A World of Sources Ii: Further Insights from a Life of Reading

Copyright © 2011 by Michael J. Hillyard.

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ISBN: 978-1-4620-6119-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4620-6120-4 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 10/22/2011

Contents

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

OTHER BOOKS BY MICHAEL HILLYARD

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1:

SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY,

AND SCIENCE FICTION

CHAPTER 2:

LEADERSHIP, MANAGEMENT,

AND ORGANIZATIONS

CHAPTER 3:

ECONOMICS, FINANCE,

AND INVESTING

CHAPTER 4:

POPULAR FICTION

CHAPTER 5:

HISTORY AND HISTORICAL FICTION

CHAPTER 6:

CULTURE

CHAPTER 7:

PHILOSOPHY, PSYCHOLOGY,

AND RELIGION

CHAPTER 8:

POLITICAL SCIENCE

AND POLITICAL FICTION

CHAPTER 9:

SPORTS AND ENTERTAINMENT

LIST OF SOURCES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael Hillyard is an education and training consultant. He has served as a dean, provost, president, trustee, and director of various colleges and universities. Hillyard was educated at Miami University (Ohio), American Military University, and the University of Southern California, where he received his doctorate in public administration. He lives with his family in Florida.

OTHER BOOKS BY MICHAEL HILLYARD

A World of Sources: Insights from a Life of Reading

Cincinnatus and the Citizen-Servant Ideal: The Roman Legend’s Life, Times, and Legacy

Homeland Security and the Need for Change: Organizing Principles, Governing Institutions, and American Culture

Public Crisis Management: How and Why Organizations Work Together to Solve Society’s Most Threatening Problems

Great things have small beginnings.

—Sir Francis Drake

INTRODUCTION

Much of why I wrote World of Sources II affirms why I wrote its predecessor, World of Sources I. I am pleased that so many people have read, enjoyed, and applied the first World of Sources in their lives. For those who have not read the first book, I explain why I wrote the books below.

I wrote these books for a few reasons. First, I have been a lifelong reader of books. I read both fiction and non-fiction, and I allow my interests to pull me to whatever topic or theme catches my attention. Through reading I have tried to make myself knowledgeable of many ideas, areas of life, and people I otherwise would not have discovered. The knowledge has then influenced my education, career, personal interests, voluntary pursuits, wealth, and contributions to the world around me.

My passion for reading comes from two desires: I love to learn about new things, and I do not believe that any formal education system of high schools, colleges, and continuing education programs can fully prepare me or anyone else for the challenges we face in the modern world. So, it is out of both love and necessity that I read approximately 50 books a year and have been doing so throughout my adult life.

The second reason I wrote the books is to reveal my method for learning new knowledge so that others may consider adopting the method for their own purposes. At some point in my journey as a reader, I not only read books, but I also found myself taking notes in the margins of the books I read, underlining key passages, and otherwise enjoying a conversation with their contents. After employing this process with many books, it became impossible to keep track of the books I had read when I wanted to later reference their insights. So, I started to capture each book’s insights by transcribing the underlined passages and margin notes and storing those insights in a binder. Although time consuming, I can now review the (now several) binders’ contents and refresh my thinking with important insights whenever I desire to do so. The binders bulge with insights from several hundred books and provide the source material for this book.

The third reason I wrote the books is to enable others to benefit from the knowledge I gained without having to spend thousands of hours reading all of the source material. Readers can read these books and then spend the rest of their time applying their insights and reading other books of interest to them.

A final reason I wrote the books is in knowing that I will learn much in the authorship process of compiling the sources, reviewing what I thought was valuable in each source, and then distilling that information into key insights for the reader.

