Backward reasoning

This is the 10th newsletter of Book Lovers sent on October 16, 2015, focusing backward reasoning.
This edition features Avinash K. Dixit and Barry J. Nalebuff.

Don't miss the following letters:

Last week, we’ve talk about the bandwagon effect, characterized by the probability of individual adoption increasing with respect to the proportion who have already done so.

Why does bandwagon effect matter?
Because the path we take shapes our present. And that’s particularly true for technology.

Yesterday trade-offs might not be optimal today yet are still playing a big role.

Today we will consider how to avoid being stuck with a present that was shaped by wrong choices in the past.

The main trick is to use what is called backward reasoning, which is just working backward from the goals.

Let’s take an example to illustrate what backward reasoning is: a gamble between two people. This case is also inspired by the excellent book Thinking Strategically by Avinash K. Dixit and Barry J. Nalebuff.

The Game

The rules is very simple: there are two envelopes, each containing an amount of money, the amount of money is either $5, $10, $20, $40, $80, or $160 and everybody knows this. We are told that one envelope contains exactly twice as much money as the other. The two envelopes are shuffled, and we give one envelope to Ali and one to Baba. (pun hidden)

After both the envelopes are opened (but the amounts inside are kept private), Ali and Baba are given the opportunity to switch. If both parties want to switch, we let them.

Suppose Baba opens his envelope and sees $20. He reasons as follows: Ali is equally likely to have $10 or $40. Thus my expected reward if I switch envelopes is (10 + 40)/2 = $25 > $20. For gambles this small, the risk is unimportant, so it is in my interest to switch. 

By a similar argument, Ali will want to switch whether she sees $10 (since she figures that he will get either $5 or $20, which has an average of $12.50) or $40 (since she figures to get either $20 or $80, which has an average of $50).

Something is wrong here. Both parties can't be better off by switching envelopes since the amount of money to go around is not getting any bigger by switching.

What is the mistaken reasoning?

Answer: forgetting to reason backward

A switch should never occur if Ali and Baba are both rational and assume that the other is too. The flaw in the reasoning is the assumption that the other side's willingness to switch envelopes does not reveal any information. We solve the problem by looking deeper and deeper into what each side think! about the other's thought process. 

Suppose that Ali opens her envelope and sees $160. In that case, she knows that she has the greater amount and hence is unwilling to participate in a trade. Since Ali won't trade when she has $160, Baba should refuse to switch envelopes when he has $80, for the only time Ali might trade with him occurs when Ali has $40, in which case Baba prefers to keep his original $80. But if Baba won't switch when he has $80, then Ali shouldn't want to trade envelopes when she has $40, since a trade will result only when Baba has $20. Now we have arrived at the case in hand. If Ali doesn't want to switch envelopes when she has $40, then there is no gain from trade when Baba finds $20 in his envelope; he doesn't want to trade his $20 for $10.
The only person who is willing to trade is someone who finds $5 in the envelope.

1. We say that innovative organizations need to be more horizontal.
   Quick test to know wether one organization is horizontal: is anyone from the organization capable to speak publicly in the name of it? (not only authorized, but also capable of doing it without feeling overwhelmed)
   

2. We often say: we are getting lost by too much connectivity. That is a mistake. The problem is not being always connected: it just increases our capacities. We are getting lost if we don't manage our attention. The key is to distinguish connectivity and attention.

a16z Podcast: A Podcast about Podcasts

Key insights:

1. the issue for user is managing between the attachment of one show producer (one unique style/voice/vision of the world) AND one topic of interest (eg entreprenership, sport) or mood (looking for humour, sophisticated content, entertainment, etc.)

2. mainstream users develop the habits of building their own selection of content (eg: netflix)

3. best way to market a podcast: being featured or participating in other podcasts

4. speaking in podcasts = performing

5. podcast = very intimate relationship

Forecasting Tournaments: What We Discover When We Start Scoring Accuracy

Incredible master class in superforecasting with great thinkers. Really a must watch/listen to. Two of the several lessons learned in part 1:

1. The correlation between your ability to tell a good explanatory story and your forecasting accuracy is rather weak

2. The clairvoyance test means that if the question is so well-framed that if you handed it to a genuine clairvoyant who could see perfectly into the future, the clairvoyant could look into the future, say thumbs up or thumbs down, without needing to come back to you for some ex post facto re-specification of what the question was.

62% of Americans Have Under $1,000 in Savings, Survey Finds

I've been really surprised with the following data set. American don't save much...
(left: savings balances by age, right: savings account balances by income)

Bandwagon effect & the ideology of lean

This is the 9th newsletter of Book Lovers sent on October 4, 2015, focusing on game theory, especially on bandwagon effect, and its effect in the adoption of new technologies.
This edition features Avinash K. Dixit and Barry J. Nalebuff.

Don't miss the following letters:

Rear-View Mirror

Last week, I've written a plea for relativism (and long content), in which I’ve highlighted two considerations:
1. as Spinoza wrote in Ethics, we don't desire things because we judge them to be good; on the contrary, we judge something to be good BECAUSE we desire it.
2. we should always remind ourselves that between all and nothing, there is something. Often we are engaged in battles that lure us into thinking that their can be only two camps… when in reality there are many more.

This Week

This week, this newsletter has been inspired by the greatest book I know about game theory: Thinking Strategically by Avinash K. Dixit and Barry J. Nalebuff. Whereas many books on game theory are filled by mathematics, this one is free of formulas and gives us nonetheless a very rigorous introduction to game theory. We understand very easily its key principles (brinkmanship, bargaining, unconditional moves, vicious circles), with a great diversity of illustrations, drawn from the military world, public policies, sport, political campaigns, etc. A must read, I swear. ;)

The Bandwagon effect

I’ll focus this newsletter on something called “bandwagon effect”, that points out the necessity of thinking strategically even in a world of increased complexity. The bandwagon effect is characterized by the probability of individual adoption increasing with respect to the proportion who have already done so. As more people come to believe in something, others also "hop on the bandwagon" regardless of the underlying evidence.

In this extract, the authors show that history matters in determining today’s technology choices. What could appear trivial is in fact very problematic: historical trade-offs may be irrelevant considerations in the present.

As they say “the important insight from game theory is to recognize early on the potential for future lock-in — once one option has enough of a head start, perior technological alternatives may never get the chance to develop. Thus there is a potentially great payoff in the early stages from spending more time figuring out not only what technology meets today's constraints, but also what options will be the best for the future.”

The ideology of lean

That doesn’t seem very much in coherence with the way we develop innovative product, right?
Under today’s ideology, we build prototype called “MVP” (minimum viable product) that we test and improve with quick iterations and small feedback loops. We never fire out if today's constraints will be the best for the future (and that is not a question of technical debt, I see you in the back raw!).

