A Short Summary of Frederick Douglass' Narrative

Frederick Douglass was born in 1818? (like many slaves he was unsure of his exact date of birth) in Tuckahoe, Maryland and died on February 20, 1895, Washington D.C. As one of the main precursors of Afro-American writing he was a self-taught scholar and a self-made man par excellence for his time. He was the author of the "Narrative", "My Bondage and My Freedom" and essays on slavery while his Narrative on his real life incidents is his masterpiece. Later after his emancipation Frederick Douglass became a social reformer, orator and statesman and the charismatic leader of the abolitionist movement.

Like all slave narratives Douglass' was no exception and begins with the following lines: "I was born in Tuckahoe, near Hillsborough, and about twelve miles from Easton, in Talbot County". The story portrays his personal experiences, struggles and his unfortunate daily encounters with his masters and expresses the story's hopeful message that there would be hope in the future. In the first few chapters he gives ample accounts of the lives of other slaves in the Great Farm House describing in a clear engaging manner the brutality, starvation and the dehumanization of these people under servitude. He has used these themes to a stunning effect to illustrate and condemn the abominable practice of slavery. Though these real life incidents were written very much later after his emancipation they are told convincingly and emotionally by Douglass who conveys his pathos and sympathy for his brothers under bondage. He begins with a tableau of shocking violence, when as a young boy he watched the whipping of his aunt by the master that reflected the white people's sordid savagery who did not accept slaves as genuinely human. They are also filled with extreme anger and incomprehension with the dehumanization of the whole system and structure of slavery.

This autobiographical account in itself is written in a language easily readable with just eleven chapters filled with details tracing his life as a young boy and ultimately a self emancipated adult. For the epoch it was a daring work and is considered even today as one of the masterpieces of this genre. The book also outlines the literary elements of the story, which is a first-person recounting of the life of a slave and these anecdotes were very popular with the Northern white population who was more or less against this cruel institution. These writings in general greatly influenced writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe and her "Uncle Tom's Cabin". Later Mark Twain's masterpiece "Huck Finn" with the colorful character of the fugitive slave Jim who was directly inspired by these people who ran away from the South seeking freedom in the North. These slave narratives were written with a certain purpose for they were meant to depict and describe the evils of slavery that existed in the South of the United States. They were also meant to touch and inform certain of the Northern audience who were skeptic of the existence of this barbarian institution.

This literary form which grew out of the written records of enslaved Africans in the United States were prefaced by white abolitionists to prove the authenticity of their writings for many refused to believe and accept that black people could read and write. They were published in the 18th century by white abolitionists and soon became a mainstay of African American literature.

Book Summary: Hacking Work - Breaking Stupid Rules for Smart Results by Bill Jensen and Josh Klein

In business, infrastructure equals money. In order to scale, you need a flexible infrastructure to handle the growth. With that said, when centralized infrastructure turns into bureaucracy and slow response, the company becomes lethargic. Hacking work examines these problems from the workers standpoint and outlines things you can do to get your work done by working smart.

Why is this important to me?

I am not doing this summary to waste your time. It is my vision to provide concise action steps that you can adopt right now to reach your entrepreneurial goals. Most companies today trust their vendors and customers more than their employees. This is a real problem because brilliant results require team work and you cannot have a cohesive team if there is no trust. Companies want transparency and centralization similar to command and control systems. This is not a bad thing until it takes a sales man 2 hours to enter an order or if the company blocks Facebook, twitter and LinkedIn. Stupid actions like this kill results.

Results are the name of the game. If you do not get results NOW, you are dead. The hub and spoke model for business is not a bad model just as long as the spokes have autonomy to deliver to the customers and are not tied up by bureaucracy.

Hacking work is broken down into four sections. For the sake of time, I will highlight one point from each section.

1. Engaged Team Members - This one point sums up the whole book and separates great businesses from crappy ones. Engaged team members are four times more productive and profitable than disengaged team members. This statistic if focused on can transform any business.

2. Slaves to Infrastructure - I understand the need for procedures and infrastructure because you cannot scale without it. With that said, I know that larger companies handcuff their employees with ridiculous rules and procedures that ultimately kill the creative spirit. Hacking Work is all about working around these ridiculous rules and procedures. A simple example of this would be locking down file transfer access from one computer to the next. People today can have access to everything outside their work from their phone. Having stupid policies in place to limit creative freedom for the illusion of security is bad policy.

3. Three Types of Hackers - Black Hacks are the ones that steal, cheat and create havoc. These are the people who have given hacking a bad name. This book does not advocate black hacks. Grey Hacks and White Hacks are what are necessary to get the job done in a more efficient manner. These types of hacks are simply clever work around that save an enormous amount of time and allow workers to use their creative freedom for profit and customers loyalty.

4. Clarity - This one is a big deal. Take a look at the stats: one, three of the top five time wasters all relate to communication. Two, information in companies doubles every 550 days. Three, once every three minutes, the average cube dweller accepts an interruption and shifts her focus, consuming 28% of the day. Creating clarity and simple communication and information sharing networks can cure all of this.

Hacking Work is a good book that every company leader should read. I personally think that if we could eliminate wasted time on stupid procedures, we could create an additional economy the size of Texas.