And now, I will offer one reason I did not write the books. I did not intend to write a scientific study, and these books are not academic endeavors; they do not have insights that can be tested through a scientific approach. The books were written to offer practical insights I felt were important to remember, with a particular emphasis on insights that could be used to improve the quality or success of life in the modern world. The insights are provided after a long and thoughtful process: reading hundreds of books and other sources across a range of fields, documenting the key insights from more than 150 of them, and trying to learn from them so they might be applied in life. The sources reflect my interests and do not even closely represent all of life’s diverse subject matter. Heck, if I covered everything, then my readers would have nothing left to discover on their own!

Finally, I offer a brief commentary on the information referenced in the books. The information comes almost exclusively from its 150+ sources. My contribution has been to recognize what I believe are the sources’ valuable insights, organize the sources into recognizable themes so the information flows as coherently as possible, and present the insights as concisely as possible. A full reference to each source is provided on the page of each source’s key insights. Information directly attributed from a source is provided in quotations, and information not provided in quotations is either a paraphrase or my interpretation of that source’s information. Providing each source’s reference on the page of its key insights is also my way of encouraging readers to read some of the sources in their entirety.

I hope you enjoy the book!

CHAPTER 1:

SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY,

AND SCIENCE FICTION

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

—Immanuel Kant

Idea Man: A Memoir by the Cofounder of Microsoft

by Paul Allen

(New York: Penguin Books, 2011)

:

1.   Setting the Stage for the Future. My really big ideas have all begun with a stage-setting development… I ask a few basic questions: Where is the leading edge of discovery headed? What should exist but doesn’t yet? How can I create something to help meet the need, and who might be enlisted to join the crusade? Whenever I’ve had a moment of insight, it has come from combining two or more elements to galvanize a new technology and bring breakthrough applications to a potentially new audience.

2.   Learning As a Child. Allen learned from reading complex texts, whereby the magical became logical, as he dove into understanding how things such as trains, engines, and other mechanical processes work. He was a self-taught youth who was stubbornly unregimented. One of his teachers said, Paul is an ‘enthusiast’ (in the old religious sense) and when in the grip of an enthusiasm is almost totally irresponsible in other areas.

3.   The Enthusiasm of Youth. If we’d been older or known better, Bill (Gates) and I might have been put off by the task (of starting Microsoft) in front of us. But we were young and green enough to believe that we just might pull it off. Had I come around five years later… I would have missed the opportunities that come from trying something new.

4.   Knowing Your Limitations. One day I watched a professor cover the blackboard with a maze of partial differential equations, and they might as well have been hieroglyphics… It was one of those moments when you realize, I just can’t see it. I felt a little sad, but I accepted my limitations. I was OK with being a generalist.

Inside Steve’s Brain

by Leander Kahney

(New York: Portfolio, 2008)

:

1.   Steve Jobs Is… a control freak, perfectionist, elitist, taskmaster. Jobs also likes confrontation—an argument helps him get to the right answer. He’s an elitist who thinks people are bozos. But he makes gadgets so easy to use that a bozo can master them.

2.   The Jobs Mind. In order to be creative, Jobs believes you need to be able to think broadly, connect ideas and things together, and avoid being linear.

3.   Steve Jobs’s Lifelong Goal… has been to create easy-to-use technology for the widest possible audience. While engineers tend to create products only they can understand, Jobs creates products anyone can understand. Apple is also more than a company; it truly believes it is out to make the world a better place.

4.   Technology As Art. Jobs is more of an artist than a businessman, but (he) has the brilliant ability to capitalize on his creations. He admires Bob Dylan and Pablo Picasso because they kept risking failure their entire lives instead of atrophying like most successful people who continue doing what made them successful even if that formula no longer works. Jobs knows his strengths, which are marketing, product development, and keynote speeches, and he delegates the rest. At Apple, Jobs says, you (only) need a few creative people, and the rest get the work done.

5.   Shrink to Grow. When Apple was on the brink of bankruptcy and Jobs returned to run it, he cut the products back to the bone and said only things that made a profit would survive. He cut the company from $12 billion to $6 billion in revenues and downsized dozens of computer lines down to four computers (two professional and two personal computers) in order to get profitable.

