I enjoy finding ways to exercise my rights as a consumer and push back against corporate abuse, so this was right up my alley. The book was eye-opening and made me infuriated with how corrupt the medical system is in the US and how much it extracts wealth by fleecing the middle class.| mtlynch.io
If you’re a liberal who’s interested in becoming a radical progressive, this is a good book for you. If you’re anyone else, you’re probably not the target audience.| mtlynch.io
I found it eye-opening in terms of understanding how municipal governments work in practice and how perverse incentives lead to poor community outcomes. It had a huge impact on the way that I think about where to live and what policies I support in local government. This book complements Happy City in that both books explore what characteristics of a city make it attractive for residents to live there but also how legislation often yields the opposite results.| mtlynch.io
I’m a fan of Mat Ryer’s work, and his blog posts have had a significant impact on the way I program in Go. I found the book hit or miss. Some chapters were fascinating and taught me valuable Go lessons, while others felt boring and got too bogged down in the minutiae of third-party libraries. Overall, I’d still recommend it to anyone who considers themselves a beginner or intermediate Go programmer.| mtlynch.io
Overall, this was an interesting read, but I found it hard to apply the lessons to my product. The book contains compelling case studies and ideas from the field of meta-learning, but most of the ideas were either too theoretical or too specific to large companies.| mtlynch.io
As a big fan of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, I was interested in this book. 70 years after it was published, I still see people recommending it, so I had high hopes. Sadly, the book fell short of my expectations. When I read How to Win Friends and Influence People, every chapter felt relevant and useful. In contrast, only about 20% of How to Stop Worrying and Start Living felt useful. Most of the book is personal anecdotes that failed to connect with me and menta...| mtlynch.io
The Goal is an attempt to reevaluate business management from first principles. The book explains Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints, which states that in any business, the sole determinant of output is the bottleneck resource. To grow, a business has to identify its bottlenecks and reorganize business processes to address them. It sounds simple and perhaps obvious, but the lessons helped me to think about my own business.| mtlynch.io
I bought this book hoping for lessons to apply to my business, manufacturing and selling physical products. I didn’t find many business insights, but it was still an engaging and funny story.| mtlynch.io
I had a mixed reaction to this book. Some of Ibram X. Kendi’s ideas felt novel and compelling. It broadened my perspective in thinking about race. And there’s a lot of historical discussion of race and slavery that covered details I don’t remember from school. At the same time, I felt that many of Kendi’s arguments were flimsy and his facts questionable. He cherry-picked statistics and often misrepresented details or got them outright wrong.| mtlynch.io
The idea of social capital has interested me for a long time, but when I finally sat down to read this book, it was painfully dry. It offers an eye-opening investigation into the many ways that civic engagement has declined in the US, but it was a real slog to get through.| mtlynch.io
This book was thoroughly underwhelming. Dozens of people have recommended it to me in the past couple of years, and I don’t understand the hype. It has some insightful ideas, but they’re buried under questionable advice and poor writing.| mtlynch.io
Before reading The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, I thought of it as the canonical cliché self-help book. But as the saying goes, clichés become clichés because they’re true. The book’s insightfulness surprised me, and I found many of its ideas useful in my everyday life.| mtlynch.io
This book follows the author of the hit 90s computer game Prince of Persia through the game’s development, release, and several years after. The book consists of diary entries that author Jordan Mechner wrote during that time, with margin notes and accompanying photos and sketches Mechner added for publication.| mtlynch.io
Nonviolent Communication describes a communication style centered around sharing vulnerability and offering empathy. One of its biggest strengths is in how it highlights common patterns of lazy communication that exclude personal feelings or critical thinking. I also found its discussion of empathy illuminating, as it made me realize ways that I could improve my skills at listening empathetically.| mtlynch.io
Like all Gladwell books, Outliers does an excellent job of building an engaging narrative out of topics that the average person might otherwise find inaccessible. His exploration into the causes of airline crashes was especially fascinating. While it provides a nice collection of interesting stories, I didn’t feel like Outliers delivered on any meaningful overarching point.| mtlynch.io
A quick, practical guide to interviewing customers during the early stages of a new product idea. I expected basic advice about how you shouldn’t ask customers leading questions, but Fitzpatrick goes much more in-depth. The book made me recognize weaknesses in my approach to interviewing users and provided interesting perspectives about obtaining unbiased, actionable feedback from customers.| mtlynch.io
An insider’s story about Facebook in the years leading up to its IPO. It’s surprisingly candid — it names names and exposes internal Facebook discussions that were never meant to be public. An engaging read, but the narrator is painfully obnoxious.| mtlynch.io
I wish that I had found this book nine years ago. It taught me a great deal about choosing the right product to build and the advantages of targeting small niches. The author makes compelling points about the importance of marketing and small founders’ common pitfall of treating it as an afterthought. Unfortunately, much of the content aged poorly. Published in 2010, Walling intentionally kept the book pragmatic, recommending specific tools and strategies that were popular at the time. Read...| mtlynch.io
The book contains many interesting examples of common biases and logical fallacies, but it’s buried in a lot of bluster and fluff about how smart the author is. While it was likely groundbreaking when it was published in 2004, its ideas have since permeated into the mainstream. Reading it in 2018, the ideas feel neither novel nor original. Thinking Fast and Slow covers the same material with more depth and better writing.| mtlynch.io
This was my favorite book of 2018. It profoundly impacted the way I approach my work and organize my time. After reading it, I find it easier to maintain concentration and to prioritize important tasks. It was also the final push I needed to un-addict myself from social media.| mtlynch.io
Given how much urban design affects our lives, it’s surprising how little we think about and participate in it. This book was eye-opening in terms of the way I look at cities and how its inhabitants interact with them. I took for granted the idea that cities should be friendly to car-travel, but the book highlights many ways in which a focus on car-friendliness makes cities worse overall. It was interesting to see examples of how cities can flourish when they prioritize the needs of pedestr...| mtlynch.io