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Book Review: Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh

🇺🇸 · TrepHub · Ahmed Reza

A formative business book for me personally and a book I wish I reviewing much sooner. Tony exemplifies what he preaches in the book, be good, do right by people, with the ultimate focus on enjoying the journey and being happy day to day. In light of his very recent passing, it’s incredible to see the insights and accomplishments of this incredible entrepreneur and leader. This book is a must read for business leaders and a wonderful testament to the brilliance and generous nature of the author. Hi, it’s Ahmed back from mountaintop. I was actually not planning on recording a video today but I felt like I needed to record a very special book review. This morning I just found out that Tony Hsieh, the fabled CEO of Zappos and the author of delivering happiness, has unfortunately passed away in an accident. And that I’m sure like many others I’m deeply moved, deeply saddened and my thoughts and prayers go out to Tony and his family and his loved ones and friends and the folks of Zappos who probably miss him very much and all the other people that he’s influenced. So today, I felt like I needed to talk about how instrumental Tony Hsieh’s book, Delivering Happiness, has been in my own entrepreneurial journey. I’m kind of ashamed of the fact that I didn’t talk about it before. It was one of the early books that I read and it skipped my mind, you know, kind of like availability bias but when I found out about his passing, it brought to me the things that I learned from his book and how it impacted me as an entrepreneur. The biggest thing about his book that I can remember that I’ve implemented is culture, understanding culture, growing as an entrepreneur, and realizing what’s truly important. From the outside, it’s always like, ’oh, it’s money and success and all this other stuff.’ But what you can see from Tony’s journey is he saw that it was not just about the end result but also the journey. And the biggest thing that he showed in his book is that you could, you know, build a great company, a great culture, and make money while doing it. So I would highly recommend you checking out the book, Delivering Happiness, if you haven’t already and it’s just a wonderful read. Many people have done reviews on Tony Hsieh’s books and I think that’s another incredible thing about being a great leader, being a great entrepreneur is he’s not just leaving behind, you know, just money or a charity that he’s done. The impact of someone like Tony Hsieh is huge from the works he’s done, from companies he’s built. If you ever been to downtown Las Vegas, you’ll see his imprint there. But even beyond that, I think from knowledge that he’s shared. Everybody who’s been responding on social media today, many of them have had personal interactions with him. Others have just known him through his works like myself. I’ve unfortunately never got to know him personally but I did read his books and took a lot of inspiration out of that. So bottom line, if you do well, if you do well by other people, you’re gonna do all right in life and you can actually do all right in life, do all right, you know, even afterwards. But the legacy that you leave behind in the organizations that you build and the people that you touch again highly recommend checking out Tony Hsieh’s book, Delivery Happiness. One of the best business books that I’ve read and it’s a wonderful personal development as well. Thanks. Take care. The post Book Review: Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh appeared first on TrepHub .

Book Review

Startup Life in the Post Covid Era

🇺🇸 · TrepHub · Ahmed Reza

Image from stanford.edu During this Post COVID era, it’s a particularly difficult time for startups. Funding may have dried up for most, however, opportunities are not lost. In this session, Ahmed Reza will be discussing tips for startups on surviving and thriving in the Covid-19 economic crisis and the opportunities that arise from it. Professional Bio: Ahmed Reza is an AI geek and a serial entrepreneur with a childhood background in the performing arts. He started his engineering career building image-processing software for NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope at Cornell University, where he studied computer science and electrical engineering. In college, Ahmed also participated in the DARPA Grand Challenge, which resulted in self-driving cars. His technical work extends from developing AI for UAVs, hacking engine control units (ECUs) to make cars go faster, and designing and building scalable solutions for the travel industry such as self check-in and FlyFi for connectivity in the air. Ahmed’s current startup, YiB.io Inc., applies Artificial Intelligence to Voice and SMS data to address business problems such as task automation, marketing attribution, sales training, and customer and employee relationship management. The post Startup Life in the Post Covid Era appeared first on TrepHub .

