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Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things
494 points by zachlatta 9 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 437 comments
Seeking recommendations for books about how hard things got done. I like the Acquired podcast, but am looking for reading deeper than it.

I’m reading The Big Rich about the oil boom in Texas and like it. I also liked Barbarians at the Gate about how private equity got created and how deals went down.

Less interested in people and character studies. More interested in the mechanics of how things that we take for granted actually got built and what the world they were made in was like.






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 get back to the moon again", "Recall: Toyota hits the breaks", "Last fag: how big tobacco lost against a Minneapolis law firm" ;-) and the fact that the winner gets to write the history. For example, next month, Bill Gates new memoir "Source Code" will come out, the first of three planned autobiographical books, and I doubt he will share with us how he strongarmed PC manufacturers into shipping Windows pre-installed in order to get the OS monopoly and other important events.

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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.

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When I was a kid, I read about Jack Welch and thought he was great. Later I learned of all the shenanigans he pulled, not just unethical, but illegal stuff. And the way he trampled people. Bill Gates is a respected philanthropist today, he too did all kinds of shady, ruthless stuff to get to the top. Everywhere I look, same story - Amazon, Facebook, Google... The only big company I think is okay is Costco - either they really are good or I haven't yet about their practices.

There is this podcast called Behind the bastards - in one way, it is eye opening. But it is also depressing, it does a pretty good job of shattering all our beliefs and respect for the rich and the successful.

Is it even possible today to become super successful without doing shady/unethical/illegal stuff? Everything from garden variety wage theft all the way upto buying politicians and corporate espionage?

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USA culture has this idolatry for the Rich that looks like what the aristocracy always did: my "beloved" king, the kind princess... Like the philanthropy of the robber barons that made them respectable, but when they are still alive.

I prefer the French approach to take care of aristocrats.

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> America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, 'It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.' It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: 'if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?' There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.

> Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.

~ Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

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In 388 BC, Aristophanes tackled the question, "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" Society has evolved since then, but not drastically. I find his perspective "compelling" :-)

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The French Revolution led to quite poor results for those fortunate enough to survive it. You might prefer the approach, but I doubt you’d enjoy the aftermath.

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? Have you ever even opened a history book? Is this sarcasm?

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I am not being sarcastic. The revolution and subsequent wars caused extremely high casualty rates among French men, while the country isolated itself from international trade, and suffered negative economic consequences.

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Have you held the nations that stayed aristocratic and the havoc they caused next to france? Getting rid of parasitic waterhead bodies of government is always a pro birthong pains included.

PS : Those wars started because the assembled aristocracy of f europe jumped the reforming nation.

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Can’t replay the counter factual, but for those that lived it, there were regrets… and most reasoned there was a better way about the changing of power.

Also, it’s not like it was all happy republicanism after the terror, there was a new elite replacing the old (Napoleons) and he was a petty noble anyway, plenty of the aristocracy stuck around, and said emperor did his best to marry into Europe’s aristocracy. Seems a bit like musical chairs, don’t you think? Plenty of France was still royalist too anyway after it all. I don’t think the narrative is so clear, except everyone realized you can’t beat down your peasants too hard.

Even Peter the Great, traveling through France in the 1700s, wondered how long the wealth disparity could last, having seen Versailles and the peasants from the road.

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The problem with the French revolution was that the radicals moved too far, too fast, in the social reform. Their economics werent the issue, it was the total disregard for any religious or traditional culture and the factionalism that doomed the revolutionaries.

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peter the great gave a shit about the peasants , like all Russian zhars, russians had cholera as main source of death till the communists did take over. thats drink from the place you shit in savagery ,those aristocrats did less then nothing and deserved to be purged for dysfunctionality alone . You can not romanticize backwardness just because the front fell of the anti democratic progressive priest caste in the west. Those guys didn't built a thing either besides a caste system .

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Big part the French Revolution is not by chance called “la Terreur”.

You can acknowledge that the values the revolution promoted are good, aristocratic rule needed reform, while still being clear that revolutions are not a peaceful thing, especially not for poor or marginalised groups. 50.000 people executed is quite some birthing pains…

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> Those wars started because the assembled aristocracy of f europe jumped the reforming nation.

And you think this helps your argument?

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I think he means to say that had the other European nations not declared war on France with all the grand coalitions, the casualty rate wouldn’t be what it was.

I think that is partially true.

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Even without that, the execution rate in the Reign of Terror was appalling and I doubt it's something the initial commenter would want to live through. Revolutions only sound good idealistically but are very difficult to pull off, most even fail.

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It led to dictatorship and itself was a super bloody dictatorships. The regime it replaced was failing, corrupt etc. But the revolution was not "make us free and happy" kind of event. It was "and now we are going to go through really really bad times" kind of event.

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Strange response, heard of the Reign of Terror? This helped Napoleon rise to power and after he was overthrown, they simply went back to kings. It didn't really solve anything.

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America's attitude towards the rich is heavily qualified gratitude. Rich people tend to create lots of wealth. It's hard to argue Microsoft hasn't made America better. Same with Google, FB, etc.

But the rich are most likely to support effective political solutions (and be politely ignored).

Rich people have, in general, made America a better country, and there's a certain deference because of that.

But this isn't blind stupidity. The Sackler family is as unloved as the Manson family. But even folks who built their wealth in questionable ways (the Kennedys) tend to make America a better place.

I saw a video on Youtube where an American asked a Belgian where the "new money" families lived. The Belgian said "what are you talking about, there is no new money." Most Americans react in horror to that idea.

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> But even folks who built their wealth in questionable ways (the Kennedys) tend to make America a better place.

I dispute that strongly. How has the Walton family made America a better place? I'd say they've made it a much worse place. Similarly, Zuck hasn't "made America a better place". I'm not sure you can argue that Gates and Microsoft have.

This sounds like the same trickle down economics BS that we've been fed for decades now.

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Walmart has arguable built the most efficient grocery logistic in existence giving the whole country access to cheap fresh food with minimal spoilage

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The only real benefit is to the owners of Walmart though. Their food is not healthier, and their business impact is not better for local economies than what came before.

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You can't have food that is at the same time cheap, healthy and at your doorstep. You can have two of them. Walmart gets you cheap and nearby. If you want healthy and nearby, go to Whole Foods and be prepared to stretch your wallet. Not everyone can afford it though.

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You’re missing the point that Walmart destroyed all the other small local grocery options and other small stores that used to exist.

So yeah, TODAY all you have is Walmart garbage or expensive Whole Foods (in same places)

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I don't think the stores that used to exist had the same or superior choice of goods and the same prices as Walmart did. I mean there might be some that did, but they persist even in the presence of Walmart - I have several Walmarts within 15 min drive of me, and still know a bunch of local grocery stores and specialized shops that still do fine. But I am not sure why "local store" is inherently superior to Walmart unless it does something better, or how it will be able to deliver on the all three.

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Their food is absolutely cheaper for the same health value as comparable grocery stores. Walmart was amazing for low income families in small cities and rural areas.

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> Walmart was amazing for low income families in small cities and rural areas.

stop drinking the corporate Kool-Aid, my friend

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/12/walmart-pr...

> In the 10 years after a Walmart Supercenter opened in a given community, the average household in that community experienced a 6 percent decline in yearly income—equivalent to about $5,000 a year in 2024 dollars—compared with households that didn’t have a Walmart open near them. Low-income, young, and less-educated workers suffered the largest losses.

> They calculate that poverty increases by about 8 percent in places where a Walmart opens relative to places without one even when factoring in the most optimistic cost-savings scenarios.

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All that research indicates is that Walmart isn’t a good place to work. It doesn’t say anything about how much is saves you by shopping there.

I saw this first hand when Walmart showed up in my small city in the 90s. Everyone saved enormous amounts of money, complained about shopping there, and avoided working there because the pay was shit.

If you were low income and had a job outside of Walmart retail competition space, Walmart was a godsend. Think teachers, construction workers, etc.

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so what? it came at the expense of thousands of small businesses, destroyed hundreds of towns, and is one of the largest transfers of wealth in US history

all to serve us up cheap garbage

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You forget the massive benefit to everyone who shops there. It wrecked small businesses because the prices were lower for the same things.

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So people were goi g hungry before Walmart came along? No, Walmart destroyed the local economies and so now people can only afford to shop at Walmart.

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Yes, people quite literally did go hungry or got far worse food.

The local economies were shit before Walmart. There just happened to be a handful of small business owners that did well squeezing their community.

If Walmart didn’t offer better product/price ratios, nobody would have shopped there.

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Aaron Greenspan created the early version of what Facebook became, and has loudly criticized the zero-sum tactics used by Zuckerberg, Gates, and other billionaires: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-legend-of-mark-zucker_b_7...

Some interesting books in this category: * Masters of Doom. It’s about John Carmack and the team that built Id Software * Einstein. By Walter Isaacson, author of the Jobs biography. Einstein’s 4 papers are one of the most unexpected, ground breaking discoveries in history * Houdini!!! Tells the story of the escape artist and magician, and exposer of psychics. * The Double Helix * Stress Test. By Tim Geithner who pulled the world out of the financial crisis * Man’s Search for Meaning. Surviving and finding meaning in a concentration camp

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> * The Double Helix

This one is rather famous for Watson's minimization of the role Rosalind Franklin played in the process of discovering DNA, and Watson himself later acknowledged his mistakes in doing so (though he never corrected them).

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I'm fairly convinced most successful "social" sites have bodies buried somewhere. The problem of launching a two-sided market is tough.

It was against my ethics but we sent a round of unsolicited emails to about 10,000 people in Brazil to launch a voice chat service circa 2001. It must have been a really good list (and a different time and place) because we had close to a 40% response rate. (Later we got a list that was so bad some of the emails didn't have '@' signs in them!)

There's that famous story of how reddit was initially populated with fake users too.

---

I've never been able to enjoy that Viktor Frankl book, Man's Search for Meaning ,since I read an essay that pointed out how pernicious it was that postmodern people like to fantasize that everyday life is like a concentration camp -- paradoxically that fantasy undermines Frankl's own thesis

I recently read an account of a 14 year old girl (a demo that is vulnerable to Franklism, I had one in an acting class I was in) who said she thought about the Holocaust (survived by some ancestors she'd never met) every day and experienced it as a trauma. If that's what it means to "remember the Holocaust" we might be better to forget. We hear the refrain that "it must never happen again" but it happens over and over again routinely

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide

and if that memory makes us think it is a memory and not an ongoing crime, it is part of the problem and not part of the solution. You can take your own experiences of your group being persecuted and apply that to justice universally (Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner gave their lives together with African-American James Chaney in 1964 to fight racism in the U.S. South) or you can use it as an excuse to commit similar crimes (kill and displace civilians) against other people. It's your choice.

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I read the Einstein biography. Highly recommended. But to the parents point, I came way think Einstein was a huge asshole, especially given his pop culture representation as a kindly old grandfather type.

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Probably every human being looks like a huge asshole if you put their entire life under a microscope. Even Mother Teresa did some giant asshole things if I remember. You're just not aware what a huge asshole you are because someone hasn't written a very good biography of your life from a perspective different from yours (or you havent lived long enough)

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Most people are very selfish when it suits them, and most people would completely deny that selfishness as being not part of their "morality."

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For any successful company, you can probably find ex-employees who think that some "fat trimming" was excessive and unnecessarily cruel or that they pushed some line or another in excessive ways.

The Jack Welch case (and I'd add Mark Hurd at HP) was an example of financial engineering looking great for a time--until it wasn't.

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ghaff. you said the first part well well. Welch "looked great" its the second part "until it wasn't." that stands out to me...because his approach, to kill the goose to get the golden eggs, so to speak, was doomed from the beginning. Its just hard to tell early on if you don't know what to look for. People in his orgs knew what was happening, but hard to go against the "hero".

I don't know a solution to these kinds of scenarios except for having a more wise and educated populace. Perhaps trusting the people at the bottom. Big issues. Hard to solve. And in today's world, harder than ever.

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> There is this podcast called Behind the bastards

I know so much more now about the figures behind the rise of the fascism before the end of WW2 because of this podcast.

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Perhaps not, but I think you can be "very successful" while remaining ethical.

Most people want to be successful because success brings happiness. But there is a level of success at which happiness starts to plateau and yields diminishing returns of happiness.

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Thank you for saying that. I get low-level irritated at the constant background murmur that success means that you had to screw someone over at some point.

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There's a certain strand of progressivism that holds as axiomatic that wealth and power are inherently evil.

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It really boils down to your system of morality.

If your are willing to look at capitalism and free markets objectively[1], as just algorithms rather than moral systems (i.e. private property is part of an algorithm, not an "inalienable human right"), and you realize that it isn't moral that one's share of the pie be determined by the free market, that it isn't moral that the value of a person be determined by the free market, that it isn't moral to leverage your advantage or even hard work to grab a much bigger share of the pie even as others who because of birth circumstance get the thinnest slice or no slice at all, that it isn't moral to enjoy the fruits of cheap labor do to the desperation of the aforementioned, that it isn't moral to take advantage of your other advantages birth circumstances (e.g. being born within the borders of a wealthy country that keeps out those born in poor ones) to grab more, then you will find that material success (success as defined by capitalism) that is complicit in all the aforementioned does screw someone over.

