Chicken Soup for the Soul: Random Acts of Kindness: 101 Stories of Compassion and Paying It Forward

Chicken Soup for the Soul: Random Acts of Kindness: 101 Stories of Compassion and Paying It Forward by Amy Newmark

The "Good Deeds" book is a short version of the Random Acts of Kindness book. It has a series of kindness stories, including many tear-jerkers. Sometimes people tell the stories of being helped, while other times they help others. Helping can be a true benefit of its own. (Though in a few you wonder if it did help.) There are also a few stories about help received from those who you would least suspect it. It does seem to be primarily from a middle-class suburban mindset, but there is a bit of variety in there.

Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection

Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection by Charles Duhigg

Communicating and connecting with people is the key to build strong relationships. Those that can communicate well tend to get along better. Some people are born with natural skills, but others can learn. Some simple things to do are showing interest and relating. Responding to nonverbal cues in nonverbal manners is key. When two people exhibit the same type of laughter, they better relate to each other. (Though if they show different types of laughter it may cause a rift.) Showing vulnerability and struggles that one had previously are also valuable.

The book includes examples from various fields. In the initial pitch for "Big Bang Theory", some geniuses had no social skills. However, people couldn't relate. Adding somebody social that exposed her feeling allowed the others a foil and helped the performance. A CIA operative tried to recruit a spy. She turned him down out of feer. However, after dropping the recruit pitch and letting her walk, he shared his concerns about his career. She relaxed and decided to join. For dealing with anti-vaxers, doctors could present facts to no avail. However, relating to concerns about life and family did bring about some desire for vaccines. 

In general, people need to show concern for others concerns and let them make choices on their own. Nonverbal communication can be as helpful as verbal.  

Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout by Cal Newport

In factory work, productivity is easily measured by widgets produced and time spent working. Knowledge work is different. However, we try to focus on the same productivity measures. We often force ourselves to keep busy and spend time doing lots of things. However, this business can distract us from actually being productive. Newport encourages us to take breaks and not overly schedule. We can allocate a meeting-free time when we can work. Or we can give ourselves one chunk of time for our own work for every chunk we devote to helping others. It helps to communicate well with others. We can list what we have on our plate and when they can expect to have things finished. Going outside our fields can be helpful for inspiration. (As an example, a writer might second-guess himself when reading other books. However, movies can provide creative insight without self-criticism.) It is also important to scheduled breaks and downtime. Especially in knowledge work, time spent working does not equate with productivity.

Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life

Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life by Nir Eyal

We have many distractions that prevent us from being productive and achieving our goals. Today, it is digital distractions that most often cause problems. However, they are only the root cause. The proximate cause may be other struggles in our life or bad habits that we have. We need to look at the underlying issues to help ourselves to not be distracted. Part of this is making sure we allocate appropriate time for things that matter. We need to spend appropriate time with people that are important to us. This may require scheduling priority and giving time.

We can more effectively use our digital time. We can remove apps we don't need from our phones. We can turn off notifications. Instead of responding to individual emails and notifications, we can allocate a certain time each day to process all our messages. (Sometimes this means that others will already find responses.) We can focus on activities. For kids, we can encourage them to set their own boundaries - and set a good example for them.

Don't Sweat the Small Stuff with Your Family: Simple Ways to Keep Daily Responsibilities from Taking Over Your Life (Don't Sweat the Small Stuff Series)

Don't Sweat the Small Stuff with Your Family: Simple Ways to Keep Daily Responsibilities from Taking Over Your Life by Richard Carlson

This is a basic self-help book about family relationships. Often we take family members for granted. We need to willing to treat them as real people, like we treat our friend. We should tell them we love them, and respect their wants and needs. We should listen and be there for the members of our family. Don't focus too much on vacations. Focus on the daily life.

How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen by David Brooks

In order to know a person, you must listen. We often spend time in conversation thinking of the next thing to say, rather than focussing on what they are saying. Everyone has different experiences. Their view of the world is different. People also change over time. We may still be locked into a view of them that is no longer accurate. To know somebody, we must let them evolve.

The Berenstain Bears and the Bad Habit

We found this book searching for thumb sucking. It did mention that one of the bears had the bad habit of sucking his thumb in first grade. However, the focus is on Sister Bear and her nail biting habit. She overcomes it by use of pennies. She gets 10 pennies in the morning, and loses one for each nail that she bites. The bears always seem to have "simple" solutions for their problems. Will any of these work these days?

Make Your Own Rules: A Renegade Guide to Unconventional Success

Wayne Rogers accidentally ended up in acting. He had a successful career in film and TV as well as in business. This book is a business advice book that primarily relies on his personal anecdotes. He had various business experiences that turned out well, as well as some that did not. Sometimes (like in a vineyard), the adversity helped spawn innovation that led to future success. While he does detail luck involved in business decisions, he also stresses the importance of doing homework and understanding why a "good deal" is there.

