“Trauma is an indivisible part of human existence. It takes many forms but spares no one.”

The Trauma of Everyday Life is about the parallels between ancient Buddhism and modern day psychotherapy. Buddhism and psychotherapy are remarkably similar in their approach to soothing the pain of existence, this book is an exploration of their methods and dogma. Even though one is a religion and the other strives to be modern and secular, both attempt to soothe the anxieties of life by examining personal problems and repeated behaviors. They both start by acknowledging that trauma is inevitable and attempt to figure out what to deal with it.

Simply acknowledging that trauma is unavoidable is therapeutic. Throughout this book, Mark Epstein talks about the life and teachings of Buddha and his experience as a therapist, helping others through the trauma of existence.

In line with this book, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny summarizes the importance of Buddhism this way: “In the spiritual realm, India gave us Buddhism, the first major religion to stress tolerance and nonviolence, the only major religion to spread far and wide without conquest, and arguably the major religion whose founding doctrines (unembellished by later additions) most readily survive the modifying force of modern science.”

Further Links:

School of Life video summary of the Buddha and his principals.
BBC documentary on Freud and the origins of psychotherapy and mass psychology: The Century of the Self.
Buy from Amazon: The Trauma of Everyday Life

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It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.

—Steve Jobs

This book is about how technology is driven forward by small companies while larger firms often become bloated and obsolete. Even though the companies with the most money and employees might make a discovery it’s oftentimes not in their best interest to make a business off of this new technology.

Oftentimes, innovations aren’t immediately profitable and their utility isn’t immediately apparent. The book heavily influenced Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and many other technology entrepreneurs of the past couple decades. This is why newer technology companies are so segmented and have divisions in so many different products, both mature and developing. Google is in effect run more like a conglomeration of many smaller business (advertising, search, maps, flying cars) than a single entity.

Giant companies have a tough time competing with smaller, more flexible companies. I found this quote from the book I’m currently reading, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny” by Robert Wright, to do a good job putting this phenomenon into a larger historical context:

When a civilization such as Rome dominates its neighbors, it typically possesses some sort of cultural edge: better weapons, say, or better economic organization. Yet this dominance is hard to maintain precisely because these valuable memes tend naturally to spread beyond its borders, empowering its rivals. In the case of Rome, the barbarian-empowering memes included military strategy. But the exact memes will differ from case to case. As the historian Mark Elvin has observed, the diffusion of Chinese iron-making technology to the Mongols during the thirteenth century would come back to haunt China. Elvin was among the first to clearly see that this is a general dynamic in history: the very advancement of advanced societies can bring the seeds of their destruction. As Elman Service put the matter: “The precocious developing society broadcasts its seeds, so to speak, outside its own area, and some of them root and grow vigorously in new soil, sometimes becoming stronger than the parent stock, finally to dominate both their environments.”

Companies, just like countries, face growing pains from competition.

Further links:
MIT Summary
Farnam Street: “Escape The Innovator’s Dilemma”
Clayton Christensen Talks About The Innovator’s Dilemma
Buy from Amazon:The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business

Interesting anecdotes and new vocabulary:

The first hard drive
Bernoulli’s Principal: The physical law that liquid flows faster the less constricted it is.
Joseph Schumpter ‘creative destruction’: “the process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.”
Early retail innovators: John Wanamaker, George Hartford (A&P), Frank Woolworth, W.T. Grant, General Wood (Sears), Michael Cullen (supermarkets), and Eugene Ferkauf.
locus—Latin for ‘place’ SEE: locus of control
collocated—to be placed side by side.
Technology: as used in this book, means the processes by which an organization transforms labor, capital, materials, and information into products and services of greater value.
Sustaining Technology: Radically or incrementally improving the performance of existing products along the dimensions of performance that mainstream customers in major markets value.
Disruptive Technology: A completely different kind of technology that typically takes a while to catch on and match the performance of the previous technologies in place but eventually comes to dominate the market.
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