guevara) shirt and the platinum and diamonds together is honest. In the end I wore it because I meant it.” Jay-Z

“The words are witty and blind, abstract and linear, sober and fucked up. And when we decode that torrent of words—by which I mean really listen to them with our minds and hearts open—we can understand their world better. And ours, too. It’s the same world.” Jay-Z

Entrepreneurial mindset:
“You have to make sure the match runs according to your style and rhythm and not get caught up in someone else’s gameplay. You have to be willing to suffer and to make someone else suffer, because only one of you can win.” Jay-Z

A great product and the hustle to move it are the ultimate advantage.

“Success could only mean self-sufficiency, being a boss, not a dependent.”

“I’m also lucky never to have needed the approval of the gatekeepers in the industry because from the start we came into the game as entrepreneurs. That gave me the freedom to just be myself, which is the secret to any long-term success, but that’s hard to see when you’re young and desperate to get put on.” Jay-Z ^ the opposite of this was Jaz-O recording “Hawaiian Sophie” because he trusted producers that got Will Smith airplay even though it didn’t resonate with him.

The depth of hip-hop:
It’s dense with multiple meanings and unresolved layers you might not understand until you’ve listened to it multiple times through. Those layers of meaning help get at complicated truths in a way that straightforward storytelling might not.

“Every hustler knows the value of a feint. It keeps you one step ahead of whoever’s listening in, which is also a great thing about the art of hip-hop. And it makes it all the more gratifying to the listener when they finally catch up.” Jay-Z

Rap is built to handle contradictions: “It doesn’t force you to pretend to be only one thing or another, to be a saint or sinner. It recognizes that you can be true to yourself and still have unexpected dimensions or opposing ideas…The real bullshit is when you act like you don’t have contradictions inside you, that you’re so dull and unimaginative that your mind never changes or wanders into strange, unexpected places.” Jay-Z

The curse of outrage:
“It’s hard to beat the entertainment value of people who deliberately misunderstand the world, people dying to be insulted, running around looking for a bullet to get in front of.” Jay-Z

Life is motion:
“I’ve always believed in motion and action, in following connections wherever they take me, and in not getting entrenched. My life has been more poetry than prose, more about unpredictable leaps and links than simple steady movement, or worse, stagnation. It’s allowed me to stay open to the next thing without feeling held back by a preconceived notion of what I’m supposed to be doing next.” Jay-Z

The truth is always relevant:
“When it seems like I’m bragging or threatening or whatever, what I’m actually trying to do is embody a certain spirit, give voice to a certain emotion. I’m giving the listener a way to articulate that emotion in their own lives, however it applies. Even when I do a song that feels like a complete autobiography, like ‘December 4th,’ I’m still trying to speak to something that everyone can find themselves in.” Jay-Z

“My songs are my stories, but they take on their own life in the minds of people listening. The connection that creates is sometimes overwhelming.” Jay-Z

Empire State of Mind – Zack O'Malley Greenburg

Empire State of Mind – by Zack O'Malley Greenburg
Date read: 1/16/23. Recommendation: 8/10.

An exceptional Jay-Z biography that details his journey as one of the greatest artists and entrepreneurs of our generation. This book aims to answer a simple question: How did Jay-Z rise from a Brooklyn housing project to a position as one of America’s most successful entrepreneurs? It contains great lessons in the power of controlling your own destiny, honing resourcefulness, doing the work, taking risks, and allowing your voice to evolve.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

This book aims to answer a simple question: How did Jay-Z rise from a Brooklyn housing project to a position as one of America’s most successful entrepreneurs? 

The benefits of starting late:
“My first album didn’t come out until I was twenty-six, so I had a bit more maturity….My debut album had all these emotions and complexities and layers that a typical hip-hop album wouldn’t have if you were making it at sixteen, seventeen years old. That isn’t enough wealth of experience to share with the world.” Jay-Z

Control your own destiny:
Record companies had a habit of taking advantage of artists financially. Jay-Z was focused on making great music and controlling the business side too.

Built “an unparalleled commercial hip-hop empire encompassing music, film, liquor, and a clothing company that grew from a few sewing machines into a giant that produced $700 million in annual revenues.” ZG

“Jay-Z’s ability to make money by attaching his name to products is one of his greatest strengths as a businessman, and it was especially important during a period of declining numbers in the record industry, when barely one-fifth of his earnings came from record sales.” ZG 

Jaz-O:
Jay-Z’s early mentor helped him fine-tune his rhymes—his lyrics became wittier, his delivery faster, and his syncopation sharper. Jay-Z would practice his rap skills at school by freestyling to beats pounded out on the cafeteria table.

