Reading some of these books recommended here, perhaps the most shocking thing is that so much is due to randomness: an arbitrary person does something small that turns out to be on the critical path, and without it the big thing would not get completed.
I like the kind of books recommended here, but please be aware of survivor's bias (there not many books about failures! Any great recommendations? "How we could NOT get back to the moon again", "Recall: Toyota hits the breaks", "Last fag: how big tobacco lost against a Minneapolis law firm" ;-) and the fact that the winner gets to write the history. For example, next month, Bill Gates new memoir "Source Code" will come out, the first of three planned autobiographical books, and I doubt he will share with us how he strongarmed PC manufacturers into shipping Windows pre-installed in order to get the OS monopoly and other important events.
That's my problem with a lot of the literature on building successful businesses. They all seem to be offering a white glove path and don't talk about all the tactics ranging from shady to downright illegal that helped many of the biggest companies today to be where they are now.
Unorthodox suggestion - look at the documentaries and lit on mob tactics.
The mob is basically a corporation, held together by a charismatic CEO. In its later years, violence was (I think?) less common, so politics and deal-making became the norm. However, given the subject matter, they likely wouldn't whitewash the reality of it.
Damn you’re right I’m tired of naïve explanations we can find in books. Wouldnt the authors be in legal trouble though ?
Back in the day, when authors were afraid of negative (public perception) pushback, they used to write and publish under pseudonyms.
Not sure it'd work today, everyone and their mother seems so focus on building their "personal brand" and attaching their name to everything that it seems impossible for an author to not take credit for something that would surely make big waves.
Unraveling a person behind a pseudonym and Doxing is much easier nowadays though. But I guess a self hosted blog would work just fine
I share your thoughts. Sometimes you just need to be at the right place, at the right time, solving the exact problem and this is troublesome, especially in this era when so much is already invented.
Maybe I just have a wrong view, but I don't know how to decouple from this.
The fact that capitalism can be modeled by pure random chance only drives the point home, in my opinion. So much depends on luck...
That being said, luck can be engineered, to a degree:
- meeting people; networking
- having access to resources
- recognizing potential opportunities and taking advantage of them
That being said, I'm by no means "successful" but I'm also not a "failure" ... I win some, and I lose some.
And just following up: Even though there is a significant amount of random chance, that does not mean you are randomly sorted into success and failure.
Even if you move from 0 to success with a very-small positive bias on your random walk, even the lower-bound on most of the results will be increasing with sqrt(n).
Don't let randomness dissuade you from effort, even maximal effort, because every thing you can do it increase your "bias towards success" will have an effect over long time scales.
Also, start early - stretch the time scale.
One of the fun things about reading Young Stalin, which is a biography of Stalin from birth to the Russian revolution, is nobody liked him in Georgia where he grew up, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union, so it was easy for the biographer to get sources to tell all the negative and horrifying details of his earlier life building and running organized crime gangs to fund the Russian revolution. Imagine the most paranoid narcissistic jerks you've ever known who also happen to be exceptionally intelligent decide to take over a country and they manage to pull it off. Fascinating stuff.
Definitely agree on that last point, and recommended folks read Jerry Kaplan's _StartUp_ which tells the story of how MS wiped out Go Corp. and eliminated PenPoint from the marketplace:
> an arbitrary person does something small that turns out to be on the critical path, and without it the big thing would not get completed.
I've been on a somewhat James Burke binge for the last 6 months or so. For the ones who don't know, Burke write books and makes TV shows talking about inventions/technology and how they're all connected, often by chance and randomness.
And the amount of discoveries we (humanity) made by pure luck/chance/coincident is incredible. So many things we find vital today can be summed up to be discovered when someone was bored and was randomly messing around with stuff, or they tried to do something that would never have worked, but accidentally did X and noticed something strange.
Just a random example I can recall: In 1928, Alexander Fleming was researching influenza when he noticed that some mold had accidentally contaminated his petri dishes. Looking into it further, he noticed that the mold seemed to be killing the bacteria. Because of that, this particular species of mold became world famous ("Penicillium notatum") and Penicillin became the world's first antibiotic :)
And how Bill mom (IBM board member) helped him to win the contract for... IBM, despite better options on the market. Thanks to that we were all rewarded with such gems like Windows 98 ME or Windows Vista.
Why reason in hypotheticals?
Microsoft has been crucial into bringing compute in people's homes, the evolution of video gaming, the internet etc.
They fluked a lot, they used their advantageous position like most companies try to, but assuming that we would have gotten better alternatives is not a given.
Also, in hindsight was IBM wrong to bet on Microsoft? They sure have done multi hundred billions $ together.
I have a contrary opinion: most important things are started by apparently small things, but there is a huge amount of training, effort and persistence behind getting to that small thing. Zuckerberg was a serial entrepreneur who already made a few successful websites/apps before Facebook, Nvidia spent decades becoming the world's best GPU manufacturer (when they started there were ~300 graphics processor companies), etc etc.
I don’t think that’s contrary, rather both are usually true. You have to get lucky but also be in a position to take advantage when you do.
enjoyed seeing bill gates mentioned here (in this context). i had no idea msods was essentially bought until very recently (mentioned in a book i've been listening to - "fancy bear goes fishing" for those interested - which shines some light on security practices, or lack thereof, by microsoft)
In the 1930s Phyllis Pearsall (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllis_Pearsall) walked 3000 miles of every street of London (23000), collected house numbers, to create a street atlas to sell. Took her 4 years of 18 hour days. The book title is "Mrs P's Journey". The whole history of early map making is fascinating.
