Aquí van las 10 recomendaciones de esta semana:
1. Look: A Practical Guide for Improving Your Observational Skills
James Gilmore
Aprender a mirar es un arte muy difícil de dominar y también es difícil encontrar libros y recursos prácticos sobre el tema.
Por eso Look es un libro tan especial, es un manual práctico con muchos ejercicios y herramientas.
Y unos cuantos momentos ahá.
Prácticamente no hay profesión que no se beneficie de saber dirigir la atención de manera efectiva (y creativa).
Verás que el tema de capitalizar la atención recorre las recomendaciones de este número, porque creo que es la habilidad future-proof por excelencia y saber gestionarse a uno mismo, como diría Peter Drucker, comienza por saber hacia dónde mirar.
Gilmore es economista y se ha hecho conocido por sus ideas sobre diseño estratégico de experiencias. Su framework para aprender a mirar el mundo sistemáticamente es algo menos conocido que sus anteriores trabajos, pero en las manos adecuadas (Hint: CPSer) puede convertirse en una navaja suiza perceptiva.
"The Swiss artist Felice Varini is known for his projector-stencil technique for painting circles, squares, and lines in various urban environments—on, in, or between multiple buildings or building fixtures. The geometric shapes he paints can only be recognized by finding the one location from which the pattern can be seen. If you stand anywhere else, you will only see disaggregated fragments of paint. Appreciating Varini’s art requires binoculars looking. Each work must be taken in from a distance. One cannot stand immediately before any component fragment, as one would normally behold a framed painting. Instead, the very positioning of the onlooker serves to frame the painting. The art patron must move about to find the only vantage point from which to view the overall work. Both in and out of alignment, it is the interplay with the component pieces that enriches the art experience. Any distance is defined by two end points. With binoculars looking, what is “out there” defines the one end, and the positioning of the looker defines the other. It is not enough to merely keep a distance when looking with binoculars; moving about to locate a suitable vantage point from which to scan the scene is also necessary. An ideal vantage point is that place or position that affords the broadest possible perspective on what is being surveyed. Such places need to be discovered. Interestingly, Varini does not mark the place from which the fragments align; the vantage point must be discovered by interacting with the space. So it is with any environment, object, or event that you wish to survey with binoculars looking. How are such vantage points discovered? By looking while moving about, exploring, and experimenting to pick a place that affords the widest possible view of everything to be seen."
2. The 50th Law
Robert Greene, 50 Cent
Cada capítulo de este libro se centra en un episodio de la vida del rapero y empresario 50 Cent, con un tema determinado, unas anécdotas de personajes y hechos históricos referidos al mismo tema, y unas lecciones morales a veces un poco forzadas.
Del libro recuerdo poco más que un capítulo llamado Turn Shit into Sugar - Opportunism porque es un capítulo que me ha influenciado mucho a lo largo de los años.
Habla sobre el arte de crear oportunidades y se centra en el momento de la vida de 50 en que le acribillan justo antes de sacar su primer disco.
Como consecuencia del ataque pierde el contrato, una de las balas, la que le ha atravesado la mandíbula, le impide seguir cantando y para más inri sus atacantes le siguen amenazando.
En vez de ocultarse y deprimirse, decide hacer de su nueva situación una plataforma inesperada para el lanzamiento de su carrera.
Todas las historias que incluye el capítulo ilustran el concepto de oportunismo, no en su acepción moderna con sus connotaciones negativas, sino tal como lo entendían los antiguos griegos: el arte de quien ha dominado los vaivenes de la Fortuna.
Uno de los artistas de la oportunidad que reseña Greene es Napoleón Bonaparte, cuya atención a los detalles es proverbial y que me lleva al siguiente libro de la lista de hoy.
