Nazi Russia

Finally after several days of shock and dismay, I can write, just not sure what exactly to say. If you asked me a week ago: “would Russia attack Ukraine?” – I would have answered: “no way, never gonna happen!” – Obviously I was wrong. I’m not a history buff (also I’m not a professional writer so excuse my poor writing), but Russia’s action sure shit looks like Nazi Germany at the beginning of WW2 – same pretexts for invasion, same strategy.

I’m honestly lost for words… my grandfather fought Nazis (Russian side) and “lived to tell about it”. He was in Airborne and went all the way from Leningrad to Europe. He didn’t talk about the war, it seems that people who do the fighting never talk much about it afterwards.

My mom is a wise person, almost 20 years ago, when she saw Putin rising, she made correct decision, she said: “you are not staying in this country”. She prepared everything and we left. As I was growing up, I somewhat poorly followed events in Russia but each passing year, it was becoming more and more clear – Russia is going backwards in time and off the rails. Business were taken away by Putin and his gang, news become more patriotic and idiotic, freedoms taken away, journalists who asked one too many questions killed or jailed, people intimidated by “internal security forces” and/or jailed/killed and on and on.

So is it surprising to see Nazi Russia? I guess not. I guess this is how it works, this is the finale – mad king with a gang of yes men and oppressed population.

Fake TIME's cover photo of Putin with Hitler's moustache ...

This is marketing

Business is a very strange beast to me, on the one hand I understand importance of it, on the other hand I never wanted to dive deep into it. I guess business to me is like forbidden fruit – it is there, it is tempting but I never got enough desire to take a bite.

Something changed over last few years and I figured it wouldn’t hurt to learn a thing or two about marketing. This book was chosen almost randomly. As I scrolled over a blog, someone highly recommended the book, without much thought I picked it up.

This is my first book about marketing and since I’m fairly clueless on the subject, it is hard to judge the content. However I can cross reference some ideas from other books and materials:

And so as I read the book, I came across some previously acquired knowledge (good refresher or reinforcement) and since the book is focused on one topic, there were more interesting tidbits.

Now I’ve been dragging my feet with this book for a very long time, embarrassingly long. It is a short read so what the problem? Well, the delivery is… for the lack of better word – ugly. Whenever I picked it up, shortly after I find my mind wondering away, loosing focus and interest. Often I had to put it away and say to myself: “may be tomorrow”. The book just simply does not flow. It is like a bumpy ride, might be entertaining for a bit but ultimately wears you out. Some books you can’t wait to pickup and keep on going, this one is the opposite – delay delay delay.

In a nutshell:
+: Interesting aphorisms, anecdotes and stories
+: General case studies and analysis
+: More on psychological side
+/-: Short book but hard read
-: Lack of concrete recipes and techniques
=: It is hard to make a conclusion on the book in the subject matter that I don’t know much about. I guess if you have to read it (because of a job or deep interest in the subject) then go for it. Otherwise it is not a pleasant read, you will have to commit to get through.

Title: This is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn To See
Author: Seth Godin
Cover:

Enom – the epic screw up

My 2 sites have been offline for more than 40 hours! What happened? “Planned maintenance” by enom. I wonder if enom as a company understands what DNS is and how fundamental it is. Perhaps they are going after a title: “the most incompetent company of 2022”.

In any case I’ll be moving away from enom this week. I don’t want to have any more “planned maintenance” events or any other incompetence. It is not the first time I grind gears with enom, however before it was just minor issues (relative to this event) such as email forwarding stopped working, or inability to provide dynamic DNS answers (even thou their service claims and supports it – eventually I figured it out). I believe I was very patient customer with very few complaints.

But after such a major screwup, I think it will be irresponsible on my part to stay with enom. It is time to move on!

How to get rich

The material got into my hands from a friend of mine. Something tells me he never read the material, but somehow convinced me to read it. Let me say right off the bat, while the material is somewhat interesting and philosophical, rather than hands-on practical, I believe it is worth while.

From this point on, I’ll call it a book, even though it might not qualify. The book is a collection of brief and not terribly deep conversations on the topic of “getting rich”. Now, I can’t blame the author since Twitter is somewhat limited in terms of thought expression. Also the book leaves much to be desired in terms of structure and language. Quite often I had to do double, triple, quadruple take and still couldn’t understand a meaning behind a sentence. Yeah and I’m still calling it a book. But in this day and age perhaps none of this matters.

So will this book make me rich? Well, it’s up to you, or your genetics or upbringing or education and luck. But is there a “secret sauce”? Nope! Effectively the book just talks about your own behaviour and how to focus on essential things and let everything else go – because extreme focus on one thing, is exactly what it takes to get rich.

“Extreme people get extreme results.”

Sam Altman

So, no deep discussions, poorly written, no “secret sauce”, why should I bother? Because (in my opinion) the same techniques and ideas can be applied elsewhere. You don’t have to play status games, you should read books, you should learn to build, learn specific knowledge, you should experiment and go beyond recipe books. Not everything from the book will be applicable, but most of it seems like pretty universal advice that can be applied to other areas of life.

“Don’t partner with cynics and pessimists. Their beliefs are self-fulfilling.”

Naval Ravikant

I wish authors went deeper into discussions with more concrete examples and exercised more upon each topic. At times some material feels like pure philosophy – a wishful thought if I may. However I read few things before and able to fill some gaps or extrapolate some idea further, but I wonder how would this book read to someone without prior knowledge. Perhaps this is on purpose, by design – leave them striving for more and they shall achieve more.

“A calm mind, a fit body and a house full of love. These things can not be bought. They must be earned.”

