I don’t remember who recommended this book to me, but I bought it on impulse for a few dollars.

It comes from an earlier era — 2007 — a strange period in which companies like Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, and Microsoft were still widely respected on college campuses. During this strange time, elite college students wanted to be working in derivatives, consulting, or working on Windows Vista.

I’m being inappropriately rude here, because it’s actually a useful book packed into a small package. It distinguishes why some organizations succeed over the long run and others don’t: top-tier companies have a better understanding of how to recruit, train, and motivate young employees:

“Time to face the facts! Students do not think about what’s best for your organization during the recruiting process. They may start to think about the company once they actually begin to work, but while they’re deciding where they will work, they think about only one thing: keeping their options open.”

While it may seem like the book’s advice — to give college graduates some measure of responsibility, to give perks like travel, to give them role flexibility — are obvious, they’re actually not to people who suck at business or are ignorant about how to get new recruits motivated.

The book is geared towards companies doing college recruiting. There’s almost nothing about how to find and hire candidates who are already out of college — which disappointed me. I hoped to get a book that was a more general guide to spotting talent — because as Mark Suster writes, everyone at a startup should Always Be Recruiting.

What also surprised me was to learn about how much spying and intelligence-gathering top corporations do at the best universities. I went to two very good schools, but I dropped out before I could encounter recruiting-mania, so it was interesting to read about how those networks function.

I bought this book on introversion immediately on the advice of my old friend (and recent Brooklyn transplant) Ned White.

Yes, dear reader, if I trust your recommendation enough, I’ll buy a book on your say-so, read the whole thing, and then tell you what I think of it at the end. I can call multiple witnesses to attest to this perverse habit of mine.

I’ve not typically thought of myself as as introvert, despite the massive quantities of evidence in favor of the adjective being applied to me. I went roughly four years working in an apartment by myself, with only e-mails and the occasional Skype call to keep me company during the workday.

I enjoy talking to people. I’m comfortable performing in front of an audience. I can run a meeting. I enjoy casual banter. All of these made me think that I’m some kind of hybrid.

After reading this book, I’m not so sure anymore. The author, Marti Laney, defines introversion and extroversion in terms of whether social activity energizes you or drains you. Reviewing my own life, I know that chatting with people is exhausting. I don’t need as many casual friends as most other people that I’ve met. I tend to keep a small number of close friendships. Parties with large numbers of strangers alternately exhaust and terrify me.

I feel most comfortable in crowds of people who don’t know me. What I love about New York City (even though I don’t live there anymore) is how easy it is to be alone in a crowd.

I learned that I’m not fucked up because I dislike keeping a lot of random people in my life, and that it takes me an onerous level of effort to do something like “hang out” with “bros” on a couch, slamming “brewskies” and chatting about sporting events. It’s because that kind of activity drains the hell out of me.

It also explains why I can’t tolerate roommates — the mere presence of someone else in an apartment when I’m trying to get myself together for the next day prevents me from restoring my brain:

The more introverted you are, the more you need a serene environment for processing stimuli and for recharging. Why is processing time so crucial? Without it, you get information overload. New input lands on top of old input, and suddenly, your threshold is reached and you shut down. Crash. Circuits are jammed. Numbness sets in.

The book also taught me a measure of empathy for extroverts. I have usually found typical socialization habits of extroverts to be incomprehensible. Now, I’m starting to understand — a party for an extrovert is as enjoyable and relaxing as solitude is for me.

The author describes it simply:

They may be the ones who are raring to go after a party, asking, What shall we do next? Often the harder part for them is relaxing and giving their bodies a rest. Introverts, on the other hand, are energized by the internal world—by ideas, impressions, and emotions. Counter to our stereotypes of introverts, they are not necessarily quiet or withdrawn, but their focus is inside their heads.

The book’s title is about the advantages of introverts, because apparently pro-extrovert propaganda dominates America, which makes introverts feel deficient about themselves.

