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.)

Impostor Syndrome: A Novel

Imposter Syndrome seems really dialed into Silicon Valley, but "the 101"? The book centers on a company (Tangerine) that feels like Facebook with a dash of Google and Yahoo. The founder/CEO is mentioned, but has a very minor role in the story. The focus is instead on the COO, a Russian immigrant woman who is the perfect strong female executive. Oh, and it just so happens she is also a spy, part of an elaborate espionage scheme. She utilizes her special access to anybody's account to pass off information to the Russians. A low-level female Chinese engineer at the company discovers suspicious activity and eventually discovers who it was. She ends up getting connected with the feds and helps implicate the COO, but loses her job in the process. In the end, she gets a job at a startup, while the COO takes a "leave" only to come back (and offer the Chinese engineer her job back if she wants it.)

As a spy novel, this story feels fairly contrived. (However, after the spying going on at the Russian consulate in San Francisco, who knows. Infiltrating big tech may actually be much more valuable than typical espionage.) Where the novel best succeeds is in detailing the culture and power dynamics in technology. The engineers are those that do the work. However, they "controlled" by the business culture that is filled with a multitude of conflicts. Security is an area where companies love to skimp on, devoting resources, yet in an incomplete manner. The culture is also filled with many ethnic subgroups, each with their own stereotypes and challenges. The spy story serves as a nice vehicle for documenting the culture.