[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things
___________________________________________________________________
Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things
Seeking recommendations for books about how hard things got done. I
like the Acquired podcast, but am looking for reading deeper than
it. I'm reading The Big Rich about the oil boom in Texas and like
it. I also liked Barbarians at the Gate about how private equity
got created and how deals went down. Less interested in people and
character studies. More interested in the mechanics of how things
that we take for granted actually got built and what the world they
were made in was like.
Author : zachlatta
Score : 423 points
Date : 2025-01-06 19:45 UTC (4 days ago)
| bobheadmaker wrote:
| You can find documentaries also on youtube, for example. There
| was one interesting about Dubai's development
| jrflowers wrote:
| "Check out something other than books" is a hilarious response
| to a request for book recommendations, though I would have
| included a specific example of a non-book, like "I see you
| mentioned private equity, have you listened to the songs of Jim
| Croce? He often writes about love and getting into bar fights,
| which are things that some people have difficulty with"
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| I remember a few years ago Taylor Hawkins of the Foo Fighters
| rock band died unexpectedly and the cause of death was not
| immediately revealed. I was disappointed to learn sometime
| later that the cause had been heart failure. If I were a
| member of the Foo Fighters and had to die at the relatively
| early age of 50, of course I would have wanted it to be in a
| bar fight. Come to think of it, Bar Fighters might be a good
| name for a tribute band.
|
| So is starting a tribute rock band an ok alternative to
| reading books?
| pjmorris wrote:
| > So is starting a tribute rock band an ok alternative to
| reading books?
|
| That might depend on how you feel about 'Our Band Could Be
| Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground,
| 1981-1991', which is a book about bands starting.
| jrflowers wrote:
| Instead of reading that book there is a painting called
| Smiling Girl, a Courtesan, Holding an Obscene Image by
| Gerard van Honthorst that's worth checking out
| aaron695 wrote:
| Extra points for not linking said docos.
|
| Creating an account to post this and this
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42612506, what's the game
| plan?
|
| Trying to pollute HN like TLAs did 4chan or just a misfiring
| brain?
|
| I'll call it aaron695s adage, it's now impossible to tell
| mental illness and TLAs apart on the internet.
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| Exactly: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World
| http://www.simonwinchester.com/exactly
|
| Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the
| Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_(book)
|
| Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War -
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38840.Boyd
| anfractuosity wrote:
| Longitude is a great book, I thought this was cool too re. one
| of the clocks Harrison designed -
| https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/apr/19/clockmaker-j...
| peterldowns wrote:
| I'm extremely excited to read Exactly, thanks for the
| recommendation.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| The thing about Boyd that really resonated with me was.
|
| 1) Realizing that he was better at something than everyone else
| around him.
|
| 2) Figuring out what it was that was making him better.
|
| 3) Reducing it to practice, so it could be taught to others and
| refined to become even better.
|
| Amazing story.
| wbl wrote:
| Boyd gets far too much credit for the F-16. If he had his way
| it wouldn't work at night or honestly at all in the face of
| the current threat environment.
| squeedles wrote:
| I loved Longitude, and Harrison was a determined guy, but the
| most interesting part for me was seeing the "rewrite from
| scratch" and "never ship" dynamics are old indeed! He had a MVP
| with his first iteration.
| thruway516 wrote:
| Unfortunately I got this as an audiobook and the author, who
| is born in the Bronx, decided for some reason to read it in a
| British accent which made it really hard for me to get
| through. Might have to get the book itself and give it
| another try.
| uncomplexity_ wrote:
| how to get rich by felix dennis is a banger for me
| readyplayernull wrote:
| The Soul of a New Machine:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine
| markus_zhang wrote:
| This is a good one. I read it twice just to experience the
| 70-80s development atmosphere. The daughter of Tom West did
| complain on Reddit a few years ago that Tom neglected them
| during the period, but I still admire such personality. The
| same admiration goes to David Cutler in "Showstopper".
| ghaff wrote:
| Tom was very intense. Dotted line worked for him for a while.
| Latterly he had an internet-related effort that didn't pan
| out (welcome to the crowd) but also was fairly instrumental
| in CLARiiON RAID disk arrays and an early NUMA architecture,
| neither of which ultimately saved Data General but probably
| helped keep it running for longer than it otherwise would
| have.
| Gooblebrai wrote:
| Feels like season 1 of Halt And Catch Fire
| ghaff wrote:
| Different segment of the industry but about the same time
| period (HaCF is maybe set a few years later).
| superconduct123 wrote:
| My main takeaway from reading that book was that working in
| tech in the late 70s was not that different from now days
|
| Just different technology/hardware/timescale
|
| Same workplace problems, personality types, company politics,
| etc...
|
| Did not expect to find it so relatable in 2024
| throwawayohio wrote:
| Curious -- To me it just seemed pretty standard (for any
| industry). Did you think the tech work environment today was
| somehow more enlightened than previous generations general
| working environments?
| jbullock35 wrote:
| There's at least one huge respect in which tech is different,
| at least in the USA: worker compensation.
|
| In the book, Tracy Kidder writes repeatedly about how Data
| General (the company at the heart of the book) is proud of
| its austerity. It doesn't pay well. It's proud of having an
| ugly, austere, warehouse-like building. It puts its critical
| engineers in the windowless basement of this building. Kidder
| is describing a world that's very far from the FAANG of
| today, at least were compensation is concerned.
| withinboredom wrote:
| I worked for a guy that converted half the office into a
| store with windows so shoppers could "watch us work" ...
| things haven't changed much, for non-FAANG.
| silvestrov wrote:
| Is a windowless basement that much worse than the open
| officies of Facebook?
|
| I'd rather have a small room with silence than work in a
| well lit factory with tons of noise like this:
| https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-
| public/thumbnails/imag...
|
| There isn't any dividers or other stuff that blocks noise.
| ghaff wrote:
| Offices were pretty much for managers. The standard was
| (high-walled) cubicles. Although a lot of the people
| involved here were in hardware so a lot of their work was
| in open labs.
| adamc wrote:
| People are mostly the same. It's just the cultural context
| that shifts, and mostly that changes slowly, even when tech
| changes rapidly.
| Rokesmith wrote:
| Came here to say that.
| padraigf wrote:
| Yes, very memorable prologue:
|
| https://www.amazon.co.uk/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-Kidder-ebook...
| adamc wrote:
| This is the best non-fiction book I have ever read. It's great
| simply as a piece of writing -- and the story it tells is an
| interesting one.
|
| I liked it enough that after I listened to it on Audible I went
| out and bought a hardback version to re-read. That almost never
| happens.
| rednafi wrote:
| "South: The Story of Shackleton's Last Expedition, 1914-1917" by
| Sir Ernest Shackleton. Here, Shackleton documents the journey of
| the Endurance expedition, which aimed to traverse Antarctica but
| instead became a legendary tale of survival after the ship was
| trapped and destroyed by pack ice.
| RGamma wrote:
| I haven't verified the info in this video myself, but it's
| making a point about Shackleton actually being somewhat
| incompetent/overeager and getting himself and crew into more
| trouble than necessary (as compared to Amundsen):
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=DU06c7f9fzc (TED talk, sorry)
| tamersalama wrote:
| I'm currently listening to "Endurance: Shackleton's
| Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing". I've also heard of some
| of the arguments against Shackleton (I haven't watched the
| talk).
|
| I have to think of what Shackleton, as a leader (boss), was
| going through and with uncertainties abound.
|
| 28 people who he hired based not only on capability alone,
| but also for crew (team) fit.
|
| He apparently cared deeply for them, and they in-turn cared
| for one another.
|
| They managed to work together in the harshest of
| environments. They all made it.
|
| That in and of itself, is a remarkable feat.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| You have a mistaken perspective on the whole thing. These men
| were seafaring adventurers, not people who will call their
| lawyer if there isn't a gluten free option in their
| restaurant.
|
| Every crew member was fully informed that they were more
| likely to die than survive the journey - before even sending
| in their applications.
|
| And Shackleton is dead since long, so you can't cancel him
| anymore.
| guappa wrote:
| I'd say Scott was the most incompetent of the lot.
|
| At least according to https://www.amazon.com/Scott-Amundsen-
| Last-Place-Earth/dp/03...
| digikata wrote:
| Related and also a good read is "The Roald Amundsen Diaries :
| The South Pole Expedition 1910-1912". You can see the ship he
| used on the expedition, the Fram at the appropriately named,
| Fram Museum in Oslo. It's an incredible experience to see and
| contemplate the expeditions these explorers mounted, and what
| equipment and resources they assembled to do it at a very early
| time.
|
| https://www.abebooks.com/products/isbn/9788282350105?cm_sp=b...
| fiftyacorn wrote:
| I didnt realise the ship was in a museum - Dundee has the
| discovery museum for Scotts ship which is good for a visit
| too
| fifilura wrote:
| Moreover, you can walk around inside the ship and see the
| cabins they lived in, indeed an incredible, immersive
| experience.
|
| Came here to say that Amundsen is a great example of someone
| who did hard things and made them look easy. Nansen also. And
| Shackleton, although he didn't make them look easy...
|
| Basically everything written by Roland Huntford about polar
| exploration is great inspiration. The Last Place on Earth
| covers Amundsen and Scott (the latter who did difficult
| things and made them look hard and died.)
| anfractuosity wrote:
| I rather liked 'The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of
| American Innovation'
| Blackstrat wrote:
| Agreed. Just finished it a couple of weeks ago. Hackers by Levy
| and fire in the Valley may also fit the bill.
| dyingkneepad wrote:
| > hard things
|
| How about consistently competing at fighting video-games at the
| highest level in the world for more than 30 years?
|
| "The Will to Keep Winning", by Daigo Umehara. He was the first
| Street Fighter 2 player to reach the top (being considered either
| the best player or top 3), and he was able to stay at the stop
| since then. No other video-game player has ever been so
| consistently good as Daigo. He may not have won many EVO or
| Capcom Cup titles, but he has _always_ stayed at the top. And he
| 's the protagonist of Evo Moment 37.
|
| Also, his story is good. The book may make you cry. And it's a
| very short book.
| willmarch wrote:
| Freedom's Forge
| jamestimmins wrote:
| Second this. It do a great job explaining how the WW2 armament
| buildup required both legislative and mindset changes on behalf
| of the government about what a good working relationship
| between business and government looked like.
|
| 10/10 book.
| teleforce wrote:
| Richard Hamming's book on AT&T Bell Labs R&D culture in inventing
| and solving many of the important problems [1].
|
| Another is Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner on the
| early days of the Internet [2].
|
| [1] The Art of Doing Science and Engineering:
|
| https://press.stripe.com/the-art-of-doing-science-and-engine...
|
| [2] Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet:
|
| https://katiehafner.com/books-new/where-wizards-stay-up-late...
| lnwlebjel wrote:
| The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American
| Innovation by Jon Gertner is similarly great for some of the
| earlier/origin stories of Bell Labs.
| marcklingen wrote:
| The Innovators, Walter Isaacson
|
| It's interesting to read how many individuals contributed in all
| sorts of important ways in the history of computing.
| mitchbob wrote:
| _The Dream Machine_ by M. Mitchell Waldrop [1]. An in-depth
| history of how personal computing was created.
|
| [1] https://press.stripe.com/the-dream-machine
| f2000 wrote:
| Copies in Seconds: Chester Carlson and the Birth of the Xerox
| Machine by David Owen
|
| "A history of the photocopier offers a portrait of reserved
| physics graduate Chester Carlson, who invented the copier to ease
| his job as a patent clerk and who saw his marketing efforts
| daunted by numerous rejections, before the head of Xerox research
| recognized the machine's potential. "
| shivaraj1996 wrote:
| "Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched
| SpaceX" by Eric Berger documents how SpaceX employees poured
| their blood, sweat, and tears into launching a cost-effective
| rocket at a time when legacy operators dominated the space market
| with their costly cost-plus-fee contracts. This book mostly
| follows the journey of employees and (thankfully) doesn't resolve
| to Elon praise too much. There is a continuation to this book
| called "Reentry" but I haven't read it yet.
| sien wrote:
| I've just read both and highly recommend them and was coming in
| to this thread to do so.
|
| Liftoff :
| https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/53402132-liftoff
|
| Re-entry :
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/205309521-reentry
|
| Both have very high ratings on Goodreads.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| > Less interested in people and character studies.
|
| If you don't want examples then all you need to know is
| _velocity_. The Y Combinator people call it doing things that
| don't scale. Here is how it works for absolutely anything:
|
| 1. Get the right tools in place. This is an intrinsic capability
| set you have to build. People tend to fail here most frequently
| and hope some framework or copy/paste of a library will just do
| it for them. Don't be some worthless pretender. Know your shit
| from experience so you can execute with confidence.
|
| 2. Build a solid foundation. This will require a lot of trial and
| error plus several rounds of refactoring because you need some
| idea of the edge cases and where you the pain points are. You
| will know it when you have it because it's highly durable and
| requires less of everything compared to the alternatives. A solid
| foundation isn't a thing you sell. It's your baseline for doing
| everything else at low cost.
|
| 3. Create tests. These should be in writing but they don't have
| to be. You need a list of known successes and failures ready to
| apply at everything new. There are a lot of whiners that are
| quick to cry about how something can't be done. Fuck those guys
| and instead try it to know exactly what more it takes to get
| done.
