 ended up on one of my “want to read” lists after seeing it at a local bookstore. I think I mostly liked the cover, but if you 

 and you’ll see a fair number of books on similar topics. 

 has some themes in common with books like 

, specifically how do you change your routines and thinking about how you live your life to achieve meaningful change. Or, to use the title in a sentence: when something in your environment triggers you, do you respond without thinking, or do you introspectively look at how that trigger impacts you then respond. And can you get to a point where you respond to triggers in your environment as you want to without having to think about them.

One point that stood out to me in this book that was unique to it was the idea of looking at a set of goals with active questions instead of passive ones. The example it uses is changing this type of review:

And keeping a daily 0-10 scorecard of the answers to the active questions. Goldsmith recommends six as a default set anyone could use:

Asking active questions does two things: it prevents you from blaming outside circumstances for failures, and it makes you, over time, recognize the places you are actively not doing your best to give you the option to get better, or give up. As a simplified example, imagine you want to exercise every day. You make a grid with every day of the week, and check it off if you exercised for 30 minutes. Now say on Thursday you’re not feeling well, and on Friday there’s an interruption in the morning and work goes late and you meet up with friends after. Simple tracking you’d not check those days. In active questioning format you might put 0s for both days. Or you might put a 5 on Thursday, giving yourself some leeway knowing that rest is as important to an exercise routine as the exercise itself, and a 0 on Friday and make a plan for next Friday to get out for a walk at lunch. If you put 0s for an entire week, there's no need to dig into excuses, you just recognize “I’m not doing my best” and you either stop trying or do better.

The focus of the book is deeper behavioral change more than simple habits. Professionally, Goldsmith is a coach to CEOs and other already successful people who know how to excel in at least one domain in their lives. He states the point clearly later in the book: something like quitting smoking is a great change, but it’s not a behavioral change that’s going to impact the other people you interact with on a day to day basis (short of smelling less smoke). The book is more focused on the ideas captured in his six questions: did I do my best to find meaning, happiness, build relationships, stay engaged. The sort of things that will not only make your life better, but will likely cascade back to your environment as well.

The principle theme of the book can be summed up as “you can‘t control what happens, only how you respond to what happens”.  Goldsmith’s advice in the book is also entirely reasonable. He notes that sometimes you don't have the space or energy to change, or do the best thing in a given situation. It’s fine. The important part is acknowledging the triggers that got you to that state, instead of having things trigger you that you don’t notice or acknowledge, which lead you into traps of behaving badly or falling short of the goals you’ve set. Goldsmith references a Buddhist parable as an example of not blaming your environment for why you can’t change, which I enjoyed:

A young farmer was covered with sweat as he paddled his boat up the river. He was going upstream to deliver his produce to the village. It was a hot day, and he wanted to make his delivery and get home before dark. As he looked ahead, he spied another vessel, heading rapidly downstream toward his boat. He rowed furiously to get out of the way, but it didn't seem to help.
He shouted, "Change direction! You are going to hit me!" To no avail. The vessel hit his boat with a violent thud. He cried out, "You idiot! How could you manage to hit my boat in the middle of this wide river?" As he glared into the boat, seeking out the individual responsible for the accident, he realized no one was there. He had been screaming at an empty boat that had broken free of its moorings and was floating downstream with the current.

Certainly I can think of many empty boats I’ve yelled at in my life. Overall I recommend the book. If you were looking at it or 

 I’d go with this one, the strategies outlined in it target behavioral change in as simple of a format but in a more meaningful way.

Some notes on the book Triggers by Marshall Goldsmith.

Triggers by Marshall Goldsmith

Lately I’ve been picking up new reading by wandering around the “new books” section of the library and grabbing a few interesting books off the shelves after doing exactly zero research about what the book might be about besides looking at the cover. Yes, this is literally me judging books by their covers, but I’ve had some good luck with it. I try to pick up one fiction and one non-fiction book, and last trip the non-fiction one was 

. The description on the inner jacket cover starts with “How tech giants are reshaping spirituality to serve their religion of peak productivity”. You could read this two ways, either the way I did, where that sounds awful and makes me want to live in a cabin in the woods, or where that sounds great, what a novel idea, using spirituality to increase productivity, hmm have we considered selling copies of the Bible as NFTs?

The book begins somewhat neutral in tone, describing how in the absence of social/civic/religious organizations in the United States, large corporations attempt to fill the void. They do it for a few reasons:

If you read the above list and felt strongly suspicious of their motives, you might be like me, someone in what is described as the “nonbelievers” group:

Who then, are the exceptions, the "nonbelievers"? Who doesn't drink the Kool-Aid? And what relationship do those holdouts have with religion? As it turns out, there is a clear demographic pattern to who becomes a "true believer" and who doesn't. "True believers" tend to be the young, single, and more recent migrants, who are also the majority of the tech workforce. "Nonbelievers," on the other hand, tend to be older workers (forty-plus) and people with families. I found one exception to the pattern. Religious people-people who identify with a religious tradition and belong to religious communities--are"non-believers" in the religion of work, regardless of age, family status, or timing of migration.

