Dare to Lead

By Brene Brown.

This book is a very 'soft' book. Focusing on getting the ego out of the way.

Quotes...

If you are not in the arena getting your ass kicked on occasion, I’m not interested in or open to your feedback. There are a million cheap seats in the world today filled with people who will never be brave with their lives but who will spend every ounce of energy they have hurling advice and judgment at those who dare greatly. Their only contributions are criticism, cynicism, and fearmongering. If you’re criticizing from a place where you’re not also putting yourself on the line, I’m not interested in what you have to say.

Leaders must either invest a reasonable amount of time attending to fears and feelings, or squander an unreasonable amount of time trying to manage ineffective and unproductive behavior.

The Dance of Connection

By Harriet Lerner

There is a lot here for me to think about. I came across this book while reading "Dare to Lead." The book has an observation that when under stress, people have two responses. They can over function and try to take over. They can underfunction-- disengage, go quiet.

I am an underfunctioner and I need to address that. It won't be easy. It will take a lot of work.

For example, the book examines "The evil stepmother" trope. Evil stepmothers happen when the father underfunctions or disengages dumping all mother duties on the step mother. It's not the stepmothers problem than she has to be the mother with children that she has no relationship with. The problem is that the father has disengaged.

The Trouble with Gravity-- Solving The Mystery Beneath Our Feet

By Richard Panek.

I'm a little frustrated with the book. Panek never really try's to answer what Gravity is. He pushes the question off, going over the history of not-explaining what gravity is.

Physicist Kip Thorne has said that asking "What is Gravity?" is a meaningless question, kind of like asking "What is north of the north pole?"

Even that is a punt. "What is north of the north pole?" is only meaningless once you realize that the Earth is a globe and its geometry non-euclidean. For the non-physicist, what concepts am are needed to know "What is gravity?" a meaningless question?

The history of not explaining gravity is very interesting. It marks a philosophical transition from explaining things from first principal, to explaining things using the scientific method.

Before Newton, we tried to explain the world from the Bible, from Aristotle. Newton came up with a theory better at making testable predictions about the effects of gravity. His theory didn't depend on the Bible. It depended on observations that anyone could make. This was new. It removed the Church from being an authority.

Newton never produced a theory explaining what gravity was, only that it could make very accurate predictions. At the time there was a lot of controversy around this. If you can't explain why, only what, then how can you trust the theory?

By observing more deeply. By making testable predictions.

And this is where much of physics is now. It can make very accurate predictions about very extreme conditions. It struggles to say why that should be so.