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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

#261

Post by jcranmer »

codechicago277 wrote: post #225
akudha wrote: 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’…

> * The Double Helix

This one is rather famous for Watson's minimization of the role Rosalind Franklin played in the process of discovering DNA, and Watson himself later acknowledged his mistakes in doing so (though he never corrected them).

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

#262

Post by no_wizard »

withinboredom wrote: post #151
gamebak wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I share your thoughts. Sometimes you just need to be at the right place, at the right time, solving the exact problem and this is troublesome, especially in this era when so much is already invented. Maybe I just have a wrong view, but I don't know how to decouple from this.

The fact that capitalism can be modeled by pure random chance only drives the point home, in my opinion. So much depends on luck... That being said, luck can be engineered, to a degree: - meeting people; networking - having access to resources - recognizing potential opportunities and taking advantage of them That being said, I'm by no means "successful" but I'm also not a "failure" ... I win some, and I lose some.

There are many types of success.

Tech has often been associated with novel success. That is success by inventing or perfecting a previously underrated, underestimated or wholly invented technology.

This isn’t the only type though.

There is success through persistence. In the long run, 95% of businesses fail. Simply running a component operation that outlasts competitors in a proven market can take you very far. It’s harder than it looks. Likewise this gets little traction on most media

Then there is success by accident. The one that gets most traction in media is businesses that have some flash in the pan unexpected success. These seem to be a traditional combination of luck and persistence. Along these same lines are businesses that come to fruition during a time in which they can succeed, like TikTok and the pandemic.

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

#263

Post by stevenfoster »

Fall of Carthage by Adrian Goldsworthy

Few people understand the Punic wars and what it took to “delete” Carthage from the world. Delenda Cartago Est.

Goldsworthy tells the story accessibly from both sides of the wars. Lessons that echo throughout history.

More of a biography but still fits your criteria is The Wright Brothers by David McCullough. It’s an easy read and hard to put down. I had no idea what it took to make flying a thing until that book. We definitely take for granted how much those two men changed the world.

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

#266

Post by OxfordOutlander »

abtinf wrote: post #61

The Box by Marc Levinson is the incredible story of the dawn of containerized shipping. It is a little shocking just how recently this happened (the very first experimental loads were in the 1950s), and that the standard of shipping before containers was for longshoremen to literally hand carry boxes of stuff onto ships and stuff them just anywhere. You would be stunned to realize just how new and unused the piers of…

+1

Fantastic book. Particularly the impact it had on the vietnam war, and the role the battles between rail + trucking played in driving containers.

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

#268

Post by shrugsworth »

Tune In: The Beatles: All These Years by Mark Lewisohn. I picked it up as a Beatles fan, but it actually reads more like "how did the Beatles happen" - a social history of the times, the factors that led to each of their development as artists, and their iterative development into the group that we know as The Beatles. Put another way, it's a deep dive into the four founders of one of the most successful artistic organizations of all time and their search for product-market fit. This is also part 1 of 3, ending when they finally achieve PMF, releasing their first number one record.

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

#269

Post by zie »

mmkos wrote: post #123
jll29 wrote: 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…

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.

It's more of a, it generally wasn't illegal at the time they did those things, and of course now they want it to be illegal. It's much like pulling the rope up behind them so nobody else can climb the same ladder they did.

There is a reason you have to have licenses to braid hair, cut nails, etc(and charge for it) in many US states for instance. It's not a simple license like a food worker has to do. It's much more involved.

I mean if someone is going to mess with my hair, do a manicure or pedicure they should know the basic hygiene things much like a food worker has to do. I'm good with that. Why do they need more than that? It's not because we as a society actually care that much about a person that can't braid hair trying to charge for it. It's because all those beauticians want to limit their competition.

OK rant over for the day.

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

#270

Post by etc-hosts »

akudha wrote: post #211
mmkos wrote: 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…

> There is this podcast called Behind the bastards

I know so much more now about the figures behind the rise of the fascism before the end of WW2 because of this podcast.

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