6.   Apple Product Characteristics. Apple products are simple and avoid what Jobs calls, feature creep. For Jobs, less is always more. Focus and simplicity are the goals, and to everything else, Jobs simply says, no. Apple works extremely hard to hide the complexity behind its products so the consumer only sees how easy they are to use. Apple cares about the smallest detail, because each detail adds up to make something either easier or harder to use.

7.   Apple Is Expensive. Apple will never compete on price, because Jobs says price competition is a race to the bottom that no one wins. Apple wins on quality, which is why it enjoys a 25% profit margin.

8.   Key People Make the Difference. Jobs recruits the most talented people he can find. He believes there is not much difference in certain jobs, such as a cook or driver, but there is hundreds of times more impact in an excellent versus an average programmer.

9.   No Product Focus Groups, No Committees. Apple does not systemize innovation. Jobs himself finds the next product gem out of hundreds of options. He does not trust consumers or employee committees to tell him where products, consumer demand, and the future will align. People cannot express what they want until it is created for them.

The Decade of Steve (Jobs): His Legacy

by Adam Lashinsky

(Fortune, November 23, 2009)

:

1.   The Jobs Vision. Steve Jobs is out to liberate the world through a peaceful revolution driven by his products. He thinks his products will help us be better humans. The key to the revolution is the fact that computing advances now allow individuals to do what only large groups could previously.

2.   The Jobs Persona. Jobs is compelled by intense drive, unflagging curiosity, and keen commercial imagination that have allowed (him) to see products and industries and possibilities that might be. He is an extremely hard worker and demanding of others. His actions are rapid fire, and they always aim to answer the question, What is next? Like Andrew Carnegie, he is extremely hands-on. Unlike Carnegie, Bill Gates, or other former industry giants, Jobs has not diverged from his core business—his revolution is his product.

3.   No Customer Surveys. Much like Henry Ford, Jobs does not ask the customer what he wants, or he would end up with the computer-equivalent of a faster horse instead of a car. Jobs uses his own judgment to determine where customer desire is headed and then offers something totally new that is adopted in great numbers to meet that desire. Jobs is a one-man research and development machine, who says of his process, there is a certain amount of homework involved… but mostly it’s just picking up on things you can see on the periphery. Sometimes when you’re almost asleep, you realize something you wouldn’t otherwise have noted. I subscribe to a half-dozen Internet services, and I get about 300 emails a day, many from people I don’t know, hawking crazy ideas. And I’ve always paid close attention to the whispers around me.

4.   Public Relations. Jobs is famous for his new product launches, and he spends a huge amount of time scripting and preparing for them.

5.   Art and Science. Gustave Eiffel was a brilliant architect because he was an engineer with an artistic touch, characteristics not commonly found in one person.

6.   Apple’s Retail Touch. Customers in Apple stores have no idea that immense amounts of research went into the store lighting to make Apple products as colorful as they appear in advertisements. Jobs does not need customers to know how much time was spent on the details; he simply wants them to feel the difference when they walk into an Apple store versus any other.

Newton

by Peter Ackroyd

(New York: Doubleday, 2006)

:

1.   Abandonment = Success? It is often said that brilliant mathematicians tend to have solitary childhoods, in which they can explore the visionary world of numbers. Isaac Newton qualified in that regard. He was left by his mother to be cared for by his grandmother because the mother had remarried and the new husband did not want children.

2.   Early Characteristics. The young Newton was inventive, preferring to tinker and build things rather than play with other children. He was an artisan as well as a calculator, loving both the arts and sciences. Like many geniuses who cannot rely on the precepts of the masters, Newton preferred to learn on his own. He compiled notebooks on his reading and other interests, he organized and systematized his scattered areas of knowledge, and he set a goal of discovering solutions to 12 problems he wanted to solve within a year.

3.   Single-Mindedness. Newton was single-minded in