|
| 4. Finally, measure things. It is absolutely astonishing that
| most people cannot do this at all. It looks amazing when you see
| it done well and this is ultimately what separates the adults
| from the children. This is where velocity comes from because you
| will know exactly how much faster you are compared to where you
| were. If you aren't intimately aware of your performance in
| numbers from a variety of perspectives you aren't more special
| than anyone else.
|
| People who accomplish hard things are capable of doing those
| because they didn't get stuck. They had the proper tools in place
| to manipulate their environment, redefine execution (foundation),
| objectively determine what works without guessing, and then know
| how much to tweak it moving forward.
| random3 wrote:
| Not bad advice, but the ask was for _books_ - do you have any?
| cindycindy wrote:
| Thank you so much for putting these heuristics into words. My
| only question here is that a lot of what you wrote seems like
| best practice from the perspective of a person within the tech
| industry. Outsiders might call it common sense. So if everyone
| knows what they 'should' be doing, then why do so few actually
| follow through?
|
| One answer to that question might be character. Angela
| Ducksworth has a book called, "Grit". It is a lot like
| character study, which the OG explicitly expressed their
| disinterest for. My intuition is no matter how well you can
| describe the steps for success, success is not replicable. If
| true, that would explain why there are hundreds of self books,
| thousands of coaches, and only a handful of people who can
| consistently excel.
|
| Having said that, I hesitate to say that there are only a few
| people in the world who are exceptional due to a constraint I
| would describe as "genuine article". How depressing a thought
| that would be.
|
| Carpe diem! Floor the gas pedal, and see how fast you can go.
| Maybe you'll break all expectations and fly into space.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Luck is a massive, massive factor. There are plenty of
| exceptionally smart and gritty people who fail, and plenty of
| far less-so who succeed.
|
| Your argument is good if you just follow it to the obvious
| (if inconvenient) conclusion. Despite so many people "having
| the answers," no one can replicate it reliably. And even the
| ones who can likely wouldn't be able to if you removed
| capital from the equation. The clear explanation is: luck.
|
| But of course luck tends to strike when you're working hard
| and consistently, so it's not totally out of one's hands.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| I suspect there are a number of factors that eliminate people
| from these steps like objectivity, persistence, and other
| virtues.
|
| The biggest single discriminator that the Y Combinator people
| talk about, which I agree with, is doing the right things
| first without regard for scale. Most developers will
| immediately jump to some framework so that they can prop up
| some web app in the shortest time and immediately go into
| promotions and then struggle with scale when they need to
| scale.
|
| I had this big app that tried to solve for full
| decentralization of universal file system access from a
| browser. I wrote my own end-to-end test automation tool and
| focused all my energy on software execution performance.
| These things allowed me to prove out new ideas and identify
| regression in about 8 seconds on a single machine or about 2
| minutes on 5 machines talking to each other. Most people
| won't invest in that. I could perform a massive refactor
| across dozens for files and hundreds of lines without
| regression in about 2 hours. At work, at that job at that
| time, I spending more than 2 weeks for tiny refactors that
| were littered with regressions and having to clean up other
| people's messes.
|
| Worse, is that most people recognize when they are not
| performing well, especially if it is anywhere from 10-100x
| less well. The normal go to place is either sympathy or an
| echo chamber. High performers don't do that. They aren't
| trying to impress people with their awesomeness or seeking
| sympathy when it falls apart. They just build what they need
| at great expense because its something they can have that
| others won't have.
| cpach wrote:
| You might like _Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early
| Days_. It's written by Jessica Livingston, who founded Y
| Combinator.
| intpx wrote:
| The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern
| World by Simon Winchester
| pololeono wrote:
| House on Fire: The Fight to Eradicate Smallpox
|
| In House on Fire, William H. Foege describes his own experiences
| in public health and details the remarkable program that involved
| people from countries around the world in pursuit of a single
| objective--eliminating smallpox forever.
| djkivi wrote:
| Masters of Doom is quite good about John Carmack and the creation
| of id Software.
| zooweemama wrote:
| I loved MoD! The audio book read by Will Wheaton is also pretty
| good.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| Recommend Doom Guy as well, by John Romero. Kind of dispels a
| little bit of the mythology about Carmack. It doesn't downplay
| his contributions, but kind of frames them in context of the
| rest of the team. Masters of doom kind of portrays Carmack as a
| sort of wizard locked away in his tower while working on quake,
| when in actuality he struggled a great deal with the technology
| and personally, lashing out at the rest of the team. They hired
| some more experienced engineers to help take the load off of
| him for things like networking and other aspects of graphics.
| His major breakthrough with BSPs in quake was not the usage of
| BSPs (which he was not the first to pioneer; the technique had
| been described 30 years prior at AT&T), but caching mechanisms
| for the node adjacency graphs. Really humanizes Carmack a lot.
| There's also quite a few minor factual errors in MoD, but
| nothing major and nothing consequential related to Carmack
| Steffajos wrote:
| Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes does a great job covering the
| rivalry between Edison, Tesla, and Westinghouse over electrifying
| the world. I liked how it broke down the technical and business
| challenges and showed the impact on everyday life and industry.
| zem wrote:
| dava sobel's "longitude" is excellent
| peterldowns wrote:
| I read these three books last year and I believe that each would
| be interesting to you:
|
| Undaunted Courage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undaunted_Courage
|
| This is about doing something extremely hard with a huge amount
| of unknowns, and the type of person it takes to succeed.
|
| How Big Things Get Done https://www.amazon.com/How-Big-Things-
| Get-Done/dp/0593239512
|
| This is about project planning and has plenty of real examples
| and case studies.
|
| The Education of Cyrus by Xenophon
| https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-the-education-of-cyrus-b...
|
| This is the best book on leadership and teamwork that I've ever
| read. You can read this review instead but get a copy of the
| actual book, too, it's wonderful.
| deanebarker wrote:
| +1 for "How Big Things Get Done." Great book.
| iainmerrick wrote:
| Janna Levin, _Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space_.
| It describes the construction of the LIGO experiment over a span
| of about 50 years. It does have a lot of character studies (one
| of Levin's strengths) but also plenty of details about the
| incredible equipment and what it took to design it and put it all
| together.
| liendolucas wrote:
| Digital Apollo by David A. Mindell. An excellent book that
| describes how the Apollo computer was developed.
|
| Dealers of Lighting Xerox Parc and the dawn of computer age by
| Michael A. Hiltzik. If you're interested in knowing where the PC
| as we know it today originated from.
|
| Others have already suggested The Dream Machine which was a book
| that once started I couldn't stop reading and finished it in
| about a week.
|
| Edit: Maybe not exactly the book that you might be interested in
| but I read Mindstorms by Papert and I think his work on education
| through the use of computers was groundbreaking. Very interesting
| book.
| pjmorris wrote:
| I'd add 'Sunburst and Luminary: An Apollo Memoir' [0], written
| by one of the LM guidance computer programmers, Don Eyles, to
| the Apollo reading list.
|
| [0] https://www.doneyles.com/LM/Tales.html
| rasse wrote:
| You might want to look into books about H. Tracy Hall. He's one
| of the inventors of lab-grown diamonds, the hardest things ever
| done.
| kristianc wrote:
| Newton and the Counterfeiter
|
| https://www.royalmint.com/shop/books/Newton-and-the-Counterf...
|
| Excellent book about Isaac Newton's role in solving the great
| recoinage crisis.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| I greatly enjoyed _The Leadership Moment_ by Michael Useem, which
| covers 9 stories of crises and how leaders approached them.
|
| _The Man Who Discovered Quality_ by Andrea Gabor is an
| interesting story of W. Edwards Deming, the American who
| revolutionized post-WWII Japanese manufacturing with statistical
| approaches to reducing variance.
|
| _Issac Newton_ by James Gleick conveys what it was like for
| Newton to essentially invent modern physical science in a pre-
| scientific world.
|
| _Dreaming In Code_ by Scott Rosenberg is a good counterpoint to
| inspiring tech origin stories: legendary coders coming together
| to build an amazing product and... basically failing.
| timhigins wrote:
| Vaccinated: One Man's Quest to Defeat the World's Deadliest
| Diseases
|
| Describes how Maurice Hilleman invented 40 vaccines, including
| for eight of the most common diseases in the US, over a 36 year
| career at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Merck & Co. His
| vaccines are estimated to save 8 million lives each year.
| anteloper wrote:
| The Wright Brothers biography was incredible. Highly recommend
| for the exact qualities you're looking for: the
| mechanics of how things that we take for granted actually got
| built and what the world they were made in was like
| mkl wrote:
| Which one, McCullough's? Your comment is the only search result
| for that quote.
| jtcond13 wrote:
| _Turing 's Cathedral_ by George Dyson
| tmsh wrote:
| Re: getting hard things done I've been admiring the way Elon Musk
| takes calculated risks in:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk_(Isaacson_book)
| antisthenes wrote:
| I haven't personally read it, but The Making of the Atomic Bomb
| by Richard Rhodes seems to fit the bill.
| zetazzed wrote:
| The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes! Lots of detail,
| but it also shows how many geniuses it took working over years to
| really make it work.
| deaddodo wrote:
| And, as added reading, _The Radioactive Boy Scout_.
|
| Just for a perspective on how abundant and readily available
| that information had become in academia a few decades later.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Loved that book!
| pjmorris wrote:
| Hearty agreement. One of the best books I've read.
| pauldix wrote:
| Second this one, it's incredible in the level of research and
| detail.
| DashAnimal wrote:
| One of the greatest books I've ever read. It is long and took
| me a couple of months to absorb this one, but in return the
| amount of detail is staggering and it never ever felt like it
| got boring or tedious or overstayed it's welcome.
| searine wrote:
| This was a life-changing book for me.
| beAbU wrote:
| How to Make a Spaceship by Julian Guthrie was a greally good read
| for me.
| tuetnsuppe wrote:
| Failure is not an Option by Gene Kranz, Flight Director of Apollo
| 11 and Apollo 13 among other missions give a lot of insight into
| the preparation and focus of safety critical operations.
| cl42 wrote:
| "The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York" by
| Robert Caro
|
| This is an incredibly long biography of a man who figured out how
| to build an urban empire. While he wasn't an "entrepreneur" per
| se, he figured out how to generate huge amounts of revenue via
| tolls/bridges, how to manage and manipulate public policy, and
| how to attract the best urban planning talent.
|
| ... and you can then read about how it all fell apart.
|
| Regardless of your opinion on Robert Moses / NYC, it's an
| incredibly fascinating read or (~90-hour) audio book.
| jbullock35 wrote:
| The Power Broker is a superb choice for OP. This comment should
| be closer to the top of the thread.
| squeedles wrote:
| Absolutely also recommend! Took a while to get through it but
| Moses figured out how to hack government and civil engineering
| projects. He literally changed the New York State constitution,
| used bond contracts to build a defensive barrier around
| himself, and for better or worse then built half of the public
| works projects in the US himself or through his disciples.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| 99% invisible recently did it as a book club. You can listen to
| a much shorter chapter-by-chapter summary and discussion about
| it: https://99percentinvisible.org/club/
| gainda wrote:
| second this: i was trying to follow along with the 99 percent
| invisible book club but i fell behind due to life events. i
| picked it back up during the holidays with about 25% left to
| go.
|
| Caro does an amazing job writing in an engaging, compelling way
| about topics that would otherwise feel dry coming from a
| different writer.
|
| i look forward to getting into his LBJ books in the future.
| dayvid wrote:
| This is a top answer. Robert Caro goes into excruciating detail
| on how he accomplished most public works projects. I especially
| appreciate him covering the grey or dark sides of getting deals
| done as most really hard things have some unpleasant sides to
| them.
| gantron wrote:
| I really enjoyed American Prometheus. Might be a bit too focused
| on Oppenheimer for the original request, but it covers the
| Manhattan Project more broadly too.
| hashishen wrote:
| moonwalking with Einstein is about a man who decides to get into
| memory competitions upon learning it's more skill based than he
| realized. this in turn helped me develop more confidence in my
| own abilities with day to day routine and not be afraid to try
| new things i never considered myself naturally good at
| ppsreejith wrote:
| Great book! IIRC, after attending the 2005 USA memory
| championships as a journalist, he became intrigued and started
| training and in one year became USA Memory champion in 2006 at
| age 24
|
| I'd tried applying memory training lessons from this book a few
| years ago and written about my experience:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20210301185111/https://ppsreejith...
| abtinf wrote:
| The Box by Marc Levinson is the incredible story of the dawn of
| containerized shipping.
|
| It is a little shocking just how recently this happened (the very
| first experimental loads were in the 1950s), and that the
| standard of shipping before containers was for longshoremen to
| literally hand carry boxes of stuff onto ships and stuff them
| just anywhere. You would be stunned to realize just how new and
| unused the piers of San Francisco really are, because they were
| built with massive government subsidies at exactly the wrong
| time.
|
| The book covers the courageous people involved, the political and
| economic impacts, and how the industry truly found its footing
| prioritizing absolutely reducing operational costs over all other
| concerns (like delivery speed).
