I picked up Tal Ben – Shahar’s Happier after finishing reading Shawn Achor’s The Happier Advantage and I really enjoyed this book as well. In my mind, these two books complement each other well, and you should read them both, but the order perhaps doesn’t matter as much.

Positive psychology is a relatively new field, and in the past I’ve also read Martin Seligman’s works, and I feel everyone should familiarize themselves with positive psychology because of course happiness is relevant to everyone, and it is not something we generally think about in our day to day lives.

The name Happier signifies that when you are thinking about happiness you should think of it is as something in a continuum, and not something that can be achieved and be done with.

At the beginning of the book Tal Ben – Shahar draws out a quadrant of four different types of people – the rat racer – someone who thinks that if he gets this job then he will be happy, or if he buys that house then he’ll be happy. Essentially a person who thinks achieving something in the future will make him happier at that time. Then there is the hedonist who’s maximizing pleasure today, the nihilist who has somewhat given up on life, and the truly happy person who is doing something that makes him happy in the moment, and will add to his happiness in the future as well.

Personally, I relate very closely to the rat – racer in all honesty, and this is something I have to work on, and learn to live in the moment, find things that make me happy in the present, have meaning for me, and as a result are fulfilling to me, and also will lead me to have a happier future.

The book goes quite deep into how you can find such things for yourself, and I highly recommend the exercises mentioned there.

The other concept that resonated quite well with me was the concept that for most people they can look at their work in three different ways  – as a job, a career or a calling. A job is something that you do just to earn money today, a career is when you look at it as a slightly longer term thing in terms of progression, money, titles etc. and there again the motivation is extrinsic. Finally, there’s the calling where you are doing something because of internal motivation, and because you truly love doing it. Here again, I’m at the stage where my work is a career, and I must work towards making it a calling.

All in all, I really loved this book, and I highly recommend that you read or at least familiarize with the ideas of positive psychology.

 

What better book to read during a pandemic than one written on the worst pandemic in human history. The Great Mortality is a fascinating history of the bubonic plague that devastated Europe and Asia in the 14th century. Black Death killed an estimated 75 to 200 million people in Europe, or about one third of the entire population!

Our modern mind can probably not even comprehend death and misery at this scale, and our current pandemic seems like a walk in the park compared to the Black Death. The book itself deals with this grim subject in a very interesting manner. It lays the foundation by talking about the causes of the plague, its origin, and then traces the plague as it moves from one European city to another.

The author has relied on historical accounts as well as personal diaries, and as a result some passages in the book are deeply moving, and saddening.

The book also tells you a little about life in the Middle Ages in Europe, and you learn about how Astrology was still a prominent part of medicine at the time, and most sailing was sailing from one port to another, not open sea sailing (which is probably how the plague spread).

My favorite parts in the book were those that touched on human nature especially because you can see how nothing has changed in seven hundred years.

For instance, you can see a desperate attempt by some people to give a racist overtone to the current pandemic, and during the Black Death there was strong anti-semitism on display, and large swathes of people blamed Jews for the disease. Mass execution of Jews became common in a lot of countries, and a lot of Jews were persecuted because people convinced themselves that Jews had poisoned wells, and were responsible for deaths.

Another crazy thing is how the demand for notaries increased during this time. A large number of deaths meant that people needed to write their wills, and the orderly transfer of property from the living to the dead became very important, and therefore notaries became high in demand.

Voltaire said that History never repeats itself. Man does. Reading this book made me feel that I understood what he meant for the first time.

Personally, I loved this book, but I do realize it is not for everyone. It is a grim subject in grim times, but what I did like was that it provided perspective, and informed me on how good things are even when they are really bad.

Powerful by Patty McCord is one of the best business books I’ve read in a while. Patty McCord was the chief talent officer at Netflix from 1998 to 2012, and along with founder Reed Hastings, she was responsible to create the wildly innovative culture at Netflix which is very well known today.

I first discovered the book via this HBR article: How Netflix Reinvented HR, and I was intrigued by the embedded slide deck which was written in 2009, and is popularly known as the Netflix culture deck. This deck has been downloaded more than five million times, and explains how Netflix shapes their culture and motivates performance.

Several things in the deck make you do a double take; for instance, Netflix’s formal expense policy is five words long: “Act in Netflix’s Best Interest”.

That’s it? Can a public company worth over a $150 billion really have an expense policy which is essentially no policy. Apparently, the answer is yes. In the book Patty McCord states that they rarely had any trouble with this type of policy – occasionally someone would eat at a restaurant that they shouldn’t, or buy a gadget that they shouldn’t, but by and large this policy just works.

Similarly, the no defined vacation policy which is not very uncommon these days was pioneered by Netflix.

Compared to some of the other ideas mentioned in the book – these two things seem almost trivial. The most powerful thing to me was the thought that Netflix says that adequate performance gets a generous severance package. The idea is that they want to hire only top performers, and pay their top performers top of the market rate. This is because while in procedural work the best performers perform 2x as much as the average performers, in creative work the best performers contribute 10x as much as the average performers, so it makes sense to hire just one great person rather than two average ones.

Obviously, the flip side of this is the immense pressure a lot of Netflixers must come under to perform, and this is clearly not for everyone.

The question when reading business books is how relevant they are to what you are doing. In terms of directly actionable things – I believe there was just one – Patty McCord talks about getting feedback on yourself in the form of Start, Stop and Continue, and I am interested in implementing that for myself, and see what my colleagues have to say about my performance in these three simple buckets.

While other things may not be actionable for me in their pure form I did some further reading on almost everything mentioned in the book and concepts such as managing with context, not control, and avoid rules can always be adapted to suit your style.

While these things are all at a tactical level, the foundation of all of this is to hire high performance people, and Netflix does a great job on defining what high performance means to them. That is something you can certainly model yourself on if it resonates with you.

In deciding whether you should read this book or not, I would say that go ahead and read this HBR article on How Netflix Reinvented HR, and if you find that interesting then you will definitely find value in the book.