Drama Free: A Guide to Managing Unhealthy Family Relationships

Drama Free is geared towards dealing with the really bad family relationships. One point in the book encourage people not to enable the drug habits of family members. Avoiding abuse is also an important point. There is also advice on dealing with different beliefs and life-styles. It seems to have the contemporary approach of "live one's life independently", while pushing off the blame on others. It does acknowledge that therapy and being vulnerable is hard and that it is impossible to force other people to change. Setting boundaries is a point that re-occurs in the book.

There seemed to be some useful items in the book, together with a lot of modern spin that likely won't stand the test of time.

How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

Making changes in your own life is not a simple process. The first step is understanding what change needs to be made. Sometimes other people can assist in observing areas that need improvement. Maybe the quest to be the best interferes with the ability to be good. 

Then comes the hard part of doing something and sticking with it. It is easier to "change" if there is no past behavior to replace. If there is something in the past, getting a fake "fresh start" is often helpful. A special date or event can do it. New Year's resolutions are set at the turning of the year because they represent this "fresh start". Many fail. However, there are probably more that succeed at that time than at arbitrary dates during the year.

Gamification, peer pressure and nudges all help in the process. Rather than going directly to the hardest machine at the gym, starting with the most fun can be helpful. The "Spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down." It can even be helpful to combine the desired new behavior with something fun or an indulgence. One example was to listen to audiobooks only while working out. You can also look to others that have done what you want and follow their example. Thought it is important to make sure it is realistic. (Don't jump right in and try to follow the olympic gold medalist.)

Many of the ideas in the book sound familiar from similar books. There some interesting twists. Some nudges can actually make things worse. Putting best performers with worst performers in a military academy is worse than having randomly selected groups. Telling employees how much others save can discourage them from saving appropropriate. Giving students the option of hard deadlines (with penalties) increases performance. Giving savers an option for an account that they can't take out of improves saving. People are interesting and don't behave exactly as economists would have them do.

Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life

How can design principles be used to live your life? Looking at purpose and prototyping are ideas that can be applied to life. In design, failure and rejection is just part of the process.

 In job seeking, the conventional route of applying to jobs is slow and leads to high rate of rejection. The "hidden job market" is a source of many jobs. "Networking" gets a bad word. A "design" approach involves talking to others to get a better understanding of the jobs and then decided what is intriguing to you. The actual job offer ends up flowing naturally.

A lot of the book seems to repeat various psychology and self-help principles. The design principles add a little nuance, but provides a big enough bucket that just about anything can fit in.

The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life (Learn In and Use It for Life)

Twyla Tharp is a dancer and choreographer. She must be creative in order to produce new shows. She likes to be able to do the dances herself, and struggled when she was injured and could no longer show others exactly how to do things. However, that ended up being something that helped her to "let go."

The book dispenses with rather trite advice on creativity. You must work at doing creative things. You must also learn to identify when you are going down a bad path and stop. Know when you are in a rut and work on getting out of it. Have a routing. The advice felt straightforward, even if the examples felt a little "unique". (She would always get in a cab to work out.)

Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done

People often complain about not having enough time to accomplish what they want to do. Yet, when delving into their detailed time usage, they find that they end up wasting a lot of their time. Off the Clock recommends being mindful of time usage in order to accomplish what we need and have more free time. 

It is tempting to pick up the phone to scan some random social media when we have a free moment. However, very few people would mention "spending three hours scanning social media" as something they want to accomplish for the day. Even though exercising only takes a few minutes, most people claim they don't have enough time to fit it into their schedule. By tracking our detailed activities each day, we can get an idea where our time really is going. We may find that we are spending less time working than we think. 

In choosing the areas to spend our time, it is often valuable to block of time, such as the start of day to engage in our high-value individual activities. We should also know how things typically work. If meetings run late, don't schedule them back to back. If it often takes longer than expected to go to a soccer game, add in buffer time. Make valuable use of the time that you have. Spending time socializing with coworkers can be help accomplish more than working through lunch. "Appearing busy" does not provide as much value as we think. Accomplishing things does. Even in a marriage, we have picked somebody that we want to "suffer the least" with. We will have challenges with our time. We can make the best of them.

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

The average human lives 4000 weeks. What is the best way to use that time? Rather than advocate ways to squeeze maximum productivity out the time. This book advocates that we instead pick fewer things to do. Picking what to do can be more important than picking what not to do. An example was given of "Inbox-zero". If we respond to all emails immediately, we may find that we receive more emails. Some of the emails we take this effort to respond to may be resolved without our response. Our efforts can just lead to more work.

What is our goal in finishing things? Do we hope to finally have time at the end to do other things? Why don't we spend time doing some of those other things now? 

The other does provide a few suggestions for improving our time management. We can serialize the things we work on. Have one small list (with 10 items or less) of things that we actively work on. The overall to-do list may have many more things. However, we don't give them any effort until they move to the "active" list. We can also serialize what we do. Focus on one thing at a time to completion. Then go to the next thing. It is ok to fail at something. Just make it explicit. It is also useful to have a list of things that are "done". Other suggestions have more to do with how to deal with life as it unfolds. Looks for bits of interesting or novel things in the boring. Cultivate "instant" generosity. We have a short time to live. We should live it the best we can.