| riffraff wrote:
| I second this recommendation of a fantastic book, mildly
| inconvenienced by the author delving into _very specific
| details_, like whole paragraphs of different sizes of locks
| that felt like line noise to me.
|
| It also offers a very interesting perspective on the fears of
| the AI/automation craze, like, what happened to whole towns of
| dock workers who used to manually pack goods in round-hulled
| ships and got replaced by a single machine moving a container
| on a flat ship.
|
| Still, I'm not sure it's exactly "people who did hard things"
| as much as the story of decades-long incremental changes
| brought by a bunch of people.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Also research the development of the pallet and the pallet
| jack, which had similar effects.
| OxfordOutlander wrote:
| +1
|
| Fantastic book. Particularly the impact it had on the vietnam
| war, and the role the battles between rail + trucking played in
| driving containers.
| ackbar03 wrote:
| If you want more entrepreneurial type stories.
|
| When the heavens went on sale, by Ashly Vance, is pretty good. It
| details the early days of the space start-ups other than spaceX
|
| The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who
| Shaped Silicon Valley is also pretty good, describes the crazy
| days of early paypal.
|
| Someone already mentioned Liftoff by Erig Berger. Starting a
| private space company is probably as hard as things get, and it
| describes the early days pretty well
| juliend2 wrote:
| Her biography on Elon Musk is also pretty good as far as
| depicting someone who did hard things. I was quite impressed by
| his tenacity.
| GlennFarrant wrote:
| Apollo: The Race To The Moon Charles Murray, Catherine Bly Cox
|
| My favorite book of this type by far.
| pjmorris wrote:
| I came to recommend this as well. It's a study of the
| engineering and management efforts behind Apollo, and much more
| interesting and entertaining than that makes it sound. The
| section on how they developed the F-1 engines that powered the
| first stage of the Saturn V, including how they'd explode bombs
| inside the engine nozzle to be sure that it could cope with
| instabilities, is just one of dozens (hundreds?) of examples of
| how all the small pieces came together to accomplish their
| priorities, 'Man. Moon. Decade.'
|
| An amazing book.
| hoytech wrote:
| The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden
| Error That Transformed the World by Ken Alder
|
| These guys went through quite some hardships to define the length
| of a meter. Good read!
| bwb wrote:
| Out of the Shadows By Jonathan Kingsman
| https://shepherd.com/book/out-of-the-shadows
|
| Amazing book about the grain markets and how they have changed
| over the last 40 years.
|
| "Once shadowy figures, grain merchants have now come out of the
| shadows. Almost everything that you eat or drink today will
| contain something bought, stored, transported, processed,
| shipped, distributed or sold by one of the seven giants of the
| agricultural supply chain. The media often refers to them as the
| ABCD group of international grain-trading companies, with ABCD
| standing for ADM, Bunge, Cargill and Dreyfus. The acronym,
| though, ignores the other three giants of the food supply:
| Glencore, COFCO International and Wilmar. Together, they handle
| 50 percent of the international trade in grain and oilseeds. In
| this book's series of exclusive and unprecedented interviews,
| CEOs and senior traders from these seven giants describe in their
| own words how the agricultural markets are changing, and how they
| are adapting to those changes."
|
| The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American
| Supermarket By Benjamin Lorr https://shepherd.com/book/the-
| secret-life-of-groceries
|
| Five years of research really explains large swaths of our food
| system and how it changes what we eat.
|
| You might like these as well:
|
| The best unexpectedly enthralling books about seemingly boring
| things https://shepherd.com/best-books/good-books-about-
| seemingly-b...
|
| The best books that make sense of how globalization broke down,
| and what happens next https://shepherd.com/best-
| books/globalization-breaks-down-wh...
|
| *Features The Big Rig, a book about the American trucking
| industry and it's breakdown
|
| Some good ones in there :)
| icelancer wrote:
| Almost no one thinks about the modern miracle that are grocery
| stores. It wasn't that long ago that getting out-of-season
| produce was literally impossible.
|
| Today, you just put up with inferior tomatoes in the winter and
| be annoyed about it.
|
| The logistical complications of worldwide produce supply chains
| and your local supermarkets are really, really nuts.
| niels_bom wrote:
| I think most people don't have access to supermarkets tho.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Most people on this forum do
| bwb wrote:
| I actually think more people have access than don't...
|
| Even in rural and developing regions, there are grocery
| stores, just not as fancy. I tried to find numbers, but it
| was hard to find the right source for that.
|
| Anyone living in an urban area would have access and that
| is 60% of the global population. Plus, rural areas in the
| USA, Canada, Europe, Mexico, etc etc have access to one.
|
| Only about 25% of the population are engaged in subsistence
| farming at this point.
| bwb wrote:
| Ya I think about as a kid I only knew two types of cheese,
| yellow and white. Now there is an insane number as just one
| example.
|
| And the fresh fruit and veggies are crazy. Blueberries in
| December? How and why are we doing that :)
| purple-leafy wrote:
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/124718.One_Man_s_Wildern...
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| QED And The Men Who Made It, by Sylvan S. Schweber. About the
| development of quantum electrodynamics. It is partly biography,
| centering on Freeman Dyson, Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger,
| and Sin-Itoro Tomonaga in roughly decreasing order of word count
| by rough recollection. Mostly I'd say the subject matter is
| history of physics from a fairly hardcore technical perspective.
| Tbh I didn't understand that much of the physics, though I
| learned some through reading. The history and biography parts
| were quite engaging anyway.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants - is
| a pretty great read, full of (literally) explosive twists.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Seconding this! It has great detail on the actual rocket fuel
| chemistry, alongside incredibly well-told stories and
| anecdotes.
|
| Many people's favorite line from it:
|
| > It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that's the least of
| the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so
| rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been
| measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth,
| wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and
| water-with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some
| of the ordinary structural metals-steel, copper, aluminium,
| etc.-because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal
| fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the
| invisible coat of oxide on aluminium keeps it from burning up
| in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed
| off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted
| with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For
| dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good
| pair of running shoes.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Oh man. I remember laughing out loud at "It is also
| hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test
| engineers" and then hooting at the end of that paragraph.
| noufalibrahim wrote:
| One of the "hard things" I've come across was turn of the century
| explorations. The stories of polar explorers like Ernest
| Shackleton (chronicled in Lansing's Endurance) or tropical ones
| like "River of Doubt" detailing Roosevelt's exploration of the
| Amazon tributary are fascinating stories of how people's grit
| accomplished hard things.
| matrix2596 wrote:
| i understand polar expeditions, but werent people already
| living in amazon
| vasco wrote:
| Do you have a recommendation of a book written by them?
| fauria wrote:
| The letters from Francisco de Orellana:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_de_Orellana
|
| https://en.scribd.com/document/647918681/The-Voyage-of-
| Franc...
| ghostthunder wrote:
| River of Doubt - Candice Millard
|
| https://www.candicemillard.com/river-of-doubt.html
|
| Covers Teddy Roosevelt's Amazon expedition. To the comment
| about "weren't people living in the Amazon" - read the
| book. The Brazilian government was scouting and mapping the
| terrain for the project of connecting the coasts with
| telegraph lines. This was uncharted territory and the
| chance of not returning was high.
|
| I cannot recommend enough.
| noufalibrahim wrote:
| The "Rio da Duvida" was a tributary which wasn't really
| mapped at the time. The Brazilian government was laying out
| Telegraph lines at the time to map the area.
|
| There were tribals in the area but it wasn't mapped.
| 0xEF wrote:
| Shackleton and his crew became something of a hero of mine
| after I read South and Endurance. Less so frok.a masculine
| perspective, but more of a fortitude thing. There is a certain
| triumph felt when we persevere through impossible odds, and
| ever since I've been attracted to a genre of stories that I
| loosely label as "Frozen Thrillers," where humans just have to
| deal with bad things happening in cold unforgiving
| environments.
| noufalibrahim wrote:
| If you liked that, you should read "Empire of Ice and Stone"
| by Budy Levy which was about an Arctic expedition.
|
| It's a good read from a leadership perspective. The "leader"
| of the expedition (Vilhjalmur Stefansson) abandoned his crew
| in the middle of the frozen arctic seas and went off the hunt
| caribou and meet his secret inuit wife. The book portrays him
| as being completely irresponsible and interested only his own
| glory and fame (and money)
|
| Meanwhile, the captain of the ship (Robert Bartlett) walked
| for 700 miles from where they were stranded and then started
| a rescue mission from Alaska which saved some (though not all
| of the crew). He's portrayed as a real hero in harsh
| circumstances.
|
| The whole expedition was named after the flagship. The Karluk
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_voyage_of_the_Karluk).
| They had two inuit families with them during the trip
| including their kids. It was funny to see how the inuit kids
| would play in the snow and have fun while the "explorers"
| were all but dropping dead. The youngest child was aged 3 at
| the time. She passed away finally in 2008 at the age of 97.
| 0xEF wrote:
| I will definitely check that out, thanks for the
| recommendation!
| phantom_wizard wrote:
| I am reading a book about it right now and as I learn more it
| seems too crazy and unbelievable to sustain (and im quite
| gullible person), especially part about living on full ocean
| in small boats with no food, water and heat, in extreme cold,
| still travelling those 100s of kilometers.
| 0xEF wrote:
| There was a part that stuck with me, a journal entry that
| described the Endurance crew standing on a ice that had
| trapped their boat, and just watching in horror as the
| shifting ice flow crushed it. It powerfully conveyed raw
| despair and overwhelming hopelessness, which in an of
| itself is exceedingly difficult for anyone to overcome, let
| alone in extremely hostile conditions.
| db48x wrote:
| The _Path Between the Seas_ by David McCullough is really
| excellent. It starts with the French diplomat Ferdinand De
| Lesseps, specifically with the way his friendship with the king
| of Egypt enabled him to start the Suez canal project. It then
| details how he got the Isthmian Canal project off the ground and
| how, because he wasn't an engineer, he became willfully blind to
| the realities in Panama. He made horrendously flawed plans (a
| sea-level canal through a mountain range, to be dug below the
| level of a massive river that flooded every year...), completely
| ignored all of the massive problems facing his company, and made
| press releases about how well everything was going right up until
| the day before the company was finally bankrupt. As a result,
| none of those huge problems got solved.
|
| When the Americans finally stepped in 15 years later, they too
| made the mistake of appointing bureaucrats to run the project.
| The result was a shambles. Eventually President Roosevelt simply
| ignored Congress and appointed an individual to run the project.
| He was a railroad engineer named Stevens. Stevens was the first
| to realize that the real logistical problem to solve was not
| actually digging up the dirt, but disposing of it. The French had
| famously used steam shovels to dig the canal as fast as possible,
| just as they had in Suez. But once the dirt was loaded into train
| cars and carted away from the dig site, they used teams of men
| with shovels to empty them. Stevens calculated how fast the dirt
| would need to be loaded and unloaded, and set up a system of
| trains that could carry any quantity of dirt any distance, while
| loading as quickly as possible at the dig site and unloading it
| just as quickly at the dump site. Once he knew the numbers and
| had the system built, he could track exactly how quickly each
| train was unloaded and know which teams were working efficiently
| and which needed training to avoid falling behind.
|
| Another good one by the same author is _The Wright Brothers_.
| It's shorter and perhaps not as detailed as _The Path Between the
| Seas_ (but then it only took them 4 years while the canal needed
| 33), but it focuses on the actual tasks undertaken by the Wrights
| as they developed their first few airplanes. They first used
| gliders to test their wings and the control mechanisms. Then they
| built a wind tunnel to get accurate data about the lift and drag
| of a wing under specific circumstances. Then they built an engine
| lighter than any in use at the time. They designed their own
| propellers too, since nobody they talked to knew how to design
| one. Even for boats, the engineers who designed them just used
| heuristics and guesses and rules of thumb rather than any
| scientific processes in their work. The first few propeller
| shafts that they built turned out not to be strong enough and
| were destroyed. But they were methodical and driven, so they
| solved each problem one at a time until they had both a working
| airplane and a working knowledge of how to fly it.
| ttoinou wrote:
| Mastery by Robert Greene also mentions in a few pages this
| story about the Wright Brothers (they started from their
| expertise in bicycles, that's how they got planes right) and
| it's def a book the OP might be interested in.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| The Caro books on the LBJ presidency are incredible biographies.
| LBJ did crazy things to get where he got.
| pjmorris wrote:
| I've only read the first of Caro's LBJ biographies, 'The Path
| to Power', but I'd very much agree. I plan to read one
| annually, but last year's Caro was 'The Power Broker: Robert
| Moses and the Fall of New York.' How Moses acquired the power
| (genius, legislation, money and, through them, influence) to
| physically reshape New York City and State seems pretty
| relevant to understanding how things work today.
|
| I consider Caro's short book, 'Working', a gateway drug for the
| longer books.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| I just finished the first and I'm halfway through the second
| one, Means of Ascent. It's granted a little slower than the
| first.
|
| It helps to listen to them as audiobooks because I can play
| them at the gym or something or on my commute and don't have
| to get too focused on the details.
| riffraff wrote:
| not sure it's a story of "people doing hard things" but it may go
| your way for "mechanics of how things that we take for granted
| actually got built", the book is "Against the Gods: The
| Remarkable Story of Risk"
|
| > a comprehensive history of man's efforts to understand risk and
| probability, from ancient gamblers in Greece to modern chaos
| theory.
