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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

#151

Post by withinboredom »

gamebak wrote: post #128
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.

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.

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

#152

Post by crones »

Based on what you said you have enjoyed already, I'd highly recommend "A Triumph of Genius: Edwin Land, Polaroid and the Kodak Patent War" by Ronald K. Fierstein (http://www.triumphofgenius.com/).

It is a history of Land and Polaroid, together with a detailed, insider's view of the long-running litigation between Polaroid and Kodak (the author worked at the firm which represented Polaroid on the case).

One of the things I found most interesting was just how much Steve Jobs was inspired by and copied Edwin Land.

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

#153

Post by narrator »

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.

One of the fun things about reading Young Stalin, which is a biography of Stalin from birth to the Russian revolution, is nobody liked him in Georgia where he grew up, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union, so it was easy for the biographer to get sources to tell all the negative and horrifying details of his earlier life building and running organized crime gangs to fund the Russian revolution. Imagine the most paranoid narcissistic jerks you've ever known who also happen to be exceptionally intelligent decide to take over a country and they manage to pull it off. Fascinating stuff.

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

#155

Post by ttoinou »

db48x wrote: post #77

The _Path Between the Seas_ by David McCullough is really excellent. It starts with the French diplomat Ferdinand De Lesseps, specifically with the way his friendship with the king of Egypt enabled him to start the Suez canal project. It then details how he got the Isthmian Canal project off the ground and how, because he wasn’t an engineer, he became willfully blind to the realities in Panama. He made horrendously f…

Mastery by Robert Greene also mentions in a few pages this story about the Wright Brothers (they started from their expertise in bicycles, that’s how they got planes right) and it’s def a book the OP might be interested in.

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

#156

Post by _aavaa_ »

cl42 wrote: post #58

"The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York" by Robert Caro This is an incredibly long biography of a man who figured out how to build an urban empire. While he wasn't an "entrepreneur" per se, he figured out how to generate huge amounts of revenue via tolls/bridges, how to manage and manipulate public policy, and how to attract the best urban planning talent. ... and you can then read about how it all f…

99% invisible recently did it as a book club. You can listen to a much shorter chapter-by-chapter summary and discussion about it: https://99percentinvisible.org/club/

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

#157

Post by withinboredom »

jbullock35 wrote: post #66
superconduct123 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My main takeaway from reading that book was that working in tech in the late 70s was not that different from now days Just different technology/hardware/timescale Same workplace problems, personality types, company politics, etc... Did not expect to find it so relatable in 2024

There's at least one huge respect in which tech is different, at least in the USA: worker compensation. In the book, Tracy Kidder writes repeatedly about how Data General (the company at the heart of the book) is proud of its austerity. It doesn't pay well. It's proud of having an ugly, austere, warehouse-like building. It puts its critical engineers in the windowless basement of this building. Kidder is describing a…

I worked for a guy that converted half the office into a store with windows so shoppers could "watch us work" ... things haven't changed much, for non-FAANG.

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

#158

Post by diggan »

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…

> 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've been on a somewhat James Burke binge for the last 6 months or so. For the ones who don't know, Burke write books and makes TV shows talking about inventions/technology and how they're all connected, often by chance and randomness.

And the amount of discoveries we (humanity) made by pure luck/chance/coincident is incredible. So many things we find vital today can be summed up to be discovered when someone was bored and was randomly messing around with stuff, or they tried to do something that would never have worked, but accidentally did X and noticed something strange.

Just a random example I can recall: In 1928, Alexander Fleming was researching influenza when he noticed that some mold had accidentally contaminated his petri dishes. Looking into it further, he noticed that the mold seemed to be killing the bacteria. Because of that, this particular species of mold became world famous ("Penicillium notatum") and Penicillin became the world's first antibiotic :)

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

#159

Post by lnsru »

zikduruqe wrote: post #143

Surviving a concentration camp seems a tad difficult. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man's_Search_for_Meaning Everyone should read this at least twice in their lives.

Another book about survival there: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_of_the_Gods When I have a bad day I think about this book and intellectuals in hell.

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

#160

Post by jkingsbery »

The Last Viking - a biography of explorer Roald Amundsen

The Wager- a book about a ship by the same name which wrecked in the Drake Passage.

Eccentric Orbits - about the Iridium constellation.

The Great Bridge by David McCullough - goes into a pretty good amount of detail in the engineering and sub-problems of construction of the Brooklyn Bridge.

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