Below is a framework to match guidance to an individual based on their expertise and the WHY, WHAT and HOW of a solution.

Categorizing your team based on experience / expertise

Want to read this story later? Save it in Journal.

First, it helps to have a general sense of the people you manage and how they fall into one of three buckets depending on either their skill or experience:

1. Early stage-of-career team members with the least experience or those with less developed skillsets
2. Mid-career team members with more developed experience or expertise
3. Most senior team members or those with the most advanced skill sets (these men and women are often referred to as A players)

(Note that diverse and well-rounded teams are always filled with varying skillsets, experiences and capabilities. In a healthy team the people in bucket 1 today should be the people in bucket 3 tomorrow).

The WHY, WHAT and HOW of a problem

The next thing to recognize is that different levels of experience require a varying degree of guidance. When it comes to guidance, I like to consider the WHY, WHAT and HOW of a customer or business problem:

• WHY something is needed — typically a user problem or a business / strategic need (this is the problem and not the solution)
• WHAT to do about that problem — this is the solution. For example, “more people driving hybrid cars is the solution to reduce carbon emissions”
• HOW to implement it — the tactics for putting the solution in place. For example, the specifics of a design, a heuristic / algorithm in coding, an execution plan of policy in government, etc

Matching the WHY, WHAT and HOW to level of experience / expertise

Now we have our definitions, we can build a matrix which matches the WHY, WHAT and HOW to each level of experience or expertise. As a general guideline, it’s best to err more towards describing only the problem to the highest skilled / most experienced individuals and being more prescriptive with the solution to less experienced team members. The recommendation then becomes:

• To effectively manage less experienced team members, provide a clear explanation of HOW to implement / approach something
• For mid career /experience individuals, provide a clear explanation WHAT needs to be built / implemented
• For the most skilled / experienced, you need only explain WHY a solution is important

And that’s pretty much it. Here’s a simpler way to illustrate this:

An example

To look at this in practice, imagine a redesign of a user registration / sign up page. As a team leader / manager, you might explain the following to the differing levels of Product Managers in your team:

• For a new Product Manager, explain that you need to make a couple of changes to a user registration page by adding a zip (required, with country specific validation), age drop down (required), phone number (required, with validation) and gender drop down (optional). This level of detail provides the individual with sufficient clarity to implement it effectively while providing room for experimentation on the design, layout, etc.
• For a mid level / experience PM, explain you need location, contact and age information to be captured at sign up. This gives more freedom to the individual to figure out the specifics of implementation such as. validation, what’s optional vs required, etc.
• For an experienced / highly-skilled PM, explain that you need to begin capturing user-level data to improve ads or recommendations without significantly dropping the activation rate. This puts the responsibility on the individual to figure out the right solution based on the goal, how to make those metrics trade-offs and allows buy-in to be developed.

Avoiding Pitfalls

So what happens when we don’t get this right? This can occur when you start telling your highest skilled / most experienced HOW to implement something, leaving them feeling micromanaged and overly constrained. Similarly, if you provide an early-stage career team member with WHY something is needed, but not enough information on HOW to implement it, they may be left feeling unsupported with an ambiguous problem.

A final thought — always explain the WHY

One footnote worth calling out is that while less experienced team members need more guidance on the solution required, there is always value in describing the WHY to everyone (regardless of tenure or experience). By doing this, you’re providing the support that will help that person develop autonomy in the future, as well as generate longer-term buy-in.

Closing

Like all frameworks, this is an oversimplification therefore nuanced execution is far more important than following rigid guidelines. Hopefully, it’ll be simple enough to remember while providing a solid base to build on for your own team’s development strategy.

