Tag: Non-Fiction Book

Nonfiction (also spelled non-fiction) is any document or media content that attempts, in good faith, to provide accurate information regarding a real-world topic. It is written to communicate facts or opinions about reality.
Nonfictional content may be presented either objectively or subjectively. Nonfiction is one of the fundamental divisions of narrative writing (specifically, prose) — in contrast to fiction, largely populated by imaginary characters and events, though sometimes ambiguous regarding its basis in reality.

Be Useful

If you are going to do, do it. Recounting a life of pursuit, drive, and relentless optimism. 


To categorize this book under self-help would infuriate Arnold. He views the label of a self-made man as a charming myth. In reality, he got a lot of help from hundreds of people. This is especially true for his parents raising him right despite their flaws. Arnold found support in Munich, not far from Austria, where he was able to pump iron and get his first experience with running a fitness business. Joe Weider, a bodybuilding entrepreneur before bodybuilding was an industry, invested in Arnold by facilitating opportunities that would allow Arnold to prove his drive, realize his dreams, and demonstrate his astute business acumen. He admits he would have never made it if it wasn’t for the kind help and support from others. Perhaps, this philosophical viewpoint lays the foundation for the book “Be Useful” – to others and the world at large. 

I have not read any other Schwarzenegger books, but I have seen plenty of his movies. Ironically, it was a stand-up comedy special that put Arnold’s life story on my radar. In “Be Useful” he chronicles aspects of his journey without too much detail on the actual history, but with in-depth access to his mindset at the time. It is no surprise that Arnold’s foundation for all of his success is a simple and clear vision. In German, you can describe this as “Fernweh”, a deep convulsing desire for experiences never had, sensations never felt. Arnold describes his childhood as filled with dreams of America. This faraway land of the free, home of the brave where nothing is impossible. His advice on this is simple: don’t be afraid to look yourself in the eyes and really see. The idea of starting with a broad vision, zooming in, and making space for deep reflection isn’t inherently new. David Goggins is known for his Accountability Mirror. Steve Jobs stated

“For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today? ‘ And whenever the answer has been no for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”

Deep, critical reflection and introspective moments have become a rare form of leisure experience in our modern world full of instant gratification and consumerism. If I lose my mind tomorrow, I hope to retain (or relearn) the idea of facing myself and envision what could be.

A cultural phenomenon I seem to share with Arnold is a healthy ignorance of naysayers. He describes this attitude as a need for doubt and laughter of others because his upbringing in Austria involved plenty of negative reinforcement. Germans and Austrians are often viewed as harsh and mean characters with little patience for tomfoolery and lollygagging. Embracing opposition and adversity with a smile allowed him to reinforce his vision and confidence so that he could throw all his drive behind it. He writes

“If millions of European immigrants can come to America with nothing but a suitcase and a dream and make life for themselves, why couldn’t I?”

The most intriguing part of “Be Useful” is the glimpse into his finances at the time of his arrival in the United States. The entire sequence is closely tied to actual historical events playing out in his favor. Arnold already had earned some income in Europe as a fitness instructor and from competition rewards when he moved to the United States. While living on the couches of friends in Venice, he would sell bodybuilding booklets. The distribution deal was a cleverly constructed advertising agreement where he would volunteer for photo shoots in exchange for ad space. At the same time, he enrolled in business, language, and acting classes knowing each of these studies would expand his horizon and field of opportunities in America. When he wasn’t lifting weights, selling his booklet, or studying, he would work as a bricklayer. Arnold had no background or experience in masonry but thought laying bricks would be a good workout in between workouts. To his luck, his business catered to Americans interested in European-style houses at an economic time when the housing market was in a bubble. 

Undoubtedly, the man found himself in an opportune time. But more importantly, he had the wits to recognize the times and the drive to take advantage of it. In his words, those days felt so full and rich because he was always switched on. He was energized and excited because he just spent two hours moving closer to achieving his vision. Isn’t this experience, the near flow state something we as a people call “a perfect life ” and we all aspire to experience?     

While reading Arnold’s guidance on life, I couldn’t help myself but hear his iconic accent ring through my head as I thought through each sentence. It was a unique, fun reading experience. Arnold Schwarzenegger has attracted many critics, but whatever one might think of him, his unwavering drive in pursuit of his goals is inspiring. Should you pay $28 for it? No.    

