Think Like a Rocket Scientist is a book about different tactics that can be used in our thought process. This book is a great example of well researched non-fiction with 50+ references in the bibliography for each section. It has lots of examples from famous scientists or business life to demonstrate each point. The author studied planetary sciences, worked on NASA’s Mars Exploration Rovers mission and has an interest in astronomy. It was refreshing to see familiar concepts like first principles thinking, Occam’s razor or unknown unknowns illustrated by examples from fields other than technology companies. Here are some parts that I liked from different chapters:
Clarity & Connection is a collection of poems about turning inwards, self love and growth. Yung Pueblo is the author’s nickname and he has a large following on social media. Here are some parts that resonated with me:
next time you feel agitated / because you are falling back into past patterns, / remember that simply being aware / that you are repeating the past / is a sign of progress
self-awareness is noticing / the rhythm of your thoughts / feeling when they are clear / and when they are out of sync / knowing when to take them seriously / and when to let them go / not every thought is valuable / most are just the sounds of / impulsive emotional reactions
maturity / is knowing that / when your mood is down / you should not trust / the way you see yourself
real maturity is observing your own / inner turbulence and pausing before / you project how you feel onto / what is happening around you
before you can see / someone else clearly / you must first be aware / that your mind will impulsively / filter what it sees through the lens / of your past conditioning and / present emotional state
sometimes a person end a good relationship / because the areas they think are bad are being / intensified by their personal issues that they / have not dealt with properly. sometimes / people break apart a home because they / are unaware of their projections and are / not ready to appreciate a good thing.
heal yourself / not just so you can thrive / but to ensure that people / who cross your path in the future / are safer from harm
ask yourself / is this how i actually feel, or / is this my emotional history / trying to recreate the past?
time does not heal all the wounds; it just gives / them space to sink into the subconscious / where they will continue to impact your emotions / and behavior. what heals is going inward / loving yourself, accepting yourself, listening / to your needs, addressing your attachments / and emotional history. learning how to let go, / and following your intuition.
have you noticed that when / you feel the urge to change / someone, what you really want is / for them to behave more like you?
when desire combines with tension, it morphs into craving. attachment is when you start craving things to be a certain way …. craving itself gives birth to attachment… craving occurs when wanting deepens and becomes filled with tension or stress.
being okay with not being okay / does not make things / automatically better / but it does stop you / from adding more tension / to an already difficult situation / being okay with not being okay / helps you let go
it is not about managing your / emotions; it is about managing / your reactions to your emotions
know your sources of rejuvenation / the amount of solitude you need to feel fresh again / the activities that strengthen your creativity / the people who light up your spirit
in relationships, it is important to understand that the other person cannot fix your emotional problems.
throw away the idea that your partner can make you happy. they can be great support, treat you well, and bring so many good things into your life, but happiness is only sustainable when it comes from within.
it is not about expecting your partner / to make you happy; it is about clearly / communicating the best ways they / can support you as you travel inward / to ignite your own happiness
heartbreak shows you that your self-worth and wholeness should not depend on another’s word or love.
love is rejuvenated / when partners / occasionally ask each other / how can I better / support your happiness?
when an argument starts / your goal should be to arrive /at a mutual understanding
trust blossoms in the absence of control
find a partner you do not have to perform for
a lot of advice comes from fear
we feel so safe with the ones we love / that we often share with them / our tensions, our stress, our fear / our sadness / and even our anger / but let us remember to also / give them the best version of ourselves / our joy and happiness, our excitement / and peace, our attention and care
getting unsolicited advice is one of the best tests / and a great time to check in with your self / are they saying this for my benefit or their own?
Los Angeles’ta kaldığım paylaşımlı evin üst katında üç oda var. Bir tane de banyo. Üst kattaki odalardan biri boşalınca içine girip gezdim. Evin en büyük odasıymış ve kendi banyosu varmış. Bunu görünce o odaya imrenmeye başladım. İçten içe bir sonraki sefer orada kalmak istediğimi düşünmeye başladım.