Discover two stories, from the book Thinking Strategically, that show how our society has been shaped by things like “hoof-and-mouth disease” and the “submarine space constraints”:

Gasoline as the best power source

"In 1890 there were three ways to power automobiles stearn, gasoline, and electricity — and of these one was patently the other two: gasoline. ... [A turning point for gasoline was] an 1895 horseless carriage competition sponsored by the Chicago Times Herald. This was won by a gasoline-powered Duryea - one of only two cars to finish out of six starters — and has been cited as the possible inspiration for R. E. Olds to patent in 1896 a gasoline power  source, which he subsequently mass-produced in the "Curved-Dash Olds." Gasoline thus overcame its slow start. Steam continued viable as an automotive power source until 1914, when there was an outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease in North America. This led to the withdrawal of horse troughs — which is where steam cars could fill with water. It took the Stanley brothers about three years to develop a condenser and boiler system that did not need to be filled every thirty or forty miles. But by then it was too late. The steam engine never recovered. 

While there is little doubt that today's gasoline technology is better than steam, that's not the right comparaison. How good would steam have been if it had had the benefit of seventy five years of research and development? While we may never know some engineers believe that steam was the better bet."

Light-water reactors are suboptimal yet the norme

In the United States, almost all nuclear power is generated by light-water reactors. Yet there are reasons to believe that the alternative technologies of heavy-water or gas-cooled reactors would have been superior, especially given the same amount of learning and experience. 

[Two main reasons for the curious minds:
(a) heavy-water reactors can operate without the need to reprocess fuel
(b) both heavy-water and gas-cooled reactors have a significantly lower risk of a meltdown]

The question of how light-water reactors came to dominate has recently been studied by Robin Cowen, in a 1987 Stanford University Ph.D. thesis.

The first consumer for nuclear power was the U.S. Navy. 
In 1949, then Captain Rickover made the pragmatic choice in favor of light-water reactors. He had two good reasons. It was then the most compact technology, an important consideration for submarines, and it was the furthest advanced, suggesting that it would have the quickest route to implementation.

[...] At the same time civilian nuclear power became a high priority.
The Soviets had exploded their first nuclear bomb in 1949. In response, Atomic Energy Commissioner T. Murray warned, "Once we become fully conscious of the possibility that [energy-poor] nations will gravitate towards the USSR if it wins the nuclear power race, it will be quite clear that this race is no Everest-climbing, kudos-providing contest." [...]

Considerations of proven reliability and speed of implementation took precedence over finding the most cost-effective and safest technology. Although light-water was first chosen as an interim technology, this gave it enough of a head start down the learning curve that the other options have never had the chance to catch up.

Weekly #MustRead articles

This week, we will talk about three articles, two of which has been pointed out by people I like, so I'll pass them along with my thoughts on them.

1. Baptiste Bachellerie send me a piece that he loved (He told me “I like his concept of thin versus thick value (value that take externalities into account) that he describes in 'The New Capitalist Manifesto'.”).

As I really enjoyed the reading (but didn’t agree that much with the author), I share with you the article and the answer I sent him. 
The article is titled The Unicorn Bubble (Or, Why You Shouldn’t Want to be the Next Uber), written Umair Haque, who tells us that we shouldn’t take Uber as a guide to innovate.

He raises very good questions (and highlight the necessity to take into account externalities) and assures that Uber has not such a great strategic position (low entry barriers, low switching costs, and low power). To be honest I was quite bittersweet at the end of the reading for the 3 following points:

1. In theory he's quite right about switching cost & barriers to entry but I feel they are harder and harder to take into consideration now in the digital world: we tend to underestimate  (a) the cognitive cost of switching -- power of habits, (b) the barry that constitute users (both suppliers & demanders) which provides a tons of knowledge -- data + inside knowhow + brand.
Groupon is yet a really interesting counter-example: a strong brand that has been almost forgotten in the blink of an eye. Did they lack a sense of belonging from their user or some kind of magic in the use?

2. I'm quite cautious about the tactics of dominance: Uber is in a very specific position -- a massive legal "grey zone" at the very least. I don't like how they operate as a whole (they are quite agressive) but I don't think we can legitimately say they are weak because they have to fight to be authorized.

3. I really think - as many people do when they talk about innovation - that we shouldn't compare companies when they are giant success with new (or at least "young") entrants. Uber might have a terrific valuation but the firm is only 6 years old. Apple used to have lots of traits he highlights: a low bargaining power (and disputable practices), a barry that was really hard to cross in front them - Microsoft built tremendous network effects thanks to the interoperability of its softwares- and was really easy to switch from.

2. Nicolas Debock told me about his fondness for Carlo Rovelli, who could be, in his opinion, one of the greatest thinker of our time. I’ve looked for an introduction to his thinking and was not disappointed!
Rovelli tells us that we should “forget time” to understand the world. Contrary to what generally assumed, the physical world does not exist "in time". At the basic microscopic level, the world is better described in terms of a a-temporal theory, where physical laws do not express time evolution of physical variables, but just relations between variables. He explains that time is just a trick introduced in physics to help us study other variables, and this trick (using time as the “prime variable”) doesn’t work anymore when we try to combine general relativity, and quantum field theory.

For him, time only exists in our day-to-day life because of our ignorance of the microscopic state of the world: “if we knew every variables, there would be no time. [...] time is a side effect of ignorance.”

A great interview by Hélène Le meur in La recherche (french): Il faut oublier le temps

3. I've found an article myself! ;)
In Shifting tides: Global economic scenarios for 2015–25, 3 directors of McKinsey -- Luis Enriquez (McKinsey’s Brussels office), Sven Smit (Amsterdam office), and Jonathan Ablett  (expert in the North American Knowledge Center in Waltham) wonder how will evolve the global economy in the next 10 years.
Will we witness a global convergence? Will it be linked with an acceleration of a deceleration of the economy?

They've articulated four global scenario, shaped by the 3 sets of factors outlined below:

1. near term forces: (a) monetary stimulus (most countries have a negative interest rate to encounter the weak demand) and (b) shifting energy markets (oil prices fell by 50 percent in the latter half of 2014, Even after a slight rebound, they remained well below average levels of the past five years)

2. long term forces:

   1. inexorable trends: (a) urbanization and (b) aging (life spans are growing and birthrates falling), which both impose burdens -among them, lower productivity, falling demand, and rising health and pension loads

   2. uncertain forces: (a) technological innovation and (b) global connectivity (trading relationships are increasingly dense and complex, with financial & economic flows seem to diverge since 2010)

If you enjoyed this week's newsletter, please forward it to someone you like.

And start the conversation by replying to this email or by sending my a quick tweet: @willybraun

Looking forward to having your feedbacks and your impressions after the readings.
Warm regards, 
Willy

A plea for relativism (and long content)

This is the 8th newsletter of Book Lovers sent on September 27, 2015, highlighting that we don't desire things because we find them valuable but that we find things valuable because we desire them and to remember that between all and nothing... there is something.
This edition features Baruch Spinoza & André Comte Sponville.

Don't miss the following letters:

Rear-View Mirror

Last week, we were talking about the need to choose the game before choosing how to play it. 