Such a person will have a different definition of success: A life of contribution to the community done out of love and morality, not a coerced transaction leveraging one's advantages against those with less.

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[1]: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" ~ Upton Sinclair

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This is a classic midwit criticism of capitalism that assumes zero sum.

You can sell services and goods that boost productivity and the alternative is just the status quo that produces waste. Someone that creates a successful business doing something productive is not inherently evil because of capitalism.

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Can you run a 1M, 10M dollar business ethically without screwing over anyone - employees, customers, suppliers, environment etc? Sure. What about 100M, 1B, 10B, 100B businesses?

How many Billion dollar businesses can we name that are run ethically? Not that many, correct me if I am wrong. I suppose at some level, profit and monopoly becomes the one and only motivation. Plus if you didn’t do shady stuff, your competitors surely would, putting you at a disadvantage.

Why else would Google drop “don’t do evil” from their principles?

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Theres a ton of ethical wealthy people, you just have no clue who they are because they are playing a different game and don't want the spotlight.

Whats the shady ruthless stuff from Google? They've obviously started running their business differently after the easy growth went away, but I've never heard anyone be like: they made me pee in a bottle because going to the bathroom was too much time off the line.

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Here is a nice list: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Google

Mind you that only includes the most high profile (and known) stuff. Plenty of skeletons still in the closet

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I think a problem is that we have to look at shady, ruthless, unethical and illegal actions as different categories, but to many people they are all the same.

Of course, you don't want to leave a trail of bodies in your wake but Life's not a bowl of cherries and taking a Pollyanna approach to business won't get you very far.

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Yes, and even just the normal business attitude of "our goal is to make a profit, not solve all the world's social problems" is viewed as "unethical" by many people (most of whom have never run a business).

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If your business’s goal is only “make money” and not solve any real human problems then it should not exist.

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It doesn't have to be the only goal, but if you're not making money you will not be able to achieve anything else. So it's the thing that enables any other goals you might have (and, I might add, it's the main thing that makes it worth the risk, vs. just putting your money in savings bonds or something).

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Read my post again, of course companies have to make money.

My problem is with those whose __only__ goal is to make money.

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That would exclude approximately 99% of all the businesses that have ever existed (including most of those that claim to have some other, loftier goal)

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What "real human problem" is a coffee shop solving?

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Giving people a place to buy and drink coffee.

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From what I hear Costco is also changing after their new CEO took over and the stock skyrocketed.

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You talking about Ron Vachris? The guy who started his career as a Costco forklift driver?

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>Is it even possible today to become super successful without doing shady/unethical/illegal stuff?

No I don’t think it is - and I would argue it never was - for me it is morally reprehensible to be a millionaire.

But then again humans are complex creatures and who is without fault may throw the first stone

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sounds cynical but I'm shifted to believing not. If you don't do it there will always be someone else who will. Not to say you should, that's a personal choice of course, but in a competitive environment there will always be someone or lots of someones who will do anything.

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This is why its vital to make unethical corporate malfeasance costly. Meaningful fines and criminal convictions for individual executives responsible for law breaking, wage theft, and intentional violations of regulation, provide meaningful deterrent. In their absence tax evasion and white collar crime become normative, which changes the game for anyone working in executive level roles.

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Unorthodox suggestion - look at the documentaries and lit on mob tactics.

The mob is basically a corporation, held together by a charismatic CEO. In its later years, violence was (I think?) less common, so politics and deal-making became the norm. However, given the subject matter, they likely wouldn't whitewash the reality of it.

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>Unorthodox suggestion - look at the documentaries and lit on mob tactics.

You got any documentaries and books/articles to recommend?

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@jvanderbot agreed. I think you are on to something. where can we go to learn more?

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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.

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Success comes from hard work and perseverence.

Success comes from being at the right place at the right time.

Both of these statements can be true at the same time.

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I would say that hard work and perseverance create the foundation, but timing and opportunity often determine the outcome.

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Yes. Although I suspect many would disagree since there's an entire subreddit dedicated to them! r/antiwork

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Hard work alone isn’t always enough

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Combined with the willingness to exploit those two things to hoard as much as you can, without qualms about taking advantage of cheap goods and cheap labor even from those who work as hard as you but get less because of economic/power/freedom asymmetries, without concern for the Mathews Effect (that wealth breeds wealth, that poverty breeds poverty)...

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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.

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And just following up: Even though there is a significant amount of random chance, that does not mean you are randomly sorted into success and failure.

Even if you move from 0 to success with a very-small positive bias on your random walk, even the lower-bound on most of the results will be increasing with sqrt(n).

Don't let randomness dissuade you from effort, even maximal effort, because every thing you can do it increase your "bias towards success" will have an effect over long time scales.

Also, start early - stretch the time scale.

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The way my dad explained it to me: "a heads or tail might matter, in the grand scheme of things, but at the end of the day, you gotta be there to flip the coin in the first place." Granted, he said that in regards to me being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but the quote applies aptly here.

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There are many types of success.

Tech has often been associated with novel success. That is success by inventing or perfecting a previously underrated, underestimated or wholly invented technology.

This isn’t the only type though.

There is success through persistence. In the long run, 95% of businesses fail. Simply running a component operation that outlasts competitors in a proven market can take you very far. It’s harder than it looks. Likewise this gets little traction on most media

Then there is success by accident. The one that gets most traction in media is businesses that have some flash in the pan unexpected success. These seem to be a traditional combination of luck and persistence. Along these same lines are businesses that come to fruition during a time in which they can succeed, like TikTok and the pandemic.

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Absolutely. I've been pretty lucky in my career, especially at a couple of critical junctions. But I had also put the foundations in place to be lucky at those junctions.

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Not just capitalism, luck applies to even ordinary things like getting jobs etc. This is not to say we shouldn't try or put effort into whatever we are doing, but luck does play a big part. In one place where I worked, this 18 year old kid got an internship. She wasn't terrible, but she wasn't great either. She masterfully did minimum work for maximum benefit. I learned she was the kid of a VP who worked there - I am sure there were plenty of kids who were more qualified/motivated than her, but they don't have a VP parent.

There is a reason young people today feel hard work doesn't reward as much as it used to. Everything is stacked against them - from student loans to crappy jobs. SO MUCH depends on luck

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Damn you’re right I’m tired of naïve explanations we can find in books. Wouldnt the authors be in legal trouble though ?

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Back in the day, when authors were afraid of negative (public perception) pushback, they used to write and publish under pseudonyms.

Not sure it'd work today, everyone and their mother seems so focus on building their "personal brand" and attaching their name to everything that it seems impossible for an author to not take credit for something that would surely make big waves.

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Unraveling a person behind a pseudonym and Doxing is much easier nowadays though. But I guess a self hosted blog would work just fine

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> Unraveling a person behind a pseudonym and Doxing is much easier nowadays though

For state level actors, sure. But generally? I don't think that's necessarily true, as long as you come up with a pseudonym that is unique, not related to anything in your real life, and you haven't already published a lot of prose under your real name.

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It depends how much people care even outside of state level actors, how much of a celebrity you are IRL, and how much care you've put into covering your tracks including just not telling people.

These days you can probably do some writing pattern matching if you suspect the true name of an author but you can probably stay pretty pseudonymous unless people really want to determine a true identity. I don't have a lot of doubt I could probably publish a pseudonymous blog if I took some reasonable precautions and didn't write stuff that especially provided a fingerprint pointing to my IRL identity.

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An interesting question is how authors of these books look for stories to turn into book. Stories traditionally have a standard arc where the hero faces a challenge but wins in the end having learned something. I'd be curious to talk to authors about how much the desire to fit this template influences the selection of what they write about.

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That's because the literature has a value in its own right. Like history, the message that is presented, is for the present. Reality/truth be damned. The present day operational advantage is all.

This is very cynical - but also freeing - when accepted. Do you think the yatch, billions, beautiful wife is worth your integrity? You decide.

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It's more of a, it generally wasn't illegal at the time they did those things, and of course now they want it to be illegal. It's much like pulling the rope up behind them so nobody else can climb the same ladder they did.

There is a reason you have to have licenses to braid hair, cut nails, etc(and charge for it) in many US states for instance. It's not a simple license like a food worker has to do. It's much more involved.

I mean if someone is going to mess with my hair, do a manicure or pedicure they should know the basic hygiene things much like a food worker has to do. I'm good with that. Why do they need more than that? It's not because we as a society actually care that much about a person that can't braid hair trying to charge for it. It's because all those beauticians want to limit their competition.

OK rant over for the day.

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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.

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If you're interested in a book about massive failure - read the story of Donald Crowhurst (The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst is the book, there is also a documentary out there). It's hard to tell much without spoiling it, but basically, a highly publicized sailing competition was sponsored in the mid 20th century to see who could be the first person in history to solo circumnavigate the globe with a sailboat. Crowhurst had little to no sailing experience, and mostly sold navigation equipment and gadgets for sailing - a weekend warrior - and bet his entire future and business to support his entry into this endeavor. It erm... did not go well, and got increasingly worse, then almost ok.. then absolutely not okay. They don't know what truly happened in the end, but what did survive shows he went mad at sea from the likely pressure he was under.

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The 2018 biopic is also absolutely gorgeous: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3319730/plotsummary/

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> 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 :)

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In the same timeframe, someone here mentioned 'The Trigger Effect', the first episode of Burke's first (BBC 1970's) Connections series. We watched the first series (via random videos we could find online) and the most recent version of the series (on CuriousityStream), and I think he digs deeper in the first one. I need to read the books, I'm now a huge fan, and recommend him to my curious friends.

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Which Burke books do you most recommend?

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The Day the Universe Changed and Connections were his two big series. I think I have the former book somewhere but I'd probably be inclined to find and watch the two series.

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I have a contrary opinion: most important things are started by apparently small things, but there is a huge amount of training, effort and persistence behind getting to that small thing. Zuckerberg was a serial entrepreneur who already made a few successful websites/apps before Facebook, Nvidia spent decades becoming the world's best GPU manufacturer (when they started there were ~300 graphics processor companies), etc etc.

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Since we're talking about books, this statement reminds me of one that OP might want to look at: Super Founders.

It's been a while since I've read it, but off the top of my head: most successful founders are older than you probably think, have less industry experience than you probably think, start (like nVidia) with more competitors than you think, but (to your other point) are more likely to have more entrepreneurial experience than you think (even very young famous founders like Zuckerberg or the Collisons had another venture before the one that made them very well known).

Honestly I found Super Founders kind of dry, but it's one of the only data-driven books about what differences exist between founders of businesses with exception outcomes vs founders with less successful outcomes that I've read.

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I don’t think that’s contrary, rather both are usually true. You have to get lucky but also be in a position to take advantage when you do.

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One thing I've noticed working with successful people, is they consistently have a track record of success. Even when its non work related - for instance being very high level in a competitive video game. Being personally interested in both business and hobby success, I see this across so many disparate activities. Successful people tackle their pursuits with their heart and soul, but are also smart about what they do, who they learn from, who they surround themselves with, etc.

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And how Bill mom (IBM board member) helped him to win the contract for... IBM, despite better options on the market. Thanks to that we were all rewarded with such gems like Windows 98 ME or Windows Vista.

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Why reason in hypotheticals?

Microsoft has been crucial into bringing compute in people's homes, the evolution of video gaming, the internet etc.

They fluked a lot, they used their advantageous position like most companies try to, but assuming that we would have gotten better alternatives is not a given.

Also, in hindsight was IBM wrong to bet on Microsoft? They sure have done multi hundred billions $ together.

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Yes. If you look at the Alto, the Unix OS or the original mac (which itself was a kind of inferior ripoff of the Alto), Microsoft's domination was very much a case of bad products driving out the good and setting back personal computing by decades. Not until Linux, the Internet and the Iphone did we start to get a taste of where most people in the 70s and 80s thought personal computing was headed.

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It's not like CP/M was really better. Some of the minicomputer operating systems were but it's not clear they would have been a good fit for the IBM PC and, in any case, companies like DEC and DG wouldn't have been inclined to play in that space--especially for a reasonable price--at the time.

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Exactly. "Better options on the market"? Better by whose definition? Certainly not IBM's.

And it's naive to assume that other companies wouldn't have used the same tactics that Microsoft did.

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Definitely agree on that last point, and recommended folks read Jerry Kaplan's _StartUp_ which tells the story of how MS wiped out Go Corp. and eliminated PenPoint from the marketplace:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1171250.Startup

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I'd recommend Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. It covers the trials and tribulations as well as the brilliance and ruthless tactics taken to build Standard Oil.

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Yeah it's a great book. It definitely gets into the weeds about his family and personal life (as a comprehensive biography should). Personally, I enjoyed that stuff, but if you just want to learn about how he did hard stuff as the OP described, it may be a bit thick at 600+ pages. That said, we summarized it in discussion form on our podcast if anyone is interested: http://businessbooksandco.com/episode/7b5d6ab9/titan-the-lif...

