Checklist Manifesto

I've been wanting to read this book for a long time but I knew it was going to be a bunch of stories about how checklists saved the day. Turns out, that what it was. However, there were a few interesting insights. First, checklists are suprisingly effective. The amount of issues arising from surgery that are 100% eliminated by checklists makes me think there should be laws. There's also subtlety around how to use a checklist. A checklist's primary function is to drive conversation around the most important parts of a project. An effective list for a complex project is closer to a list of check points. A side effect of the list is that it distributes power and shows how all of us are smarter than any of us.

This book also addresses that we are all, in fact, human. Anyone claiming to be better than human is essentially worse. The aviation and construction industries have acknowledged this fact and successfully implemented checklists to accomplish what no hotshot pilot nor master builder could ever have done. Much like todo lists free an individual to be creative, checklists seems to free groups to worry about the hardest parts of the project.

I wish the book went into more detail on how to write a checklist; however, I suppose there's only so much of an art you can teach in a book. From his description of how he created checklists for surgery, there are certain psychological factors that need to be addressed as well as empirical data that need to be gathered. The checklist cannot create friction as that will cause folks to avoid using it. The data must be gathered to make sure you're checking the right things. It's really hard to generalize what a good checklist looks like because it's so dependent on the goals and team. However, if the list is hard to use or it's checking the wrong things, you can guarantee it won't be worth the effort.

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Sex At Dawn

It's always nice to reexamine the nature of human beings. And if said examination reveals that common behavior is not evil, well that's intriguing. Much in the way that folks suffering from obesity are not guilty of glutony, it seems the promiscious aren't guilty of lust. It seems, once again, that agriculture has led humans down a path from which we may never recover. While the conclusions are quite confusing, it's amazing the conclusions we can draw about human behavior based on physiology and anatomy. It's also inspiring to hear that prehistorical times were not nasty and brutish, but rather a golden era of equality and happiness.

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Practice

Introducing Practice!

Dance practice: a time to learn choreography and how to finagle your music player to start right before the chorus, so the group can practice that one bit, one more time. Hopefully, Practice! helps with this little aspect of dance life.

Let's, first, go through the history before we get to the future.

• Tape Decks - Hold down rewind kind of half way, hope that the screeching in't ruining your tape, and let go when you think you're in the right place. Press play to check. After a minute of rewinding and checking, announce to the group, "Ok, ready?"
• CD Player - Hold down "rewind" for two seconds, hope that your finger doesn't twitch and take you back to the beginning of the track. Yell, "dang it" and tell the group, "one second."
• Winamp - Pretty decent, actually. It has quick keyboard shortcuts for play/pause and forward/rewind. Why isn't this the default music player for dance practice?
• ITunes/Windows Media Player - As music players shift from focusing on the track to the collection we lose critical keyboard shortcuts. You must now use the mouse to navigate; one of humanity's true regressions. Your guesswork with the mouse means the group will waiting an extra couple of 8-counts to get to the right spot.

Are you ready for the future? Practice! does two things:

• Restores keyboard shortcuts for play/pause and seeking within a track.
• Allows one-button access to any part of the song.

FAQ:

• Q: How does it work?
  A: Thanks to Google Chrome, HTML5, jQuery, and some javascript, Practice! captures keystrokes and manipulates the audio tag.
• Q: Will it work offline?
  A: Sort of. You need to visit the tool while online, so long as you don't close its tab/window, you should be good. I'll see about saving it for a true offline version if there's interest.
• Q: Why only Google Chrome?
  A: Firefox won't play MP3s, IE makes me mad, no clue about Safari.

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The Jungle Effect

After noticing that populations with identical genetics develop Western disease when eating Western diets, the author runs around the world learning about indigenous diets. She targets countries that have a particularly low incidence of specific disease. The following are the pairs of countries and the disease their diets prevent: Iceland=depression, Crete=heart disease, Camaroon=colon cancer, Okinowa=breast and colon cancer, Mexico=diabetes. While this was all common sense, what was new to me was the importance of the quality of the food. For example, Icelanders eat a lot of fish from the ocean. Icelanders who moved to Canada who started eating lake fish, started suffering from increased rates of depression.

Once I started making the connection between specific disease and the quality of ingredients, the food industry's incentives became very clear to me. If they could sell me something that could pass for a tomato, but cost them less to make, they would do it. We'd all be sicker, and think we were eating healthful food stuffs.

Back to the book. She shares her information in the form of a frame tale with in a frame tale (inception?). Each adventure starts with the story of a patient who suffers from a disease, which then frames her travels to a country. I'd say the book is about half story, and half information. What's nice is that she's published the recipes she collected here. I'm looking forward to trying out a couple. The book concludes with a short interview with the author. She said she wishes she was able to visit India, I couldn't agree with her more :)

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Steve Jobs

I read the abridged version as I didn't think I would be interested in the full version; it was almost three times as long. However, the abridged version ended up being a fairly shallow synopsis of his life. At first I regretted my choice to read the abridged version, but then I read reviews of the full version. Their conclusions were similar. The book doesn't seem to get to the heart of his motivations, nor does it expose much of his logic around decisions. In other words, he covers the 'what' and 'who', not the 'why' nor 'how'. I think he should just publish the full texts of his many interviews and allow the reader to seek insight. The author's attempt to organize and present his life reads as though he is trying to shock and surprise the reader. It's more likely that the reader already knows about Steve Jobs and his remarkable life and is curious more about the 'why' and 'how'. I did leaf through the unabridged text and found the same lack of insight in the chapter involving Johnny Ive and product design. Quite a disappointment.