|
| In some parts it's not an easy read, but the underlying stories
| are very interesting.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Agreed not sure it exactly fits the prompt but this is a really
| fascinating book. One of those things where I didn't fully
| bring into conscious awareness until reading it: statistics are
| tools that didn't always exist, and had to be developed
| alongside multiple philosophical revolutions.
| 9dev wrote:
| Even if it probably isn't exactly what you were looking for, I'd
| wholeheartedly recommend _The Spy and the Traitor_ by Ben
| McIntyre, documenting the story of Oleg Gordievsky, the soviet
| spy that crossed over to the MI5 during the Cold War. It gave me
| a glimpse into the secret war at the time, the stuff that
| inspired James Bond, and the hardships and permanent threat faced
| by a spy trying to live several lives at once. It was one hell of
| a read.
| FinnLobsien wrote:
| All of the author's books are great imo. If you like cold war
| spy stories, you'd also enjoy Billion Dollar Spy.
| danieloj wrote:
| Agreed, this is probably the most gripping non-fiction I've
| ever read
| WalterBright wrote:
| "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" Rhodes
| solumos wrote:
| This is a more broad interpretation of "getting things done," but
| The Secret Race is an excellent book about what it was like to be
| a professional cyclist in the late 90s/early 2000s, doping and
| all
| sharpshadow wrote:
| Back then I've got my hands on a book about the history of low
| temperature research in German but unfortunately I can't find it
| anymore.
|
| I would say "Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold" would be a
| fitting match.
|
| The history to get to absolut zero kelvin would fit your
| description.
| DarknessFalls wrote:
| Do anthropomorphic trains count? The Little Engine That Could.
| xxr wrote:
| https://youtu.be/0T7huuYNEBA
| JudeFawley wrote:
| "Red Moon Rising" by Matthew Brzezinski, it tells the story of
| the Sputnik programme and is just really very well written.
| sebstefan wrote:
| "Outliers: The Story of Success" by Malcolm Gladwell but it's
| more centered on the mechanics that made successful people able
| to do the hard things. It does case studies on others that failed
| as well.
| simon_acca wrote:
| Cool question!
|
| Patrick Collison (of stripe fame) put together a collection of
| historical ambitious projects that got done quickly, look into
| the biographies of people mentioned in there.
| https://patrickcollison.com/fast
| stereobit wrote:
| The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal,
| 1870-1914
| idlewords wrote:
| Came here to post this same book.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| The chariots of apollo
| alexpogosyan wrote:
| Eccentric Orbits: The Iridium Story
|
| Book about Dan Colussy, who somehow managed to rescue Iridium
| satellite network when it was weeks away from bankruptcy and
| being deliberately crashed into the ocean.
| afandian wrote:
| I find reading books about how people did hard things to be very
| motivating and therapeutic, especially when facing a difficult
| task myself! I've enjoyed all of these; they were all
| recommendations from HN.
|
| Showstopper - Windows NT
|
| Losing the Signal - BlackBerry
|
| Made in Japan - Sony
|
| Piloting Palm - Palm
|
| Sweating Bullets - PowerPoint
|
| Folklore.org - Early Apple.
|
| The "Mac Folklore Radio Podcast" [0]. Has a few interesting
| stories of people innovating and solving challenges.
|
| [0] https://macfolkloreradio.com/
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Showstopper is a must read for anyone who is interested in
| living a pure engineering life. David Cutler is one of my
| heroes and I'll quote:
|
| "What I really wanted to do was work on computers, not apply
| them to problems"
|
| I'd also recommend listening to his interviews on YouTube.
| There are two long interviews, one by David's Garage and the
| other by CHM. Both very long and inspiring so I keep going back
| to them when I'm driving.
| ghaff wrote:
| If we're recommending Showstopper (which I do), I'd add Soul
| of a New Machine about Data General, where I worked for many
| years--but a bit later.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I have read that too, twice. I love the part that they
| talked about the microcode, and all others too. Maybe you
| should write a post about your experience too :) I'm sure
| it's going to be a blast to read.
| ghaff wrote:
| As I say, I was a bit later--mid-eighties--but I knew Jim
| Guyer who was one of the microkids as I recall. Helped
| setup an interview for Command Line Heroes podcast. Do
| need to get back into writing. Next week. Really.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Please do! Do you plan to write a book or blogs? Please
| let us know. I'll look for the podcast at least.
| ghaff wrote:
| https://www.redhat.com/en/command-line-
| heroes/season-4/minic...
|
| Another interesting pub from around the same period you
| may be interested in: https://archive.org/details/year-
| in-dev
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Thanks! I found it and just listened the podcast. It's
| pretty interesting albeit a bit short.
|
| I'll read the second link too tonight.
|
| Thanks again for sharing.
| ghaff wrote:
| They kept the podcasts fairly punchy. Actually both
| myself and Tom West's daughter were interviewed for it
| and we were both trimmed in the interests of length in
| favor of people they they were able to get who had first-
| hand involvement.
| begueradj wrote:
| "The Soul of a New Machine", by Tracy Kidder.
| FinnLobsien wrote:
| Robert Kurson's diving books (Shadow Divers and Pirate Hunters)
| are some of the best books on startups I've ever read. They're
| stories about some of the most ambitious wreck divers out there.
|
| It might not seem analogous, but there's a lot of parallels, i.e.
| you have limited air (aka runway), you need to choose the people
| on your expedition wisely and can't bring too many, you need to
| be extremely ambitious (seeking more than just touristy diving),
| etc.
|
| The writing is incredible, too.
| tompccs wrote:
| "Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of
| Science That Changed the Course of World War II"
|
| Covers the invention of radar, "big science", involvement in the
| Manhattan project.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Tuxedo-Park-Street-Science-Changed/dp...
|
| "Insisting On the Impossible : The Life of Edwin Land (inventor
| of instant photography and founder of Polarioid)"
|
| Probably one of the most brilliant commercial technology
| breakthroughs largely attributable to a single team and a
| singular vision. Steve Jobs' hero.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Insisting-Impossible-Life-Edwin-Land/...
| fhe wrote:
| Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology (goodreads link:
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/809315.Making_PCR)
|
| for a short video version of this history, see
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaXKQ70q4KQ from Veritasium.
|
| reasons for recommendation: - it's an example in the biological
| science, to complement the heavy representation of examples from
| computer science and entrepreneurship in this thread - the main
| character, Kary Mullis, is colorful and controversial. Not a
| likable individual, but nevertheless had traits (mostly an
| unreasonable obsession) that enabled him to make such a discovery
| - the discovery of high temperature tolerant enzymes predated
| Mullis' insight by some two decades, and it played a key role in
| making PCR practical and widely applicable. this is a pattern I
| have seen often in major inventions, which were made possible by
| prior discoveries (often decades old) which lay dormant until
| someone put everything together. This process of re-discovering
| the pieces and making connections is also where I think machine
| learning could be particularly helpful. In fact this is my main
| motivation for picking up this book (by online reviews, not a
| particularly well-written one).
| jll29 wrote:
| Reading some of these books recommended here, perhaps the most
| shocking thing is that so much is due to randomness: an arbitrary
| person does something small that turns out to be on the critical
| path, and without it the big thing would not get completed.
|
| I like the kind of books recommended here, but please be aware of
| survivor's bias (there not many books about failures! Any great
| recommendations? "How we could NOT get back to the moon again",
| "Recall: Toyota hits the breaks", "Last fag: how big tobacco lost
| against a Minneapolis law firm" ;-) and the fact that the winner
| gets to write the history. For example, next month, Bill Gates
| new memoir "Source Code" will come out, the first of three
| planned autobiographical books, and I doubt he will share with us
| how he strongarmed PC manufacturers into shipping Windows pre-
| installed in order to get the OS monopoly and other important
| events.
| mmkos wrote:
| That's my problem with a lot of the literature on building
| successful businesses. They all seem to be offering a white
| glove path and don't talk about all the tactics ranging from
| shady to downright illegal that helped many of the biggest
| companies today to be where they are now.
| gamebak wrote:
| I share your thoughts. Sometimes you just need to be at the
| right place, at the right time, solving the exact problem and
| this is troublesome, especially in this era when so much is
| already invented.
|
| Maybe I just have a wrong view, but I don't know how to
| decouple from this.
| withinboredom wrote:
| The fact that capitalism can be modeled by pure random
| chance only drives the point home, in my opinion. So much
| depends on luck...
|
| That being said, luck can be engineered, to a degree:
|
| - meeting people; networking
|
| - having access to resources
|
| - recognizing potential opportunities and taking advantage
| of them
|
| That being said, I'm by no means "successful" but I'm also
| not a "failure" ... I win some, and I lose some.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| And just following up: Even though there is a significant
| amount of random chance, that does not mean you are
| randomly sorted into success and failure.
|
| Even if you move from 0 to success with a very-small
| positive bias on your random walk, even the lower-bound
| on most of the results will be increasing with sqrt(n).
|
| Don't let randomness dissuade you from effort, even
| maximal effort, because every thing you can do it
| increase your "bias towards success" will have an effect
| over long time scales.
|
| Also, start early - stretch the time scale.
| withinboredom wrote:
| The way my dad explained it to me: "a heads or tail might
| matter, in the grand scheme of things, but at the end of
| the day, you gotta be there to flip the coin in the first
| place." Granted, he said that in regards to me being in
| the wrong place at the wrong time, but the quote applies
| aptly here.
| ghaff wrote:
| Absolutely. I've been pretty lucky in my career,
| especially at a couple of critical junctions. But I had
| also put the foundations in place to be lucky at those
| junctions.
| akudha wrote:
| Not just capitalism, luck applies to even ordinary things
| like getting jobs etc. This is not to say we shouldn't
| try or put effort into whatever we are doing, but luck
| does play a big part. In one place where I worked, this
| 18 year old kid got an internship. She wasn't terrible,
| but she wasn't great either. She masterfully did minimum
| work for maximum benefit. I learned she was the kid of a
| VP who worked there - I am sure there were plenty of kids
| who were more qualified/motivated than her, but they
| don't have a VP parent.
|
| There is a reason young people today feel hard work
| doesn't reward as much as it used to. Everything is
| stacked against them - from student loans to crappy jobs.
| SO MUCH depends on luck
| no_wizard wrote:
| There are many types of success.
|
| Tech has often been associated with novel success. That
| is success by inventing or perfecting a previously
| underrated, underestimated or wholly invented technology.
|
| This isn't the only type though.
|
| There is success through persistence. In the long run,
| 95% of businesses fail. Simply running a component
| operation that outlasts competitors in a proven market
| can take you very far. It's harder than it looks.
| Likewise this gets little traction on most media
|
| Then there is success by accident. The one that gets most
| traction in media is businesses that have some flash in
| the pan unexpected success. These seem to be a
| traditional combination of luck and persistence. Along
| these same lines are businesses that come to fruition
| during a time in which they can succeed, like TikTok and
| the pandemic.
| buzzardbait wrote:
| Success comes from hard work and perseverence.
|
| Success comes from being at the right place at the right
| time.
|
| Both of these statements can be true at the same time.
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| I would say that hard work and perseverance create the
| foundation, but timing and opportunity often determine
| the outcome.
| buzzardbait wrote:
| Yes. Although I suspect many would disagree since there's
| an entire subreddit dedicated to them! r/antiwork
| eevilspock wrote:
| Combined with the willingness to exploit those two things
| to hoard as much as you can, without qualms about taking
| advantage of cheap goods and cheap labor even from those
| who work as hard as you but get less because of
| economic/power/freedom asymmetries, without concern for
| the Mathews Effect (that wealth breeds wealth, that
| poverty breeds poverty)...
| ttoinou wrote:
| Damn you're right I'm tired of naive explanations we can find
| in books. Wouldnt the authors be in legal trouble though ?
| diggan wrote:
| Back in the day, when authors were afraid of negative
| (public perception) pushback, they used to write and
| publish under pseudonyms.
|
| Not sure it'd work today, everyone and their mother seems
| so focus on building their "personal brand" and attaching
| their name to everything that it seems impossible for an
| author to not take credit for something that would surely
| make big waves.
| ttoinou wrote:
| Unraveling a person behind a pseudonym and Doxing is much
| easier nowadays though. But I guess a self hosted blog
| would work just fine
| diggan wrote:
| > Unraveling a person behind a pseudonym and Doxing is
| much easier nowadays though
|
| For state level actors, sure. But generally? I don't
| think that's necessarily true, as long as you come up
| with a pseudonym that is unique, not related to anything
| in your real life, and you haven't already published a
| lot of prose under your real name.
| ghaff wrote:
| It depends how much people care even outside of state
| level actors, how much of a celebrity you are IRL, and
| how much care you've put into covering your tracks
| including just not telling people.
|
| These days you can probably do some writing pattern
| matching if you suspect the true name of an author but
| you can probably stay pretty pseudonymous unless people
| really want to determine a true identity. I don't have a
| lot of doubt I could _probably_ publish a pseudonymous
| blog if I took some reasonable precautions and didn 't
| write stuff that especially provided a fingerprint
| pointing to my IRL identity.