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There’s also and “authoring” bias. The “did random thing and it let to big things” is just a good story that we like to tell and hear.

I guess my best example is Netflix’s “I forgot to return Apollo 13 to blockbuster and ended up starting one of the most prominent tech and entertainment business”, even though that random event is total bogus.

It’s a good story that helped Netflix get stories in the news.

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I think the book "The Bill Gates Problem" should be mandatory reading for all of HN.[0] Unfortunately, I'm afraid this requirement would backfire on me as I'm afraid that a ton of HN visitors would use it as a guide to become like Gates instead so they can too become a mini-dictator with unreasonable influence over the world.

[0]: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/448140/the-bill-gates-proble...

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There are some chapters in a fantastic book, "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman, that explain how luck has a huge amount of influence on the events in the world.

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A great book on failure is "Riding the Runaway Horse," about the rise and fall of Wang Computers.

A cautionary tale about hubris and nepotism.

https://www.amazon.com/Riding-Runaway-Horse-Decline-Laborato...

It is a real shame that more books aren't written about failures, since that's supposedly where all the learning happens.

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> there not many books about failures! Any great recommendations?

The Logic of Failure is a fantastic book about failures, including some famous examples of failure (e.g. Chernobyl).

https://www.amazon.com/Logic-Failure-Recognizing-Avoiding-Si...

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> 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.

A great example is the discovery of the Thermus aquaticus bacteria in hot springs, seemingly pretty insignificant. That lead to PCR which allows DNA reading and analysis.

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A fun read on failures was "In Search of Stupidity: Over Twenty Years of High Tech Marketing Disasters" It taught me the lesson of "people will stop buying v1 of your product as soon as you announce v2... so don't announce it until it actually ships!"

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enjoyed seeing bill gates mentioned here (in this context). i had no idea msods was essentially bought until very recently (mentioned in a book i've been listening to - "fancy bear goes fishing" for those interested - which shines some light on security practices, or lack thereof, by microsoft)

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The Big Short is an excellent book about failures. Really shows how, despite huge institutions and government regulation, human hype and bluster still was the main culprit.

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Every success story is built on a path of failures. I like to believe in this. It motivates me not to give up. (If I understood everything correctly...)

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That made me think of my favourite motivational poster, which is titled «Mistakes»: https://despair.com/collections/posters/products/mistakes?va...

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Even if they’re a bit painful in the moment

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stfu

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The Box by Marc Levinson is the incredible story of the dawn of containerized shipping.

It is a little shocking just how recently this happened (the very first experimental loads were in the 1950s), and that the standard of shipping before containers was for longshoremen to literally hand carry boxes of stuff onto ships and stuff them just anywhere. You would be stunned to realize just how new and unused the piers of San Francisco really are, because they were built with massive government subsidies at exactly the wrong time.

The book covers the courageous people involved, the political and economic impacts, and how the industry truly found its footing prioritizing absolutely reducing operational costs over all other concerns (like delivery speed).

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I second this recommendation of a fantastic book, mildly inconvenienced by the author delving into _very specific details_, like whole paragraphs of different sizes of locks that felt like line noise to me.

It also offers a very interesting perspective on the fears of the AI/automation craze, like, what happened to whole towns of dock workers who used to manually pack goods in round-hulled ships and got replaced by a single machine moving a container on a flat ship.

Still, I'm not sure it's exactly "people who did hard things" as much as the story of decades-long incremental changes brought by a bunch of people.

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+1

Fantastic book. Particularly the impact it had on the vietnam war, and the role the battles between rail + trucking played in driving containers.

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Also research the development of the pallet and the pallet jack, which had similar effects.

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This is very much a shameless plug but I wrote a book, Rebooting a Nation, on how the country of Estonia was able to modernize post re-independence in the early '90s and become a leader in e-government (99% of government services accessible online) and a tech hub (Skype, Transferwise, Bolt, etc.). I tried to draw out practical lessons for policymakers in other countries, especially in the U.S. as I wrote it after having worked for the Estonian government and advised some members of Congress in DC on tech policy. It's available for pre-order now and comes out in a few months, link below.

https://www.rebootinganation.com/

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Endurance - about Ernest Shackleton and his crew during their 1914-1916 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance:_Shackleton%27s_In...

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A top recommendation along these lines is The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garard; a member of the Scott expedition to the south pole, which goes into detail of his winter journey (which the title refers to). One of the best historical adventure books I've read

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I came here to say this. Props.

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Not related, but because I also liked that one, I'll add:

Devil in the White City, by Eric Larson

Covers the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. Light on some of the sorts of details OP is asking for; also follows the thread of a serial killer to keep things interesting for those less interested in the business/engineering, but still good.

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That one is fantastic.

Also, _Abandoned_, which is about the [less fortunate] Greely expedition.

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Similar in nature is Farthest North: The Incredible Three-Year Voyage to the Frozen Latitudes of the North. Fridjtof Nansen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fridtjof_Nansen) led the expedition.

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Second this suggestion. The one by Caroline Alexander is also very good.

It's a story of the most incredible leadership during spectacular difficulty overcoming multiple seemingly impossible things.

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Yep came here to recommend this. Incredible story.

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"Farthest North"

In 1893, Fridjtof Nansen set sail in the Fram, a ship specially designed and built to be frozen into the polar ice cap, withstand its crushing pressures, and travel with the sea’s drift closer to the North Pole than anyone had ever gone before. Experts said such a ship couldn't be built and that the voyage was tantamount to suicide.

This brilliant first-person account, originally published in 1897, marks the beginning of the modern age of exploration. Nansen vividly describes the dangerous voyage and his 15-month-long dash to the North Pole by sledge. Farthest North is an unforgettable tale and a must-read for any armchair explorer.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/30197/30197-h/30197-h.htm

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fram2

You might be interested in the upcoming Fram 2 mission. :-)

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The Soul of a New Machine:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine

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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

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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 world that's very far from the FAANG of today, at least were compensation is concerned.

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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.

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Is a windowless basement that much worse than the open officies of Facebook?

I'd rather have a small room with silence than work in a well lit factory with tons of noise like this: https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/imag...

There isn't any dividers or other stuff that blocks noise.

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I worked there a few years ago. It was almost always easy to reserve a room if you wanted more quiet or more privacy.

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Offices were pretty much for managers. The standard was (high-walled) cubicles. Although a lot of the people involved here were in hardware so a lot of their work was in open labs.

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Curious -- To me it just seemed pretty standard (for any industry). Did you think the tech work environment today was somehow more enlightened than previous generations general working environments?

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People are mostly the same. It's just the cultural context that shifts, and mostly that changes slowly, even when tech changes rapidly.

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Feels like season 1 of Halt And Catch Fire

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Different segment of the industry but about the same time period (HaCF is maybe set a few years later).

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This is a good one. I read it twice just to experience the 70-80s development atmosphere. The daughter of Tom West did complain on Reddit a few years ago that Tom neglected them during the period, but I still admire such personality. The same admiration goes to David Cutler in "Showstopper".

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Tom was very intense. Dotted line worked for him for a while. Latterly he had an internet-related effort that didn't pan out (welcome to the crowd) but also was fairly instrumental in CLARiiON RAID disk arrays and an early NUMA architecture, neither of which ultimately saved Data General but probably helped keep it running for longer than it otherwise would have.

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Yes, very memorable prologue:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-Kidder-ebook...

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This is the best non-fiction book I have ever read. It's great simply as a piece of writing -- and the story it tells is an interesting one.

I liked it enough that after I listened to it on Audible I went out and bought a hardback version to re-read. That almost never happens.

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Came here to say that.

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The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes! Lots of detail, but it also shows how many geniuses it took working over years to really make it work.

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One of the greatest books I've ever read. It is long and took me a couple of months to absorb this one, but in return the amount of detail is staggering and it never ever felt like it got boring or tedious or overstayed it's welcome.

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And, as added reading, The Radioactive Boy Scout.

Just for a perspective on how abundant and readily available that information had become in academia a few decades later.

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Loved that book!

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Second this one, it's incredible in the level of research and detail.

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Hearty agreement. One of the best books I've read.

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This was a life-changing book for me.

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Even if it probably isn’t exactly what you were looking for, I’d wholeheartedly recommend The Spy and the Traitor by Ben McIntyre, documenting the story of Oleg Gordievsky, the soviet spy that crossed over to the MI5 during the Cold War. It gave me a glimpse into the secret war at the time, the stuff that inspired James Bond, and the hardships and permanent threat faced by a spy trying to live several lives at once. It was one hell of a read.

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All of the author's books are great imo. If you like cold war spy stories, you'd also enjoy Billion Dollar Spy.

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Agreed, this is probably the most gripping non-fiction I've ever read

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> Less interested in people and character studies.

If you don’t want examples then all you need to know is velocity. The Y Combinator people call it doing things that don’t scale. Here is how it works for absolutely anything:

1. Get the right tools in place. This is an intrinsic capability set you have to build. People tend to fail here most frequently and hope some framework or copy/paste of a library will just do it for them. Don’t be some worthless pretender. Know your shit from experience so you can execute with confidence.

2. Build a solid foundation. This will require a lot of trial and error plus several rounds of refactoring because you need some idea of the edge cases and where you the pain points are. You will know it when you have it because it’s highly durable and requires less of everything compared to the alternatives. A solid foundation isn’t a thing you sell. It’s your baseline for doing everything else at low cost.

3. Create tests. These should be in writing but they don’t have to be. You need a list of known successes and failures ready to apply at everything new. There are a lot of whiners that are quick to cry about how something can’t be done. Fuck those guys and instead try it to know exactly what more it takes to get done.

4. Finally, measure things. It is absolutely astonishing that most people cannot do this at all. It looks amazing when you see it done well and this is ultimately what separates the adults from the children. This is where velocity comes from because you will know exactly how much faster you are compared to where you were. If you aren’t intimately aware of your performance in numbers from a variety of perspectives you aren’t more special than anyone else.

People who accomplish hard things are capable of doing those because they didn’t get stuck. They had the proper tools in place to manipulate their environment, redefine execution (foundation), objectively determine what works without guessing, and then know how much to tweak it moving forward.

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Not bad advice, but the ask was for books - do you have any?

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No, the only real answer to this is character studies the op did not want those I won’t recommend them.

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Thank you so much for putting these heuristics into words. My only question here is that a lot of what you wrote seems like best practice from the perspective of a person within the tech industry. Outsiders might call it common sense. So if everyone knows what they 'should' be doing, then why do so few actually follow through?

One answer to that question might be character. Angela Ducksworth has a book called, "Grit". It is a lot like character study, which the OG explicitly expressed their disinterest for. My intuition is no matter how well you can describe the steps for success, success is not replicable. If true, that would explain why there are hundreds of self books, thousands of coaches, and only a handful of people who can consistently excel.

Having said that, I hesitate to say that there are only a few people in the world who are exceptional due to a constraint I would describe as "genuine article". How depressing a thought that would be.

Carpe diem! Floor the gas pedal, and see how fast you can go. Maybe you'll break all expectations and fly into space.

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Luck is a massive, massive factor. There are plenty of exceptionally smart and gritty people who fail, and plenty of far less-so who succeed.

Your argument is good if you just follow it to the obvious (if inconvenient) conclusion. Despite so many people “having the answers,” no one can replicate it reliably. And even the ones who can likely wouldn’t be able to if you removed capital from the equation. The clear explanation is: luck.

But of course luck tends to strike when you’re working hard and consistently, so it’s not totally out of one’s hands.

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I suspect there are a number of factors that eliminate people from these steps like objectivity, persistence, and other virtues.

The biggest single discriminator that the Y Combinator people talk about, which I agree with, is doing the right things first without regard for scale. Most developers will immediately jump to some framework so that they can prop up some web app in the shortest time and immediately go into promotions and then struggle with scale when they need to scale.

I had this big app that tried to solve for full decentralization of universal file system access from a browser. I wrote my own end-to-end test automation tool and focused all my energy on software execution performance. These things allowed me to prove out new ideas and identify regression in about 8 seconds on a single machine or about 2 minutes on 5 machines talking to each other. Most people won't invest in that. I could perform a massive refactor across dozens for files and hundreds of lines without regression in about 2 hours. At work, at that job at that time, I spending more than 2 weeks for tiny refactors that were littered with regressions and having to clean up other people's messes.

Worse, is that most people recognize when they are not performing well, especially if it is anywhere from 10-100x less well. The normal go to place is either sympathy or an echo chamber. High performers don't do that. They aren't trying to impress people with their awesomeness or seeking sympathy when it falls apart. They just build what they need at great expense because its something they can have that others won't have.

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I read these three books last year and I believe that each would be interesting to you:

Undaunted Courage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undaunted_Courage

This is about doing something extremely hard with a huge amount of unknowns, and the type of person it takes to succeed.

How Big Things Get Done https://www.amazon.com/How-Big-Things-Get-Done/dp/0593239512

This is about project planning and has plenty of real examples and case studies.

