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by Roberto Zoia

Book Reviews

Create or Hate. Successful People Make Things, by Dan Norris

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Even if some factors that lead people to be successful could be attributed to sheer luck, a common trait is that successful people create things.

In Norris’ vision, creating something –that is, being creative– has little to do with wild talent and is more about productivity. The first requisite for being creative is to start to do something.

In his book The War of Art, Steven Pressfield writes about The Resistance, the voice that delays us from doing our work, the self-sabotaging habits of procrastination, self-doubt, susceptibility to distraction, perfectionism, and shallowness. Dan Norris’ nemesis to creativity is Hate.

“Haters don’t create anything, and instead get caught up in a never-ending cycle of Hate feeding Hate and criticism triumphing over creation.” The hate ecosystem nurtures from negative people that may surround us or work with us. However, what most hinders our capacity to do things is own self-hate.

It turns out that people can be very good at making up reasons [for not making things]. Not all reasons are invalid, but we have to beware of Hate breeding excuses.

Some common excuses are:

  • It’s expensive
  • I don’t want to divide my attention
  • I don’t want to be one of those guys/gals that teaches people something before they know it themselves.
  • There is too much effort needed to start
  • The learning curve. I will definitely suck at the first try
  • I see no purpose to get it going
  • I don’t have what it takes

The second half of the book is about how to fight hate. For conquering hate, we need to accept failure as part of the creative process, an essential part of creating anything. Self awareness and gratefulness are our allies in our fight for being creative.

The final chapter gives practical advice that can give you some ideas on how to improve your creative process.

I specially liked to chapter on how empathy breeds creativity. Empathy is hard, and not commonly understood.

Your goal in being empathic is to imagine what it’s like to be that person and feel what they are feeling. If you can improve your empathy, you improve your imagination. And imagination is the source of all creativity.

The author is not shy about his own failures and learned lessons. For me, this showing himself vulnerable by reflecting about his own experiences is one of the things that makes the book valuable.

7 Steps for Achieving Extraordinary Results

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The One Thing by Gary Keller is one of my favorite books because it offers a down-to-earth framework for achieving extraordinary results in work and in life in general. The author’s premise is that extraordinary results are directly determined by how narrow you can make your focus, or more precisely, by your ability to focus on what he calls the One Thing.

I strongly agree with most of what the author proposes. You can use the framework "as-is" or adapt it to suit your needs. While this post summarizes Keller's main points, I suggest you read the whole book. (You can also read the previous review I wrote about The One Thing.)

1. Develop an eye for the essential.

Achievers have an eye for the essential. They pause just long enough to decide what matters and then allow what matters to drive their day. Achievers do sooner what others plan to do later and defer, perhaps indefinitely, what others do sooner. The difference isn’t in intent, but in right of way. Achievers always work from a clear sense of priority.

2. Getting things done is not a matter of discipline but of developing habits that will help you focus on the task at hand. Discipline is needed to acquire the habit, but we cannot run on discipline in the long term.

3. Achieving extraordinary results requires extraordinary efforts. In that sense, Keller does not believe in a balanced life as a goal to be achieved or a state of balance, but in counterbalancing your life as an every day reality, an act of balancing.

If you think of balance as the middle, then out of balance is when you’re away from it. Get too far away from the middle and you’re living at the extremes. The problem with living in the middle is that it prevents you from making extraordinary time commitments to anything. In your effort to attend to all things, everything gets shortchanged and nothing gets its due.

Sometimes this can be okay and sometimes not. Knowing when to pursue the middle and when to pursue the extremes is in essence the true beginning of wisdom. Extraordinary results are achieved by this negotiation with your time.

One day you finally come to understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. The other four balls—family, health, friends, integrity—are made of glass. If you drop one of these, it will be irrevocably scuffed, nicked, perhaps even shattered.

4. Keller’s framework is constructed on applying what he calls the Focusing Question to the different areas of your life: What’s the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?

Productivity isn’t about being a workhorse, keeping busy or burning the midnight oil…. It’s more about priorities, planning, and fiercely protecting your time.

