Ask HN: Books about people who did hard things
Seeking recommendations for books about how hard things got done. I like the Acquired podcast, but am looking for reading deeper than it.
I’m reading The Big Rich about the oil boom in Texas and like it. I also liked Barbarians at the Gate about how private equity got created and how deals went down.
Less interested in people and character studies. More interested in the mechanics of how things that we take for granted actually got built and what the world they were made in was like.
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).
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.
Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants - is a pretty great read, full of (literally) explosive twists.
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 :)
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
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/124718.One_Man_s_Wildern...
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.
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.
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.
The Soul of a New Machine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine
Yes, very memorable prologue:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-Kidder-ebook...
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.
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
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.
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!
> 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.
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
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.
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.
Apollo: The Race To The Moon Charles Murray, Catherine Bly Cox
My favorite book of this type by far.
The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop [1]. An in-depth history of how personal computing was created.
[1] https://press.stripe.com/the-dream-machine
"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.
The Power Broker is a superb choice for OP. This comment should be closer to the top of the thread.
“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.
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.
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.
How to Make a Spaceship by Julian Guthrie was a greally good read for me.
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.
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.
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
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.
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. "
The Wright Brothers biography was incredible. Highly recommend for the exact qualities you're looking for:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester
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.
Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson
dava sobel's "longitude" is excellent
I haven't personally read it, but The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes seems to fit the bill.
"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.
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.
Re: getting hard things done I've been admiring the way Elon Musk takes calculated risks in:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk_(Isaacson_book)
how to get rich by felix dennis is a banger for me