Starting

Engineering courses and other interesting things in college don’t leave much time to read for pleasure.  But if I’m on vacation or taking a break on the weekend, I may still get lost in a good book.  Sometimes to the detriment of other priorities.  I try not to allow my education to interfere with my schooling … or is it the other way around?

My mouth salivates at the thought of one day having my own huge library with towering aisles of books already read or soon to be consumed.  I devour multiple books at a time, tasting new genres each afternoon, casually traversing nonfiction, novels, plays, history, poetry all in the same week.

But more practically, I’ll make sure wherever I live is next to a library.  Hopefully one with long checkouts and forgiving overdue policies.  Right now I owe Stanford Library $32, but luckily no interest and full circulation privileges until I reach $50.  Will gladly be paid around graduation.  All that knowledge and pleasure for fifty bucks:  one of the few bargains in college.

Here’s reviews of some recent reading material, with my main takeaways:

Only the Paranoid Survive by Andy Grove, Intel’s co-founder and former COO and CEO

About Grove leading Intel during what he has famously termed ‘strategic inflection points’ or moments when the basic nature of an industry is disrupted by some unavoidable force.  Much of the book explains how companies compete amidst inflection points that alter the rules, competitors, and goals of the race.  I learned a lot about the history of Intel, especially their transition from memory production to microprocessor design.

The book’s advice may seem only helpful if you are the chief-something-officer of your company, but much of it can be applied to capital L..ife.  One exceptional excerpt:  “The discipline of re-employment is needed in spades when it comes to your personal time… The point is that redeploying resources sounds like such an innocuous term.  But the inevitable counterpart is that you’re subtracting from someplace else.  You’re taking something away.  If you’re in a leadership position, how you spend your time has enormous symbolic value.  It will communicate what’s important or what isn’t far more powerfully than all the speeches you can give.  Strategic change doesn’t just start at the top.  It starts with your calendar.”