booknewb

They were right.  If I thought, Adam Grant's book last year Originals was remarkable, his first book Give and Take, is even more impressive. The premise opens. On the bottom of performance charts for different industries, Givers are worse off. Surprisingly at the top, it's the Givers also. A chunk in the middle are the Takers and Matchers . In this book, Adam Grant looks in to what he calls reciprocity styles. On the two sides of the continuum, Givers and Takers. Takers get advantage in the short run, or in zero-sum contexts. Being a Giver takes time to see fruits of labor. But it is the most successful way. Takers show tells of being a Faker or acting like a Giver out of pure self-interest. Givers give more than they receive. Givers share credit Givers create a psychologically-safe environment when leading Givers see potential in others and acts upon that potential, whereas Matchers wait for signs that one has potential, before providing help Givers are less...

It is hard to understand and absorb. Let alone mentally process it, for an amateur like myself, with very little idea of the topic.  What I got is our current models of predicting and making sense of randomness needs an upgrade: We underestimate Black Swans. A Black Swan is an event with three properties. It is unpredictable, of very high consequence and can be rationalized afterwards. In the book, Taleb writes of two worlds: Mediocristan and Extremistan. One land of Averages and one of Extremes. Black Swans are produced in Extremistan. He goes on to argue the over-reliance on the Gaussian Bell Curve, which functions well on Mediocristan. However reality is much closer to Extremistan and more Mandelbrotian. Again, very hard to process, especially on the nitty gritty details of the topics. Some of the much easier to absorb texts. Taleb advises. "Be a fool in the right places. Avoid unnecessary dependence on large scale harmful predictions. Avoid the big subject...

"There is no cosmic rule that says that great suffering equals great reward, but we talk about love as if this is true." -Mandy Len Catron

"You know what, that cliche about the journey being more important than the destination? There's something in that.  The closer I got to my finish line, that rubbly, rocky coast of Ross Island, the more I started to realize that the biggest lesson that this very long, very hard walk might be teaching me is that  happiness is not a finish line, that for us humans, the perfection that so many of us seem to dream of might not ever be truly attainable, and that  if we can't feel content here, today, now, on our journeys amidst the mess and the striving that we all inhabit, the open loops, the half-finished to-do lists, the could-do-better-next-times, then we might never feel it." -Ben Saunders Link to Ted Talk:  https://www.ted.com/talks/ben_saunders_to_the_south_pole_and_back_the_hardest_105_days_of_my_life