Synopsia Reads: Book Summaries

A deep dive into Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg. Only three paths lead to lasting change: having an epiphany, changing your environment, or changing your habits in small steps. The first cannot be summoned, nobody decides to have a revelation. The second depends on means and circumstances that no decision can produce: moving house takes money and an available place, changing jobs takes someone willing to...

A deep dive into The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck. Life is difficult. Once that sentence is accepted, it stops weighing on us: what makes existence unbearable is not the difficulty but the secret conviction that it should not have fallen to us. Complaint, the "why me?", adds to legitimate pain a surplus suffering that leads nowhere. Suffering is the condition of existence, not an accident o...

A deep dive into The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. More than 40% of the actions we perform each day are not decisions at all but habits: the figure comes from a 2006 paper by a Duke University researcher who logged, one by one, the actions of an ordinary day. Most of what we do, then, was never chosen that morning. The mechanism is a three-part loop: a cue, a routine, a reward. The cue tells t...

A deep dive into A Technique for Producing Ideas by James Webb Young. Where the charts showed nothing but deep sea, an islet rises, which had the air of magic for sailors of old, when in fact the atoll is the work of countless coral builders laboring beneath the surface. Ideas appear in the same way above the surface of the mind: what shows is the emergence alone, and the work that produces it was...

A deep dive into Getting More by Stuart Diamond. Negotiation is not a specialist's affair, confined to boardrooms and salary talks. Every time people interact there is negotiation, spoken or unspoken, conscious or not: driving, talking to your children, doing the shopping. What decides the outcome is almost never the strength of your case, but what the person across from you perceives and feels. C...

A deep dive into Originals by Adam Grant. Some 30,000 call center agents at banks, airlines and mobile carriers were studied by the economist Michael Housman for Cornerstone OnDemand, with one variable nobody had thought to look at: the web browser installed on their workstation. Those who used Firefox or Chrome stayed in the job 15% longer than those who used Internet Explorer or Safari, sold mor...

A deep dive into Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull. Hand a good idea to a mediocre team and the result is spoiled; hand a mediocre idea to a brilliant team and they will either fix it or throw it out and come back with something better. The usual order, in which a strong idea goes on to attract the right people, is reversed: the group comes first, the idea after. The hiring rule that follows is to ta...

A deep dive into How to Talk So Kids Will Listen by Adele Faber & Elaine Mazlish. What a child feels and what a child does are directly connected. A child who feels right behaves right, and the first thing most of us do when a child misbehaves is deny what they feel. "Mom, I'm tired." "You can't be tired, you just had a nap." "Mom, I'm hot." "It's cold out, keep your sweater on." Said often enough...

A deep dive into The Charisma Myth by Olivia Fox Cabane. Charisma passes for a gift, received at birth or never. Summer 1955, Grand Central Terminal in New York: Marilyn Monroe crosses the concourse and goes down to the subway platform beside the photographer Eve Arnold without anyone recognising her. She is Norma Jeane, hair pulled back, walk unremarkable. Back up on the pavement, she offers to l...

A deep dive into Made to Stick by Chip & Dan Heath. An idea that sticks is one that is understood, remembered, and able to change the way people think or act. Urban legends manage it with no budget and no special talent: the kidney-theft story has circulated for decades, keeping the same three elements everywhere, the drugged drink offered by a stranger, waking up in a bathtub full of ice, the pun...

A deep dive into Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. Behind the fence in the Los Altos garden, the wood is as carefully finished as it is out front. "No one will ever know," protests the child helping to build it. "But you will know," Paul Jobs answers. The circuit boards of the Apple II and then the Macintosh are redrawn to be beautiful even though the machine is sealed and no one will see them: "I wa...

A deep dive into Educated by Tara Westover. Seven years old, standing on the abandoned red railcar beside the barn at the foot of Buck's Peak, in Idaho. Tara Westover was born on 27 September 1986 in Clifton, a town of 259 people, the last of seven children, four of whom were never registered; her own birth certificate was not issued until she was nine. The eldest had attended public school before...