How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness

How can you not be attracted to a book that features a yellow bust of Adam Smith with sunglasses? The author treats Adam Smith's writings as aa self help book. The focus is more on his lesser known Theory of Moral Sentiments. This book looks at the morality of the decisions and activities that we make in regular life. A lot of it is based on the Golden Rule. We do good to others like they would have us due to them. Russ Roberts uses an easy-going, conversational delivery to explore the ways that Adam Smith can help you to be happy. Much of this seems contrary to the Wealth of Nations Adam Smith we are used to. Sometimes we just need to kick back and enjoy life rather than be constantly seeking more and more. 

Why Simple Wins: Escape the Complexity Trap and Get to Work That Matters

Things can be improved by keeping things simple. There is a lot of work that is done that doesn't really benefit anyone. Complexity can also be used to defer making decisions. People can hide behind a complex process rather than do what needs to be done. We can improve a lot of our lives and business by simplifying. That is a simple summary of this book.

How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life

How do you do you have a positive experience at work? Caroline Webb has an answer. She has bounced around a few different careers, but has now focussed on psychology of the workplace. Having a good experience is often a personal decision and effort. We need to look at situations from others' perspective. Assume they are suffering from bad situations rather than bad people. We also need to make sure out body is in a good condition to act. The proper amount of sleep is important. Putting in more hours at the expense of sleep can make things worse. Food is also important. The way we communicate can make a load of difference. If we take time to relate to others, our working experience will be improved. Look at the positives in what others are doing and guide them to improve. This tends to have much more success than straight criticism. 

This book is primarily an amalgamation of available research rather than new work. Most of the topics are covered in other works. One of the key value-adds is the illustration with anecdotes of the theory in practice. It is well organized and practical, though at times a little superficial.

When to Jump: If the Job You Have Isn't the Life You Want

The book was written by Mike Lewis, not to be confused with the more well known author Michael Lewis. (Though interestingly, Michael Lewis does make an appearance to describe his "Jump".) Mike had a nice venture capital job. However, he had a longing to jump to try his hand as a professional squash player. This book details the steps he made in the jump from something safe to something more fulfilling. His story is interleaved with the stories of many other people that have done similar things and provides advice for those considering the change. In many cases, the jump is from a more common job such as secretary or wall street banker to a passion project (like squash or starting a company.) There are also examples of people that merely pivot to different roles, or decide that something like teaching Yoga is more fulfilling. (One person even went to medical school in her late 40s) The book provides some "steps" to help do it. Some items include talking to others, but not requiring approval. Being willing to fail, but having a "safe landing" is valuable as is preparing (and having sufficient funding.) Jumping can be challenging, but even a failure helps absolve you of endlessly wondering "what if"?

Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder

In Thrive, Arianna Huffington goes through the laundry list of "things to do to be happy." She realized that focussing on career and the laurels from others does not provide long term happiness. The details things that she found provided a better happiness. Things like service and meditation were advocated. For people that look up to the author it may be interesting to hear what she has to say. As a general book, it is more a regurgitation of pop-psychology of the day.

The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life

The experiences of an orchestra conductor help make The Art of Possibility great. The book was written by a duo of a psychotherapist and a conductor. The advice is primarily to have a positive outlook on things. Give an "A" to everyone. Look through the positive aspects of the situation. Admit mistakes and focus on making anything possible.

The examples from the conductor side include various musical passages. Sometimes composers make parts intentionally difficult. The struggle is part of the desired result. A musician that is too talented would not provide the desired "struggle". Trusting in people can help them to thrive. In an example of bringing music into schools, there was little hope that the kids in the rough part of town would benefit from it. However, by trusting in them, they were able to obtain a positive experience. In another case, a youth orchestra was causing trouble in their hotel while on tour. Rather than move straight to chew them out, he instead talked about what went well with the previous performance. They eventually self-criticized and ensure they did not have problems again. (In another case, he did chew out an orchestra member, only to have her quit. He later admitted to his poor behavior and she came back on her own.)

Music is an interesting field. Conductors holds great power and rarely admit to error or even accept internal criticism. Good performances often involve the proper "feelings" as opposed to just the mechanical process. This all provides a great testbed for working to have the desired attitude and internal desire for achieving the best.

The book also had interesting discussion about serving and being served. In one case, a musician was biking and noticed her tires were flat. She went to a gas station, but needed quarters to get air. She asked if they had changed for $10. They said the till was not opened. She was stuck. Then she asked if they could give their personal change to operate the pump. They were willing to do it, and everybody felt happy. Similarly, a woman was struggling financially. She was reluctant to ask for small handouts from her mother. Instead, she was convinced to ask for all the money she would need. The mother ended up being happy to do so - and also gave to her other children. People get joy from serving. They often just need to be nudged to do it.