To close, here are a few final notes:

• I’ve given examples of PM’s but this should work equally for any discipline (Design, Eng, Ops, Sales, etc)
• Like many frameworks, this can be applied as a fractal. So you can recruit some of the highest skilled / most experienced people on your team, to translate the WHY into the HOW for more junior / early-stage team members
• I haven’t talked about the WHEN in any of the above (i.e. when a solution is needed by). Timelines are always important as a communication tool for urgency / priority / etc — so always include them in the conversation
• Even if you’re not a manager, the above may help you figure out what would be most valuable to you as a team member about what you need to be more effective in your role. Example statements you might imagine coming out of this could be: “I‘d love more more context on WHY this is important”, “HOW would you recommend I implement this”, or “I’d like to ask for more freedom on WHAT solution I use to solve the customer problem”.

📝 Save this story in Journal.

👩‍💻 Wake up every Sunday morning to the week’s most noteworthy stories in Tech waiting in your inbox. Read the Noteworthy in Tech newsletter.

I’ve witnessed this a during the workplace but perhaps given the current political and social climate, it’s happening a lot more outside as well. Here’s an observation I’ve made about these types of situations, as well as how I now try to handle them. The observation is this:

We spend 90% of our time, talking about the 10% of things we disagree on

Expressed visually — it looks like this.

Stop for a minute. Think back over the past week and see if you can recall an example of this. If you can, the counter-productiveness will feel obvious. But to be specific about the downsides of this phenomenon, here’s why it’s not awesome:

• All the creativity and energy goes into arguing and articulating the minor differences in interpretation or point of view, rather than building on shared beliefs and values
• If there are people who are dependent on you to resolve a conflict, their progress is blocked as there’s no clarity on where there is agreement
• You feel more misaligned / distant / out of sync with someone than you need to be. This can reduce the likelihood you’ll want to engage with that person in the future

These discussions often painful or “low bandwidth” … If you’re a leader or manager at work, the issue can sometimes stem from prioritizing ‘being heard’ over ‘creating clarity’. But if we flip that, our role becomes obvious — to provide maximum clarity on wherever there is agreement (and where there is not). If we rethought our roles, we’d find the % of agreement is higher than we thought.

This doesn’t mean we have to agree on everything. Creating space for disagreement is actually really important — it helps flesh out important differences that can be amplified if wallpapered over or dismissed. This is captured well in Amazon’s “disagree and commit” leadership principle. But for me, sequencing is super important… Create clarity (and build on) wherever there is ‘about 90% agreement’ first— then come back around and address the disagreements after. Articulating this through a series of steps, this is how I try [not always successfully] to manage a discussion:

1. Actively look for common ground by asking “what do we agree on”, “what shared points of view do we have”, “where are we aligned”? As these are shared, write them down. The goal isn’t to find agreement on everything, but to look for areas where there is 90% agreement and spend time on those. As disagreement emerges, make sure these areas are articulated / written down but resist the urge to debate or resolve them at this point.
2. As the list of agreed upon items grows, spend time articulating them to make sure it’s actually the case. Have individuals try to express the other person’s point of view to make sure it’s roughly aligned. Perfection isn’t required — remember, we’re looking for 90% agreement. If there’s someone / something dependent on a decision then ask “is there enough of a shared view here for this [team / person / decision] to move forwards?”. If so, make sure that happens.
3. Finally, loop back around to where there is actual disagreement and work on that.

There’s lots we could say now about how to resolve real differences (#3), how to break deadlocks and making sure a decision isn’t ‘the average of all opinions’ but that’s out of scope for this article. For now, my main hope is to help those situations where common ground is closer than you may believe or perceive.

So, the next time we feel compelled to explain to someone how wrong they are or someone feels the need to do the same to us, before launching into an incredulous debate we can first ask ourselves “what do we actually agree on?”. Once in a while the answer will be “nothing at all” — but if we can lean into that question with curiosity, we may find the answer is “actually, quite a lot”.

