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Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things

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Re: Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things

#251
"THE WRIGHT BROTHERS" by Fred C. Kelly. This is the one I read and it turns out to be on project Gutenberg:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/67672/67672-h/67672-h.htm

I'm really curious how that is considered public domain, it was published in 1943 and he died in 1959.

Anyway, one of the things most fascinating to me was their attempts to sell an airplane to the US army and other business related things. You'd think inventing the airplane would bring quick financial rewards but it was a long road.

Re: Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things

#252
"The Wright Brothers" by David McCullough - Shows how Orville and Wilbur surpassed the leading researchers of the day to be the first to achieve controlled, powered flight. Does a great job of describing their work ethic and research process.

"The Myths of Innovation" by Scott Berkun - Not exactly about how hard things got done, but it discusses some of the misconceptions and assumptions we make about current technology and the process of inventing new tech.

Re: Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things

#253
post #248
post #115

Reading some of these books recommended here, perhaps the most shocking thing is that so much is due to randomness: an arbitrary person does something small that turns out to be on the critical path, and without it the big thing would not get completed. I like the kind of books recommended here, but please be aware of survivor's bias (there not many books about failures! Any great recommendations? "How we could NOT g…

I'd recommend Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. It covers the trials and tribulations as well as the brilliance and ruthless tactics taken to build Standard Oil.

Yeah it's a great book. It definitely gets into the weeds about his family and personal life (as a comprehensive biography should). Personally, I enjoyed that stuff, but if you just want to learn about how he did hard stuff as the OP described, it may be a bit thick at 600+ pages. That said, we summarized it in discussion form on our podcast if anyone is interested: http://businessbooksandco.com/episode/7b5d6ab9/titan-the-lif...

Re: Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things

#254
"Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea" is the story of a shipwreck discovery that has always enthralled me. I've read it three times, and I'm so inspired about all the challenges they solved along the way.

(Note: the hero of the story went a little crazy in recent years. Hid from the law for a long time, and I think he just died... but still, the book itself is amazing.)

Re: Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things

#255
post #211
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's my problem with a lot of the literature on building successful businesses. They all seem to be offering a white glove path and don't talk about all the tactics ranging from shady to downright illegal that helped many of the biggest companies today to be where they are now.

When I was a kid, I read about Jack Welch and thought he was great. Later I learned of all the shenanigans he pulled, not just unethical, but illegal stuff. And the way he trampled people. Bill Gates is a respected philanthropist today, he too did all kinds of shady, ruthless stuff to get to the top. Everywhere I look, same story - Amazon, Facebook, Google... The only big company I think is okay is Costco - either th…

USA culture has this idolatry for the Rich that looks like what the aristocracy always did: my "beloved" king, the kind princess... Like the philanthropy of the robber barons that made them respectable, but when they are still alive.

I prefer the French approach to take care of aristocrats.

Re: Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things

#256
post #174

In the 1930s Phyllis Pearsall ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllis_Pearsall ) walked 3000 miles of every street of London (23000), collected house numbers, to create a street atlas to sell. Took her 4 years of 18 hour days. The book title is "Mrs P's Journey". The whole history of early map making is fascinating.

Didnt have offsite backups, and if you did you were doing twice the work.

Re: Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things

#257
post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was a kid, I read about Jack Welch and thought he was great. Later I learned of all the shenanigans he pulled, not just unethical, but illegal stuff. And the way he trampled people. Bill Gates is a respected philanthropist today, he too did all kinds of shady, ruthless stuff to get to the top. Everywhere I look, same story - Amazon, Facebook, Google... The only big company I think is okay is Costco - either th…

Aaron Greenspan created the early version of what Facebook became, and has loudly criticized the zero-sum tactics used by Zuckerberg, Gates, and other billionaires: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-legend-of-mark-zucker_b_7... Some interesting books in this category: * Masters of Doom. It’s about John Carmack and the team that built Id Software * Einstein. By Walter Isaacson, author of the Jobs biography. Einstein’…

I'm fairly convinced most successful "social" sites have bodies buried somewhere. The problem of launching a two-sided market is tough.

It was against my ethics but we sent a round of unsolicited emails to about 10,000 people in Brazil to launch a voice chat service circa 2001. It must have been a really good list (and a different time and place) because we had close to a 40% response rate. (Later we got a list that was so bad some of the emails didn't have '@' signs in them!)

There's that famous story of how reddit was initially populated with fake users too.

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I've never been able to enjoy that Viktor Frankl book, Man's Search for Meaning ,since I read an essay that pointed out how pernicious it was that postmodern people like to fantasize that everyday life is like a concentration camp -- paradoxically that fantasy undermines Frankl's own thesis

I recently read an account of a 14 year old girl (a demo that is vulnerable to Franklism, I had one in an acting class I was in) who said she thought about the Holocaust (survived by some ancestors she'd never met) every day and experienced it as a trauma. If that's what it means to "remember the Holocaust" we might be better to forget. We hear the refrain that "it must never happen again" but it happens over and over again routinely

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide

and if that memory makes us think it is a memory and not an ongoing crime, it is part of the problem and not part of the solution. You can take your own experiences of your group being persecuted and apply that to justice universally (Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner gave their lives together with African-American James Chaney in 1964 to fight racism in the U.S. South) or you can use it as an excuse to commit similar crimes (kill and displace civilians) against other people. It's your choice.

Re: Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things

#259
Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption Zamperini's life was a series of hard things. Going to the Olympics, surviving a plane crash, then 47 days at sea, then a Japanese concentration camp ...

Very well written as well

Re: Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things

#260
post #115

Reading some of these books recommended here, perhaps the most shocking thing is that so much is due to randomness: an arbitrary person does something small that turns out to be on the critical path, and without it the big thing would not get completed. I like the kind of books recommended here, but please be aware of survivor's bias (there not many books about failures! Any great recommendations? "How we could NOT g…

The Big Short is an excellent book about failures. Really shows how, despite huge institutions and government regulation, human hype and bluster still was the main culprit.
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