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What I’ve Been Reading

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Recent books.

1. Feel Free by Zadie Smith. Collection of her non-fiction writing over the past many years. Lovely as always, with Smith. Skip around and pick the topics that tickle your interest. It’s quite a diverse compendium. I enjoyed it. To be sure, Tyler Cowen said he “spotted several intellectual and emotional fallacies” in the collection. I read it for the quality of the writing.

2. Heartburn by Nora Ephron. A famous novel from the 80’s, I finally got around to reading Ephron for the first time. I found Heartburn consistently laugh out loud funny, and insightful too. Some highlights.

On being single versus married:

One thing I have never understood is how to work it so that when you’re married, things keep happening to you. Things happen to you when you’re single. You meet new men, you travel alone, you learn new tricks, you read Trollope, you try sushi, you buy nightgowns, you shave your legs. Then you get married, and the hair grows in. I love the everydayness of marriage, I love figuring out what’s for dinner and where to hang the pictures and do we owe the Richardsons, but life does tend to slow to a crawl.

On systems of thought that can simplify if you’re not careful:

When I talk about it I sound a little like one of those starlets on The Tonight Show who’s just stumbled onto Eastern philosophy or feminism or encounter therapy or any other system of thought that explains everything in the universe in eight minutes.

On loving versus hating someone you marry:

You fall in love with someone, and part of what you love about him are the differences between you; and then you get married and the differences start to drive you crazy.

On crying:

The first is that I have always believed that crying is a highly overrated activity: women do entirely too much of it, and the last thing we ought to want is for it to become a universal excess. The second thing I want to say is this: beware of men who cry. It’s true that men who cry are sensitive to and in touch with feelings, but the only feelings they tend to be sensitive to and in touch with are their own.

3. Bandwidth by Eliot Peper. Eliot’s new, widely heralded sci-fi novel got published today! Very timely. Eliot has his pulse on the Valley.

4. Be the Pack Leader by Cesar Milan. Great advice on how to think about how to relate to dogs. Recommended for first time dog owners. Cesar’s Netflix show Cesar 911 is also amusing and educational.

5. Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. A bit repetitive. Sleep is vital, and the author manages to say this in 50 different ways. I’m convinced! I already was convinced. I did glean some practical tips though:

  • I’ve been turning off my bedroom light as soon as I get in bed and reading only by the light of my Kindle before sleep. He discusses the impact of light in the bedroom and the importance of getting into a dark room as quickly as possible as you try to fall asleep.
  • I now splash water on my face each night before getting into bed. “It is no evolutionary coincidence that we humans have developed the pre-bed ritual of splashing water on one of the most vascular parts of our bodies—our face, using one of the other highly vascular surfaces—our hands. You may think the feeling of being facially clean helps you sleep better, but facial cleanliness makes no difference to your slumber. The act itself does have sleep-inviting powers, however, as that water, warm or cold, helps dissipate heat from the surface of the skin as it evaporates, thereby cooling the inner body core…Consequently, you fall asleep more quickly because your core is colder. Hot baths prior to bed can also induce 10 to 15 percent more deep NREM sleep in healthy adults.”
  • I more aggressively use A/C or a fan. “A bedroom temperature of around 65 degrees Fahrenheit (18.3°C) is ideal for the sleep of most people.”
  • I will ask doctors who need to perform work on my body how many hours of sleep they got the night prior. “If you are a patient under the knife of an attending physician who has not been allowed at least a six-hour sleep opportunity the night prior, there is a 170 percent increased risk of that surgeon inflicting a serious surgical error on you, such as organ damage or major hemorrhaging, relative to the superior procedure they would conduct when they have slept adequately.”

6. Reset by Ellen Pao. Powerful personal testimony and a call to arms about diversity in the tech industry. Required reading for all VCs, at a minimum, if not everyone who works in tech.

Lessons on Confidence, Criticism, and How to Thrive as an Underestimated Founder from Sara Blakely

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We were honored to have one of our LPs, Spanx founder/CEO Sara Blakely, in Palo Alto for the Village Global event called Underestimated. Sara was joined by dozens of other remarkable female founders and VCs in Silicon Valley.

Here’s a writeup on some of the insights shared by the speakers.

Here are a bunch of photos from the event.

The energy in the room was electric. More to come!

Lessons from Ben Silbermann, Founder of Pinterest

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Ben Silbermann is co-founder and CEO of Pinterest, one of the world’s most successful consumer internet companies.

Ben is also a Village Global luminary — a group of tech industry founders and executives who are backing the next generation of amazing entrepreneurs.

At a dinner recently with a small group of Village Global’s Network Leaders, Ben shared stories and lessons from the Pinterest journey. Here’s a writeup of some of my favorite nuggets that Ben shared. And below is a video with some of the highlights…

 

The School of Life Conference

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I’ve been following Alain de Botton and his wonderful School of Life content for years. When I saw that they were hosting one of their weekend conferences in San Francisco, I signed up immediately.

The conference — best described as philosophical self-help programming focused on emotional intelligence — took place over Friday afternoon, Saturday, and Sunday morning. It was mostly Alain de Botton himself lecturing charismatically from on stage, interspersed with short video clips, pair-up exercises with someone sitting near you, and line-up-at-the-mic exercises where one person in the audience spoke to the full of audience of 500.

The pervasive word of the weekend was pessimism. None of us is normal. A degree of loneliness is the norm. No one can fully understand anyone else. So walk through life, Alain said, with a kind of “cheerful despair.” Of all the topics covered, from self-knowledge to meaning, from work to sex, the topic that received the most airtime was romance and relationships. Love is the source of our deepest happiness and our deepest despair. Pessimism pervaded all discussion of romance at the event.

