Before reading this book, Regis came across to me as a normal talk show host who would make a big deal out of trivial events to fill the time and did it in such a dramatic way. After reading this, I came to appreciate his true talents that he’s always doubtful of himself throughout his career.

Like a good talk show host, he introduces in this books lots of people I’m not familiar with like:
1. Jack Paar: a big-time Tonight Show host before Johnny Carson who he tries to emulate and had a close relationship with until Paar’s death. I had to watch some old Youtube videos to see what’s he like.
2. Joey Bishop: a talk show host who Regis was his sidekick in the Joey Bishop show, competing with Johnny Carson on ABC network. Regis appeared to be not too crazy about Joey because Joey forced him to pretend quitting/walking out the show to get a jump on the rating. But Regis was appreciate of his giving him a break. He looked like a boy in those days.
3. John Severino: a revengeful boss who gave him a middle finger early in Regis’ career and later offered him the Live with Regis talk show in New York after he defected to ABC.

Some facts that I learned from this book:
1. Regis started the red carpet show on Oscar night before anyone else.
2. How accurate this astrologist, Sydney Omarr, predicted his success in 20 years which turned out to be true when he got his gig New York talk show more than 25 years ago.
3. Jack Nicolson is such a private person and has never been interviewed except for this one time he phoned Regis to invite him to a Lakers game.
4. George Steinbrenner’s superstition that caused him a lot of bladder pain when he had to stay while the Yankees went into over time and won the game. Funny story.
5. Dean Martin is someone he literally worshiped and admired as someone with so much talent and grace, working with Jerry Lewis. Dean’s spontaneity and great voice were still legendary. His last encounter with him in a Beverly Hill restaurant is something of a sad ending and yet he reminisced.
6. Regis had a lot of self doubt in the beginning of his career because his perception of “lack of talents” after seeing Steve Allen’s setting the high bar.
7. Regis has a strong tie with his alma mater, Notre Dame, which seemed to bring him lots of consolation during his lull.
8. Steven Spielberg was a young man who choked when interviewed by Regis.
9. Howard Stern was such a gentle soul when you live next to him and have a share the same elevator like Regis did.

At the end of each chapter, there are a couple of paragraphs on “what he took away from it all.” They are very true and sometimes funny. A couple of quotes here:
a. “To specifically label what you do best is to unfairly limit what you can do best.” “Just make sure you know what you absolutely cannot do. And don’t be afraid to admit it.”
b. Go ahead and take a chance on doing surprising things at work (as I did in the piggy bank story). Attention will be paid.” “There is no such a thing as a lowly job when you start in a particular business where you’ve always dreamed of succeeding.”
c. “Great things can happen much later than you might have hoped. But even then, great things are great – and always worth appreciating – so don’t give up.”
d. “Never stop saying thank you to the people who’ve made the biggest differences in your life. No matter how much it embarrassed them.”
e. “Learn what you can from old mistakes, but don’t dwell on them too long or you may miss out on truly great opportunities.”
f. “Loyalty to others tends to ensure that your loyalty will always be returned in kind.” “Know how to take a ribbing, especially from people who obviously care about you – as well as those who do it for a living and mean you no harm. (Don Rickles). It’s really a compliment that they though enough of you to talk about you in the first place.”
g. “In business, think first with your head, and soon enough your heart will follow the same path.”
h. “When difficult times arise, don’t lose sight of how far you’ve already come and of all the better times that have helped sustain you along the way.” “After a terrible setback, the true test is how you face the next day: Get up, show up and I promise you you’ll soon begin to cheer up.”
i. “Get yourself near people who exude great enthusiasm and watch how it rubs off on you.”
j. If you approach any task with perfection as your goal, it will always bring you that much closer to truly achieving it.”
k. “To become big, you cannot be afraid to play big – and to dream even bigger.” “Always keep self-doubt to yourself – as best you can. And never buy into it for very long.”
l. “The bigger you build your dreams, the more likely you are to take heat from detractors. Forget about the heat and just keep building.”
m. “Helping others will, more often than not, help yourself find a greater sense of fulfillment.” (Charles Grodin).
n. “Those who’ve shared the same health scares as you and eagerly comfort you along the way are the realest friend you can find.” (David Letterman)
o. If you are lucky enough to find the right one, you’ll know it. Then just hang on for dear life. Dearer life, really.” (Joy Philbin)

I really enjoyed this memoir. Regis is truly an icon who shared his life on live TV and shared his life lessons in this book. He’s a generous man.