| narrator wrote:
| One of the fun things about reading Young Stalin, which is a
| biography of Stalin from birth to the Russian revolution, is
| nobody liked him in Georgia where he grew up, especially
| after the fall of the Soviet Union, so it was easy for the
| biographer to get sources to tell all the negative and
| horrifying details of his earlier life building and running
| organized crime gangs to fund the Russian revolution. Imagine
| the most paranoid narcissistic jerks you've ever known who
| also happen to be exceptionally intelligent decide to take
| over a country and they manage to pull it off. Fascinating
| stuff.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Unorthodox suggestion - look at the documentaries and lit on
| mob tactics.
|
| The mob is basically a corporation, held together by a
| charismatic CEO. In its later years, violence was (I think?)
| less common, so politics and deal-making became the norm.
| However, given the subject matter, they likely wouldn't
| whitewash the reality of it.
| vik0 wrote:
| >Unorthodox suggestion - look at the documentaries and lit
| on mob tactics.
|
| You got any documentaries and books/articles to recommend?
| akudha wrote:
| When I was a kid, I read about Jack Welch and thought he was
| great. Later I learned of all the shenanigans he pulled, not
| just unethical, but illegal stuff. And the way he trampled
| people. Bill Gates is a respected philanthropist today, he
| too did all kinds of shady, ruthless stuff to get to the top.
| Everywhere I look, same story - Amazon, Facebook, Google...
| The only big company I think is okay is Costco - either they
| really are good or I haven't yet about their practices.
|
| There is this podcast called _Behind the bastards_ - in one
| way, it is eye opening. But it is also depressing, it does a
| pretty good job of shattering all our beliefs and respect for
| the rich and the successful.
|
| Is it even possible today to become super successful without
| doing shady/unethical/illegal stuff? Everything from garden
| variety wage theft all the way upto buying politicians and
| corporate espionage?
| theposey wrote:
| sounds cynical but I'm shifted to believing not. If you
| don't do it there will always be someone else who will. Not
| to say you should, that's a personal choice of course, but
| in a competitive environment there will always be someone
| or lots of someones who will do anything.
| dbspin wrote:
| This is why its vital to make unethical corporate
| malfeasance costly. Meaningful fines and criminal
| convictions for individual executives responsible for law
| breaking, wage theft, and intentional violations of
| regulation, provide meaningful deterrent. In their
| absence tax evasion and white collar crime become
| normative, which changes the game for anyone working in
| executive level roles.
| ghaff wrote:
| For any successful company, you can probably find ex-
| employees who think that some "fat trimming" was excessive
| and unnecessarily cruel or that they pushed some line or
| another in excessive ways.
|
| The Jack Welch case (and I'd add Mark Hurd at HP) was an
| example of financial engineering looking great for a time--
| until it wasn't.
| buzzardbait wrote:
| Perhaps not, but I think you can be "very successful" while
| remaining ethical.
|
| Most people want to be successful because success brings
| happiness. But there is a level of success at which
| happiness starts to plateau and yields diminishing returns
| of happiness.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Thank you for saying that. I get low-level irritated at
| the constant background murmur that success means that
| you had to screw someone over at some point.
| akudha wrote:
| Can you run a 1M, 10M dollar business ethically without
| screwing over anyone - employees, customers, suppliers,
| environment etc? Sure. What about 100M, 1B, 10B, 100B
| businesses?
|
| How many Billion dollar businesses can we name that are
| run ethically? Not that many, correct me if I am wrong. I
| suppose at some level, profit and monopoly becomes the
| one and only motivation. Plus if you didn't do shady
| stuff, your competitors surely would, putting you at a
| disadvantage.
|
| Why else would Google drop "don't do evil" from their
| principles?
| eevilspock wrote:
| It really boils down to your system of morality.
|
| If your are willing to look at capitalism and free
| markets objectively[1], as just algorithms rather than
| moral systems (i.e. private property is part of an
| algorithm, not an "inalienable human right"), and you
| realize that it isn't moral that one's share of the pie
| be determined by the free market, that it isn't moral
| that the value of a person be determined by the free
| market, that it isn't moral to leverage your advantage or
| even hard work to grab a much bigger share of the pie
| even as others who because of birth circumstance get the
| thinnest slice or no slice at all, that it isn't moral to
| enjoy the fruits of cheap labor do to the desperation of
| the aforementioned, that it isn't moral to take advantage
| of your other advantages birth circumstances (e.g. being
| born within the borders of a wealthy country that keeps
| out those born in poor ones) to grab more, then you will
| find that material success (success as defined by
| capitalism) that is complicit in all the aforementioned
| _does_ screw someone over.
|
| Such a person will have a different definition of
| success: A life of contribution to the community done out
| of love and morality, not a coerced transaction
| leveraging one's advantages against those with less.
|
| ---
|
| [1]: _" It is difficult to get a man to understand
| something, when his salary depends upon his not
| understanding it!"_ ~ Upton Sinclair
| jimbokun wrote:
| There's a certain strand of progressivism that holds as
| axiomatic that wealth and power are inherently evil.
| codechicago277 wrote:
| Aaron Greenspan created the early version of what Facebook
| became, and has loudly criticized the zero-sum tactics used
| by Zuckerberg, Gates, and other billionaires:
| https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-legend-of-mark-
| zucker_b_7...
|
| Some interesting books in this category: * Masters of Doom.
| It's about John Carmack and the team that built Id Software
| * Einstein. By Walter Isaacson, author of the Jobs
| biography. Einstein's 4 papers are one of the most
| unexpected, ground breaking discoveries in history *
| Houdini!!! Tells the story of the escape artist and
| magician, and exposer of psychics. * The Double Helix *
| Stress Test. By Tim Geithner who pulled the world out of
| the financial crisis * Man's Search for Meaning. Surviving
| and finding meaning in a concentration camp
| thinkharderdev wrote:
| I read the Einstein biography. Highly recommended. But to
| the parents point, I came way think Einstein was a huge
| asshole, especially given his pop culture representation
| as a kindly old grandfather type.
| thruway516 wrote:
| Probably every human being looks like a huge asshole if
| you put their entire life under a microscope. Even Mother
| Teresa did some giant asshole things if I remember.
| You're just not aware what a huge asshole you are because
| someone hasn't written a very good biography of your life
| from a perspective different from yours (or you havent
| lived long enough)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I'm fairly convinced most successful "social" sites have
| bodies buried somewhere. The problem of launching a two-
| sided market is tough.
|
| It was against my ethics but we sent a round of
| unsolicited emails to about 10,000 people in Brazil to
| launch a voice chat service circa 2001. It must have been
| a really good list (and a different time and place)
| because we had close to a 40% response rate. (Later we
| got a list that was so bad some of the emails didn't have
| '@' signs in them!)
|
| There's that famous story of how reddit was initially
| populated with fake users too.
|
| ---
|
| I've never been able to enjoy that Viktor Frankl book,
| _Man 's Search for Meaning_ ,since I read an essay that
| pointed out how pernicious it was that postmodern people
| like to fantasize that everyday life is like a
| concentration camp -- paradoxically that fantasy
| undermines Frankl's own thesis
|
| I recently read an account of a 14 year old girl (a demo
| that is vulnerable to Franklism, I had one in an acting
| class I was in) who said she thought about the Holocaust
| (survived by some ancestors she'd never met) every day
| and experienced it as a trauma. If that's what it means
| to "remember the Holocaust" we might be better to forget.
| We hear the refrain that "it must never happen again" but
| it happens over and over again routinely
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide
|
| and if that memory makes us think it is a memory and not
| an ongoing crime, it is part of the problem and not part
| of the solution. You can take your own experiences of
| your group being persecuted and apply that to justice
| universally (Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner gave
| their lives together with African-American James Chaney
| in 1964 to fight racism in the U.S. South) or you can use
| it as an excuse to commit similar crimes (kill and
| displace civilians) against other people. It's your
| choice.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > * The Double Helix
|
| This one is rather famous for Watson's minimization of
| the role Rosalind Franklin played in the process of
| discovering DNA, and Watson himself later acknowledged
| his mistakes in doing so (though he never corrected
| them).
| neves wrote:
| USA culture has this idolatry for the Rich that looks like
| what the aristocracy always did: my "beloved" king, the
| kind princess... Like the philanthropy of the robber barons
| that made them respectable, but when they are still alive.
|
| I prefer the French approach to take care of aristocrats.
| nickff wrote:
| The French Revolution led to quite poor results for those
| fortunate enough to survive it. You might prefer the
| approach, but I doubt you'd enjoy the aftermath.
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| ? Have you ever even opened a history book? Is this
| sarcasm?
| nickff wrote:
| I am not being sarcastic. The revolution and subsequent
| wars caused extremely high casualty rates among French
| men, while the country isolated itself from international
| trade, and suffered negative economic consequences.
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| Have you held the nations that stayed aristocratic and
| the havoc they caused next to france? Getting rid of
| parasitic waterhead bodies of government is always a pro
| birthong pains included.
|
| PS : Those wars started because the assembled aristocracy
| of f europe jumped the reforming nation.
| portaouflop wrote:
| Big part the French Revolution is not by chance called
| "la Terreur".
|
| You can acknowledge that the values the revolution
| promoted are good, aristocratic rule needed reform, while
| still being clear that revolutions are not a peaceful
| thing, especially not for poor or marginalised groups.
| 50.000 people executed is quite some birthing pains...
| jimbokun wrote:
| > Those wars started because the assembled aristocracy of
| f europe jumped the reforming nation.
|
| And you think this _helps_ your argument?
| watwut wrote:
| It led to dictatorship and itself was a super bloody
| dictatorships. The regime it replaced was failing,
| corrupt etc. But the revolution was not "make us free and
| happy" kind of event. It was "and now we are going to go
| through really really bad times" kind of event.
| etc-hosts wrote:
| > There is this podcast called Behind the bastards
|
| I know so much more now about the figures behind the rise
| of the fascism before the end of WW2 because of this
| podcast.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| I think a problem is that we have to look at shady,
| ruthless, unethical and illegal actions as different
| categories, but to many people they are all the same.
|
| Of course, you don't want to leave a trail of bodies in
| your wake but Life's not a bowl of cherries and taking a
| Pollyanna approach to business won't get you very far.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yes, and even just the normal business attitude of "our
| goal is to make a profit, not solve all the world's
| social problems" is viewed as "unethical" by many people
| (most of whom have never run a business).
| portaouflop wrote:
| If your business's goal is only "make money" and not
| solve any real human problems then it should not exist.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| It doesn't have to be the only goal, but if you're not
| making money you will not be able to achieve anything
| else. So it's the thing that enables any other goals you
| might have (and, I might add, it's the main thing that
| makes it worth the risk, vs. just putting your money in
| savings bonds or something).
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| What "real human problem" is a coffee shop solving?
| jimbokun wrote:
| Giving people a place to buy and drink coffee.
| Wohlf wrote:
| From what I hear Costco is also changing after their new
| CEO took over and the stock skyrocketed.
| Jimpulse wrote:
| You talking about Ron Vachris? The guy who started his
| career as a Costco forklift driver?
| jppope wrote:
| Theres a ton of ethical wealthy people, you just have no
| clue who they are because they are playing a different game
| and don't want the spotlight.
|
| Whats the shady ruthless stuff from Google? They've
| obviously started running their business differently after
| the easy growth went away, but I've never heard anyone be
| like: they made me pee in a bottle because going to the
| bathroom was too much time off the line.
| portaouflop wrote:
| Here is a nice list:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Google
|
| Mind you that only includes the most high profile (and
| known) stuff. Plenty of skeletons still in the closet
| portaouflop wrote:
| >Is it even possible today to become super successful
| without doing shady/unethical/illegal stuff?
|
| No I don't think it is - and I would argue it never was -
| for me it is morally reprehensible to be a millionaire.
|
| But then again humans are complex creatures and who is
| without fault may throw the first stone
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| An interesting question is how authors of these books look
| for stories to turn into book. Stories traditionally have a
| standard arc where the hero faces a challenge but wins in the
| end having learned something. I'd be curious to talk to
| authors about how much the desire to fit this template
| influences the selection of what they write about.
| verisimi wrote:
| That's because the literature has a value in its own right.
| Like history, the message that is presented, is for the
| present. Reality/truth be damned. The present day operational
| advantage is all.
|
| This is very cynical - but also freeing - when accepted. Do
| you think the yatch, billions, beautiful wife is worth your
| integrity? You decide.
| zie wrote:
| It's more of a, it generally wasn't illegal at the time they
| did those things, and of course now they want it to be
| illegal. It's much like pulling the rope up behind them so
| nobody else can climb the same ladder they did.
|
| There is a reason you have to have licenses to braid hair,
| cut nails, etc(and charge for it) in many US states for
| instance. It's not a simple license like a food worker has to
| do. It's much more involved.
|
| I mean if someone is going to mess with my hair, do a
| manicure or pedicure they should know the basic hygiene
| things much like a food worker has to do. I'm good with that.
| Why do they need _more_ than that? It 's not because we as a
| society actually care that much about a person that can't
| braid hair trying to charge for it. It's because all those
| beauticians want to limit their competition.
|
| OK rant over for the day.