The Box by Marc Levinson is the incredible story of the dawn of containerized shipping.
It is a little shocking just how recently this happened (the very first experimental loads were in the 1950s), and that the standard of shipping before containers was for longshoremen to literally hand carry boxes of stuff onto ships and stuff them just anywhere. You would be stunned to realize just how new and unused the piers of San Francisco really are, because they were built with massive government subsidies at exactly the wrong time.
The book covers the courageous people involved, the political and economic impacts, and how the industry truly found its footing prioritizing absolutely reducing operational costs over all other concerns (like delivery speed).
I second this recommendation of a fantastic book, mildly inconvenienced by the author delving into _very specific details_, like whole paragraphs of different sizes of locks that felt like line noise to me.
It also offers a very interesting perspective on the fears of the AI/automation craze, like, what happened to whole towns of dock workers who used to manually pack goods in round-hulled ships and got replaced by a single machine moving a container on a flat ship.
Still, I'm not sure it's exactly "people who did hard things" as much as the story of decades-long incremental changes brought by a bunch of people.
Also research the development of the pallet and the pallet jack, which had similar effects.
Endurance - about Ernest Shackleton and his crew during their 1914-1916 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance:_Shackleton%27s_In...
Even if it probably isn’t exactly what you were looking for, I’d wholeheartedly recommend The Spy and the Traitor by Ben McIntyre, documenting the story of Oleg Gordievsky, the soviet spy that crossed over to the MI5 during the Cold War. It gave me a glimpse into the secret war at the time, the stuff that inspired James Bond, and the hardships and permanent threat faced by a spy trying to live several lives at once. It was one hell of a read.
All of the author's books are great imo. If you like cold war spy stories, you'd also enjoy Billion Dollar Spy.
Agreed, this is probably the most gripping non-fiction I've ever read
Surviving a concentration camp seems a tad difficult.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man's_Search_for_Meaning
Everyone should read this at least twice in their lives.
Another book about survival there: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_of_the_Gods When I have a bad day I think about this book and intellectuals in hell.
To avoid some survivorship bias and maybe offer something you wont find other recommending.
Gamasutra used to offer these amazing post mortems written up by game developers after shipping a product. Often recounting all their failures and how they still shipped.
I find reading books about how people did hard things to be very motivating and therapeutic, especially when facing a difficult task myself! I’ve enjoyed all of these; they were all recommendations from HN.
Showstopper - Windows NT
Losing the Signal - BlackBerry
Made in Japan - Sony
Piloting Palm - Palm
Sweating Bullets - PowerPoint
Folklore.org - Early Apple.
The “Mac Folklore Radio Podcast” [0]. Has a few interesting stories of people innovating and solving challenges.
Showstopper is a must read for anyone who is interested in living a pure engineering life. David Cutler is one of my heroes and I'll quote:
"What I really wanted to do was work on computers, not apply them to problems"
I'd also recommend listening to his interviews on YouTube. There are two long interviews, one by David's Garage and the other by CHM. Both very long and inspiring so I keep going back to them when I'm driving.
I think that "people who did hard things" fall on a spectrum between these two extremities:
- someone who got lucky
- someone who invested an unfathomable amount of time to their craftsmanship or to their beliefs
Of course it is not black and white, and even luck mostly requires hard work in the first place, which I admire (and if you find your luck - hold to it!, nothing wrong with that), but you get the gist. I guess that in other words what I am saying is: beware of the survivorship bias on the left side of this spectrum.
--
Finally, the book: "The story of my experiments with Truth", Ghandi. Definitely belongs to the "work hard" extremity and a very interesting read; but I don't want to create an impression that I find it special in any way because of my above comment, it is just one of the latest I have read, consider the two comments unrelated.
One of the "hard things" I've come across was turn of the century explorations. The stories of polar explorers like Ernest Shackleton (chronicled in Lansing's Endurance) or tropical ones like "River of Doubt" detailing Roosevelt's exploration of the Amazon tributary are fascinating stories of how people's grit accomplished hard things.
Shackleton and his crew became something of a hero of mine after I read South and Endurance. Less so frok.a masculine perspective, but more of a fortitude thing. There is a certain triumph felt when we persevere through impossible odds, and ever since I've been attracted to a genre of stories that I loosely label as "Frozen Thrillers," where humans just have to deal with bad things happening in cold unforgiving environments.
I am reading a book about it right now and as I learn more it seems too crazy and unbelievable to sustain (and im quite gullible person), especially part about living on full ocean in small boats with no food, water and heat, in extreme cold, still travelling those 100s of kilometers.
If you liked that, you should read "Empire of Ice and Stone" by Budy Levy which was about an Arctic expedition.
It's a good read from a leadership perspective. The "leader" of the expedition (Vilhjalmur Stefansson) abandoned his crew in the middle of the frozen arctic seas and went off the hunt caribou and meet his secret inuit wife. The book portrays him as being completely irresponsible and interested only his own glory and fame (and money)
Meanwhile, the captain of the ship (Robert Bartlett) walked for 700 miles from where they were stranded and then started a rescue mission from Alaska which saved some (though not all of the crew). He's portrayed as a real hero in harsh circumstances.
The whole expedition was named after the flagship. The Karluk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_voyage_of_the_Karluk). They had two inuit families with them during the trip including their kids. It was funny to see how the inuit kids would play in the snow and have fun while the "explorers" were all but dropping dead. The youngest child was aged 3 at the time. She passed away finally in 2008 at the age of 97.
i understand polar expeditions, but werent people already living in amazon
The "Rio da Dúvida" was a tributary which wasn't really mapped at the time. The Brazilian government was laying out Telegraph lines at the time to map the area.
