Wayne Haber

I have always admired the power and effectiveness of TED talks.  This book was a quick read and helped to reinforce the best practices that the most successful TED presenters employ. My notes and key excerpts are below.   Unleash the master within Dig deep to identify your unique and meaningful connection to your presentation topic. “Nothing great has ever been achieved without enthusiasm.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson Master the art of storytelling You need data, facts, and analysis to challenge people, but you also need narrative to get people comfortable enough to care about the community that you are advocating for. Your audience needs to be willing to go with you on a journey.” Aristotle believed that persuasion occurs when three components are represented: ethos, logos, and pathos. Ethos is credibility. We tend to agree with people whom we respect for their achievements, title, experience, etc. Logos is the means of persuasion through logic, data, and statistics. Pathos is th...

Hyrum’s Law: with a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody. I really enjoyed and learned a lot from this book.  I noted that, as is the case with many O'Reilly books about best practices at Google, different people will find various chapters more/less interesting and pertinent to them. Below are the excerpts that I found most pertinent.   Leadership Contrary to some people’s instincts, leaders who admit mistakes are more respected, not less. If you perform root-cause analysis on almost any social conflict, you can ultimately trace it back to a lack of humility, respect, and/or trust. Your organization needs a culture of learning, which requires creating psychological safety that permits people to admit to a lack of knowledge. If you try to achieve an impossible goal, there’s a good chance you’ll fail, but if you fail to try to achieve the impossible, you’...