| InkCanon wrote:
| I have a contrary opinion: most important things are started by
| apparently small things, but there is a huge amount of
| training, effort and persistence behind getting to that small
| thing. Zuckerberg was a serial entrepreneur who already made a
| few successful websites/apps before Facebook, Nvidia spent
| decades becoming the world's best GPU manufacturer (when they
| started there were ~300 graphics processor companies), etc etc.
| relaxing wrote:
| I don't think that's contrary, rather both are usually true.
| You have to get lucky but also be in a position to take
| advantage when you do.
| sjm-lbm wrote:
| Since we're talking about books, this statement reminds me of
| one that OP might want to look at: Super Founders.
|
| It's been a while since I've read it, but off the top of my
| head: most successful founders are older than you probably
| think, have less industry experience than you probably think,
| start (like nVidia) with more competitors than you think, but
| (to your other point) are more likely to have more
| entrepreneurial experience than you think (even very young
| famous founders like Zuckerberg or the Collisons had another
| venture before the one that made them very well known).
|
| Honestly I found Super Founders kind of dry, but it's one of
| the only data-driven books about what differences exist
| between founders of businesses with exception outcomes vs
| founders with less successful outcomes that I've read.
| cloverich wrote:
| One thing I've noticed working with successful people, is
| they consistently have a track record of success. Even when
| its non work related - for instance being very high level in
| a competitive video game. Being personally interested in both
| business and hobby success, I see this across so many
| disparate activities. Successful people tackle their pursuits
| with their heart and soul, but are also smart about what they
| do, who they learn from, who they surround themselves with,
| etc.
| diggan wrote:
| > an arbitrary person does something small that turns out to be
| on the critical path, and without it the big thing would not
| get completed.
|
| I've been on a somewhat James Burke binge for the last 6 months
| or so. For the ones who don't know, Burke write books and makes
| TV shows talking about inventions/technology and how they're
| all connected, often by chance and randomness.
|
| And the amount of discoveries we (humanity) made by pure
| luck/chance/coincident is incredible. So many things we find
| vital today can be summed up to be discovered when someone was
| bored and was randomly messing around with stuff, or they tried
| to do something that would never have worked, but accidentally
| did X and noticed something strange.
|
| Just a random example I can recall: In 1928, Alexander Fleming
| was researching influenza when he noticed that some mold had
| accidentally contaminated his petri dishes. Looking into it
| further, he noticed that the mold seemed to be killing the
| bacteria. Because of that, this particular species of mold
| became world famous ("Penicillium notatum") and Penicillin
| became the world's first antibiotic :)
| adonovan wrote:
| Which Burke books do you most recommend?
| ghaff wrote:
| The Day the Universe Changed and Connections were his two
| big series. I think I have the former book somewhere but
| I'd probably be inclined to find and watch the two series.
| pjmorris wrote:
| In the same timeframe, someone here mentioned 'The Trigger
| Effect', the first episode of Burke's first (BBC 1970's)
| Connections series. We watched the first series (via random
| videos we could find online) and the most recent version of
| the series (on CuriousityStream), and I think he digs deeper
| in the first one. I need to read the books, I'm now a huge
| fan, and recommend him to my curious friends.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Definitely agree on that last point, and recommended folks read
| Jerry Kaplan's _StartUp_ which tells the story of how MS wiped
| out Go Corp. and eliminated PenPoint from the marketplace:
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1171250.Startup
| rmvt wrote:
| enjoyed seeing bill gates mentioned here (in this context). i
| had no idea msods was essentially bought until very recently
| (mentioned in a book i've been listening to - "fancy bear goes
| fishing" for those interested - which shines some light on
| security practices, or lack thereof, by microsoft)
| piokoch wrote:
| And how Bill mom (IBM board member) helped him to win the
| contract for... IBM, despite better options on the market.
| Thanks to that we were all rewarded with such gems like Windows
| 98 ME or Windows Vista.
| epolanski wrote:
| Why reason in hypotheticals?
|
| Microsoft has been crucial into bringing compute in people's
| homes, the evolution of video gaming, the internet etc.
|
| They fluked a lot, they used their advantageous position like
| most companies try to, but assuming that we would have gotten
| better alternatives is not a given.
|
| Also, in hindsight was IBM wrong to bet on Microsoft? They
| sure have done multi hundred billions $ together.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's not like CP/M was really better. Some of the
| minicomputer operating systems were but it's not clear they
| would have been a good fit for the IBM PC and, in any case,
| companies like DEC and DG wouldn't have been inclined to
| play in that space--especially for a reasonable price--at
| the time.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Exactly. "Better options on the market"? Better by whose
| definition? Certainly not IBM's.
|
| And it's naive to assume that other companies wouldn't have
| used the same tactics that Microsoft did.
| thruway516 wrote:
| Yes. If you look at the Alto, the Unix OS or the original
| mac (which itself was a kind of inferior ripoff of the
| Alto), Microsoft's domination was very much a case of bad
| products driving out the good and setting back personal
| computing by decades. Not until Linux, the Internet and the
| Iphone did we start to get a taste of where most people in
| the 70s and 80s thought personal computing was headed.
| louwrentius wrote:
| I think the book "The Bill Gates Problem" should be mandatory
| reading for all of HN.[0] Unfortunately, I'm afraid this
| requirement would backfire on me as I'm afraid that a ton of HN
| visitors would use it as a guide to become like Gates instead
| so they can too become a mini-dictator with unreasonable
| influence over the world.
|
| [0]: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/448140/the-bill-gates-
| proble...
| wodenokoto wrote:
| There's also and "authoring" bias. The "did random thing and it
| let to big things" is just a good story that we like to tell
| and hear.
|
| I guess my best example is Netflix's "I forgot to return Apollo
| 13 to blockbuster and ended up starting one of the most
| prominent tech and entertainment business", even though that
| random event is total bogus.
|
| It's a good story that helped Netflix get stories in the news.
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| Every success story is built on a path of failures. I like to
| believe in this. It motivates me not to give up. (If I
| understood everything correctly...)
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| That made me think of my favourite motivational poster, which
| is titled <<Mistakes>>: https://despair.com/collections/poste
| rs/products/mistakes?va...
| dano wrote:
| I'd recommend Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. It
| covers the trials and tribulations as well as the brilliance
| and ruthless tactics taken to build Standard Oil.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| Yeah it's a great book. It definitely gets into the weeds
| about his family and personal life (as a comprehensive
| biography should). Personally, I enjoyed that stuff, but if
| you just want to learn about how he did hard stuff as the OP
| described, it may be a bit thick at 600+ pages. That said, we
| summarized it in discussion form on our podcast if anyone is
| interested:
| http://businessbooksandco.com/episode/7b5d6ab9/titan-the-
| lif...
| meigwilym wrote:
| The Big Short is an excellent book about failures. Really shows
| how, despite huge institutions and government regulation, human
| hype and bluster still was the main culprit.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| If you're interested in a book about massive failure - read the
| story of Donald Crowhurst (The Strange Last Voyage of Donald
| Crowhurst is the book, there is also a documentary out there).
| It's hard to tell much without spoiling it, but basically, a
| highly publicized sailing competition was sponsored in the mid
| 20th century to see who could be the first person in history to
| solo circumnavigate the globe with a sailboat. Crowhurst had
| little to no sailing experience, and mostly sold navigation
| equipment and gadgets for sailing - a weekend warrior - and bet
| his entire future and business to support his entry into this
| endeavor. It erm... did not go well, and got increasingly
| worse, then almost ok.. then absolutely not okay. They don't
| know what truly happened in the end, but what did survive shows
| he went mad at sea from the likely pressure he was under.
| Anon84 wrote:
| The 2018 biopic is also absolutely gorgeous:
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3319730/plotsummary/
| standeven wrote:
| There are some chapters in a fantastic book, "Thinking Fast and
| Slow" by Daniel Kahneman, that explain how luck has a huge
| amount of influence on the events in the world.
| alaithea wrote:
| > there not many books about failures! Any great
| recommendations?
|
| The Logic of Failure is a fantastic book about failures,
| including some famous examples of failure (e.g. Chernobyl).
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Logic-Failure-Recognizing-Avoiding-Si...
| master-lincoln wrote:
| The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn showing how
| Stalin operated and how imprisoned people survived is a good read
| about humans doing hard things.
| ned99 wrote:
| The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan is a nice read. You can
| learn critical thinking from this book.
| matt_j wrote:
| Carrying The Fire by Michael Collins is an excellent account of
| Apollo 11 from the perspective of the command module pilot. I've
| read it three times, it's a wonderful book, he's a very
| intelligent, capable and humble man.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| This book completely changed my understanding of how that era
| of space projects was developed. Before reading it I didn't
| know how involved the early astronauts were in actually
| developing the systems, spacecraft, and procedures.
|
| As test pilots they were extremely competent technicians
| obviously, but they were expected to develop in novel
| individual domains to solve previously unexplored problems. By
| the end of gemini the first two dozen astronauts were each
| among a handful of world experts in their focus: things like
| orbital rendezvous mechanics, navigation, interface design,
| biomechanics of flight, radio telemetry. The program wasn't
| built for them to fly, to a huge extent they guided how it was
| built.
| andrepd wrote:
| Damn, I must confess when I read the title I thought you meant
| things like war, or scientific inventions, or historical
| political events. Turns out you meant private equity and Texas
| oil x)
| oliwary wrote:
| I really enjoyed the book "iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How
| I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun
| Doing It", which not only talks about the beginning of Apple and
| computers in general, but also gives a fascinating insight into
| the character of Steve Wozniak.
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/798635.iWoz
| Over2Chars wrote:
| Your title says "people who did hard things" then you say "less
| interested in people..."
|
| It sounds like you want second hand accounts of the events or
| groups that occurred around "hard things". Like a description of
| NASA going to the moon, but not the accounts of a particular
| astronaut.
|
| What is a "hard thing"?
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| The road to character.
|
| It's a great reality check, poking into human nature, morality,
| suffering, all with real life examples and littlz tolerance for
| bullshit without delusion of grandeur.
| fsloth wrote:
| "Walt Disney" by Neal Gabler. The man was reinventing himself
| through his life. Disney is sort nowadays stereotypical corporate
| americana but by god, it actually was started by the whims,
| passion, skill & vision of Walt. A must read imo to anyone
| interested in creation and building.
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| Walt Disney's story was always fascinating for me! How one
| person's vision could shape an entire industry and cultural
| legacy
| SeriousGamesKit wrote:
| I'd suggest 'The Rickover Effect' by Theodore Rockwell. The
| author gives a firsthand account of what it was like to be part
| of the teams who created the first nuclear-powered submarine and
| civilian nuclear power plant (perhaps counterintuitively, in that
| order). There is a fair amount of discussion about people,
| culture and leadership, but it is very grounded and very detailed
| about the mechanics of what went into these projects and how the
| former made the latter possible.
| squeedles wrote:
| "Across The Airless Wilds" by Eric Swift. Tells the story of how
| the moon buggy came to be and how it was contracted and built in
| 18 months. Fascinating deep dive into what it actually took to
| make that work on the moon.
|
| https://www.harpercollins.com/products/across-the-airless-wi...
|
| He also wrote a book on the interstate highway system called The
| Big Roads which was interesting but not as much of a page turner.
| squeedles wrote:
| Sorry, Earl Swift, not Eric
| alentred wrote:
| I think that "people who did hard things" fall on a spectrum
| between these two extremities:
|
| - someone who got lucky
|
| - someone who invested an unfathomable amount of time to their
| craftsmanship or to their beliefs
|
| Of course it is not black and white, and even luck mostly
| requires hard work in the first place, which I admire (and if you
| find your luck - hold to it!, nothing wrong with that), but you
| get the gist. I guess that in other words what I am saying is:
| beware of the survivorship bias on the left side of this
| spectrum.
|
| --
|
| Finally, the book: "The story of my experiments with Truth",
| Ghandi. Definitely belongs to the "work hard" extremity and a
| very interesting read; but I don't want to create an impression
| that I find it special in any way because of my above comment, it
| is just one of the latest I have read, consider the two comments
| unrelated.
| ryandrake wrote:
| The books about people who did hard things and spent an
| unfathomable amount of time on them, but failed and never
| became known for anything--generally don't get written. It's
| hard for me to take any "hard work success story" as
| prescriptive. It's mostly survivorship bias.
| SanjayMehta wrote:
| The Six Mountain Travel Books by Eric Shipton.
| somenameforme wrote:
| "The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch" [1] is an
| amazing read. It's a mix of history and how-to describing how
| (and when.. which is often extremely surprising) developed the
| technology that we have, and how it might be recreated starting
| from scratch.
|
| [1] -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Knowledge:_How_to_Rebuild_...
| commondream wrote:
| The Making of the Atomic Bomb is one I read recently and really
| enjoyed.
|
| I didn't love the writing, but thought Skunkworks was full of
| good stories.
|
| It is a little more character study but Dealers of Lightning is a
| good one.
|
| I also enjoyed The Idea Factory.
|
| And last, a little off the path of making things but Endurance
| was a good read.
| protocolture wrote:
| To avoid some survivorship bias and maybe offer something you
| wont find other recommending.
|
| Gamasutra used to offer these amazing post mortems written up by
| game developers after shipping a product. Often recounting all
| their failures and how they still shipped.
| alecco wrote:
| Good idea. * "Billion Dollar Loser" by Reeves
| Wiedeman (WeWork) * "Bad Blood" by John Carreyrou
| (Theranos) * "Losing My Virginity" by Richard Branson
| (his failed projects) * "The Hard Thing About Hard
| Things" by Ben Horowitz
| zikduruqe wrote:
| Surviving a concentration camp seems a tad difficult.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man's_Search_for_Meaning
|
| Everyone should read this at least twice in their lives.
| lnsru wrote:
| Another book about survival there:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_of_the_Gods When I have
| a bad day I think about this book and intellectuals in hell.
| sreeramvenkat wrote:
| Read it as if you are reading it the second time.
| brainzap wrote:
| I am not reading it
| itisit wrote:
| Perhaps you should.
| ckmate-king-2 wrote:
| One of the most famous accounts, also universally acclaimed, is
| Primo Levi's Survival at Auschwitz.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/22/primo-levi-aus...