The 90% agreement rule was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking has been on my reading list for years. I finally got around to reading it and it was worth the wait. There was a period a while back when it felt as if everyone was talking about this book (heh, the irony), Today “quiet” has an amazing 5,110 reviews on Amazon. This means there are more people who have shared an opinion on this book (at least on Amazon) than Outliers, The Catcher in the Rye, Guns Germs and Steel and Animal Farm.

This also means is that there’s a very small chance I can offer any insight into this book that hasn’t already been written so I’ll be brief.

Q: What’s an introvert?

Being an introvert does not mean shy (which suggests a fear of social judgement). Cain’s definition is that introverts

have a preference for a quiet, more minimally stimulating environment

Another dictionary definition is:

a person predominantly concerned with their own thoughts and feelings rather than with external things.

A friend of mine who self identifies as an introvert (but many mistake an extrovert) explains it simply as “I get energy from being alone whereas an extrovert gets energy from being around people”. This is the thing about introvert / extroverts — you can’t always tell which end of the spectrum someone falls because it’s an internal thing. It’s as much about how someone feels and where they get energy as how they appear.

Q: Should I read this book?

If you are an introvert, yes most definitely. You will hear that the extrovert ideal is not something to be universally aspired to and will find encouragement and a guide to embrace your unique strengths. If you are an extrovert, the answer is also “read this book”. This will be enlightening and an exercise in empathy for what is estimated to be 30–50% of the population.

For me, I believe I somewhere in the middle of the introvert / extrovert spectrum (this is a thing — “ambivert”). I crave and am recharged by long road trips filled with solitude, yet I’m also drawn to conversation, tight knit groups of people and regular interactions. Sometimes this means I get the best of both worlds, yet very often I’ll miscalibrate and I’ll exhaust myself.

It really is a great book, rich in research, insight and relatable personal stories. And while Cain is a deep introvert, I didn’t find her vilifying the “other side”. It’s relevant for all aspects of social life (both professional and personal) and I’ll be recommending it for many years to come.

Q: No time to read?

No time to read but still have twenty minutes? Watch the TED Talk:

Last time I was in Japan, I wrote a post about the gates which mark the entrance to all Shinto shrines. Torii, as they are called, have an important symbolic meaning which has stuck with me ever since:

A torii (鳥居, literally bird abode, /ˈtɔəri.iː/) is a traditional Japanese gate most commonly found at the entrance of or within a Shinto shrine, where it symbolically marks the transition from the profane to the sacred.

From the profane to the sacred. It’s such a powerful phrase — one that has lodged itself in my mind. While I was traveling, I also read Phil Knight’s book “Shoe Dog” which is essentially the autobiography of Nike. Throughout, he recalls multiple story of his own time in Japan which was intertwined with the history of Nike. Several times he recalls the same phrase — from the profane to the sacred — and it had a lasting impact on him. So much so that on the floor of the stadium of the Matthew Knight Arena, which he and his wife named in honor of his late son, is an image of a torii gate. Symbolism is powerful.

Here are a few photos of my encounters with some sacred locations. There’s a mix of both Shinto (shrines, torii) and Buddhist (temples).

I enjoyed it. The book brings a different perspective and is extremely well researched. I also found myself generalizing the lessons to many other aspects of life. This was particularly true of the sections which illustrate how nations who win their freedom through revolution, often end up upholding the same negative and oppressive behaviors as their previous captors. In these cases, applying well known free trade tactics (such as an independent central bank) has little benefit — because the underlying system is still exclusionary or corrupt. It reminded of corporate / company culture and the overemphasis that is sometimes placed on implementations (e.g. messaging vs email debates, open space vs closed space, diversity quotas) rather than the underlying culture (e.g. building trust, increasing transparency, reducing communication overhead, rewarding inclusive behavior, etc).

There are some notable reviewers of “Why Nations Fail”. Zuckerberg considers this “required reading” for politicians and I agree. Because of the parallels to the business / startup world, I think it’s valuable for anyone looking at organizational design and culture as well. By contrast, Bill Gates disliked the book and produced a very negative review (so much so that the authors published a rebuttal).