Pero antes, un par de muestras del capítulo en cuestión:
"Perhaps the greatest opportunist in history is Napoleon Bonaparte. Nothing escaped his attention. He focused with supreme intensity on all of the details, finding ways to transform even the most trivial aspects of warfare—how to march and carry supplies, how to organize troops into divisions—into tools of power. He ruthlessly exploited the slightest mistake of his opponents. He was the master at turning the worst moments in battle into material for a devastating counterattack. All of this came out of Napoleon’s determination to see everything around him as an opportunity. By looking for these opportunities, he found them. This became a mental skill that he refined to an art."
"The hustler thinks: “I must make the most of what I have, even the bad stuff, because things are not going to get better on their own. It is foolish to wait; tomorrow may bring even worse shit.” If Fifty had waited, as he had been counseled, he would be just another rapper who had had a moment of success and then faded quickly away. The hood would have consumed him. This hustler mind-set is more realistic and effective. The truth is that life is by nature harsh and competitive. No matter how much money or resources you have accumulated, someone will try to take them from you, or unexpected changes in the world will push you backward. These are not adverse circumstances but merely life as it is. You have no time to lose to fear and depression, and you do not have the luxury of waiting."
3. Napoleon: A Life
Andrew Roberts
Es una biografía extraordinaria, muy bien documentada y mejor escrita.
Pero como he dicho más arriba, a este libro llego desde Greene y lo leo esencialmente como la trayectoria vital de un estratega con un poder de atención hiperdesarrollado y un sentido del timing y la oportunidad (albeit España y Rusia) únicas.
"Napoleon despaired that ‘the provisioning of armies is no more than luck’. In a typical letter to Saliceti and Gasparin he wrote: ‘One can remain for twenty-four or if necessary thirty-six hours without eating, but one cannot remain three minutes without gunpowder.’59 Along with his energy and activity, his letters convey a meticulous attention to detail in everything from the price of rations to the proper building of palisades. Overall, however, his message was constant; they only had 600 milliers (just over half a ton) of gunpowder, and if they couldn’t procure more it would be impossible to start serious operations. On October 22 he wrote to the Committee of Public Safety of the ‘extreme pain he felt at the little attention paid to his branch of the service,’ adding: ‘I have had to struggle against ignorance and the base passions which it engenders.’60 The result of all his hectoring, bluster, requisitioning and political string-pulling was that Napoleon put together a strong artillery train in very short order. He commandeered a foundry where shot and mortars were manufactured, and a workshop where muskets were repaired. He got the authorities in Marseilles to supply thousands of sandbags. This took significant powers of leadership – and also the kind of implicit threat that could be made by a Jacobin army officer during Robespierre’s Terror. By the end of the siege Napoleon commanded eleven batteries totalling nearly one hundred cannon and mortars."
‘There’s no-one more pusillanimous than me when I make a military plan,’ Napoleon told Roederer on the 27th. ‘I exaggerate all the possible dangers and all the possible harms in the circumstances. I get in a very tiresome agitation. This doesn’t prevent me looking very serene in front of those surrounding me. I’m like a woman who’s giving birth. And when I’m resolved, everything is forgotten except what can make it succeed.’ Napoleon applied the same obsessive attention to the planning of the Brumaire coup."
‘The Austrians fought like lions,’ Victor later acknowledged. The French refused to abandon the Fontanone line when the Austrians counter-attacked; soldiers urinated on muskets that had become too hot to handle from the constant firing. By noon the French line was being pounded by forty guns and incessant musketry, and was running low on ammunition. ‘Bonaparte advanced in front,’ recalled Petit, ‘and exhorted to courage and firmness all the corps he met with; it was visible that his presence reanimated them.’
4. Ambassador of Hope: Turning Poverty and Prison into a Purpose-Driven Life
Andre Norman
Desde la celda de confinamiento solitario de una prisión de máxima seguridad hasta la Escuela de Derecho de Harvard, lo que ha hecho Norman con su vida es un turnaround espectacular.