In 1988, Jaz-O became the first rapper to land a deal with the British label EMI. He brought Jay-Z along to London where he got his first exposure to the broader music industry.

In 1989 after returning to the U.S., Jay-Z talked his way onto the tour bus of Big Daddy Kane (a successful rapper). Would go on stage during intermissions to entertain crowds with his freestyle. Spent four months working unpaid for a place to sleep on the tour bus floor and food. 

“After the tour, Jay-Z found himself between worlds. Nearly twenty years old, he’d gotten a taste of the good life with Jaz-O in London, and he’d rubbed elbows with the biggest names in hip-hop on Big Daddy Kane’s tour. But he’d dropped out of high school, and his own musical career hadn’t gotten to a point where he could make serious money as an artist. So he picked up where he left off as a hustler.” ZG

Hustling:
Childhood friend DeHaven Irby introduced Jay to the lucrative opportunities offered by drug dealing. At 18, Jay started taking the train to Trenton on weekends where Irby taught him everything he knew about the local drug market. 

Jay-Z saw music as a side hustle, his first album was supposed to be his only album. But selling drugs was what he saw as the most lucrative path. But in 1994, in an ambush by rivals, Jay-Z was shot at multiple times before a gun jammed, which saved his life. At that point, he got out of the drug trade in the mid-90s. He knew he couldn’t run the streets forever and the only way out was likely death or prison. 

Natural talent:
“What set Jay-Z apart as an artist was the sharpness and rapidity with which he delivered his lyrics; that verbal dexterity earned him some attention in the underground scene.” ZG

Memorization:
Jay-Z is famous for memorizing all his verses instead of writing them down. Early in his career (1992), Clark Kent (A&R department at Atlantic Records) wanted Jay to lay down a song with rapper Sauce Money. Producer, Patrick Lawrence, was in charge of booking studio time for them. After three hours of Jay and Sauce laughing and talking, Lawrence got on them for wasting studio time. Jay asked to hear the song. “Lawrence played the track. Jay-Z began mumbling along to it, then picked up a pen and a notebook and seemed to write several lines. He placed the pad on the sofa and started pacing back and forth, muttering half-formed words. After five minutes, he glanced once more at the pad and told Lawrence he was ready. While Jay-Z was in the sound booth recording his verse, Lawrence went over to see what he’d written in the notebook, still sitting on the couch. ‘I walk to the pad, and there’s fucking nothing on it,’ Lawrence recalls. ‘He was doing it as a fucking joke, like just to show people.’” ZG

Recording Brooklyn’s Finest with Notorious B.I.G.—Big saw Jay do his part without having anything written down. He had to go home to do his part and fill in the blanks and only after he saw Jay do that, he also stopped writing down his rhymes. 

Debut Album:
Thanks to connections, Jay-Z landed tracks from well-respected producers for his debut album, Reasonable Doubt. With his debut album nearly complete, he shopped it to all major record labels but no one was interested. 

Seize creative control: After getting rejected by every major label, Jay-Z and his business partner, Damon Dash, pooled their resources to start their own record label, Roc-A-Fella Records. 

Resourcefulness and doing whatever it takes: They pressed their own records, their CDs, their T-shirts, their stickers, their flyers. Pedaled music from the backs of their cars. Traveled across the five boroughs distributing tracks in clubs, barbershops, and street corners. Went to open mic nights. 

Creating their own brands:
One of Dash and Jay’z primary tenants was that they shouldn’t let other people make money off of them or give free advertising—meaning they should always be compensated for endorsements or create their own brands. 

During the late 90s, Jay and Dash would often wear Iceberg (Italian knitwear designer). His fans started wearing it and Iceberg’s sales took off. They approached the brand about a partnership and were shrugged off. Jay and Dash then went on to start Rocawear. 

Rocawear was started in the back of the Roc-A-Fella Records office with three sewing machines where they stitched a Roc-A-Fella logo on the front of a T-shirt. But they barely knew how to sew and realized they had no idea what they were doing so they started working with Russell Simmons when founded Phat Farm for advice and partners. Within 18 months, Rocawear was doing $80 million in revenue. 

Transcending mentors and business partners:
“Just as he honed his lyrical skills with Jaz-O’s help as a teenager in Brooklyn and developed his hustler’s sense selling crack with DeHaven Irby in Trenton, he learned legitimate entrepreneurialism from Damon Dash. In each case, Jay-Z absorbed the best qualities of his mentor, applied his own considerable talents to the subject at hand, quickly surpassed said mentor, and moved on to the next one.” ZG

Taking over as president at Def Jam:
When he started at Def Jam, he found people who had been living off one act for the past 20 years, there was no excitement, nothing fresh. During a retreat, he went around the room asking employees to share their reasons for getting into the record business to revitalize their sense of meaning and connection to their work. “We got people to go back to that inner kid and the joy of being in the record business.” Jay-Z

The key to staying on top is to treat everything like it’s your first project—stay humble and curious. 

