Max Mednik
  • Home
  • About
  • Interests
    • Angel investing
    • Magic
    • Scuba Diving
  • Blog
  • Contact

Readings and musings

Notes on When I Stop Talking, You'll Know I'm Dead by Jerry Weintraub

9/29/2015

0 Comments

 
Picture
I just finished the heartwarming and inspiring book When I Stop Talking, You'll Know I'm Dead: Useful Stories from a Persuasive Man by Jerry Weintraub and Rich Cohen. I heard about it from Ryan Holiday's reading newsletter.

This was almost my second book in a row about the entertainment business and true hustlers in that realm (the one I finished earlier this month was A Curious Mind by Brian Glazer). And both harken back in my mind to The Kid Stays in the Picture by Robert Evans, which I read in 2013. And just last week I watched Supermensch, about Shep Gordon, which my friend recommended to me and which I loved. So much can be learned about life from the crazy lives all these guys have lived!

I really, really liked this book by Weintraub. It was co-written with Rich Cohen, who wrote The Fish That Ate the Whale, which I really enjoyed reading last year. It was a combination of street-smart lessons, advice for business and personal life, and lots of hilarious anecdotes about crazy times with some of the most famous people ever (Elvis, Sinatra, etc.).

I was very sad to hear that only a couple months ago Jerry passed away. This book is truly a gift that he has left us. Below are some of my biggest takeaways from its many wonderful stories.
​
  • ​All about packaging; makes a difference and allows discovery for sales
  • Parents taught him to earn money to buy what he wanted
  • Later the work/means becomes the end if u can enjoy it
  • Relationships are the only thing that matters in life
  • Lots of odd jobs and came up with ideas
  • Entrepreneur
  • People will pay u to make their lives easier
  • Never get paid once for doing something twice
  • Personal service is the name of the game
  • Always take the time to make the pitch
  • As soon as u feel comfortable that's when it's time to start over
  • Seeing the pattern of money and opportunities everywhere 
  • Finding your own path and packaging
  • As long as ur assets exceed liabilities ur gonna have a good life
  • Improv exercises: sometimes when in a jam just need to open ur mouth and start talking and see where the words take u
  • Be willing to take risks
  • When the obvious thing is to lie, Tell the truth
  • When the game changes, u gotta change with it to survive
  • Don't follow another man's script
  • A talent manager must be an optimist
  • Buy your own steak; it's cheaper
  • Phrases to create demand: "first come first served", "limited edition"
  • Idea only crazy until someone does it
  • Standing up for yourself against underground mob
  • Promising something before u have it
  • Context
  • Home field advantage
  • Need to control your product
  • Persistence and keep talking
  • Accomplish things on the third or fourth try
  • Better to be feared than loved
  • Cut out middle man
  • Need to innovate and improvise
  • Always meet in person to discuss deal
  • Even if u have the greatest script in the world it won't work if the actors don't play their parts
  • Let the other guy save face but keep score
  • Being able to cross cultures and frontiers
  • Power of spontaneity and first take 
  • Never downplay your own special thing
  • Sell someone as if they're already a star
  • Stand up for yourself when people mistreat u
  • When u want to learn, find someone and study them
  • Work with the best ppl; life is too short to work for morons
  • When you're a manager you're working for someone else not yourself
  • Hotels are never really sold out
  • Wake up early to beat others
  • You have to be willing to walk away from the most comfortable perks precisely because they're the most comfortable
  • No matter your age you're never too old to stop looking for teachers
  • As long as you're here you might as well smile
  • If you find something you love keep doing it
  • Title without the job is the worst: u get all of the blame and none of the credit or the fun
  • Perception is reality
  • Grow into the suit
  • Need to be able to survive long series of failures
  • Talent doesn't go away; companies do which doesn't matter
  • Can never tell quality of bull fighter until he has been hit
  • Can learn how to act only when learn to be yourself
  • Authentic honesty with everyone
  • whenever you feel the urge to obfuscate tell the truth instead
  • Ask when u don't know
  • Listen when someone else is talking
  • Sell with joy so product fun to buy
  • Never afraid to fail
  • Never afraid to try or look silly or threatened by a new idea

0 Comments

Notes on The Secrets of Consulting by Gerald Weinberg

9/24/2015

1 Comment

 
Picture
Our office engineering reading group just finished going through The Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully by Gerald M. Weinberg. I really liked the book and got a lot out of it. It's not really about consulting; it's about dealing with other people in general and being street smart.