Startup

Book Review: The Most Human Human by Brian Christian

🇺🇸 · TrepHub · Ahmed Reza

Book Review I highly recommend Brian Christian’s book. It will be an eye-opening look into the world of AI whether you’re a computer scientist or whether you’re a complete novice or you’re an investor who’s interested in this space. At the very least you’re going to find it incredibly entertaining. Hi, it’s Ahmed back from the mountaintop. Well, not quite the top. This is kind of on the way down but it’s a beautiful spot and i wanted to record another book review. So something that’s been on my mind lately a lot has been AI. Specifically natural language processing. So I’m sure you’ve heard a lot about artificial intelligence and you know how it’s going to take over the world, how it’s going to you know dominate us and make us their slaves. Most of that I believe is just conjecture and terminator and other movies that have influenced us. A book that has been very influential even for me being a practitioner of artificial intelligence right? I have a biased view of it of course. I learned a lot from this book called The Most Human Human by the author Brian Christian . And I highly recommend this book if you’re trying to understand artificial intelligence, the bounds of artificial intelligence, and what else is involved in artificial intelligence. So kind of the pinnacle of AI according to Brian Christian and according to many is basically the touring prize. The touring prize is all about whether a chatbot can fool you enough to think that you’re talking to a human being. and there’s this contest that happens every year where everybody builds these bots that try to beat people and to try to get them to think that they’re talking to a human being. It’s a blind test where you don’t know whether you’re talking to a human being, you’re chatting with a human being, or you’re chatting with a robot. So they have this one a word called the most “human human” and the most human AI, the most machine-like human. A funny anecdote from the book, a person that won the most machine-like human was a Phd. We just knew so much about a subject that the people who were chatting with her said there’s no way this could be a real human being no real human being would have that much knowledge about this subject. But the nice thing about the book is it tells you a lot about how computers work. It makes you think about how human minds work right. We often equate oratory skills or language skills or intelligence. We find funny people intelligent; of course, we find mathematicians intelligent too but we index pretty highly on communication because we have a gut feel for what an intelligent person would do or say, which is why when somebody doesn’t speak your language you automatically might think, “oh that person is not as intelligent”. But yeah he breaks it down to,”hey if you really want to know what makes human beings human, is it really anything else but language”. I personally think machines are way more powerful than us and I believe in a future where machines and human beings augment each other to make amazing outcomes whether it’s in science or it’s in driving, machines do what machines do really well, they’re not human. And humans do what humans do really well. So I’ve been trying to optimize myself to be a better human and I know I’ll never be as good of a machine as a machine is in things like adding and calculating and just being as consistent as a machine would be. So I highly recommend Brian Christian’s book. It will be an eye-opening look into the world of AI whether you’re a computer scientist or whether you’re a complete novice or you’re an investor who’s interested in this space. At the very least you’re going to find it incredibly entertaining. There are certain parts of the book that are unexpected so if you have the audiobook version and you’re playing it in your car, don’t have your kids in the car because you’ll have to explain certain terms and you’ll have to explain certain viewpoints where I think maybe he’s being funny that it’s let’s just say it’s not rated PG in certain parts of the book. I was listening to a naughty book and it was just such a fascinating listen it was like you’re in the car and I happen to have my kid and I had to pause it really quickly so that I was like don’t worry about those words. It is a great book though again, The Most Human Human by Brian Christian. I think it’s one of the best books and one of the most entertaining books on AI that you’ll read that is not going to put you to sleep. The post Book Review: The Most Human Human by Brian Christian appeared first on TrepHub .