While it wasn’t perfect (I found repetitive and dismissive of other theories at times), I thought it was very valuable overall. Even if you don’t read the whole thing, it’s definitely worth finding a good summary online.

One a previous trip to Japan we stayed overnight in Tokyo to see the early morning sumo training (“asa geiko”, pictured below). While it was a great experience, I’d never attended an official sumo match. Timing had never worked and also tickets can be hard to come by. However, things fell into place this time and thanks to a generous gift from my father-in-law, we were fortunate enough to attend the May Sumo Grand Championships in Ryōgoku, Tokyo.

I’ve always been impressed by Sumo wrestlers as athletes. They typically average well over 6' and 300lbs and have an impressive combination of power, speed and surprising flexibility. Physically, they’d match up well against NFL offensive or defensive lineman. In recent years, the championships and top ranking positions (Yokozuna) have been dominated by foreigners, especially Mongolians. However, just this year Japan got its first Japanese born Yokozuna in nearly two decades. This was courtesy of the wrestler Kisenosato who is now a household name.

Like several sports with long standing traditions (cricket, golf and tennis being a few that come to mind), etiquette plays an important role. Perhaps none more so than sumo however, whose essence is described as “hinkaku” (dignity). It is this quality, projected through through the honoring of traditions, non celebration in victory and respect to their opponents that is considered as vital as winning. In learning about Sumo, I found this to be one of the most interesting aspects. Many sports have been around for more than one hundred years, but Sumo stands alone in that is has been preserved in time for several centuries. Tennis surfaces quickened and golf picked up space age shaft materials but despite advances in technology, ySumo’s traditions have remain largely unchanged since the Edo period. The sport is not without its controversies however and has been subject to numerous scandals and challenges.

For our day at the championships, we arrived around 3pm. While it’s an all-day event, it’s fairly common to arrive later when the higher ranking matches start. The stadium at Ryōgoku was just beginning to fill up and the atmosphere was bristling and rowdy, yet also unintimidating and family friendly. There was a lot of excitement over Kisenosato (mentioned above) and also Hakuhō, a Yokozuna from Mongolia who is considered one of the greatest Sumo in history. Both would be fighting later that day.

The early matches, fought in the lower divisions, are actually pretty exciting with a lot of speed and effort on display.

From the bout pictured above, the wrestler on the right opened by receiving a relentless barrage of blows to the head and neck. Despite this, he ended as the eventual winner. This type of resilience was well received by the crowd.

Before the final division matches begin, there is an intermission where the top fighters enter the ring.

The only wrestlers absent from circle are the three top ranking Yokozuna. They enter separately and perform a special ceremony, displaying their unique skills. Every move, shuffle and sleight of hand was met with roars from the crowd.

The final Yokozuna matches were impressive. Unfortunately, Kisenosato was injured for much of the tournament and lost his match on this day.

Overall it was a wonderful and unique opportunity for me to experience one of Japan’s most famous traditions. I also made a quick video which captures a sliver of the experience.

Japan 2017 — Part 3, Sumo was originally published in Future Travel on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Here are a few portraits or street photos I took during our vacation. I love street photography but it’s harder for me — taking much more effort and focus than say landscape photography, which comes more naturally. I didn’t feel the pull or energy as much this time, but still managed to capture a few shots that were meaningful to me. Looking back, all seem to have a familiar theme — people during moments of relaxation, worship or silence. It’s bene said that every portrait is really a photo of the photographer, so perhaps this is a reflection of what I was seeking and craving at the time.