This is an awesome book for anyone with dying loved ones or those dying. For everyone, because we all will be dying some day.

The author, being a surgeon himself, discusses about what’s best for a person to end his life journey, whether due to aging and illness, and how a doctor and his/her loved ones should help.

Need to think about the end goals – what matters at the end: short quality time, less suffering, ability to “watch in front of TV football game while eating chocolate ice cream.”

Several touching stories in the book: a new mother, an old independent man, his daughter’s piano teacher, and a few others. But mostly, his father’s story really hit home and is most touching.

He touched on nursing homes, assisted living, and others in between to help the old living out their end of life with autonomy and without the constant risk of falling or missing medicines.

He advocates the use of hospice to help making the last days of life worth living. I got to know how the home hospice care work. Spelling out the goals and writing down what’s needed: funeral home to use, when to resuscitate and etc.

Human remembers mostly of the peak pain and the pain at the end – our remembering self. The average of the pain experience that we experience is normally not important to us because they don’t make good stories. When it comes to handling losses (like fighting cancer), we tend to take excessive risk without considering the quality of life at the end.

This is a great book. You’ll need to read it sooner or later. Read it now.

The six drivers of the future according to Al Gore are:

1. Earth Inc. – a deeply interconnected global economy that operates as a fully integrated entity. Robosourcing and technology-induced job losses.

2. The Global Mind: the increase in interconnected world that produces “intelligent beings” that surpass our intelligence. Our brain capacity got extended by the Internet that benefit the democracy movement worldwide. Pitfalls of the internet including education, security, privacy, and frauds.

3. Power in the Balance:shift of economic and political power from the east to the west and to the large corporations. In the west, he warned about the power of the corporations and their lobbyists.

4. Outgrowth: unsustainable growth of human population and resource consumption. Growth of mega cities from the exponential growth of population means more hunger and obesity, mass marketing, waste and pollution and longevity, which contributes to the growing pains that include migration, refugees, endangered ground water, top soil, and over exploitation of ocean.

5. The reinvention of the Life and Death: breakthroughs in materials science and biological and medical advances may redefine how we evolve. He argued against patenting of genes, human cloning, antibiotics usage in farm animals. And he touched on the upcoming technological singularity, creation of new body parts, fertility, lifespans or “healthspans”, GMO and etc.

6. The Edge: our new relationship between human civilization and the Earth’s ecological systems – the environments. As expected, Al Gore goes through lots of details on global warming, CO2, methane gas under the icecaps, and it’s depressing, coral reefs for fish habits are dying. He goes into the politics of global warming which is very insightful. He warned about the danger of fracking. He advocates cap and trade.

Key points:
1. Love the mindmap in the beginning of each chapter.
2. Lots of history if you enjoy it. In a way, he’s extrapolating the future from the past/history.
3. Depressing state but hopeful.
4. China’s determination to become the superpower in application of genetic and life science analysis.
5. Call to the US to lead the world.

Overall, it’s a pretty good state of the world now and his projection of the future may well be true.

I listened to the audiobook in some random order for some reasons. This is the first time that happened. Don’t know why. In any case, I was confused by the sequence of event in this memoir. I had to go back to the hardcopy and reread the book.

This book is all about Jeff Bezos and the rise of his grand Everything Store, Amazon. You get to know a little of the history of Amazon and a little of this man Jeff Bezos, his working styles and visions for the company.

What gets me is that he was already pretty well off as an investment banker in a “quants” shop and he decided to quit it and start this company from scratch after catching the Internet fever. Very gutsy!

Something about Jeff Bezos
1. Jeff’s being passionate being customer-centric is admirable. However, convincing the investors to stay with him while he scaled the company up does take some persuasion and good sale job.

2. He flexed his muscle with strong tactics in driving his competitors into being bought at a bargain price when it most counts.

3. His biological father lost touch with him since young age and wasn’t reconnected until after he became famous. He had the same laugh as his father.

4. He burned out many of his early executives because of his hard driving management style and possibly the lack of stock appreciation in those days due to the dot com bust.