In December of 2007, his three-year contract was nearing an end and he had launched the careers of Rihanna, Kanye West, and Ne-Yo. His musical career was again on the rise and he immersed himself back into that. 

Blazing the trail for hip-hop at rock festivals:
Headlined Glastonbury in UK in 2008. Many, including Noel Gallagher (Oasis), spoke out against a rapper playing a traditionally rock-focused show. Critics thought Jay would be booed off the stage. Jay came out with a parody of the Oasis song “Wonderwall” and the crow erupted. 

Allow your voice to evolve:
“But the most remarkable aspect of 4:44 was its reflection of an artist who’d evolved from a closed-off adolescent to victory-obsessed hot-head to overly stoic dad to middle-aged sage finally in touch with his emotions and vulnerability.” ZG

Let My People Go Surfing – Yvon Chouinard

Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman – by Yvon Chouinard
Date read: 1/10/23. Recommendation: 10/10.

A wonderful autobiography that details Chouinard’s early days as a climber and the origins of Patagonia. Most of the content in the book was originally intended to act as a philosophical manual for employees of Patagonia. But Chouinard makes this captivating for any reader through stories that explore his own life lessons, the trials of building an enduring company, and the trap of short-sighted decisions. The book contains powerful insights on simplicity, disrupting yourself, communicating with customers, seeking inspiration from unlikely sources, and the lifelong search for your guiding principle.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Chouinard Equipment:
Origins: “In 1957 I went to a junkyard and bought a used coal-fired forge, a 138-pound anvil, and some tongs and hammers and started teaching myself blacksmithing. I wanted to make my own climbing hardware, since we were starting to climb the big walls in Yosemite on multiday ascents that required hundreds of piton placements.” 

At the time all climbing gear was European and the pitons used were soft iron—meant to be hammered in once and left in position (and if you tried to take these pitons out and reuse them, they would often break). The prevailing European attitude was to conquer the mountain and leave all gear in place to make it easier for the next person to reach the summit. American climbers modeled themselves after transcendental writers like Emerson, Thoreau, and Muir, and believed in leaving no trace. 

Chouinard made his first pitons from an old chrome-molybdenum steel blade. They were stiffer and stronger, which made them easier to drive into cracks in Yosemite, and they could be taken out and reused. 

“I made these Lost Arrow pitons for myself and the few friends I climbed with; then friends of friends wanted some. I could forge only two of my chrome-molybdenum steel pitons in an hour, and I started selling them for $1.50 each. You could buy European pitons for twenty cents, but you had to have my new gear if you wanted to do the state-of-the-art climbs that we were doing.” 

In 1964, Chouinard put out his first catalog—“a one-page mimeographed list of items and prices, with a blunt disclaimer on the bottom saying not to expect fast delivery during the months of May to November.” 

As demand grew, “We redesigned and improved just about every climbing tool, making each one stronger, lighter, simpler, and more functional.” 

Quality as a top priority: With climbing tools, it is a matter of life and death, and they were often the heaviest users of their own products. 

Despite the volume of sales doubling year over year, Chouinard Equipment showed only about a 1 percent profit at the end of the year because they were constantly coming up with new designs. By 1970 they were the largest supplier of climbing hardware in the U.S. 

Simplicity:
“In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away…” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“Good design is as little design as possible.” Dieter Rams

“An illustrator becomes an artist when he or she can convey the same emotion with fewer brushstrokes.”

“I believe the way toward mastery of any endeavor is to work toward simplicity; replace complex technology with knowledge. The more you know, the less you need.”

Disrupt yourself:
By the 1970s, the popularity of climbing had skyrocketed. Particularly on well-known routes in primary climbing areas like El Dorado Canyon near Boulder, the Shawangunks in New York, and Yosemite Valley. On these routes, the repeating hammering of hard steel pitons during placement and removal in the same cracks was beginning to severely disfigure the rock. “After an ascent of the Nose route on El Capitan, which had been pristine a few summers earlier, I came home disgusted with the degradation I had seen. Frost and I decided we would phase out of the piton business. This was the first big environmental step we were to take over the year. Pitons were the mainstay of our business, but we were destroying the very rocks we loved.”