A deep dive into Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows. Place a Slinky on an open palm, hold it at the top, then take away the hand underneath: it drops, springs back, oscillates. Do the same with the toy's cardboard box, same hand: nothing happens. The answer is not in the hand, it is in the spring. A system largely causes its own behavior. Political leaders do not really cause recessions or boo...

A deep dive into The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee. Sixty-two years separate the peas of the walled garden in Brno, whose results Mendel presented in 1865 after sowings begun in 1856, from the 1927 Buck v. Bell decision, by which the Supreme Court of the United States authorised the sterilisation of a young woman in the name of her heredity. In that interval, heredity stopped being a family mystery...

A deep dive into Spark by John J. Ratey. Feeling better after a run has little to do with discharging tension. The relief is real, but the essential thing happens elsewhere: during the effort, the brain runs at its best. Human energy expenditure relative to body mass now amounts to less than 38% of that of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, who walked five to ten miles a day simply in order to eat. Eve...

A deep dive into Why We Get Fat by Gary Taubes. Hilde Bruch, a German pediatrician who settled in New York in 1934, was astonished by the number of obese children she encountered there: this was the depth of the Great Depression, one worker in four out of a job, one New York child in four reckoned to be malnourished. One of her adolescent patients, who disappeared beneath mountains of fat, told he...

A deep dive into The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen. Sears is held up as a model by Fortune in 1964, at the exact moment it lets discounting and home centers pass it by; in 1992 its retail operations lose 1.3 billion dollars before a restructuring charge of 1.7 billion. Digital Equipment is among the stars of 1980s management studies, and a 1986 article warns IBM that taking on DEC amo...

A deep dive into The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. A beggar has been sitting at the side of a road for more than thirty years. A stranger walks up, and he holds out his hand. I have nothing to give you, says the stranger, then asks: what is that thing you are sitting on? An old box, says the beggar, I have been sitting on it forever and I have never opened it. He finally pries off the lid: it is...

A deep dive into Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky. Salt is the only rock we eat. It is a mineral, neither plant nor animal, and the body demands it so insistently that entire states have drawn their chief tax revenue from it. From the first civilizations to the turn of the twentieth century it ranked among the most coveted commodities, and it is today so common, so easy to come by and so ch...

A deep dive into 1491 by Charles C. Mann. In the early 1940s, the anthropologist Allan R. Holmberg lived among the Sirionó, in the Bolivian province of Beni, and in 1950 described them as one of the most destitute peoples on earth: no history, no institutions, no art, a wandering band consumed by bare survival. That account held authority until the 1980s, and a common American textbook, American H...

A deep dive into The Smartest Kids in the World by Amanda Ripley. A country can rank second in the world for spending per pupil and watch its fifteen-year-olds come in twenty-sixth in mathematics, seventeenth in science and twelfth in reading among OECD countries: that was where the United States stood in the 2012 PISA. The test, designed by Andreas Schleicher at the OECD, first sat in 2000 in thi...

A deep dive into How Children Succeed by Paul Tough. For decades, one idea has governed the way children are raised: success was said to depend above all on measurable cognitive skills, IQ, test scores, the number of words heard before the age of three, and so the brain had to be filled as early and as heavily as possible. This cognitive hypothesis runs up against an anomaly. In the United States,...

A deep dive into Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell. On 10 July 2015, in Prairie View, Texas, a 28-year-old driver named Sandra Bland changed lanes without signaling. Officer Brian Encinia pulled her over. Three days later she was found dead in her cell in Waller County. Between those two moments there is nothing but a conversation between two people who do not know each other, and which goe...

A deep dive into The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. The Struggle has a proper name because it names a precise condition, that of the leader whose venture is collapsing, and that condition can only be described by accumulation. The Struggle is when you wonder why you ever started this company. It is self-doubt turning into self-hatred, loneliness among people you hired yourself, slee...

A deep dive into Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. There is a place where the hypothesis of total determinism can be put to the test: the place where outward conditions decide everything. The transport arrives, some fifteen hundred people packed into cattle cars; on the platform an officer points a casual index finger to the right or to the left, and nine people out of ten go straight to...