Category: Book Review

Adams’ business book is so good that I have to share his closing statement. He sums up his strategy and I agree whole-heartedly with him. I think if you start with small changes and build solid personal systems, those systems will carry you to great things. Adams writes on the last page of his book:

Focus on your diet first and get that right so you will have enough energy to want to exercise. Exercise will further improve your energy, and that will in turn make you more productive, more creative, more positive, more socially desirable, and more able to handle life’s little bumps.

Once you optimize your personal energy, all you need for success is luck. You can’t directly control luck, but you can move from strategies with bad odds to strategies with good odds. For example, learning multiple skills makes your odds for success dramatically higher than learning one skill. If you learn to control your ego you can pick strategies that scare off the people who feel embarrassment, thus allowing you to compete against a smaller field. And if you stay in the game long enough, luck has a better chance of finding you.

Avoid career traps such as finding jobs that require you to sell your limited supply of time while preparing you for nothing better.

Happiness is the only useful goal in life, and unless you are a sociopath, your own happiness will depend on being good to others. And happiness tends to happen naturally whenever you have good health, resources, and a flexible schedule.

Get your health right first, acquire resources and new skills through hard work and look for an opportunity that gives you a flexible schedule someday.  

Some skills are more important than others and you should acquire as many of those key skills as possible, including public speaking, business writing, a working understanding of the psychology of persuasion, an understanding of basic technology concepts, social skills, proper voice technique, good grammar, and basic accounting.

Develop a habit of simplifying, learn how to make small talk with strangers and how to avoid being an asshole. If you get that stuff right, and almost anyone can, you will be hard to stop.

It might help some of you to think of yourselves as moist robots and not skin bags full of magic mystery. If you control the inputs, you can control the outcomes, give or take some luck.

Eat right, exercise, think positively, learn as much as possible, stay out of jail, and good things can happen.

Look for patterns in every part of life. From diet, to exercise, and any component of success. Try to find scientific backing for your observed patterns and use yourself as a laboratory and see if the patterns hold for you.

Most important, understand that goals are for losers and systems are for winners. People who seem to have good luck are often the people who have a system that allows luck to find them.

And always remember that failure is your friend. It is the raw material of success. Invite it in, learn from it, and don’t let it leave until you pick its pocket. That’s a system.

“The special, supportive role that grandmother’s play may be one of the reasons that evolution engineered women to live for decades after they can no longer bear children”. 

A friend of mine and his wife have decided not to have kids. He feels we as humans are driven biologically to have kids to further the species, and he doesn’t want that drive to decide for him whether or not to have kids. But actually, according to Dr. Louann Brizendine, 85% of what we do, it turns out, is biologically driven, including romance, pairing off, and caring for our kids.

Brizendine writes, “For men and women, the initial calculations about romance are unconscious, and they’re very different. In short-term couplings for example, men are Chasers and women are choosers. That’s not sex stereotyping. It’s our inheritance from ancestors who learned, over millions of years, how to propagate their genes. As Darwin noted, males of all species are made for a wooing females, and females typically choose among their suitors. This is the brain architecture of love, engineered by the reproductive winners in evolution. Even the shapes, faces, smells, and ages of the mates we choose are influenced by pattern set millennia ago”. 

Brizendine’s book takes us through what’s happening in the female brain during all the stages of life, from infancy to old age, and details some of the differences between the female and male brains. Baby girl’s brains are bathed in estrogen in utero, and baby boys brains are bathed in testosterone. These hormone baths literally change the structure and function of the brain. And these hormonal differences drive our actions throughout our lives.

Brizendine talks about our ancient brains and how our brain function has evolved over human history. She discusses why women go to the bathroom together, mystery solved! Not that women ever wondered why. It’s because women are/were safer traveling in groups in hunter/gatherer societies than they are traveling alone while the men are out hunting. Women could also band together and fight an angry man if they needed to. There is power in numbers.

As a woman, if your girlfriend ever says to you, “Let’s go to the bathroom.” The instant answer is, “Ok.” Another woman doesn’t even question, she just goes with her friend.

This book reinforces that biologically, women really are the nurturers of our human society. The skin to skin contact of a mom with her baby floods her brain with bonding chemicals. Moms, you know when your babies are running around in the park and you constantly track them. That is a brain function. Touching our kids every day reinforces our brain’s desire to care for our kids.

Brizendine said that in hunter/gatherer societies, if a dad is present, a child has a greater chance of survival. I think in our modern grocery store society, if a dad is present, a child has a greater chance of success (Shout out to all the single parents, you so totally rock!). But she said that if a grandmother is present in hunter/gatherer societies, a child has an even greater chance of survival than if a dad is present. Word.

What does this mean for single parents? Rely on your trusted family and friends, build a tribe to help you raise your babies. We should all be doing this anyway. We’ve cultivated indepence to an extreme in America, and we need to reconnect. Older generations add significant value by helping out the younger generations.

Brizendine covers this and so many more fascinating topics.

Celebrate who you are and what you uniquely have to offer this world. And remember, we’re all in this together.