Interesting company cultures:
1. Being “cheap” and thrifty sets the tone of the company like Walmart.
2. Reading prose/write-up instead of listening to PowerPoint presentation in a meeting.

3. The interaction with eBay (trying to buy eBay) and Walmart (sold to Walmart) were possibilities that never yield fruits.

4. The Amabot replaced the editorial staff. Why do you need the editorial staff when you have all the customers do the work for you.

In handling the “narrative fallacy,” I believe the author did a pretty good job in presenting the material in the most objective way. The book is worth the read if you want to know what it takes to start a company and make it to a behemoth while facing continuous criticism from the Wall Street about profitability.
I got to know Jeff Bezos, this amazing person.

A fairly good read over all.

A few good quotes:
“We should stop asking people in their twenties what they “want to do” and start asking them what they don’t want to do.”
“You tell people the good things. Diaries are for the bad things!”
“Decide what your currency is early. Let go of what you will never have. People who do this are happier and sexier.”
She joked that an SNL hairstylist once told her, she “had a great place for wigs.”

Great at improvisation and writing. “I was never too this or not enough that. Every week o SNL I had the opportunity to write whatever I wanted. And then I was allowed to read it!” “Writing gave me an incredible amount of power, and my currency became what I wrote and said and did.”

Her gynecologist died the day before she went into labor. How ironic. She did the Hillary Clinton vs. Sarah Palin SNL sketch and the Sarah Palin rap the week she gave birth.

A few inserts by her friends like Seth Meyers about the SNL sketch with Sarah Palin rap and her mother about her birth. Nice perspectives from other people.

Comedy is hard work. “Doing comedy for a living is, in a lot of ways, like a pony and camel trying to escape from the zoo. It’s a ridiculous endeavor and has a low probability of success, but more importantly, it way easier if you’re with a friend.

As a comedian, she occasionally went overboard and had to apologize like the case about a disabled girl. “A word about apologizing: It’s hard to do without digging yourself in deeper. It’s also scary and that’s why we avoid the pain. We want so badly to plead our case and tell our story. The bad news is that everybody has a story. Everyone has a version of how things went down and how they participated. It’s hard to untangle facts and feelings.” How true! “Every performer has to to figure out what feels right.”

About divorce, she quotes Louis CK “divorce is always good news because no good marriage has ever ended in divorce.” She referenced a few of her favorite books about divorce. She didn’t talk much about her own divorce of her 10-year marriage though.

On aging, “fighting aging is like the war on Drugs. It’s expensive, does more harm than good, and has been proven to never end.” “Getting older makes you somewhat invisible.” – so you’re better observing a situation. “The moment people start looking at you less is when you start being able to see through people more.” Learning from the “older friends”: “I am interested in people who swim in the deep end. I want to have conversations about real things with people who have experienced real things.” “Young people can remind us to take chances and be angry and stop our patterns. Old people can remind us to laugh more and get focused and make friends with our patterns.”

Taking improv lessons from Charna and Del Close. Met Tina Fey in the class and performed “Women of Color.” Did her work touring as Second City member across Texas and many town with low pay and Upright Citizens Brigade. “We were young and foolish and didn’t know what we were up against.” “Being foolish was the smartest thing to do.”

Amy had lots of imagination since childhood. Living in a normal, loving middle-class family, she needed to create her own drama like handcuffing herself with a friend at fourth grade.

She enjoyed reading “tragedy porn.” “I would read terrible stories to punish myself for my lucky life. Some real deep Irish Catholic shit.”

Amy was hired on Saturday Night Live in August, 2001, just a month before 9/11. She was forced to do comedy in a city that was “battered and still on fire… while avoiding being killed by Anthrax.”

About being a mother, Amy complained about people’s asking her, “I don’t know how you do it.” She heard “I don’t know how you COULD do it.” – making her feel guilty and overwhelmed. I never thought of it that way. She did disclose she’s got a full time nanny or “wife.”

On sex, she gave a few advises. I like #6, “get better at dirty talk.” and #11 Laugh a lot and try new things with someone you love.”

Awards or “pudding” were elusive to her in the beginning. I like her practical joke of organizing every nominee in the category to fake winning the award. Have fun anyway whether you win or not.

