Walter Isaacson
Reading-Period: Oct 2018 - Feb 2020
This is the autobiography for Steve Jobs, covering his life-time story from childhood to his death in detail.
I have enjoyed the read so far. And I really admired Jobs for his vision and courage to do the things he believes is right, no mather what others say. In early stages of Apple, Jobs insisted that the software made for the MAC OS would not be compatible on Windows - This was a very controversial decision at the time, and was actually hurting the company in some ways. Yet Jobs insisted on doing it, and today we can see the huge benefit this kind of "eco-system" brought for Apple. If I were Jobs, given the pressure from the company's board, I would've given up already.
Of course, I am not saying that we should all become as "stubborn" as Jobs and insist on our own thoughts. In fact, this characteristic of Jobs also led to many failures in his life. But for me personally, I felt that I sometimes compromise too easily when having a disagreement with people. This is something I felt that I should definitely improve on.
In addition, reading about Jobs' last days before he died just teared me up and made we value my health even more. When the book described his conversation with his friend/enemy Bill Gate reminiscing their past experiences months before he died, I was also "reminiscing" all the Steve Jobs stories when I was reading the first half of the book. As a reader of this autobiography, I was partially "feeling" what Jobs was feeling at the time when he was looking back to his life with Gates. Very emotional!
Malcolm Gladwell
Reading-Period: March 2019 - April 2019
In this book, the author shared his research and opinions on the most successful "outliers" of our time, including Bill Gates, Bill Joy and Steve Jobs, trying to explore what made them so successful. In conclusion, he believes that while their own efforts played an important role in their success, it is mostly the unique environment that made them "outliers".
I felt the author narrow the definition of "success" to make his statements more convincing. He only focuses on the "extreme" successes. I don't think we need to be someone like "Bill Gates" to be successful. Of course, the definition of success is a very deep topic, and it varies for each of us.
I did agree on the fundamental influence the "environment" has on us. Here, the "environment" is a broader concept which includes social environment, cultural influence, etc. The example of Korean Airline impressed me a lot. Korean Air had more plane crashes than almost any other airline in the world for a period at the end of the 1990s. The author gives the details of the black box recordings during some of the incidences, and he points out how "conservative" are the younger Korean pilots when they are trying to point-out mis-operations of older pilots, even when the situation is extremely bad. In one of the case, the plane was clearly running out of gas right before landing. Yet when the young, secondary pilot noticed the issue, his way of communicating it to the senior pilot was so conservative that it made the senior pilot think "there is no big deal."
In Asian cultures, we are educated to show great respect to seniors. And we will need to be very careful when we express disagreements with the seniors, sometimes we are even "afraid" to correct their mistakes. I believe showing respect is good, but the more important aspect is to always tell the truth and express our sincere feelings.
Malcolm Gladwell
Reading-Period: October 2019
In this book, the author illustrates why is it so easy for us to misunderstood the intents of strangers, and what is the difficult aspect of having an effective communication with strangers.
I didn't enjoy the read. I am a little confused on many of the examples the author gives. And the author spends lots of time addressing his point that we all "default to truth" when we communicate - that is, when someone tells us something, it is our nature to assume its true at first instead of questioning it. This seem to be a "common sense" for me, but the author repeatedly trying to "prove" it and gives tons of tedious examples, which made me very confused and lost track of what he's trying to say.
Carol S.Dweck
Reading-Period: November 2019
In this book, the author explains two kinds of mindsets: the growth mindset and the fixed mindset. The former believes every skills can be improved through practices and effort, while the latter believes something is purely innate and cannot be changed. Everyone possess both of the mindsets with different "ratios."
The concepts of these two mindsets are intuitive. But after reading the book and all the real-life examples, I started to reflect on myself frequently and actually had multiple "gotcha" moments when I found myself in the "fixed mindset". For example, sometimes I would be afraid of criticisms. Before I post my first blog, I was worried that what if there are stupid errors in it? People would then judge my ability in data science! - typical fixed mindset. The growth mindset tells me that exposing my mistakes to others is nothing to be ashamed of, and it provides opportunities for me to grow my abilities.
In general, the book is a little too "illustrative," and I probably won't sit down and read it (I listened to the audio book version of it through Audible). But it is very enlightening and I learned a lot from it.
Stephen Westaby
Reading-Period: December 2019 - Jan 2020
In this book, the author describes his career as a cardiac surgeon with several exciting stories involving heart transplants and the implementation of artificial hearts.
It was a very enjoyable and eye-opening read. I originally started this book via Amazon Audible. However, the number of medical vocabularies in this book makes it extremely challenging for me to comprehend the story. Eventually I found a Chinese version on Amazon and read it on my kindle.
As I'm reading about the career of the author, amazed by his expertise and talent, I found one of the facts brought up by the author especially thought-provoking and interesting. He says that a heart surgery is nothing but a daily routine for a heart surgeon, yet it is a once-in-a-lifetime and scary experience for the patient and his family.
In one way, this fact makes me less "scared" about hospital visits - after all its just someone else's daily routine. From a broader perspective, we always talk about the importance to show empathy. However, it seems that in some cases including a surgeon-patient relationship, it's either reasonable nor realistic to ask either side for empathy. Patients usually don't have the background or knowledge to empathize the surgeon, while there is of no benefit for a surgeon to feel the panic and nervousness of the patients. In such cases, love, trust and communication become vitally important.
Charles Duhigg
Reading-Period: December 2019 - Now