Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (Amy Chua)

(This is not a post about how I find Chinese and Western parenting & whether or not I support/ condemn Amy Chua's parenting although I truly enjoyed her memoir and I certainly agreed with most of her views)

When I first read this memoir, after discovering it among a stack of leadership books at my training center's library, I found it hilarious and honest. I then got myself a copy and took my time to read it for the second time two months later.

I was filled with mainly two thoughts. Firstly, I recall with bitterness those days with an oppressively strict and demanding mom. Yes, I had a tiger mom. Afterall, I am an Asian living in a developing Asian country. But then again, I think it is unjustified to relate it to my background because my younger siblings were not entirely subject to the same parenting style. Everything Amy Chua shared was no stranger to me, except the part about playing musical instruments. Like Lulu, I rebelled. I was determined to make her life hell. At one point, things got so bad between us that we didn't speak to each other for a minimum 5 years. My liberal and supportive dad, who gave me all the choices and freedom in life, borne the brunt of the conflict. Things finally improved when I turned 18. Nevertheless, we still have this love-hate relationship going on today. After reading this memoir, I realized I was not alone as I previously assumed other teenage daughter-mother pairs seemed to have no problem getting along just fine.

Secondly, I start to question whether I have pushed myself hard enough to the limit. There are truths we simply can't deny. The younger generation, who has it so easy compared to their parents and grandparents, can be self-indulgent and pathetic. I looked around and saw peers who felt entitled to good things in life without wanting to fight hard for them. Then I was reminded that I too, was guilty of spoiledness and laziness. If we don't work as hard as possible and climb as high a mountain as we can when we are still young, we will never have the energy to do it when we are older. Among the meaningful quotes are:

'Everything valuable and worthwhile is difficult.'

"Nothing is fun until you are good at it."

"There is nothing better for building confidence than learning you can do something you thought you couldn't."

Drive - The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us (Daniel H Pink)

I read this book because I was interested to find out what motives me to do something and what I can do to continuously motive myself.

All this time I thought motivation was built around external rewards and punishments - people respond to rewards and punishments. For example, the more severe a punishment is, the less likely someone is gonna commit that crime. It is not something hard to understand and correlate after all. However, little did I know that it is more than sticks and carrots, we have our third drive called intrinsic motivation as contrast to extrinsic motivation. 

Why do I read books and keep a blog when I am not receiving any monetary perks? According to this book, it is powered by our innate need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world. The three elements of intrinsic behaviors are autonomy (our desire to be self-directed), mastery (our urge to get better and better at what we do) and purpose (our yearning to be part of something larger than ourselves). Come to think of it, owning a blog does give me a sense of control (to decide the layout/ fonts I am gonna use) and I do want to get better at writing, reading and thinking through blogging. And maybe I do have the inner yearning to share the knowledge and my thoughts with people from the other side of the world. But if I start generating income through blog advertising, I might lose all the fun, joy and satisfaction because such an act can transform an interesting task into a drudge, turn play into work which in turn diminish the intrinsic motivation. This is why carrots and sticks method is no longer compatible in today's corporate world. 

My main focus is mastery, one of the elements in intrinsic behaviors - what can we do to move toward mastery in our lives? There are 3 laws - mastery is a mindset, mastery is a pain and lastly mastery is an asymptote. This helps to remind myself whenever I procrastinate.

All in all, this book is very useful to help you understand and improve your lives and your business. Another good thing about this book is that at the end of it, the author actually provides a summary of all chapters to strengthen your memory in case you have forgotten certain key points. The author also goes as far as to provide you a list of books/ websites relevant to this subject matter. I will definitely reread once I get a hard copy of it.

I am reading this for Non-Fiction, Non-Memoir Reading Challenge 2012.

Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office: 101 Unconscious Mistakes Women Make That Sabotage Their Careers (Lois P. Frankel)

I was introduced to this book through one of the posts made by JoV and I subsequently bought it with my RM200 book vouchers in January. This is a book every young girl should receive upon graduation.

The major I studied and the industry which I will be working are filled predominantly by men. I have my rationale for refusing to choose a major in which there are more female students than male. That way, I wouldn't end up in a stereotypical role. Anyway, there are always pros and cons when you are in the minority group. Hopefully, learning about the team dynamics and chemistry between two genders, as well as the mistakes made by women will work to my advantage.

Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office outlines the mistakes women make unconsciously at work which are divided by the author into 7 chapters - how you play the game, how you act, how you think, how you brand and market yourself, how you sound, how you look and lastly, how you respond. Coaching tips suggested at the end of each section help women to overcome the mistakes and further develop in their personal and career growth. 

I was embarrassed to find myself guilty of mistake #82 - Grooming in Public *facepalm*. Public displays of grooming, which I thought was no big deal, has now made me more conscious of what I do in public. Also, another mistake which has hit me hard is lengthy explanation. And the author was right with her analysis on why women talk more (and write longer emails or messages).