Abogado y trabajador social, Norman ha sacado de la calle a miles de adolescentes y ha ayudado a reconstruir el tejido social tras la revuelta del 2014 en Ferguson, Missouri.
Este libro es una de las fuentes que utilicé para escribir la historia de su iniciación como complex problem solver. Si aún no la has leído, creo que la disfrutarás.
Puedes verlo aquí:
"When I first went to prison, my father told me, “There are two ways to do time. You can be in the visitors’ room, on the phone, trying to get shout-outs on the radio from the DJ, writing letters and trying to be with your girl—and it will drive you crazy. Or you can focus on you, and you only.” I have always been a super literal person, so when he told me that, that’s exactly what I did. I spent fourteen years without visits and almost never talking on the phone. The only thing I could control was me inside those walls. I lived in my own personal snow globe, and there was nothing outside of it. What’s incredible to consider is that the distance between the gate and the outside to the lobby was no more than thirty to forty feet. That was as far as I had to travel to be in the free world. The walls of the prison might have been miles long and many feet thick as far as I was concerned—yet a short walk put me on the other side of that wall. Outside, two men from the program waited for me. We got in their car and they drove me to the parole office. Immediately, the woman sitting behind the front desk there began reading the riot act—she’s been doing this job for one hundred years, and this is how things work, etc., etc. I only had one question for her: “When do I get off parole?” I asked her. “Three years,” she told me. My paperwork said eighteen months, and I told her so. Her paperwork said three years, and she told me so. We argued back and forth about it until she told me she was in charge and could send me back that day if need be. It was at that moment that some of the anger management I had done in the programs inside kicked in. It dawned on me that I had eighteen months to fix this problem. It wasn’t something I had to solve now. I told her she was right. She handed me her card and I left, flipping her card in the trash on the way out the door."
5. The Kekulé Problem
Cormac McCarthy
Entre The Road y The Passenger, McCarthy se tomó un respiro para escribir este curioso ensayo.
Cogiendo ideas de sus científicos amigos del Santa Fe Institute, fruto de días y noches enteras de conversaciones y especulaciones locas sobre lo que nos mueve, sobre lo que nos hace humanos, McCarthy se lanza a teorizar sobre la fuente de nuestra creatividad.
La idea central del ensayo es que mientras el lenguaje ha estado con nosotros probablemente unos cien mil años, la parte inconsciente de nuestra mente ha sujetado las riendas de nuestra conducta por unos dos millones de años.
¿Y qué sucede cuando a un recién llegado se le da demasiado poder? Que el que mandaba desde antes no se fía del newbie y trabaja su propia agenda en paralelo, y a veces en contra.
Y como no podía ser de otra manera en una discusión sobre creatividad, McCarthy toma al bueno de August Kekulé, el químico alemán que descubrió la estructura circular del benceno en un sueño, como ejemplo y conejillo de indias para poner en escena sus ideas.
Puedes leerlo aquí:
https://nautil.us/the-kekul-problem-236574/
Una muestra:
"The sort of isolation that gave us tall and short and light and dark and other variations in our species was no protection against the advance of language. It crossed mountains and oceans as if they werent there. Did it meet some need? No. The other five thousand plus mammals among us do fine without it. But useful? Oh yes. We might further point out that when it arrived it had no place to go. The brain was not expecting it and had made no plans for its arrival. It simply invaded those areas of the brain that were the least dedicated. I suggested once in conversation at the Santa Fe Institute that language had acted very much like a parasitic invasion and David Krakauer—our president—said that the same idea had occurred to him. Which pleased me a good deal because David is very smart. This is not to say of course that the human brain was not in any way structured for the reception of language. Where else would it go? If nothing else we have the evidence of history. The difference between the history of a virus and that of language is that the virus has arrived by way of Darwinian selection and language has not."