Chouinard started looking into aluminum chocks that could be wedged by hand rather than hammered in and out, designed his own versions called Stoppers and Hexentrics, and piloted them in small quantities until they appeared in the Chouinard Equipment catalog in 1972. “The catalog opened with ‘A word…,’ an editorial from the owners on the environmental hazards of pitons and a fourteen-page essay on clean climbing and how to use chocks by Sierra climber Doug Robinson. 

“Within a few months of the catalog’s mailing, the piton business had atrophied; chocks sold faster than they could be made. In the tin buildings of Chouinard Equipment, the steady pounding rhythm of the drop hammer gave way to the high-pitched, searing whine of the multiple drill jig.” 

Underwear: Wearing quick-drying insulation layers (e.g. pile jackets) over cotton underwear defeated the purpose of outer shells. In 1980 they tested making underwear out of polypropylene, a synthetic fiber that absorbs no water. It was originally intended to manufacture industrial commodities like marine ropes which float. Then it started being used in the lining of disposable diapers for its wicking ability to keep babies dry by carrying moisture away from the skin and transferring it to more absorbent outer layers in the diaper. “Using the capabilities of this new underwear as the basis of a system, we became the first company to reach the outdoor community, through essays in our catalog, the concept of layering. This approach involves wearing an inner layer against the skin for moisture transport, a middle layer of pile for insulation, and then an outer shell layer for wind and moisture protection.” 

But polypropylene had a very low melting temperature. Customers who went to commercial laundromats (much hotter dryers than home) would melt their underwear. When Chouinard was at 1984 sporting goods show in Chicago watching a demonstration of polyester football jerseys being cleaned of grass stains. He realized that the material in combination with the etched jersey worked to wick away moisture. Polyester also had a much higher melting temperature. They then introduced their Capilene polyester underwear. Sales soared.

Know your shit: “Some people think we’re a successful company because we’re willing to take risks, but I’d say that’s only partly true. What they don’t realize is that we do our homework. A few years back when we switched midstream from polypropylene to Capilene for our underwear fabric, we had done our fabric development, we had done our testing in the fabric lab. We made tops and bottoms with half the garment Capilene and half polypropylene and extensively tested them in the field. We knew the market, and we were absolutely confident that it was the right thing to do.” 

Other companies started introducing rip-offs and had to scramble to keep up. They repeated the same move in the early 1980s when they realized how bland all outdoor products were (tan, forest green, gray). So they drenched the Patagonia line in color (cobalt, teal, French red, mango, sea foam)

By disrupting themselves, they set the tone for the entire market. Whereas if they had focused on competitors instead, they would have been locked in a reactive state rather than forging ahead with bold decisions and new ideas. 

Switching to organic cotton: “After several trips to the San Joaquin Valley, where we could smell the selenium ponds and see the lunar landscape of cotton fields, we asked a critical question: How could we continue to make products that laid waste to the earth in this way? In the fall of 1994, we made the decision to take our cotton sportswear 100 percent organic by 1996. We had eighteen months to make the switch for sixty-six products, and less than a year to line up the fabric.” 

Seek inspiration from unlikely places:
Chouinard’s first idea for clothing: “In the late sixties, after crag climbing in the Peak District in England, I stopped by an old Lancashire mill that contained the last machine left in the world that still made a tough, superheavy corduroy cloth…Back then, before denim, workmen’s pants used to be made of corduroy because its tufted wales protected the woven backing from abrasion and cuts. I thought this durable cloth would be great for climbing. Ordering up some fabric, I had some knickers and double-seated shorts made. They sold well to our climbing friends, so I ordered some more.”

Rugby shirts: In the late sixties, men didn’t wear bright clothes. Active sportswear was often a gray sweatshirt and pants. On a winter climbing trip to Scotland in 1970, Chouinard bought a regulation rugby shirt to wear, thinking it would be good for climbing since it was built to withstand scrums in rugby and had a collar to keep hardware slings from cutting into his neck. The basic color was blue with two red and one yellow center stripe across the chest. When he returned home his friends started asking about it so he ordered some from Umbro and sold out immediately. They couldn’t keep them in stock. 

Pile sweaters becoming an outdoor staple: “At a time when the entire mountaineering community relied on the traditional, moisture-absorbing layers of cotton, wool, and down, we looked elsewhere for inspiration—and protection. We decided that a staple of North Atlantic fisherman, the synthetic pile sweater, would make an ideal mountain sweater because it insulated well without absorbing moisture…We sewed a few seaters and field-tested them in alpine conditions. The polyester fabric was astonishingly warm, particularly when used with a shell. It insulated well but also dried in minutes, and it reduced the number of layers a climber had to wear.” 