To stay on track for the best possible day, month, year, or career, you must keep asking the Focusing Question. Ask it again and again, and it forces you to line up tasks in their levered order of importance. (…) you can drive yourself nuts analyzing every little aspect of everything you might do. I don’t do that, and you shouldn’t either. Start with the big stuff and see where it takes you. Over time, you’ll develop your own sense of when to use the big-picture question and when to use the small-focus question.

5. Answers to the Focusing Question come in three categories:

  • doable, something that is already within your reach
  • stretch, at the farthest end of your range
  • possibility, an answer that exists beyond what is already known and being done

“Highly successful people”, explains Keller, “choose to live at the outer limits of achievement. They not only dream of but deeply crave what is beyond their natural grasp.”

6. The Focusing Question, however, is not enough. Adopting the mindset of someone seeking mastery is needed (the commitment to becoming your best, and embrace the effort it represents).

More than anything else, expertise tracks with hours invested. Michelangelo once said, “If the people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it wouldn’t seem wonderful at all.”

You will also need to deal with the natural ceiling of achievement with a purposeful mindset (not accepting the limitations of our natural approach as the last word), and learn to be accountable for the outcome of your lives (in contrast with being a victim of the situation). This is essential –according to Keller– to achieve extraordinary results.

If you have to beg, then beg. If you have to barter, then barter. If you have to be creative, then be creative. Just don’t be a victim of your circumstances.

7. Be warned against the four thieves that can stand in our way to extraordinary results. The inability to say “No” , the fear of chaos —”pursuing your One Thing moves other things to the back burner (…) chaos is unavoidable. Make peace with it. Learn to deal with it”—, poor health habits, and an environment that doesn’t support your goals.

Steal Like an Artist, by Austin Kleon

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I won’t try to write a review of this great book by Austin Kleon because there are a lot of good ones available. (For example, this one in Spanish, or this one in English.)

Steal Like an Artist takes out part of the mystique around creativity, and will teach you some very concrete ideas about creative work and how to approach it, in a direct, colloquial, and easy to read style. The basic idea is that no work is really original. We are all a mashup of ideas.

In Brainpicking’s Maria Popova words, Steal Like an Artist is “an intelligent and articulate manifesto for the era of combinatorial creativity and remix culture that’s part 344 Questions, part Everything is a Remix, part The Gift, at once borrowed and entirely original.”

A quote from T.S. Eliot, stolen from Kleon’s book:

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn.

For my self future-reference, here are the 10 points the author proposes:

  1. Steal like an Artist.
  2. Don’t wait until you know who you are to get started.
  3. Write the book you want to read.
  4. Use your hands.
  5. Side projects and hobbies are important.
  6. The Secret: Do good work and share it with people.
  7. Geography is no longer our master.
  8. Be nice. (The World is a small town.)
  9. Be boring. (It’s the only way to get work done.)
  10. Creativity is substraction.

Don’t Reply All: 18 Email Tactics That Help You Write Better Emails and Improve Communication with Your Team, by Hassan Osman

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Don’t Reply All: 18 Email Tactics That Help You Write Better Emails and Improve Communication with Your Team, by Hassan Osman

Hassan Osman has a vast experience managing projects with large, geographically distributed teams. His previous book, Influencing Virtual Teams, offered no-nonsense tactics to help you managing your team.

Despite the huge advances in communications and the little improvement in email systems, email is here to stay. And it makes sense, because email remains one of the most effective and frictionless form of communications.

Reading, writing, and answering emails consumes a significant amount of everybody’s time.
According to a 2012 McKinsey study cited by Osman, the average US worker spends 28% of his/her workweek reading and responding to email. Most people recognize that they should do something about how they deal with mail, the actual number of people taking some real action is small.

This book is not about managing your inbox –no “inbox zero” pretentions here–, but about down-to-earth tactics to help you and your team become better and more effective communicators. The value of the book is not in its novelty –“There’s nothing earth-shattering about the contents of this book. In fact, many of my tips are common sense that you’ve probably read somewhere before”– but in that it offers proven best practices that you can adopt immediately, and that you can share with your team immediately.

