So, the executive summary would be that the ideas in the book are quite interesting, but it’s way too long and it’s often, in my opinion, annoying to read due to the author’s arrogance (you can probably imagine what I mean by looking at his website “Fooled By Randomness“).

The rest of this post is my random notes that sort of serve as a summary. They’re meant mostly for myself (or at least someone who has actually read the book) and probably fairly bad, but hey, it’s the first book I read like this, so bear with me. If you haven’t read the book and want to read them anyway, at least you have to know what a “Black Swan” is: it’s an event that it’s basically unpredictable, and changes the world in a substantial way. Just go to Wikipedia and check it out.

• From page 8: History is opaque. Reasons:
  • Illusion of understanding: the world is more complex and random that everyone thinks.
  • Retrospective distortion: we assess matters after the fact and look for tidy, regular explanations.
  • Overvaluation of factual information and experts: we “Platonify” the world.
• Page 12 (about the second point above): history makes jumps, not small increments of change. Yet we believe in nice, tidy, incremental changes.
• Page 30: About scalable vs. non-scalable jobs (writer vs. nurse; getting paid for your time or not), “talent” comes from success, not the other way around.
• Page 49: the book is not about avoiding risks, but about knowing which ones to take and know what we don’t know.
• Page 50: Black Swan blindness, related themes:
  • We focus on preselected segments and generalise from them: confirmation error.
  • We believe in tidy explanations: the narrative fallacy.
  • We behave as if Black Swans don’t exist.
  • We don’t see all it’s there: we hide Black Swans under other explanations.
  • We “tunnel”: we focus on well-defined sources of information.
• Page 58, about the “confirmation error” above. Experiment: given 2, 4 and 6, people are asked to guess the rule they follow. Each person can give any number of three-number series and the experimenters will say if the series follows the rule. In that experiment, people tend to first build a theory and then try to confirm it. So, most people never guess that it’s simply “ascending numbers”.
• Page 71, about people behaving as if Black Swans didn’t exist: When you remember something, you change the story at each remembrance. We renarrate the past to make it “more logical”.
• Page 114, about hiding Black Swans under other explanations: We don’t hear the stories of the non-successful, so the information we have comes mostly from the lucky ones.
• Page 120, still about the same topic: When survival is in play, we look for cause and effect. We believe in the “because” and not in randomness. It may have been just luck, but we always try to find a cause.
• Page 138 has a summary about chapter 10 (all notes up to and including page 158 belong to this chapter). There are two main topics in this chapter: (a) we are arrogant about what we think we know, and (b) that has implications when predicting. Why do we predict so much, even if we know we make so many mistakes?
• Page 144. Ideas are sticky: once we have a theory, it’s hard to change our minds. We have trouble interpreting information that contradicts our opinions. Experiment with horse race prediction: knowing the 10 most useful variables, people predicted.  Then, when given extra variables, the accuracy of predictions didn’t increase, but the confidence in the predictions did.
• Page 151: When you predict wrong, you tend to think you couldn’t know because it was an aspect you don’t know that well (e.g. about predicting the fall of the Soviet Union when having an excellent knowledge of the political workings, one would think that it turned out to be economic reasons, so you couldn’t predict it).
• Page 158: We anchor: when we see a number before a prediction, even if it’s random and we know it, we make predictions “close” to that number. This, by the way, I had read before, I think in “Predictably irrational“.
• Page 203: Advice: be human, admit your arrogance and ignorance. Avoid large scale, harmful predictions.
• Page 205: Advice: put 85-90% of your resources in something very low risk, and 10-15% in something very high risk. Avoid “medium risks”.
• Page 207: Closing tricks:
  • Make a difference between positive and negative contingencies. When you have a limited loss, you have to be as aggressive, speculative and “unreasonable” as you can.
  • Don’t look for the precise and local. Don’t be narrow-minded. Do not try to predict precise Black Swans. Invest in preparedness, not prediction. Infinite vigilance is not possible.
  • Seize any opportunity, or anything that looks like one. They’re much rarer than people think.
  • Beware of precise plans by governments.
  • Do not waste time trying to fight forecasters.

In summary, I liked the ideas in the book, even if sometimes I wasn’t very convinced by the arguments or the evidence provided… and it was sort of boring to read at times.

But I hate not trying to be constructive, and just saying that it was disappointing for me won’t tell you much about the possibility of it being disappointing for you, so here we go:

• The choice of articles seemed “random”: clearly some of the authors had very good things to share, but many others didn’t sound that experienced or having so much interesting to say. I could imagine myself writing some of those articles.
• Many articles read like they want to give “general” advice, but extrapolating from circumstances that I may never have (like making a rule out of a “this happened to me once” kind of experience).
• I didn’t find it “inspiring” at all, if I wasn’t a project manager already I would not want to become one. The idea of working as a project manager felt dry, boring, and too focused on processes.
• Many articles feel written for someone that doesn’t have any project management experience whatsoever. That’s cool, but it’s useless for me and should have been clearer in the book I think.
• Many other articles seem written for project managers from other industries (or even simply “managers”) that are going to start managing a software project. That is not only plain useless to me, it also bores me to death. Seriously, WTF is with the definitions of super basic concepts? If you don’t know what an “iteration” or a “hack” is and you won’t check yourself out of curiosity you shouldn’t be allowed to manage a software project. Period.
• Many articles felt too “corporate” to me, there was too much jargon and too many references to job titles, methodologies and contractors instead of really essential stuff based on experience.
• Reading some of the more or less interesting stuff, I couldn’t help thinking that those things would be obvious for someone who has been working as a software developer for years and wants to become a project manager because she finds it interesting.
• Other articles were interesting, but lacked depth to make them really useful.