Entrepreneurship:
“If you want to understand the entrepreneur, study the juvenile delinquent. The delinquent is saying with his actions, ‘This sucks. I’m going to do my own thing.’”

“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.” L.P. Jacks

Generalist:
“I’ve always thought of myself as an 80 percenter. I like to throw myself passionately into a sport or activity until I reach about an 80 percent proficiency level. To go beyond that requires an obsession and degree of specialization that doesn’t appeal to me. Once I reach that 80 percent level I like to go off and do something totally different; that probably explains the diversity of the Patagonia product line—and why our versatile, multifaceted clothes are the most successful.” 

Search for guiding principle:
During a period of extreme growth when scale was shaking the company, Chouinard sought advice from Dr. Michael Kami who had run strategic planning for IBM and had turned Harley-Davidson around. 

“Before he could help us, he said, he wanted to know why we were in business. I told him the history of the company and how I considered myself a craftsman who had just happened to grow a successful business…We told him about our tithing program, how we had given away a million dollars just in the past year to more than two hundred organizations, and that our bottom-line reason for staying in business was to make money we could give away. Dr. Kami thought for a while and then said, ‘I think that’s bullshit. If you’re really serious about giving money away, you’d sell the company for a hundred million or so, keep a couple million for yourselves, and put the rest in a foundation. That way you could invest the principal and give away six or eight million dollars every year…So maybe you’re kidding yourself about why you’re in business.’” 

Stick with what you know: “The sooner a company tries to be what it is not, the sooner it tries to ‘have it all,’ and the sooner it will die.” 

As a recession hit the company had to reset, they were growing at an unsustainable pace. They redefined their values and mission statement. And while managers solved for the sales and cash-flow issues, Chouinard led weeklong employee seminars on the company’s revitalized philosophy. The goal was to teach every employee their business and environmental ethics and values. 

Teaching the classes to his employees on Patagonia’s philosophies finally gave Chouinard his answer to Dr. Kami’s question. “I knew, after thirty-five years, why I was in business. True, I wanted to give money to environmental causes. But even more, I wanted to create in Patagonia a model other businesses could look to in their own searches for environmental stewardship and sustainability, just as our pitons and ice axes were models for other equipment manufacturers…I realized how much Patagonia as a business was driven by its high-quality standards and classic design principles. The products we made, each feature of every shirt, jacket, or pair of pants, had to be necessary.” 

“The history of Patagonia from the crisis of 1991-92 to the present day doesn’t make for such interesting reading, fortunately…The story is really about how we are trying to live up to our mission statement: ‘Make the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, and use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.’”

“We never wanted to be a big company. We want to be the best company, and it’s easier to try to be the best small company than the best big company.”

Make the best product:
“Having high-quality, useful products anchors our business in the real world and allows us to expand our mission. Because we have a history of making the best climbing tools in the world, tools that your life is dependent on, we are not satisfied making second-best clothing.” 

Product design principles: Functional, multifunctional, durable, repairable, simple. “As individual consumers, the single best thing we can do for the planet is to keep our stuff in use longer.” 

Non-obvious application of Occam’s Razor and simplification to establish fewer points of failure: “The best-performing firms make a narrow range of products very well. The best firms’ products also use up to 50 percent fewer parts than those made by their less successful rivals. Fewer parts means a faster, simpler (and usually cheaper) manufacturing process. Fewer parts means less to go wrong: quality comes built in.”

“When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.” Richard Buckminster Fuller

Communicating with customers:
“Since the publication of the 1972 Chouinard Equipment catalog that contained the ‘Clean Climbing’ essay, we have seen that the primary purpose of our catalogs is to serve as a vehicle to communicate with our customers—whether it is by trying to change climbing philosophy, by rallying them to register and vote for the environment…or just by relating stories.” 

The ‘Clean Climbing’ essay not only encouraged climbers to climb clean but was also the first piece ever written about how to use the new chocks. “As a result, Chouinard Equipment’s piton business dried up, and its chock business exploded, nearly overnight. To show its impact, far beyond a business tool, that catalog was reviewed as a mountaineering book in the American Alpine Journal.”

“Just as Patagonia makes products for a deeper, less distracted experience of the world and its wild places, our image has to convey refuge from, and offer an alternative to, a virtual world of fast-moving, mind-skimming (and numbing) pictures and sound.” 

The Responsible Company – Yvon Chouinard and Vincent Stanley

The Responsible Company: What We’ve Learned from Patagonia’s First 40 Years – by Yvon Chouinard and Vincent Stanley
Date read: 1/4/23. Recommendation: 8/10.

