Talent is Overrated argues that in the endless nature versus nurture debate, at least when it comes to traditional definitions of success, is over. Nurture wins.

The book claims that to reach the great heights, to do the game changing work, talent doesn't really matter. Intelligence doesn't matter. Hard work matters. You need about 10,000 hours (or roughly 10 years) of dedicated, deliberate practice before you can even begin to start doing great work. Talent only helps you in the very beginning. In the end, it's all about hard work. Across all fields, across time, no one who ever did great work ever achieved it without at least ten years of practice.

Even though Mozart started composing music at an early age, all of his most famous pieces were created after he turned 19. He only started learning music at an age of three because his father was a musician, not because of some innate skill. He had to work 16 years before anything great was accomplished.

It also doesn't matter if you just work hard. You have to do deliberate practice, specific practice to improve a small portion of the overall picture. Tiger Woods spent hundreds of hours hitting balls in sand, even though it rarely occurs in real games. Benjamin Franklin learned prose by taking an idea, expressing the idea in his own sentence, then comparing that sentence with the same idea expressed in the classics. This is targeted work to practice one small specific skill.

While anyone can do the necessary hard preparation work to do great work, few have the resources to do it. The passion to put in the hours has to be put into someone, usually the parents. The roadmap to start targeted practice has to be developed by a mentor. The support network to actually push someone, to give them the necessarymotivation, has to be built over years before someone can actually start managing themselves.

This notion actually made me start to wonder. When hiring, instead of looking at people in their current state, we should simply look for one attribute: Do they constantly improve themselves? Perhaps if they are constantly getting better, and can articulate what they have done to specifically improve some skill, that person may be able to contribute leaps and bounds more than someone who may currently know more but has stopped improving. This is especially important as hiring is probably the one of the most important things an organization needs to do.

Overall, Talent is Overrated presents an interesting premise, one that invigorates you to start working towards great work.

Coders At Work, by Peter Seibel, interviews 15 famous computer scientists about both the technical and non-technical issues in computer science.

Seibel starts off by asking every person how they learned to program. The person answers, and Siebel keeps digging for more wherever it goes, creating a conversational tone that makes the book an easy read with immense depth. Whenever a pause in the conversation is hit, Siebel asks another standard question. Rinse and repeat for 4 or 5 main questions. Siebel is quite a skilled interviewer. He goes in depth when he needs to and gives each question enough time to cover the major issues. The result is that you get to see how 15 respected people have totally different views on the same subject.

For example, how is computer science as a field, going to solve parallelism? We have so many cores and no idea what to do with them. Many say functional languages are the way to go as they give you this nice ability to go do some piece of work given an independent set of data. Others say transactional memory is just one of many ways to solve the concurrent problem.

The book also gives insight as to how differently people approach programming. Some like the "bottom-up" approach: you just start writing code, hashing things out as they go. Some, notably Donald Knuth, like to think about the program for months on end before even touching a computer. Some programmers need nothing more than a text editor and print statements to debug any program. Amazingly, one of the interviewees who is known for his debugging abilities, simply rewrites everything and magically bugs go away.

Since the programmers were good, many eventually moved into management. Siebel asked about managing computer scientists starting with one of the biggest problems: "how do you find great talent?". Some of the interviewees went with a very unsatisfying answer - it's a gut feeling. They have to talk with the person for an hour. They have to bounce ideas off someone's head, see how their head works. Or they just ask them about their old projects and see what problems they encountered and how they solved them. Thankfully, many of the interviewees didn't like the logic puzzle approach to finding people. (I bomb magnificently at such puzzles!)

Others such as the director of Yahoo pointed out that he looks at their writing skills. If they have great English, they probably have great code. A few other people said the same thing. Then it hit me that it could entirely be true. Both writing and coding are fundamentally about translating an idea into something understandable. English for humans; code for computers. Both use the same thought processes. An essay needs structure, needs to be edited, and rewritten numerous times, which sounds a lot like refactoring.