There’s an obvious alignment between Buddhism and the School of Life. Life is suffering. Life is unsatisfactoriness. The inevitability of death was remarked upon as frequently at this conference as at a Buddhist meditation retreat.

For the most part, I was in violent agreement with the ideas Alain laid out, and utterly captivated by the breadth of topics explored. Where I part ways intellectually, I think, is the School of Life’s intensive focus on psychotherapy, particularly as understood by childhood experiences. Many of the frames they use involve analyzing your parents. Childhood experiences matter, of course, though I’d submit not as much as psychoanalysts would have you think. Even then, there are a range of childhood influences beyond strictly parental.

One of the most poignant exercises of the weekend involved this prompt: “On a piece of paper, write down something rather personal and vulnerable that you are longing, in a way, to share with someone, if only they were trustworthy and kind.” People wrote down sometimes stunning confessionals. And then the confessionals were read aloud on stage anonymously.

One of the most difficult exercises was to pair up with a person sitting next to you in the audience — a complete stranger — and describe your sexual fantasies. Yes, your uncensored sexual fantasies.

One of the most amusing exercises involved writing down a long-held life dream you’ve maintained — perhaps to achieve a certain kind of change in the world, finally marry a soulmate, accomplish a professional goal — and then throw the piece of paper containing the dream in an oversized trash can that had been rolled on-stage. Relinquish your dreams!

Other nuggets I wrote down in my notebook:

  • “I’m a little broken” should be the first words on a first date with someone. “Hello, my name is… And I’m suffering because…”
  • Let’s all strive for “sane insanity.”
  • There’s no such thing as overthinking; only thinking badly.
  • Kierkegaard quote, which could be the modern Stoic manifesto: “If you marry, you will regret it; if you do not marry, you will also regret it; if you marry or if you do not marry, you will regret both; whether you marry or you do not marry, you will regret both. Laugh at the world’s follies, you will regret it; weep over them, you will also regret it; if you laugh at the world’s follies or if you weep over them, you will regret both; whether you laugh at the world’s follies or you weep over them, you will regret both. Believe a girl, you will regret it; if you do not believe her, you will also regret it; if you believe a girl or you do not believe her, you will regret both; whether you believe a girl or you do not believe her, you will regret both. If you hang yourself, you will regret it; if you do not hang yourself, you will regret it; if you hang yourself or you do not hang yourself, you will regret both; whether you hang yourself or you do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the sum of all practical wisdom.”
  • Manic cheeriness is an ill of modern society.
  • Many people’s #1 problem is they are too hard on themselves.
  • Think through the worst case scenarios
  • When lusting after someone new from afar, stare into their eyes, and think about all the ways s/he could annoy you over time.
  • Good sex involves decadance, roughness, immediacy, vulgarity. Good relationships involve respect, responsibility, patience.
  • Tip on humor to lessen the fights with your partner. Exaggerate the annoying tendency of your partner to make him/her laugh. For example, if your wife is obsessed with cleaning, try to out-clean her to such an extreme degree that she can’t help but laugh at your newfound obsession. If your husband is always panicked about getting to the airport early, pack your suitcase and propose leaving for airport the night before the flight–just to be safe. Make him laugh.
  • True love is the forgiveness of weakness; not the admiration of strength.
  • Interview question at job: In what particular ways are you crazy?
  • Hang a sign at the office that says, “No one who works here is entirely normal.”
  • Over-obedient adults are more problematic than under-obedient ones.
  • What are you most afraid of? Who are you afraid of letting down?
  • Frustration + Surprise = Anger. Frustration + Expectation = Sadness.
  • When you encounter a local frustration, instead of maintaining “local pessimism” around whatever happened try enveloping your feeling into a kind of “global pessimism.” For example, if your kid spills rice all over the floor, the local pessimist would say: “My kid isn’t neat.” The global pessimist would say, “Children are lifelong punishment for a few moments of sentimentality.”
  • As a child you cry when angry or wronged. As an adult you often cry at tender moments or when encountering profound beauty.
  • To have a meaningful life, become skilled at cultivating meaningful moments. Hardship can be meaningful when it’s a byproduct of your search for something meaningful.

Thank you, Alain, for all you do. And thank you to the School of Life for being a fount of ideas and inspiration.

“That Doesn’t Surprise Me”

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I’m always on the lookout for how people try to signal high status.

Here’s a subtle example I’ve discovered recently. Tell someone a fact they don’t know, and listen for the answer: “That doesn’t surprise me.”

The other day I told a guy who’s well connected in tech: “Did you know that Joe had a falling out with his cofounder, and so he has moved on to a new project?”

The other guy’s reply: “That doesn’t surprise me.”

The alternative answer would have been: “Huh, I didn’t know that.” By saying “That doesn’t surprise me,” he conveyed that he did not, in fact, know the thing that was just said to him, but rather than stop there — which would have lowered his status relative to me in that moment — he simultaneously conveyed the fact that he would have guessed the fact to be the case had he been asked. All done in one tidy sentence.

As another example, Donald Trump’s first quoted response to the Harvey Weinstein news was: “I’m not surprised.”

Signaling status in this way is not necessarily good or bad or even that important. It’s fun to notice it. And, sometimes, it can be a useful data point as you build psychological models of how the people around you operate, and in particular, as you predict how status-oriented a person might be.