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| We read this book in book club when I was a teenager. It was
| incredibly impressive. I think it's time to read it again...
| rottc0dd wrote:
| I really "Idea Man" by Paul Newman. Though survivorship bias is
| apparent, it was insightful read on how Apple an Msft came to be
| and why they are what they are. For example, why closed system
| was important and worked for Apple.
|
| It was great read until he leaves Microsoft.
| jdeibele wrote:
| "Idea Man" is by Paul Allen.
|
| "The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man: A Memoir" looks
| like an interesting book on Paul Newman but I haven't read it.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| Every few years I re-read Homer - Odyssey. And maybe the
| threats/challenges aren't the same, but.. they are.
| crones wrote:
| Based on what you said you have enjoyed already, I'd highly
| recommend "A Triumph of Genius: Edwin Land, Polaroid and the
| Kodak Patent War" by Ronald K. Fierstein
| (http://www.triumphofgenius.com/).
|
| It is a history of Land and Polaroid, together with a detailed,
| insider's view of the long-running litigation between Polaroid
| and Kodak (the author worked at the firm which represented
| Polaroid on the case).
|
| One of the things I found most interesting was just how much
| Steve Jobs was inspired by and copied Edwin Land.
| busyant wrote:
| I was a postdoc at Land's research institute (https://en.wikipe
| dia.org/wiki/The_Rowland_Institute_at_Harva...) in the '90s.
|
| The place was wild. Land had been dead for a few years when I
| got there, but they still employed his driver. My recollection
| is that the driver brought in donuts once per week. The place
| felt like an upscale hotel with laboratories in it. And $$ was
| no object. Need a $40k laser? Just write the requisition.
|
| Looks like it was fully taken over by Harvard (at the time it
| was only peripherally associated).
|
| Another funny Land story... My postdoc advisor was a faculty
| member at another university in the 1970s and Land and his
| entourage were there visiting various labs. My advisor thumped
| Land on the chest and said that he liked his shirt. According
| to my advisor, Land's handlers were visibly upset, but Land
| appreciated being treated like a regular human.
| Jimmc414 wrote:
| Endurance - about Ernest Shackleton and his crew during their
| 1914-1916 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance:_Shackleton%27s_In...
| 20wenty wrote:
| Similar in nature is Farthest North: The Incredible Three-Year
| Voyage to the Frozen Latitudes of the North. Fridjtof Nansen
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fridtjof_Nansen) led the
| expedition.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| Second this suggestion. The one by Caroline Alexander is also
| very good.
|
| It's a story of the most incredible leadership during
| spectacular difficulty overcoming multiple seemingly impossible
| things.
| quirk wrote:
| Yep came here to recommend this. Incredible story.
| krysp wrote:
| A top recommendation along these lines is The Worst Journey in
| the World by Apsley Cherry-Garard; a member of the Scott
| expedition to the south pole, which goes into detail of his
| winter journey (which the title refers to). One of the best
| historical adventure books I've read
| sgt101 wrote:
| I came here to say this. Props.
| jkingsbery wrote:
| The Last Viking - a biography of explorer Roald Amundsen
|
| The Wager- a book about a ship by the same name which wrecked in
| the Drake Passage.
|
| Eccentric Orbits - about the Iridium constellation.
|
| The Great Bridge by David McCullough - goes into a pretty good
| amount of detail in the engineering and sub-problems of
| construction of the Brooklyn Bridge.
| WillAdams wrote:
| _The Biography of Ottmar Mergenthaler, Inventor of the Linotype_
| by Carl Schlesinger
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3648638-the-biography-of...
|
| c.f.,
|
| _Tolbert Lanston and the Monotype: The Origin of Digital
| Typesetting_ by Richard L Hopkins
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17140645-tolbert-lanston...
|
| For background on how difficult/apparently impossible this was,
| see the story of Mark Twain's investment in a typesetting
| machine:
|
| https://twain.lib.virginia.edu/yankee/cymach6.html
|
| One of the more memorably moments of my life was visiting a local
| newspaper back when they were still setting type using a Linotype
| machine --- it's just incredible to watch one (or the competing
| Monotype) work.
|
| If I could, I'd have a Monotype machine in my shop along with a
| printing press, but first I'd need a shop, rather than a
| workbench at one end of the basement laundry room...
|
| It's my understanding that for a long while, the U.S. Patent
| Office refused to consider patents for intermittent windshield
| wiping mechanisms because none of them worked --- the actual
| story of the invention is far more sordid:
|
| https://thehustle.co/windshield-wiper-inventor-robert-kearns
|
| For us folks interested in computers, there is of course Charles
| Babbage who tried and failed, yet still managed to create many of
| the concepts underlying our modern computing devices.
|
| While the story of a team, Tracy Kidder's _The Soul of a New
| Machine_ is a classic which I would highly recommend:
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/7090.The_Soul_of_a_Ne...
|
| and for a more recent spin on things, look at the folks who
| crashed and burned such as Jerry Kaplan:
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1171250.Startup
| Dowwie wrote:
| Power Broker
| mtmail wrote:
| In the 1930s Phyllis Pearsall
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllis_Pearsall) walked 3000
| miles of every street of London (23000), collected house numbers,
| to create a street atlas to sell. Took her 4 years of 18 hour
| days. The book title is "Mrs P's Journey". The whole history of
| early map making is fascinating.
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| Didnt have offsite backups, and if you did you were doing twice
| the work.
| newswasboring wrote:
| The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll might be interesting to you. Its
| a story about how he tracked down a spy starting from a few
| pennies missing in a balance sheet. A very pleasant read and a
| good audio book too.
| zekyl314 wrote:
| I was going to suggest the same book. I first ran into story on
| PBS as a teenager, it was titled "The KGB, the Computer and
| Me".
| 23B1 wrote:
| > Less interested in people and character studies. More
| interested in the mechanics of how things that we take for
| granted actually got built and what the world they were made in
| was like.
|
| These two things are inseparable.
| willturman wrote:
| Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner is about America's water
| infrastructure and does an incredible job of outlining the mind-
| blowing scale of it all as well as the political / historical
| context in which bureaucracies like the Bureau of Reclamation
| were able to build 30,000+ dams across nearly every instance of
| flowing water in the American West.
| te_chris wrote:
| The Wager by David Grann, about a disastrous British maritime
| voyage in the 18th century that involved shipwreck, surviving
| castaways, multiple distinct routes back to Britain, then
| fighting over the story when different parties got back.
|
| None of this hagiographic bollocks.
| JoyfulTurkey wrote:
| In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by
| Nathaniel Philbrick.
|
| Story of the survivors of a sunken whale ship after a sperm whale
| attack. A source of inspiration for Moby Dick.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| _The Poincare Conjecture_ by Donal O 'Shea
|
| _In the Heart of the Sea_ by Nathaniel Philbrick
| simulo wrote:
| Bruno Latour's "The Pasteurization of France" is about Louis
| Pasteur and the creation and success of germ theory. It does
| explain it not by focussing on Pasteur per se, but by showing how
| different groups of people adapted it for different goals.
| joaodelgado wrote:
| I've recently read Annapurna by Maurice Herzog. It's a recall of
| the first accent of an 8000m peak, told by the leader of the
| expedition. I highly recommend it.
| mikesabat wrote:
| The first book I thought about from this prompt is The
| Fountainhead. It's fiction and was written in the 1940's, but is
| very relevant to modern times. Very well written and in my
| opinion this book is better than Atlas Shrugged.
| jdshaffer wrote:
| "Farthest North"
|
| In 1893, Fridjtof Nansen set sail in the Fram, a ship specially
| designed and built to be frozen into the polar ice cap, withstand
| its crushing pressures, and travel with the sea's drift closer to
| the North Pole than anyone had ever gone before. Experts said
| such a ship couldn't be built and that the voyage was tantamount
| to suicide.
|
| This brilliant first-person account, originally published in
| 1897, marks the beginning of the modern age of exploration.
| Nansen vividly describes the dangerous voyage and his 15-month-
| long dash to the North Pole by sledge. Farthest North is an
| unforgettable tale and a must-read for any armchair explorer.
|
| https://www.gutenberg.org/files/30197/30197-h/30197-h.htm
| iforaa wrote:
| My favorite on this topic is The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil,
| Money & Power. It's a deep dive into the emergence and evolution
| of the oil industry. Technological innovations, financial
| developments, political shifts and so on.
| oblo_mov wrote:
| Great call! I went for The New Map but this one is v high up my
| to read list.
| angusb wrote:
| I've been finding The Prize surprisingly light on technical
| details - I'm 1/3 of the way through the book and half way
| through the chronology of the oil industry and it hasn't even
| mentioned a distillation column. Does it get more technical?
| oblo_mov wrote:
| I would recommend The New Map - it's about the extraordinary
| development of Fracking and how it changed geopolitics.
| pauldix wrote:
| Great Fortune, a book about the making of Rockefeller Center is
| one of my favorites.
| lhh wrote:
| Titan (about John Rockefeller and the making of Standard Oil) and
| House of Morgan (about J.P. Morgan, the man and the investment
| bank, and the making of the modern financial system) were both
| excellent.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| American Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Marin J. Sherwin
|
| It is based on ~20 years of research about Robert Oppenheimer,
| and is the inspiration for the movie Oppenheimer. Robert
| Oppenheimer is the scientist who lead the development of the
| first atomic bomb.
|
| > Less interested in people and character studies. More
| interested in the mechanics of how things that we take for
| granted actually got built and what the world they were made in
| was like.
|
| In this case, the "people and character studies" are very
| critical to understanding "the mechanics of how things that we
| take for granted actually got built and what the world they were
| made in was like". The early part of the book goes in depth to
| Oppenheimer's social ties to communist groups, _which is critical
| to understanding the reason why he was forbidden from continuing
| research in the latter part of his life._
|
| https://www.amazon.com/American-Prometheus-Triumph-Tragedy-O...
|
| (To make a long story short, the American Communists, and their
| sympathizers, in the 1930s were blissfully unaware that the
| Soviet Union was an authoritarian hellhole. Many of the people
| involved in the Manhattan project had ties to those American
| Communists, and thus scientists in the Soviet Union. Because, for
| them, the Manhattan project was an academic endeavor, they wanted
| to share their results with their Soviet collogues. And that's
| how the nuclear race started... Information was leaked to the
| Soviets in the name of science. Oppenheimer was a victim of the
| resulting witch hunt; which requires understanding the "people
| and character studies" part of the book.)
| dwayne_dibley wrote:
| I really enjoyed 'How big things get done' [1], which is close to
| your 'how things.... got built' requirement. Very interesting
| read about delivery of really big projects. I also read
| 'Built'[2] which was a little more relatable about civil
| engineering, specifically the Shard in London. And finally
| 'Build' by Tony Fadell but this didn't quite hit the mark for me
| as it was more a memoir about how great he is.
|
| [1] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/61327449-how-big-
| thin... [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34921647-built
| [3] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59696349-build
| meifun wrote:
| "The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan" By:
| Robert Kanigel
|
| A biography of one of the most innovative mathematicians of all
| time traces the rise of Srinivasa Ramanujan from his days as a
| clerk to his collaboration with one of England's greatest
| mathematicians
|
| There is also a movie with this same name. It was good, IMHO.
| jkristobans wrote:
| The Founders Podcast (founderspodcast.com) would probably be the
| best source. There are a lot of book recommendations about how
| founders overcome obstacles to achieve great things.
| d_runs_far wrote:
| I would suggest Loonshots - fascinating dive into both the
| technology and the conditions that allowed people to really make
| stuff happen (or not) https://www.bahcall.com/book/
| js2 wrote:
| - _Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet_
|
| - _A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts_
| joe8756438 wrote:
| American Genesis covers a few inventors around the turn of the
| century 1900, including wright bros IIRC, inspiring stuff.
|
| in the fiction realm i think the martian fits the bill too!
| phkahler wrote:
| "THE WRIGHT BROTHERS" by Fred C. Kelly. This is the one I read
| and it turns out to be on project Gutenberg:
|
| https://www.gutenberg.org/files/67672/67672-h/67672-h.htm
|
| I'm really curious how that is considered public domain, it was
| published in 1943 and he died in 1959.
|
| Anyway, one of the things most fascinating to me was their
| attempts to sell an airplane to the US army and other business
| related things. You'd think inventing the airplane would bring
| quick financial rewards but it was a long road.