Book Review

Book review: GRIT By Angela Duckworth

🇺🇸 · TrepHub · Ahmed Reza

Book Rewiew You can call it perseverance. You can call it tenacity, you can call it drive. But no matter what, without grit, you’re not going to get very many places. TRANSCRIPTION Hi, it’s Ahmed. I’m back from the mountaintop. This time I’m holding the camera so it’s going to be a little bit weird and back with new crazy shades, so these my reflecting shades. Well, today I wanted to talk about a book called Grit . It’s something that’s been on my mind a lot lately as I’ve been coming up and trying to do this hiking thing every day. I am not a sports person. My kids asked me recently, “Dad, what sport were you really into?” I said does video games count? Maybe like, you can say that. It wasn’t a video games, but really, I’m not, you know, a physical person at all. So I’ve been committed to like doing something healthy. So I’ve been coming up on these hikes with some relative regularity. And yeah, so one of the books that I wanted to review today is a book called Grit by Angela Duckworth that is a wonderful read and a very insightful book actually. Angela Duckworth talks about what it really takes or, you know, what we call smart people. And you know, when we look at people who go off to Harvard or do all these other things, and we think “oh man, they’re just blessed”, they were born with so much tenacity, so many so much brains but then you see people in life where you may have had a lot or who may have not had a lot. And you wonder how that person didn’t make it or how that person didn’t make it. And she chalks it up mainly to grit. Of course, there’s a lot of factors like luck. You don’t really know like, you know, being obviously being born in the United States or in Europe gives you a better chance at a better life on average, being born the prince of a third world country is probably just as good, if not better. So just counting luck, you know, what’s the one thing that you can say? That really makes a difference for people. And she basically says it’s this thing called grit. Grit is the ability to keep going. Grit is the ability to fail, recover, get up and keep going. And this height thing, not my cup of tea. But if I look back at the one thing that I can tell my kids and say, Hey, I might not be a sportsman, but I do know a thing or two about grit. And if you’re in a startup , if you’re a programmer, or if you’re a student, you are going to fail, you’re going to fail, probably more than once. how you deal with that failure, how you handle that how greedy you are is what will define how successful you ultimately become given all, you know, given all other things being equal. So, she basically goes on to demonstrate and show how she herself was pretty gritty. And how that perseverance like, you know, that’s something that we see in a lot of a lot of the sports figures that we admire. And that’s something that we see in executives that we admire. People who we look at and say, Hey, you know, that person is a self made or that person is pretty impressive. So it’s not just fun stuff. It’s not just hard stuff but it’s like constant, repetitive doing over and over and over again. I don’t want to go too much into the book but the court comms concept is around grit and she basically makes her case around it. You can call it perseverance. You can call it tenacity, you can call it drive. But no matter what, without grit, you’re not going to get very many places. So I highly recommend it to anybody who’s thinking about leadership parenting. Those are the two things that have kind of helped me with personally, is realizing, hey, what what do I teach my kids? What do I tell them to go do? And what do I tell them to pick up from sports or any other team activity that they do? And now I always remind them, it’s grit. That’s the one thing that you definitely want. And I’m trying to be gritty myself. So even though sports or physical activity isn’t really my thing, it’s something that I have committed to doing to improve my health. So I try to come up to the mountaintop think clear my head and do some of these videos from time to time. with my funny sunglasses on. The post Book review: GRIT By Angela Duckworth appeared first on TrepHub .