Last time we traveled there, we realized the value of hiring a car to get to further afield destinations and we took the same approach time time. Shortly after arriving, we were on an internal flight out of Haneda to Fukuoka. This is a beautiful seaside city is part of Kysushu, one of the four main islands (and most SW) that make up Japan. I’m always impressed by the number of Japanese people I know who describe Kyushu as an ideal place to live — with its food, natural beauty, historic shrines and numerous onsens being cited as some of the main reasons. These were also our motivations for choosing this as the destination too. Our trip looked something like this:

For more info on the places we hit up in our Kyushu trip, head over to my Pinterest board which I used to plan this. Here’s some of my favourite photos from this part of our trip, all in honor of the natural beauty of this wondrous part of Japan.

Intro

When reading Ben Horowitz’s “The Hard Thing about Hard Things”, he refers to his document on what makes a good product manager. Even though he originally authored this several years ago, it’s still highly relevant and filled with great advice.

As I was reading it, I found myself mentally checking off the things I’ve observed amongst the best product managers I’ve known. I’ve managed a couple of hundred product / program managers over the years and worked with countless others. I count many of them among the very best in the industry and a number have become some of my closest friends. So I put together my own list of the behaviors I’ve seen in best product people. These have become the skills and approaches I value and try to develop in others, and against which I measure my own growth. I’ll make no claim that it is comprehensive, absolute or any sort of truth.

I’ve left out the fairly obvious things like “is a decent human being”, “treats people with respect”, “gives credit to others” and so on. It’s written as if I were describing the ultimate product manager to a friend or colleague. In reality it’s impossible for a single person to exhibit all these traits and if you’re reading this for yourself, the key will be to figure out which resonate with you and your situation. Once you’ve figured that out, just do more of it (#9 — invest in strengths). Also, while I use the industry term “product manager”, what I really mean is “product people”. Great product people come with any title — whether that’s product managers, program manager, designers, developers, marketing or sales. In other words, skills over titles.

I intentionally left this list unordered as the value of each attribute is somewhat situational and depends on the individual, team and context. As such, feel free to read it as you might a guide and in any order. However, a friend reminded me I should still follow own advice (#10 — Prioritize). So, if I had to pick any three attributes in a product person, they’d probably be #1 (Starts with Why), #13 (Is curious / values curiosity) and #18 (Has a strong point of view / weakly held). Others' mileage will vary but I believe these are so foundational that with them, most of the other items can be learned.

The List

1) Starts with Why. She always starts with the customer and has a clear articulation of why someone would want to use our product and what problems in their life we’re solving for. Simon Sinek summarizes her approach nicely. She writes the reviews that we aspire for our users to write. Once establishing a mission for the product, she rallies people around it and is stubborn on this vision while remaining flexible on the implementation and how to get there.

“Be stubborn on the vision, flexible on the details”, Jeff Bezos

2) Builds products that solve for her own problems. She knows that great products often come from building for yourself. While this advice is often given to CEO’s — it’s just as relevant to anyone who builds products for a living. By working on products she would actually use, she has empathy for the customer and an intuitive sense of what they need. She uses the product every day and is one of the best testers on the team, finding more quality issues than almost anyone.

“If you look at the origins of successful startups, few were started in imitation of some other startup. Where did they get their ideas? Usually from some specific, unsolved problem the founders identified.”, Paul Graham

3) Sets goals, measures, communicates clearly. She has a clear definition of success for any team and product she’s working on. These are goals that are aspirational (to help people dream), realistic (to keep people focused) and quantifiable (to help guide the way). They’re also shared goals — something the team fundamentally believes and wants to achieve. She tracks progress against these goals relentlessly but knows that metrics are only evidence of success, not success in itself.

4) Market awareness. She knows the market well and where our product fits in. She understands the competition and uses their products daily. She regularly shares information on the broader market context with other team members via news links, presentations and product tear downs. She uses this information to guide and inform (but not dictate) our own product directions.

5) Seeks out mentors. Mentors others. She knows that one of the best ways to learn is from those who have already done what you want to do. She invests in relationships with mentors and makes it easy for them, taking on the scheduling burden and being clear about where she wants to grow. She pays this forward by mentoring other up-and-coming product mangers and finds that by doing so, her articulation and point of view is continually reinforced and improved.

