Justin Harter

I read a lot of books in this space and this is the first time I've run across one that's overtly religious. It started off secular enough, but most of the end of the book is about Jesus and the Christian God. If that's your jam, great. But I felt a little bamboozled by it.

It's 60% self-help, 20% helpful, and 20% completely detached from reality for a great many people (single parents, the elderly, the super young, etc.).

This book has a chapter on making sure everyone has a laptop

This book is dated in places, cliche in others (“Be a good listener!”), and disregards entire industries in others (“You don't need designers, just get crowdsourced spec work!”).

If you've read any business book you've heard all the advice in here before.

Don't let the copyright date of this book fool you, there's plenty of pertinent information in here even for 2017. There's plenty to laugh at too, like remembering to send faxes to people. But the concepts are here. Weiss also comes across a little...high falutin' sometimes for my taste, but this is book held my attention for its contrarian and supported positions against common beliefs.

Really well researched, and a great piece of scholarly work. I just had a hard time getting into it. Don't read too much into my rating. Like many great books, they're not for everyone.

A short, breezy read that makes you kinda feel good about living. Or at least, that you could do better. I like this book because it pulls from other great sources, like Blue Zones of Happiness, and Flow State from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (yeah, I don't think I pronounced it right).

Ikigai is a Japanese word that roughly translates to “the reason you get up in the morning” and the researchers (I assume they're researchers anyway) follow the advice and lives of Okinawans. Supposedly, there are more 100+ year olds living there than anywhere else in the world.

I give it four stars. Plus, it makes for a lot of deep discussion about living, culture, and society.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

There are many books on this topic, but this one is probably the most comprehensive at citing or sourcing material from many other long-time sources, like Tristan Harris, Cal Newport, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

I read “The Everything Store” several years ago and found it fascinating. I always like to peek inside large companies that really change industries, for better or worse. “Amazon Unbound” is the follow-up to that book.

The focus is invariably on Jeff Bezos and much of that revolves around Amazon, but it does extend into his work with The Washington Post, Blue Origin, and personal issues.

Frankly, I don't know how Brad Stone managed to get so much amazing detail. How does he know who sat where around a table or what someone wore the day such-n-such happened? It impresses me and makes for a rich story with many characters, all revolving around this world inside Amazon with a special way of thinking about problems.

I also really liked talking about this book because it helps solidify some of my thoughts on the company—for better or worse. I recorded a podcast review here: https://justinharter.com/amazon-unbound-by-brad-stone-ep-013

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

This book feels like it was written by a tech bro investor type who lives in hustle culture. If that's your thing, then great. It's not for me.

Be less like you, and other shitty life advice

I'm glad I picked this up from the library, because if I had paid for it I'd be more pissed than I already am.

Everything about the book is presumptive. Like tutorials about how to draw an owl: draw a circle, then two more, then the rest of the owl.

Harris is an agency owner. He grew up in California, worked with Chiat/Day, made connections with people at Disney and the Obama White House, and really everything has just been great. You too, says Harris, can be equally successful if you'd just be optimistic and believe in yourself.

This is borderline misleading. Be generous but not too generous. Say no, but not to everything. Because rational people know that if you said yes to everything something somewhere else will fall apart. Work hard, but not too hard. Be humble, but have a brand, but make sure it's not an old-fashioned brand.

Be human, but not too human. Spend time, but not too much. Devote yourself to your task, but not too much because you should always do your best work, but don't forget about budgets and constraints and clients with dumb ideas, like spending every ad cent on a YouTuber.

This line of thinking is why this country has Republicans. You spend your life in San Francisco, New York, or DC as a talented but otherwise normal white guy and then wonder why the rest of the country isn't as good as you.

Harris got connections with Disney and the Obama White House. I assure you no one at Disney has ever thought to connect with anyone in Indiana. Sure, people from Indiana work at Disney, but Disney has never contracted with an agency here. In fact, among the whole ad industry, no agency has ever captured the industry's imagination in the middle of the country except for a literal few outliers in places like Austin, Nashville, Denver, and Minneapolis over the last generation.

This line of “Just say yes to things that are automatic nos!” and “Learn the power of no!” is so mindlessly fruitless it's patronizing. “Don't take every client!” is equally dumb when you need to, you know, eat. Might as well tell kids not to bother waiting tables or working retail. “Learn the power of no, kids! And don't accept the money, something better is always somewhere else!”

If you like rah-rah cheerleading that makes you feel better about yourself, read the book.

This has a little of everything in it, and is solid advice. But if you're like me and find yourself working in the sticks with small clients that have budgets of about $5000 a year, much of this book is going to seem like a wild dream.

This book is pretty thin on details about Tim as a person. It's a lot of publicly known and available Apple history.

I ended up with a library book I wanted to finish and spin around. And at about 250 pages it was a quick read: Happier at Home, by Gretchen Rubin.

Sadly, I found it lacking. It's not written for me. It's about precisely what it sounds like: how to be happier in your home. Useful for those of us in places melting down with infections right now.

But I don't like the tone. She's a rich white woman who went to Yale and lives in New York with two kids and a husband. She gets to write books all day after having a successful law career at the top levels of the Supreme Court.

She basically puts all her eggs in family, kids, having the “right amount” of no doubt expensive possessions and making time for things like acupuncture.

I'm a gay man in Indiana who can't have kids, makes nowhere near that kind of money, has no family, and hates spending money.

Like I said, this book just wasn't written for me.

Applicable, but not highly applicable, to small businesses with one or a few people. The takeaway can be established as: “Set realistic goals, measure them appropriately, and be diligent and public about it.”

I stopped reading after a section on relieving uncertainty said to “imagine lifting all the weight of your problems on to God or the universe.”

I'm a humanist and there is no God. So this lousy solution solves nothing.

This book could best be summarized as: Don't be a jerk and pay attention.

I admit this book was not for me and was hyped to be something I should have anticipated. This is great if you're a big publicly-traded company. Or if you have dozens or hundreds of employees. Or if you're into the world of Silicon Valley tech startups.

I'm a service business of 3 in middle America. None of this relates to me in the least. Points for being detailed where other books bluster. But not ideal for truly small businesses.

I tried really hard to not just type, “Ok, boomer” and hit post.

Maybe it's just the age of the book showing a smidge, but the things this guy bemoans hardly seem catastrophic. Kindles come with the Internet built into the price! The Indianapolis Symphony lets people vote by text for the encore song! There are children who use laptops instead of books!

I am far from a tech-only booster. I think plenty of people would do well to thoughtfully reconsider the value of technology to the extent devices should be a tool. What this author misses is what I was after: reasonable arguments to analyze whether reading that book on your iPad is actually more distracting. Do you sit down to read the “newspaper” only to get sucked into Twitter? That stuff is problematic.

I'm sure many of us could remember our parents complaining we “always had our nose in a book”, as if it was a bad thing. But unlike reading, which the author tries to hold up as far back as Gutenberg, people didn't walk around incapable of working because they were reading. People didn't have “reading addictions”.

Tech like our phones should be tools, but the apps on them are increasingly engineered to be addictive and sociologically sticky.

This book doesn't get very deep into that.

A lot about the financials of Pixar in the early days. Not much we haven't already heard about the formation of Pixar and its relationship with Jobs and Disney. Would be really interesting, I imagine, for people interested in IPOS, stocks, etc.