The Education of Cyrus by Xenophon https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-the-education-of-cyrus-b...

This is the best book on leadership and teamwork that I've ever read. You can read this review instead but get a copy of the actual book, too, it's wonderful.

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+1 for "How Big Things Get Done." Great book.

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"Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed" by Ben R. Rich and Leo Janos.

Details, among other things, the engineering challenges faced during the development of the F-117 Nighthawk and the SR-71 Blackbird.

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More aviation project books along those lines:

V-2 by walter dornberger - wartime engineering, rocket development

Gossamer odyssey - human powered aircraft, scrappy university project style engineering

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worth reading for rich's crazy jokes alone. the fact he is telling them to senior military brass in the context of negotiating his division's survival after kelly johnson's retirement makes them even funnier. my favorite - a boy comes home from school, finds his dad, and proudly declares "dad, i saved 25 cents by running alongside the bus instead of riding it!". the father shakes his head and replies sternly, "you fool, you should have run next to a taxi and saved five dollars"

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Eh, for me those all weakened the book.

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Excellent book about the strength of a free market and the extreme damage government bureaucrats cause.

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An excellent read, no doubt. I've actually read it a couple of times. Ben Rich was a great writer.

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Boy, I don't agree with that last. It's a pretty interesting book, but the writing is pedestrian and there are far too many asides and stories that detract from the main points. By way of contrast, I read it because it was recommended after I said I loved "The Soul of a New Machine" (Tracy Kidder), which really is an extremely well-written book, in the "every word counts" sense. "The Soul of a New Machine" is a book that a writer can appreciate for the writing.

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you have a point. how about this. s/writer/storyteller/

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It was written by Leo Janos, who also wrote Chuck Yeager's bio.

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Exactly: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World http://www.simonwinchester.com/exactly

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_(book)

Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38840.Boyd

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I loved Longitude, and Harrison was a determined guy, but the most interesting part for me was seeing the “rewrite from scratch” and “never ship” dynamics are old indeed! He had a MVP with his first iteration.

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Unfortunately I got this as an audiobook and the author, who is born in the Bronx, decided for some reason to read it in a British accent which made it really hard for me to get through. Might have to get the book itself and give it another try.

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The thing about Boyd that really resonated with me was.

1) Realizing that he was better at something than everyone else around him.

2) Figuring out what it was that was making him better.

3) Reducing it to practice, so it could be taught to others and refined to become even better.

Amazing story.

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Boyd gets far too much credit for the F-16. If he had his way it wouldn't work at night or honestly at all in the face of the current threat environment.

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The Day Fighter role https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_fighter was viable for many decades and is still common in many non- first world countries. He invented the concept of maintaining low drag during high-G maneuvers.

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Boyd’s contributions might seem impressive but he seemed like a disgusting human being. He was confrontational, chewed his nails, smoked cigars, made his family live in a tiny apartment so he could be close to work, etc. I can’t remember it all but I quit reading his biography 3/4s in because he just sounded like horrendous person.

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Longitude is a great book, I thought this was cool too re. one of the clocks Harrison designed - https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/apr/19/clockmaker-j...

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How the Empire State building got built in only a year: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/building-fast-and-slo... (article)

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I'm extremely excited to read Exactly, thanks for the recommendation.

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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.

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One of the most famous accounts, also universally acclaimed, is Primo Levi's Survival at Auschwitz.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/22/primo-levi-aus...

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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.

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Read it as if you are reading it the second time.

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We read this book in book club when I was a teenager. It was incredibly impressive. I think it's time to read it again...

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great recommendation

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[flagged]


Do you mean the Holodomor famine? In any case it seems you should be the one to recommend a book on the subject.

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I am not reading it

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Perhaps you should.

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I find reading books about how people did hard things to be very motivating and therapeutic, especially when facing a difficult task myself! I’ve enjoyed all of these; they were all recommendations from HN.

Showstopper - Windows NT

Losing the Signal - BlackBerry

Made in Japan - Sony

Piloting Palm - Palm

Sweating Bullets - PowerPoint

Folklore.org - Early Apple.

The “Mac Folklore Radio Podcast” [0]. Has a few interesting stories of people innovating and solving challenges.

[0] https://macfolkloreradio.com/

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Showstopper is a must read for anyone who is interested in living a pure engineering life. David Cutler is one of my heroes and I'll quote:

"What I really wanted to do was work on computers, not apply them to problems"

I'd also recommend listening to his interviews on YouTube. There are two long interviews, one by David's Garage and the other by CHM. Both very long and inspiring so I keep going back to them when I'm driving.

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If we're recommending Showstopper (which I do), I'd add Soul of a New Machine about Data General, where I worked for many years--but a bit later.

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I have read that too, twice. I love the part that they talked about the microcode, and all others too. Maybe you should write a post about your experience too :) I'm sure it's going to be a blast to read.

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As I say, I was a bit later--mid-eighties--but I knew Jim Guyer who was one of the microkids as I recall. Helped setup an interview for Command Line Heroes podcast. Do need to get back into writing. Next week. Really.

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Please do! Do you plan to write a book or blogs? Please let us know. I'll look for the podcast at least.

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https://www.redhat.com/en/command-line-heroes/season-4/minic...

Another interesting pub from around the same period you may be interested in: https://archive.org/details/year-in-dev

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Thanks! I found it and just listened the podcast. It's pretty interesting albeit a bit short.

I'll read the second link too tonight.

Thanks again for sharing.

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They kept the podcasts fairly punchy. Actually both myself and Tom West's daughter were interviewed for it and we were both trimmed in the interests of length in favor of people they they were able to get who had first-hand involvement.

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Ah that's unfortunate. I wish they kept everything in record at least.

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Productions of things in any format, whether text, audio, or video, don't tend to preserve the cutting floor stuff--especially for public consumption. It's unedited. It's unvetted. It's not the material you're putting out for the public.

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One of the things I'd add is that, while Edson de Castro was clearly remarkable in a lot of ways, he really wasn't that open to a lot a new things.

Reluctance to cede control to retailers was one of the the nails in the DG/One's coffin although it was probably also before it's time.

But there was a general secretiveness as well. I was once in an executive briefing center presentation to a customer maybe a day or two before a relevant product announcement. My skip manager I think basically said, what the hell I'll tell the customer about what's coming. Ed walked walked in to say hi to the customer and she quietly erased what she had written from the white board.

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My understanding from reading the Soul of new machines and Showstoppers is that earlier innovative firms in the 70s and 80s have "characters" that were defined by their leaders (unlike nowadays it's mostly an army of professional managers assigned by the board). But it's probably still true nowadays, but we don't see many of these low level system companies popping up anymore.

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I'm not sure it was all that different. De Castro also got ejected by Data General's board in the early 90s or so. And there were certainly plenty of professional managers at the minicomputer companies.

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The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop [1]. An in-depth history of how personal computing was created.

[1] https://press.stripe.com/the-dream-machine

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Richard Hamming's book on AT&T Bell Labs R&D culture in inventing and solving many of the important problems [1].

Another is Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner on the early days of the Internet [2].

[1] The Art of Doing Science and Engineering:

https://press.stripe.com/the-art-of-doing-science-and-engine...

[2] Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet:

https://katiehafner.com/books-new/where-wizards-stay-up-late...

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The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner is similarly great for some of the earlier/origin stories of Bell Labs.

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One of the "hard things" I've come across was turn of the century explorations. The stories of polar explorers like Ernest Shackleton (chronicled in Lansing's Endurance) or tropical ones like "River of Doubt" detailing Roosevelt's exploration of the Amazon tributary are fascinating stories of how people's grit accomplished hard things.

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Shackleton and his crew became something of a hero of mine after I read South and Endurance. Less so frok.a masculine perspective, but more of a fortitude thing. There is a certain triumph felt when we persevere through impossible odds, and ever since I've been attracted to a genre of stories that I loosely label as "Frozen Thrillers," where humans just have to deal with bad things happening in cold unforgiving environments.

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If you liked that, you should read "Empire of Ice and Stone" by Budy Levy which was about an Arctic expedition.

It's a good read from a leadership perspective. The "leader" of the expedition (Vilhjalmur Stefansson) abandoned his crew in the middle of the frozen arctic seas and went off the hunt caribou and meet his secret inuit wife. The book portrays him as being completely irresponsible and interested only his own glory and fame (and money)

Meanwhile, the captain of the ship (Robert Bartlett) walked for 700 miles from where they were stranded and then started a rescue mission from Alaska which saved some (though not all of the crew). He's portrayed as a real hero in harsh circumstances.

The whole expedition was named after the flagship. The Karluk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_voyage_of_the_Karluk). They had two inuit families with them during the trip including their kids. It was funny to see how the inuit kids would play in the snow and have fun while the "explorers" were all but dropping dead. The youngest child was aged 3 at the time. She passed away finally in 2008 at the age of 97.

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I will definitely check that out, thanks for the recommendation!

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I am reading a book about it right now and as I learn more it seems too crazy and unbelievable to sustain (and im quite gullible person), especially part about living on full ocean in small boats with no food, water and heat, in extreme cold, still travelling those 100s of kilometers.

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There was a part that stuck with me, a journal entry that described the Endurance crew standing on a ice that had trapped their boat, and just watching in horror as the shifting ice flow crushed it. It powerfully conveyed raw despair and overwhelming hopelessness, which in an of itself is exceedingly difficult for anyone to overcome, let alone in extremely hostile conditions.

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The book starts in media res with the sinking of the ship iirc. I happened to read it just as the actual ship was discovered.

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i understand polar expeditions, but werent people already living in amazon

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The "Rio da Dúvida" was a tributary which wasn't really mapped at the time. The Brazilian government was laying out Telegraph lines at the time to map the area.

There were tribals in the area but it wasn't mapped.

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Do you have a recommendation of a book written by them?

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River of Doubt - Candice Millard

https://www.candicemillard.com/river-of-doubt.html

Covers Teddy Roosevelt's Amazon expedition. To the comment about "weren't people living in the Amazon" - read the book. The Brazilian government was scouting and mapping the terrain for the project of connecting the coasts with telegraph lines. This was uncharted territory and the chance of not returning was high.

I cannot recommend enough.

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The letters from Francisco de Orellana: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_de_Orellana

https://en.scribd.com/document/647918681/The-Voyage-of-Franc...

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“South: The Story of Shackleton’s Last Expedition, 1914–1917” by Sir Ernest Shackleton. Here, Shackleton documents the journey of the Endurance expedition, which aimed to traverse Antarctica but instead became a legendary tale of survival after the ship was trapped and destroyed by pack ice.

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Related and also a good read is "The Roald Amundsen Diaries : The South Pole Expedition 1910-1912". You can see the ship he used on the expedition, the Fram at the appropriately named, Fram Museum in Oslo. It's an incredible experience to see and contemplate the expeditions these explorers mounted, and what equipment and resources they assembled to do it at a very early time.

https://www.abebooks.com/products/isbn/9788282350105?cm_sp=b...

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I didnt realise the ship was in a museum - Dundee has the discovery museum for Scotts ship which is good for a visit too

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Moreover, you can walk around inside the ship and see the cabins they lived in, indeed an incredible, immersive experience.

Came here to say that Amundsen is a great example of someone who did hard things and made them look easy. Nansen also. And Shackleton, although he didn't make them look easy...

Basically everything written by Roland Huntford about polar exploration is great inspiration. The Last Place on Earth covers Amundsen and Scott (the latter who did difficult things and made them look hard and died.)

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I haven't verified the info in this video myself, but it's making a point about Shackleton actually being somewhat incompetent/overeager and getting himself and crew into more trouble than necessary (as compared to Amundsen): https://youtube.com/watch?v=DU06c7f9fzc (TED talk, sorry)

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I'm currently listening to "Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing". I've also heard of some of the arguments against Shackleton (I haven't watched the talk).

I have to think of what Shackleton, as a leader (boss), was going through and with uncertainties abound.

28 people who he hired based not only on capability alone, but also for crew (team) fit.

He apparently cared deeply for them, and they in-turn cared for one another.

They managed to work together in the harshest of environments. They all made it.

That in and of itself, is a remarkable feat.

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You have a mistaken perspective on the whole thing. These men were seafaring adventurers, not people who will call their lawyer if there isn't a gluten free option in their restaurant.

Every crew member was fully informed that they were more likely to die than survive the journey – before even sending in their applications.

And Shackleton is dead since long, so you can't cancel him anymore.

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I'd say Scott was the most incompetent of the lot.

At least according to https://www.amazon.com/Scott-Amundsen-Last-Place-Earth/dp/03...

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The co-founder of Autodesk, John Walker, chronicled the company's journey from founding through IPO and beyond: https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/

I haven't read all of it (~900 pages), but he seems like an honest man, humble with minimal ego, who doesn't sugarcoat the challenges of building a business from scratch as a non-business guy. He also includes internal memos and the like, so you do get a feel for the "mechanics" of company-building.