One observation that resonated with me (and may resonate with you) is the introverted tendency to attempt to learn as much about a topic as possible before feeling confident about it:

Many introverts don’t feel as if they know enough about a subject until they know almost everything, and that’s the way I approached this project. This happens for three reasons. First, introverts can imagine the vastness of any subject. Second, they have had the experience of their brain locking, so in an attempt to avoid that awful blank-mind moment, they overprepare by accruing as much information as they can.

I want to say that I don’t ‘over-prepare,’ but it usually takes me around three to six books read on a topic before I feel confident enough to win debates on it.

An introverted character brings sometimes-unpopular skills to any group:

We bring important attributes to the party—the ability to focus deeply, an understanding of how a change will affect everyone involved, the capacity to observe, a propensity for thinking outside the box, the strength to make unpopular decisions, and the potential to slow the world down a notch.

Extroverts cohere groups. They seem to focus on surface interactions. For introverts, the world of thought is brighter than the sensory world that we share with others. When I’m speaking with someone, I attempt to understand the inner world of the other person I’m talking to. I consider what’s being said to be the small exposed peak of an island that’s mostly submerged.

This book is easy to recommend, unlike most of the other psychology books that I’ve read. Most psychology books require too much effort from the reader to be applied effectively. Anyone can understand this one and make use of it.

Also, it seems like reading about introverts is chic these days, especially now that nerds are becoming billionaires again.

Read my notes on Hewitt Book List, my Quora board about what I’m reading.

I was glad to find pictures of tits in this book when I didn’t expect them.

Ogilvy on Advertising is one of those books that I routinely thought “you should buy this book, JC” many times over the last two years. It took me a long time to act on my self-nagging, because it  costs $35, and I experience conniptions whenever I spend more than $20 at a time.

It’s embarrassing to me that I avoided reading this for so long. It’s not that I couldn’t have afforded the $35 earlier. It’s just that I was always reading something else, and had grown to prefer digital books. All of those were dumb rationalizations.

This is more than just a useful book for people interested in advertising. It’s valuable for anyone even vaguely interested in managing people, running a business, or persuading others to your point of view. Even though I’ve probably read dozens of blog posts and articles about Ogilvy’s work, I still learned something new on almost every page.

Also, as I mentioned earlier, there are tits in this book. It ostensibly demonstrates differences in mores between advertisements from different cultures.

Reading Ogilvy made me feel like I was in the presence of a powerful mind. He writes on knowledge and advertising:

“What distinguishes the great surgeon is that he knows more than other surgeons. It is the same with advertising agents. The good ones know more.”

It’s not always easy for people to make this connection. I don’t always make this connection with myself (hence why I delayed reading this book for years after I put it on my Amazon wishlist).

This is probably because it took me a long time to actually think that business was worthwhile. I thought that business was for stupid chumps. I wanted to write about politics — African wars, Russian corruption, and American scandals. I wanted to be a big-shot writer.  I never wanted to be a plebian pusher of products. I was much too brilliant to bother.

I had it backwards, intellectually, and it’s taken me a long time to go into reverse and drive myself along a more productive route. I had to develop a little humility. I had to develop the wisdom that selling products to people is a lot more helpful than lecturing them about obscure political topics that “they should” care about.

No busybody intellectual ever clothed anyone, fed the hungry, or cured the sick. The tailor, the baker, and the doctor did all three — and the ad-man told the people that their services were worthwhile and explained where to find them.

On leadership, Ogilvy writes

“The best leaders are be found among those executives who have a strong component of unorthodoxy in their characters. Instead of resisting innovation, they symbolize it — and companies cannot grow without innovation.”

Principles like these don’t expire. Innovation requires unconventional characters.

Speaking again of breasts in advertising, Ogilvy counsels against cheap stunts that fail to feature the product:

“Some copywriters, assuming the reader will find the product as boring as they do, try to inveigle him into their ads with pictures of babies, beagles, and bosoms. This is a mistake.”

