1. The Weather Detective (Wohlleben, 2018): Being more attentive to my day, activities, relationships, and the world around me generally is one of the reasons I've started typing up this "Reading List" series. It helps me pay more attention to what I'm reading and learning. This book also helps with attention; being more attentive to the natural world around me. Usually I experience the weather as a random string of things that happen. Sometimes I mentally organised these events when I check the weather report to see if I should wear a jacket. But this book helps add meaning to the events--big puffy snow, like we had this weekend, is caused by warmer air encouraging the ice in clouds to join together more and indicates warmer weather coming.
2. It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work (Fried and Hansson): Two standout quotes for me:
2. It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work (Fried and Hansson): Two standout quotes for me:
A great work ethic . . . [is] about doing what you say you're going to do, putting in a fair day's work, respecting the work, respecting the customer, respecting coworkers, not wasting time, not creating unnecessary work for other people, and not being a bottleneck. Work ethic is about being a fundamentally good person that others can count on and enjoy working with.
If the boss really wants to know what's going on, the answer is embarrassingly obvious: They have to ask! Not vague self-congratulatory bullshit questions like "What can we do even better?" but the bard ones like "What's something nobody dares talk about?" or "Are you afraid of anything at work?" or "Is there anything you worked on recently that you wish you could do over?".
The dysfunctional work cultures described in the book that lead to 80 hour work weeks, emailing at all hours, burnout, and very little to show for it for employees and customers reminds me a lot of the performative work cultures I used to hear about from people who worked at Samsung in the early 2000. I lived in South Korea then and acquaintances would describe how to make it seem like you were working a lot by always being the last to leave, making it look like you were working at your desk when in fact you had collapsed from exhaustion, etc.
One part of the book that I have perhaps a disagreement with is a highly agile way of working without long-term goals (other than remaining profitable). I definitely agree that there is a lot of hand wave-y nonsense with any given long-term goal (see earlier post about how accounting rules help give some certainty to otherwise uncertain futures) and it is a shame to see people push themselves obsessively in the pursuit of a particular goal that was "pulled out of thin air". But long-term goals do enable us to achieve big goals, as discussed in Working Backwards (Bryar and Carr 2021).
3. Not Cross Buns--Honey & Co's non-denominational treats (FT $): looking forward to making this recipe, and I learned a new word:
One part of the book that I have perhaps a disagreement with is a highly agile way of working without long-term goals (other than remaining profitable). I definitely agree that there is a lot of hand wave-y nonsense with any given long-term goal (see earlier post about how accounting rules help give some certainty to otherwise uncertain futures) and it is a shame to see people push themselves obsessively in the pursuit of a particular goal that was "pulled out of thin air". But long-term goals do enable us to achieve big goals, as discussed in Working Backwards (Bryar and Carr 2021).
3. Not Cross Buns--Honey & Co's non-denominational treats (FT $): looking forward to making this recipe, and I learned a new word:
comestible: an item of food