The main takeaways: 
1. we should pay attention not to put too much emphasis on efficiency (doing things right), running the risk of losing effectiveness (doing the right things).
2. we should always remember that we can have counterpoints in our lives, which is the relationship between voices that are interdependent harmonically yet independant in rythm and contour.
Don't lose your love for books even if you like to run.

This Week

This week, we will make it shorter. And you'll understand why. 
Last Thursday, I was in Toulouse and met my old friend Thomas Goubin under the sun.

As we were mentioning this newsletter he told me (I’m quoting without his consent): “What I like about your newsletter is that it forces me to take the time to read it.”

You know how the mind works: I immediately thought about my lifelong battle against short content. “People like video. People like short essays. People like photos”. Yeah, I know. But I don’t really care. Or I really care but I can’t convince myself it is really something of value.

At the same time, I had several feedbacks asking me to write shorter essay, and to put more emphasis on my favourite articles of the week.

So here I am, stuck between two alternatives:
1. declaring war against short content, ie: just keeping on my newsletters as they are
2. accepting people as they are: we are busy people, facing tons of stimuli

Trusting (or avoiding to choose)

The very natural way for me, when confronted with an equivocal choice to make, is to not think about it and let my unconscious decide. So I open thebook I was reading at that time from André Comte Sponville (very good bookbtw).

And the answer was just there in front of my eyes, just as an intentional message from the author (high five André!).

Comte Sponville was speaking about relativism. He first told the difference between values and truths. “We should be relativist regarding values, but not regarding facts” (science is all about facts, they don't (and can't) say anything about values)

He tells us the difference between relativism and nihilism, which get often mixed up. 
"To be a relativist is considering that any value is relative (to a certain subject, to a certain society, to a certain culture, to a certain time…). To be a nihilist[abolishing value], it’s thinking that everything has the same value and that this value is nothing."

Relativism & desire

He then adds: we should neither make norms absolute (we are not God) nor abolish them (it would be giving up our humanity).

Don't stop the reading there, you'll soon understand why we are talking about all of that. 

Why would it be giving up humanity? Because “desire is the essence of a man” (Spinoza). And if reason makes us capable of knowing, desire makes us value things. Spinoza tells us that we desire things because they are pleasing to us, not the way around:

It is clear that we neither strive for, nor will, neither want, nor desire anything because we judge it to be good; on the contrary, we judge something to be good because we strive for it, will it, want it, and desire it. (Ethics, IIIp9s)

The conclusion (finally!)

When I read these words, I couldn't help but think that long content are not something more valuable than short content per se, it is just that I prefer them and as a consequence find them more desirable (high five Baruch!)  

But the real conclusion lays in Comte Sponville words: between all (absolute value) and nothing (nihilism), there is something (relativism).

That might sounds obvious but I often forget it.  So this week I just tried to keep that in mind.
Try yourself, maybe you will find matters in which you side in one camp forgetting that between the two opposing positions… there are many more.

Weekly #MustRead articles

1. In We’ve Got This Whole Unicorn Thing All Wrong!, Tim O'Reilly calls for a shift in our way of evaluating tech companies. We shouldn’t just look at their value for investors but as the real value they provide. And gives us 3 great indicators of desirable unicorns: (a) unbelievable at first, (b) change the way the world works, (c) enormous economic impact that is not all captured by the entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who birthed it.

2. In Give It Five Minutes, Jason Fried tells us a story in which he has the role of the jerk. And the lesson learned he gives us might prevent us from being the jerk ourselves.

3. In The Operating Model That Is Eating The World, Aaron Dignan describe what he calls the Responsive Operating System used by the new tech giants. Hint: Visionary (not commercial) Purpose that guides an agile Process that enables People who make (not manage) Products built to evolve (not to last) which become Platforms for the world (not just the company) to build upon.

If you enjoyed this week's newsletter, please forward it to someone you like.And start the conversation by replying to this email or by sending my a quick tweet:@willybraun

Looking forward to having your feedbacks and your impressions after the readings.
Warm regards, 
Willy

How to choose the game before choosing how to play it

This is the 7th newsletter of Book Lovers sent on September 20, 2015, highlighting the need to not only look at efficiency but also at effectiveness. The game you play matters a lot.
This edition features Saint Augustinus, Paul Watzlawick, Peter Drucker, Tim Ferriss and George Leonard.

Don't miss the following letters:

Protect your time. Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk. Take the phone off the hook. Work regular hours.
-- Jane Kenyon - Everything I Know About Writing Poetry

Last week, we were talking about the fight against homeostasis and the way to initiate change. We also mentioned the importance of looking beyond our natural tastes.

The main takeaways: to initiate change, we must appeal to both our Elephant and its Rider, that’s to say to emotion AND rationality.

For that, we need to (1) direct the rider, because what looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity, (2) motivate the elephant, because otherwise it's exhausting trying to keep an elephant in line, (3) shape the path, because what looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.

This week, we will wonder: where should we be heading if we choose to change?

But before speaking about the right direction, we need to consider if selecting a direction is needed. And I have to confess that it is something that wasn’t natural for me.

Love vs strategy

This is a difficult topic for me, because my beliefs resonated hugely with the words of Saint Augustinus “Dilige et quod vis, fact” (love and do what you will). More precisely he wrote:

Once for all, then, a short precept is given you: Love, and do what you will. Whether you hold your peace, through love hold your peace; whether you cry out, through love cry out; whether you correct, through love correct; whether you spare, through love do you spare: let the root of love be within, of this root can nothing spring but what is good.
-- Saint Augustinus Hipponensis, In Epistolam Ioannis ad Parthos, Tractatus 7 (407-409)

Do not waste your time predict the future, just root your thoughts and your actions with genuine love and enthusiasm. That belief in goallessness was strengthened by one of the reading that impacted me the most in my Youth:  The language of change by Paul Watzlawick (highly recommended). I discovered in this book that many resolutions lied in the change itself, independently of the content of the change.  

My core belief system, in two maxims?

(1) “Love and do what you will” & (2) “Keep on moving and you’ll be safe” (or to be a bit more Watzlawickian, I’d say (2 bis) “Act so as to maximize the possible choices” which implies the necessity of movement). 

But soon, I entered a world (business school & the corporate world) that didn’t work that way.

As they’d say, if you want to become master and possessor of nature you’d better embrace the culture of strategy: setting goals and finding optimal strategy to reach them.

There are already a lot to say and sooner or later I’ll talk about predictability, heuristics, game theory & decision making. 

But let’s focus on something broader for this edition: before maximizing the chances to win the game, you need to choose the game you want to play.

How to choose the game

When you enter the mighty world of business, you’re quickly confronted with concepts such as efficiency & effectiveness (Reminder by Peter Drucker (Management): Efficiency is concerned with doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right things).

You can be really good at answering your emails, but if you could have a greater impact for your company doing something else, then you should not answer them (you’d be efficient but not effective).

The pace of our lives makes us take too much emphasis in efficiency. We read books and articles to be “more productive”, to “be better organized”, to “use better tools”, etc.
And we want to learn as fast as possible. We are not happiness seekers anymore, we are “life hackers”. We are not marketers, we are “growth hackers”.