The tactics described in Don’t Reply All can be divided in two groups, tactics 1 to 5 being the most important and effective ones. “If you take away a handful of lessons from this entire book, they should be those five tactics. They are your 80/ 20—the 20% of actions that will produce 80% of your results.”

These 5 tactics are about how to write meaninful subject lines, keeping the content of your emails short and to the point, and assigning tasks using the “3W”s:

  • The Who. Use the name of a single person of the name of the persons, don’t address people using “all”, “team”, etc.
  • The What. Don’t be ambiguous and avoid making assumptions.
  • The When. The exact time and date a task needs to be completed by. Always use a deadline, even if it’s fake.

The remaining 13 tactics in the book cover other no-nonsense advice like why you should steer away from asking open-ended questions in mails, how to use delayed delivery for sending emails when they are most likely to be read, and the maybe the most important one: do not hit reply-all when only the original sender needs to read your message.

I think that anybody whose work involves using email for communicating with coworkers and clients will greatly benefit from the tactics offered in this book.

80/20 Sales and Marketing, by Perry Marshall

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Perry Marshall’s book is all about Pareto’s Principle and Power Curves. Although the author tries to reason the logic under the principle, the value of this book is in the online marketing and sales tactics it offers.

The book covers topics like market discovery, getting traffic, conversion and selling. “To build a sales funnel, you begin with the end in mind.” Since selling starts with traffic, advanced marketers don’t begin with the invention (i.e., the final transaction). “They begin by asking: ‘what would these people want to buy?’ Then they create it or find it.”

Before trying to convince anybody of anything, however, you must disqualify people who don’t fit. Marshall explains what he calls the 5 Power Disqualifiers. They define who of the traffic you are going to buy:

Do they have money? (…) Do they have a bleeding neck? (A dire sense of urgency, an immediate problem that demands to be solved. Right. Now.) (…) Do they buy into you unique selling proposition? (…) Do they have the ability to say YES? (…) Does what you sell fit in with their overall plans?

The three steps to selling anything, according to Marshall, is what he calls the Power Triangle:

  • Get Traffic. Who would buy this?
  • Conversion. What can we say to persuade them to buy?
  • Economics. Can you reach them affordably? Can they give you money?

The Power Triangle can be applied to each corner of the Power Triangle itself, again and again. For example, to get traffic, you should think about traffic in terms of traffic, conversion, and economics. “There is a Power Triangle inside each element of the Triangle.”1

Marshall’s approach finding customer needs and effective marketing actions is to test, test, and test. Test fast. Fail fast. Move on.

“You send a calculated signal that most ignore, but a few respond to. (…) Before you bet your precious time or money on any sales or business project, you need to rack the shotgun.”

The best place to start testing, Marshall argues, is Google Adwords. Test ads. Test landing pages. Test sign-up pages. Test everything. Then, scale up.

Marshall offers some insights about the Bull’s-Eye Social Media Technique, a method developed by Glenn Livingston to narrow your field of competitors and focus on the exact “corner of the internet”.

Finally, Pareto’s principle should be applied to analyzing your client portfolio. Which 20 percent of your clients make the 80 percent of your sales. Marshall goes deeper and proposes three variables that must be considered in the analysis in addition to gross sales: Recency (when was the last time this customer bought something), Frequency (how often does the customer buys from us), and Money (how much does he buy). He then uses this additional variables to build a scoring system and applies Pareto’s Principle to the results.

Although I didn’t like Marshall’s writing style and I found the hype around the 80/20 Principle somewhat excessive, this is a useful book. It will get you up to speed on modern marketing techniques, specially regarding to online sales and advertising.

Find 80/20 Sales and Marketing in Amazon.

  1. What Marshall calls Power Triangle is a Sierpinski Triangle, a fractal with the overall shape of an equilateral triangle, subdivided recursively into smaller equilateral triangles. ↩

The One Thing: The surprisingly simple truth behind extraordinary results, by Gary Keller

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Gary Keller proposes a framework for achieving extraordinary results in work and in life in general. The author’s premise is that extraordinary results are directly determined by how narrow you can make your focus, or more precisely, by focusing on the One Thing.