Amy has worked so far throughout her life including serving ice cream in a local parlor, waitressing. “How a person treats their waitress is a great indication of their character.” This was followed by doing gigs as a comedian before her career took off on SNL.

“Treat your career like a bad boyfriend.” “Good or bad, the reality is most people become “famous” or get “great jobs” after a very very long tenure shoveling shit.” The reality is that most career advancement is from referrals. “Try to care less. Practice ambivalence. Learn to let go of wanting it. Treat your career like a bad boyfriend.” “Career is the stringing together of opportunities and jobs. Career is something that fools you into thinking you are in control and then takes pleasure in reminding you that you aren’t. Career is the thing that will not fill you and never make you whole.”

But distinguish it from creativity. “Creativity is connected to your passion, the light inside you that drives you. That joy that comes when you do something you love. The small voice that tells you, ‘I like this. Do this again. You are good at it. Keep going.'” She drew analogy of “creativity” to a really warm older Hispanic lady who has a beautiful laugh and loves to hug.

“Ambivalence is the key to success.” Wow, that’s powerful and so true. “You have to care about how good you are and you good you feel, but not how good people think you are or how good people think you look.”

She talked a lot about her role in “Park and Recreation” series and how it came about after the end of SNL career. Because of this book, I actually a few episodes on Netflix. She went a step further talking about the show business – the pros and cons of all the players: actor, writer, director, and producer. Nice insight.

She offers some tidbits about time travels (and she does in her own way), using drugs, her two boys and being a “moon junkie,” her charity involvement in WWO visiting orphanage, and ended the book on her love/hate relationship with the cell phone.

This is a good book to read if you like comedy and curious about how a comedian become success or you simply like the story of a hard working woman doing what she loves with great passion and creativity and succeeded in it. You’ll get some laughs too. Why not?!

My key takeaways from this book:

1. Bliss point – precise amount that makes the food and drink more enjoyable – the inverted U-shape in pleasure vs. quantity of sugar.

2. Grouping data into “light,” “medium,” and “strong” coffee drinkers. Gladwell’s TED talk about Ragu’s grouping into extra chunky and 35 other kinds of spaghetti sauces. Sugar is the second critical ingredient after tomatoes.

3. We are driven to eat or crave certain food other than the emotional needs, tastes, followed by aroma, appearance, and texture. Sugar does it all.

4. Use of DOE (Design of Experiments) to come up with most appealing taste in carefully orchestrated taste tests across the country to engineer a food product.

5. Convenience is the key, e.g. Jello remade to jell within 5 minutes. Thanks to more women working. For convenience, lots of additives were added. Among them, the biggest one is sugar. Tang orange mix was created in the lab trading off all other vitamins except Vitamin C.

6 Food companies deploy an army of home economics teachers to teach cooking classes using their ready-made mix, and create a fictitious chef celebrity like Betty Crocker, and infiltrate the home economic associations.

7. Cereal should be considered as “candy.” They are laces with sugar for quick fixes.

8. Good history of the processed foods like cereals, Dr. Pepper, and chips.

9. People are eating more snacks and less or skipping main meals.

10. People can exercise their own will but can they if they’re “addicted” to the salt, sugar and fat.

11. Lots of repetition since all 3 ingredients combined pack the biggest punch.

12. The CEO’s or product managers of their own food category do not eat their own foods to keep off the salt, sugar and fat.

13. It’s sad to see that in pursuit of ever time and cost efficiency, people are replacing normal healthy home made foods with those processed foods that would eventually put them in the chronic illness like diabetes, heart diseases, high blood pressure and others.

Sugar:
– Cola war story of Jeffery Dunn, repented – now selling carrots.
“Sensory-specific-satiety” explains why people are addicted to Coca Cola because of it’s balanced taste – no lingering edginess, the aroma of vanilla and the citrus, and whole family of spices, like cinnamon and nutmeg, then you have the sweetness and the bite of phosphoric acid, and the tingle of the carbon dioxide bubble – all the parts of the flavor construct.
– Self imposed curb of marketing to children under 12. But local stores are magnets for kids to consume soda. Teens spend less and visit stores more often.
– Story of “Tang” mix: designed artificially to mimic oranges but have to add in Vitamin C only to keep the good taste.

Fat:
-Mouth fullness feeling from fat. But it has no tongue receptor. Gives cookies more bulk and a firmer texture. Has not bliss point – the more the better – no negative feedback from the brain.
– Fat has a narcotic effect on people. Ice cream makes people happy.
– Hard to replace as people can taste the difference – “mouthful” feel.
– Fat is often linked up with sugar in candy bars. Majority of calories (60~80%) come from fat.
– There is no cheese in Cheez Whiz.
– Krafts’ American Cheese is the “processed cheese” left over from bottom of the pot after stirring the cheese. Enzymes are added to speed up aging and flavoring process.
– Surplus milk was converted to cheese.
– Story of Lunchables – from Oscar Mayer, started by Bob Drane.
– The making of the “pink slime.”
– Government agency including USDA helps promote meat, cheese, and milk inside and outside the country.
– Correlation of saturated-fat diet to lung cancer. For Philips Morris, this could be another nicotine problem like in the cigarette.

Salt:
– Sodium in salt pulls the fluid from our tissues into the blood which raises the blood volume (high blood pressure) and forces the heart to work harder.
– Most of the sodium/salt consumption comes from the processed foods, as people are cooking less at home.
– People don’t just love salt, they crave (or addicted to) salt . It’s one of the hardest thing to live without.
– Makes the wet-dog-hear meat taste more tolerable.
– More salt makes people less sensitive to salt, hence eating more of it. After being cut off, the sensitivity to salt can be enhanced and need less.
– In bread making process, salt keeps the huge, spinning mixer machines from gumming up. Also salt slows down the rising process to keep up the pace.
– Salt can help the “warmed-over” foods taste better.
– Cargill, one of the biggest supplier of salt and other farm-related products, is an extremely profitable private company.
– Potassium Chloride could be substitute for salt but tastes bitter.
– Potato chips are a source of heavy salt consumption. Call them “toasted” not “fried.”
– Baby Boomers are aging and eating less potato chips but more salty foods in general due to more snacking and reduced home cooking.
– Different crystal formation of salt can be customized to each form of food. Fine crystal for potato chips to produce the maximal effect.

In summary, this book serves as a wake up call to the readers/consumers the danger of submitting oneself to the seduction of salt, sugar and fat in the processed food. The food companies will do their best to pander to the customers even if the products are not good for our health. Being educated is the best weapon to protect ourselves from the harmful effects of the processed foods.

This is a journey of a great leader in arriving and sustaining a creative culture in Pixar, a famous movie animation studio that started out as an animation lab for Lucas Film. It was bought up by Steve Jobs after he’s been ousted from Apple.
Lots of concepts were evolved as a result of working years in a highly creative Pixar and later applying the same philosophy to Disney Animation.

My summary:

1. Processes:
a. Having an open communication in a setting like Braintrust helps everyone struggle with the story line and come up with the most creative plot and results.
b. Postmortems are one route into understand why we are not exceptional but we’re resistant to self-assessment. 90% of the value is in the preparation leading to the postmortem – pre-postmortem. Make 2 lists: Top 5 things they would do again and top 5 things they wouldn’t. Don’t trust the data again. “The first conclusions are draw from our successes and failures are typically wrong. Measuring the outcome without evaluating the process is deceiving.
c. lunch lottery that match people at random to encourage new connections and friendships, and holding cross-departmental mixers get far-flung colleagues to know each other over a few beers.

2. It’s about people and the team: “If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better.” “Getting the team right is the necessary precursor to getting the ideas right.” “Getting the right people and the right chemistry is more important than getting the right idea.”

3. Ideas:
a. “Ideas, are not singular. They’re forced through tens of thousands of decisions, often made by dozens of people.” They are additive rather than competitive.
b. “Idea – without the critical ingredient that is candor, there can be no trust. And without trust, creative collaboration is not possible.”

4. Approaches. “The more time you spend mapping out an approach, the more likely you are to get attached to it.”

5. Leadership:
a. Reward the aspiration: “One of the most crucial responsibilities of leadership is creating a culture that rewards those who lift not just your stock prices but our aspirations as well.”
b. Demonstrate trustworthiness by responding well to failure.
c. Not to prevent risk but to build the ability to recover.
d. View conflict as essential. It’s how we know that best ideas will be tested and survive. “The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends.”
e. Hold lightly to goals and firmly to intentions/values. Goals can be shifted.
f. Have the bravery to endorse something unproven and providing room for it to grow.
g. Taking a risk necessitated a willingness to deal with the mess created by the risk. Make it safe to take them.
h. Try to understand the nature of the “unseen.”
i. Be humble: understand many of the factors that shapes our lives and businesses are out of sight.
j. Mental models are not reality but tools.
k. make your best guess and hurrying up about it so if it’s wrong, there’s still time to change course.
l. Loosen the controls, accept risk, trust your colleagues, work to clear the path for them, and pay attention to anything creates fear.
m. On hiring: give more weight to the potential to grow than their current skill level. What they will be capable of tomorrow is more important than what they can do today. Hire people who are better than you are. Always take a chance on the better.
n. Trust means you trust them when they do screw up, not just trust them not to screw up.
o. Don’t make stability a goal. Balance is more important than stability.
p. Don’t confuse the process with the goal. Making the product great is the goal.

6. Struggling with changes and randomness:
a. “There is no growth or success without change.” “The unpredictable is the ground on which creativity occurs. Let the randomness work for us, don’t fear them.
b. “Only from struggle does clarity emerge — makes many people uncomfortable.” Pick the explanation – to a good or bad outcome – that rely on the fewest assumptions and is thus the simpliest.
c. Creativity starts out working with changes.
d. Don’t resist changes and uncertainty – they are part of life. Our job is to build the capability to recover when unexpected occur.

7. Dealing with failures (a necessary consequence of doing something new):
a. Small vs. big: “There is not a bright line between small and big problems, which are in key ways the same. Don’t freak out or start blaming people.”
b. Learn from the past but don’t let it master our future. The attempt to avoid failure could make failure more likely.
c. The cost of preventing errors is often far great than the cost of fixing them.

8. Culture:
a. candor, safety, research, self-assessment, and protecting the new are all mechanisms we use to confront the unknown and keep the chaos and fear to a minimum.
b. allow smaller groups within the large to differentiate themselves and operate according to their own rules (so long as those rules work). This foster a sense of personal ownership and pride in the company, which benefits the larger enterprise.

9. Crafts vs. Art: Craft is what we are expected to know; art is the unexpected use of our craft. Art classes are about learning to see, not learning to draw.

10. Setting limits: Before we impose procedure and limits, ask how they will aid in enabling people to respond creatively. If not, it’s ill suited to the task at hand.

11. Arts vs. technology: “Art challenges technology, technology inspires art.”

12. Solving problems:
a. Don’t just focus on the problem but also look at the environment.
b. move the focus away from the notion of the “right” way to fix the problem to actually fixing the problem.
c. Engaging with exceptionally hard problems force us to think differently.

13. Measurements: Measure what you can, evaluate what you measure, and appreciate that you cannot measure that vast majority of what you do. At least one a while, make time a take a step back and think about what your’re doing.

14. Creativity in Zen: “To have a “not know mind” is a goal of creative people. It means you are open to the new, just as children are. Like Japanese Zen – having the “beginner’s mind.” We must let go of something.

15. Creative habits:
a. creative people discover and realize their visions over time and through dedicated, protracted struggle. Creativity is more like a marathon than a sprint.
b. Key is to linger between the known and the unknown where originality happens.
c. Imagining making the impossible possible.
d. Imagining – dreaming, noodling, audaciously rejecting what is true for the moment is the way we discover what is new or important.
f. Think of each statement as a starting point, as a prompt toward deeper inquiry, and not as a conclusion.
g. “Do not discount ideas from unexpected sources. Inspiration can and does come from anywhere.”

16. Directors’ rare skill:
a.pitching as a way of testing material, taking its measure and strengthening it by observing how it plays to an audience. But if the idea doesn’t fly, they are extremely adapt at dropping it and moving on. Steve Job has a similar trait and he wanted to be one in his next life.
b. Act on our intentions and stay true to our values.

17. Balance between feeding the “beast” (Profit) and coming up with the most creative products/movies.

18. Steve Jobs’ story is intriguing. He evolved as a leader and respect those who’s willing to challenge him and argue for what he believes.

This is a great book for anyone in the leadership positing trying to grow and sustain a creative organization and culture. Highly recommended.