Büyük odanın sahibi bir gün benim odamı görünce şaşırdı. Odamın ne kadar aydınlık olduğunu, kendi odasının iyi ışık almadığı için kötü bir enerjisi olduğunu söyledi. Benim evde en önem verdiğim özellik aydınlık olmasıdır. Ve odamın diğerlerinde olmayan çok keyifli bir balkonu vardı. Oysa ben odamın güzel yönlerine odaklanmak yerine kendi banyosunun olmamasına odaklanıyordum. Fark ettim ki meğer ben haftalardır evin en güzel odasında kalıyormuşum, ama diğer odaya imrenmekten kendi odamın güzel yönlerinin kıymetini bilmeyip, yeterince şükretmiyormuşum.
Psikiyatrist Gülcan Özer’in TEDx Istanbul’daki konuşması ilişkilerin tökezlediği yerlere dair tavsiyeler içeriyor:
Koca terbiye edilmez, terbiyelisi alınır. Değiştirme listeniz olan birisiyle evlenmeyin.
Kayınvalide-gelin problemi: Kayınvalidenizle iki kadın ahbaplığı ilişkisi kurun, kocanızı devre dışı bırakın.
Cinsellik: Performans sanatı olmaktan çıkmalı.
Ebeveynlik: Amerikalılar en çok doğumdan sonraki 4 yıl içerisinde boşanıyorlar. Anne/baba olmak karı/koca olmaktan çok farklı. Yalnız / çocuksuz zaman geçirmek ve birbirinin ebeveynliğine müdahele etmemek gerekiyor.
İçgörü: Kendini bilmek cebimizdeki en kıymetli malzeme. İlişkinle ilgili şu üç soruyu yanıtlaman gerekiyor:
Niye evleniyorum bu insanla, başkasıyla değil?
Nerede dert yaşıyorum?
Bu yaşadıklarımda benim rolüm nedir?
İletişim: Uzlaşamayacağınız alanlar olacağı konusunda uzlaşmalısınız. “Ama” ile başlayan her cümle patinajdır.
Sinan Canan’ın üç kitaplık İnsanın Fabrika Ayarları serisinin ilk kitabı hareket ve beslenme çerçevesinde bedenimize odaklanıyor.
Yazarın kitap boyunca savunduğu ana tez evrim sürecinin yüz binlerce yıllık sürelerde gerçekleştiği, bu yüzden bedenimizin günümüz koşullarına değil, atalarımızın doğada yaşadığı ortama uygun tasarlandığı, ve bizim de fabrika ayarlarımız ( atalarımızın yaşam biçimi) doğrultusunda yaşamamızın faydalı olacağı şeklinde.
Yer yer gereğinden fazla biyolojik detaya girerek bir ders kitabına dönüşme eğilimi gösterse de kitap kendini okutuyor. Bir yandan bu kadar bilimsel konulara değinmesine rağmen bir yandan da çoğu Türkçe kitap gibi çok kısıtlı bir kaynakça içeriyor. Bu da kitabın bilimsel araştırma sonuçlarından çok yazarın subjektif görüşlerini sunduğunu düşündürüyor.
Psychology of Money contains 20 lessons for investors and how our psychology affects our investment decisions. Chapter 19 has a good summary of each chapter. In the last chapter, the author shares his own investment strategy: “For most investors, dollar-cost averaging into a low-cost index fund will provide the highest odds of long-term success… We invest money from every paycheck into these index funds - a combination of U.S. and international stocks.”
Creative Selection is a book about the product development process and demo culture at Apple. The author shares personal stories about problems he worked on at Apple, such as building Safari browser, supporting HTML editing in email, and developing the iPhone keyboard. It’s an interesting read if you’re curious about Apple’s history or product development process, especially around prototyping and demos. The author summarizes Apple’s product development culture as:
When is a book on perfect timing. It has interesting stories filled with practical advice after each chapter. Here are some tips involving caffeine:
Don’t drink coffee immediately after you wake up: The moment we awaken, our bodies begin producing cortisol. Caffeine interferes with the production of cortisol. Drink your first cup of coffee an hour or ninety minutes after waking up, once our cortisol production has peaked.
Nappucino: The most efficient nap is the nappucino. Caffeine won’t engage in your bloodstream for about twenty-five minutes, so drink up right before you lie down for you nap. When you wake up, caffeine will begin to kick in.
This book has a good mix of interesting research and actionable advice, highly recommended if you’re interested in self-improvement.
