Peter Kang

Raving Fans: A Revolutionary Approach to Customer Service by Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles is a quick read (a little over 100 pages, can easily be finished in one sitting) told in a business parable style. A protagonist called Area Manager is guided by a fairy godmother-like character named Charlie and introduced to business owners practicing the Raving Fans framework, delivering exceptional customer experiences to their respective customers. Raving Fans Framework Overview The Raving Fans […]

The Emotional Bank Account Concept The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey is one of the most popular and best-selling personal development books of all time. I’ve had a copy since college when a friend gifted it to me, but I didn’t truly appreciate its lessons until recently, when I revisited the book for our quarterly Barrel Partners meeting, where the four of us shared our respective takeaways. One of the […]

The Joy of Selling by sales consultant, coach, and speaker Steve Chandler is a small 132-page volume that anyone can quickly finish in a couple of sittings. But inside this skinny volume are some very potent ideas and concepts about selling that have continued to stick around the back of my mind long after my first read. I highly encourage anyone, even those not engaging actively in an official sales role, to check this book out. […]

Blackstone co-founder and CEO Stephen A. Schwarzman’s memoir What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence is what you might expect from a successful billionaire who exudes self-confidence and knows he has achieved most anything he’s set his sights on. Unlike, say, Disney CEO Bob Iger’s memoir The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company, Schwarzman doesn’t linger on internal struggles, moral crises, or any vulnerable moments. Instead, […]

I benefited greatly from reading Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen. My only regret is that I didn’t read it years earlier when I first heard about it. My initial reaction to a book about a framework/methodology for getting things done was: “I’m pretty organized, I have To Do lists, and I get stuff done every day. No need.” Such arrogance, such missed opportunities to get better. But better late […]

Stillness is the Key by Ryan Holiday is a book about inner peace and how this “stillness” is the key to “unlocking all that we are capable of in this life.” Holiday references ancient philosophers, religions, historical figures, and other successful people throughout the book to lay out his framework for achieving stillness: mastering the mind, spirit, and body. I’ve been a long-time subscriber to Holiday’s monthly newsletter where he recommends books he’s read. It’s […]

Orphan X is a entertaining fiction series from author Gregg Hurwitz. The hero, Evan Smoak a.k.a. Orphan X, is a product of a government black ops program that turned wayward children into deadly assassins. Smoak is out of the program and has turned into the “Nowhere Man”, an invisible force who saves the helpless, dishing out punishment to sex traffickers, rapists, domestic abusers, gangs, and other nefarious characters. Think Jason Bourne meets the Equalizer. I’ve listened […]

Sig had developed a theory—a hypothesis, to be exact—about undersized ballplayers, after so many years of watching Jed Lowrie and José Altuve, and now Alex Bregman. Most players with their skills but traditional pro bodies had lived their entire lives without having ever been told no and often without suffering any setbacks. So, when faced with the prospect of failing at a critical moment, they didn’t know how to handle it, because they’d never had […]

I’ve compiled some additional thoughts on Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done by Laura Vanderkam. You can read about my time diary experiment here. Progress is motivational, and makes time feel expansive. In the time-perception survey, people who strongly agreed with the statement “Yesterday, I made progress toward my personal or professional goals” were 20 percent more likely than the average survey respondent to believe that they generally had enough time for the […]

In Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done by Laura Vanderkam, the author writes about her study of over 900 participants in which she surveys them on how they spent a Monday in March hour by hour and how they felt both about that day and about time in general. She writes: First, people who feel like they have enough time are exceedingly mindful of their time. They know where the time […]

The real art in learning takes place as we move beyond proficiency, when our work becomes an expression of our essence. Josh Waitzkin grew up as a chess prodigy and competed at the highest levels of competition. In his early twenties, he left the chess world to pursue a career as a martial artist, specifically in Push hands, which is rooted in tai chi and a very popular competitive sport in Taiwan. His book, The […]

I read Homo Deus by Yuval Harari back in March and one passage that stuck with me was his take on spirituality and why religions are anything but spiritual. Harari defines religion as such: Religion is any all-encompassing story that confers superhuman legitimacy on human laws, norms and values. It legitimises human social structures by arguing that they reflect superhuman laws. Religion asserts that we humans are subject to a system of moral laws that […]

I recently finished reading The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, a novel about a double spy agent during and after the Vietnam War. It was one of the more memorable fiction reads I’ve had in a while. I really enjoyed Nguyen’s style of writing and found myself highlighting a number of passages. I’ve been trying to get better in general about revisiting books I’ve read and re-reading my highlights. With The Sympathizer, I found it a very […]