What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: Book Summary | Hacker News Reader

What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: Book Summary

jamesclear.com

94 pointsmooreds29 comments

This book was given to me by the president of my company when I was promoted to management. It's a great book and like most of these types of books not all of the information applies, but it does a good job of explaining how to do a better job in a leadership role.

This book along with the following are good for any managers in a technical role: Checklist Manifesto, Team of Teams, Influence: Science and Practice, The New Rational Manager

To add to the list, I just finished Radical Candor, and I found it pretty good.

How do you get through books like these, especially if you're not a fast reader / native speaker?

I find that they have a core theme that could be explained in a few pages, but somehow they try to fill 200+ pages with the concept with examples, anecodotes and such.

Is it usually worth reading through the entire book or is there a 'life hack' to reading them faster?

I would say you just need to develop a habit of pushing through. Set a goal to read a few pages a day either during lunch (or cut it a few minutes short) or before you go to bed.

Sometimes those examples can hit close to home with a certain situation that you have seen in the past or may encounter in the future. I do skim them if they don't really connect to me, but it's worth at least reading the first few sentences of each.

Audiobooks. Listen to them at faster speeds.

And if that’s too much commitment you can usually find a talk/podcast episode that is functionally an audio-summary of the book. I’ll usually listen to something like this first and if I really like the content I will consider buying the audiobook.

I feel no shame sifting through non-fiction books. There is nothing wrong with not reading cover to cover. I tend to skip chapters or long anecdotes for concepts I have already absorbed, and I sometimes also apply speed reading principles (usually the first and last sentence of a paragraph are most significant, and the body of the paragraph provides supporting evidence).

We don't owe any book our time. I am very selective about what I choose to expose myself to, and I gravitate toward only novel information. I'll slow down when I don't understand something, and speed up 5x or entirely skip the fluff/fodder or non-new info.

Sorry this just gave me a flashback to my college writing course, where a common bit of advice included summaries of the paragraph in the beginning and end (basically) and details in the middle.

Is there a vast conspiracy to ensure that "good writing" fits a common format that's easy to speed read? :O

Or more likely, it's just a good way to format paragraphs, and speed reading tips just follow the convention.

I tried reading this book, but I kept summarizing what I read into "You got here by being an a-hole. Now stop that".

I'm genuinely curious, is that what the book is about? Did I need to keep reading? Would you consider yourself an a-hole (note: I'm guessing you aren't because your CEO promoted you, and then gave you the book)?

I mean I don't think I am, but then again how many assholes really think they are. The book is more about how being a high performer can get you into a position like management, but that same mindset won't necessarily make you a good manager. In fact it can make it worse because you have a certain standard of work and realizing that you will never have a full team of people that meet that standard is very hard to overcome and manage.

I'm sure the book speaks to people differently, but I'd say it makes me more empathetic to my direct reports (and really many others in my life) as well as realizing and working on my own flaws.

A lot of this is good advice that I wish I had been told earlier, but like a lot of this sort of thing, there are at least two critical problems.

First, a lot of this is in the abstract and the difficult part is how it gets applied in any given situation. For example, there's a lot in it about "successful people maintain a belief in control" but then also a lot about "being able to shift goals is important." Those aren't mutually exclusive, but they can often be in practice, and that conflict of choices is where the true difficulty is.

Second, these sorts of things often have nothing to say about goals or values. That is, it assumes there's some "success" that's implicitly known and agreed to. For example, profit, or holding a certain position or something of that sort. That's all well and good if you are on board with that being your goal, but what happens when your ultimate goal comes into question? What if you get to a certain point and realize that progressing further conflicts with your ethical values? What if you realize that you're on a track that doesn't appeal to you for whatever reason? I think these types of questions are often the most tricky ones.

I'm not saying this sort of text isn't useful -- on the contrary, I would have liked to read this long ago. But often times the sorts of dilemmas people face are one thing dressed up as another.

Regarding control, viewing goals as outcomes that I can influence is changing my life.

An objective is "Be the greatest programmer of all time". The outputs are things like, "Find and read the top 3 most important books on programming." Those can then be broken down further until they are actionable. I find control in the difference between an objective and an output.

A nice habit I can recommend from the article is keeping a notebook of people you want to thank. I keep the notebook so I don't get distracted and don't forget if I remember someone suddenly.

If you do engage in that habit, the idea of output/objective is important to keep in mind. Some people don't respond to gratitude well, or at all. That's not the point though, that's focusing on the outcome which you can only influence not control. You can control the action of writing a note of gratitude to someone you care about. Imagine how nice it feels to receive an unexpected thank you note.

> First, a lot of this is in the abstract and the difficult part is how it gets applied in any given situation.

A lot of these "genre" of books tend to fall into this camp for me. They feel like trying to hold onto sand: sure in the initial moment you have it grasped, but it just as quickly falls away and there's nothing really there to hold onto.

