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Book Summaries

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In Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know, Wharton’s top-rated professor, organizational psychologist and bestselling author Adam Grant explores how rethinking happens, the Value of rethinking, and adopting mental flexibility/agility. He describes how we can challenge our intuition, accept and implement criticism and establish a challenge network to push our thinking to greater levels.

The book is an invitation to let go of knowledge and opinions that are no longer serving you well, and to anchor your sense of self in flexibility rather than consistency.

In Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction, behavioural neuroscientist and recovering addict Judith Grisel shares how she transforms her life from a daily drug user and college dropout to becoming a renowned behavioural neuroscientist. She writes about the lessons learned in her over twenty-five years of experience as a researcher studying the neuroscience of addiction. The principles thus shed light on the biological dead end that perpetuates substance use and abuse: namely, that there will never be enough drugs because the brain’s capacity to learn and adapt is infinite.

Understanding the mechanisms behind every addict’s experience makes it very clear that short of death or long-term sobriety there is no way to quell the screaming need between exposures. At the point where pathology determines behavior, most addicts die trying to satisfy an insatiable drive.

In How to Lead: Wisdom from the World’s Greatest CEOs, Founders, and Game Changers, American lawyer and co-founder of the private equity firm The Carlyle Group, David Rubenstein interviews and profiles some of the world’s most successful individuals. He shares his discussions, advice, and wisdom from CEOs, presidents, founders, and master performers from the worlds of finance (Warren Buffett, Jamie Dimon, Christine Lagarde, Ken Griffin), tech (Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, Tim Cook), entertainment (Oprah Winfrey, Lorne Michaels, Renee Fleming, Yo-Yo Ma), sports (Jack Nicklaus, Adam Silver, Coach K, Phil Knight), government (President Bill Clinton, President George W. Bush, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Nancy Pelosi), and many others.

David Rubenstein has had a long fascination with different individuals becoming and staying leaders. In 2008, he became the president of the Economic Club of Washington, D.C., and began almost monthly interviewing a prominent business, government, or cultural leader. As a follow up he started the Peer to Peer interview show on Bloomberg TV in 2016 (broadcast on PBS as well since 2018). The How to Lead Book is an outgrowth of these interviews and is designed to provide the reader with the perspectives of different kinds of leaders, with the hope that readers might be inspired to develop or enhance their own leadership skills.

Rubenstein divides the leadership experience of interviewees in the book into six categories:

  • Visionaries: Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Oprah Winfrey, and Warren Buffett
  • Builders: Phil Knight, Ken Griffin, Robert F. Smith, Jamie Dimon, and Marillyn Hewson
  • Transformers: Melinda Gates, Eric Schmidt, Tim Cook, Ginni Rometty, and Indra Nooyi
  • Commanders: George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Colin Powell, David Petraeus, Condoleezza Rice, and James A. Baker III
  • Decision-Makers: Nancy Pelosi, Adam Silver, Christine Lagarde, Anthony S. Fauci, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg
  • Masters: Jack Nicklaus, Mike “Coach K” Krzyzewski, Renée Fleming, Yo-Yo Ma, and Lorne Michaels

English comedian, actor, writer and activist Russell Brand is a man of extremes with a loquacious and flamboyant lifestyle. Brand struggled with drugs, sex, alcohol, food, fame and online shopping addiction for several years. In Recovery: Freedom from Our Addictions, he writes about his journey of recovery using the twelve-step program of Alcohol Anonymous framework and principles.

Initial Resistance to 12-step program

Brand was initially resistant to the 12-step addiction program, but upon further examination of the principles he found out that self-centred, egotistical thinking is the defining attribute of the addictive condition. Self-centredness is a tricky thing; it encompasses more than just vanity. It’s not just Fonzie, looking at himself in self-satisfied wonder and flexing his little tush, no.

I can attest personally that the 12 Steps work with severe addiction issues. If you have them, you should engage with the appropriate 12 Step support group.

In Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members: Tools to Maintain Boundaries, Deal with Criticism, and Heal from Shame After Ties Have Been Cut, psychologist and toxic-family survivor Sherrie Campbell, Ph.D. argues that surviving our toxic and dysfunctional family units requires cutting ties forever for a while or forever. Campbell provides strategies for embracing the decision with pride, validation and faith in oneself. She provides tools for creating boundaries, coping with judgment, and overcoming self-doubt.

 In The Value of Debt in Building Wealth, bestselling author Thomas J. Anderson writes about strategically using debt to build wealth in the long run. Anderson notes that Debt is a powerful tool that corporate financial officers have understood since capitalism was born. Savvy use of debt provides liquidity and flexibility, allowing smart companies to jump on opportunities and ride out emergencies.

Debt is neither good nor bad. It is simply a magnifier. If you choose investments that deliver higher returns than the after-tax cost of your debt, then debt adds value. If you choose investments that return less than the after-tax cost of your debt, then debt destroys value.

“The single biggest determining factor in your rate of return and in being on track for retirement is your debt, debt structure, and the choices you make with respect to debt. Do not underestimate the power of building up assets early and paying down debt later.”

New York Times bestseller and author of one of my favourite books, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, Susan Cain, writes about bittersweetness in her book Bittersweet (Oprah’s Book Club): How Sorrow and Longing Make Us, The book’s central theme is that there is no happiness in life without sadness, no one lives a sorrow free life, it is not a matter of whether that the tough times would come around; it is more about how we handle it. We all have a choice to either get better or get bitter, learn the lessons or let it lessen us, get the message or stay stuck with the mess.