I was introduced to Bill Burnett at work, where he gave a great talk on creativity. His book is on approaching work life as a design problem and follows on the footsteps of his first book “Designing Your Life”. The chapter that resonated with me the most was on defining the problem and the art of reframing. He talks about two types of problems where people get stuck:
Anchor Problems: These are when we pose one of the possible solutions as the problem itself. Example: “I want to go sailing every weekend, but I can’t afford a boat.” So the problem I need to solve is: “How do I buy a boat when I have no money?” Here, we’ve anchored to one of the possible solutions for sailing, which is to buy a boat, and we’ve flipped it into the problem we need to solve. However, a broader framing of the problem, “How can I go sailing regularly on a limited budget?” has many possible solutions: join a sailing club, share a boat with friends, volunteer to crew someone else’s boat etc.
Gravity Problems: These are inactionable problems that don’t have a solution. “I want to be a poet, but poets don’t make enough money to live on in our culture. How can I make a good living as a poet?” Bill argues that it’s a situation, a circumstance, a fact of life, and if it’s not actionable, it’s not a problem that can be solved. A reframing could be “How might I write poetry while making a living doing other things?” or “How can I learn to live on what I’d make working only ten hours a week so I can be an almost full-time poet?”
The chapter on money or meaning was also a good reminder on finding a good balance of different attributes for yourself. Overall, most of the book was low signal for me, but the handful of chapters that I mentioned were amazing and invaluable.
As a kid, Porsche was my dream car. I also liked building legos. One of the themes during COVID was reconnecting with my inner child, so I embarked on a journey to build a 1500 piece lego car. Here are my reflections from this experience:
You like what you can do well: When I first started, I was moving very slowly, having a hard time finding the pieces and understanding the instructions. After completing 20% of the instructions, I became more familiar with the process, started to move faster, and got more engaged. The same phenomenon happened when I got a new job and started working on a new codebase. Initially, things looked unfamiliar, simple things took me a long time. I got frustrated, my enjoyment was low. As my familiarity and competence increased, so did my enjoyment and engagement with the new job. This simple idea is explained by CsÃkszentmihályi’s Flow Model as well: there’s a sweet spot of challenge vs skill level that gets you into the flow. I experienced this first hand.
Breaking down the big problem: Reading 50 books a year sounds challenging. Reading 30 pages a day does not. If you read 30 pages for 365 days, that’s more than 10,000 pages. Say 200 pages for each book, that’s equal to 50 books a year. Same idea with building legos. There were 500 instructions to complete to put together 1,500 pieces. These numbers sounded scary at first. I noticed that it took me 1 hour to build ~50 instructions. If I spent 1 hour per day building lego, I could complete it in 10 days. That’s a less scary and more achievable goal.
Reflecting along the way: After finishing 100 instructions, I reflected on what was not going well. I noticed that I spend most of my time searching for pieces in 10 different bags. I decided to put them all out on the table, group the same pieces together and sort them by color. Having this preprocessing step made it easier to build. I made it a habit to reflect along the way and make improvements to my process to increase my speed and reduce defects. Similarly, I added a recurring Slack reminder for Friday 5 pm to reflect on the past week at my job.
Enjoying the process: We often get into things with the result in mind, but overlook the process. People start companies because they want the result: change the world, get rich, become famous. Or kids think they want to be a doctor because they like the idea of curing others. But will you enjoy the daily life of being a doctor? Being in the hospital all day, seeing patient after patient, having late night shifts and all the other challenges that are a part of a doctor’s day to day. A part time job I do is helping engineers prepare for coding interviews by conducting mock interviews. The result is fulfilling, I enjoy helping people grow, but the process for me as an interviewer is repetitive and not as fulfilling. That’s why I don’t do it full-time. I decided to buy this lego car because I liked the end result, but didn’t really think about whether I’d enjoy the 10 hours it would take me to build it. For things we do long term, it’s essential that we enjoy not just the outcome, but the process as well.
Overall, it was interesting to see the building blocks of the car and how they interact with each other - how the engine turns the wheels, how the wheel turns the tires, how everything comes together etc. It was also fun to revisit a childhood activity as an adult. Did I enjoy putting together pieces for 10 hours by following an instruction manual? Not that much. But the learnings were worth it…