There were tribals in the area but it wasn't mapped.
Do you have a recommendation of a book written by them?
River of Doubt - Candice Millard
https://www.candicemillard.com/river-of-doubt.html
Covers Teddy Roosevelt's Amazon expedition. To the comment about "weren't people living in the Amazon" - read the book. The Brazilian government was scouting and mapping the terrain for the project of connecting the coasts with telegraph lines. This was uncharted territory and the chance of not returning was high.
I cannot recommend enough.
The letters from Francisco de Orellana: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_de_Orellana
https://en.scribd.com/document/647918681/The-Voyage-of-Franc...
Based on what you said you have enjoyed already, I'd highly recommend "A Triumph of Genius: Edwin Land, Polaroid and the Kodak Patent War" by Ronald K. Fierstein (http://www.triumphofgenius.com/).
It is a history of Land and Polaroid, together with a detailed, insider's view of the long-running litigation between Polaroid and Kodak (the author worked at the firm which represented Polaroid on the case).
One of the things I found most interesting was just how much Steve Jobs was inspired by and copied Edwin Land.
I was a postdoc at Land's research institute (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rowland_Institute_at_Harva...) in the '90s.
The place was wild. Land had been dead for a few years when I got there, but they still employed his driver. My recollection is that the driver brought in donuts once per week. The place felt like an upscale hotel with laboratories in it. And $$ was no object. Need a $40k laser? Just write the requisition.
Looks like it was fully taken over by Harvard (at the time it was only peripherally associated).
Another funny Land story... My postdoc advisor was a faculty member at another university in the 1970s and Land and his entourage were there visiting various labs. My advisor thumped Land on the chest and said that he liked his shirt. According to my advisor, Land's handlers were visibly upset, but Land appreciated being treated like a regular human.
The Last Viking - a biography of explorer Roald Amundsen
The Wager- a book about a ship by the same name which wrecked in the Drake Passage.
Eccentric Orbits - about the Iridium constellation.
The Great Bridge by David McCullough - goes into a pretty good amount of detail in the engineering and sub-problems of construction of the Brooklyn Bridge.
The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes! Lots of detail, but it also shows how many geniuses it took working over years to really make it work.
Hearty agreement. One of the best books I've read.
And, as added reading, The Radioactive Boy Scout.
Just for a perspective on how abundant and readily available that information had become in academia a few decades later.
The Soul of a New Machine:
My main takeaway from reading that book was that working in tech in the late 70s was not that different from now days
Just different technology/hardware/timescale
Same workplace problems, personality types, company politics, etc...
Did not expect to find it so relatable in 2024
There's at least one huge respect in which tech is different, at least in the USA: worker compensation.
In the book, Tracy Kidder writes repeatedly about how Data General (the company at the heart of the book) is proud of its austerity. It doesn't pay well. It's proud of having an ugly, austere, warehouse-like building. It puts its critical engineers in the windowless basement of this building. Kidder is describing a world that's very far from the FAANG of today, at least were compensation is concerned.
I worked for a guy that converted half the office into a store with windows so shoppers could "watch us work" ... things haven't changed much, for non-FAANG.
Curious -- To me it just seemed pretty standard (for any industry). Did you think the tech work environment today was somehow more enlightened than previous generations general working environments?
Feels like season 1 of Halt And Catch Fire
Yes, very memorable prologue:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-Kidder-ebook...
This is a good one. I read it twice just to experience the 70-80s development atmosphere. The daughter of Tom West did complain on Reddit a few years ago that Tom neglected them during the period, but I still admire such personality. The same admiration goes to David Cutler in "Showstopper".
Came here to say that.
> Less interested in people and character studies.
If you don’t want examples then all you need to know is velocity. The Y Combinator people call it doing things that don’t scale. Here is how it works for absolutely anything:
1. Get the right tools in place. This is an intrinsic capability set you have to build. People tend to fail here most frequently and hope some framework or copy/paste of a library will just do it for them. Don’t be some worthless pretender. Know your shit from experience so you can execute with confidence.
2. Build a solid foundation. This will require a lot of trial and error plus several rounds of refactoring because you need some idea of the edge cases and where you the pain points are. You will know it when you have it because it’s highly durable and requires less of everything compared to the alternatives. A solid foundation isn’t a thing you sell. It’s your baseline for doing everything else at low cost.
3. Create tests. These should be in writing but they don’t have to be. You need a list of known successes and failures ready to apply at everything new. There are a lot of whiners that are quick to cry about how something can’t be done. Fuck those guys and instead try it to know exactly what more it takes to get done.
4. Finally, measure things. It is absolutely astonishing that most people cannot do this at all. It looks amazing when you see it done well and this is ultimately what separates the adults from the children. This is where velocity comes from because you will know exactly how much faster you are compared to where you were. If you aren’t intimately aware of your performance in numbers from a variety of perspectives you aren’t more special than anyone else.
People who accomplish hard things are capable of doing those because they didn’t get stuck. They had the proper tools in place to manipulate their environment, redefine execution (foundation), objectively determine what works without guessing, and then know how much to tweak it moving forward.
Not bad advice, but the ask was for books - do you have any?
Thank you so much for putting these heuristics into words. My only question here is that a lot of what you wrote seems like best practice from the perspective of a person within the tech industry. Outsiders might call it common sense. So if everyone knows what they 'should' be doing, then why do so few actually follow through?