Book’s Theme

The book is about the melancholic direction which Cain calls the “Bittersweet”:  a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world. The bittersweet is also about the recognition that light and dark, birth and death—bitter and sweet—are forever paired. “Days of honey, days of onion,” as an Arabic proverb puts it. The tragedy of life is linked inescapably with its splendor; you could tear civilization down and rebuild it from scratch, and the same dualities would rise again. Yet to fully inhabit these dualities—the dark as well as the light—is, paradoxically, the only way to transcend them. And transcending them is the ultimate point. The bittersweet is about the desire for communion, the wish to go home.

The idea of  transforming pain into creativity, transcendence, and love—is the heart of the book.

The Pursuit of Happiness

Americans prioritize happiness so much that we wrote the pursuit of it into our founding documents, then proceeded to write over thirty thousand books on the subject, as per a recent Amazon search. We’re taught from a very young age to scorn our own tears (“Crybaby!”), then to censure our sorrow for the rest of our lives.

Longing

Longing is momentum in disguise: It’s active, not passive; touched with the creative, the tender, and the divine. We long for something, or someone. We reach for it, move toward it. The word longing derives from the Old English langian, meaning “to grow long,” and the German langen—to reach, to extend. The word yearning is linguistically associated with hunger and thirst, but also desire. In Hebrew, it comes from the same root as the word for passion.

Our Longing is the gateway to belonging.

The place you suffer, in other words, is the same place you care profoundly—care enough to act. This is why, in Homer’s Odyssey, it was homesickness that drove Odysseus to take his epic journey, which starts with him weeping on a beach for his native Ithaca. This is why, in most every children’s story you’ve ever loved, from Harry Potter to Pippi Longstocking, the protagonist is an orphan. Only once the parents die, transforming into objects of yearning, do the children have their adventures and claim their hidden birthrights. These tales resonate because we’re all subject to illness and aging, breakups and bereavement, plagues and wars. And the message of all these stories, the secret that our poets and philosophers have been trying to tell us for centuries, is that our longing is the great gateway to belonging.

Bittersweetness

At their worst, bittersweet types despair that the perfect and beautiful world is forever out of reach. But at their best, they try to summon it into being. Bittersweetness is the hidden source of our moon shots, masterpieces, and love stories. It’s because of longing that we play moonlight sonatas and build rockets to Mars. It’s because of longing that Romeo loved Juliet, that Shakespeare wrote their story, that we still perform it centuries later.

All the best in your quest to get better. Don’t Settle: Live with Passion.

In Atlas of the heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience, Bene Brown describes the various emotions and experiences that define what it means to be human – including the language that allows us to make sense of what we experience. She sought to open up the language portal – a universe where we can share the stories of our bravest and most heartbreaking moments with each other in a way that builds connection.

The Alchemists: The INEOS Story – An industrial giant comes of age is an autobiographical account of how British billionaire, chemical engineer and businessman Jim Ratcliffe built INEOS from a  single site in Antwerp to the fourth-largest chemical company in the world and Britain’s largest private company. According to Forbes, Ratcliffe is the 77th wealthiest person in the world and the second richest Briton.

The Alchemist – About the rise of an unassuming and perhaps unlikely team with a canny combination of vision, intelligence, integrity, humility and steady competence in the face of recurring high stakes. A team that, together, created a lean, entrepreneurial, expanding business quite unlike any of its kind.

“You are right not because others agree with you, but because your facts and reasoning are sound.—Benjamin Graham

In The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success, author  William N. Thorndike profiles eight unconventional CEOs whose firm average returns outperformed the S&P 500 by a factor of twenty—in other words, an investment of $10,000 with each of these CEOs, on average, would have been worth over $1.5 million twenty-five years later. Thorndike referred to these unconventional, radically rational chief executives as “The Outsiders.”

As a group, these CEOs faced the inherent uncertainty of the business world with a patient, rational, pragmatic opportunism, not a detailed set of strategic plans.

A little more asking people questions and a little less telling people what to do.

In The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever, author and speaker Michael Bungay Stanier describes seven essential questions for becoming a better coach. Stanier advocates staying curious a little longer and asking more questions as a tool for coaching.

The real secret sauce here is building a habit of curiosity. The change of behaviour that’s going to serve you most powerfully is simply this: a little less advice, a little more curiosity. Find your own questions, find your own voice. And above all, build your own coaching habit.

In Small Company Big Business: How to get your small business ready to do business with big business, Small Business | Big Business Relationship counsellor Bronwyn Reid describes the five essential steps for attracting and retaining buyers as customers – whether they be national or international companies, Government, or even large Not For Profits.

In Raise Capital on Your Own Terms: How to Fund Your Business without Selling Your Soul, attorney and capital raising coach Jenny Kassan describes various capital-raising strategies available to mission-driven entrepreneurs and provides a six-step process for finding and enlisting investors who are a match with your personal goals and aspirations. 

Jenny has over 25 years of experience as an attorney and advisor for mission-driven enterprises.  She has helped her clients raise millions of dollars from values-aligned investors and raised over $2 million for her own businesses.