Reading a book takes time, immersion, and reflection. For anyone interested in learning more about “Be Useful” without investing this much money, I can recommend the Jocko Podcast episode with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

As a little “Schmankerl”, I mentioned a stand-up comedy special earlier. Comedian Bill Burr created “You People Are All The Same” in which he describes the stupendous odds a person needed to overcome to achieve what Arnold has achieved in his lifetime. Viewer discretion is advised.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things

Sometimes the answer lies in doing what is necessary, not what is easy.

Ben Horowitz first published his book “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” about ten years ago. Yet most of his content couldn’t be more relevant today. Starting with his personal background and upbringing in the People’s Republic of Berkeley, the book quickly gets into the nitty-gritty of his experience running Netscape and Loudcloud, which would later morph into Opsware. That’s where the book lives. Most leadership advice throughout this book are distilled lessons from his experience at these three companies. 

When reading past the first three chapters, the reader will come to an imminent refreshing realization: the author’s notion that “there are no easy answers” is the answer to great leadership. A great leader of a business lives with the relentless struggle between deciding a bad and a terrible situation. Moreover, a great leader recognizes the adversity to utilize its downward energy and turn it into something productive. In essence, it is a book on functional business leadership. How to function as a leader when your business is faced with layoffs, raising capital, restructuring, hiring the right people, promoting the right people, and many more real-life business scenarios. 

I like the rather simple structure of medium to short-length chapters that describe a situation infused with his hindsight knowledge. It’s to the point, crisp, and without fuzzing around the reality of the situation, which is often a choice between terrible and horrific, but a choice that has to be taken nevertheless. Understanding that the leader of the company is ultimately alone in making those hard decisions with imperfect information at a fast pace is a baseline for great leadership. There is obviously so much more to unpack here. Read it for yourself. You can buy the book on Amazon.

My only quibble with the book was including quoted rap lyrics in almost every chapter. It created distractions to my reading flow when my brain was trying to think through for example his account of selling Opsware to HP, but the chapter opens with Kanye West’s lyrics to “Stronger” and its catchy tune immediately infiltrated my thought process. 

I would recommend this book to business owners who are ambitious and whose businesses are already employing double-digit staff. It’s a fun read when you run a small sub-10 employees startup, but not really applicable just yet. It’s also a great book to keep on your desk and randomly pick up for guidance on a certain situation. My main takeaway is likely found in the chapter on the most difficult CEO skill to master and it is very simple: don’t quit.

Playing With Power 

A short book review of Tim Higgin’s controversial book “Power Play – Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century.”


“Power Play” by Tim Higgins chronicles the inception and scaling of Tesla Motors. The book explores the history and challenges faced by Tesla, its growth as a company, and the impact it has had on the automotive and clean energy sectors. It delves into the business strategies, controversies, and innovations that have defined Tesla’s journey, as well as the broader implications of its success for the future of transportation and sustainable energy. 

A strong focus of the author is on the leadership decisions, behavior, and actions of Elon Musk. He is depicted as a complex, stubborn, and erratic micromanager who is also a visionary entrepreneur and romantic futurist. Musk’s relentless drive to perform ultra hardcore all the time and his asking the same of his employees is a common theme throughout the book. This mindset seemingly allows Musk to deliver on promises that traditional automakers thought to be impossible. But it also creates an adversarial environment between him and his employees and supporters; testing the depth and longevity of those relationships and – unsurprisingly – churning through most. The complex order of historical events in conjunction with the author’s writing style, jumping from crisis to peacetime to crisis, creates unwanted contradictions about Elon Musk making it harder to follow the events as they unfold.

Personally, I found it an intriguing account with a neutral depiction of a leader who attempts the impossible. As an entrepreneur or startup founder, I can relate to the everlasting moments of despair Musk must have experienced. The book is inspiring to the extent that it conveys a sense of urgency and survival for Tesla and its leaders in an environment that is rooting against them. 

The hardcover book is currently priced at $30 on Bookshop. While a very large online platform offers a discounted price on the book, I found $30 too expensive for a subject so very much in the public eye of our times. If you Musk (see the pun there), start with Ashlee Vance’s account of Elon Musk titled “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.” I read it a while back and still fondly remember how energized I felt after reading it.  