One answer to that question might be character. Angela Ducksworth has a book called, "Grit". It is a lot like character study, which the OG explicitly expressed their disinterest for. My intuition is no matter how well you can describe the steps for success, success is not replicable. If true, that would explain why there are hundreds of self books, thousands of coaches, and only a handful of people who can consistently excel.
Having said that, I hesitate to say that there are only a few people in the world who are exceptional due to a constraint I would describe as "genuine article". How depressing a thought that would be.
Carpe diem! Floor the gas pedal, and see how fast you can go. Maybe you'll break all expectations and fly into space.
Luck is a massive, massive factor. There are plenty of exceptionally smart and gritty people who fail, and plenty of far less-so who succeed.
Your argument is good if you just follow it to the obvious (if inconvenient) conclusion. Despite so many people “having the answers,” no one can replicate it reliably. And even the ones who can likely wouldn’t be able to if you removed capital from the equation. The clear explanation is: luck.
But of course luck tends to strike when you’re working hard and consistently, so it’s not totally out of one’s hands.
Failure is not an Option by Gene Kranz, Flight Director of Apollo 11 and Apollo 13 among other missions give a lot of insight into the preparation and focus of safety critical operations.
I read these three books last year and I believe that each would be interesting to you:
Undaunted Courage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undaunted_Courage
This is about doing something extremely hard with a huge amount of unknowns, and the type of person it takes to succeed.
How Big Things Get Done https://www.amazon.com/How-Big-Things-Get-Done/dp/0593239512
This is about project planning and has plenty of real examples and case studies.
The Education of Cyrus by Xenophon https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-the-education-of-cyrus-b...
This is the best book on leadership and teamwork that I've ever read. You can read this review instead but get a copy of the actual book, too, it's wonderful.
I really enjoyed the book "iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It", which not only talks about the beginning of Apple and computers in general, but also gives a fascinating insight into the character of Steve Wozniak.
Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology (goodreads link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/809315.Making_PCR)
for a short video version of this history, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaXKQ70q4KQ from Veritasium.
reasons for recommendation: - it's an example in the biological science, to complement the heavy representation of examples from computer science and entrepreneurship in this thread - the main character, Kary Mullis, is colorful and controversial. Not a likable individual, but nevertheless had traits (mostly an unreasonable obsession) that enabled him to make such a discovery - the discovery of high temperature tolerant enzymes predated Mullis' insight by some two decades, and it played a key role in making PCR practical and widely applicable. this is a pattern I have seen often in major inventions, which were made possible by prior discoveries (often decades old) which lay dormant until someone put everything together. This process of re-discovering the pieces and making connections is also where I think machine learning could be particularly helpful. In fact this is my main motivation for picking up this book (by online reviews, not a particularly well-written one).
The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop [1]. An in-depth history of how personal computing was created.
“Across The Airless Wilds” by Eric Swift. Tells the story of how the moon buggy came to be and how it was contracted and built in 18 months. Fascinating deep dive into what it actually took to make that work on the moon.
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/across-the-airless-wi...
He also wrote a book on the interstate highway system called The Big Roads which was interesting but not as much of a page turner.
Sorry, Earl Swift, not Eric
"The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch" [1] is an amazing read. It's a mix of history and how-to describing how (and when.. which is often extremely surprising) developed the technology that we have, and how it might be recreated starting from scratch.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Knowledge:_How_to_Rebuild_...
Your title says "people who did hard things" then you say "less interested in people..."
It sounds like you want second hand accounts of the events or groups that occurred around "hard things". Like a description of NASA going to the moon, but not the accounts of a particular astronaut.
What is a "hard thing"?
I really "Idea Man" by Paul Newman. Though survivorship bias is apparent, it was insightful read on how Apple an Msft came to be and why they are what they are. For example, why closed system was important and worked for Apple.
It was great read until he leaves Microsoft.
Exactly: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World http://www.simonwinchester.com/exactly
Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_(book)
Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38840.Boyd
I loved Longitude, and Harrison was a determined guy, but the most interesting part for me was seeing the “rewrite from scratch” and “never ship” dynamics are old indeed! He had a MVP with his first iteration.
The thing about Boyd that really resonated with me was.
1) Realizing that he was better at something than everyone else around him.
2) Figuring out what it was that was making him better.
3) Reducing it to practice, so it could be taught to others and refined to become even better.
Amazing story.
Boyd gets far too much credit for the F-16. If he had his way it wouldn't work at night or honestly at all in the face of the current threat environment.
Longitude is a great book, I thought this was cool too re. one of the clocks Harrison designed - https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/apr/19/clockmaker-j...
I'm extremely excited to read Exactly, thanks for the recommendation.
"Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II"
Covers the invention of radar, "big science", involvement in the Manhattan project.
https://www.amazon.com/Tuxedo-Park-Street-Science-Changed/dp...
"Insisting On the Impossible : The Life of Edwin Land (inventor of instant photography and founder of Polarioid)"
Probably one of the most brilliant commercial technology breakthroughs largely attributable to a single team and a singular vision. Steve Jobs' hero.
https://www.amazon.com/Insisting-Impossible-Life-Edwin-Land/...
moonwalking with Einstein is about a man who decides to get into memory competitions upon learning it's more skill based than he realized. this in turn helped me develop more confidence in my own abilities with day to day routine and not be afraid to try new things i never considered myself naturally good at
Great book! IIRC, after attending the 2005 USA memory championships as a journalist, he became intrigued and started training and in one year became USA Memory champion in 2006 at age 24
I'd tried applying memory training lessons from this book a few years ago and written about my experience: http://web.archive.org/web/20210301185111/https://ppsreejith...