"We dont know what the unconscious is or where it is or how it got there—wherever there might be. Recent animal brain studies showing outsized cerebellums in some pretty smart species are suggestive. That facts about the world are in themselves capable of shaping the brain is slowly becoming accepted. Does the unconscious only get these facts from us, or does it have the same access to our sensorium that we have? You can do whatever you like with the us and the our and the we. I did. At some point the mind must grammaticize facts and convert them to narratives. The facts of the world do not for the most part come in narrative form. We have to do that."
6. Couldn't Care Less: Cormac McCarthy in conversation with David Krakauer
Cormac McCarthy
Este no es un libro. Es un vídeo documental.
En esta charla con David Krakauer, biólogo y presidente del Santa Fe Institute, Cormac se despacha a gusto acerca de la matemática, la física, los sueños, los extraños modos que tienen los científicos de resolver problemas, y por supuesto, el ouroboros de nuestro amigo Kekulé.
Es un buen complemento a su ensayo y puedes verlo en Youtube
7. Managing Oneself
Peter Drucker
Un gurú del management hablando sobre un tema que excede la gestión empresarial: cómo gestionarnos a nosotros mismos.
Nuestra naturaleza, nuestros recursos, cómo aprendemos más efectivamente y cómo enfocar mejor una carrera profesional o un proyecto personal.
Es un libro muy breve pero con un gran valor de relectura.
"The first secret of effectiveness is to understand the people you work with and depend on so that you can make use of their strengths, their ways of working, and their values. Working relationships are as much based on the people as they are on the work. The second part of relationship responsibility is taking responsibility for communication. Whenever I, or any other consultant, start to work with an organization, the first thing I hear about are all the personality conflicts. Most of these arise from the fact that people do not know what other people are doing and how they do their work, or what contribution the other people are concentrating on and what results they expect. And the reason they do not know is that they have not asked and therefore have not been told. This failure to ask reflects human stupidity less than it reflects human history. Until recently, it was unnecessary to tell any of these things to anybody. In the medieval city, everyone in a district plied the same trade. In the countryside, everyone in a valley planted the same crop as soon as the frost was out of the ground. Even those few people who did things that were not “common” worked alone, so they did not have to tell anyone what they were doing."
"Another crucial question is, Do I produce results as a decision maker or as an adviser? A great many people perform best as advisers but cannot take the burden and pressure of making the decision. A good many other people, by contrast, need an adviser to force themselves to think; then they can make decisions and act on them with speed, self-confidence, and courage. This is a reason, by the way, that the number two person in an organization often fails when promoted to the number one position. The top spot requires a decision maker. Strong decision makers often put somebody they trust into the number two spot as their adviser—and in that position the person is outstanding. But in the number one spot, the same person fails. He or she knows what the decision should be but cannot accept the responsibility of actually making it. Other important questions to ask include, Do I perform well under stress, or do I need a highly structured and predictable environment? Do I work best in a big organization or a small one? Few people work well in all kinds of environments. Again and again, I have seen people who were very successful in large organizations flounder miserably when they moved into smaller ones. And the reverse is equally true. The conclusion bears repeating: Do not try to change yourself—you are unlikely to succeed. But work hard to improve the way you perform. And try not to take on work you cannot perform or will only perform poorly."
8. Thinking in Bets
Annie Duke
Para leerlo en tandem con el libro anterior, Thinking in Bets trata sobre cómo tomar decisiones inteligentes bajo condiciones de incertidumbre.
Annie Duke es una ex jugadora profesional de póker y, en cierto sentido, hizo el camino inverso de Maria Konnikova, la autora de The Biggest Bluff": de jugadora de póker profesional a autora y consultora.
Las dos mezclan el mundo académico con la astucia callejera que da las interminables noches de high-stakes gambling.
Duke no solo hace un repaso completo por las trampas en las que podemos caer al pensar (sesgos de toda laya, heurísticos, ilusiones cognitivas), sino que también propone técnicas originales para superarlas que no he visto explicadas en ninguna otra parte.