The book's tone was very similar to Taleb's, Buffett's, and Munger's: brutally honest, realistic, and folksy. Every chapter was filled with amusing stories and anecdotes, illustrating his dirt simple ideas and why people often forget them.

Below are my notes and biggest takeaways. As I read through the book, I saw so many examples of mistakes I had made or traps I had fallen into (like "Nothing new ever works" and the Law of Raspberry Jam), so reading this book was particularly meaningful for me.

1: why consulting is tough
Sherby's laws
1: in spite of what client may tell u, there's always a problem
2: no matter how it looks at first, it's always a people problem
3: never forget they're paying you by the hour not by the solution
4: if they didn't hire u, don't solve their problem 
10% promise: never promise more than 10% improvement. If u happen to achieve more, make sure it isn't noticed. 
Marvin's law: whatever the client is doing, advise something else
Credit rule: you'll never accomplish anything if u care who gets the credit
Lone Ranger fantasy: when clients don't show appreciation, pretend they're stunned by your performance, but never forget it's your fantasy not theirs
Law of raspberry jam: wider you spread it, thinner it gets. Influence or affluence: take your choice. 
Weinbergs' law of twins: most of the time, for most of the world, no matter how hard people work at it, nothing of any significance happens. For most systems, prediction of tomorrow is same as today. 
Rudy's rutabaga rule: once you eliminate your number one problem, number two gets a promotion
Hard laws of consulting
Hard law: if u can't accept failure, you'll never succeed as a consultant
Harder law: once u eliminate ur number one problem, YOU promote number two. Give up illusion that will ever finish solving problems. Learn to ignore problems. 
Hardest law: helping myself is even harder than helping others

2: cultivating a paradoxical frame of mind 
Consultants needed when logic not working
Don't be rational; be reasonable
People who think they know everything are easiest to fool
The business of life is too important to be taken seriously 
Optimitis and tradeoff treatment
Inability to resist solving problems
Correct answer: what are you willing to sacrifice
Tradeoff charts
One performance measure vs another
You don't get nothin for nothin
Treatment: let me check my tradeoff chart
Moving in one direction incurs a cost in the other
Time trade offs
Now vs later: balancing certainty with uncertainty 
Fisher's fundamental theorem: the better adapted u r, the less adaptable u tend to be
Risk vs certainty: different risk appetites
Third time charm: consultants tend to be most effective on the third problem u give them
Orange juice test: We can do it--and this is how much it will cost

3 being effective when u don't know what ur doing
Bolden rule: if you can't fix it, feature it
Marvins medical secrets
90% of all illness cures itself with no intervention. Deal gently with systems that should be able to cure themselves. If it ain't broke don't fix it. 
Repeatedly curing a system that can cure itself will eventually create a system that can't. 
Every prescription has 2 parts: the medicine and the method of ensuring correct use
If what they've been doing hasn't solved the problem, tell them to do something else
Make sure they pay you enough so they'll do what u say. The most important act in consulting is setting the fee.  
Don't give up the treatment too soon. Don't stick with the treatment too long. 
Know how pays much less than know when. 
Featuring failure
Bolden rule
Faking success
Gilded rule: if u can't feature it, fake it
Inverse gilded rule: if something is faked, it must need fixing

4 seeing what's there
Law of the hammer: The child who receives a hammer for Christmas will discover that everything needs pounding
The study of history
White bread warning: if u use the same recipe, you get the same bread
Study other people or group's evolution before suggesting how u can do it better
Don't ask others how to do something; ask them how they did it
History teaches history teaches
If you don't study history of org then will repeat mistakes
Boulding's backward basis: things are the way they are because they got that way
Sparks law of problem solution
Chances of solving a problem decline the closer u get to finding out who was the cause of the problem
Keep it simple and not too detailed; you're a consultant not a district attorney
Study for understanding not criticism
Look for what u like in the present situation and comment on it
Why whammy
We may run out of energy or air but not reasons
Seeing beyond the conspicuous
The bigness is not the horse
Most of us buy the label not the merchandise
The name of the thing is not the thing
Label is not full description for understanding 
Maintenance vs design
Create more specific labels and break things up
misdirection method: using emotionally charged label
3 finger rule: when you point finger at someone, notice where other three fingers pointed
5 minute rule
Clients always know how to solve their problems and always tell the solution in the first five minutes