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Failure is not an Option by Gene Kranz, Flight Director of Apollo 11 and Apollo 13 among other missions give a lot of insight into the preparation and focus of safety critical operations.

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In the 1930s Phyllis Pearsall (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllis_Pearsall) walked 3000 miles of every street of London (23000), collected house numbers, to create a street atlas to sell. Took her 4 years of 18 hour days. The book title is "Mrs P's Journey". The whole history of early map making is fascinating.

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Didnt have offsite backups, and if you did you were doing twice the work.

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I think that "people who did hard things" fall on a spectrum between these two extremities:

- someone who got lucky

- someone who invested an unfathomable amount of time to their craftsmanship or to their beliefs

Of course it is not black and white, and even luck mostly requires hard work in the first place, which I admire (and if you find your luck - hold to it!, nothing wrong with that), but you get the gist. I guess that in other words what I am saying is: beware of the survivorship bias on the left side of this spectrum.

--

Finally, the book: "The story of my experiments with Truth", Ghandi. Definitely belongs to the "work hard" extremity and a very interesting read; but I don't want to create an impression that I find it special in any way because of my above comment, it is just one of the latest I have read, consider the two comments unrelated.

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The books about people who did hard things and spent an unfathomable amount of time on them, but failed and never became known for anything--generally don't get written. It's hard for me to take any "hard work success story" as prescriptive. It's mostly survivorship bias.

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To avoid some survivorship bias and maybe offer something you wont find other recommending.

Gamasutra used to offer these amazing post mortems written up by game developers after shipping a product. Often recounting all their failures and how they still shipped.

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Good idea.

  * "Billion Dollar Loser" by Reeves Wiedeman  (WeWork)
  * "Bad Blood" by John Carreyrou (Theranos)
  * "Losing My Virginity" by Richard Branson  (his failed projects)
  * "The Hard Thing About Hard Things" by Ben Horowitz

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The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf

It details Alexander von Humboldt, his travels through South America and Siberia, and general contributions to science.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23995249-the-invention-o...

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moonwalking with Einstein is about a man who decides to get into memory competitions upon learning it's more skill based than he realized. this in turn helped me develop more confidence in my own abilities with day to day routine and not be afraid to try new things i never considered myself naturally good at

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Great book! IIRC, after attending the 2005 USA memory championships as a journalist, he became intrigued and started training and in one year became USA Memory champion in 2006 at age 24

I'd tried applying memory training lessons from this book a few years ago and written about my experience: http://web.archive.org/web/20210301185111/https://ppsreejith...

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Masters of Doom is quite good about John Carmack and the creation of id Software.

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Recommend Doom Guy as well, by John Romero. Kind of dispels a little bit of the mythology about Carmack. It doesn't downplay his contributions, but kind of frames them in context of the rest of the team. Masters of doom kind of portrays Carmack as a sort of wizard locked away in his tower while working on quake, when in actuality he struggled a great deal with the technology and personally, lashing out at the rest of the team. They hired some more experienced engineers to help take the load off of him for things like networking and other aspects of graphics. His major breakthrough with BSPs in quake was not the usage of BSPs (which he was not the first to pioneer; the technique had been described 30 years prior at AT&T), but caching mechanisms for the node adjacency graphs. Really humanizes Carmack a lot. There's also quite a few minor factual errors in MoD, but nothing major and nothing consequential related to Carmack

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I loved MoD! The audio book read by Will Wheaton is also pretty good.

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Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology (goodreads link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/809315.Making_PCR)

for a short video version of this history, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaXKQ70q4KQ from Veritasium.

reasons for recommendation: - it's an example in the biological science, to complement the heavy representation of examples from computer science and entrepreneurship in this thread - the main character, Kary Mullis, is colorful and controversial. Not a likable individual, but nevertheless had traits (mostly an unreasonable obsession) that enabled him to make such a discovery - the discovery of high temperature tolerant enzymes predated Mullis' insight by some two decades, and it played a key role in making PCR practical and widely applicable. this is a pattern I have seen often in major inventions, which were made possible by prior discoveries (often decades old) which lay dormant until someone put everything together. This process of re-discovering the pieces and making connections is also where I think machine learning could be particularly helpful. In fact this is my main motivation for picking up this book (by online reviews, not a particularly well-written one).

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Fall of Carthage by Adrian Goldsworthy

Few people understand the Punic wars and what it took to “delete” Carthage from the world. Delenda Cartago Est.

Goldsworthy tells the story accessibly from both sides of the wars. Lessons that echo throughout history.

More of a biography but still fits your criteria is The Wright Brothers by David McCullough. It’s an easy read and hard to put down. I had no idea what it took to make flying a thing until that book. We definitely take for granted how much those two men changed the world.

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"Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II"

Covers the invention of radar, "big science", involvement in the Manhattan project.

https://www.amazon.com/Tuxedo-Park-Street-Science-Changed/dp...

"Insisting On the Impossible : The Life of Edwin Land (inventor of instant photography and founder of Polarioid)"

Probably one of the most brilliant commercial technology breakthroughs largely attributable to a single team and a singular vision. Steve Jobs' hero.

https://www.amazon.com/Insisting-Impossible-Life-Edwin-Land/...

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Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants - is a pretty great read, full of (literally) explosive twists.

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Seconding this! It has great detail on the actual rocket fuel chemistry, alongside incredibly well-told stories and anecdotes.

Many people's favorite line from it:

> It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that’s the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water-with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals-steel, copper, aluminium, etc.-because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminium keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.

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Oh man. I remember laughing out loud at “It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers” and then hooting at the end of that paragraph.

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My favorite on this topic is The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power. It’s a deep dive into the emergence and evolution of the oil industry. Technological innovations, financial developments, political shifts and so on.

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I've been finding The Prize surprisingly light on technical details - I'm 1/3 of the way through the book and half way through the chronology of the oil industry and it hasn't even mentioned a distillation column. Does it get more technical?

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Great call! I went for The New Map but this one is v high up my to read list.

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"Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea" is the story of a shipwreck discovery that has always enthralled me. I've read it three times, and I'm so inspired about all the challenges they solved along the way.

(Note: the hero of the story went a little crazy in recent years. Hid from the law for a long time, and I think he just died... but still, the book itself is amazing.)

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+100000

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"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 fell apart.

Regardless of your opinion on Robert Moses / NYC, it's an incredibly fascinating read or (~90-hour) audio book.

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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/

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The Power Broker is a superb choice for OP. This comment should be closer to the top of the thread.

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Absolutely also recommend! Took a while to get through it but Moses figured out how to hack government and civil engineering projects. He literally changed the New York State constitution, used bond contracts to build a defensive barrier around himself, and for better or worse then built half of the public works projects in the US himself or through his disciples.

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This is a top answer. Robert Caro goes into excruciating detail on how he accomplished most public works projects. I especially appreciate him covering the grey or dark sides of getting deals done as most really hard things have some unpleasant sides to them.

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second this: i was trying to follow along with the 99 percent invisible book club but i fell behind due to life events. i picked it back up during the holidays with about 25% left to go.

Caro does an amazing job writing in an engaging, compelling way about topics that would otherwise feel dry coming from a different writer.

i look forward to getting into his LBJ books in the future.

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Your title says "people who did hard things" then you say "less interested in people..."

It sounds like you want second hand accounts of the events or groups that occurred around "hard things". Like a description of NASA going to the moon, but not the accounts of a particular astronaut.

What is a "hard thing"?

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Tune In: The Beatles: All These Years by Mark Lewisohn. I picked it up as a Beatles fan, but it actually reads more like "how did the Beatles happen" - a social history of the times, the factors that led to each of their development as artists, and their iterative development into the group that we know as The Beatles. Put another way, it's a deep dive into the four founders of one of the most successful artistic organizations of all time and their search for product-market fit. This is also part 1 of 3, ending when they finally achieve PMF, releasing their first number one record.

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You might want to look into books about H. Tracy Hall. He's one of the inventors of lab-grown diamonds, the hardest things ever done.

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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.

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I was a postdoc at Land's research institute (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rowland_Institute_at_Harva...) in the '90s.

The place was wild. Land had been dead for a few years when I got there, but they still employed his driver. My recollection is that the driver brought in donuts once per week. The place felt like an upscale hotel with laboratories in it. And $$ was no object. Need a $40k laser? Just write the requisition.

Looks like it was fully taken over by Harvard (at the time it was only peripherally associated).

Another funny Land story... My postdoc advisor was a faculty member at another university in the 1970s and Land and his entourage were there visiting various labs. My advisor thumped Land on the chest and said that he liked his shirt. According to my advisor, Land's handlers were visibly upset, but Land appreciated being treated like a regular human.

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Great stories! The research institute gets a mention in the book too.

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The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll might be interesting to you. Its a story about how he tracked down a spy starting from a few pennies missing in a balance sheet. A very pleasant read and a good audio book too.

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I was going to suggest the same book. I first ran into story on PBS as a teenager, it was titled "The KGB, the Computer and Me".

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Changing How the World Does Business: FedEx's Incredible Journey to Success - The Inside Story by Roger Frock is an excellent story of creating a completely new way of doing logistics, and what it takes to start a network-based business that can only work if it launches on a large scale from day one.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/574979/changing-how-...

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> hard things

How about consistently competing at fighting video-games at the highest level in the world for more than 30 years?

"The Will to Keep Winning", by Daigo Umehara. He was the first Street Fighter 2 player to reach the top (being considered either the best player or top 3), and he was able to stay at the stop since then. No other video-game player has ever been so consistently good as Daigo. He may not have won many EVO or Capcom Cup titles, but he has always stayed at the top. And he's the protagonist of Evo Moment 37.

Also, his story is good. The book may make you cry. And it's a very short book.

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QED And The Men Who Made It, by Sylvan S. Schweber. About the development of quantum electrodynamics. It is partly biography, centering on Freeman Dyson, Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger, and Sin-Itoro Tomonaga in roughly decreasing order of word count by rough recollection. Mostly I'd say the subject matter is history of physics from a fairly hardcore technical perspective. Tbh I didn't understand that much of the physics, though I learned some through reading. The history and biography parts were quite engaging anyway.

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Digital Apollo by David A. Mindell. An excellent book that describes how the Apollo computer was developed.

Dealers of Lighting Xerox Parc and the dawn of computer age by Michael A. Hiltzik. If you're interested in knowing where the PC as we know it today originated from.

Others have already suggested The Dream Machine which was a book that once started I couldn't stop reading and finished it in about a week.

Edit: Maybe not exactly the book that you might be interested in but I read Mindstorms by Papert and I think his work on education through the use of computers was groundbreaking. Very interesting book.

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I'd add 'Sunburst and Luminary: An Apollo Memoir' [0], written by one of the LM guidance computer programmers, Don Eyles, to the Apollo reading list.

[0] https://www.doneyles.com/LM/Tales.html

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Seven Pillars of Wisdom, by T. E. Lawrence.

During WWI he was sent from the UK to the Arabs to find a leader who could unite them and lead a rebellion against the Turks, who were allied with Germany.

He succeeded.

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"The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch" [1] is an amazing read. It's a mix of history and how-to describing how (and when.. which is often extremely surprising) developed the technology that we have, and how it might be recreated starting from scratch.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Knowledge:_How_to_Rebuild_...

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"The Wright Brothers" by David McCullough - Shows how Orville and Wilbur surpassed the leading researchers of the day to be the first to achieve controlled, powered flight. Does a great job of describing their work ethic and research process.

"The Myths of Innovation" by Scott Berkun - Not exactly about how hard things got done, but it discusses some of the misconceptions and assumptions we make about current technology and the process of inventing new tech.

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I really enjoyed the book "iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It", which not only talks about the beginning of Apple and computers in general, but also gives a fascinating insight into the character of Steve Wozniak.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/798635.iWoz

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I loved the book about Leonardo Delvecchio, the founder of Luxottica (the biggest sunglasses manufacturer in the world, owner of Rayban/Oakley/etc.)

He became an orphan at age 9.

Started working in factories at 14.

Started working in glasses factories at 16.

He built his own first at 27. Grew it from 0 to 6,000 employees.

Died while still being the CEO of the company aged 86 years old.

One of the best stories of perseverance, and doing hard things from nothing I've ever witnessed!

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I really enjoyed 'How big things get done' [1], which is close to your 'how things.... got built' requirement. Very interesting read about delivery of really big projects. I also read 'Built'[2] which was a little more relatable about civil engineering, specifically the Shard in London. And finally 'Build' by Tony Fadell but this didn't quite hit the mark for me as it was more a memoir about how great he is.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/61327449-how-big-thin... [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34921647-built [3] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59696349-build

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Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

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Copies in Seconds: Chester Carlson and the Birth of the Xerox Machine by David Owen

"A history of the photocopier offers a portrait of reserved physics graduate Chester Carlson, who invented the copier to ease his job as a patent clerk and who saw his marketing efforts daunted by numerous rejections, before the head of Xerox research recognized the machine's potential. "

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You might like Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days. It’s written by Jessica Livingston, who founded Y Combinator.