[Achievers] have an eye for the essential. They pause just long enough to decide what matters and then allow what matters to drive their day. Achievers do sooner what others plan to do later and defer, perhaps indefinitely, what others do sooner. The difference isn’t in intent, but in right of way. Achievers always work from a clear sense of priority.

The author explains how getting things done is not a matter of discipline but of developing habits that will help you focus on the task at hand. Discipline is needed to acquire the habit, but we cannot run on discipline in the long term.

Achieving extraordinary results requires making extraordinary efforts. In that sense, Keller does not believe in a balanced life as a goal to be achieved or a state of balance, but in counterbalancing your life as an every day reality, an act of balancing.

If you think of balance as the middle, then out of balance is when you’re away from it. Get too far away from the middle and you’re living at the extremes. The problem with living in the middle is that it prevents you from making extraordinary time commitments to anything. In your effort to attend to all things, everything gets shortchanged and nothing gets its due. Sometimes this can be okay and sometimes not. Knowing when to pursue the middle and when to pursue the extremes is in essence the true beginning of wisdom. Extraordinary results are achieved by this negotiation with your time.

One day you finally come to understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. The other four balls—family, health, friends, integrity—are made of glass. If you drop one of these, it will be irrevocably scuffed, nicked, perhaps even shattered.

The book mentions the now-more-known Stanford Marshmallow Experiment by Walter Mischel, which relates the effect of delayed gratification and developing grit with outcome and success in different areas in life.

Keller also cites Carol Dweck‘s research on growth-mindsets vs fixed mindsets as an example of how your perception of things strongly affect what you can achieve:

Dweck’s work with children revealed two mindsets in action—a “growth” mindset that generally thinks big and seeks growth and a “fixed” mindset that places artificial limits and avoids failure. Growth-minded students, as she calls them, employ better learning strategies, experience less helplessness, exhibit more positive effort, and achieve more in the classroom than their fixed-minded peers. They are less likely to place limits on their lives and more likely to reach for their potential

Keller’s framework is constructed on applying what he calls the Focusing Question to the different areas of your life: What’s the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?

Productivity isn’t about being a workhorse, keeping busy or burning the midnight oil…. It’s more about priorities, planning, and fiercely protecting your time.

To stay on track for the best possible day, month, year, or career, you must keep asking the Focusing Question. Ask it again and again, and it forces you to line up tasks in their levered order of importance. (…) you can drive yourself nuts analyzing every little aspect of everything you might do. I don’t do that, and you shouldn’t either. Start with the big stuff and see where it takes you. Over time, you’ll develop your own sense of when to use the big-picture question and when to use the small-focus question.

Answers to the Focusing Question come in three categories: doable (something that is already within your reach), stretch (at the farthest end of your range), and possibility (an answer that exists beyond what is already known and being done). “Highly successful people”, explains Keller, “choose to live at the outer limits of achievement. They not only dream of but deeply crave what is beyond their natural grasp.”

The Focusing Question, however, is not enough. Adopting the mindset of someone seeking mastery is needed (the commitment to becoming your best, and embrace the effort it represents).

More than anything else, expertise tracks with hours invested. Michelangelo once said, “If the people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it wouldn’t seem wonderful at all.”

You will also need to deal with the natural ceiling of achievement with a purposeful mindset (not accepting the limitations of our natural approach as the last word), and learn to be accountable for the outcome of your lives (in contrast with being a victim of the situation). This is essential –according to Keller– to achieve extraordinary results.

If you have to beg, then beg. If you have to barter, then barter. If you have to be creative, then be creative. Just don’t be a victim of your circumstances.

Almost finishing the book, Keller warns the reader against the four thieves that can stand in our way to extraordinary results. The inhability to say “No” , the fear of chaos –“pursuing your One Thing moves other things to the back burner (…) chaos is unavoidable. Make peace with it. Learn to deal with it”– , poor health habits, and an environment that doesn’t support your goals.

I enjoyed reading the book and strongly agree with most of what the author proposes. You can use the framework “as-is” or adapt it to suit your needs.

Find The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results in Amazon.