I'd suggest 'The Rickover Effect' by Theodore Rockwell. The author gives a firsthand account of what it was like to be part of the teams who created the first nuclear-powered submarine and civilian nuclear power plant (perhaps counterintuitively, in that order). There is a fair amount of discussion about people, culture and leadership, but it is very grounded and very detailed about the mechanics of what went into these projects and how the former made the latter possible.
_The Biography of Ottmar Mergenthaler, Inventor of the Linotype_ by Carl Schlesinger
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3648638-the-biography-of...
c.f.,
_Tolbert Lanston and the Monotype: The Origin of Digital Typesetting_ by Richard L Hopkins
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17140645-tolbert-lanston...
For background on how difficult/apparently impossible this was, see the story of Mark Twain's investment in a typesetting machine:
https://twain.lib.virginia.edu/yankee/cymach6.html
One of the more memorably moments of my life was visiting a local newspaper back when they were still setting type using a Linotype machine --- it's just incredible to watch one (or the competing Monotype) work.
If I could, I'd have a Monotype machine in my shop along with a printing press, but first I'd need a shop, rather than a workbench at one end of the basement laundry room...
It's my understanding that for a long while, the U.S. Patent Office refused to consider patents for intermittent windshield wiping mechanisms because none of them worked --- the actual story of the invention is far more sordid:
https://thehustle.co/windshield-wiper-inventor-robert-kearns
For us folks interested in computers, there is of course Charles Babbage who tried and failed, yet still managed to create many of the concepts underlying our modern computing devices.
While the story of a team, Tracy Kidder's _The Soul of a New Machine_ is a classic which I would highly recommend:
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/7090.The_Soul_of_a_Ne...
and for a more recent spin on things, look at the folks who crashed and burned such as Jerry Kaplan:
“South: The Story of Shackleton’s Last Expedition, 1914–1917” by Sir Ernest Shackleton. Here, Shackleton documents the journey of the Endurance expedition, which aimed to traverse Antarctica but instead became a legendary tale of survival after the ship was trapped and destroyed by pack ice.
Related and also a good read is "The Roald Amundsen Diaries : The South Pole Expedition 1910-1912". You can see the ship he used on the expedition, the Fram at the appropriately named, Fram Museum in Oslo. It's an incredible experience to see and contemplate the expeditions these explorers mounted, and what equipment and resources they assembled to do it at a very early time.
https://www.abebooks.com/products/isbn/9788282350105?cm_sp=b...
I didnt realise the ship was in a museum - Dundee has the discovery museum for Scotts ship which is good for a visit too
I haven't verified the info in this video myself, but it's making a point about Shackleton actually being somewhat incompetent/overeager and getting himself and crew into more trouble than necessary (as compared to Amundsen): https://youtube.com/watch?v=DU06c7f9fzc (TED talk, sorry)
I'm currently listening to "Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing". I've also heard of some of the arguments against Shackleton (I haven't watched the talk).
I have to think of what Shackleton, as a leader (boss), was going through and with uncertainties abound.
28 people who he hired based not only on capability alone, but also for crew (team) fit.
He apparently cared deeply for them, and they in-turn cared for one another.
They managed to work together in the harshest of environments. They all made it.
That in and of itself, is a remarkable feat.
I'd say Scott was the most incompetent of the lot.
At least according to https://www.amazon.com/Scott-Amundsen-Last-Place-Earth/dp/03...
You have a mistaken perspective on the whole thing. These men were seafaring adventurers, not people who will call their lawyer if there isn't a gluten free option in their restaurant.
Every crew member was fully informed that they were more likely to die than survive the journey – before even sending in their applications.
And Shackleton is dead since long, so you can't cancel him anymore.
The Making of the Atomic Bomb is one I read recently and really enjoyed.
I didn’t love the writing, but thought Skunkworks was full of good stories.
It is a little more character study but Dealers of Lightning is a good one.
I also enjoyed The Idea Factory.
And last, a little off the path of making things but Endurance was a good read.
Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants - is a pretty great read, full of (literally) explosive twists.
Seconding this! It has great detail on the actual rocket fuel chemistry, alongside incredibly well-told stories and anecdotes.
Many people's favorite line from it:
> It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that’s the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water-with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals-steel, copper, aluminium, etc.-because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminium keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.
Oh man. I remember laughing out loud at “It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers” and then hooting at the end of that paragraph.
“Walt Disney” by Neal Gabler. The man was reinventing himself through his life. Disney is sort nowadays stereotypical corporate americana but by god, it actually was started by the whims, passion, skill & vision of Walt. A must read imo to anyone interested in creation and building.
QED And The Men Who Made It, by Sylvan S. Schweber. About the development of quantum electrodynamics. It is partly biography, centering on Freeman Dyson, Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger, and Sin-Itoro Tomonaga in roughly decreasing order of word count by rough recollection. Mostly I'd say the subject matter is history of physics from a fairly hardcore technical perspective. Tbh I didn't understand that much of the physics, though I learned some through reading. The history and biography parts were quite engaging anyway.
Robert Kurson's diving books (Shadow Divers and Pirate Hunters) are some of the best books on startups I've ever read. They're stories about some of the most ambitious wreck divers out there.
It might not seem analogous, but there's a lot of parallels, i.e. you have limited air (aka runway), you need to choose the people on your expedition wisely and can't bring too many, you need to be extremely ambitious (seeking more than just touristy diving), etc.