5 seeing what's not there
Browns brilliant bequest
Words useful but always listen to the music (especially your own internal)
Missing tools
Absence of a tool is evidence of quality problem
Look at non-problems to see what's working 
Reasoning from what isn't there
Level law: effective problem-solvers may have many problems but rarely have a single dominant problem
Look for missing histories and missing requests for help
How to see what isn't there
Find out what u usually miss in design a tool to ensure that you don't miss it again
Use other people like janitors
Investigate other cultures
Use laundry lists
Ridiculous
Weinberg law of fetch: sometimes far fetched is only shortsighted 
Rule of three: if you can think of three things that might go wrong with your plans then there's something wrong with your thinking
Loosening up your thinking 
Look for analogies
Move to extremes 
look outside the boundary
Look for alibis versus explanations 
The emotional component
Incongruence insight: When words and music don't go together the point to a missing element

6 avoiding traps 
Titanic effect: thought that disaster is impossible often leads to an unthinkable disaster 
Staying out of trouble
Laws rules and edicts
Triggers
Main Maxim: what you don't know may not hurt you but what you but you don't remember always does
The potato chip principle: if you know your audience it's easy to set triggers
Building your own system of bills that you can't ignore
attach notes to remind u
Tally cards: Record times of doing something you don't like
Use physical devices 
use hand signals
Mutual trigger pacts
Using your unconscious mind
Listen to the songs in your head
Catchy commercials 

7 amplifying your impact
Teaching the blind: everyone sees a part of the whole and identifies the whole with that part
Getting stuck
Organizational jigglers to unstick systems
Giving speeches
Asking questions
Less is more
Teaching others to accept that other views are possible
Ppl need shared experiences to be on same communication page

8 gaining control of change
Romer's rule: best way to Lose something is to struggle to keep it
Prescott's pickle principle: cucumbers get more pickled than brine gets cucumbered
The system usually wins out against lone battler
A small system that tries to change a big system through long and continued contact is more likely to be changed itself
Roamer's rule: struggling to stay at home can make you a wanderer
Homer's rule: struggling to travel can make you stay at home
Fast food fallacy: no difference plus no difference repeated eventually equals a clear difference
Ford's fundamental feedback formula: people can do anything they want as long as they personally have to live with the consequences
Weinberg test: would you place your own life in the hands of this system?

9: how to make changes safely
Rhonda's first revelation: it may look like a crisis, but it's only the end of an illusion
Nothing new ever works
Yet people always want something new
Pandora's Pox: Nothing new ever works but there's always hope that this time will be different
Living with failure
Hope caused by marketers
Dealer's choice: Trust everyone but cut the cards
Let them try whatever they like, but teach them how to protect themselves
Accept failure
New system won't stop failures
Failure is inevitable
Trade improvement for perfection
Apply rule of 3 to consider how new system can fail
Invent a backup
Preventive medicine
Edsel edict: if u must have something new, take one, not two
Choosing your time and place to put change into effect
Volkswagen verity: if u can't refuse it (newness), defuse it
Make practice runs in similar situation
Break newness into parts to be adopted singly
Let others share in the breaking in
Rent before buy
Buy new models near end of model year
Add in one at a time, allow a generous breaking in period of lower productivity, give meaningful but not critical work, provide backups for inevitable failures 
Time bomb: response to these ideas as wasting time: time wounds all heels
Surest way to waste time is to throw caution to the winds
Rhonda's revelations
It may look like a crisis but it's only the end of an illusion
When change is inevitable we struggle most to keep what we value most
Use others' struggle to understand what they value most
When u create an illusion to prevent or soften change, the change becomes more likely and harder to take
Never protect PPl from the truth

10: what to do when they resist
U can make buffalo go anywhere as long as they want to go there
Naming the resistance in a neutral way
Keep mouth shut. Limit statement to 1-2 short sentences then stop talking. 
You can keep Buffalo out of anywhere just so long as they don't want to go there
U can make someone move when u hit on something they want
Introduce element of fantasy in asking what someone would change 
Find ways to relieve client fears and uncertainty
Insurance 
Options

11 marketing ur services
9th law of marketing: spend at least 1/4 of ur time doing nothing 
I need more business vs I need more time
Best way to get clients is to have clients
Spend at least one day a week getting exposure
Clients are more important to you than you can ever be to them
Never let a single client have more than one fourth of your business
Lynne's law of life: to be able to say yes to yourself be able to say no to any of your clients
The best marketing tools is a satisfied client
Give away your best ideas
It tastes better when u add your own egg
Involve the client in the solution
Keep slack in schedule