Book Review

Book Review: Entrepreneurial Leadership by Joel Peterson

🇺🇸 · TrepHub · Ahmed Reza

At first, I listened to the audiobook, then I bought the hard copy and find myself referring to it frequently. I find that there’s plenty of materials on how to start up. The next phase is where leaders need help and this is as good of a field guide to leadership as I’ve seen. I’ve bought the book for several executives and would prescribe it to anyone who wants to improve their business leadership skills. Hi, this is Ahmed again coming from the mountaintop or middle of the mountain. It’s been a while since I’ve recorded one of these. Mainly because I’ve been so focused on building my next venture which is Yobi . It’s a unified communication so a little bit of shameless plug in my book reviews. So, if you get a chance, check it out. It’s trying to revolutionize digital communications or actually communication for business. Today, speaking of business there is a specific book that comes to mind that I think is an iconic book and is going to become a classic someday and for business folks. It’s a book called Entrepreneurial Leadership by Joel Peterson. Now, the first time I found out about this book was when I learned that Joel Peterson was the chairman of JetBlue and I actually worked at a company that was acquired by JetBlue and I remember the culture of JetBlue just being an amazing culture where people were proud of working for JetBlue and I hope to build a company like that so I figured why not check out this book by Joel Peterson. Started reading it and I then, I started realizing this was, this was an extra ordinary work. Having been in business for a while, having learned some of the lessons the hard way, one of the things that a lot of people don’t tell you there’s a lot of advice how to start up. I can probably repeat them verbatim to you from different books that I’ve read, different courses that I’ve taken but the problem comes when you’re trying to grow a company, when you’re trying to scale, when you realize that the lead, the problem is you. I came to that point in my career as an entrepreneur when I realized it’s not a competitor that’s slowing me down it’s my lack of business knowledge or it’s my lack of leadership knowledge or you know something else that I didn’t have. So, I spent a good amount of time focusing on myself, focusing inward I started reading a lot of books because it’s lot easier to read books and learn than to fail and learn because that’s another way that you can learn and I learned by failing and learning at first and then I started reading books. So, I would highly recommend Entrepreneurial Leadership where Joel Peterson actually distills his years and years’ worth of business experience and gives you a road map on how to navigate your way around leadership such that you’re a better business person, you’re a better leader, you’re a better dad even he actually talks about his family and how he approaches the world. It was a refreshing read, it wasn’t cutthroat it was about how you could be a nice person, a good person, and win. One of my favorite parts of the book is this part called firing with compassion it’s about people you know people as people are the hardest thing in business at least for me but in people hiring people, recruiting, motivating and then firing. Firing sounds like a really terrible thing but you can fire with compassion and that and that’s when you understand the other person is. And you can be a leader who at the end of your career are not hated. You people look back at you and go that guy he was an awesome guy; he took care of me or awesome guy or gal. right? Took care of me, helped pay my rent, helped pay the bills and genuinely cared so, it’s been a very influential book for me personally, I’ve taken a lot out of it I’ve actually implemented some of the HR parts out of the book. I’ve made sure to take some advice for myself give myself time. One of the reasons I’m back on the hike again is because it shows the importance of having mental clarity as a leader. I would highly recommend this book. I’ve actually gotten about 10 copies of physical book after I listened to the audiobook because it was that good and I sent it to all of the executives that work for me or work for one of the companies that I have ownership interest in. And I recommended it to just about everybody that I meet who’s in a position of leadership and in a time like 2020 you know when there’s all this craziness happening all around I think it’s even more important book because when else did the world require leadership of us than now? Now, is the time to lead not just in business but in life and volunteering and helping our neighbors and just being a decent good person. If you are in that position in your community like take that on and I look forward to being a leader not one that feels like oh I have all these minions but rather I get to serve in this way that I understand that I know I can get people to collaborate. Again, that book is Entrepreneurial Leadership by Joel Peterson I highly recommend it one of the best business books that I have ever read. It’s not the densest books and places like there are certain chapters where you can find other books that elaborate on it you know at great length but if you wanted to go through and touch upon all the important things that you need to have to be a well-rounded leader, this book’s got it all. So check it out, let me know what you think. Until next time, bye. The post Book Review: Entrepreneurial Leadership by Joel Peterson appeared first on TrepHub .