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"The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan" By: Robert Kanigel

A biography of one of the most innovative mathematicians of all time traces the rise of Srinivasa Ramanujan from his days as a clerk to his collaboration with one of England's greatest mathematicians

There is also a movie with this same name. It was good, IMHO.

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The Emperor of all Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee.

This book describes how hundreds of people tried (and failed) to cure cancer over *millennia*. It spends a lot of time talking about how the modern approach, which works surprisingly well, was developed by Sidney Farber and others through great effort and a lot of good science.

My feeling when reading this book was similar to reading about the making of the atomic bomb- what happens when you put a bunch of smart people in a box and tell them to solve a problem. However, this time it didn't work nearly as well, because as we found out, curing cancer is an order of magnitude harder than building an atomic bomb. Building the bomb required new engineering, while curing cancer requires new science and new engineering.

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Shadow Divers (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9530.Shadow_Divers) - story of amateur deep sea divers who discover a sunken German U-Boat and spend years trying to get into it. Genuinely riveting story, absolute nutters operating at the edge of what’s possible (and what should be done?).

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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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Newton and the Counterfeiter

https://www.royalmint.com/shop/books/Newton-and-the-Counterf...

Excellent book about Isaac Newton's role in solving the great recoinage crisis.

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I would suggest Loonshots - fascinating dive into both the technology and the conditions that allowed people to really make stuff happen (or not) https://www.bahcall.com/book/

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Dreaming In Code[1] is an interesting one. It recounts the history of the team (which included Mitch Kapor of Lotus fame) who built Chandler[2]. Chandler was intended to be a game-changing PIM (personal information manager) / note-taking app inspired by Lotus Agenda[3].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreaming_in_Code

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandler_(software)

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Agenda

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The Making of the Atomic Bomb is one I read recently and really enjoyed.

I didn’t love the writing, but thought Skunkworks was full of good stories.

It is a little more character study but Dealers of Lightning is a good one.

I also enjoyed The Idea Factory.

And last, a little off the path of making things but Endurance was a good read.

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Bruno Latour’s "The Pasteurization of France" is about Louis Pasteur and the creation and success of germ theory. It does explain it not by focussing on Pasteur per se, but by showing how different groups of people adapted it for different goals.

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Tracy Kidder, _Soul of a New Machine_

Henry SF Cooper, _The Evening Star_ (debugging OS race conditions on a Venus orbiter)

Pascal Zachary, _Showstopper_ (about David Cutler and Windows NT)

Richard Preston, _American Steel_ (building an early continuous casting steel mill in the midwest)

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Back then I’ve got my hands on a book about the history of low temperature research in German but unfortunately I can’t find it anymore.

I would say “Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold” would be a fitting match.

The history to get to absolut zero kelvin would fit your description.

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Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption Zamperini's life was a series of hard things. Going to the Olympics, surviving a plane crash, then 47 days at sea, then a Japanese concentration camp ...

Very well written as well

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EB Sledge - With the Old Breed is the account of a combat infantryman in WWII in the Pacific. It's about the fear, misery, and despair soldiers faced as they struggled to survive the horrors of war. It was the basis for HBO's The Pacific (successor to Band of Brothers).

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The first book I thought about from this prompt is The Fountainhead. It's fiction and was written in the 1940's, but is very relevant to modern times. Very well written and in my opinion this book is better than Atlas Shrugged.

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House on Fire: The Fight to Eradicate Smallpox

In House on Fire, William H. Foege describes his own experiences in public health and details the remarkable program that involved people from countries around the world in pursuit of a single objective―eliminating smallpox forever.

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Carrying The Fire by Michael Collins is an excellent account of Apollo 11 from the perspective of the command module pilot. I've read it three times, it's a wonderful book, he's a very intelligent, capable and humble man.

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This book completely changed my understanding of how that era of space projects was developed. Before reading it I didn't know how involved the early astronauts were in actually developing the systems, spacecraft, and procedures.

As test pilots they were extremely competent technicians obviously, but they were expected to develop in novel individual domains to solve previously unexplored problems. By the end of gemini the first two dozen astronauts were each among a handful of world experts in their focus: things like orbital rendezvous mechanics, navigation, interface design, biomechanics of flight, radio telemetry. The program wasn't built for them to fly, to a huge extent they guided how it was built.

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"THE WRIGHT BROTHERS" by Fred C. Kelly. This is the one I read and it turns out to be on project Gutenberg:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/67672/67672-h/67672-h.htm

I'm really curious how that is considered public domain, it was published in 1943 and he died in 1959.

Anyway, one of the things most fascinating to me was their attempts to sell an airplane to the US army and other business related things. You'd think inventing the airplane would bring quick financial rewards but it was a long road.

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GPT tells me (take it or leave it) that books published before 1963 only had a copyright of 28 years generally, and it wasn't until 1978 that the "author life + 70 years" started

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I rather liked 'The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation'

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Agreed. Just finished it a couple of weeks ago. Hackers by Levy and fire in the Valley may also fit the bill.

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Highly recommend Apollo by Blythe Cox and Murray. Tremendous engineering history of the Apollo program, and really makes you appreciate the numerous folks and terrific stories that all had to come together to make it happen.

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Great Fortune, a book about the making of Rockefeller Center is one of my favorites.

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American Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Marin J. Sherwin

It is based on ~20 years of research about Robert Oppenheimer, and is the inspiration for the movie Oppenheimer. Robert Oppenheimer is the scientist who lead the development of the first atomic bomb.

> Less interested in people and character studies. More interested in the mechanics of how things that we take for granted actually got built and what the world they were made in was like.

In this case, the "people and character studies" are very critical to understanding "the mechanics of how things that we take for granted actually got built and what the world they were made in was like". The early part of the book goes in depth to Oppenheimer's social ties to communist groups, which is critical to understanding the reason why he was forbidden from continuing research in the latter part of his life.

https://www.amazon.com/American-Prometheus-Triumph-Tragedy-O...

(To make a long story short, the American Communists, and their sympathizers, in the 1930s were blissfully unaware that the Soviet Union was an authoritarian hellhole. Many of the people involved in the Manhattan project had ties to those American Communists, and thus scientists in the Soviet Union. Because, for them, the Manhattan project was an academic endeavor, they wanted to share their results with their Soviet collogues. And that's how the nuclear race started... Information was leaked to the Soviets in the name of science. Oppenheimer was a victim of the resulting witch hunt; which requires understanding the "people and character studies" part of the book.)

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_Madhouse at the End of the Earth_ by Julian Sancton went hard. It documents the tragic expedition of Adrian de Gerlache to the south pole in the late 19th century. Due to hubris, they wound up locked in the ice overwinter, and came within a hair's breadth of death.

A gripping read. 10/10 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jun/09/madhouse-at-th...

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The Wright Brothers biography was incredible. Highly recommend for the exact qualities you're looking for:

  the mechanics of how things that we take for granted actually got built and what the world they were made in was like

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Which one, McCullough's? Your comment is the only search result for that quote.

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Apollo: The Race To The Moon Charles Murray, Catherine Bly Cox

My favorite book of this type by far.

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I came to recommend this as well. It's a study of the engineering and management efforts behind Apollo, and much more interesting and entertaining than that makes it sound. The section on how they developed the F-1 engines that powered the first stage of the Saturn V, including how they'd explode bombs inside the engine nozzle to be sure that it could cope with instabilities, is just one of dozens (hundreds?) of examples of how all the small pieces came together to accomplish their priorities, 'Man. Moon. Decade.'

An amazing book.

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I greatly enjoyed The Leadership Moment by Michael Useem, which covers 9 stories of crises and how leaders approached them.

The Man Who Discovered Quality by Andrea Gabor is an interesting story of W. Edwards Deming, the American who revolutionized post-WWII Japanese manufacturing with statistical approaches to reducing variance.

Issac Newton by James Gleick conveys what it was like for Newton to essentially invent modern physical science in a pre-scientific world.

Dreaming In Code by Scott Rosenberg is a good counterpoint to inspiring tech origin stories: legendary coders coming together to build an amazing product and… basically failing.

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> Less interested in people and character studies. More interested in the mechanics of how things that we take for granted actually got built and what the world they were made in was like.

These two things are inseparable.

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Out of the Shadows By Jonathan Kingsman https://shepherd.com/book/out-of-the-shadows

Amazing book about the grain markets and how they have changed over the last 40 years.

"Once shadowy figures, grain merchants have now come out of the shadows. Almost everything that you eat or drink today will contain something bought, stored, transported, processed, shipped, distributed or sold by one of the seven giants of the agricultural supply chain. The media often refers to them as the ABCD group of international grain-trading companies, with ABCD standing for ADM, Bunge, Cargill and Dreyfus. The acronym, though, ignores the other three giants of the food supply: Glencore, COFCO International and Wilmar. Together, they handle 50 percent of the international trade in grain and oilseeds. In this book’s series of exclusive and unprecedented interviews, CEOs and senior traders from these seven giants describe in their own words how the agricultural markets are changing, and how they are adapting to those changes."

The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket By Benjamin Lorr https://shepherd.com/book/the-secret-life-of-groceries

Five years of research really explains large swaths of our food system and how it changes what we eat.

You might like these as well:

The best unexpectedly enthralling books about seemingly boring things https://shepherd.com/best-books/good-books-about-seemingly-b...

The best books that make sense of how globalization broke down, and what happens next https://shepherd.com/best-books/globalization-breaks-down-wh...

*Features The Big Rig, a book about the American trucking industry and it's breakdown

Some good ones in there :)

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Almost no one thinks about the modern miracle that are grocery stores. It wasn't that long ago that getting out-of-season produce was literally impossible.

Today, you just put up with inferior tomatoes in the winter and be annoyed about it.

The logistical complications of worldwide produce supply chains and your local supermarkets are really, really nuts.

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Ya I think about as a kid I only knew two types of cheese, yellow and white. Now there is an insane number as just one example.

And the fresh fruit and veggies are crazy. Blueberries in December? How and why are we doing that :)

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I think most people don’t have access to supermarkets tho.

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I actually think more people have access than don't...

Even in rural and developing regions, there are grocery stores, just not as fancy. I tried to find numbers, but it was hard to find the right source for that.

Anyone living in an urban area would have access and that is 60% of the global population. Plus, rural areas in the USA, Canada, Europe, Mexico, etc etc have access to one.

Only about 25% of the population are engaged in subsistence farming at this point.

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Most people on this forum do

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Titan (about John Rockefeller and the making of Standard Oil) and House of Morgan (about J.P. Morgan, the man and the investment bank, and the making of the modern financial system) were both excellent.

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“Across The Airless Wilds” by Eric Swift. Tells the story of how the moon buggy came to be and how it was contracted and built in 18 months. Fascinating deep dive into what it actually took to make that work on the moon.

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/across-the-airless-wi...

He also wrote a book on the interstate highway system called The Big Roads which was interesting but not as much of a page turner.

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Sorry, Earl Swift, not Eric

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I hope surviving shipwrecks and such counts as getting hard things done. "Safety and Survival at the Sea" has a lot of those. Chapters like Fire, Man in Water, Man on life raft, Man in a boat, and so on. Each chapter has many short episodes, just the hard facts, leaving the details to your imagination. I can quote one from memory: "North Atlantic, November. 12 people on a life raft. The raft kept capsizing, righted by walking on the inside of the canopy. 7 survived."

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It's on my reading list, but I have not read it (yet), but perhaps How Big Things Get Done:

* https://dangardner.ca/publication/how-big-things-get-done

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61327449-how-big-things-...

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I'd suggest 'The Rickover Effect' by Theodore Rockwell. The author gives a firsthand account of what it was like to be part of the teams who created the first nuclear-powered submarine and civilian nuclear power plant (perhaps counterintuitively, in that order). There is a fair amount of discussion about people, culture and leadership, but it is very grounded and very detailed about the mechanics of what went into these projects and how the former made the latter possible.

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Maybe a bit off-topic if you are less interested in people and character studies, but it is one of the books I have read the most.

The Age of Uncertainty by Tobias Hürter

It’s about the minds who redefined our understanding of the universe, and I would say they were people who did a hard thing or two.

https://openlibrary.org/books/OL37331178M/Age_of_Uncertainty

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Robert Kurson's diving books (Shadow Divers and Pirate Hunters) are some of the best books on startups I've ever read. They're stories about some of the most ambitious wreck divers out there.

It might not seem analogous, but there's a lot of parallels, i.e. you have limited air (aka runway), you need to choose the people on your expedition wisely and can't bring too many, you need to be extremely ambitious (seeking more than just touristy diving), etc.

The writing is incredible, too.

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Simply Fly: A Deccan Odyssey, Collins Business, 2010, ISBN 978-81-7223-842-1, 978-93-5029-155-9

amazon link:: https://www.amazon.in/Simply-Fly-Odyssey-Captain-Gopinath/dp...

he created the low cost airline in India. There is a movie also based on his life - Sarfira ( starring Akshay Kumar)

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*Engines That Move Markets: Technology Investing from Railroads to the Internet and Beyond* by Alasdair G. M. Nairn

I’ve had a few aha moments while reading this book. Although it's primarily written from an investor's perspective, it does contain a fair share of insight about creation and commercialisation of technology, the mechanics of monopolies, government involvement, foreign affairs, etc.