A quick read that operates like a handbook for how to build an enduring, responsible company. Chouinard and Stanley detail—across decades of experience—how doing the right thing and focusing on sustainable growth is actually what’s good for business. Every entrepreneur should read this. There are tremendous lessons in doing hard things, anchoring in truth, disrupting yourself, and investing in meaningful work.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Patagonia origins:
“Yvon created Patagonia as an offshoot of the Chouinard Equipment Company, which made excellent mountain-climbing gear recognized as the best in the world, but very little money. Patagonia was intended to be a clean and easy company.” 

“At Chouinard Equipment we were used to a life-or-death standard of product quality: you did not sell an ice axe without checking it closely for a hairline fracture or any other fault. Although we applied the same standard to rugby shirts (they had to be thick and tough to survive the skin-shredding sport of rock climbing), we knew that seam failure was unlikely to kill anyone. Patagonia was to be our irresponsible company, bringing in easy money, a softer life, and enough profits to keep Chouinard Equipment in the black.”

We are part of nature:
“As men and women we are part of nature. If we were to have no experience of wild nature, or no way to know of it, we would lose entirely our sense of human scale. We derive our sense of awe from our ability to feel nature’s force. We better know ourselves when we come face to face with the magnificence of the unknown. Emerson, Thoreau, and other transcendentalists learned and taught these lessons in New England in the 1830s through 1860s. They showed us that we can learn directly from nature about who we are and how to live.”

Not everything can be quantified: “We don’t think a speech from John Muir on the need for ecosystem services would have swayed Teddy Roosevelt to preserve Yosemite Park nearly as much as a night in the redwoods under the stars.”

Reducing environmental harm:
“Know your impacts, favor improvement, share what you learn.” Daniel Goleman

“Responsible behavior, as it becomes cumulative, also makes a company smarter, more nimble, and potentially more successful.”

Making it everyone’s job: “It is important to note that Patagonia’s dedicated environmental staff for products numbered all of two. The small size of the department was deliberate: we wanted the reduction of environmental harm to be part of everyone’s job. We did not want to create a separate bureaucracy that might clash unproductively with our product-quality or sourcing staff, or give that staff a reason to make environmental considerations secondary because someone else would handle them in their stead.”

Verify before trust: “Before placing an initial order with a factory, Patagonia has a member of its social/environmental responsibility team visit to verify conditions. This team member can break the deal. Our quality director has similar veto power over the sourcing department’s decision to take on a new factory.”

Win/win: “Companies that recognize the opportunity to use the intelligence and creative capacity of their people to do less harm, certainly less harm that serves no useful purpose, will benefit. The company that wreaks less environmental harm will at the same time reduce its sharply rising costs for energy, water, and waste disposal.”

Meaningful work:
“At its heart, to have meaningful work is to do something you love to do and are good at doing for a living. Most people don’t know, at first, what they love best. What they become best at develops by trial and error or by accident. We’re all good at something: with words or numbers, or we work with our hands, or we work best outside.”

“Meaningful work is doing things you love to do, often, though not always, with other people. No responsible company can function well without a lot of different people doing things they love to do in concert with others. Doing what you love to do makes work meaningful. Doing the right thing, with others, makes work meaningful.”

“We have made the choice to do better and not accept the status quo. This is how our work has become more meaningful: we’re not just making clothes, we’re making long-lasting clothes that do less damage.”

Disrupting yourself:
“In 1972, Chouinard Equipment was still a small company (about $400,000 a year in sales), but it had become the largest supplier of climbing hardware in the U.S. With the increased popularity of climbing, and its concentration on the same well-tried routes (in Yosemite Valley, El Dorado Canyon, the Shawangunks, etc.), our reusable hard-steel pitons had become environmental villains. The same fragile cracks had to endure repeated hammering of pitons during both placement and removal, and the disfiguring was severe. After an ascent of the degraded Nose route on El Capitan, which had been pristine a few summers earlier, Yvon and partner Tom Frost decided to phase out of the piton business. It was a huge risk: pitons were the mainstay of the business. But the change had to be made for reasons both moral and practical: the routes were beautiful and satisfying and shouldn’t be ruined; and to ruin them would put an end to, or greatly reduce, the possibilities for climbing in the most popular areas, and thus eventually hurt our business.”

“There was an alternative: aluminum chocks that could be wedged in and removed by hand without the use of a hammer. Hexentrics and stoppers made their first appearance in the Chouinard Equipment catalog in 1972.”