Book Review

Book Review: Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

🇺🇸 · TrepHub · Ahmed Reza

Book Review This is an intense book, despite its brevity, especially if you’re already thinking about existential issues. A Must Read for just about anyone who wants to become a better family or business leader or just get an incredible perspective on life after loss. Hi, it’s Ahmed. And I am coming to you from the mountaintop right by Mary Jane Falls at Mount Charleston. When I started on this hike, I didn’t realize it would bring me to the top of Mount Charleston. But it has been an amazing journey and it has been an amazing hike. Not being a very physical person, this is specially challenging for me but this was also mind over matter type of thing for me. And I am accompanied up here with my beautiful wife and my good friend who’s at the camera and humoring me to record another book review of all things up here. So I had to think for a while to go okay. This is a very, very special moment. You know you’re at the top of the mountain. It means a lot of things, you know. A Muslim and the Prophet Muhammad received revelation from God at the top of a mountain. Moses spoke with God at the top of a mountain, got the 40 or the sorry, top 10 commandments, not 40, after 40 days and 40 nights. So mountains, there’s something really mythical and mystical about mountains and spirituality and just making it up the mountain is, to me, it’s a spiritual journey as well as a physical one. You know the beauty is just absolutely overwhelming. The majesty of these mountains here, they’re mind-boggling and to witness the waterfall after you get up, it’s just, you know, humbling. You feel so small next to these mighty and majestic mountains. So, I want to review a very special book. It’s not going to be a business book but it is one of those books that has helped me tremendously. It is Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl . I love Viktor Frankl. The man is simply amazing. You wouldn’t believe it, he’s a very positive guy and he went through the holocaust. He lost family members and he just barely survived the holocaust. And he describes how dehumanizing it was to be in the concentration camps, to have everything taken away from you, to, I mean, you could, you start to question everything. I can’t even imagine, you know, as I was reading the book, I was trying to imagine. There are no words that I can speak to the horrors of what the holocaust was like. And he talks about the mixed feelings he has about the people who, you know, want to save themselves and they turn to the enemy, they, you know, side with the Nazis. So along with all the misery, there’s and death and too sheer evil. There is also, you know, distrust, you know. There were people that you couldn’t trust and really it, he describes how it breaks everything down, you have nothing, you know. I’m so incredibly blessed to even be able to come up here, to have the ability to come up here. There are fires in California right now, it’s smoky but here it’s absolutely beautiful. So it’s nothing to be taken for granted. So in Viktor Frankl’s book he describes what happens to you when you lose everything when you lose everything including the will to live. You know, death doesn’t seem, you know, death doesn’t seem that bad like everything is just so bad. And it’s there that he finds his philosophy. It’s there that he finds his core. And he realizes that even though he has lost control of everything, he remembers his wife, he remembers love. Because they can take away everything, they can take away his life, they can control every single aspect of his life but they don’t dominate his mind. They cannot control his mind. He is still free in his mind and if he gives that up, if he gives up focusing on love, he loses everything. And that’s how he kept control in a time when, you know, it’s you would have given up, I don’t, I can’t even imagine. I’m not even going to make a comparison. I am fluffy even by normal standards and I don’t hold a candle to Viktor Frankl but to really think that type of a negative experience helped him see the very best in humanity, the very best in himself, and to see that life is worth living, every moment is a gift and so much of that is your choice. So even though the Nazis were trying to make his life miserable, he chose not to be. He chose to not give in. I mean, what kind of incredible power is that? You have to look at the world in a whole different way. You have to re-examine everything, you have to think about your life, think about your death and come to terms with it. Come to terms with your mortality and the mortality and loss of everything around you. And there is a sense of freedom in that. Because at that moment, it pushes you to think, to decide, who are you. If you have, don’t have any control, what free will do you have? And that’s where he finds meaning. And it’s absolutely incredible. I personally am a religious person. I don’t know of Viktor Frankl’s leanings one way or another is certainly very spiritual, certainly very soft and love, you know, unfortunately, the English language is not expressive enough. Because we have only one word for love, it’s what you feel for your children, it’s what you feel for you wife, it what’s you feel for ice cream, for crying out loud, you know. I think Arabic has a nice word called “Rahma” which is, which is love, which translates to, “motherly love” or which our unconditional love. And at the end of the day, that’s, that’s the beauty. That’s what you see everywhere around you is the sense of love that you can either gravitate to, you can either choose to see that beauty, or you can see the devastation and you can see that, “oh, this, you know, hike was just ridiculous. It was really hard.”, and you know chose to focus on that or you could choose to focus on the beauty and the moment. So for me, that book it’s not a particularly long book. But Viktor Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning, is probably one of the most instrumental books in shaping my cognitive frame and how I look at the world. It’s helped me as an entrepreneur, it’s helped me as a dad, it’s helped as a person. And as I grow, you know, as I climb mountains metaphorically and physically, I think about the search for meaning and the beauty in every moment that’s there. So I’m incredibly thankful, I’m thankful to you for watching and hearing me rant. I’m thankful for my friends, for all, for family. And I am, I feel truly blessed at this moment, and, I feel blessed always actually to have experienced every single thing I’ve experienced, the good and the bad. Because just like Viktor Frankl, I feel like some of the hardest moments in my life shaped me. And had those moments not happened, I probably wouldn’t have thought about life, I wouldn’t have thought about death, and I wouldn’t have thought about meaning. So, if you’re going through a tough time in your life or if you just want to, you know, get a glance at what this great man experience and how he came to his epiphany, I would highly recommend reading Viktor Frankl’s, Man’s Search for Meaning. Thank you for watching. The post Book Review: Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl appeared first on TrepHub .