" Another (reason) is that we fear we haven't been thorough or complete enough, so in an effort to be "perfect" we keep talking. "

" And finally we overcompensate for our insecurity. We think the more we talk the better case we make.. when in fact the opposite is true. "

Thank JoV for introducing me this wonderful book on your blog. More to read and learn and experience! :)

Freakonomics (Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner)

Firstly, the title is misleading. It's not all that freaky after all and I am not dazzled. Basically this book has been written based on a few fundamental ideas:

1) Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life.

2) The conventional wisdom is often wrong.

3) Dramatic effects have distant, even subtle, causes.

4) "Experts" use their information advantage to serve their own agenda.

5) Knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so.

" Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work - whereas economics represents how it actually does work. Economics is above all a science of measurement. It comprises an extraordinary powerful and flexible set of tools that can reliably assess a thicket of information to determine the effect of any one factor, or even the whole effect. That's what "the economy" is after all: a thicket of information about jobs and real estate and banking and investment. But the tools of economics can be just as easily applied to subjects that are  more - well, more interesting "

The problem I have with this book is I don't find it mind-boggling. Okay, maybe I didn't know about what school teachers and sumo wrestlers have in common before this. But once I knew their dark side is cheating, I can see why. Just the same as why hundreds or millions of people faking or exaggerating their personal information on online dating sites. It all boils down to human nature which responds to incentives. The same reason why your dentist or real-estate agent is using his informational advantage to make more bucks. This is hardly something hard not to be able to comprehend. So the "findings" or "discoveries" in this sense are kinda  nothing new to me. And it was hard to get excited over something that u have already figured out all this time.

However, we gotta give the author(s) credits for not simply accepting conventional wisdom - the crime rate didn't just take a historical plunge because of stronger economy, increased number of police or all other explanations like what was being told in the media by the journalists or politicians, though it is not hard to relate abortion ban with the increase in crime rate twenty years down the road, especially when I am pro-choice.

" But just because two things are correlated does not mean that one causes the other. A correlation simply means that a relationship exists between two factors - let's call them X and Y - but it tells you nothing about the direction of that relationship. It's possible that X causes Y; it's also possible that Y causes X; and it may be that X and Y are both being  caused by some other factor, Z. " 

Overall, I would rate 3 stars out of 5.

Phew

Corresponding to my goal to read more non-fiction books, I have kickstarted the new semester with Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success and Robert Levine's The Power of Persuasion: How We're Bought and Sold. Truth to be told, I am very much relieved when I am writing this post. It is simply because I have finally finished reading these two books after one and a half month of carrying them around (not really, but I usually tried to read them when I was waiting for bus, lectures to start or before I slept.

I initially thought of reading The Tipping Point instead of Outliers but I couldn't find it on the bookshelves (probably getting misplaced). What a disappointment. Anyway, Outliers was brilliant. It presents to u that, despite the popular belief, successful people don't get to where they are just because they are hardworking, ambitious and passionate. The question we should be asking by now is "why do some people succeed far more than others?". Hence, the book argues, it takes more than personal merit to be Bill Gates or a star athlete or to be lifted onto the top rung or to be extremely good at Mathematics. And the book looks into it by dividing into two parts - opportunity and legacy followed with examples and statistics which the society itself tends to overlook.

I have always believed that environment plays an important role to shape a person, be it his personality or future. But I have never done more research or reading on it before. So this book is really an eye-opener and the chapters which I enjoyed the most - The Trouble with Geniuses, Part 1 & 2 where the comparison between Chris Langan and Robert Oppenheimer - two very brilliant young students, each of whom ran into a problem that imperiled his college career but they ended up having distinctly different lives is being highlighted. Then I realize, I won't be extraordinary successful. I didn't even receive much of the middle-class parenting style "concerted cultivation" (heavily involved in their children's free time, shuttling them from one activity to the next etc).

" It's an attempt to actively "foster and assess a child's talents, opinions and skills." Poor parents tend to follow, by contrast, a strategy of "accomplishment of natural growth." They see as their responsibility to care for their children but to let them grow and develop on their own. Lareau stresses that one style isn't morally better than the other. The poorer children were, to her mind, often better behaved, less whiny, more creative in making use of their own time, and had a well-developed sense of independence. But in practical terms, concerted cultivation has enormous advantages. "

Having said that, I was thankful that my mom did a good job at encouraging me to read and write since I was only 6 years old. She would make me a scrapbook with all the articles or essays she had cut down and collected from the newspapers and as I grew older, she ordered books and magazines for me (it was a luxury since it was quite a huge expense 15 years ago). Although she didn't sign me up for piano lessons etc, she is the reason why I love books so much. :)

(I might or might not write on Robert Levine's The Power of Persuasion: How We're Bought and Sold)