"Certainly, in exchange for losing the fear of taking blame for bad outcomes, you also lose the unadulterated high of claiming good outcomes were 100% skill. That’s a trade you should take. Remember, losing feels about twice as bad as winning feels good; being wrong feels about twice as bad as being right feels good. We are in a better place when we don’t have to live at the edges. Euphoria or misery, with no choices in between, is not a very self-compassionate way to live. You also become more compassionate toward other people when you treat fielding outcomes as bets. When you look at the outcomes of others from their perspective, you have to ask yourself, “What if that had happened to me?” You come up with more compassionate assessments of other people where bad things aren’t always their fault and good things aren’t always luck. You are more likely to walk in their shoes. Imagine how Bartman’s life would have changed if more people worked to think this way. Thinking in bets is hard, especially initially. It has to start as a deliberative process, and will feel clunky, weird, and slow. Certainly, there will be times it doesn’t make sense. Like if you don’t get a promotion at work, you’re probably going to wonder how you’re supposed to feel better acknowledging that so-and-so was more deserving and that you could learn a lot from them. It takes work to avoid the temptation to blame it on the boss being a jerk who doesn’t know how to evaluate talent. That feeling is natural. I built my poker career out of these principles of learning and truthseeking, yet I still catch myself falling into the self-serving bias and motivated reasoning traps. Duhigg tells us that reshaping a habit requires time, preparation, practice, and repetition."
"Happiness (however we individually define it) is not best measured by looking at the ticker, zooming in and magnifying moment-by-moment or day-by-day movements. We would be better off thinking about our happiness as a long-term stock holding. We would do well to view our happiness through a wide-angle lens, striving for a long, sustaining upward trend in our happiness stock, so it resembles the first Berkshire Hathaway chart. Mental time travel makes that kind of perspective possible. We can use our past- and future-selves to pull us out of the moment and remind us when we’re watching the ticker, looking at our lives through that lens on extreme zoom. When we view these upticks and downticks under the magnification of that in-the-moment zoom lens, our emotional responses are, similarly, amplified. Like the flat tire in the rain, we are capable of treating things that will have little effect on our long-term happiness as having significant impact. Our decision-making becomes reactive, focused on off-loading negative emotions or sustaining positive emotions from the latest change in the status quo. We can see how this can result in self-serving bias: fielding outcomes to off-load the negative emotions we feel in the moment from a bad outcome by blaming them on luck and sustaining the positive emotions from good outcomes by taking credit for them. The decisions driven by the emotions of the moment can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, degrading the quality of the bets we make, increasing the chances of bad outcomes, and making things worse."
9. What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20
Tina Seelig
En ocasiones para emprender un nuevo proyecto no hace falta dinero, relaciones o talento, sino tener la capacidad de rechazar premisas falsas y asunciones que el resto parece haber olvidado que están ahí cerrando el paso a la innovación.
De esto habla este libro escrito por una ingeniera y profesora de Entrepreneurship e Innovación en el Instituto Hasso Plattner de la Universidad de Stanford, aka d.school.
Son las lecciones y experiencias de años de entrenar a jóvenes diseñadores en el arte de lanzarse al vacío sin paracaídas.
Canela en rama para cualquier aspirante a CPSer.