The writing is incredible, too.
Back then I’ve got my hands on a book about the history of low temperature research in German but unfortunately I can’t find it anymore.
I would say “Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold” would be a fitting match.
The history to get to absolut zero kelvin would fit your description.
Richard Hamming's book on AT&T Bell Labs R&D culture in inventing and solving many of the important problems [1].
Another is Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner on the early days of the Internet [2].
[1] The Art of Doing Science and Engineering:
https://press.stripe.com/the-art-of-doing-science-and-engine...
[2] Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet:
https://katiehafner.com/books-new/where-wizards-stay-up-late...
The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner is similarly great for some of the earlier/origin stories of Bell Labs.
Masters of Doom is quite good about John Carmack and the creation of id Software.
I loved MoD! The audio book read by Will Wheaton is also pretty good.
Recommend Doom Guy as well, by John Romero. Kind of dispels a little bit of the mythology about Carmack. It doesn't downplay his contributions, but kind of frames them in context of the rest of the team. Masters of doom kind of portrays Carmack as a sort of wizard locked away in his tower while working on quake, when in actuality he struggled a great deal with the technology and personally, lashing out at the rest of the team. They hired some more experienced engineers to help take the load off of him for things like networking and other aspects of graphics. His major breakthrough with BSPs in quake was not the usage of BSPs (which he was not the first to pioneer; the technique had been described 30 years prior at AT&T), but caching mechanisms for the node adjacency graphs. Really humanizes Carmack a lot. There's also quite a few minor factual errors in MoD, but nothing major and nothing consequential related to Carmack
The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll might be interesting to you. Its a story about how he tracked down a spy starting from a few pennies missing in a balance sheet. A very pleasant read and a good audio book too.
Carrying The Fire by Michael Collins is an excellent account of Apollo 11 from the perspective of the command module pilot. I've read it three times, it's a wonderful book, he's a very intelligent, capable and humble man.
"The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York" by Robert Caro
This is an incredibly long biography of a man who figured out how to build an urban empire. While he wasn't an "entrepreneur" per se, he figured out how to generate huge amounts of revenue via tolls/bridges, how to manage and manipulate public policy, and how to attract the best urban planning talent.
... and you can then read about how it all fell apart.
Regardless of your opinion on Robert Moses / NYC, it's an incredibly fascinating read or (~90-hour) audio book.
99% invisible recently did it as a book club. You can listen to a much shorter chapter-by-chapter summary and discussion about it: https://99percentinvisible.org/club/
Absolutely also recommend! Took a while to get through it but Moses figured out how to hack government and civil engineering projects. He literally changed the New York State constitution, used bond contracts to build a defensive barrier around himself, and for better or worse then built half of the public works projects in the US himself or through his disciples.
The Power Broker is a superb choice for OP. This comment should be closer to the top of the thread.
Out of the Shadows By Jonathan Kingsman https://shepherd.com/book/out-of-the-shadows
Amazing book about the grain markets and how they have changed over the last 40 years.
"Once shadowy figures, grain merchants have now come out of the shadows. Almost everything that you eat or drink today will contain something bought, stored, transported, processed, shipped, distributed or sold by one of the seven giants of the agricultural supply chain. The media often refers to them as the ABCD group of international grain-trading companies, with ABCD standing for ADM, Bunge, Cargill and Dreyfus. The acronym, though, ignores the other three giants of the food supply: Glencore, COFCO International and Wilmar. Together, they handle 50 percent of the international trade in grain and oilseeds. In this book’s series of exclusive and unprecedented interviews, CEOs and senior traders from these seven giants describe in their own words how the agricultural markets are changing, and how they are adapting to those changes."
The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket By Benjamin Lorr https://shepherd.com/book/the-secret-life-of-groceries
Five years of research really explains large swaths of our food system and how it changes what we eat.
You might like these as well:
The best unexpectedly enthralling books about seemingly boring things https://shepherd.com/best-books/good-books-about-seemingly-b...
The best books that make sense of how globalization broke down, and what happens next https://shepherd.com/best-books/globalization-breaks-down-wh...
*Features The Big Rig, a book about the American trucking industry and it's breakdown
Some good ones in there :)
Almost no one thinks about the modern miracle that are grocery stores. It wasn't that long ago that getting out-of-season produce was literally impossible.
Today, you just put up with inferior tomatoes in the winter and be annoyed about it.
The logistical complications of worldwide produce supply chains and your local supermarkets are really, really nuts.
Ya I think about as a kid I only knew two types of cheese, yellow and white. Now there is an insane number as just one example.
And the fresh fruit and veggies are crazy. Blueberries in December? How and why are we doing that :)
I think most people don’t have access to supermarkets tho.
I actually think more people have access than don't...
Even in rural and developing regions, there are grocery stores, just not as fancy. I tried to find numbers, but it was hard to find the right source for that.
Anyone living in an urban area would have access and that is 60% of the global population. Plus, rural areas in the USA, Canada, Europe, Mexico, etc etc have access to one.
Only about 25% of the population are engaged in subsistence farming at this point.
Most people on this forum do
Cool question!
Patrick Collison (of stripe fame) put together a collection of historical ambitious projects that got done quickly, look into the biographies of people mentioned in there. https://patrickcollison.com/fast
Power Broker
"Outliers: The Story of Success" by Malcolm Gladwell but it's more centered on the mechanics that made successful people able to do the hard things. It does case studies on others that failed as well.
You might want to look into books about H. Tracy Hall. He's one of the inventors of lab-grown diamonds, the hardest things ever done.
The Caro books on the LBJ presidency are incredible biographies. LBJ did crazy things to get where he got.
This is a more broad interpretation of "getting things done," but The Secret Race is an excellent book about what it was like to be a professional cyclist in the late 90s/early 2000s, doping and all
The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan is a nice read. You can learn critical thinking from this book.
Digital Apollo by David A. Mindell. An excellent book that describes how the Apollo computer was developed.
Dealers of Lighting Xerox Parc and the dawn of computer age by Michael A. Hiltzik. If you're interested in knowing where the PC as we know it today originated from.
Others have already suggested The Dream Machine which was a book that once started I couldn't stop reading and finished it in about a week.
Edit: Maybe not exactly the book that you might be interested in but I read Mindstorms by Papert and I think his work on education through the use of computers was groundbreaking. Very interesting book.
> hard things
How about consistently competing at fighting video-games at the highest level in the world for more than 30 years?
"The Will to Keep Winning", by Daigo Umehara. He was the first Street Fighter 2 player to reach the top (being considered either the best player or top 3), and he was able to stay at the stop since then. No other video-game player has ever been so consistently good as Daigo. He may not have won many EVO or Capcom Cup titles, but he has always stayed at the top. And he's the protagonist of Evo Moment 37.
Also, his story is good. The book may make you cry. And it's a very short book.
"Red Moon Rising" by Matthew Brzezinski, it tells the story of the Sputnik programme and is just really very well written.
not sure it's a story of "people doing hard things" but it may go your way for "mechanics of how things that we take for granted actually got built", the book is "Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk"
> a comprehensive history of man's efforts to understand risk and probability, from ancient gamblers in Greece to modern chaos theory.
In some parts it's not an easy read, but the underlying stories are very interesting.
Agreed not sure it exactly fits the prompt but this is a really fascinating book. One of those things where I didn’t fully bring into conscious awareness until reading it: statistics are tools that didn’t always exist, and had to be developed alongside multiple philosophical revolutions.
Copies in Seconds: Chester Carlson and the Birth of the Xerox Machine by David Owen
"A history of the photocopier offers a portrait of reserved physics graduate Chester Carlson, who invented the copier to ease his job as a patent clerk and who saw his marketing efforts daunted by numerous rejections, before the head of Xerox research recognized the machine's potential. "
Apollo: The Race To The Moon Charles Murray, Catherine Bly Cox
My favorite book of this type by far.
I came to recommend this as well. It's a study of the engineering and management efforts behind Apollo, and much more interesting and entertaining than that makes it sound. The section on how they developed the F-1 engines that powered the first stage of the Saturn V, including how they'd explode bombs inside the engine nozzle to be sure that it could cope with instabilities, is just one of dozens (hundreds?) of examples of how all the small pieces came together to accomplish their priorities, 'Man. Moon. Decade.'
An amazing book.
The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error That Transformed the World by Ken Alder
These guys went through quite some hardships to define the length of a meter. Good read!
Newton and the Counterfeiter
https://www.royalmint.com/shop/books/Newton-and-the-Counterf...
Excellent book about Isaac Newton's role in solving the great recoinage crisis.
The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914
House on Fire: The Fight to Eradicate Smallpox
In House on Fire, William H. Foege describes his own experiences in public health and details the remarkable program that involved people from countries around the world in pursuit of a single objective―eliminating smallpox forever.
The Wright Brothers biography was incredible. Highly recommend for the exact qualities you're looking for:
the mechanics of how things that we take for granted actually got built and what the world they were made in was likeWhich one, McCullough's? Your comment is the only search result for that quote.
How to Make a Spaceship by Julian Guthrie was a greally good read for me.
Every few years I re-read Homer - Odyssey. And maybe the threats/challenges aren't the same, but.. they are.
I greatly enjoyed The Leadership Moment by Michael Useem, which covers 9 stories of crises and how leaders approached them.
The Man Who Discovered Quality by Andrea Gabor is an interesting story of W. Edwards Deming, the American who revolutionized post-WWII Japanese manufacturing with statistical approaches to reducing variance.
Issac Newton by James Gleick conveys what it was like for Newton to essentially invent modern physical science in a pre-scientific world.
Dreaming In Code by Scott Rosenberg is a good counterpoint to inspiring tech origin stories: legendary coders coming together to build an amazing product and… basically failing.
"The Soul of a New Machine", by Tracy Kidder.
I really enjoyed American Prometheus. Might be a bit too focused on Oppenheimer for the original request, but it covers the Manhattan Project more broadly too.
I rather liked 'The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation'
Agreed. Just finished it a couple of weeks ago. Hackers by Levy and fire in the Valley may also fit the bill.
Do anthropomorphic trains count? The Little Engine That Could.
"The Making of the Atomic Bomb" Rhodes
Janna Levin, Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space. It describes the construction of the LIGO experiment over a span of about 50 years. It does have a lot of character studies (one of Levin’s strengths) but also plenty of details about the incredible equipment and what it took to design it and put it all together.
The Six Mountain Travel Books by Eric Shipton.
Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes does a great job covering the rivalry between Edison, Tesla, and Westinghouse over electrifying the world. I liked how it broke down the technical and business challenges and showed the impact on everyday life and industry.
The chariots of apollo
Freedom's Forge
Second this. It do a great job explaining how the WW2 armament buildup required both legislative and mindset changes on behalf of the government about what a good working relationship between business and government looked like.
10/10 book.
The road to character.
It's a great reality check, poking into human nature, morality, suffering, all with real life examples and littlz tolerance for bullshit without delusion of grandeur.
The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn showing how Stalin operated and how imprisoned people survived is a good read about humans doing hard things.
Damn, I must confess when I read the title I thought you meant things like war, or scientific inventions, or historical political events. Turns out you meant private equity and Texas oil x)
dava sobel's "longitude" is excellent
Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson
You might like Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days. It’s written by Jessica Livingston, who founded Y Combinator.
The Innovators, Walter Isaacson
It’s interesting to read how many individuals contributed in all sorts of important ways in the history of computing.
Eccentric Orbits: The Iridium Story
Book about Dan Colussy, who somehow managed to rescue Iridium satellite network when it was weeks away from bankruptcy and being deliberately crashed into the ocean.
If you want more entrepreneurial type stories.
When the heavens went on sale, by Ashly Vance, is pretty good. It details the early days of the space start-ups other than spaceX
The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley is also pretty good, describes the crazy days of early paypal.
Someone already mentioned Liftoff by Erig Berger. Starting a private space company is probably as hard as things get, and it describes the early days pretty well
The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester
Vaccinated: One Man's Quest to Defeat the World's Deadliest Diseases
Describes how Maurice Hilleman invented 40 vaccines, including for eight of the most common diseases in the US, over a 36 year career at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Merck & Co. His vaccines are estimated to save 8 million lives each year.
The _Path Between the Seas_ by David McCullough is really excellent. It starts with the French diplomat Ferdinand De Lesseps, specifically with the way his friendship with the king of Egypt enabled him to start the Suez canal project. It then details how he got the Isthmian Canal project off the ground and how, because he wasn’t an engineer, he became willfully blind to the realities in Panama. He made horrendously flawed plans (a sea-level canal through a mountain range, to be dug below the level of a massive river that flooded every year…), completely ignored all of the massive problems facing his company, and made press releases about how well everything was going right up until the day before the company was finally bankrupt. As a result, none of those huge problems got solved.
When the Americans finally stepped in 15 years later, they too made the mistake of appointing bureaucrats to run the project. The result was a shambles. Eventually President Roosevelt simply ignored Congress and appointed an individual to run the project. He was a railroad engineer named Stevens. Stevens was the first to realize that the real logistical problem to solve was not actually digging up the dirt, but disposing of it. The French had famously used steam shovels to dig the canal as fast as possible, just as they had in Suez. But once the dirt was loaded into train cars and carted away from the dig site, they used teams of men with shovels to empty them. Stevens calculated how fast the dirt would need to be loaded and unloaded, and set up a system of trains that could carry any quantity of dirt any distance, while loading as quickly as possible at the dig site and unloading it just as quickly at the dump site. Once he knew the numbers and had the system built, he could track exactly how quickly each train was unloaded and know which teams were working efficiently and which needed training to avoid falling behind.
Another good one by the same author is _The Wright Brothers_. It’s shorter and perhaps not as detailed as _The Path Between the Seas_ (but then it only took them 4 years while the canal needed 33), but it focuses on the actual tasks undertaken by the Wrights as they developed their first few airplanes. They first used gliders to test their wings and the control mechanisms. Then they built a wind tunnel to get accurate data about the lift and drag of a wing under specific circumstances. Then they built an engine lighter than any in use at the time. They designed their own propellers too, since nobody they talked to knew how to design one. Even for boats, the engineers who designed them just used heuristics and guesses and rules of thumb rather than any scientific processes in their work. The first few propeller shafts that they built turned out not to be strong enough and were destroyed. But they were methodical and driven, so they solved each problem one at a time until they had both a working airplane and a working knowledge of how to fly it.
Mastery by Robert Greene also mentions in a few pages this story about the Wright Brothers (they started from their expertise in bicycles, that’s how they got planes right) and it’s def a book the OP might be interested in.
how to get rich by felix dennis is a banger for me
"Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX" by Eric Berger documents how SpaceX employees poured their blood, sweat, and tears into launching a cost-effective rocket at a time when legacy operators dominated the space market with their costly cost-plus-fee contracts. This book mostly follows the journey of employees and (thankfully) doesn't resolve to Elon praise too much. There is a continuation to this book called "Reentry" but I haven't read it yet.
I've just read both and highly recommend them and was coming in to this thread to do so.
Liftoff : https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/53402132-liftoff
Re-entry : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/205309521-reentry
Both have very high ratings on Goodreads.
I haven't personally read it, but The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes seems to fit the bill.
Re: getting hard things done I've been admiring the way Elon Musk takes calculated risks in:
You can find documentaries also on youtube, for example. There was one interesting about Dubai's development
“Check out something other than books” is a hilarious response to a request for book recommendations, though I would have included a specific example of a non-book, like “I see you mentioned private equity, have you listened to the songs of Jim Croce? He often writes about love and getting into bar fights, which are things that some people have difficulty with”
I remember a few years ago Taylor Hawkins of the Foo Fighters rock band died unexpectedly and the cause of death was not immediately revealed. I was disappointed to learn sometime later that the cause had been heart failure. If I were a member of the Foo Fighters and had to die at the relatively early age of 50, of course I would have wanted it to be in a bar fight. Come to think of it, Bar Fighters might be a good name for a tribute band.
So is starting a tribute rock band an ok alternative to reading books?
Extra points for not linking said docos.
Creating an account to post this and this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42612506, what's the game plan?
Trying to pollute HN like TLAs did 4chan or just a misfiring brain?
I'll call it aaron695s adage, it's now impossible to tell mental illness and TLAs apart on the internet.