The book digs in to the cult of high-performance found in Silicon Valley companies. It’s parodied in the show 

, but the book keeps a straight face while describing things like:

In several workshops we assumed psychologist Amy Cuddy’s "victory pose". — arms stretched out above the shoulders in a V — to activate testosterone and put us in a state of confidence and success. And in a few workshops, we danced to “get into our bodies.” In all these practices, the goal is to get engineers out of “their heads” so that they can attend to their bodies and emotions.

At another workshop geared toward entrepreneurs, the speaker encouraged the participants to engage in a "spiritual practice" of asking three questions of themselves: "Who are you really? And keep double-clicking…. What do you really want? And double-click…. And what are you in service to? And double-click. Is it your ego… validation?" Through this practice of re-flection, practitioners go deeper into discovering the "real self" with each spiritual "double click"

Falling strongly into the “nonbeliever” crowd I’d assume anyone asking me to “double-click” myself is an idiot, but apparently there’s a market for such idiocy that pays well, so what do I know.

The book transitions in it’s latter half to how Eastern religions (primarily Buddhism) became popular in the Valley, and how over time they have been repackaged in various ways to appeal to the cult of productivity and corporate Capitalism. Chen brings up the transition in Coke ads from the 70s to today, which had me think of the ending of 

, a perfect encapsulation of her point here: Buddhism, meditation, mindfulness, they’re stripped of all their original religious purpose to drive sales and productivity.

The book’s final chapter is a pretty scathing critique of the Valley (and places like it, some of which aren’t too far from home), wherein tech workers resemble the chosen ones of a cult, who are socially supported by their employers with little subtext that if you 

 work for them, you run the risk of being like everyone else, who struggles to get by as housing costs rise and existing social services disappear to only be found in the campuses or benefits packages of the tech giants.

But what do you do to stop work from being the primary source of fulfillment for people as religion and other forms of social engagement decline? There’s no definite answer. I do worry sometimes about younger coworkers who jump right into the lifestyle of a “tech worker” from college. They have little insight into what alternative realities are, and little time to even contemplate them. But they’re paid well and deemed smart and it’s a sure path to a decent middle class life — a path to salvation, of sorts.

My notes on the book Work Pray Code by Carolyn Chen

Work Pray Code (a book review)

Notes on the book Effortless, by Greg McKeown.

Effortless

Happy Sunday, life is meaningless. But not just yours, everyone's!

The End of Everything

I finished "Digital Minimalism" by Cal Newport last weekend. I assumed, from the title, the book would just be this:

repeated for 300 or so pages. It wasn't! The 2016 election and Twitter comes up at least a few times, but the book is more about forming good habits to replace digital distractions. My favorite quote from the book:

You cannot expect an app dreamed up in a dorm room, or among the Ping-Pong tables of a Silicon Valley incubator, to successfully replace the types or rich interactions to which we’ve painstakingly adapted over millennia.

The book resonates with my belief that the value of the internet is fundamentally found in two things:

As an example: I play guitar, I'm interested in building my own guitar. There are many thousands of videos on YouTube on how to do this, reviews of every single piece I might be considering, and more forums than I can even find with detailed instructions and helpful tips from other people on how to build almost any combination of guitar. This was nonexistent when I was a kid - if you wanted this level of information you were lucky if a book existed, otherwise you had to find someone who knew how to build guitars, maybe at the local music store, if you happened to have one and someone working there knew something about guitars.

The Internet supports these activities, but most of the attention economy (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc) is driven by users being distracted by other things. Facebook might help you organize real-life events, but wouldn't it be great if you also paid attention to these people you never see in real-life? Twitter might be a great place to follow your favorite author, but wouldn't it be great if you also saw some retweets about a political argument from a friend of a friend? YouTube might be a great place to watch instructional videos, but hey also have you considered that 9/11 might have been perpetrated by the US government and here's a 3-hour long video about that from OffTheGridLifeAmerica you might be interested in. Accepting these platforms as they would like you to accept them (i.e., in a way that makes them money) can only be done in a way that is inherently detrimental to your free time and quality of life.

In conclusion I give the book ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ (out of 5), not on Goodreads or any other platform, just here. Also, true to form, I read the print version, and we got it from the library so we could work on real world minimalism too.

built with coffee

Posts tagged: book notes

Triggers by Marshall Goldsmith

Work Pray Code (a book review)

Effortless

The End of Everything

Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport