This book is a short memoir of Biz Stone, who stumbled on the idea of Twitter while researching new things to make when odeo, the podcasting startup, wasn’t doing so good. He teamed up with his coworker, Jack, to start a simple text message system where connect people can see the messages in real time. The 140-character limitation came from the text message system (160 characters).

During his high school years, he was too exhausted from attending school and working to help out his single-mom family. He negotiated with the teachers to not doing any homework and still maintain reasonable grades. Now that takes guts!

Until the Twitter success, he was constantly in debts especially after his initial start up company failed. He landed at Google doing blogging and eventually left that post to join Odeo.

The rest of the book he talked about the lessons he learned:
A short lesson on constraint: “Embrace your constraints, whether they are creative, physical, economic, or self-imposed. They are provocative. They are challenging. They wake you up. They make you more creative. They make you better.” The constraint of 2-week hackathon led to the creation of Twitter. 140-character tweet is in itself a constraint to force creativity.

Twitter is successful because of the flocking behavior as in birds as he observed when Twitter was introduced to the Southwest Interactive Conference (SXSW). That’s when Biz realized that Twitter is going to be a success.

Be willing to fail in order to be successful is one of the advises Stone gave with his example of learning and executing back handspring in high school.

Compartmentize the software modules allows Twitter to become more stable – a lesson from the Star Trek. This same philosophy should apply to every undertaking in life. Modularize if possible. Don’t open up to developers too quickly, lest suffers the stability issue Twitter faced in its early days.

Stone was asked to be the “bright spot” of the company when their system crashed. “An open, curious, optimistic mind yields solutions, and has a better time along the way.”

Twitter almost got bought up by Facebook back in 2008. He came up with a huge figure $500M for the company. And Mark Zuckerberg went for it. This was an interesting story.

The new rules for Twitter employees:
1. We don’t always know what’s going to happen – humility.
2. There are more smart people out there than in here – don’t always look internally for answers.
3. We will win if we do the right thing for our users – sometimes conflicts with profit.
4. The only deal worth doing is a win-win deal.
5. Our coworkers are smart and they have good intentions.
6. We can build a business, change the world, and have fun.

The 25-dollar in a gift card from DonorsChoose.org goes a long way in choosing who you donate the money too. What a clever idea.

This is a fun book to read. You probably won’t learn too much but it’s good to know how you can stumble into a “billion”-dollar idea given a short deadline while fighting to survive. Biz Stone is a smart and lucky man.

This is a fascinating story of the World War II era centering around George Patton, a 4-star general leading the 3rd army in driving Adolf Hitler to his demise. It’s as much about the key characters in WWII as about George Patton’s life.

From this book, I learned about several interesting tidbits about all the key players in World War II.

Franklin Roosevelt: He’s a man of great passion for the country who worked himself to death. But his personal life like most political figures in the early era is bit shady.

Dwight Eisenhower – a military man with political savvy that frequently ran into conflict with George Patton in his effort to appease the British by favoring UK’s Montgomery at times to make UK look good. Also, some mention of his affair was intriguing.

Winston Churchill – tried hard to position UK’s power post WWII by working out deals with Russia’s Stalin, who didn’t honor any of them. He was voted out of office at the end of WWII but came back to power later. Pretty resilient. The fact that Churchill was more American than British; his mother was from NY.

Joseph Stalin – what a vicious dictator he was in treating his people and his German enemy. He was conniving, calculating leader. No wonder Patton was very skeptical of the Russians and fearful of the Russians more than the Germans.

My impression of George Patton:
1. He appears to be a very good judge of characters like Stalin, Hitler, and Dwight Eisenhower.
2. Patton made lots of enemy and got himself into controversies by talking from his guts, especially the last controversy he talked something nice about the Germans and his distrust against the Russian. Almost got himself fired.
3. Some personal poor judgement on his affair with young Lucy Mercer Rutherford and sending a commando to rescue his son-in-law in keeping his promise with his daughter. The poorly executed plan cost more than 30 lives.
4. His cause of death appears to be non-accidental. Looked like someone was out to get him. That’s what happened when you had lots of enemy. My guess is the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) head, William J. Donovan.
5. Patton was a very brave man and served the country well despite the strange death shrouded his latter day in life. Was it an accident or assassination? The author presented the facts that tilted toward the latter.

This is a great book. Not only the Patton character is interesting, the surrounding characters and the war details in the book were equally intriguing. I highly recommend this book, even if you’re not a history buff. It reads like a novel and very educational.

What a great love story for two young kids with great passion for arts, poems, and music.

My takeaways from the memoir:
– Being an true artist starting out could be a trial experience. Patti Smith was homeless for a while and was constantly hungry and directionless, and yet her passion for art, poems, music kept her going.
– She met Robert in a book store then bumped into him as she was trying to escape the advances of a date. That’s when their relationship started.
– Her love for Robert Maplethorpe read like a love story despite Robert’s inclination toward homosexuality later in life.
– Pregnant at 19 and gave up her daughter up for adoption and then leave down. Now that’s brave in that era.
– In her dire financial situation, she saved enough money to travel to France and stayed for months. That takes determination and the passion for France.
– Though she frequently encounter people using drugs/speed, she stayed clean until she started using marijuana – a mild form.
– Her low, monotone voice in the audiobook takes some time to get used to. At the end, it was almost poetic.
– The description of the New York arts scenes, the famous people and fame-searching peole in and out of Chelsea Hotel, all make an interesting backdrop of story.
– In the beginning, I didn’t sense she was musically talented except for listening to them and hanging out with famous singer like Jimi Hendrix. I kept looking for clue that she discovered her talent later in life. But all along, her love for drawing, poems and lyrics seem to exceed her love for singing or song writing. Fortunately, she’s got a good voice and musically talented after all, or maybe she tried to minimize her singing talent.
– Because of this book, I googled/brushed up all the characters mentioned in the book and Patti Smith’s songs and poems including her Patti Smith Complete book. She’s indeed talented.
– After reading the book, I have new found respect for those who are passionate about arts and creativity in spite of difficult situation. The world owed them the refinement they endowed on this earth. Makes me want to write some poems. Maybe I will.

I particularly like the farewell paragraph: “I stood there and looked at him. So peaceful like an ancient child. He opened his eyes and smiled.” Back so soon?” And then again to sleep. So my last image was as the first. A sleeping youth cloaked in light, who opened his eyes with a smile of recognition for someone who had never been a strange.” When you can adore someone through the hard time and happy time, you have the love of your life. A relationship to envy. It’s great that Robert makes this book and stories his dying wish. What a treat for all of us!