Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

This reads like a commercial, but I'm not going to downvote it. I read the book and liked it, along with about a hundred other books on culture over the years. There is a similar pattern: a problem, an old way of doing things, a hero, a change, and a beautiful sunset with our hero riding off.

I think there are really, really good things in these kinds of books, especially if you identify with the problem and hero. At the same time, having gone through a bunch, there's a tendency for them to be like self-help or diet books: lots of great feelings while you're consuming them, energetic talking about the ideas with your friends, then a slow die-off until the next book.

Years ago I started collecting news articles and bits of information on culture. (IT culture). It's a fascinating topic because it intersects hype and measurable reality. Unlike a self-help book that promises "Be a happier you in 3 weeks!", your job is something that either gets better or doesn't.

For what it's worth, my best choice so far is "The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups" I read this book and thought "That son of a bitch! He's stolen all of my research material!" There is a bunch of anecdotes, stories, and research in there. I am still thinking over many of the ideas in the book I hadn't considered before.

This is important stuff. If it's something you're concerned about, don't give up. Read as much as you can. Just step back a bit from the hype cycle as you do so.

> then a slow die-off until the next book.

I'm curious if you think that it's actually possible for a book (or perhaps more generally, a school of thought) to actually break out of the cycle, or whether it's just the natural order of these sorts of things.

What I mean is, maybe what we get from these sorts of "self-help" pieces of literature/philosophies/whatever is less like a mantra that's one and done, and more like food satisfying a nutritional need, and just as you can't expect to eat a perfect meal and never be hungry for the rest of your life; when you get hungry again, you just need to find the next thing to eat.

I ask because I've gone through a number of these sorts of cycles in my own personal development over the last decade or so, and I'm finding that success tends to lie in seeing things in the latter light.

Like you describe, I just kept sucking it all in, consuming as much as I could. I have self-taught through a few of these subjects. I don't have an answer for you, but I have an answer for me. Perhaps sharing my answer might help you too. I hope so.

These are unsolved problems, that's why the material keeps getting produced. I think if you can find inspiration or a good "nutritional meal" to last for a while, it's a good thing. If nothing else, it serves to motivate. That's a big plus.

I'm pretty dense and hard-headed, so I have the hand-grenade theory of teaching myself: I just keep lobbing book-after-book into my own ignorance over time until I make progress. The vast majority of my attacks on my own personal ignorance are ineffective in the long run, but you know what? Little pieces here and there tend to stick. Maybe nobody's said it before or maybe it just takes the right author in the right context to get to me. I suspect the latter. After enough pieces stick, I can start actually working the problem of making myself better.

People who want to help in areas like this (unsolved domains) will BS one another in a heartbeat. I suspect that it's all so contextual to each of us we're just not aware of what we're doing. I don't know. But it means that personal recommendations of material should make you wary, especially if they come with heavily-laden emotional terms. ("Fight the evil corporate management structure!" or something like that) Like an organist that rests on the pedals too much, you get a long ways with books like this by making them emotional. Once again, motivation is great. If that's all you get, that's still a win for many.

So now we get to the heart of it. The real problem is coming up with evaluation criteria. Everything is great until there's a feedback loop and a way to fail, so your long-term job in trying to learn is setting up faster feedback loops and clear criteria to indicate success or failure. From there you can begin sorting out the "good" parts of the material from the fluff.

But that's just me. Until I had a good, solid way of evaluating whether something failed, a criteria that could point me to consuming smarter the next time, I was just going meal-to-meal.

An unsolicited advice that might cut your learning time in half:

Every book gives advice, every advice is an answer to a question. Ignore the answer, but scrutinize the question.

For example: "embrace remote work, go remote-first even!" says one book, "face-to-face is the only thing that works in the face of inevitable confusion and complexity" says another. Not helpful, right? However, consider that the first author got good result with remote work, and the second one got great results in-office. The two may have had different circumstances which they fail to describe for the reason you're describing the air you are breathing - being very immersed in something makes that something invisible. So a question to ponder then: under what circumstances is remote work possible, and if/how can one modify those circumstances?

Scrutinizing the question is a lot more work than getting excited with the first answer that came your way, but it's that much more likely to yield applicable result on top of a bout of enthusiasm.

Also, thanks for [The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups] suggestion.

I both strongly agree and strongly disagree with your comment. Not sure, I think this makes me a consultant (smile)

Yes, it does boil down to questions. However questions drive out language, so simply saying that "scrutinizing the question" is the real work is both true and incomplete.

It is an important point, though. Thank you.

> I both strongly agree and strongly disagree with your comment. Not sure, I think this makes me a consultant (smile)

It may or may not, naturally.

> questions drive out language

What do you mean by this?

Culture Code is a fantastic book. I'm almost done reading it. My main takeaway: decent cultures are built by good people doing good things. In some ways, it's really as simple as good leadership. (Kindness, empathy, filling people's cups, listening skills, etc.)

> This reads like a commercial, but I'm not going to downvote it

Is it possible to downvote a submission? I thought you could only upvote and flag?

When your internet points on HN exceed some threshold you may be able to downvote. I’ve heard there’s also a thing called a supervote. (I have neither of these privileges)

This is not true, no matter how much karma you have, you can never downvote stories on HN, only flag.

Super down voting is something only mods can do (maintains the story, but it gets nuked off the site index)

You may be correct, though you have a lot fewer internet points than the person who was talking about downvoting ;)

Also, I was referring to a super upvote, not a downvote, sorry if this was unclear. I’m pretty sure this is a thing, I have it mentioned by an extremely high karma HNer.

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