And our culture is becoming more and more a culture of instant gratification (#pornfood), quick fix (#weightwatchers), with eyes on the winners only (#topmodels).

As I was thinking such pessimistic thoughts, I remembered a really great book on that matter. 
It is the kind of book that doesn’t make a lot of noise or win prizes. Worst, this is the kind of book you find in personal development. But this is a hell of a book if you ask me.

The book is Mastery, written by George Leonard, a former United States Army Air Corps pilot  and Aikido instructor (5th degree black belt). And as the title state, it is an invitation to the quest of mastery.

If Tim Ferriss, the guru of productivity, will focus on the 20% that makes you learn 80% of what you need to know, George Leonard invites you to spend 99.9% of your time to reach the top 0.1%.

And there are huge differences between these two philosophies of action. The first: “always be improving” and “create deadlines and maximize your learnings in short period of times”. The second: “fall in love with the plateau ; forfeit hard-won competencies in order to advance the next stage” and “practice as long as you are alive”.

For George Leonard, the 5 keys to long-term fulfillment are:

1. Instruction: get first a first rate instructor that will point out both the good and the bad, keeping in mind that teachers are not perfect and that you will eventually have to say goodbye to your teacher
2. Practice: for the sake of practice, even when you don’t progress, even when you lose, even when you feel you are worsening, even when you reach the top of the mountain (just climb the next one),
3. Surrender: learning involves certain indignities, you will not look good from the get-go and even after. There are times when you forfeit hard-won competency in order to advance to the next stage. (like when a golfer decides to change his or her swing)
4. Intentionality: visualizations, thoughts, images and feelings play into your success
5. The Edge: you must be able to play the edge while respecting practice. Pushing the limits for higher performance, but never crossing the point of stupidity.

Why is it a hell of a book? I can’t say I was blown away by the novelty of his insights.

But Mastery is exactly what we need, because it offers something else, something we need to be remember.
And I see this book less as a source of rebalance but as a counterpoint: the relationship between voices that are interdependent harmonically (polyphony) yet independent in rhythm and contour.

Weekly #MustRead articles

1. In The Future and How to Survive It (McKinsey, HBR), Richard Dobbs, Tim Koller and Sree Ramaswamy show that during the last 3 decades corporate net income grew more than 50% faster than global GDP and explain us why (deregulations, privatization, urbanization, industrialization, global presence boosted by increase of a solvent demand worldwide, falling labor costs and higher productivity of both capital and labor). And the biggest beneficiaries are multinationals from North American (26%) and Western Europe (25%).

But the future won’t be as bright. If global economy has expanded by about 3.5£ annually since 1980, its growth averaged less than 2% in the 100 years prior to WWII, and the next 50 years will look alike globally. And they warn especially companies from North American & Western Europe: there is a shift in center of gravity & technology is changing the rules. The competition will get fiercer, with an increasing war for talent and the environment will be less favorable and less predictable. A must read!

2. In The IPO is dying (VOX), Marc Andreessen explains that IPO is getting a second choice for young companies because it implies a lot of costs & a high sensitivity to rumours. He also reminds us that due to regulation most people can’t invest where growth is occurring: the private markets.

3. In France Pavillonnaire (FR), l’envers du décor (Sciences Humaines), Anne Lambert, author of “Tous propriétaires!” highlights a very problematic trend in the suburban habitations in France: women’s work have a bigger opportunity cost due to the need to buy a 2nd car, to look after the children while at work, which is especially high when correlated with precarious job, often in part time and with low wages. So access to home, highly supported by the State, could go with demotion for women.

If you enjoyed this week's newsletter, please forward it to someone you like.And start the conversation by replying to this email or by sending my a quick tweet: @willybraun

Looking forward to having your feedbacks and your impressions after the readings.
Warm regards, 
Willy

How to fight homeostasis and initiate change

This is the sixth newsletter of Book Lovers sent on September 13, 2015, asking how to change when change is hard. And highlighting that to initiate change, you first need to be open to change and to stay flexible. This edition features the Heath brothers (Switch), JD Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye) & Claude Lévi-Strauss.

Don't miss the following letters:

"Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything."
 -- George Bernard Shaw

Last week, we talked about the permanent war between Old and New. We were talking about resistance, the need of understanding and the unstoppable wave of change.

My key takeaway: we should try to acknowledge change and protect what is dear to our heart. And the best way to do it, might be to understand the new wave and to find a way to integrate some of the old parts in the new reality.

And this week I witness something slightly different: if the outer world is a world of chaos, your inner world always try to find equilibrium, which serious people call homeostasis, the property of a system in which variables are regulated so that internal conditions remain stable.
 

So how can we fight homeostasis? 

How can we to change things when change is hard? This is exactly what Dan & Chip Heath, two brothers, tried to figure out in their book Switch (Dan previously worked as a researcher and case writer for Harvard Business School, Chip is still working as researcher and professor at Stanford School of Business).

First of all, let’s borrow an image from the Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt, psychologist at University of Virginia. Haidt says that our emotional side is an Elephant and our rational side is its Rider. Perched atop the Elephant, the Rider holds the reins and seems to be the leader.

But the Heath brothers, using this image remind us that “the Rider’s control is precarious because the Rider is so small relative to the Elephant. Anytime the six-ton Elephant and the Rider disagree about which direction to go, the Rider is going to lose. [..] The weakness of the Elephant, our emotional and instinctive side is clear: It’s lazy and skittish, often looking for the quick payoff (ice cream cone) over the long-term payoff (being thin). [...] The Rider’s strength is the opposite: its ability to think long-term, to plan, to think beyond the moment”.

Interesting image, but nothing really new, right?

But here comes the interesting part: “the Elephant also has enormous strengths and the Rider crippling weakness. Emotion is the Elephant’s turf -- love and compassion and sympathy and loyalty. That fierce instinct you have to protect your kids against harm -- that’s the Elephant. That spine-stiffening you feel when you need to stand up for yourself -- that’s the Elephant.
And even more important: the Elephant is the one who gets things done. This energy and drive is the mirror image of the Rider’s great weakness: The Rider overanalyze and overthink things (agonizing for twenty minutes about what to eat, brainstorming for hours but never making a decision or a things done).”

They say: if you want to change things you’ve got to appeal to both.

So how can we appeal to both?

In the book, they share a very interesting framework, full of studies, stories and actionable tips.
They show us that

1. what looks like resistance is often lack of clarity and show us how to direct The Rider (follow the bright spots, script the critical moves, point to destination)

2. it's exhausting trying to keep an elephant in line and show us how to motivate The Elephant (find the feeling, shrink the change, grow your people)

3. what looks like a people problem is often a situation problem and how to shape The Path (tweak the environment, build habits, rally the herd).

I cannot but invite you to buy this wonderful books that will have a meaningful impact on your life. Satisfaction guaranteed or your money back (or at least a free coffee to talk about it ;)).

And before going to my curation of the weekly best articles, let me share with you something that I discovered BEYOND this wonderful book.