Initial criticism of the book called out Higgins’s depiction of Elon Musk as a business leader is unsubstantiated since he had no access to internal communications – or the man himself. However, works of non-fiction are often written with information derived from former employees and accounts close to the business. His notes indicate he relied plenty on interviews but does not disclose with whom and when the interview took place. It’s not a negative sign, but a possible canary in the coal mine that this book, too, is somewhat riding on the media interest around Elon Musk. In a note from the author, Higgins relays a response from Elon Musk: “Most, but not all, of what you read in this book is nonsense.” Elon Musk later posted on X about the book “Higgins managed to make his book both false *and* boring 🤣🤣”

Zuckerberg’s Ugly Truth Isn’t So Ugly

A review of the 2021 book “Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination” by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang. The truth is far more complex.

Writing this review didn’t come easy. I spent five years helping to mitigate and solve Facebook’s most thorny problems. When the book was published, I perceived it to be an attack on Facebook orchestrated by the New York Times, a stock-listed company and direct competitor in the attention and advertising market. Today, I know that my perception then was compromised by Meta’s relentless, internal corporate propaganda.

Similar to Chaos Monkeys, An Ugly Truth tells a story that is limited to available information at the time. The book claims to have had unprecedented access to internal, executive leadership directly reporting to Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. It is focused on the time period roughly between 2015 and 2020; arguably it was Facebook’s most challenging time. Despite a constant flow of news reporting about Facebook’s shortcomings, the book, for the most part of it, remains focused on the executive leadership decisions that got the company into hot waters in the first place. Across 14 chapters, well-structured and perfectly written, the authors build a case of desperation: in an increasingly competitive market environment, Facebook needs to innovate and increase its user statistics to beat earnings to satisfy shareholders. Yet, the pursuit of significance infiltrated the better judgment of Facebook’s executive leadership team and eventually led to drowning out the rational voices, the protective and concerned opinions of genuine leadership staff over the self-serving voices of staff only interested to progress at any cost.

To illustrate this point, the authors tell the story of former Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos, who persistently called out data privacy and security shortcomings:

Worst of all, Stamos told them (Zuckerberg and Sandberg), was that despite firing dozens of employees over the last eighteen months for abusing their access, Facebook was doing nothing to solve or prevent what was clearly a systemic problem. In a chart, Stamos highlighted how nearly every month, engineers had exploited the tools designed to give them easy access to data for building new products to violate the privacy of Facebook users and infiltrate their lives. If the public knew about these transgressions, they would be outraged […]

His calls, however, often went unanswered, or, worse invited other executive leadership threatened by Stamos’ findings to take hostile measures.      

By December, Stamos, losing patience, drafted a memo suggesting that Facebook reorganize its security team so that instead of sitting on their own, members were embedded across the various parts of the company. […] Facebook had decided to take his advice, but rather than organizing the new security team under Stamos, Facebook’s longtime vice president of engineering, Pedro Canahuati, was assuming control of all security functions. […] The decision felt spiteful to Stamos: he advised Zuckerberg to cut engineers off from access to user data. No team had been more affected by the decision than Canahuati’s, and as a result, the vice president of engineering told colleagues that he harbored a grudge against Stamos. Now he would be taking control of an expanded department at Stamos’s expense.

Many more of those stories would never be told. Engineers and other employees, much smaller fish than Stamos, who raised ethical concerns of security and integrity were routinely silenced, ignored, and “managed out” – Facebook’s preferred method of dealing with staff refusing to drink the kool-aid and toe the line. Throughout the book, the authors maintain a neutral voice yet it becomes very clear how difficult the decisions were for executive leadership. It seemed as though leading Facebook is the real-world equivalent of Kobayashi Maru – an everyday, no-win scenario. Certainly, I can sympathize with the pressure Mark, Sheryl, and others must have felt during those times.