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Some time ago, I wrote a few stories along these lines mostly for fun. https://www.hardmode.app/

I'm quite aware of survivorship bias, and it is a theme I had thought about but wasn't sure how to frame in terms of individual stories.

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Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl, a explorer/anthropologist. He and a group of other volunteers sailed across the pacific on a raft built using ancient methods to prove that the pacific isles were settled by south americans (this turned out to be wrong based on population genetics). Great read!

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I really enjoyed American Prometheus. Might be a bit too focused on Oppenheimer for the original request, but it covers the Manhattan Project more broadly too.

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The Making of Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. Its not about one people but a project, Manhattan Project. One of my most favorite book.

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Autobiographies are far better than biographies here as the biographers typically have no clue as to what made the successful person successful.

The best autobiography I've ever read in terms of nuggets of wisdom is Sam Walton's made in America autobiography.

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Freedom's Forge

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Second this. It do a great job explaining how the WW2 armament buildup required both legislative and mindset changes on behalf of the government about what a good working relationship between business and government looked like.

10/10 book.

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Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner is about America’s water infrastructure and does an incredible job of outlining the mind-blowing scale of it all as well as the political / historical context in which bureaucracies like the Bureau of Reclamation were able to build 30,000+ dams across nearly every instance of flowing water in the American West.

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If you are a fan of history, Conquistador: Hernan Cortes, King Montezuma, and the Last Stand of the Aztecs by Buddy Levy is a fantastic read.

Prior to reading this book, I naively assumed Cortes waltzed into Meso America and took over, this is a well sourced historical account of everything that happened that led to the fall of Tenochtitlan.

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Robin Marantz Henig: Monk in the Garden: Life of Gregor Mendel

An amazing biography. The perseverance and meticulousness with Mendel performed the experiments is very inspiring. He was not the typical gifted/talented student either. He would face many difficulties at school as well as while trying to be a priest.

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Janna Levin, Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space. It describes the construction of the LIGO experiment over a span of about 50 years. It does have a lot of character studies (one of Levin’s strengths) but also plenty of details about the incredible equipment and what it took to design it and put it all together.

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Cool question!

Patrick Collison (of stripe fame) put together a collection of historical ambitious projects that got done quickly, look into the biographies of people mentioned in there. https://patrickcollison.com/fast

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“Walt Disney” by Neal Gabler. The man was reinventing himself through his life. Disney is sort nowadays stereotypical corporate americana but by god, it actually was started by the whims, passion, skill & vision of Walt. A must read imo to anyone interested in creation and building.

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Walt Disney's story was always fascinating for me! How one person's vision could shape an entire industry and cultural legacy

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The Caro books on the LBJ presidency are incredible biographies. LBJ did crazy things to get where he got.

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I've only read the first of Caro's LBJ biographies, 'The Path to Power', but I'd very much agree. I plan to read one annually, but last year's Caro was 'The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.' How Moses acquired the power (genius, legislation, money and, through them, influence) to physically reshape New York City and State seems pretty relevant to understanding how things work today.

I consider Caro's short book, 'Working', a gateway drug for the longer books.

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I just finished the first and I'm halfway through the second one, Means of Ascent. It's granted a little slower than the first.

It helps to listen to them as audiobooks because I can play them at the gym or something or on my commute and don't have to get too focused on the details.

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I haven't personally read it, but The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes seems to fit the bill.

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I really "Idea Man" by Paul Newman. Though survivorship bias is apparent, it was insightful read on how Apple an Msft came to be and why they are what they are. For example, why closed system was important and worked for Apple.

It was great read until he leaves Microsoft.

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"Idea Man" is by Paul Allen.

"The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man: A Memoir" looks like an interesting book on Paul Newman but I haven't read it.

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Too late to edit. Paul Allen it is

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The Wager by David Grann, about a disastrous British maritime voyage in the 18th century that involved shipwreck, surviving castaways, multiple distinct routes back to Britain, then fighting over the story when different parties got back.

None of this hagiographic bollocks.

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  - The making of the Atomic bomb
  - The Eighth Day of creation
Both long, and both are built from first-hand interviews of people who solved some of the most difficult problems in the 20th century.

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The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn showing how Stalin operated and how imprisoned people survived is a good read about humans doing hard things.

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Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes does a great job covering the rivalry between Edison, Tesla, and Westinghouse over electrifying the world. I liked how it broke down the technical and business challenges and showed the impact on everyday life and industry.

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Shoe Dog by Phil Night might fit the bill. It is definitely about the person (who founded Nike), but also a fascinating look into how the sportswear industry took hold, sponsorship deals, Michael Jordan, etc.

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This is a more broad interpretation of "getting things done," but The Secret Race is an excellent book about what it was like to be a professional cyclist in the late 90s/early 2000s, doping and all

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https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/124718.One_Man_s_Wildern...

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The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error That Transformed the World by Ken Alder

These guys went through quite some hardships to define the length of a meter. Good read!

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How to Make a Spaceship by Julian Guthrie was a greally good read for me.

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Damn, I must confess when I read the title I thought you meant things like war, or scientific inventions, or historical political events. Turns out you meant private equity and Texas oil x)

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The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914

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Came here to post this same book.

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The Founders Podcast (founderspodcast.com) would probably be the best source. There are a lot of book recommendations about how founders overcome obstacles to achieve great things.

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In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick.

Story of the survivors of a sunken whale ship after a sperm whale attack. A source of inspiration for Moby Dick.

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I've recently read Annapurna by Maurice Herzog. It's a recall of the first accent of an 8000m peak, told by the leader of the expedition. I highly recommend it.

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American Genesis covers a few inventors around the turn of the century 1900, including wright bros IIRC, inspiring stuff.

in the fiction realm i think the martian fits the bill too!

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Vaccinated: One Man's Quest to Defeat the World's Deadliest Diseases

Describes how Maurice Hilleman invented 40 vaccines, including for eight of the most common diseases in the US, over a 36 year career at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Merck & Co. His vaccines are estimated to save 8 million lives each year.

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not sure it's a story of "people doing hard things" but it may go your way for "mechanics of how things that we take for granted actually got built", the book is "Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk"

> a comprehensive history of man's efforts to understand risk and probability, from ancient gamblers in Greece to modern chaos theory.

In some parts it's not an easy read, but the underlying stories are very interesting.

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Agreed not sure it exactly fits the prompt but this is a really fascinating book. One of those things where I didn’t fully bring into conscious awareness until reading it: statistics are tools that didn’t always exist, and had to be developed alongside multiple philosophical revolutions.

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I find the The Jim Collins books to be insightful.

Good to Great. Built to Last, etc.

Focuses on how the organizations are constructed and tries to divine principles that are true across time.

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Unfortunately, Good To Great is 300 pages of survivorship bias. It picks a group of companies that succeeded, and a group that failed, and then after the fact looks back to try to find what the survivors had in common. I don't know how you come out of that with any prescriptive steps on how to succeed.

It's like having a classroom stand up and flip a coin, ask everyone who flipped tails to sit down, repeat the process until there's only a few people standing, and then interview them to try to understand what makes them good heads-flippers.

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“West with the Night”, a memoir by Beryl Markham; she was the first person to fly across the Atlantic Ocean from east to west in a non-stop solo flight.

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Benjamin Franklin by Van Doren is a really in depth biography which I enjoyed. It basically tells how he was going absolutely gangbuster for 75 years

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Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose. The tale of Lewis and Clark as told largely from Lewis' journal from the journey.

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"Red Moon Rising" by Matthew Brzezinski, it tells the story of the Sputnik programme and is just really very well written.

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dava sobel's "longitude" is excellent

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I would recommend The New Map - it's about the extraordinary development of Fracking and how it changed geopolitics.

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The Innovators, Walter Isaacson

It’s interesting to read how many individuals contributed in all sorts of important ways in the history of computing.

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Every few years I re-read Homer - Odyssey. And maybe the threats/challenges aren't the same, but.. they are.

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Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson

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- Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet

- A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts

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> books about how hard things got done.

American Steel, about how a small steel fabricator took over the US steel industry.

Think, the story of the Watsons and IBM, about how IBM went from a maker of time clocks to the biggest name in computing.

The Art of the Comeback, by Trump. This is the Trump book few read. Copies are around US$200 now. Written when Trump was down, it's more honest than his other book.

Some things that were famously hard to develop:

- Xerography. First demo in 1939, started to work around 1959, became a simple technology in the 1980s.

- Television. First attempts in the 19th century, sort of worked by the 1930s, worked decently by the 1950s, worked well as digital HDTV in the late 1980s, and achieved really good and really cheap only in the last few years.

- Steel. Goes back to ancient times. Not produced in quantity until the 1880s. Took about 10,000 tries to get the metallurgy for the Bessemer process right. Turns out you need analytical chemistry to make consistently good steel. Otherwise yield is poor. Many batches come out bad.

- Magnetic resonance imaging. The guy who invented it was almost fired for wasting time.

- Home grocery delivery. Check out why Webvan failed but Amazon succeeded. Some of the same people.

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The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan is a nice read. You can learn critical thinking from this book.

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"Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX" by Eric Berger documents how SpaceX employees poured their blood, sweat, and tears into launching a cost-effective rocket at a time when legacy operators dominated the space market with their costly cost-plus-fee contracts. This book mostly follows the journey of employees and (thankfully) doesn't resolve to Elon praise too much. There is a continuation to this book called "Reentry" but I haven't read it yet.

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I've just read both and highly recommend them and was coming in to this thread to do so.

Liftoff : https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/53402132-liftoff

Re-entry : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/205309521-reentry

Both have very high ratings on Goodreads.

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Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe

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The Poincaré Conjecture by Donal O'Shea

In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick

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"The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power" by Daniel Yergin

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The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester

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_The Biography of Ottmar Mergenthaler, Inventor of the Linotype_ by Carl Schlesinger

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3648638-the-biography-of...

c.f.,

_Tolbert Lanston and the Monotype: The Origin of Digital Typesetting_ by Richard L Hopkins

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17140645-tolbert-lanston...

For background on how difficult/apparently impossible this was, see the story of Mark Twain's investment in a typesetting machine:

https://twain.lib.virginia.edu/yankee/cymach6.html

One of the more memorably moments of my life was visiting a local newspaper back when they were still setting type using a Linotype machine --- it's just incredible to watch one (or the competing Monotype) work.

If I could, I'd have a Monotype machine in my shop along with a printing press, but first I'd need a shop, rather than a workbench at one end of the basement laundry room...

It's my understanding that for a long while, the U.S. Patent Office refused to consider patents for intermittent windshield wiping mechanisms because none of them worked --- the actual story of the invention is far more sordid:

https://thehustle.co/windshield-wiper-inventor-robert-kearns

For us folks interested in computers, there is of course Charles Babbage who tried and failed, yet still managed to create many of the concepts underlying our modern computing devices.

While the story of a team, Tracy Kidder's _The Soul of a New Machine_ is a classic which I would highly recommend:

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/7090.The_Soul_of_a_Ne...

and for a more recent spin on things, look at the folks who crashed and burned such as Jerry Kaplan:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1171250.Startup

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Fermat's Last Theorem, about Andrew Wiles long hard journey to prove it.

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Maybe you're joking, but my takeaway from this fantastic book was it was about lots and lots and lots of people's cumulative effort.

But yeah, came here to recommend this one. Brilliantly written, a true classic.

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Angle of Attack: Harrison Storms and the Race to the Moon, by Mike Gray.

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How about Tesla giving away his patents to Westinghouse for AC motors?

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“From Good to Great” by Jim Collins.

Actual science-based data about good leadership.

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If you want more entrepreneurial type stories.

When the heavens went on sale, by Ashly Vance, is pretty good. It details the early days of the space start-ups other than spaceX

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley is also pretty good, describes the crazy days of early paypal.

Someone already mentioned Liftoff by Erig Berger. Starting a private space company is probably as hard as things get, and it describes the early days pretty well

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Her biography on Elon Musk is also pretty good as far as depicting someone who did hard things. I was quite impressed by his tenacity.

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Any parenting book. ;)

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Maybe controversial but Elon Musk’s biography is basically just a 600+ page book about how one man got an unbelievable amount of things done against fairly insane odds.

It’s been one of the books that surprised me the most. It totally changed my opinion of the man.

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What hard proof is there of him doing something hard that you have expertise on?

If he lies, so badly, so hilariously, about being good at video games -- apropos nobody caring whether he is -- what else is he lying about?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6N-WW0UDrVQ

As a YT comment on another video put it:

> For anyone unfamiliar with Path of Exile 2, this is like someone pretending to be a grandmaster chess player not knowing how a rook moves.

There are no ifs or buts about that. Either you know this is true, or you also don't know the game Elon pretended to be one of the best players of.

Or take him just talking nonsense about Twitter, then firing the person who corrects him: https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/14/musk_twitter_rpc_spat...