This week, I’ve bought a book that I wouldn’t have done without the suggestion of someone I value. I’ve bought the book The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger, which is the story of Holden Caulfield, a sixteen-year-old boy just expelled from prep school.

Why wouldn’t have bought it?

1. the language is very familiar, full of slangs & spoken pauses
2. the narrator is very cynical
3. the main themes are angst, alienation and teenage rebellion

Three things I don’t enjoy that much.

But in culture you sometimes have to follow someone else advice to expand your horizon.

And I’m really glad I did it, because this is a truly wonderful book (you should buy it as well - FR version). We are following his exact thought process that sounds legit. And the character makes very witty observations such as:

• “If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she's late?”
• “People always clap for the wrong reasons.”
• “It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to.”
• “I am always saying "Glad to've met you" to somebody I'm not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though.”

and asks wonderful questions such as:

• "You know those ducks in that lagoon right near Central Park South? That little lake? By any chance, do you happen to know where they go, the ducks, when it gets all frozen over? Do you happen to know, by any chance?"

Why do I tell you all of that? Because it made me realize that we need to be flexible enough to allow changes in our system of preferences even if we are totally satisfied with it.

André Comte Sponville, in his latest book “C’est chose tendre que la vie“ (don’t ask me to translate it, I just can’t!), shares an anecdote that I loved. As he was visiting Claude Lévi-Strauss, he asked him how he was doing. Lévi-Strauss answered “I have more and more tastes and less and less talent”.

What if we need not to have that much established tastes?

2. Weekly #MustRead articles

1. In How Making Time for Books Made Me Feel Less Busy (HBR), Hugh McGuire explains us why we don’t find time to read (hints: a. social media = new information = dopamine > food & sex! >> reading / b. jumping from one thing to the next makes us too tired to read) & gives us his tips that make him read again.

2. Chris Holmberg in The Most Dangerous Leadership Traps — and the 15-Minute Daily Practice That Will Save You (Firstround Review) invites us to spend 15 minutes a day in reflection to review candidly the events of the previous day and make plans for the one coming up. Because we can’t afford to have low learning efficiency.

3. In The Research Is Clear: Long Hours Backfire for People and for Companies(HBR), Sarah Green Carmichael shows with considerable evidence that overwork is not just neutral:  it hurts us and the companies we work for.
 

If you enjoyed this week's newsletter, please forward it to someone you like.And start the conversation by replying to this email or by sending my a quick tweet:@willybraun

Looking forward to having your feedbacks and your impressions after the readings.
Warm regards, 
Willy

How to Behave in a Changing World?

This is the fifth newsletter of Book Lovers sent on September 6, 2015, raising the not-so-easy question of how to behave in a changing world. It also reminds us not to trust blindly the great thinkers, thanks to a contribution of @mathieudaix. This edition of the newsletter features Alessandro Baricco & Friedrich Nietzsche

Don't miss the following letters:

1. Old vs new

We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty."  — Maya Angelou

There is an endless war in the cultural field between the Ancients and the Moderns: the former believe they’ve reached the apex of human achievement and view any divergence as a decline, the later believe in an endless course of progress and feel an urge for a wind of change, more adapted to the “changing world“.
Eventually, after the shift of paradigm, the moderns become the ancients and the story keeps on indefinitely.

That is also our everyday life in the tech industry: the new world of startups wants to overhaul the old economic world.

But is NEW always better? I doubt it.
Is NEW something we can fight? I doubt it too.
So what should we do when we don’t believe in the virtue of one gigantic wave of new?

We can complain.
We can be resigned.
We can try to build an alternative.
Or we can try to acknowledge change and protect what is dear to our heart. And the best way to do it, might be to understand the new wave and to find a way tointegrate some of the old parts in the new reality.
 
If this topic is appealing to you, I highly recommend the book The Barbarians (Les Barbares), written by Alessandro Baricco. He tries to explain what most intellectuals consider as a “cultural apocalypse“ where our civilized culture is being sacked by “predators with no culture or history“.

He describes our today's mutation as “a sort of mental and architectural restructuring“ where there is a shift of the idea of experience.

How can we understand this restructuring? How should we act? You need to study the new animals and to understand their new social rules, he says.

If you are sometimes wondering whether we are at the top of the cultural hill or just climbing, if you don’t know what are the inner forces of the mutation, just read the books.
 
A quick teasing of the new rules revealed by the author :
1. Technological innovations that shatters the privilege of a caste, making a form of action possible for a new population.
2. Commercial bliss taking up residence in the expanded playing fields.
3. Spectacularity as the only untouchable value.
4. The adoption of a modern language as the fundamental language of all experience, as the precondition for any occurrence.
5. Simplification, superficiality, speed, middlingness.

2. The usurpation of objectivity

This second part is a contribution Mathieu Daix (@mathieudaix), one of my business partner & long time friend. He invites us to remember not to trust the Great Thinkers by default and to remind ourselves that rationality might be the worst enemy of Honesty.

Mathieu Daix: 

In front of a new dish, a painting or the last Jeff Koon’s giant marble crocodile, our teachers invite the students to say a brief and dry “I like / don’t like it“ instead of a lyrical and passionate “It’s sooooooo beautifuuuuuuul!!!!“ or “aaargh it’s disgustiiiiing!!!!!“
Why? Because it opens the necessary door to subjectivity. It forces us to explore why we like it while our mother doesn't. We all like to believe our thoughts are the Truth, but we learn to see that as an usurpation of objectivity. 
 
Well, Friedrich noticed another usurpation of objectivity. And when Friedrich says something, it’s loud and clear. M. Nietzsche writes that the wise and well-educated philosophers, the same who asked us to say  “I think“ and “I like“ instead of “it is“ are damned liars. Indeed, they spend their life building thinking systems dressed with the veil of universality, rationality and objectivity. They always say “it is“ and never “I think“. Worst, philosophers, instead of working on the issues of the world are actually working on their own issues, never admitting and writing down “I think“.
 
All thoughts are confessions. 
 
Nietzsche simply warns us about something that philosophers and of all us keep doing: we use rational thinking not to build universal models and concepts but only to justify our deep believes and feelings. Well, that’s not bad in itself, but it asks us integrity, I mean saying “I think“ instead of “it is“. Your grandma was right. 