Naval Ravikant

P.S: if you want to read the book, you can search online or download copy here

In a nutshell:
+: Short & fun read
+: Generally good advice / philosophy (not everything I agree with)
+: Get a feel for what it takes to be rich
-: Not a smooth read – text should be seriously cleaned up
-: Some topics are not well covered or expanded on
=: While the material is rough, some topics are not well covered and some ideas need deeper investigation, overall its worth the time. Philosophy feels quite universal, advices can be adopted for many situations and more importantly, continuous learning is something to be adopted.

Title: How to get rich (without getting lucky)
Author: Naval Ravikant, Babak Nivi
Cover:

How-to-get-rich-Naval-notesDownload

Maverick by Ricardo Semler

I found out about Ricardo Semler from an IT blog, I don’t remember details, but the gist of it: successful Latin-American IT company follows Ricardo Semler’s approach – corporate democracy. The last bit peaked my curiosity, ultimately driving me to the book and let me say, if you never crossed the path, it is enlightening.

Every company wants to stay lean, competitive and ahead of the curve. There are multiple options to achieve it, however once a company grows, it inevitably gets fat and the ability to maneuver is diminished. Ricardo Semler addresses exactly the point – how to stay lean, agile, profitable in a competitive and turbulent environment.

“To survive in modern times, a company must have an organizational structure that accepts change as its basic premise, let’s tribal customs thrive, and fosters a power that is derived from respect, not rules. In other words, the successful companies will be the ones that put quality of life first. Do this and the rest – quality of product, productivity of workers, profits for all – will follow.“

The book is an easy read, the closest I can compare it to is “The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win”. However Maverick is written from experience in a real company (Semco) and by a real CEO/Chairman (Ricardo Semler) – it is not a novel or a fantasy. The author has a nag for writing, I found the book entertaining to read, among other things. Described ideas, practices and methodologies that are innovative and provocative at least at a time the book was published – 1995. Not all ideas are original (but what’s new under the moon), some came from the land of rising sun, others from elsewhere, however all of them seem to be remixed and modified to fit the unique Brazilian market conditions Semco found itself in. Considering the age of the book, some of the ideas seemed to survive and flourish in fairly modern and big companies, such as Amazon and Netflix. As I was reading the book, I couldn’t help but say to myself: “oh look, Amazon does this…” or “sure sounds like Netflix’s approach”. I don’t know if those companies consciously adapted those ideas or arrived to the same ideas independently.

So it is fair to ask: is the book relevant after so many years? As I mentioned before, some modern companies already adopted some ideas, but not everything the author had to offer. There is more and the reason for more is fairly simple: the author is examining ideas, practices and methods that deal with human organizational conditions and not with any particular technical issue. Humans are slow to change and after decades of technological progress we still do business the good old way.

“The conflict between advanced technology and archaic mentality is, I believe, a major reason why the modern workplace is characterized by dissatisfaction, frustration, inflexibility, and stress. If only minds were as easy to change as machines. I’ll wager that it’s easier to invent a new generation of microchips than get a generation of middle managers to alter the routes they drive to work every day. Technology is transformed overnight; mentality takes generations to alter. Who can blame us for thinking technology will cure all that ails the workplace. It’s so much easier to acquire.”

In a nutshell:
+: Easy & fun read
+: Many great ideas, practices and methodologies
+: Based on real company and written by the CEO/Chairman
+: Great discussions and examples
+/-: Wound be great to have more details but not at the expense of abstract
=: I enjoyed the book. It contains lots of interesting, provocative and as years passed, very applicable ideas. I wish the author provided more details. Even if you have no interest in business, you might have lots of fun reading the book, at least I did.

Title: Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace
Author: Ricardo Semler
Cover:

Ricardo Semler – Maverick – notesDownload

Mastery

Ah mastery, who doesn’t want to be a master? A rhetorical question, yet an important one.

I’ll come back to the question later, but for now, how is the book? I like it, strange to say from the get-go but yeah… I enjoyed the story, examples & discussions. The book takes mystery of being a genius and breaks it down into concise, foundational sequences of events that each master had to go through in order to climb to the top of their respective field. Each event and a sequence is analyzed by the author and discussed. If you ever wanted a guide on “Mastery”, this might be it.

As I was going through the book, I couldn’t help but ask myself: “well, alright, but who is this book written for?”. Is it a recipe book? I’m not sure, some of the recipes are kinda long – start when you are 5 or 10 year old. Sure, mastery takes long time, you can’t be on the top of a field in just couple of years or by following few “easy” steps. I get it, but it doesn’t answer my question. If you got this book and comprehended it by the age of 17, perhaps you can make it, but for anyone over 30 there aren’t that many recipes in the book. To be fair, the book is fascinating and at any age you should take some ideas out of it, but let’s be real, in order to take full advantage, you should be at the very young age – perhaps you can prepare your children for the journey?

But do you want to be a master? Is it even a conscious choice? I don’t know, but overarching theme seems to be outliers. Those masters have a very different view of the world, some don’t even fit into society. It feels to me that the journey starts with a perceived defect in a person. Something deep inside drives those people forward, some get unlucky and go to live on mountains (figuratively speaking), others get lucky (timing, resources) and lunge forward through many years of hard work but in the end some become dazzling stars of our society, providing example and direction for others to follow.

In a nutshell:
+: Easy & fun read
+: History, analysis, discussions
+: Examples from different eras
+: Useful bits and pieces even if you are not planning on a mastery
-: Is mastery a choice?
=: I don’t know if mastery is a choice, but I can still learn quite a few things from the book. Perhaps if you are young, you should read the book early on. If you have children, perhaps you want to read it as well and set your child on a journey. But perhaps you want to explore minds of the masters for the fun of it, then please enjoy.

Title: Mastery
Author: Robert Greene
Cover: