Founders

What I learned from reading Overdrive: Bill Gates and the Race to Control Cyberspace by James Wallace. ---- There would be an industry breakthrough unimagined at the time, and it would be made by a company that didn’t yet exist. [7:55] Another corollary to Joys Law of Innovation was that the number of bright people in any company went down as the size went up. [10:47] As Apple founder Steve Jobs l...

What I learned from reading Hollywood Rajah: The Life and Times of Louis B. Mayer by Bosley Crowther.  ---- The reason so many people showed up at his funeral was because they wanted to make sure he was dead. [0:50] He is in that phalanx of men of aggressive bent who seized on the opportunities that an expanding civilization exposed. With them, he ascended to high places along an upwardly spiralin...

What I learned from reading Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX by Eric Berger.  ---- [12:38] Numerous other entrepreneurs had tried playing at rocket science before, Musk well knew. He wanted to learn from their mistakes so as not to repeat them.  [20:55]  He could be difficult to work for, certainly. But his early hires could immediately see the benefits of worki...

What I learned from reading The Billionaire Who Wasn't: How Chuck Feeney Secretly Made and Gave Away a Fortune by Conor O'Clery. ---- He celebrated having divested himself personally of the vast wealth with which fate and his genius for making money had burdened him. [0:01]  Feeney was already showing a trait that would assert itself throughout his life: thinking big and aiming to achieve the best...

What I learned from reading My Life in Advertising by Claude Hopkins.  ---- Any man who by a lifetime of excessive application learns more about anything than others owes a statement to successors. The results of research should be recorded. Every pioneer should blaze his trail. That is all I have tried to do. [0:19] There are few pages in “My Life in Advertising” which do not repay careful study—...

What I learned from reading The King of Madison Avenue: David Ogilvy and the Making of Modern Advertising by Kenneth Roman.  ---- One characteristic of geniuses, said Einstein, is they are passionately curious. Ogilvy’s great secret was an inquiring mind. In conversation, he never pontificated; he interrogated. There were piles of books all over his house, most about successful leaders in business...

What I learned from reading Driven: An Autobiography by Larry Miller.  ---- [1:01] I decided I had to be extremely good at something.  [2:47] I’m sorry to say, neglecting my family to do all of the above. I worked and worked and worked, day after day, night after night, dawn to bedtime.  [5:23] He owned movie theaters, auto dealerships, a motorsports park with a world-class racetrack, a movie prod...

What I learned from reading Jackie Cochran: An Autobiography by Jackie Cochran.  ---- [4:37] At the time of her death on August 9, 1980, Jacqueline Cochran held more speed, altitude, and distance records than any other pilot, male or female, in aviation history. Her career spanned 40 years, from the Golden Age of the 1930s as a racing pilot, through the turbulent years of World War Il as founder a...

What I learned from reading The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley by Leslie Berlin. ---- [0:01] Bob Noyce took me under his wing,” Steve Jobs explains. “I was young, in my twenties. He was in his early fifties. He tried to give me the lay of the land, give me a perspective that I could only partially understand.” Jobs continues, “You can’t really understand...

What I learned from reading Broken Genius: The Rise and Fall of William Shockley, Creator of the Electronic Age by Joel Shurkin.  ----  [1:19] Why would a man as unquestionably brilliant as he knowingly and deliberately destroy himself? [5:04] Dear Jean: I am sorry that I feel I can no longer go on. Most of my life I have felt. that the world was not a pleasant place and that people were not a ver...

What I learned from reading Rocket Man: Robert Goddard and the Birth of the Space Age by David A. Clary.  --- [18:16] For even though I reasoned with myself that the thing was impossible, there was something inside me which simply would not stop working.   [20:08] Anything is possible with the man who makes the best use of every minute of his time.  [20:18] There are limitless opportunities open t...

What I learned from reading Alfred Nobel: A Biography by Kenne Fant. ---- [16:24] The self-awareness that would become so characteristic of him was awakening and with it the determination to be the master of every situation. He was not going to throw himself into the world and let luck or chance lead the way.  [26:26] When it comes to serious matters, I have adopted the rule of acting seriously. ...

What I learned from reading Yeager: An Autobiography by General Chuck Yeager.  ---- [10:14] I was a competitive kid. I always tried to do my best. I never thought of myself as being poor or deprived in any way. We managed to scrape by. Kids learned self-sufficiency. Mom and Dad taught us by example. They never complained. I had certain standards that I lived by. Whatever I did, I determined to do...

What I learned from reading Becoming Dr. Seuss: Theodor Geisel and the Making of an American Imagination by Brian Jay Jones. ---- [6:32] Both his parents would inspire and encourage Ted’s love for books. Reading was a pastime the entire family took seriously.  [9:24] Ted came to appreciate the considerable discipline and commitment it took to hone expertise.  [10:15] He was an inspiration. Whateve...

What I learned from reading Routines and Orgies: The Life of Peter Cundill, Financial Genius, Philosopher, and Philanthropist by Christopher Risso-Gill. ---- Excellence as a goal in itself had been drummed into him from early boyhood. I’m convinced that to achieve real greatness a person needs above all to have passion but at the same time immense discipline, concentration, patience and an unshake...

What I learned from reading Swimming Across by Andrew S. Grove.  ---- [0:01] I was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1936. By the time I was twenty, I had lived through a Hungarian Fascist dictatorship, German military occupation, the Nazis’ “Final Solution,” the siege of Budapest by the Soviet Red Army, a period of chaotic democracy in the years immediately after the war, a variety of repressive Commu...

What I learned from reading Disney’s Land: Walt Disney and the Invention of the Amusement Park That Changed the World by Richard Snow. ---- [1:29] In Disney's Land, popular historian Richard Snow brilliantly presents the entire spectacular story, a wild ride from vision to realization that reflects the uniqueness of the man determined to build “the happiest place on earth” with a watchmaker's prec...

What I learned from reading The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson. ---- [0:29] This is the story of those pioneers hackers, inventors, and entrepreneurs. Who they were, how their minds worked, and what made them so creative.  [8:41] She developed a somewhat outsize opinion of her talents as a genius. In her [Ada Lovelace] lett...

What I learned from reading Mornings on Horseback: The Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt ---- [0:20] He was scratched, bruised, and hungry, but gritty and determined as a bulldog.  [2:44] Not the least extraordinary part of the story is that during these same six days after catching the thieves, Theodore in odd moments read...

What I learned from reading Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos, With an Introduction by Walter Isaacson. ---- [2:38]  The whole point of moving things forward is that you run into problems, failures, things that don't work. You need to back up and try again. Each one of those times when you have a setback, you get back up and you try again. You're using resourcefulness; you're...

What I learned from reading My Life with Charlie Brown by Charles Schulz.  ---- [0:24] Beginning with the first strip published on October 2nd, 1950, until the last published on Sunday, February 13th, 2000, the day after his death, Schultz wrote, penciled, inked, and lettered by hand every single one of the daily and Sunday strips to leave his studio, 17,897 in all for an almost fifty-year run.  [...

What I learned from reading Bowerman and the Men of Oregon: The Story of Oregon's Legendary Coach and Nike's Cofounder by Kenny Moore.  ---- [0:01] Take a primitive organism, any weak, pitiful organism. Say a freshman. Make it lift, or jump or run. Let it rest. What happens? A little miracle. It gets a little better. It gets a little stronger or faster or more enduring. That's all training is. Str...

What I learned from reading Personal History by Katherine Graham.  ---- [1:02] A few minutes later there was the ear-splitting noise of a gun going off indoors. I bolted out of the room and ran around in a frenzy looking for him. When I opened the door to a downstairs bathroom, I found him. It was so profoundly shocking and traumatizing —he was so obviously dead.  [3:56] Katherine Graham was the f...

What I learned from reading Overnight Success: Federal Express and Frederick Smith, Its Renegade Creator by Vance Trimble. ---- [0:01] At age thirty Frederick Wallace Smith was in deep trouble. His dream of creating Federal Express had become too expensive and was fast fizzling out. He had exhausted his father’s millions. He was in hock for 15 or 20 million more. He appeared in danger of losing hi...

What I learned from reading Sam Walton: The Inside Story of America's Richest Man by Vance H. Trimble. ---- [3:11] Charlie Munger on Sam Walton: It's quite interesting to think about Walmart starting from a single store in Arkansas – against Sears Roebuck with its name, reputation and all of its billions. How does a guy in Bentonville, Arkansas, with no money, blow right by Sears, Roebuck? And he...