Here is Nietzsche writing:
It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of—namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious auto-biography; and moreover that the moral (or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ out of which the entire plant has always grown. Indeed, to understand how the abstrusest metaphysical assertions of a philosopher have been arrived at, it is always well (and wise) to first ask oneself: "What morality do they (or does he) aim at?" Accordingly, I do not believe that an "impulse to knowledge" is the father of philosophy; but that another impulse, here as elsewhere, has only made use of knowledge (and mistaken knowledge!) as an instrument. But whoever considers the fundamental impulses of man with a view to determining how far they may have here acted as INSPIRING GENII (or as demons and cobolds), will find that they have all practiced philosophy at one time or another, and that each one of them would have been only too glad to look upon itself as the ultimate end of existence and the legitimate LORD over all the other impulses. For every impulse is imperious, and as SUCH, attempts to philosophize. To be sure, in the case of scholars, in the case of really scientific men, it may be otherwise—"better," if you will; there there may really be such a thing as an "impulse to knowledge," some kind of small, independent clock-work, which, when well wound up, works away industriously to that end, WITHOUT the rest of the scholarly impulses taking any material part therein. The actual "interests" of the scholar, therefore, are generally in quite another direction—in the family, perhaps, or in money-making, or in politics; it is, in fact, almost indifferent at what point of research his little machine is placed, and whether the hopeful young worker becomes a good philologist, a mushroom specialist, or a chemist; he is not CHARACTERISED by becoming this or that. In the philosopher, on the contrary, there is absolutely nothing impersonal; and above all, his morality furnishes a decided and decisive testimony as to WHO HE IS,—that is to say, in what order the deepest impulses of his nature stand to each other. 
-- Beyond good and evil, Nietzsche

3. Weekly #MustRead articles

1.  Walter Frick shows us that we humans need to trust thinking machines and gives us tips to manage it in When Your Boss Wears Metal Pants (HBR)
 
2. In Rethinking work (NYT), Barry Schwartz wonders “in the face of longstanding evidence that routinization and an overemphasis on pay lead to worse performance in the workplace, why have we continued to tolerate and even embrace that approach to work?“ 
 
3. In « Comment faire d’une théorie inefficace un phénomène de mode en entreprise » - How to make a inefficient theory a corporate phenomenon? (HBR France), Ludovic François & Romain Zerbib show us why dubious theories can be appealing:
- managers lack time -> they look for simplicity,
- managers are rational beings -> they look for data-driven frameworks,
- managers are in a quest for new -> they look for modern theories,
- managers are sheeplike -> they are likely to follow what others do
- managers are sensible to experts -> they are likely to follow what experts says.

If you enjoyed this week's newsletter, please forward it to someone you like.
And start the conversation by replying to this email or by sending my a quick tweet:@willybraun

Looking forward to having your feedbacks and your impressions after the readings.
Warm regards, 
Willy

A question of raison d'être

This is the fourth newsletter of Book Lovers sent on August 31, 2015, focusing on one misconception concerning the notion of la raison d'être, it features Stanley Kubrick, Michael Mauboussin, Pierre Louÿs, Albert Einstein & Rabindranath Tagore.

Don't miss the following letters:

However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.
--  Stanley Kubrick

The voices of the Internet reminded me the richness of your identities. You love books but you also are avid dream builders: you are not birds caged in a library, the sky is your playground.

You’ve asked me for a rebalance between pure reading enjoyment and business matters. Let’s try that by sharing a misconception I’ve discovered lately.

In our quest to make better businesses, we’ve realized how important was the raison d’être of a firm. It was key to fully involve the people working in the firm and to stand from the crowd of opponents for the consumers. What exactly is a raison d’être? Let’s figure it out by looking at the act of creation.

The foundation of a company is just like any meeting. To grasp the essence of a meeting, I cannot but think of the wise words of Diderot in the very first line of the book Jacques the Fatalist: “How did they meet? By chance, like everybody“.

When you wonder the raison d’être you are asking for the Why. That’s exactly what Simon Sinek reminded us in his famous TED Talk (and in his book): start [any stories about your activity] with why.

But what appears to be our best ally might become our worst enemy. Let me explain you why.

If I ask you “Why are you late?”, what are you going to answer? You are going to find the cause. You don't say "I'm late to be able to finish reading Book lovers' last letter that I love", you say "I'm late because I wanted to finish something". (By the way, if you keep that in mind you can radically change your emotional state and the way people will take your answer)

Why do we answer that way? It is very well explained by Michael Mauboussin in his wonderful book Think Twice: “humans have a deep desire to understand cause and effect.”

To save and share my readings, I use the mobile app Quotle. I love it.

The ambiguity of the why lies exactly there: it is either and both an asking for cause and for motif.  
But causes are not that compelling. We like to understand the world around us but we are not moved by the understanding of causal chains. Who cares about a market opportunity or the dysfunctioning of your relationship with one’s parents? We are moved by the possibility of a new world that we want for us and our peers.

A raison d’être is not the story of the creation. A raison d’être is the story of the world that we want.

So next time someone ask you what you do, or next time you try to decide between two alternatives that seem right, just consider the world you want to be in. And this world is not the necessary future rooted in our past and present, this world is what you build with every decision you take, personally and professionally. A business doesn't sell services or products, it offers to the world a way of life.

And that is precisely what Stanley Kubrick was talking about, it is the act of creating the meaning out of indifference:

The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. Children, of course, begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; but as they grow older, the awareness of death and decay begins to impinge on their consciousness and subtly erode their joie de vivre, their idealism — and their assumption of immortality. As a child matures, he sees death and pain everywhere about him, and begins to lose faith in the ultimate goodness of man. But, if he’s reasonably strong — and lucky — he can emerge from this twilight of the soul into a rebirth of life’s elan. Both because of and in spite of his awareness of the meaninglessness of life, he can forge a fresh sense of purpose and affirmation. He may not recapture the same pure sense of wonder he was born with, but he can shape something far more enduring and sustaining. The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death — however mutable man may be able to make them — our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light. (Stanley Kubrick: Interviews, Gene D. Phillips)

What about my book recommendation of the week?

This week again I'll invite you to read poetry. I recommend you The Songs of Bilitis by Pierre Louÿs, who has been perfectly describe by Aldous Huxley as the incarnation of the "expression of pagan sensuality with stylistic perfection". From the collection, I have chosen the more SFW piece, Rain, which is an exquisite odd to nature. The 142 others poems are for those "whom Beauty might appear nude without exciting laughter or false shame"

Softly and in silence the fine rain has moistened everything. It is still raining a little. I am going to stroll under the trees. Bare-footed, not to soil my sandals.

The spring rains are delicious. Branches laden with rain-soaked blossoms daze me with their perfume. The delicate skin of the bark shines in the sun.

Alas! how many blooms have fallen to earth. Pity the fallen flowers. Pray do not sweep them up, or crush them in the mud: but leave them to the bees.

Beetles and snails promenade in the pathways between the pools of water; I do not wish to tread upon them, nor frighten this gilded lizard which stretches and blinks its eyes.
--- Rain, The Songs of Bilitis, Pierre Louÿs

The articles that most impacted me this week

1. A mind-blowing discussion between Albert Einstein and Rabindranath Tagore: can there be a conception of the universe that is not strictly human?

2. In The Company Cultures That Help Digital Transformation (HBR), Jane McConnell gives us advice to build a company more adaptable to the always changing environment. She highlights 4 pillars:

• a strong, shared sense of purpose
• freedom to experiment
• distributed decision-making
• openness to the external world.

3. In How to separate learning myths from reality (McKinsey), Artin Atabaki shares misconceptions about the brains. 
The 3 myths? 

• critical window of childhood (action: Meditate!),
• multi-tasking (action: remove distractions, especially notifications!),
• learning styles & lift/right brain hypothesis (action: engage all your senses!)