6) Builds trust. She is both trusting and trustworthy. She knows the difference between trust and blind faith, and invests in building a working environment where people have each others’ backs. She sets an example with her own behavior and works from the assumption that people have good intentions. She listens and always strives to understand others’ context, point of view and perspective.

Partly this stems from a desire to simply live in a world where people trust each other — but also because she knows this makes business sense:

7) Understands the “how”. She focus teams on good ideas that can be executed. Her knowledge of technical feasibility creates a tight and efficient feedback loop between idea generation and implementation saving many engineering cycles.

She doesn’t use things like experimentation or machine learning as a crutch (e.g. “we’ll just machine learn the user’s preferences”). She would probably have drawn the cartoon below if it didn’t already exist. While pragmatic, she isn’t overly focused on implementation (see #1 — Starts with Why) and also remains open to technical breakthroughs.

8) Embraces constraints. Many of the world’s most creative solutions have arisen out of deep constraints that would been paralyzing to many others. She understands the paradox of choice and knows that open ended statements like “we could do anything” can be counterproductive. She will even apply intentional / artificial constraints during ideation to help generate feedback, stimulate non linear thinking and test the boundaries.

“The enemy of art is the absence of limitations”, Pablo Picasso

9) Invests in strengths. She’s not a jack of all trades which is meant to imply “good at everything”, but can sometimes mean “good at nothing”. Instead, she has clear strengths that differentiate her and she continually invests in developing them. She’s interested in turning her strengths from good to great and while she’s aware of her weaknesses, she’s not consumed by them. Her greatest strength comes from the cross fertilization and knitting together of her unique skills.

She has a respect for other disciplines (dev, design, etc) but doesn’t over identify with them, knowing that skillsets are more valuable than titles.

10) Prioritizes. She is a natural list-maker, and has found many complex problems can be solved by simply writing down a list of things and doing them in priority order. She’s a hardcore prioritizer, and will force important tradeoffs at the right time and has an intuitive sense of the quality required for a given situation / stage of idea. She’s not afraid to cut ideas / features when it leads to a simpler or better customer experience, even areas where she has spent significant time and effort.

“By doing everything, you fail at the most important thing”, Ben Horowitz

She also understands that while it’s important to cut and remove things, the hard thing is knowing what to cut, and she intuitively thinks in terms of scenarios and complete experiences than features. This skill is evident with her approach to building MVP’s.

11) Asks for forgiveness, not for permission. While this may not have come naturally for her, she realizes that great workplaces encourage and reward risk taking and she takes this at its word. When acting in the best spirit of her colleagues and customers, she leads with action and asks for forgiveness in the event of mistakes rather than waiting for permission. She expects others to do the same also.

12) Thrives on change and ambiguity. While few people love a high degree of change and ambiguity, she accepts them as natural consequences in the pursuit of innovation and performs extremely well during these periods. During these volatile times, she consistently helps others, providing clarity and assurance wherever possible.

13) Is curious, values curiosity. She is highly curious and considers herself a lifelong longer or learn-it-all (a phrase which Satya Nadella is also a fan). She is always more interested in the right answer than being right. She values diversity of thought and sees opposing views as an opportunity to learn a new idea (or at the very least learn about a person).

14) Is data driven. She thrives on collecting and understanding data to help inform a decision She does this informally, efficiently and by using tools herself wherever possible (vs complex or expensive processes). While she loves data, she’s not beholden to it and understands that it’s “just another input” given even the best studies, experiments, surveys and analyses often tell only part of the story. She has an intuitive sense of when we’ve reached a law of diminishing returns on data collection, and is able to make decisions with incomplete information.

15) Simplifies the complex. She always looks to decompose problems into the most important key questions and solutions. Whenever sharing information she considers audience and ‘what do they need to know?’, not ‘how much can I show’. She anticipates future problems but remains focused on likely risks and not the complete set of what might happen. She loves to summarize (TLDR).

