Reading List is a Saturday roundup of readings and links about personal growth, business, entrepreneurship, good work, and the human condition.
This edition features several reads on topics of my personal fascination, including how our current techno-work environment makes maintaining our attention an uphill battle, the critical work of self-renewal, the unusual source of our strength, and finally, a strategy guide to growing your sales from $0 to $5 million. Enjoy.
“Gambling puts us into a flow state, just like playing music—but in a way that can be easily manipulated by profiteers.
Until recently, gambling was constrained by legal restrictions—which were based on a clear and obvious understanding of the huge social harm it causes.
But there was too much profit potential for both governments (who now run the largest gambling operations in the world) and businesses. The more people got addicted to the flow state achieved through gambling, the richer they got. So vices previously controlled by the Mafia now are exploited by politicians and Wall Street.
Even more widespread is the hijacking of the flow state to sell advertising—promoted by social media platforms. TikTok started this-but it is now everywhere online.”
“We have to face the fact that most men and women out there in the world of work are more stale than they know, more bored than they would care to admit. Boredom is the secret ailment of large-scale organizations. Someone said to me the other day “How can I be so bored when I’m so busy?” And I said “Let me count the ways.” Logan Pearsall Smith said that boredom can rise to the level of a mystical experience, and if that’s true I know some very busy middle-level executives who are among the great mystics of all time.
We can’t write off the danger of complacency, growing rigidity, imprisonment by our own comfortable habits and opinions. Look around you. How many people whom you know well — people even younger than yourselves –are already trapped in fixed attitudes and habits. A famous French writer said “There are people whose clocks stop at a certain point in their lives.” I could without any trouble name a half of a dozen national figures resident in Washington, D.C., whom you would recognize, and could tell you roughly the year their clock stopped. I won’t do it because I still have to deal with them periodically.”
“The cruel kindness of life is that our sturdiest fulcrum of transformation is the devastation of our hopes and wishes — the losses, the heartbreaks, the diagnoses that shatter the template of the self, leaving us to reconstitute a new way of being from the rubble. In those moments, brutal and inevitable, we come to realize that no prayer or protest will bend reality to our will, that we are being bent to it instead and we have two options only: bow or break. Suffering, surrender, transformation — this may be the simplest formulation of the life process. It is the evolutionary mechanism of adaptation by which every creature on Earth became what it is. It is existential mechanism by which we become who we are. In a universe where free will may well be an illusion, what we make of our suffering may be the measure and meaning of our freedom. “Everything can be taken from a man,” Viktor Frankl wrote in his epochal memoir of surviving the unsurvivable, “but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.””
“Doing sales for the first time is hard. Doing sales for the first time at a startup is even harder.
The temptation to delay this discomfort is significant. There are typically two ways I see folks try to dodge the founder-led sales bullet.
Some try to delay for as long as possible, tinkering with the product. Maybe if I build something so special, the product will just sell itself, they think to themselves as they pour another cup of coffee and code into the wee hours. This is an alluring escape hatch for founders eyeing a product-led growth model.”