And start the conversation by replying to this email or by sending my a quick tweet: @willybraun

Broaden your life with 1000 images

This is the third newsletter of Book Lovers sent on August 21, 2015, highlighting my new habits of hunting the great images in my readings and featuring Gustave Flaubert, Milan Kundera, Alessandro Baricco & Francis Ponge.

Don't miss the following letters:

Do not read as children do to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do to educate themselves. No, read to live.
― Gustave Flaubert, Correspondence (to Mlle Leroyer - June 6th, 1857)

This week's edition will be shorter. You don't need to hear my voice for too long. 
I just wanted to share with you something that impacted my readings a lot. I'm used to take bountiful notes, most of the times to keep in mind the things I never want to forget. A short bar in the margin and some key words on the very end of the book, with the corresponding page(s). Sometimes I scribble my displeasure. That feels good.

Anyway, recently I started to add some kind of notes. I added the images that I loved and that made my today's world more poetic. Let me share with you some of them from the last two books I read: 

Autumn has arrived and the trees are turning yellow, red, brown; the small spa town in its pretty valley seems to be surrounded by flames.
- Milan Kundera, Farewell Waltz

In this country people don't respect the morning. An alarm clock violently wakes them up, shatters their sleep like the blow of an ax, and they immediately surrender themselves to deadly haste. Can you tell me what kind of day can follow a beginning of such violence? What happens to people whose alarm clock daily gives them a small electric shock? Each day they become more used to violence and less used to pleasure. Believe me, it is the mornings that determine a man's character.
- Milan Kundera, Farewell Waltz

Jealousy has the amazing power to illuminate a single person in an intense beam of light, keeping the multitude of others in total darkness.
- Milan Kundera, Farewell Waltz

He stopped, thanked God, and entered the town on foot, counting his steps, so that each one should have a name, and so that he would never forget them.
- Alessandro Baricco, Silk

He was, besides, one of those men who like to witness their own life, considering any ambition to live it inappropriate.
- Alessandro Baricco, Silk

Hara Kei listened, and not a shadow of an expression discomposed the features of his face. He kept his eyes fixed on Hervé Joncour's lips, as if they were the last lines of a farewell letter.
- Alessandro Baricco, Silk

To save and share my readings, I use the mobile app Quotle. I love it.  

What about my book recommendation of the week?

It is my favourite book of one of my favourite poet: The Nature of Things (Le parti pris des choses) by Fancis Ponge.

He was the first modern poet to be moved to imagine the inner nature of objects - "things". Things animal - vegetable - mineral. Snails - moss - pebbles. Ponge's imagination delves into the very being of the objects, he sees how even the most apparently insignificant of them is an integral part of the world we know, he shows us how the nature of inanimate things is intricately linked to all things animate, to all of us human beings. 

Want to know how he does that? Here is The Crate, from The Nature of Things

English version
“Midway from a cage to a dungeon, the French language has crate, a simple slatted case devoted to the transport of such fruits as at the least shortness of breath are bound to give up the ghost. Knocked together so that once it is no longer needed it can be effortlessly crushed, it is not used twice. Which makes it even less durable than the melting or cloudlike produce within. Then, at the corner of every street leading to the marketplace, it gleams with the modest sparkle of deal. Still spanking new and a little startled to find itself in the street in such an awkward position, cast off once and for all, this object is on the whole one of the most appealing – on whose destiny, however, there’s little point in dwelling.”

French version: 
"A mi-chemin de la cage au cachot la langue française a cageot, simple caissette à claire-voie vouée au transport de ces fruits qui de la moindre suffocation font à coup sûr une maladie.
Agencé de façon qu'au terme de son usage il puisse être brisé sans effort, il ne sert pas deux fois. Ainsi dure-t-il moins encore que les denrées fondantes ou nuageuses qu'il enferme.
A tous les coins de rues qui aboutissent aux halles, il luit alors de l'éclat sans vanité du bois blanc. Tout neuf encore, et légèrement ahuri d'être dans une pose maladroite à la voirie jeté sans retour, cet objet est en somme des plus sympathiques - sur le sort duquel il convient toutefois de ne s'appesantir longuement."

The articles that most impacted me this week

1. Introducing change in organisations.

"No question about it. It’s been a long time since you could talk about sustainable competitive advantage. The cycles are shortened. The rule used to be that you’d reinvent yourself once every seven to 10 years. Now it’s every two to three years. There’s constant reinvention: how you do business, how you deal with the customer."  said Indra Nooyi, CEO of PepsiCo (HBR)

Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote said something really interesting in that matter: for him, the capacity of change depends hugely on the turnover in a company. In that regard, the Silicon Valley is especially fast changing because people very rarely stay more than 2 to 5 year in a company (full interview, a podcast with Tim Ferriss)

2. Research Shows How Consumers Integrate Marketers' Messages with Firsthand Product Experiences

Discover the incredible Sleeper Framing Effect (Mathew S. Isaac & Morgan Poor in the Journal of Consumer Psychology): 

“Marketers and public policy makers would be wise to always ensure that their messages are framed as positively as possible and to bear in mind that the failure of a message to influence immediate judgments does not necessarily imply that the message has failed because it may still influence how the experience is remembered later on" [..]

Consumers pay most attention to their direct consumption experience and largely ignore whether a product is framed positively or negatively when it comes to evaluating their experience.  

[But] the further removed consumers get from their experiences, the more they attend to and rely on frame information to form retrospective evaluations of the experience. That is, those who had previously seen a positive frame evaluated their experience more positively than those who had previously seen a negative one.

If you enjoyed this week's newsletter, please forward it to someone you like and let me know it by sending my a quick tweet: @willybraun. Tweeting is loving ;)

Looking forward to having your feedbacks and your impressions after the readings.
Warm regards, 
Willy

Kundera on the curtain of life and Confucius on becoming a junzi

This is the second newsletter of Book Lovers sent on August 16, 2015, highlighting Kundera images that I really like: novel as an observatory to embrace human life, the curtain of the pre-interprated life. It also includes a great piece from Confucius share by Genaro Bardy. 
Don't miss the next pieces, get the newsletter!  

[...] in the modern world, abandoned by philosophy and splintered by hundreds of scientific specialties, the novel remains to us as the last observatory from which we can embrace human life as a whole. -- Kundera, The Curtain (p105)

I have been asked: what is the mission of your newsletter? The first answer that came to my mind was “giving people excuse to read”: I know so many people (me included) who wish they read more.

Seeing the world as it is

Reading, especially reading novels, remains to us the last observatory from which we can embrace human life, said Kundera. Reading is ripping through the curtain of a pre-interpreted world and reveal the world as it is:  
“A magic curtain, woven of legends, hung before the world. Cervantes sent Don Quixote journeying and tore through the curtain. The world opened before the knight errant in all the comical nakedness of its prose. Like a woman who has applied her make-up before hurrying to her first tryst, the world, when it rushes toward us at the moment of our birth, is already made-up, masked, reinterpreted. And the conformists won't be the only ones fooled; the rebel types, eager to stand up against everything and everyone, will not realize how obedient they themselves are; they will rebel only against what is interpreted (or pre-interpreted) as worthy of rebellion“. -- Kundera, The Curtain (p114)

So helping ourselves to read more is a hell of a mission. And I figured out that this is not the newsletter’s mission, it is more the mission of the newsletter readers.

