Synopsis
Business book about Southwest airlines and what makes them so succesful
Key Takeaways
Final Thoughts
The problem with business books is they can’t right down exactly what happens but they cant capture the essence and give it to the reader
Synposis
How Koch Industries became so big, strong and influential
Key Takeaways
One of the key lessons that Charles Koch took from the Austrian economists von Mises and Hayek was that markets never stood still. The status quo never survived. Markets always build up and then tear down. It was an evolutionary process that never ended, and companies that tried to fight the process would only be devoured by the forces of change in the end.
Acquisition Criteria
Final Thoughts
A good book that’s worth the read to understand how big companies grow and then use their influence to affect legislation. 7.5/10
Synopsis
A young man with mental health issues comes into money, love and high society all at the same time.
Key Takeaways
Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.
It is better to be unhappy and know the worst, than to be happy in a fool’s paradise
There is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one’s idea for thirty-five years; there’s something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you forever; and with it you will die, without communicating to anyone perhaps the most important of your ideas..
Lack of originality, everywhere, all over the world, from time immemorial, has always been considered the foremost quality and the recommendation of the active, efficient and practical man.
Grown-up people do not know that a child can give exceedingly good advice even in the most difficult case
It’s life that matters, nothing but life—the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all
One can’t understand everything at once, we can’t begin with perfection all at once! In order to reach perfection one must begin by being ignorant of a great deal. And if we understand things too quickly, perhaps we shan’t understand them thoroughly
In every idea of genius or in every new human idea, or, more simply still, in every serious human idea born in anyone’s brain, there is something that cannot possibly be conveyed to others
Final Thoughts
A good book but I didn’t love it. Its book about how if you are not equipped in life people will take things from you. What I mean is being equipped to deal with people, money and situations. It’s also a good example of how you can not save people. 7/10
Synopsis: Be a better parent and do these things
Key Takeaways
Ruptures – those time when we misunderstand each other, where we make wrong assumptions, where we hurt someone, are inevitable in every important, intimate and familial relationship. It is not the rupture that is so important, it is the repair that matters. The way to make repairs in relationships is firstly by working to change your responses, that is, to recognize your triggers and use that knowledge to react in a different way
This feeling of wanting to push children away, of wanting them to sleep long and to play independently before they are ready so they don’t take up your time, can come about when you’re trying not to feel with your child because they’re such a painful reminder of your childhood.
What he discovered was then when couples are together they make what he refers ti as bids for connection. For example, if one partner is reading and says, “listen to this” and the other one puts down their own book ready to listen their bid for connection has been satisfied.
This is what a child needs, for a parent to be a container for their emotions. This means you are alongside them and know and accept what they feel but you are not being overwhelmed by their feelings. This is one of the things psychotherapists do for their clients.
You cannot tell a child that they love their sibling. They are aware of how they feel and they need a safe container for those feelings.
That acceptance, warmth and kindness are the things that matter most when it comes to our children
Your kids will lie to you so don’t make a big deal out of it
Final Thoughts: I didn’t like the tone of the book, it seemed to me to deal with a specific culture in the approach to dealing with problems. I did take away the need to show love and affection and to be patient with our children when correcting the. Claims about this and that causing trauma I think were a little bit overstated. 6/10
Synopsis: A book about organised crime in Naples and how it affects the lives of its ordinary citizens
Key Takeaways
Everyone I know is either dead or in jail. I want to become a boss. I want to have supermarkets, stores, factories, I want to have women. I want three cars, I want respect when I go into a store, I want to have warehouses all over the world. And then I want to die. I want to die like a man, like someone who truly commands. I want to be killed.
Final Thoughts: I thought the writing style was a bit over the top. The stories were fascinating and it does paint a very bleak picture for those living in the area. 7/10
Synopsis: A boy’s journey to find his father.
