I've started to listen to audiobooks
This week I share about my resent experience with audiobooks and how they have effected me.
Industry - How Audiobooks has given me a firmware update about business
I started my newsletter (my first post) after taking advice from a productivity YouTuber. This was the first action I took inspired by him. Recently, the same YouTuber had another recommendation: listen to audiobooks. The main argument is that it took most established YouTubers 4~20 hours to produce a video (let’s say a 20-minute one), and it often takes 2~3 years to write a book (turning into an audiobook, it is normally 5~20 hours of content). I’ll do a simple math for you: take the very thick book “Steve Jobs” as an example, the audiobook is around 25 hours. Assuming one works 8 hours a day, then it will take a YouTuber 25*20/8 = 62.5 days to complete the same duration of video content. This shows one thing: the amount of effort going into every minute of the audiobook is way higher than that of a video. I can no longer ignore this fact; therefore, I started my journey with audiobooks.
The first book I listened to was “Traction” by Gino Wickman (7 hours). The book talks about the key components (vision, people, data, issues, process, and traction) of a business team. I’m not going into more detail about the book (you can go check it out yourself :) but share how the learnings have affected me:
Associate work with numbers (metrics): This aligns with the “data” section; what metrics can we apply in our day-to-day work? Two weeks ago, my manager also asked me to consider identifying key metrics that can help us evaluate the tools my team is building. Initially, I didn’t take the advice seriously because it wasn't immediately clear what meaningful metrics we could track. However, after listening to the book, I realized that having these metrics is critical to the growth of the tools, especially when more and more people are involved in developing them. This is not a nice-to-have; it is a must-have. With this realization, I was able to identify over ten key metrics the next day to evaluate the status of our developing tools, which I have included in the roadmap document I will share with leadership next month.
Attitude towards meetings: The book says (in my words) “everyone hates meetings, but imagine a surgeon says - I’d love my job if I didn’t need to do operations - you (managers) are basically saying the same thing”. I can’t appreciate more the way the author puts it. I truly believe that having a good meeting is hard, yet everyone should try their best to make it happen. The author brings it to an even higher level - it is your job! I don’t want to suck at my job, so I’ll continue to work hard on making meetings great.
There are so many interesting things in the book. Now that I also lead a small team of three people, I've realized that there are many areas I need to work on after listening to the book. I’ll share more when I start to take action on these thoughts.
The other book I’m currently listening to is “DotCom Secrets” by Russell Brunson. It talks about how to create sales funnels. I’m only 30 minutes into the book, but it has already made me take action. Here is the hook that got me: “Are you wondering how to increase traffic and conversion rate?” The author uses websites as an example. Traditionally, people put all the information they want to provide on a website and hope that someone will accidentally stumble on it and find something on the website that they are interested in. However, this almost never works because there is very little chance that people will see it. And even if they do, the overwhelming amount of information will confuse people, and when they are confused, their natural reaction is to say no. Even though I’m not in a sales role, almost everyone who has a chance to talk to the people that they are providing value to, including me, is partly the “sales” of their work. In my case, I’m leading a team that is developing tools for internal use; my manager won’t push me to make more people use the tool. However, for me, one way to provide value to the company is to socialize the tool so more people can do their jobs better. I recently created a website that talks about our team’s work. After listening to the first 30 minutes of the book, I immediately started making changes to our team websites. Instead of piling information on one page, I start to think harder about what the customers are looking for and how I can create funnels for them that guide them to the maximum value that our team can provide. I’m excited to get some positive feedback on the changes from my managers. Will share more about how these changes will impact our team later on.
To summarize, I’m so pleasantly surprised by how listening to these audiobooks has immediately made an impact at work, can’t wait to learn more as I “listen” to books!
Robotics - How to learn linear algebra
Recently, I posted two of my most viewed posts Why (people in robotics) study PhD and Why (people in robotics) not study PhD on the company office Slack channel. Lucky, I received many warm responses. My skip manager shared his favorite sentence from my other post (Do I need a PhD to work in robotics industry). One senior firmware engineer reached out, saying he ordered the Modern Robotics book I referenced, and asked if I have any suggestions for learning linear algebra. The 3 blue 1 brown team quickly came to mind, and I found their series here. I haven’t checked them out myself, but I’m sure they are good since they made great videos about LLMs (checkout here).