You didn’t subscribe to know what I was reading. You subscribed to make you win your own reading mission, to rip through the curtain of a pre-interpreted world, didn’t you?

So how do you manage to read more?

First, you need to know what to read. But I don’t think that’s the real issue. We all have a great reading list waiting for us.
Second, you need to have the desire to be reading, which means going from a rational will to an emotional desire: the urge to open a book and read. I believe this desire may come from the enthusiasm that comes out of a good quote.

Third, you need to eliminate the forces that prevent you from reading. Indeed, our reading time are in competition with Facebook and Netflix and so one. But I believe the key is to be surrounded by readers so reading is a structuring part of the world you live in.
This is why I believe that much in the Facebook group Book Lovers (invite your friends!).

Seeing the world as it could be.

But there is something else.

Reading is seeing the world as it could be. The specific object of what Hermann Broch [a 20th-century Austrian writer, considered one of the major Modernists] liked to call “novelistic knowledge” is existence. And in my view, reading should not only give us knowledge or a better understanding of humanity (characters’ motives & beliefs, impact of the environment and the situation we live in), it should also make us become more human.

What makes us more human you ask? Humanity lies in meaning.
What makes us more human is adding our physical world a layer of contingent meaning: associating ideas, emotions & values to phenomena.

Thinking that “perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage“ (Rilke).

In a word becoming more human is accepting the daily poesy of our lives.
Reading is helping us to go through life composing our own music & motifs.

[Human lives] are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven's music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual's life. […] Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress. […] It is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty. -- The Unbearable Lightness of Being Kundera

So I’ll do my best to select quotes from great novels, poems (and non fiction) that had the greatest impact in my understanding of the world as it is and that made me grasp some of the world as it could be.

I hope that could help you fulfill your mission: reading more, seeing the world as it is, seeing the world as it could be.

And as I mentioned in the #1 newsletter, I really want it to be collaborative, so the second part of this #2 newsletter, doesn’t come from me but from a reader and a friend of mine, Genaro Bardy, a great photographer (discover his work: naro-photo.com). His quote comes from a book from Yu Dan who talks about Confucius' Analects that extend our weekly theme: how to become the best possible version of ourselves. He then shares with us a picture that he has taken echoing back to this text.

Be the best possible version of yourself

Confucius’s student Zilu once asked his teacher how he could become a junzi [a Chinese philosophical term often translated as "gentleman" or “wise man”].

Confucius told Zilu: ‘He cultivates himself and thereby achieves reverence.’Cultivate yourself, and maintain a serious, respectful attitude.
Zilu’s reaction to this was: ‘Just by doing this, you can become a junzi? Surely it can’t be that simple?’
Confucius added a little more: ‘He cultivates himself and thereby brings peace to his fellow men. First make yourself a better person, then you can think of ways to make other people happy. 
Zilu was plainly not satisfied with this, and pressed him further: ‘Is that all?’ 
Confucius continued: ‘He cultivates himself and thereby brings security to the people. [...]

What Confucius tells us to focus on first is not how to bring stability to the world, but how to be the best possible version of ourselves.

To ‘cultivate one’s moral character’ is the first step towards taking responsibility for the nation, and for society. Confucius and his disciples struggled hard to be ‘the best version’ of themselves, but their aim in this was to better carry out their responsibilities to the society in which they lived.

Confucius said: ‘Men of antiquity studied to improve themselves; men of today study to impress others.’(Analects XIV)

[...] Someone who has genuine respect for learning studies in order to improve his or her mind. Learning from books, learning from society, learning as we grow from childhood to old age, from all of this you will learn the ability to hold on to happiness.

First make yourself into a loyal, educated and knowledgeable citizen, then, armed with all this, go to find your place in society and your role in life. The aim of studying is to complete the process of finding your place and improving yourself. And what is ‘studying to impress others’? It is the acquisition of knowledge as a mere tool, a skill that will help you get a job, or some other purely personal benefit. 

Confucius never said that you have to be like any one person in order to be a junzi. As he saw it, to be a junzi is to be the best possible version of yourself, based on where you are right now, beginning with the things around you, and starting today. [...]

This reminds me of a little story: Three tailors each opened a shop on the same street. Each of them wanted to attract the most customers. The first tailor hung up a large sign, on which was written: ‘I am the best tailor in the province.’When the second tailor saw this he thought he would go one better, so he made a larger sign that read: ‘I am the best tailor in the whole country. ’The third tailor thought: Am I supposed to say that I’m the best tailor in the whole world? He considered the matter for a very long time, and then put up a very small sign. It drew all the customers on the street to his shop, leaving the other two establishments deserted. What did the third tailor’s sign say? ‘I am the best tailor in this street.’

-- Yu Dan - Confucius From The Heart (Ancient wisdom for today's world)

[Genaro speaking] 
The photo isn't directly linked with the previous text.
Yet I've read the book during a trip, as I was taking pictures for a client -the first assignment of my young life as a professional photographer. After months of wander, repeated failures, weariness, this reading has began what I consider now as the major shift to what is now my place in the world.  And I cannot dissociate this book and its teaching with the road I've taken now, and some success I've achieved since.

The teachings of Confucius are very simple rules of life in appearance, individually applicable, for anybody. I've always craved personal development and this book has profoundly touched me.

I wouldn't have taken this photo if I hadn't read this book. I shot it not long ago, I hope it conveys the magical moment I experienced at that time. It was dawn and I was hiking near Saint Agnan's Lake. After a day of rain and a very long walk, the night was cold and the sun was already warming the forest and the lake, that provoked the haze.

I like this picture because it is calm and magical, for me it symbolizes fullness which is what Confucius speaks about. Indeed, I could find fullness by other means but nobody could have taken this photo because I was alone. And this picture may be the best possible version of myself.

My book(s) recommendation(s) of the week?

Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

A short extract:

“Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”

The articles that most impacted me this week

1. Simple rules for a complex world, written by Donald Sull & Kathleen M. Eisenhardt, published in the Harvard Business Review. An incredible article that investigates how to think, plan & act in a world of uncertainty. (They also published a book on that topic!)

2. A tribune by the screenwritter Billy Ray, published in Medium.
I love his call to action and the analogy he used:

“Do you remember the movie WALL-E, the brilliant Pixar film?
He’s in a dangerous world and he’s one of thousands who are supposed to clean it up.

But, there’s something special about WALL-E. He finds this little tiny sprig which might one day become a plant. He guards it, and saves it, and preserves it on the chance that it might some day turn into something beautiful.
Well, Hollywood is that dangerous world and you are WALL-E.“

Shouldn't we be Wall-E ourselves in our lives?

Looking forward to having your feedbacks and your impressions after the readings.

Warm regards, 
Willy