Many young online businesses continue to struggle with this concept. That which people click on does not necessarily sell a product. People will click for the boobs, but leave the product behind.

Ogilvy knows how to make a reader feel like he’s the only person in the room. Reading his work, I felt like I was the only guy that the author cared about, even though he died when I was 13 years old. It was like reading a long letter with beautiful illustrations by a guy who cared ferociously that I would learn everything that he could teach me in as short and appealing a package as possible.

I feel ashamed that I was that copywriter guy who wrote advertisements without caring to educate myself about the field until I had been working in it for a couple years. I coasted on “talent,” which is to say that I muddled through on youthful passion and privilege until it stopped working. Avoid the same mistakes that I did, no matter what field you work in.

What I’m starting to understand is that real knowledge compounds rapidly. That ‘genius surgeon’ doesn’t emerge fully formed into the emergency room jamming scalpels into brain matter.

He gets that way by accumulating more knowledge than the lazier surgeons and applying it more effectively.

Apply Ogilvy’s advice in general and not just specifically to advertising:

“If you follow the advice I have given you, you will do your homework, avoid committees, learn from research, watch what the direct-response advertisers do, and stay away from irrelevant sex.”

Damn! If only I’d read this when I was younger.

Finishing The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman leaves me feeling like I’ve just joined a high-end cult.

Reading it made me feel like an uneducated rube that had just gone through a crash course taught by a genius-level professor. Norman respects his readers. He’s earned respect in industry that goes back decades.

This is a book of principles. It’ll hold up decades from now.

The book used to be entitled The Psychology of Everday Things, but as Norman explains in the introduction, it lead to the book being mis-categorized in bookstores. It felt almost as revelatory as one of the many affecting psychology books that I’ve read. Instead of human on human relations, this book puts man-on-thing relations on the couch.

The author writes

“Each time a new technology comes along, new designers make the same horrible mistakes as their predecessors. Technologists are not noted for learning from the errors of the past. They look forward, not behind, so they repeat the same problems over and over again.”

This is much like other human endeavors, from politics to love relationships. Technologists often find new ways to reincarnate ancient errors. Norman writes that ”we are surrounded with objects of desire, not objects of use.” Bad but flashy products that succeed on the marketplace are like beautiful girls with big breasts that also have vacuous minds and cruel temperaments.

Norman suggests that designers should “Analyze a task, and… see how it can be made easier.” Developers are more likely to analyze some existing interface and how its aesthetics can be altered. Instead, it’s better to ask what task you want the user to accomplish and to remove any impediments to them.

The author’s observation that…

“It is the rare organization that is content to let a good product stand or to let natural evolution perfect it slowly. No, each year a “new, improved” model must come out, usually incorporating new features that do not use the old as a starting point. In far too many instances, the results spell disaster for the consumer.”

…left a bitter feeling in me. Companies like Twitter seem to be superb at this (ignoring a few mis-steps). Most others aren’t. There’s nothing wrong with picking a popular problem that a lot of people want solved and then delivering a more effective solution for it at a great price.

The Design of Everyday Things fits well with a running theme in most of the books that I’ve read recently: the limitations of the mind. A major error that I grew up believing was that there were “no real mental limits” — that mental exhaustion was some combination of moral failing and laziness. It’s been rough for me to learn my own limitations and to understand those of others.

It may not be as cathartic a discovery as a personal psychological breakthrough, but the book persuaded me to stop blaming myself and to never again blame a user for a failure to understand a product. Once you accept this, it becomes easier to critique existing designs — because when you fail to understand something, you can halt the impulse to self-attack for screwing up and blame the product instead.

Be the kid in the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes when it comes to design. It seems like so many products are build from the perspective of that emperor and his sycophantic courtiers. This short (~200 page) book provides a usable toolkit for both critiquing existing design and building usable products.