Book Review

Book Review: Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It

🇺🇸 · TrepHub · Ahmed Reza

Book Review For me it was extremely fascinating to understand the finance, to understand the investment, and to also understand the dynamics behind why some certain startups become successful with VC money and others don’t. Hi, it’s Ahmed back from the mountaintop on another hike. I’ve been doing this everyday, which is a blessing at the time of coronavirus especially with the resurgence now things have started shutting down again unfortunately. One of the things that’s been really interesting and that’s on my mind recently is a venture capital. I’ve been looking at doing some investment myself and I’ve been seeing that a lot of the seed deals have been accelerating, which has been an interesting phenomenon. There’s a lot of opportunity in times like now. So I wanted to highlight a book that I think is particularly insightful to entrepreneurs. So this video, this book review is really focused on folks who really want to understand venture capital. As an engineer that’s one of the shortcomings that I had is I didn’t really understand venture capital. There was almost like this religious aspect to all of it like you go to Y Combinator and you watch videos and you think, this is how VC’s work this is how, VC’s think and instead the best thing to do is actually just read a book by a VC. So the book today is The Secrets of Sand Hill Road by Scott Kupor and Eric Ries . Scott Kupor is a fellow Los Gatos resident, an amazing guy with long history in the Bay Area. A long history as a venture capitalist and in startups, and he breaks it down in a really really nice way or they break it down in a really nice way. It’s really important to understand venture math, it’s important to understand how investors think and how they look at the world right? Because if you understand the math behind it and you happen to be an engineer like me who’s becoming an entrepreneur, who’s been an entrepreneur it’s nice to understand when you’re talking to an investor on the other side what’s important to them. And also to understand if what you’re selling or what you’re building really fits that model because not all companies fit the venture model. I bootstrap my first company and it didn’t fit the venture model. And you don’t have to go the venture capital route to become wealthy to be, you know. to do okay in your life. So if you’re building something that should blitzscale then you really should find out about how VC’s think and what a seed investor looks for, what kind of risk profile they have. One of the things that was a revelation to me personally was understanding the struggles of VCs. You could think of it as a first world problem but imagine you have like two hundred million dollars, you as a VC you have to give it back meaning you have to invest it, you have to grow it, and then you have to give it back to your investors. And if you don’t give your investors more money back than you took in or significantly more than they could have made by investing it in the stock market they’re not gonna give you money again, you’re going to be a one-time VC. So there are many things that work for VCs similar to how it works for founders in a startup except like for a startup founder failure isn’t as big of a deal as if you’re a VC, even if you’re a seasoned to VC if you know one really bad fund can kill you. So a VC who’s just announced that they raised a billion dollars means they have to give a billion dollars to startup founders who then have to provide outsized returns on that billion dollar. So let’s go back to the VC math, one hundred million dollars right? Let’s say the VC investor bought like a million bucks in each company so how long it would take to just give away a hundred million dollars in a year? And if you’re still sitting on that money and you haven’t invested it and you in a fast enough time period that money is not doing anything it’s not gonna grow and you’re not gonna get investment. So it’s kind of a double-edged sword. So a lot of times people wonder why do VCs move the way they do, why do they make decisions the way they do, why is the networks so important. Well it’s important as soon as you understand the math. They’re gonna get you introduced to a VC and through their network, basically that’s you make sure that they’re not like throwing that money away well. VCs with a large fund won’t do a year’s worth of due diligence before they invest in you either. Of course as the rounds become bigger and at later stages the math works differently and Scott Kupor does a great job explaining the entire lifecycle and explaining how startups work, the ups and the downs. It can be a little bit dry if you’re not an entrepreneur, if you don’t really care about venture capital but if you do I highly recommend this book. It’ll also tell you about where VC’s get their money and it’s just fascinating. For me it was extremely fascinating to understand the finance, to understand the investment, and to also understand the dynamics behind why some certain startups become successful with VC money and others don’t. So if you’re looking for a good read I highly recommend The Secrets of Sand Hill Road by Scott Kupor. The post Book Review: Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It appeared first on TrepHub .