| ubj wrote:
| "The Wright Brothers" by David McCullough - Shows how Orville and
| Wilbur surpassed the leading researchers of the day to be the
| first to achieve controlled, powered flight. Does a great job of
| describing their work ethic and research process.
|
| "The Myths of Innovation" by Scott Berkun - Not exactly about how
| hard things got done, but it discusses some of the misconceptions
| and assumptions we make about current technology and the process
| of inventing new tech.
| deanebarker wrote:
| "Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea" is the story of a shipwreck
| discovery that has always enthralled me. I've read it three
| times, and I'm so inspired about all the challenges they solved
| along the way.
|
| (Note: the hero of the story went a little crazy in recent years.
| Hid from the law for a long time, and I think he just died... but
| still, the book itself is amazing.)
| hundredwatt wrote:
| +100000
| gcj wrote:
| Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and
| Redemption Zamperini's life was a series of hard things. Going to
| the Olympics, surviving a plane crash, then 47 days at sea, then
| a Japanese concentration camp ...
|
| Very well written as well
| gullywhumper wrote:
| EB Sledge - With the Old Breed is the account of a combat
| infantryman in WWII in the Pacific. It's about the fear,
| misery, and despair soldiers faced as they struggled to survive
| the horrors of war. It was the basis for HBO's The Pacific
| (successor to Band of Brothers).
| stevenfoster wrote:
| Fall of Carthage by Adrian Goldsworthy
|
| Few people understand the Punic wars and what it took to "delete"
| Carthage from the world. Delenda Cartago Est.
|
| Goldsworthy tells the story accessibly from both sides of the
| wars. Lessons that echo throughout history.
|
| More of a biography but still fits your criteria is The Wright
| Brothers by David McCullough. It's an easy read and hard to put
| down. I had no idea what it took to make flying a thing until
| that book. We definitely take for granted how much those two men
| changed the world.
| ChicagoBoy11 wrote:
| Highly recommend Apollo by Blythe Cox and Murray. Tremendous
| engineering history of the Apollo program, and really makes you
| appreciate the numerous folks and terrific stories that all had
| to come together to make it happen.
| oc_elder wrote:
| I find the The Jim Collins books to be insightful.
|
| Good to Great. Built to Last, etc.
|
| Focuses on how the organizations are constructed and tries to
| divine principles that are true across time.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Unfortunately, _Good To Great_ is 300 pages of survivorship
| bias. It picks a group of companies that succeeded, and a group
| that failed, and then _after the fact_ looks back to try to
| find what the survivors had in common. I don 't know how you
| come out of that with any prescriptive steps on how to succeed.
|
| It's like having a classroom stand up and flip a coin, ask
| everyone who flipped tails to sit down, repeat the process
| until there's only a few people standing, and then interview
| them to try to understand what makes them good heads-flippers.
| hackernj wrote:
| "West with the Night", a memoir by Beryl Markham; she was the
| first person to fly across the Atlantic Ocean from east to west
| in a non-stop solo flight.
| shrugsworth wrote:
| Tune In: The Beatles: All These Years by Mark Lewisohn. I picked
| it up as a Beatles fan, but it actually reads more like "how did
| the Beatles happen" - a social history of the times, the factors
| that led to each of their development as artists, and their
| iterative development into the group that we know as The Beatles.
| Put another way, it's a deep dive into the four founders of one
| of the most successful artistic organizations of all time and
| their search for product-market fit. This is also part 1 of 3,
| ending when they finally achieve PMF, releasing their first
| number one record.
| whatnotests2 wrote:
| Seven Pillars of Wisdom, by T. E. Lawrence.
|
| During WWI he was sent from the UK to the Arabs to find a leader
| who could unite them and lead a rebellion against the Turks, who
| were allied with Germany.
|
| He succeeded.
| laxd wrote:
| Fermat's Last Theorem, about Andrew Wiles long hard journey to
| prove it.
| specproc wrote:
| Maybe you're joking, but my takeaway from this fantastic book
| was it was about lots and lots and lots of people's cumulative
| effort.
|
| But yeah, came here to recommend this one. Brilliantly written,
| a true classic.
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| _Colossus: The secrets of Bletchley Park 's code-breaking
| computers_[0]
|
| Describes how British cryptanalysts and engineers built the first
| vacuum-tube digital computer[1] to break the cipher[2] the Nazis
| were using for strategic communications.
|
| [0]
| https://global.oup.com/academic/product/colossus-97801995781...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer
|
| [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Lorenz_ci...
| mindcrime wrote:
| _Dreaming In Code_ [1] is an interesting one. It recounts the
| history of the team (which included Mitch Kapor of Lotus fame)
| who built Chandler[2]. Chandler was intended to be a game-
| changing PIM (personal information manager) / note-taking app
| inspired by Lotus Agenda[3].
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreaming_in_Code
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandler_(software)
|
| [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Agenda
| Jalad wrote:
| Benjamin Franklin by Van Doren is a really in depth biography
| which I enjoyed. It basically tells how he was going absolutely
| gangbuster for 75 years
| Aaronstotle wrote:
| If you are a fan of history, Conquistador: Hernan Cortes, King
| Montezuma, and the Last Stand of the Aztecs by Buddy Levy is a
| fantastic read.
|
| Prior to reading this book, I naively assumed Cortes waltzed into
| Meso America and took over, this is a well sourced historical
| account of everything that happened that led to the fall of
| Tenochtitlan.
| hyperific wrote:
| "Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed" by Ben
| R. Rich and Leo Janos.
|
| Details, among other things, the engineering challenges faced
| during the development of the F-117 Nighthawk and the SR-71
| Blackbird.
| geocrasher wrote:
| An excellent read, no doubt. I've actually read it a couple of
| times. Ben Rich was a great writer.
| adamc wrote:
| Boy, I don't agree with that last. It's a pretty interesting
| book, but the writing is pedestrian and there are far too
| many asides and stories that detract from the main points. By
| way of contrast, I read it because it was recommended after I
| said I loved "The Soul of a New Machine" (Tracy Kidder),
| which really is an extremely well-written book, in the "every
| word counts" sense. "The Soul of a New Machine" is a book
| that a writer can appreciate for the writing.
| carabiner wrote:
| It was written by Leo Janos, who also wrote Chuck Yeager's
| bio.
| ashika wrote:
| worth reading for rich's crazy jokes alone. the fact he is
| telling them to senior military brass in the context of
| negotiating his division's survival after kelly johnson's
| retirement makes them even funnier. my favorite - a boy comes
| home from school, finds his dad, and proudly declares "dad, i
| saved 25 cents by running alongside the bus instead of riding
| it!". the father shakes his head and replies sternly, "you
| fool, you should have run next to a taxi and saved five
| dollars"
| adamc wrote:
| Eh, for me those all weakened the book.
| carabiner wrote:
| More aviation project books along those lines:
|
| V-2 by walter dornberger - wartime engineering, rocket
| development
|
| Gossamer odyssey - human powered aircraft, scrappy university
| project style engineering
| sandropuppo wrote:
| I loved the book about Leonardo Delvecchio, the founder of
| Luxottica (the biggest sunglasses manufacturer in the world,
| owner of Rayban/Oakley/etc.)
|
| He became an orphan at age 9.
|
| Started working in factories at 14.
|
| Started working in glasses factories at 16.
|
| He built his own first at 27. Grew it from 0 to 6,000 employees.
|
| Died while still being the CEO of the company aged 86 years old.
|
| One of the best stories of perseverance, and doing hard things
| from nothing I've ever witnessed!
| TripleChecker wrote:
| One of my favorites is Sam Walton: Made In America
| akamaka wrote:
| _Changing How the World Does Business: FedEx 's Incredible
| Journey to Success - The Inside Story_ by Roger Frock is an
| excellent story of creating a completely new way of doing
| logistics, and what it takes to start a network-based business
| that can only work if it launches on a large scale from day one.
|
| https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/574979/changing-how-...
| bradstewart wrote:
| Shoe Dog by Phil Night _might_ fit the bill. It is definitely
| about the person (who founded Nike), but also a fascinating look
| into how the sportswear industry took hold, sponsorship deals,
| Michael Jordan, etc.
| srinath10 wrote:
| The co-founder of Autodesk, John Walker, chronicled the company's
| journey from founding through IPO and beyond:
| https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/
|
| I haven't read all of it (~900 pages), but he seems like an
| honest man, humble with minimal ego, who doesn't sugarcoat the
| challenges of building a business from scratch as a non-business
| guy. He also includes internal memos and the like, so you do get
| a feel for the "mechanics" of company-building.
| ether3ric wrote:
| How about Tesla giving away his patents to Westinghouse for AC
| motors?
| __alexander wrote:
| Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
| Animats wrote:
| > books about how hard things got done.
|
| _American Steel_ , about how a small steel fabricator took over
| the US steel industry.
|
| _Think, the story of the Watsons and IBM_ , about how IBM went
| from a maker of time clocks to the biggest name in computing.
|
| _The Art of the Comeback_ , by Trump. This is the Trump book few
| read. Copies are around US$200 now. Written when Trump was down,
| it's more honest than his other book.
|
| Some things that were famously hard to develop:
|
| - Xerography. First demo in 1939, started to work around 1959,
| became a simple technology in the 1980s.
|
| - Television. First attempts in the 19th century, sort of worked
| by the 1930s, worked decently by the 1950s, worked well as
| digital HDTV in the late 1980s, and achieved really good and
| really cheap only in the last few years.
|
| - Steel. Goes back to ancient times. Not produced in quantity
| until the 1880s. Took about 10,000 tries to get the metallurgy
| for the Bessemer process right. Turns out you need analytical
| chemistry to make consistently good steel. Otherwise yield is
| poor. Many batches come out bad.
|
| - Magnetic resonance imaging. The guy who invented it was almost
| fired for wasting time.
|
| - Home grocery delivery. Check out why Webvan failed but Amazon
| succeeded. Some of the same people.
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| This is very much a shameless plug but I wrote a book, Rebooting
| a Nation, on how the country of Estonia was able to modernize
| post re-independence in the early '90s and become a leader in
| e-government (99% of government services accessible online) and a
| tech hub (Skype, Transferwise, Bolt, etc.). I tried to draw out
| practical lessons for policymakers in other countries, especially
| in the U.S. as I wrote it after having worked for the Estonian
| government and advised some members of Congress in DC on tech
| policy. It's available for pre-order now and comes out in a few
| months, link below.
|
| https://www.rebootinganation.com/
| joloooo wrote:
| The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf
|
| It details Alexander von Humboldt, his travels through South
| America and Siberia, and general contributions to science.
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23995249-the-invention-o...
| 1attice wrote:
| _Madhouse at the End of the Earth_ by Julian Sancton went hard.
| It documents the tragic expedition of Adrian de Gerlache to the
| south pole in the late 19th century. Due to hubris, they wound up
| locked in the ice overwinter, and came within a hair's breadth of
| death.
|
| A gripping read. 10/10
| https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jun/09/madhouse-at-th...
| jp42 wrote:
| The Making of Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. Its not about one
| people but a project, Manhattan Project. One of my most favorite
| book.
| mannykannot wrote:
| Angle of Attack: Harrison Storms and the Race to the Moon, by
| Mike Gray.
| pmarreck wrote:
| Any parenting book. ;)
| 65 wrote:
| The Power Broker, perhaps?
| Ringz wrote:
| Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying
| Circumnavigation of the Globe
| surfingdino wrote:
| "The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power" by Daniel
| Yergin
| throw0101c wrote:
| It's on my reading list, but I have not read it (yet), but
| perhaps _How Big Things Get Done_ :
|
| * https://dangardner.ca/publication/how-big-things-get-done
|
| * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61327449-how-big-things-...
| heikkilevanto wrote:
| I hope surviving shipwrecks and such counts as getting hard
| things done. "Safety and Survival at the Sea" has a lot of those.
| Chapters like Fire, Man in Water, Man on life raft, Man in a
| boat, and so on. Each chapter has many short episodes, just the
| hard facts, leaving the details to your imagination. I can quote
| one from memory: "North Atlantic, November. 12 people on a life
| raft. The raft kept capsizing, righted by walking on the inside
| of the canopy. 7 survived."
| kabdib wrote:
| Tracy Kidder, _Soul of a New Machine_
|
| Henry SF Cooper, _The Evening Star_ (debugging OS race conditions
| on a Venus orbiter)
|
| Pascal Zachary, _Showstopper_ (about David Cutler and Windows NT)
|
| Richard Preston, _American Steel_ (building an early continuous
| casting steel mill in the midwest)
| thetanka wrote:
| Maybe a bit off-topic if you are _less interested in people and
| character studies_ , but it is one of the books I have read the
| most.
|
| The Age of Uncertainty by Tobias Hurter
|
| It's about the minds who redefined our understanding of the
| universe, and I would say they were people who did a hard thing
| or two.
|
| https://openlibrary.org/books/OL37331178M/Age_of_Uncertainty
| hartator wrote:
| "From Good to Great" by Jim Collins.
|
| Actual science-based data about good leadership.
| stonlyb wrote:
| Not a book but here's Biochemist Katalin Kariko on her journey
| from a childhood in communist Hungary to her Nobel-winning work
| on mRNA. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/katalin-
| karikos-n...
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