None of that squares with being intellectually curious. Never mind him claiming Hitler was a communist. It's like saying someone build 20 hospitals in [country] because they "are so compassionate". But I, with my own eyes, see him kick a homeless person and bark an ugly laugh, and more than once, so I know for a fact that even if his signature is on some papers related to those hospitals, even if he was involved with the planning and whatnot, it is not because he is "so compassionate". So in the same way I know none of this is because he is so very intelligent and pragmatic. At least if I think of intelligence as something general, simply the ability to think and memorize and connect facts. That's just not in the cards anymore.

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I don’t have expertise on much, so I’m not sure what to tell you there. Bragging about being good at a video game isn’t exactly a critique I really care about.

Most people who surmount incredible odds aren’t normal, stable people so I don’t know what your point is.

Also, SpaceX is proof that he’s done hard things.

Again, all this is documented in the book. If you’re someone who cares about intellectual curiosity, you should check out the book for yourself.

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When someone claims they are a grandmaster in chess, and then talks about how the king is important ("you can tell because it's very tall")... and doesn't know how the rook moves, then yeah, if you never heard of chess, and can't be bothered to learn why that is so terribly telling, then you can indeed say nothing to that.

> Most people who surmount incredible odds aren’t normal, stable people so I don’t know what your point is.

The issue isn't "not being normal", that's not just moving the goal posts, that's throwing them away and saying "I don't see the problem". Fine, so you don't see it. Doesn't make it go away.

I asked for one thing you have evidence for him doing that you personally have expertise on. That's not "documented in the book", because you are not mentioned in the book.

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Do anthropomorphic trains count? The Little Engine That Could.

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https://youtu.be/0T7huuYNEBA

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Colossus: The secrets of Bletchley Park's code-breaking computers[0]

Describes how British cryptanalysts and engineers built the first vacuum-tube digital computer[1] to break the cipher[2] the Nazis were using for strategic communications.

[0] https://global.oup.com/academic/product/colossus-97801995781...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Lorenz_ci...

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"Outliers: The Story of Success" by Malcolm Gladwell but it's more centered on the mechanics that made successful people able to do the hard things. It does case studies on others that failed as well.

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"The Soul of a New Machine", by Tracy Kidder.

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One of my favorites is Sam Walton: Made In America

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"The Making of the Atomic Bomb" Rhodes

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The Six Mountain Travel Books by Eric Shipton.

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how to get rich by felix dennis is a banger for me

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Latitude | Book by Nicholas Crane

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Not a book but here's Biochemist Katalin Karikó on her journey from a childhood in communist Hungary to her Nobel-winning work on mRNA. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/katalin-karikos-n...

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Power Broker

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The Power Broker, perhaps?

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You can find documentaries also on youtube, for example. There was one interesting about Dubai's development

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“Check out something other than books” is a hilarious response to a request for book recommendations, though I would have included a specific example of a non-book, like “I see you mentioned private equity, have you listened to the songs of Jim Croce? He often writes about love and getting into bar fights, which are things that some people have difficulty with”

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I remember a few years ago Taylor Hawkins of the Foo Fighters rock band died unexpectedly and the cause of death was not immediately revealed. I was disappointed to learn sometime later that the cause had been heart failure. If I were a member of the Foo Fighters and had to die at the relatively early age of 50, of course I would have wanted it to be in a bar fight. Come to think of it, Bar Fighters might be a good name for a tribute band.

So is starting a tribute rock band an ok alternative to reading books?

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> So is starting a tribute rock band an ok alternative to reading books?

That might depend on how you feel about 'Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991', which is a book about bands starting.

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Instead of reading that book there is a painting called Smiling Girl, a Courtesan, Holding an Obscene Image by Gerard van Honthorst that’s worth checking out

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Extra points for not linking said docos.

Creating an account to post this and this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42612506, what's the game plan?

Trying to pollute HN like TLAs did 4chan or just a misfiring brain?

I'll call it aaron695s adage, it's now impossible to tell mental illness and TLAs apart on the internet.

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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 flawed plans (a sea-level canal through a mountain range, to be dug below the level of a massive river that flooded every year…), completely ignored all of the massive problems facing his company, and made press releases about how well everything was going right up until the day before the company was finally bankrupt. As a result, none of those huge problems got solved.

When the Americans finally stepped in 15 years later, they too made the mistake of appointing bureaucrats to run the project. The result was a shambles. Eventually President Roosevelt simply ignored Congress and appointed an individual to run the project. He was a railroad engineer named Stevens. Stevens was the first to realize that the real logistical problem to solve was not actually digging up the dirt, but disposing of it. The French had famously used steam shovels to dig the canal as fast as possible, just as they had in Suez. But once the dirt was loaded into train cars and carted away from the dig site, they used teams of men with shovels to empty them. Stevens calculated how fast the dirt would need to be loaded and unloaded, and set up a system of trains that could carry any quantity of dirt any distance, while loading as quickly as possible at the dig site and unloading it just as quickly at the dump site. Once he knew the numbers and had the system built, he could track exactly how quickly each train was unloaded and know which teams were working efficiently and which needed training to avoid falling behind.

Another good one by the same author is _The Wright Brothers_. It’s shorter and perhaps not as detailed as _The Path Between the Seas_ (but then it only took them 4 years while the canal needed 33), but it focuses on the actual tasks undertaken by the Wrights as they developed their first few airplanes. They first used gliders to test their wings and the control mechanisms. Then they built a wind tunnel to get accurate data about the lift and drag of a wing under specific circumstances. Then they built an engine lighter than any in use at the time. They designed their own propellers too, since nobody they talked to knew how to design one. Even for boats, the engineers who designed them just used heuristics and guesses and rules of thumb rather than any scientific processes in their work. The first few propeller shafts that they built turned out not to be strong enough and were destroyed. But they were methodical and driven, so they solved each problem one at a time until they had both a working airplane and a working knowledge of how to fly it.

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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.

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I think it's deeper than bicycles. They never went to college or university (though their sister did), but they were extremely well read and researched everything they did. Their first business was a weekly newspaper and printing press. They built the press from scratch using scavenged materials, and they wrote most of the newspaper articles themselves. They sold advertising and set the type. When they went into bicycles they were again the entire staff. They sold to customers, repaired bicycles, and manufactured their own model of bicycle right in the back room of their shop. And now they were the ones making up advertising slogans and buying space in the papers.

They were raised with the understanding that they could learn anything, build anything, discover anything that they set their mind to. And once they had set their minds on flight it was only a matter of time.

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Yup thats what the book is saying too (:

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Longitude dava sobel

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The chariots of apollo

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Re: getting hard things done I've been admiring the way Elon Musk takes calculated risks in:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk_(Isaacson_book)

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Eccentric Orbits: The Iridium Story

Book about Dan Colussy, who somehow managed to rescue Iridium satellite network when it was weeks away from bankruptcy and being deliberately crashed into the ocean.

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Longitude

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The road to character.

It's a great reality check, poking into human nature, morality, suffering, all with real life examples and littlz tolerance for bullshit without delusion of grandeur.

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list of (most of) the books mentioned in this thread so far. I tried reading every comment but used chatGPT instead.

1. The Big Rich - Texas oil boom.

2. Barbarians at the Gate - Private equity origins.

3. Masters of Doom - John Carmack and Id Software.

4. Einstein by Walter Isaacson - Einstein's discoveries.

5. Houdini!!! - The escape artist and magician.

6. The Double Helix - DNA discovery.

7. Stress Test by Tim Geithner - Financial crisis.

8. Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl - Concentration camp survival.

9. The Chariots of Apollo - NASA's space program.

10. Across the Airless Wilds by Earl Swift - Development of the moon buggy.

11. Apollo: The Race to the Moon by Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox - Apollo missions.

12. The Secret Life of Groceries by Benjamin Lorr - Food supply chains.

13. The Prize by Daniel Yergin - Oil industry evolution.

14. Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson - Ambitious wreck divers.

15. The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes - Manhattan Project.

16. American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin - Robert Oppenheimer.

17. Conquistador by Buddy Levy - Hernán Cortés and the Aztecs.

18. Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner - Water infrastructure in the American West.

19. The Wright Brothers by David McCullough - The invention of flight.

20. Walt Disney by Neal Gabler - Vision and innovation in entertainment.

21. Tuxedo Park by Jennet Conant - Invention of radar.

22. Insisting on the Impossible - Edwin Land and instant photography.

23. The Logic of Failure - Understanding and avoiding failure.

24. The Big Short by Michael Lewis - 2008 financial crisis.

25. The Box by Marc Levinson - Shipping container revolution.

26. Latitude by Nicholas Crane - Cartography innovations.

27. When the Heavens Went on Sale by Ashlee Vance - Space startups.

28. The Founders by Jimmy Soni - PayPal's early days.

29. The Perfectionists by Simon Winchester - Precision engineering.

30. The Little Engine That Could - Children's classic.

31. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell - Success mechanics.

32. Shoe Dog by Phil Knight - Founding of Nike.

33. Black Hole Blues by Janna Levin - Building LIGO.

34. Freedom’s Forge - WWII industry mobilization.

35. Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes - Electrification by Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse.

36. The Path Between the Seas by David McCullough - Panama Canal construction.

37. Annapurna by Maurice Herzog - Climbing a Himalayan peak.

38. Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder - Data General engineers.

39. Showstopper by G. Pascal Zachary - Development of Windows NT.

40. Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand - WWII survival.

41. The Measure of All Things by Ken Alder - Defining the meter.

42. The Cuckoo’s Egg by Clifford Stoll - Tracking a hacker.

43. The Man Who Knew Infinity by Robert Kanigel - Srinivasa Ramanujan.

44. The Power Broker by Robert Caro - Robert Moses and New York infrastructure.

45. How Big Things Get Done - Large-scale project execution.

46. Dealers of Lightning by Michael A. Hiltzik - Xerox PARC.

47. Built by Roma Agrawal - Civil engineering insights.

48. The Will to Keep Winning by Daigo Umehara - Competitive gaming.

49. Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold - Low-temperature physics.

50. Carrying the Fire by Michael Collins - Apollo 11.

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51. The Dream Machine - A deep dive into the history of computing.

52. Mindstorms by Seymour Papert - Groundbreaking work on computers in education.

53. Sunburst and Luminary: An Apollo Memoir by Don Eyles - The Apollo Guidance Computer.

54. Build by Tony Fadell - Memoir and innovation lessons.

55. Fall of Carthage by Adrian Goldsworthy - Punic Wars and Carthage's fall.

56. Making PCR - The story of polymerase chain reaction development.

57. Moonwalking with Einstein - Memory training and championship.

58. The Rickover Effect by Theodore Rockwell - First nuclear-powered submarine.

59. The Idea Factory - Bell Labs and American innovation.

60. Hackers by Steven Levy - History of computer hackers.

61. Fire in the Valley - Personal computing revolution.

62. Monk in the Garden - Life of Gregor Mendel.

63. Leadership Moment - Lessons from leaders in crises.

64. The Man Who Discovered Quality - W. Edwards Deming and quality management.

65. Eccentric Orbits - Iridium satellite network's rescue.

66. The Road to Character - Human nature and moral development.

67. The Spy and the Traitor - Soviet spy Oleg Gordievsky's story.

68. Billion Dollar Spy - Cold War espionage.

69. Skunk Works - Lockheed's F-117 and SR-71 programs.

70. Working by Robert Caro - Insights into Caro's research.

71. The Wager by David Grann - 18th-century British maritime disaster.

72. Caro's LBJ Series - Biography of Lyndon B. Johnson.

73. The Prize by Daniel Yergin - Oil industry history.

74. The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf - Alexander von Humboldt's contributions.

75. Bad Blood by John Carreyrou - Theranos scandal.

76. Losing My Virginity by Richard Branson - Memoir and business insights.

77. The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz - Leadership lessons.

78. Billion Dollar Loser by Reeves Wiedeman - WeWork's rise and fall.

79. Tuxedo Park - Invention of radar during WWII.

80. Insisting on the Impossible - Edwin Land and instant photography.

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81. Failure is Not an Option by Gene Kranz

82. Mrs. P’s Journey by Phyllis Pearsall

83. River of Doubt by Candice Millard

84. Longitude by Dava Sobel

85. Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg

86. The Last Viking - A biography of Roald Amundsen

87. The Wager by David Grann

88. Simply Fly by Captain G. R. Gopinath

89. Engines That Move Markets by Alasdair G. M. Nairn

90. The Education of Cyrus by Xenophon

91. Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War by Robert Coram

92. Madhouse at the End of the Earth by Julian Sancton

93. How to Make a Spaceship by Julian Guthrie

94. West with the Night by Beryl Markham

95. The Age of Uncertainty by Tobias Hürter

96. American Steel by Richard Preston

97. Showstopper by G. Pascal Zachary

98. Eccentric Orbits by John Bloom

99. The Great Bridge by David McCullough

100. Loonshots by Safi Bahcall

101. The Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Richard Hamming

102. Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner

103. The Evening Star by Henry S. F. Cooper

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