For a long time, I had on my reading list Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ by Daniel Goleman. I finally got around to reading this classic of psychology and learned a lot from it.

I'm afraid I kind of did it backwards though: I think this book has influenced and been the foundation for many other texts that built on top it, and I probably read a lot of those other books first, so many of the ideas in this book were less surprising. What I didn't realize is how much of an emphasis this book had on biology and child development, and I liked a lot of the research it reviewed in that area.

Below are my main notes and takeaways from the book. The biggest lesson I got out of it was that with attention and training, one can improve one's "EQ," which is really important for happiness and effectiveness in various parts of life.

I was debating the pros and cons of various organizational structures with a colleague of mine who's a former Navy SEAL, and he was kind enough to gift me the book One Mission: How Leaders Build a Team of Teams written by Chris Fussell, with whom he worked on the Teams before.

Before reading this book, I always thought of "bureaucracy" as a bad word, but now I see why it exists and what important functions it serves. I also got a really good sense as to how to build a hybrid organization that aims to balance between periods of decentralization/agility/bottom-up with periods of stability/centralization/top-down.

I also really enjoyed hearing about how to implement O&I (Operations & Intelligence) Forums to get key stakeholders on the same page quickly using technology, and how to match the operating rhythm of a group with that of its environment/market. I aim to put in practice a lot of the major lessons from this book.

My major notes and takeaways are below.

My good friend Jimi recommended to me the book ​Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies by Geoffrey West. I found it very interesting from a nerdy scientific standpoint.

I enjoyed the discussions of fractals and complexity theory. My biggest major takeaways were all related to the scaling effects of life and biology and self-similarity around different species. The company stuff was also interesting, but less compelling from my standpoint (or maybe I've just read more in that department before), and the area I found least interesting was the city stuff, but it was still well written and had good information.

I definitely recommend this to anyone interested in biology and science/math in general. Below are my main notes and takeaways from the book.