Book Review

Book Review: You Are Not So Smart by David McRaney

🇺🇸 · TrepHub · Ahmed Reza

While this book might not be a super popular business book, it’s been pretty useful in business overall. For leaders it is extremely important to be self aware and next to “Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow” this book is packed with non-obvious wisdom about how people work. The title as well as the tone of the book is a bit comic and colloquial but that keeps an otherwise “textbook” subject exciting. All in all, very well worth the read! Hi, this is Ahmed. I am not at the mountaintop today but I am at a different mountain. I’m at Mount Charleston which is in Nevada and I am absolutely amazed by how beautiful this place is. It reminds me of Yosemite actually. The weather is gorgeous. In Las Vegas, it was 100 something degrees and my friend told me about mountain Charleston. At first, I wasn’t really sure that it was going to be all that special I was like there’s a lot of mountains in California. There’s one right behind my house, I go hiking every day but then I came here and I was like wow and as you can see behind me Mount Charleston. And we’re hiking, we’re going around and it’s just incredible. I’m just having a blast out here. I’m just so happy to be able to hike again it’s been like a week. So just for context, I took my family, we left California because there are fires. I mean I never thought that an entire state could catch on fire but apparently it can, and driving through it was kind of crazy. The air quality in California is still kind of crazy so definitely appreciate being able to breathe over here. And even in Las Vegas it’s hot, it’s uncomfortable but at least if you’re an asthmatic like me, it’s not that bad. At least you can breathe, you don’t get constant headaches and if you’re in Mount Charleston, oh my God like I want to live here it’s so beautiful. So, this is my second foray into Mount Charleston actually and as I was walking up here, you know, thinking about a lot of things – we’re getting close to the elections, there was the RNC and the Democratic convention and it brought a very specific book to my mind. It’s not a very famous book necessarily like other books that I’ve reviewed were relatively we known in the business community but the book that is on my mind right now it’s called “You Are Not So Smart” . It’s not the typical scholastic book but it talks about cognitive biases and biases that human beings suffer from. And it feels like we’re getting and in a time like now, you know knowing your own biases and understanding how people play on biases. It’s a good thing to have as you encounter information from different political parties and other interested parties getting targeted by ads left and right. So, the book again is called “You Are Not So Smart”. And the one thing that I keep thinking of is this thing called that they call the sharpshooter fallacy, the Texas sharpshooter fallacy . Now, in the Texas sharpshooter fallacy you basically shoot at a barn and after you shoot at the barn you draw the target on the barn so that you draw the target over wherever you’re shot and it looks like you’re just an amazing marksman because you always hit the bullseye where whenever you’re shooting you’re always hitting the bullseye and that’s especially interesting when you hear political candidates talk about how you know, everything was just perfect, you know they knew everything, they knew the future, they never got anything wrong and if you remember the book “You Are Not So Smart” you’re going to think, oh that’s a sharpshooter fallacy. There are a lot of other things that we fall like we have availability bias. So in California, the fires are very much in your face and all I can think about was the fires. All my friends were thinking about was the fires. But when I checked the news, the news initially barely covered the fires and I was like what the heck it should be all over the news. Eventually, it did make it on the news but not until, not until like a week after it was like a big big deal. But then I’m reminded of the fact that to me the fire is a big deal because it’s all around me. I have availability bias, right? But the rest of the world there’s other things going on and right now everybody got politics on their mind because they see it around. Availability bias also let us think of the world in a certain way. So if you’re in Silicon Valley you might think the world is very diverse in you know in certain ways. If you’re in New York City you might think every city’s like your city has different opinions, different languages. If you’re in the South somewhere you might think everywhere else is like that so that’s availability bias. And it’s important to think when you’re thinking about these grander scheme things, when you’re thinking about the future, about politics electing this person or that person it’s actually really nice to know about biases that you can fall prey to so that you can make a decision based on a slightly more rational view of the world than what you might if you didn’t know about your own shortcomings, about things that the human brain isn’t good for. It’s just a really great general-purpose book not just for the election but just in life in general. For example, if you’re an interviewer and you’re interviewing people you’re more likely to like the last person you interviewed better than everybody else just because of the fact that you remember that person better. Again, it’s not reality, it’s not fact it’s just availability bias You know another one of our human biases, and human beings have a lot of biases – you know we forget things, we forget big things and we’ll remember like the most recent thing. So we might have family and friends that have taken care of us all our lives but in our mind, we might be thinking what have you done for me lately, so whoever has been really nice to you lately you have probably have a very positive view. Whoever has been, you know, maybe a little mean to you lately because they’re going through a tough time you probably don’t have a positive overview and everything is painted by that. So if you’re a leader, if you’re in an organization, if you deal with other people, it’s good to know your own shortcomings and it’s good to know that as a human being we have all these biases and “You Are Not So Smart”, it’s just an excellent book because it’ll remind you why even though you think everything is perfect, or crystal clear, or 20/20, your mind is lying to you and it’s important to stay cognizant of that. Again the book I recommend from here in Mount Charleston is “You Are Not So Smart”. That includes me. Thank you. The post Book Review: You Are Not So Smart by David McRaney appeared first on TrepHub .

Book Review