Take the case of Donald John Trump, the 45th President of the United States. His Facebook Page has a reach of 34 million followers (at the time of this writing). On January 6, 2021, his account actively instigated his millions of followers to view Vice President Mike Pence as the reason for his lost bid for reelection. History went on to witness the attack on the United States Capitol. Democracy and our liberties were under attack on that day. And how did Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg respond on behalf of Facebook? First, silence. Second, indecision. Shall Trump remain on the platform? Are we going to suspend his account temporarily? Indefinitely? Eventually, Facebook’s leadership punted the decision to the puppet regime of the Oversight Board, who returned the decision power due to a lack of existing policies that would govern such a situation. When everybody was avoiding the headlights, Facebook’s executive leadership acted like a deer. Yes, Zuckerberg’s philosophy on speech has evolved over time. Trump challenged this evolution.

Throughout Facebook’s seventeen-year history, the social network’s massive gains have repeatedly come at the expense of consumer privacy and safety and the integrity of democratic systems. […] And the platform is built upon a fundamental, possibly irreconcilable dichotomy: its purported mission is to advance society by connecting people while also profiting off them. It is Facebook’s dilemma and its ugly truth.

The book contains many more interesting stories. There were a wealth of internal leaks to desperately influence and return Facebook’s leadership back to its original course. There were the infamous Brett Kavanaugh hearings, which highlighted the political affiliations and ideologies of Facebook’s executive leader Joel Kaplan, who weathered the sexual harassment allegations against Brett Kavanaugh by Christine Blasey-Ford despite an outrage of Facebook’s female employees. Myanmar saw horrific human rights abuses enabled by and perpetrated through the platform. The speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and Bay Area representative since 1987, Nancy Pelosi was humiliated when Facebook fumbled to remove a deepfake video about a speech of hers that was manipulated to make it sound slurred. And the list goes on and on and on and on.

The book is worth reading. The detail and minutiae afforded to report accurately and convincingly are rich and slow-burning. That being said, Facebook has been dying since 2015. Users leave the platform and delete Facebook. While Instagram and WhatsApp pull the company’s advertising revenue for the time being with stronger performances abroad, it is clear that the five years of the executive leadership of Facebook covered in this book point towards an undefiable conclusion: it failed. 

NPR’s Terry Gross interviewed the authors Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang on Fresh Air. It further demonstrates the dichotomy of writing about the leadership at one of the most influential and controversial corporations in the world. You can listen to the full episode here. 

Ballistic Books: Sales Books You Need To Read

Everything in life is a negotiation. Everyone alive is a salesperson.

Sales are the backbone of any enterprise. Sales establish trust and rapport between the company and its customers. Sales directly influence crucial financial metrics. Therefore, a company’s ability to compete against stiff competition. Yet, sales isn’t really a subject in our basic education. Mastering the art of sales, however, can make the difference between a good life and a great life. In an effort to learn more about the art of salesmanship, I bought three more or less fundamental books about the process of selling. 

How To Master The Art Of Selling By Tom Hopkins

Tom Hopkins learned early on that sales is “the highest-paid hard work — and the lowest-paid easy work.” It can be an easy endeavor without much effort to make ends meet or it can be the greatest adventure and highest reward ever experienced. It is entirely up to the salesman. But, it requires craft, skill, and expertise to be honed frequently and stress-tested often. Buy Hopkins at ThriftBooks.

Sell It Like Serhant By Ryan Serhant

Ryan Serhant made a splash on Million Dollar Listing New York. In his book, he argues that anybody can become a salesman. Furthermore, anyone can get lucky and accomplish one huge sale. But can you repeat the sale? Can you consistently sell at a high profit margin? Sales is not about one sale; it’s about every sale you make. Buy Serhant at Barnes & Noble.

Zig Ziglar’s Secrets Of Closing The Sale

Hillar Hinton “Zig” Ziglar was a college dropout turned salesman who would redfine the art of selling. He described himself as a pack rat taken copious notes from many great salesman over a lifetime of sales. In “Closing The Sale” Ziglar outlines fundamental strategies to take the sales pitch from zero to one. From psychological sales aspects that differ when it comes to closing the sale to the necessity of objections and resistance when you’re in the eye of the hurricane; the toughest part of any sales negotiation, Ziglar structured his book as a manifesto, ready to read rather than a cover-to-cover liaison. Buy Ziglar at (the) Book Depository.

Ballistic books is a series to present literature of interest. Each edition is dedicated to a specific topic. I found it challenging to discover and distinguish good from great literature. With this series, I aim to mitigate that challenge.