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Snuff

Another story about Sam Vimes. In this case, he's on holiday but ends needing to solve a murder which exposes slave trade. Sadly, each book in this series seems to dilute my love of world. Will I keep reading? Very likely. They're still entertaining :-)

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Influencer

A study of how folks have successfully implemented change in their lives, their organizations or in the world. The authors show how the best influencers use a combination of tactics to create change. While the tactics themselves you have likely heard before, the key insight is that they need to be executed in parallel to create change. The tactics themselves revolve around personal, social and structural aspects of motivation and ability. In other words removing friction and applying peer pressure. If you leave out any aspect, it creates a hole for the status quo to continue to flow.

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Willpower

This books covers a series of experiments that studied willpower and makes recommendations on how to deal with it. One highlight of the book was an interview with David Blane, magician and endurance artist. Apparently, he's not too different from us when it comes to willpower, but is able to hold his breath for 17 minutes and forgo food for 44 days.

So what did I learn? First, willpower is not a heroic quality that is given to some and a moral failing plaguing others. We are all in the same boat, more or less. So why do some folks seem immune to temptation while others are seemingly slaves to it?

Willpower is an exhaustible resource that needs to be focussed where it will make the biggest impact. If one uses their willpower to create a habit, that habit will be transferred to the auto-pilot department of the brain and you will continue to perform that habit without exhausting your willpower.

Other tactics such as pre-commitment, planning, monitoring, structuring your life to eliminate temptations, can help reduce the demand on your willpower. In general, it seems the more you utilize your willpower to fight, the less fun life is. My favorite is re-structuring life; e.g. don't fight TV, just cut the cable. Another tactic is to tell yourself you will enjoy the temptation later. Procrastinating on the vice apparently dulls your need for it but gives enjoyment through anticipation. Fighting fire with fire!

Your reserve of willpower is unfortunately the same bucket of energy you use to make decisions. Not just, "should I eat this doughnut?" But also to make decisions about important things in life, work, and play. The more of this energy you have at the time of decision making, the more likely you will choose the long term solution over instant gratification. So use your willpower for fun things!

Can we increase our willpower? It seems like exercising our willpower in moderate amounts leads to increases in the daily reserve. For example, after doing your best to work on your posture for two weeks, the willpower available on any given day will be a little bit better. I imagine there's a limit, but it apparently improves a little. Low blood sugar also degrades willpower. While you can use sugar water to boost it, it's healthier to use protein. Of course, sleep is requisite for restoring willpower.

It was fun to learn about different tools psychologists use to quantify willpower (m&m's are apparently indespensible). The book also tied together the messages of many of my favorite authors, David Allen, Tim Ferriss, and Seth Godin. Psychology is fascinating.

Parental nags, e.g. keep your room/workspace clean, are experimentally proven to boost efficiency. Instilling self control early in life also has been proven to impact success later in life.

The final kicker: my favorite insight into procrastination and two elegant solutions. Procrasinators don't just sit around. They busy themselves with something else that isn't as important. Solution 1, keep a list of such tasks in descending order of priority. Allow yourself to avoid task #1 by working on task#2 (productive procrastination). The most elegant tactic: all or nothing. Set aside time to do task #1, if you don't feel like doing it, don't; however, you cannot do anything else in the meantime. You have to sit there.

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Wheat Belly

What I thought was going to be a simple book about the perils of wheat consumption turned out to be a fascinating book about aging. A major component of aging is the formation of gunk called Advanced Glycation End-product, aka AGE (hah!). The process of bringing down high blood sugar results in the formation of AGEs in your body. The stuff builds up and causes you to age; cataracts, wrinkles, etc. It's a naturally ocurring process, but high blood sugar accelerates the process tremendously. The reason this is fascinating is because it was discovered from studying diabetics, i.e. folks who age really fast.

So what does this have to do with wheat? Two slices of whole grain toast has a glycemic index slighly more than a Snickers bar. However, high blood sugar is just one perils of eating wheat. The immune response, i.e. inflamation, triggered by the gluten, in wheat, in your body is subtle in most folks, but no fun (balding!?). Wheat breaks down into acidic components; to balance this, your body draws on minerals in your bones! In general, consumption of modern wheat takes a huge metabolic toll on your body and there's no nutritional reason to make it a part of your diet; except that it tastes so good :-)

Another aspect to wheat is the concept of 'exorphins'. Exorphins are a class of compounds that result from the digestion of wheat. These compounds bind to the same receptors in the brain that are known for binding to morphine; wheat addiction! Folks have proved this in couple of ways. If you take morphine-blocking meds, you'll be able to stop eating wheat and lose weight. Schizophrenic patients are closer to normal when wheat is removed from the diet; that is, wheat definitely has an impact on the brain. Exorphines are why cookies are so, so irrisitable.

So why is wheat such a big part of our diet? Well, when wheat was first cultivated it wasn't quite the beast it is today. When humans began to grow wheat, it was a low yield grain that was a dependable, storable addition to the rest of the diet. However, in the past 50 years, we've turned it into a very high yield grain by modifying its genome (more than doubling the number of chromosomes) and have thereby introduced an impact on human health. He talked about folks who sell the original variety; might have to check that out. In the meantime, I've been successful at keeping wheat out of my diet 6-days a week, I enjoy the improvement it's had on my body. In my experience, it takes two weeks to break the wheat addiction.

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Anathem

A long, long story set on a planet just a little bit different from Earth. The characters were part scientist, part monk, and all geek. The exploration into their lifestyle got me thinking, but I always found myself asking if the amount of detail provided was necessary. I think, in the end, I realized that his world was rich enough for more than one book, but his plot did not merit a longer than average book. The only question that remains is how did the author the same one who wrote Snow Crash and Diamond Age!?

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