Since the 4th of July is coming up shortly, I thought I would introduce a new serious to help the lifelong learners out there. This serous is called The First 100. In this serous I will help you with something that plagued me from day one. Finding good books to learn from. I’m not sure how helpful this will be for your 10,000-hour activity but these are all great books for your 1,000-hour activity’s. Feel free to pick and choose based on what sounds interesting. I will probably have more than 100 in in a few years for you to review.
There are 2 problems when it comes to learning from books. The first is that most of them are not good. They will be very confusing. They might just not be accurate. Or they might just not have anything useful in them. Regardless of what makes the book bad, it’s not worth getting anything out of them.
The second problem is perhaps worse. You can’t tell what books are good and what books are not. I know that when I started out, I was enamored with many books that I keep in the box of shame. Not to be confused with the other boxes of books that don’t fit on my 3 book shelves or the box of books I am getting around to reading. I found it took me reading about 100 good books before I could tell the good from the bad (you still need to test. Don’t forget that part. It’s important.)
So let’s start with the first book in this serious. A biography called “Washington A Life” by Ron Chernow. I got this book on audio so I could listen to it in the car. I a little bit regret that now as I can’t scan through it to look things up. So, I’m doing this from memory.
[Just want to give a warning that we will be discussing a very sensitive topic for some people dealing with slavery. If this offends you feel free to stop reading. I am very blunt and factual about this. Sorry for any inconvenience. You have been warned.]
There were three big lessons I took from this book and a few insights to success. I will leave the insights to success for those who read the book. The three big lessons we will talk about with some examples.
The first big lesson is that the details matter. As I’m sure most of you know George Washington owned slaves. This was something that bothered him all his life. Maybe not for the right reason but it bothered him. He quickly came to realize just how ineffective it was to have slave labor. Without the monitory drive to work harder, most of the slaves just barley worked at all.
He spent many hours and days trying to figure out how to get slaves to work faster. The only thing he found that worked was him being there and analyzing what his slaves were doing. Being watched motivated them but even with that he still couldn’t make his farm profitable with slaves. Freeing them would have. He eventually did, in his will.
Another example of this comes in his documentation of his service. He took notes of everything both during the Revelatory war and during his presidency. He new people would want to know what happened. He took great pains to make sure it all stayed together. Including paying a man to watch over the cart full of documents during it’s travel 24/7…. And instructions on how to handle going over water and the potential thief.
The second lesson was don’t take responsibility for something you are not given the power to accomplish. Oh, how many people make this mistake. I once worked for a company that had a management position where you could not tell anyone what to do. You could ask but they had no reason to obey. Could have learned a thing or two from Washington.
Washington had many disputes over the power he should receive for a position with the rest of government. I believe this started when he was serving in the British military before the war. They had a slight tendency of holding colonial officers responsible but putting British officers in charge. Having been burned by this arrangement before he spent the rest of his life trying to avoid it.
The biggest failure he had on this was actually during the Revolution War. It seems very obvious when now but most people didn’t notice the lack of authority given to Washington to defeat the British. Washington was only able to recruit people for a year before their service would be over. The problem was he was not recruiting battle hardened soldiers. He recruited common folk. People like you and me with no training. After a year of training they would be ready for battle and… leave.
No more army.
But wait it get’s worse. The government had no ability to pay the people who had served in the war. So, he had people who had put their life on the line for a year, in some cases more, and he had to tell them “thanks for your service. You know the money we should get? Yeah that’s not happening. Hope your wife made enough for you to keep your farm.” It’s understandable why so many people just up and left. These two things nearly lost the war.
The last lesson is maybe the most important. Many people don’t know this but George Washington was very emotional. When he got angry his wrath was a sight to behold. When he was sad his morning was crippling. But he hid this well form the public. Despite this, he always thought with his head. He, with very rare exceptions, never thought with his emotions.
This might be the most important lesson because when you most need it, it’s the hardest to do. When people are thinking with their emotions instead of their head, they tend to make some of their worst mistakes. Not Washington thought. He could want to rip someone head off to beat someone else to death with it and maintain his composure. At least most of the time.
So, if your like George Washington, or me for that matter, remember that it’s OK to be super emotional. It’s OK to want to really hurt someone. It’s not OK to let your emotions make decisions for you. Make decisions based on logic.
There is so much more in this book but space and time limit me from going over all of it. if you would like to read it I have a link here that will take you to amazon where you can buy it.