The great thing is that coders at work is filled with many more "ah ha!" moments. These 15 genius' just keep throwing insight after insight in such explicit glory that I found myself feeling like a better programmer just by reading the book. If you're a programmer that cares about the craft at all, you need this book.

Most of the business books I've read have the common thread of "going to the edges". The middle is boring, average. Starbucks was at the edge, now its mainstream. It's the whole idea of Indie versus mainstream. Seth Godin argues: if you want to succeed, run to the edge, get used to the awkwardness and stay there. As I think back, it's true. Going for a Ph.D is relatively edgy. Working on compilers and maintaining a blog are kind of "edgy". And a big part of doing it is listening to your gut.

And that's all Ignore Everybody says. Find your passion, hone it, box it, and own it. The book is a bunch of drawings on a business cards with witty sayings. One image was particularly poignant:

If that hit a chord with you, checkout this book. Hugh adds a one or two page story containing his ideas on life, experiences, and his friend's experiences. Each page just gives you something to think about. Until the end when you realize, sometimes this works, this doesn't, and I have to find my own thing, and thus reliving the "ignore everybody" idea.
 

Europeans just don't like America. This idea never truly hit me until I started talking to a lot of Europeans. I work mostly with Europeans, and have been exposed to a gratuitous amount of Austrian culture. I've learned to appreciate many aspects of European culture such as coffee, beer, sitting outside for the sake of sitting outside, and gluvine. These new aspects of culture are simply lovable. However, one thing that always bugged me was the notion of something becoming "Americanized" and the negative connotations associated with the word. I didn't quite understand what "Americanized" meant until I read Uncouth Nation.

Uncouth Nation drills into the history and cause for European anti-Americanism. It's a rigorous academic piece with the 1/5 of the book containing footnotes and references. It's a trough to read but extremely illuminating. Europe hates America not just due to the justifiable gripes of the Iraq War and Guantanamo, but European elites have always had qualms with America. Ever since Columbus found the "New World", Europe became the "Old World". America was blessed with the word "New World" and all of its connotations, creating an envy among the European elites. This envy created a situation where European elites fabricated a horridness about America. American soil would suck all that is good from any European. Books and articles discussed the idea that a European would become ill by eating American grown food. This sense of distaste for America expands into modern America culture, politics, economics, and just about every facet of American life. America has no culture. Movies where things blow up are for simpletons and is so uncivilized. America is too capitalist. Corporations are too big, destroying the world wherever they go. America is too arrogant, ignoring the world sport of Soccer. No matter what, America has it wrong.

Yet while Uncouth Nation unveils many of the qualms that Europeans have with Americans, it is also an ardent defense of America and American policies. Yes many specific issues anyone may have with American POLICY can be debated, but much of the gripe Europe has with America is completely irrational and hypocritical. For example, one claim is that Americans are arrogant, pushing our opinions on others, forcing Europe to digest what "lowly" culture we have. But this argument is completely unfounded. Yes we ship our movies out to Europe, but Europe does the same. Nobody forces Europeans to go watch the same movies that are produced in Hollywood. Or take the argument that American capitalism is being shipped across the world. Isn't BMW selling cars in America? Saying Americans are arrogant since we don't watch/play soccer doesn't make sense. What about the hypocrisy of Europeans blaming Americans for creating women's soccer as an arrogant deterioration of the sport. However, isn't that one of the most hypocritical statements ever? Europeans claiming that Americans that they are ruining soccer by letting women play is extreme prejudice. Europe are just displaying their own sense of discrimination against women.

Of course these are just generalizations and there will always be exceptions. But Uncouth Nation unveils a level of discrimination with no foundation. If you like soccer, and I like football, so what. If Asians like eating rice and Europeans like eating potatoes, so what? One isn't intrinsically better. That is the true value of this book. Uncouth Nation exposes European Anti-Americanism for what it is: prejudice. And for that, you should read it.