Don’t get me wrong, there are useful articles, but the book as a whole doesn’t feel that useful. Certainly not worth the time reading the whole thing.

And finally, something that kept popping in my head, even if the comparison is unfair (it’s a different kind of book), is that this book is in many respects the opposite of the things I loved about Making Things Happen (an excellent book that you should read if you have any interest in project management). Oh well.

The core of the book is about what’s wrong with many presentations. The points are made in a clear way and there is a lot of useful advice to improve your presentations and your slides. There are many examples, some of the most enlightening ones being of the “before and after” type.

After reading the book I felt I had learned a bunch of useful things, so I decided to go over the slides for a talk I had prepared but not given yet, to try to improve them. Looking at them with a new perspective made some of the problems evident. Also, I felt that correcting those problems wasn’t very hard: the hard part was seeing them in the first place.

I have to say I’m very happy with both the book and the results of having gone through my slides. I totally recommend slide:ology if you want to learn more about presentations and how to prepare slides.

I don’t read that much fiction (except in comic form), but Scott’s review really intrigued me and made me want to read it. I should warn you, though, that his review is sort of a spoiler, not in the sense that it gives away the story, but in the sense that it talks about many the kind of things that you can think of while reading it.

I don’t want to risk spoiling anything, so I’ll only say that it’s a (very) dark survival tale involving a man and his son. It’s certainly not for everyone, but if you can cope with it you’ll most probably love it. Here’s two anecdotes regarding how dark and powerful the book is:

• After a couple of days I stopped reading it before going to bed, because the next morning, when waking up, I’d feel anxiety.
• I can’t remember when it was the last time that a book made me cry. The first time it happened with this book the page number had a single digit (namely, it was page 9). As I said I don’t read much fiction, but still.

The style of the book is really crude, and it matches the theme perfectly: there aren’t “chapters”, the characters don’t have names (they’re simply “the man” and his unnamed son) and he doesn’t even use apostrophes for negations (he writes “dont know” and “I cant”, never “don’t know” or “I can’t”). I found the vocabulary quite complex and I had trouble with a lot of words, but not enough to not be able to follow the story.

A couple of days after finishing the book I actually gave the film adaptation a shot (I didn’t even know there was one when I decided to buy the book). I have to say that, while I didn’t hold my hopes up for a good film, I actually ended up enjoying it quite a bit. It’s sort of a summary of the book (too much to cover in a film), but I think the end result was very good. So, if you’re lazy about reading the book, at least you can watch the film ;-)

The book is not written as a typical “textbook”, but as a sort of novel telling the story of a group of people that is going to acting lessons. That was really surprising at first, and felt awkward, but after a couple of pages I got used and it wasn’t a problem at all. Actually the result is probably better than what it could have been with a normal “textbook” style. The content itself really changed the way I see acting and strengthened the respect I have for actors (in that sense it reminded me of “Off-Off Broadway”, that episode of “Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends“). However, it felt like learning by reading something that is only tangentially related to what I wanted to improve (speaking in public) didn’t help me a whole lot. Now what I want is to take some improvisational theatre classes (see Teresa Brazen’s chronicle to see what I mean) :-D

In summary, it’s a very good book and it looks like a useful companion if you are interested in theatre and you are learning (by doing!), but I’m not sure how much it helped me in my goal.

The book explores the difference between East and West thinking and how those societies work. By using “East” the author mostly means China, Japan and Korea, and by “West” he means most Europe and America, although it’s particularly focused on the US. It starts with the old Chinese and old Greek philosophers, showing how they lived, how their societies were like, and how they approached knowledge. From there it explains how those initial philosophy approaches and how people behaved reinforced each other in a kind of spiral. Some of the findings are pretty interesting or revealing, and the book is full of examples and experiments used to discover differences in how we think. It was pretty cool that I found out things not only about Asians, but also about Americans. Actually now I have a pet theory about why I tend to dislike Hollywood films :-D

Not everything was good though. Things I didn’t like about it:

• I found the language needlessly complex, it took me a chapter or two to get used to it
• Some of the points felt repeated over and over again
• Some (admittedly not many) parts felt a bit like a pissing contest, like somehow trying to work out which culture was “better”; I’m sure that wasn’t the author’s intention, but the wording of some parts could have been better

In summary, a quite good read on a very interesting topic, with a couple of relatively minor issues.