Key Takeaways
I got home and I thought I should stop leading so aimless an existence. It is harder than you might think to stop leading an existence, & if you can’t do that the only thing you can do is try to introduce an element of purposefulness….and though I might have to wait another 30 or 40 years for my body to join the non-sentient things in the world at least in the meantime it would be a less absolutely senseless sentience. OK
Buddy said to my father: You know at the time I didn’t want to upset my father, I didn’t want to make a big thing of it, I thought who am I to say I could be a singer, but then all the others gave in without an argument. I keep thinking, what if it’s my fault? If I’d put my foot down maybe my father would have gotten used to the idea whereas instead they all thought they didn’t have a choice, I keep thinking what if its all my fault?
An idea has only to be something you have not thought of before to take over the mind, and all afternoon I kept hearing in my mind snatches of books which might exist in three or four hundred years
But of course if you’ve worked on a piece and thought about it you don’t just (you hope) play it more intelligently you hear it more intelligently, and if you’re the only person in the room really able to hear it that’s horrible
I once read somewhere about some research that was done on baby monkeys who were given cloth surrogate mothers which became monsters: one expelled jets of air – one had an embedded wire frame that sprang out and threw the baby to the floor – another ejected sharp brass spikes on commend. The response of the baby monkeys was always the same: they clung ever more tightly to the monster, or if thrown off waited for spikes to disappear & returned to cling to their mother.
Kurosawa, however, has seen that this cannot be true. A hero who actually becomes is tantamount to a villain – for this was the only tangible aspect of the villain’s villainy. To suggest that pace, contentment, happiness, follows a single battle, no matter how important, is literally untrue – and it would limit Sugata precisely because of the limitations suggested in the words “happiness” or Judo champions
You think you know what something is about and that’s why you do it but then when you do it you realise it’s about something else. What it’s saying is thats why it’s important to study judo.
There is a strange taboo in our society against ending something merely because it is not pleasant– life, love, a conversation, you name it, the etiquette is that you must begin in ignorance & persevere in the face of knowledge, & though I naturally believe that this is profoundly wrong it’s not nice to go around constantly offending people
A good samurai will parry the blow
Final Thoughts: I loved where this book went in with Ludo and his father. It’s interesting take. 7/10
Synopsis: A journalist sits down to interview Australia’s greatest post war prime minister.
Key Takeaways
Page 33 – I feel sorry for kids who don’t have a happy home life because it makes a difference to the whole rest of your life
Page 33 – The first thing you got to show your love. And its got to be real love. Let your kids know that they matter and that you’re going to do everything you can to help them
Page 85 – You know the party policy in your area. You know what need to be done to turn that policy in to an implementable government activity. I will intervene in one of two circumstances; one you ask me to, you want my help with something: two, if something that you’re doing crosses with somebody else’s portfolio. I’ll resolve the dispute
Final Thoughts: This book could have been a third of its size and twice as good. I wished it touched on some more personal issues, like his estrangement from his kids. 5/10
Synopsis: A man goes to an island to write a book and destroy the world in the process.
Key Takeaways
Opening page – Nothing in this book is true. Live by the forma* that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy. *Harmless untruths
I was only six years old when they dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, so anything I remember about that day other people have helped me remember
Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, “It might have been”
Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder ‘why, why, why?’
Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand
Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way
Final Thoughts: Not for me, had some interesting things about how ridiculous nations and religions and marriage and bunch of other institutions are, I just didn’t enjoy the story I think, in saying that I may read again. 6/10
Synopsis: A story about a man’s journey through space and time whilst drawing attention to the bizarreness of it all.
Key Takeaways
You go up to a man and you say, “How are things going, Joe?” And he says, Oh, fine, fine – couldn’t be better. And you look into his eyes and you see things really couldn’t be much worse. When you get right down to it, everybody’s having a perfectly lousy time of it and I mean everybody. And the hell of it it is, nothing seems to help much.