A classic example is one from this list, "Delusional self-confidence causes you to resist change". If you drill into this, it seems like non-delusional self-confidence is what lets you enact control and not simply let life happen to you. In the other case, delusional self-confidence means you are refusing to accept reality and the changes you can't effect. It might be then reformed to "Rational self-confidence causes you to accept change".

What is the take away then? Seems like it's "Don't be delusional / be rational". Which, sure, but that is basically inapplicable and a near truism. If you knew you were in either camp you don't need any of this advice. "Know when you're being rational and when you're being delusional" feels like the general place a lot of stuff like this reduces down to in the end.

I do like the simple compliment / feedback accepting with a "Thank you" one as it's fairly easy to actually do. You will get thrown occasionally when someone wants to dig after the fact however.

>Behavioral problems, not technical skills, are what separate the great from the near great.

True for those with technical skills. There are also the ones with social skills that haven't honed their technical skills.

Is there a complementary list of technical skills for those who can handle the behavioral problems?

I think this book is aimed at people who have already advanced in an organization. Basically you need the skills and credentials to make it to a low level manager for the advice to apply to you. In tech, this is typically a CS degree, internships, and good references. It's hard to sweet talk your way past byzantine HR requirements at most large companies.

In my experience, if you have an inside reference and manager who wants to hire/promote you, HR requirements can almost always be waived.

The older I get the more I realize that after you get to about average intelligence, it's control over emotions that matters far more than intelligence or technical knowledge if you're not working completely alone. That, I think, is why the stereotypes about software developers in the 80s don't seem to apply to modern software developers (why they're more sociable, why they make way more money, etc.) Now it's all about interfaces and community with a little bit of technical work where before it was mostly just you and the computer.

I'd like to talk about the format that James uses for his book summary. What do others here think about this format? It's simple and to the point.

As I think through some recent books that I've listened to as audiobooks, I'd really like to generate a summary like this for each one of them so that I can help the material settle into my brain a bit better. The challenge is usually the places where I'm listening (driving, running, riding) and capturing notes in those places can be hard. I've recently experimented with using Apple Watch Reminders to take notes - have others tried this as well?

There are a few good apps like Airr and Snipd for podcasts which integrate well with Readwise. KOreader on my kindle now also connects with Readwise. Still on the search for something that can transcribe from audiobooks though.

My current method is to bookmark any interesting parts in Prologue, my audiobook app of choice. And then find the relevant part on the epub version on KOreader-> highlight it -> sync with Readwise -> Obsidian

Long winded but works.

Thanks for the tool recommendations! While much of the content that I consume via audio is from podcasts, quite a bit is also from Audible (and arguably the more valuable as I don't read that much fiction on Audible). Is there a workflow that you'd recommend for Audible (I would imagine that involves stripping DRM and hosting the audio somewhere that I control?)

I tend to use the phone to keep plain text notes that I upload. I'll listen for a chunk, pause, and type out a few bullet points. It doesn't tend to be based on time, but when I feel like I've hit a point where I have something to summarize. The clumsy touchscreen keyboard is almost a help as it forces me to be more concise than I would need to be on a keyboard.

Admittedly, this wouldn't work as well when driving (I generally do it while exercising or lounging). The goal is to take these plain text notes and add them to my TiddlyWiki, where I have entries for each book.

Completely get that. I always had the same issue with podcasts, which is why I built Snipd together with some friends. If you have the mp3 of the audiobook you can create your own private rss feed with services like SimpleCast and add that to our player. For private feeds we don't yet have our AI features activated, but you can still highlight your favorite moments, add your notes and sync them to Readwise.

Thanks for creating Snipd! I like the Obsidian integration and the triple-tap on AirPods Pro feature to capture a snippet. I'll definitely check it out.

While I would imagine this is challenging - what about Audible support? I might just solve this problem with money for the time being (buying Kindle + Audible for the books that I really do care about). But I still want the ability to "highlight" a book while listening to it via Audible and my hack (Siri + Reminders on Watch) doesn't really let me easily do this. Any thoughts here?

We do have this in the back of our minds as a possible way to branch out in the future. But for now, we want to first focus all our energy on creating the best experience for podcasts. I'll add your vote to this feature request ;) I think it would go nicely together, but as you also already mentioned, there are a couple of challenges like how to integrate into an app like Audible.

Is Snipd able to do audio transcription for private feeds? Private “podcasts” are my main way I listen to audio books. I tried Snipd last year and it seemed to struggle with private feeds at the time. I was sad, since it’s exactly what I’m looking for (especially if it ever gets Apple Watch support).

We do not yet have AI features for private feeds. But we do have it on the roadmap. Depending on when you tested it last year, you were probably not even able to add your private feeds. In the meantime, you can add your private feeds and listen to them, just like any other podcast app. You can also create highlights, but without the transcript or any other AI features. I've added your vote to this feature request to increase its priority.

"Create a To-Stop list rather than a To-Do list."

This is what I need to do. One of my biggest weaknesses is saying "yes" to help with things that I really don't want to do or don't have time to do.

You can see more books that James has summarized here:

https://jamesclear.com/book-summaries

What about people who are successful because they are jerks or in spite of that.

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