12 putting a price on your head
If they don't like your work, don't take their money
Pricing has many functions only one of which is the exchange of money
The more they pay you the more they love you
The less they pay you the less they respect you
The money is usually the smallest part of the price
Pricing is not a zero sum game
If u need the money, don't take the job
Money is more than price
Price is not a thing; it's a negotiated relationship
Principle of least regret: set the price so u won't regret it either way
All prices are ultimately based on feelings, both yours and theirs

13 how to be trusted
Nobody but u cares about the reason u let another person down
Trust takes years to win, moments to lose
People don't tell u when they stop trusting u
The trick of earning trust is to avoid all tricks
People are never liars in their own eyes
Always trust your client and cut the cards
Never be dishonest even if the client request never be dishonest even if the client requests it
Never promise anything
Always keep your promise
Get it in writing but depend on trust

14 getting people to follow your advice
In spite of your best efforts some plants will die
Never use cheap seeds or ideas
A prepared soil is the secret about gardening
Timing is critical
The plants that hold firmest are the ones that develop their own roots
Excessive watering produces weakness not strength

1 Comment

Notes on A Curious Mind by Brian Glazer

9/17/2015

0 Comments

 
Picture
A close friend recently told me to read A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life by Hollywood producer Brian Glazer. It was a quick, light read, and I enjoyed its collection of stories and observations about curiosity.

Brian is right that little is taught or researched about this important power we all have. It was neat to see how one person's life was pretty much defined by this behavior and how he used "curiosity conversations" throughout his life to learn about others and seek inspiration from outside his field. It reminded me a lot of Tim Ferriss's podcast interviews and the Half Half Man Book Club.

Below were some of my notes on the book and biggest takeaways. I liked how honest and straightforward the writing was, and it was neat to take a deep dive into the mind behind movies like Apollo 13 and A Beautiful Mind.

Intro
Curiosity helped him become movie producer and tell stories
Sit down and have curiosity conversations with people in different fields

1 no cure for curiosity
Not embarrassed to ask questions
People like to talk, especially about themselves, and all you need is a simple pretext to talk to them
Curiosity as way of uncovering ideas
Did cold calls asking for 5 minutes with high level people; wrote intro, not looking for job, have specific question 
Had to meet new person daily
Curiosity conversations 
At least one every 2 weeks
Spend time with people outside your industry
Ask questions to find stories

2: thinking like other people
Ideas as currency
Respect questions 

3: curiosity insight 

4: curiosity as superpower
Make the hardest call of the day first

5: every conversation is a curiosity conversation 
Ask questions instead of giving instructions

6: good taste and anticuriosity
When settled mind on project u want, stop getting more criticism and feedback when someone says no
Need to develop some invulnerability

7 golden age of curiosity

0 Comments
<<Previous

    Archives

    June 2021
    May 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    April 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    May 2019
    March 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    March 2012
    February 2012
    January 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011
    October 2011
    September 2011
    August 2011
    July 2011
    June 2011
    May 2011
    April 2011
    March 2011
    February 2011
    January 2011
    December 2010
    November 2010
    October 2010
    September 2010
    August 2010
    July 2010
    June 2010
    May 2010
    April 2010
    March 2010
    February 2010

    Categories

    All
    Angel Investing
    Cacti
    Cars
    China
    Community Service
    Culture
    Design
    Djing
    Dogs
    Education
    Entertainment
    Entrepreneurship
    Family
    Finance
    Food
    Google
    Happiness
    Incentives
    Investment Banking
    Judaism
    Law
    Lighting
    Magic
    Marketing
    Medicine
    Networking
    Nolabound
    Philosophy
    Professionalism
    Psychology
    Reading
    Real Estate
    Religion
    Romance
    Sales
    Science
    Shangri-La
    Social Entrepreneurship
    Social Media
    Sports
    Teams
    Technology
    Travel
    Turtles
    Ucla
    Venture Capital
    Web Services
    Weddings
    Zen

    Subscribe

    RSS Feed

Picture
Picture
  • Home
  • About
  • Interests
    • Angel investing
    • Magic
    • Scuba Diving
  • Blog
  • Contact