“I would have written a shorter letter, but I didn’t have time (Mark Twain)”

16) Values trying over talking, impact over activity, creation over criticism. She leads with action and avoids long and expensive debates on a potential solution that would have only taken 1 day to prototype, or could be answered by simply asking a customer. She’d choose a good idea, with great execution over a brilliant idea, poorly executed. She has no problem getting her hands dirty and regularly looks across the team to see what’s needed and where she can fill in.

17) Can zoom in, and zoom out. She finds the right “level of zoom” for a given situation and can comfortably operate at both the detailed or the bigger picture level. She doesn’t “suggest to take a step back” when progress is required and doesn’t become lost in the details when a broader perspective would be more useful. In Pathwise, we call this “Systems Thinking”.

18) Has a strong point of view, weakly held. Whenever faced with a need to press forwards in uncertain situations, she expresses a strong point of view but “holds it weakly”. This benefits everyone involved on a product, providing a default direction while suppressing over confidence and stimulating debate. Her strong view / weakly held shows up in the products she works on, which are described as opinionated rather than confused. She openly challenges her own assumptions through a dialectic process and invites others to do so as well. With sufficient evidence and data, she pivots to new ideas and concepts, restarting the cycle once again.

19) Creates material that can be highly leveraged, and always in a style that is “fit for purpose”. She is a prolific creator of content — not merely for the purposes of documenting, but as a means to communicate ideas, provide repeatable instructions and offer guidance. She recognizes the importance of specs, but knows these are a tool and will always consider the best tool for the job. She doesn’t over engineer a spec when a one line email will do, she knows that sometimes low fidelity UX mocks are the best way to express visual ideas and will build prototypes when specs, mocks and emails won’t do.

20) Gives feedback. Seeks feedback. Strives to give feedback that is specific, useful for the recipient and delivers it with the best of intentions. Always asks the question “what would be useful?” not “what do I want to say?”. Gives and receives product feedback so that the product is under the spotlight, not the person. Understands that being clear with someone is not mutually exclusive with being kind and in fact can be an act of kindness when delivered with authenticity. Because she understands the importance of feedback, she shares her own work early, and shares it often. Does not wait for a “grand unveiling” but instead strives to get input as early in the process as possible, when the cost of change is low.

Thats it for now! Thank you to all the amazing product people out there — you basically wrote this list by simply doing what you do. I’ll likely refresh in the future as I get a chance to reflect more.

Hacker Noon is how hackers start their afternoons. We’re a part of the @AMI family. We are now accepting submissions and happy to discuss advertising & sponsorship opportunities.

If you enjoyed this story, we recommend reading our latest tech stories and trending tech stories. Until next time, don’t take the realities of the world for granted!

Sapiens is definitely the best book I’ve read this year and it’s hard to imagine me finding something more impactful for a while. A superb narrative of our species’ transition from hunter gatherers to farmers to current day. The author tells of our storytelling capability and how it’s bound our cultures and societies together (and also put them to war against each other). He does this by introducing the notion of “myths” and how they apply to fairly obvious things (e.g. superstitions) — but also to modern concepts we consider to be fundamental rights and natural law. It’s very thought provoking, delivered in a way that doesn’t appear to be driven by a religious, political or even ideological agenda.

The last couple of chapters is the most important part to me where he talks about purpose and happiness. To quote Yuval Noah Harari (the author) from a recent interview:

“Maybe the most important lesson to learn is that even though humans are extremely good in acquiring power, they are not very good in translating power into happiness…

… If we don’t change our basic mental patterns, than the power we will gain in the twenty-first century may well upgrade us into gods, but we will be very dissatisfied gods.”

Anyway, loved it — just read it. Link below.

https://www.amazon.com/Sapiens-Humankind-Yuval-Noah-Harari/dp/0062316095