Mr. Constant,” he said, “right now you’re as easy for the Bureau of Internal Revenue to watch as a man on a street corner selling apples and pears. But just imagine how hard you would be to watch if you had a whole office building jammed to the rafters with industrial bureaucrats—men who lose things and use the wrong forms and create new forms and demand everything in quintuplicate, and who understand perhaps a third of what is said to them; who habitually give misleading answers in order to gain time in which to think, who make decisions only when forced to, and who then cover their tracks; who make perfectly honest mistakes in addition and subtraction, who call meetings whenever they feel lonely, who write memos whenever they feel unloved; men who never throw anything away unless they think it could get them fired. A single industrial bureaucrat, if he is sufficiently vital and nervous, should be able to create a ton of meaningless papers a year for the Bureau of Internal Revenue to examine.
Once upon a time on Tralfamadore there were creatures who weren’t anything like machines. They weren’t dependable. They weren’t efficient. They weren’t predictable. They weren’t durable. And these poor creatures were obsessed by the idea that everything that existed had to have a purpose, and that some purposes were higher than others. These creatures spent most of their time trying to find out what their purpose was. And every time they found out what seemed to be a purpose of themselves, the purpose seemed so low that the creatures were filled with disgust and shame. And, rather than serve such a low purpose, the creatures would make a machine to serve it. This left the creatures free to serve higher purposes. But whenever they found a higher purpose, the purpose still wasn’t high enough. So machines were made to serve higher purposes, too. And the machines did everything so expertly that they were finally given the job of finding out what the highest purpose of the creatures could be. The machines reported in all honesty that the creatures couldn’t really be said to have any purpose at all. The creatures thereupon began slaying each other, because they hated purposeless things above all else. And they discovered that they weren’t even very good at slaying. So they turned that job over to the machines, too. And the machines finished up the job in less time than it takes to say, Tralfamadore
It took that long to realize that the purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved
Final Thoughts: I barely liked this book, but the truth in the above quotes is undeniable, pure and profound and for that alone it has this score. 8/10
Synopsis: A book about psychology, chiefly how people play games to feel alive and how to transcend the need to play games.
Key Takeaways
Page 14 – This process of compromise may be called by various terms, such as sublimation; but whatever it is called, the result is a partial transformation of the infantile stimulus-hunger into something which may be termed recognition-hunger
Page 15 – Hence a stroke may be used as the fundamental unit of social action. An exchange of strokes constitutes a transaction, which is the unit of social intercourse.
Page 15 – The eternal problem of the human being is how to structure his waking hours. In his existential sense, the function of all social living is to lend mutual assistance for this project
Page 17 – Past times and games are substitutes for the real living of real intimacy
Page 33 – A procedure is a series of simple complementary Adult transactions directed towards the manipulation of reality
Page 44 – Every game, on the other hand, is basically dishonest, and the outcome has a dramatic, as distinct from merely exciting, quality
Page 158 – The attainment of autonomy is manifested by the release or recovery of three capacities: awareness, spontaneity and intimacy
Page 158 – Awareness, means the capacity to see a coffeepot and hear the birds sing on one’s own way and not the way one was taught
Page 158 – Awareness requires living in the here and now, and not in the elsewhere, the past or the future
Page 158 – Where is the mind when the body is here? Three common cases
Page 159 – Spontaneity means options, the freedom to choose and express ones’ feelings from the assortment available. It means liberation, liberation from the compulsion to play games and have only the feelings one was taught to have.
Page 159 – Intimacy means the spontaneous, game-free candidness of an aware person, the liberation of the eidetically perceptive, uncorrupted Child in all its naivete living in the here and now. Most infants seem to be loving, and that is the essential nature of intimacy as shown experimentally.
Page 161 – In essence, this whole preparation consists of obtaining a friendly divorce from one’s parents (an other Parental influences) so that they may be agreeably visited on occasion, but are no longer dominant.
Page 162 – For certain fortunate people there is something which transcends all classification of behaviour and that is awareness something which rises above the programming of the past and that is spontaneity and something that is more rewarding than fame and that is intimacy
Final Thoughts: It is such a strange coincidence that all the books I am reading now are focusing on the need to stay present and aware and get caught up in the mind. This book is great. 8/10
Stranger in Sydney 