“That catalog opened with an editorial from the owners on the environmental hazards of pitons. A fourteen-page essay by Sierra climber Doug Robinson on how to use chocks began with a powerful paragraph: ‘There is a word for it, and the word is clean. Climbing with only nuts and runners for protection is clean climbing. Clean because the rock is left unaltered by the passing climber. Clean because nothing is hammered into the rock and then hammered back out, leaving the rock scarred and the next climber’s experience less natural. Clean because the climber’s protection leaves little trace of his ascension. Clean is climbing the rock without changing it; a step closer to organic climbing for the natural man.’”

“Within a few months of the catalog’s mailing, the piton business had atrophied; chocks sold faster than they could be made. In the tin sheds of Chouinard Equipment, the steady pounding rhythm of the drop hammer gave way to the high-pitched whine of the multiple-drill jig.”

“At Chouinard Equipment, we learned that we could inspire our customers to do less harm simply by making them aware of the problem and offering a solution. We also learned that by addressing the problem we had forced ourselves to make a better product: chocks were lighter than pitons and as or more secure. We might not have risked the obsolescence of our piton business just to sell something new. But doing the right thing motivated us—and turned out to be good business.”

Retention:
“It costs Patagonia roughly $50,000, on average, to recruit, train, and get up to speed a new employee; if we want to make any money, it’s a good idea to keep the ones we have happy and fully engaged.”

“How to gain a customer and keep one? First, make something or offer a service someone can use, for which satisfaction endures. Second, your company should romance, but not bullshit, the people whose business it solicits.”

Navigating downturns:
“Our emergency plan for a downturn of any magnitude now is to cut the fat, freeze hiring, reduce travel, and trim every type of expense except salaries and wages.”

Anchor in truth:
“A company needs to present itself well to the customer; it may even preen a little, the way a lover might take care to dress for a date. A life story, or product story, told just this side of myth-making is okay when it fairly represents the real. But beware of conjuring a false image of your company’s goods or services. Mystification will no longer work in a world where stage fog can be quickly dispersed by a competitor, activist, or regulator.”

“Transparency is the primary contemporary virtue for all responsible businesses.”

“For a company to set goals or assess progress toward meeting them it needs freely flowing, transparent information. No transparency: no accountability.”

Do the hard thing:
“Patagonia was not always an especially transparent company, nor were we eager to learn about problems that seemed beyond our control. We collectively groaned when we learned how harmful conventionally grown cotton was. We had no idea when we decided to switch to organic cotton how much work would be involved; we knew only that it was possible, and that we had no compelling reason to continue to use harmful, chemically dependent cotton.”

“Over time, your company will become healthier as a benefit of knowing your business more intimately—and more fully engaging your workforce and community.”

In the Shadow of Man – Jane Goodall

In the Shadow of Man – by Jane Goodall
Date read: 12/18/22. Recommendation: 8/10.

Jane Goodall’s account of her life and lessons learned living among the chimpanzees of Gombe National Park. This book focuses on her first ten years in the field. Her beginnings—how she found her way to Gombe and met Dr. Louis Leakey are truly inspirational. And the stories she tells of her time in Africa with the chimps, how she got to know them, the behaviors she observed, and what that taught her about our own humanity will open your mind and ground you in something real.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Childhood:
Lived in a red-brick Victorian house in Bournemouth where she dreamed of one day going to Africa, living with animals, and writing books about them.

Books that inspired her: Doctor Dolittle, Tarzan, Beatrix Potter, and The Wind in the Willows.

“The years covered in this book were, perhaps, the happiest of my life, when I was immersed in the forest world I had dreamed of as a child.” JG

Fascinated with animals from an early age: One of her earliest memories (age four) was when her family went to a farm for a holiday. Goodall was asking questions about how hens lay eggs but she wasn’t getting a satisfactory answer. So she crawled into a henhouse and sat quietly for five hours in the corner just to see for herself. The entire house was searching for her and her mother called the police during that time. 

When she was eight years old, she decided she would go to Africa and live with wild animals when she grew up. 

Reaching Africa:
When she left school at eighteen, she took a secretarial course and two different jobs. When a school friend invited her to come stay at her parent’s farm in Kenya, she handed in her resignation the same day. She left a fascinating job at a documentary film studio in order to earn her way to pay for travel to Africa (it was difficult to save money in London) by working as a waitress during the summer in her hometown of Bournemouth. 

A month after arriving in Africa, a friend suggested she should meet Dr. Louis Leakey—if she were interested in animals. She had already started an office job. But she went to see Leakey at the National Museum of Natural History in Nairobi where he was the curator at the time. It just so happened that his secretary recently quit so he offered the job to Goodall. 

While at the museum she learned from the other naturalists and shared in their enthusiasm for animals. Soon after, Leakey offered Goodall a chance to join him and his wife, Mary, on their annual paleontological expedition to the Olduvai Gorge on the Serengeti plains. 