"One of Moto’s chefs, Ben Roche, said their goal was to create a circus for your senses. They questioned every assumption about food preparation and presentation, developed brand-new cooking techniques, and even designed custom utensils used to consume the food. This is a great reminder that in any arena, from your kitchen to your career, you can remove the constraints that might be comfortable but are often limiting. Another way to defy the rules is to break free of expectations you have for yourself and that others have for you. We each grow up with a story that others tell us and that we tell ourselves about what we can and can’t do, or should or shouldn’t do. I see this every day with my students. They are all in the same place, and yet they have very different aspirations based on the stories they tell themselves about how their lives will unfold. When they are encouraged to break free from self-imposed constraints, they find the range of options expands tremendously. I met with a dozen current and former students and asked them to share their stories about breaking free from expectations. After listening to all their tales about getting around obstacles in school, in the workplace, and when traveling, one student, who graduated a few years ago, summarized all he heard by stating, “All the cool stuff happens when you do things that are not the automatic next step.” The well-worn path is there for everyone to trample. But the interesting things often occur when you are open to taking an unexpected turn, trying something different, and when you are willing to question the rules others have made for you. All the students agreed that it is easy to stay on the prescribed path, but it is often much more interesting to discover the world of surprises lurking just around the corner. Knowing that you can question the rules is terrifically empowering and a reminder that the traditional path is just one option available to you. You can always follow a recipe, drive on the major thoroughfares, and walk in the footsteps of those who came before you. But there are boundless additional options to explore if you are willing to identify and challenge assumptions and break free of the expectations you and others project onto you. Don’t be afraid to get out of your comfort zone, to have a healthy disregard for the impossible, and to turn well-worn ideas on their heads. As the students described earlier learned, it takes practice to do things that are not the automatic next step. The more you experiment, the more you see that the spectrum of options is much broader than imagined. You are limited only by your energy and imagination."
10. On Becoming An Artist
Ellen Langer
Un peso pesado de la investigación en psicología social, Langer es una de las pioneras en el estudio del fenómeno conocido como "mindlessness", o la tendencia de nuestra mente a operar en piloto automático.
Junto con Robert Cialdini en el departamento de Psicologia de Harvard en los años 70s, Langer condujo los experimentos más icónicos de la psicología social de la época.
En este libro se toma a sí misma como sujeto de estudio, y explora el rol que ha tenido el desarrollo de la atención plena en su curva de aprendizaje como pintora.
En el camino va desgranando hallazgos y resultados de sus estudios seminales sobre mindlessness y su contracara, mindfulness.
"The problem isn’t simply that we are too fond of comparing ourselves with others; it’s as much that the comparisons we make are rarely accurate. The psychologist Mark Alicke has conducted several studies that demonstrate our tendency to exaggerate the abilities of others who are better than we are, a phenomenon he calls the “genius effect.”
Essentially, he found that we attribute the success of those who outperform us to unique, rare, or exceptional abilities in order to salvage our self-images. After all, we don’t look nearly so bad when the other person is “gifted.”
On those occasions when we come out on top in the comparison, we again exaggerate the difference. This time, we overemphasize our own abilities. Not only do we exaggerate the abilities of ourselves and others but we don’t consider the influence on behavior of the context, which can momentarily enhance or hinder performance.
For instance, the other person may not have slept well the night before or her various motivational concerns may affect her performance—perhaps she is not really interested in the task at the moment. We would not expect another person to perform in exactly the same way each time he tried to do something if we thought about it. Nevertheless, our social comparisons often suggest that we are doing otherwise. To make the comparison, we have to isolate behaviors and treat them as if they are representative of our and others’ performance.
But behavior fluctuates around its own mean— sometimes we do a little better, sometimes we do a little worse. If you hit a wonderful tennis shot and people compliment you, the compliment might lead you to expect more of yourself than is reasonable.
After all, compliments are more likely to be given for atypical performance.
As an aside, this is why we often perform worse after a compliment. It is not that the compliment throws us off but rather that our next shot is likely to be more typical of our ability.
Hasta aquí las recomendaciones de esta semana.
Si estás disfrutando de las recomendaciones te agradecería que le des Like y Restack a la
publicación.
No toma más que dos segundos y me alegrarás el día 😀
La próxima semana, otras 10 recomendaciones.
"La mente no es un recipiente a llenar sino un fuego a encender"
-Álvaro de Biblioteca CPS
PD: Si quieres.recomendar algún libro o recurso para la Biblioteca, puedes enviarme un mensaje directo por aquí: