Things I Learned From Books Recently

“I cannot live without books,” said Thomas Jefferson; but of course, this from a guy who didn’t spring for a Netflix subscription.

This week during a board meeting I referenced a book (American Icon) I read more than a year ago. The other day in conversation with a team member, I referenced a book related to his new endeavor (The Method Method). In a moment of feeling overwhelmed, some insight from a book gave me the right perspective (Kennedy & King).

Though always a reader to some degree, I’ve turned up the volume in the past year or two, consciously battling against time that gets wasted with Netflix, staring at my phone, or any version of the news. 

I agree with David Cancel, CEO at Drift, that “if you want to become a master of your craft and a leader of your field...read books.” And it’s not just because you can extract information from a book. It’s because books can listen and have a conversation with you (Mark Haddon). It’s because you can talk with the finest minds of past centuries (Rene Descartes). It’s because books can remind you that you already know quite a lot (George Orwell). Books can help you realize you actually don’t have it that tough (Bill Maher). And, of course, it’s the only way to get an advantage over the folks who cannot or do not read books (Mark Twain). Yes, David Cancel, that just somehow happened - you with Mark Twain, Bill Maher, George Orwell, Rene Descartes, and Mark Hadden! ;)

So. 

There are many books out there. I highly recommend taking the advice of Henry David Thoreau: “[r]ead the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.” Rather than giving you a list of books I’ve liked (you can see that here on my Goodreads Profile), here are a few things I’ve recently learned from books.

Ideas Are Cheap

Perennial Seller - Ryan Holiday

Imagining, starting, reimagining, and building a company is a creative process. Just like you’ll never produce an enduring work of art without a deep understanding and passion for some medium, like painting, it’s impossible to create an enduring product or organization if you lack the right passion. 

Arthur Miller explained the pains of creating in Death of a Salesman like this: “[fulfilling a creative need is] greater than hunger or sex or thirst, a need to leave a thumbprint somewhere on the world. A need for immortality, and by admitting it, the knowing that one has carefully inscribed one’s name on a cake of ice on a hot July day.”

Ryan Holiday put this Arthur Miller quote in Perennial Seller, which is a book he wrote about writing and publishing, but really, is simply a book about the grueling process of creating anything. It’s a great book for writers, but also for entrepreneurs, marketers, and people creating products. I enjoy most of Holiday’s work, and it’s probably because he, like me, is a clear fan of Reis & Trout’s Positioning (timely reminder from John Wooden, “The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.”) 

So, what’s the secret to creating a Perennial Seller? Can you look at the “Billboard charts” - so to speak - and figure out your idea? Or, as it relates closely to our business and something I hear about often, can you “look at the data” and engineer the Perennial Seller? Holiday’s advice attacks that mindset in a way that resonates with me as a creative.

“Ignore what’s going on around you,” he says. “There is no competition. There is no objective benchmark to hit. There is simply the best that you can do—that’s all that matters.” 

Speaking directly about the Billboard Charts, Holiday quotes Rick Rubin, a successful record producer who has worked with artists like Johnny Cash, Black Sabbath, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers:

“If you listen to the greatest music ever made, that would be a better way to find your own voice than listening to what’s on the radio and thinking: ‘I want to compete with this.’ It’s stepping back and looking at a bigger picture than what’s going on at the moment...you might be better off drawing inspiration from the world’s greatest museums than, say, finding it in the current Billboard charts.”

This reminds me of the Picasso aphorism, famously repeated by Steve Jobs: Good artists copy, great artists steal. 

It reminds me of something else, too. That there are no short cuts, hacks, or tricks. Creating something special is about stepping back, and having the patience, the passion, and the persistence required to see and understand the big picture. You can’t just wake up on a Tuesday morning and go “listen to the greatest music ever made” to find your voice. You need to envelop yourself in music. You need to fall in love with music. You need to turn the wheel for years and years and years to see and understand the big picture about the greatest music ever made. 

And that -- like building a company -- mandates “eating glass and staring into the abyss of death,” which is how Elon Musk described the process of starting a company.

Creativity and genius is not a divine act. It’s a process. Ideas are cheap, and there is enormous truth to the Howard Aiken instructions that if you have an original idea, don’t worry about people stealing it, because “you’ll have to ram it down their throats.” Along the long, challenging road toward the process of creating a Perennial Seller, the most difficult part, per Seneca, is possessing “confidence in yourself and the belief that you are on the right path, and not led astray by the many tracks which cross yours of people who are hopelessly lost, though some are wandering not far from the true path.”

You Can Actually Matter

Walt Disney - Neal Gabler

The great man theory is a 19th century idea that “history can be largely explained by the impact of great men, or heroes.” There’s a lot of debate around this. The counter-argument, of course, is that great men are the products of their societies. This debate is all fine and good, and I don’t care to engage in it right now.

We can all find some common ground in the undercurrent of this debate: great people and events do somehow pop out of the mix, and they do make some impact. Choices are made, and those choices are not all predestined. A “great” person may be the product of their societies, and their actions may be “impossible without the social conditions built before their lifetimes,” but they still have actions. They still have choices. And those actions and choices form something.

They form, for example, Mickey Mouse.

There’s a comment from Walt Disney that struck me in Neal Gabler’s biography: 

“ Believe me when I say that if we should go out of business tomorrow, the animated cartoon would drop to a low commercial level.”

If we should go out of business tomorrow, then...

If I were to die tomorrow, then...

There’s a lot of business literature out there about a company’s culture, mission, and purpose (i.e. The Advantage, Start with Why, The Monk and the Riddle), which really boils down to having some kind of soul around this statement: What is different about the world if your company went out of business tomorrow? 

Opportunities in life and business may be the product of social conditions and specifically available opportunities. But what is the Mickey Mouse? What is the “animated cartoon” that ignites so much love and passion that the world must dented in a particular way?

Hey, the construction industry, construction payment processes, contractors, financial technology, etc. may all be bizarre-o land to you. I get it. 

Yet...

Having been punched in the head by social conditions that creates struggle for contractors all across the world, I’m in love with the work we are doing to empower people to get what they earn (See: Construction Has A Payment Emergency & More Regulation Is Not The Answer). And I think there is a decacorn, highly interesting, morally impactful market opportunity developing around this.

In conversations with my team, it is the above quote from Disney that leads me to remind them that “the market will not form with a conscious on its own.”

Decisions Are Hard, But Some Are Harder Than Others

Grant - Ron Chernow

In The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz explained that “[b]y far the most difficult skill I learned as CEO was the ability to manage my own psychology.” There is a lot to identify with in that statement. 

Regardless of your job, days can be long. 

I get home from work sometimes exhausted by the day’s events, the decisions I made or am contemplating, the what-ifs of the future, the disappointments with some of my words or actions, the nuances of a touchy situation...I could go on and on. There are afternoons when I walk through my home’s front door a little later than I’d like, with my eyes baggier than I’d like. My three little kids run up to me in glee, but my mind is too occupied to return the favor. Sometimes, well, the bar eats you. 

I like the quote from Bill Maher about history books, “If you think you have it tough, read history books.”

In 2018, I spent a nice long time with Chernow’s epic on Ulysses S. Grant. The book contains hundreds of insights into the weighty duty Grant faced as the Union General in the Civil War and the U.S. President introducing Reconstruction. Here’s one:

“They call me a butcher,” he mused after the war, “but do you know I sometimes could hardly bring myself to give an order of battle? When I contemplated the death and misery that were sure to follow, I stood appalled.”

My decisions have consequences, and increasingly weighty consequence. I’m CEO of a company with more than 150 people on the team now, and sometimes I’ll stare across their desks and see their families, their own careers, their ambitions, their struggles, and it’s heavy.

But, of course, it’s not the kind of decisions and consequences faced by someone like Grant. Grant spent years of his life in tents out on Civil War battlefields, where he had to literally step across dead bodies to make his way to a meeting with military leaders to make battle decisions. In one instance, Grant was in a meeting, got up, and had a bullet go through the very chair where he was just sitting. 

Sometimes, as a leader, I can hardly bring myself to make a certain decision, or to just keep going. But I do. I just keep moving forward. And a conversation with the right book can help me put all the weight into perspective, and prove that it can always be handled.

Do It For The Sheer Beauty Of It

The Boys In The Boat - Daniel James Brown

In The Monk and the Riddle, Randy Komisar says something that jumped off the page to me about his experience selling a company: "I later realized what a rare privilege it had been to work with this group of people, in a place of our own making that gave us the opportunity to reach and stretch, to have impact, and to be great. Building a $90-million-a-year, market-leading business was a hard thing to do. Claris gave us, as a team and as individuals, a platform for growing and a chance to build a legacy and a culture that would contain our DNA in its values for decades to come. You couldn't put a price on it, and I didn't realize that until our company was dead and buried."

There are so many places to find this sentiment. 

There’s an interview I like with Sean Payton, head coach of the New Orleans Saints, who was asked about what it’s like to win a Super Bowl. The Super Bowl, of course, being this thing that hundreds and hundreds of highly paid professional footballers struggle toward each year, year-in and year-out, with only a select few of them ever capturing it. How does it feel?

Q: “Was the satisfaction...did it compare to what you expected?”

A: “Yeah..it’s a hundred times greater than you would ever expect...if I would try to explain it to you, Graham, you would have no idea. You would have no idea. But part of it is the enjoyment - it’s not - it’s not the actual game, it’s this journey throughout with a good team. That’s what was depressing about the ride home after the game is that this thing is stopping. I know we just won the final game, but you’re kind of like, let’s play four more. In other words, none of us want to stop feeling how we were feeling just playing football. And so what I think what’s missed most is not the actual end of game or certainly not the ceremony or any of that, what is missed most is the process. You know, the practice on Wednesday. The players in the locker room. The meetings. All those things are - I think - what you miss from a great team.”

This all reminds me of a quote by IKEA Founder Ingvar Kamprad in his 1976 memo to employees, The Testament of a Furniture Dealer. He says, “Happiness is not reaching your goal. Happiness is being on the way. It is our wonderful fate to be just at the beginning.” 

It’s a fantastic joy and gift to find yourself on a journey like this, and quite a tragedy if you don’t ever find yourself there. I’m not sure what you’re doing every day at your “job,” but I like another comment from Kamprad in that same document, “A job must never be just a livelihood. If you are not enthusiastic about your job, a third of your life goes to waste, and a magazine in your desk drawer can never make up for that.”

To these ends, in Daniel James Brown’s awesome book, The Boys In The Boat, I really liked rower Joe Rantz’s recollection of a conversation he had with George Yeoman Pocock, a boat builder and rowing philosopher: 

He said for him the craft of building a boat was like religion. It wasn’t enough to master the technical details of it. You had to give yourself up to it spiritually; you had to surrender yourself absolutely to it. When you were done and walked away from the boat, you had to feel that you had left a piece of yourself behind in it forever, a bit of your heart. He turned to Joe. “Rowing,” he said, “is like that. And a lot of life is like that too, the parts that really matter anyway.

A Religion. A passion. Enthusiasm.

Arthur Miller once mused that you must “specialize in something until one day you find it specializing in you.”

I don’t know how or why to develop this enthusiasm, and I don’t know how or why anyone winds up doing the random things that they do. But maybe there’s an answer right at the beginning of The Boys In The Boat, when the author is describing his time with an old, dying Joe Rantz, one the University of Washington rowers who were part of the quest for the gold medal at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Brown observed something spectacular in the dying man’s recollection about those long-past days when he and his team worked together to excel at rowing a skinny wooden boat through a stream: “Joe was crying, at least in part, for the loss of that vanished moment but much more, I think, for the sheer beauty of it.”

For the sheer beauty of it.