Towards the end of their time at Olduvai, Leakey had seen how hard she worked and how much she loved interacting with the animals, so he mentioned a group of chimpanzees living near the shores of Lake Tanganyika in present-day Tanzania. He described their habitat and how rugged and remote it was. He emphasized the patience and dedication that would be required to study them. 

Leakey asked Goodall if she would be willing to tackle the job of observing the chimpanzees at Gombe. Despite not having an official degree or scientific background to study animal behavior. Leakey wanted someone who was unbiased by current scientific schools of thought. He wanted someone who understood and connected with animals and was eager to learn. 

After Goodall agreed to go, Leakey worked on raising the necessary funds. “He had to convince someone of the need for the study itself, and also that a young unqualified girl was the right person to attempt it. Eventually, the Wilkie Foundation in Des Plaines, Illinois, agreed to contribute a sum sufficient to cover the necessary capital expenses—a small boat, a tent, and airfares—and an initial six months in the field.” JG

Patience + Perseverance:
After arriving at Gombe to conduct her research, Goodall spent almost half a year trying to overcome the chimpanzees’ inherent fear of her. Whenever she accidentally got close, the chimps would run off into the undergrowth in a panic. In the early days, they wouldn’t even let her within 500 yards of them. 

There were days and weeks she saw no sign of the chimpanzees at all. “Nevertheless, those weeks did serve to acquaint me with the rugged terrain. My skin became hardened to the rough grasses of the valleys and my blood immune to the poison of the tsetse fly, so that I no longer swelled hugely each time I was bitten. I became increasingly surefooted on the treacherous slopes, which were equally slippery whether they were bare or eroded, crusted with charcoal, or carpeted by dry, trampled grass. Gradually, too, I became familiar with many of the animal tracks in the five valleys that became my main work area.” JG

As the months went by, Goodall knew they were close to running out of funds and she didn’t have much observational evidence to keep the study alive. She was running out of time. 

Three months in, she hiked to an open peak about 1,000 feet above the lake that had a good vantage point over one of the valleys. That morning a group of chimps appeared to feed on some fig trees near the stream in the valley. They were in plain sight, about 80 years away, the closest she had been which allowed her to better observe the chimps. This day was a turning point in her study. She began to recognize individuals and give them names. She was able to get her first glimpse of social behavior and how they made their nests. 

One day from the peak she saw a small group of chimps just below her in the upper branches of a thick tree and noticed the chimps were eating meat—one of those chimps was David Graybeard who was always the least afraid of her and because of his comfort, the rest of the chimps became more comfortable around Goodall. This was the first groundbreaking discovery because previously it was believed that chimps were primarily vegetarians and fruit eaters. No one knew they would hunt and eat larger mammals. 

Two weeks after she saw the chimps eating meat, she saw David Graybeard “squatting beside the red earth mound of a termite nest, and as I watched I saw him carefully push a long grass stem down into a hole in the mound. After a moment, he withdrew it and picked something from the end of his mouth.” This was another groundbreaking discovery and was one of the first observations of non-humans using and modifying objects as tools. It demonstrated the crude beginnings of toolmaking. Previously it was believed that humans were the only tool-making animal. 

These observations (meat-eating and toolmaking) gave the study renewed life. Leakey was able to use these discoveries to secure funding from the National Geographic Society for another year of research. 

Other toolmaking observations: 
Stems and stick to capture and eat insects
Leaves to sop up water they can’t reach with their lips
Leaves to wipe dirt from their bodies and dap at wounds
Sticks as levers to enlarge underground bees’ nests

Cambridge: 
Leakey helped Goodall get admitted to Cambridge University in 1961 after her initial research despite her not having an undergrad degree. She would work towards her Ph.D. in ethology (study of animal behavior). Wanted to make sure the scientific community didn’t have excuses to reject her observations and studies. 

During this time, Goodall would spend time at Cambridge pursuing her Ph.D. and return to Gombe when she was finished with each term to continue her observations. 

Differences of degree, rather than kind:
The scientific community informed Jane that it was inappropriate to talk of chimpanzees having personalities, minds capable of thought, or emotions similar to us. “In other words, there was a sharp line dividing ‘us’ from ‘them.’”

Accumulation of observations forced science to rethink its attitude toward animals. “It became increasingly clear that we are part of, and not separated from, the rest of the animal kingdom.” 

Man’s awareness of himself is very different from the dawning awareness of the chimpanzee and this is a very important difference. 

But chimpanzees have the ability to solve complex problems, make and use tools for different purposes, and operate in complex social structures with elaborate communication.