I hope you have found this short summary useful. The key to any new idea is to work it into your daily routine until it becomes habit. Habits form in as little as 21 days. One thing you can take away from this book is "What will it take to go great work? Asking this question of yourself and your team will start to shine the light on the procedural crap that is hampering the creativity of every employee in the company.

Book Summary: Man's Search for Meaning - By Viktor E Frankel

Thomas Jefferson wrote - Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The pursuit of happiness seems to be the end game for life, but is it? Viktor Frankel is a concentration camp survivor and goes one level deeper in Man's Search for Meaning.

Why is this important to me?

I am not doing this summary to waste your time. It is my vision to provide concise action steps that you can adopt right now to enhance your life. This book is probably the most important book you will ever read. Finding the true meaning in life is the key to self-actualization. Maslow's Hierarchy of needs really shows that with the correct meaning the WHY definitely outperforms the HOW.

Dr. Frankel quotes the words of Fredrick Nietzsche - "He who has a WHY to live for can bear almost any HOW."

Dr. Frankel reveals what life was like in the concentration camps and also discusses Logotherapy which he created. For the sake of time, I will highlight key thoughts to really crystalize Nietzsche's words that a compelling WHY trumps any HOW.

Dr. Frankel goes into detail on the concentration camps. Life was simply hell on earth. What appeared to him was the mind's power to protect. The longer the stay, the more numbing all human emotion became. There are three behaviors I would like to highlight that are very strong and appeared based on Dr. Frankel's experiences.

1. Hope - People died daily in the camps. The guards played a finger game and if you were picked you were dead. The simply act of being pointed at delivered your fate in an instant. The prisoners that focused on the WHY to live had a better chance at survival. Dr. Frankel figured out that you needed to look young and always be eager to work. This increased your chance for survival. One thought controlled each man which was to stay alive for the family waiting for him at home.

2. Freedom - This part seems very counter-intuitive but there is one thing that nobody can take away from you and that is the freedom to choose HOW YOU REACT TO A SITUATION. This simply power gave the survivors the tools to live and survive. This one lesson can be life changing for anybody that decides to use it properly.

3. Mental Protection - The atrocities in the camps were hell on earth. The mind will protect and build shields for survival. Dr. Frankel discusses the second phase of camp life and that is lack of emotions. After a while the mind became calloused to the atrocities and pure survival ruled. If a dead prisoner was found then they were stripped of clothes by other prisoners. This seems inhuman but pure natural survival dictates these actions and the mind numbs the body to protect it.

Man's Search for Meaning is a life changing book. Most books today talk about being happy but let me paraphrase Dr. Frankel - "For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's dedication to a cause greater than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. Dr. Frankel developed Logotherapy and his meaning in life was to help others find meaning in theirs.

I hope you have found this short summary useful. The key to any new idea is to work it into your daily routine until it becomes habit. Habits form in as little as 21 days. One thing you can take away from this book is your freedom to choose how you will respond to a situation. Things happen in life and forces outside your control can dictate what you do in an instant. Life can change on a dime and your decision on your response is a freedom that you possess and can never be taken away.

Book Summary: The Mainspring of Human Progress For Six Thousand Years People By Henry Grady Weaver

A friend of mine recommended that I read this book and it provides a very compelling insight. That insight is simply this, freedom is the reason for our progress. There has been no place in recorded history except the U.S that has harnessed human energy to foster progress. For 6000 years humans have suffered from mass hunger yet in American history, hunger and famine are not problems. The poor in the U.S. today have about the same house hold amenities as the middle class did in the 1950's.

Why is this important to me?

I am not doing this summary to waste your time. It is my vision to provide concise action steps that you can adopt right now to enhance your life. Dictators try to operate and control human energy similar to a beehive. Basically you have the queen bee and all the worker bees creating and sustaining life. With a true Republic, man is free and controls his own human energy. How does this relate to progress? The most effective comparison you can make would be to look at East Germany vs. West Germany after World War II. When the Cold war ended, the Berlin Wall came down and East Germany found itself 40+ years behind West Germany.

Centralized power cannot control human energy. Progress will always be stifled. This is why some of the cruelest dictators are at the heart of poverty and famine. You can simply look at Sudan and Somalia for proof.

The Mainspring of Human Progress dives into history and discusses the problems with centralized power over creative freedom. Henry Weaver looks at the past and shows without a doubt that the most productive and innovative periods in history were garnered under a free society. For the sake of time, I want to profile a few of the salient points.

1. Genius thrives on rivalry - If you look at all great victories in the past, you will agree that rivalry is critical for achieving great success. Here are some examples: Seabiscuit and War Admiral. Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. Secretariat and Sham. George Patton and Rommel. This also works in business. Sales is probably the best natural competitive field because there is no second place. You either win or go hungry.

2. Human Energy flourishes with free will - We cannot force people to do anything. There is a great debate that the Egyptian Pyramids were in fact created with free labor and not slave labor. Historians know that nothing could be created that perfect under slave conditions. The ingenuity that comes out of the U.S. is still the best in the world. People are free to tinker in their garage and work on what they want to solve problems. Free will is the key to innovation.

3. Ten Commandments - The Ten Commandments are designed to highlight individual responsibility and not centralized responsibility. Without individual responsibility and accountability then there would be anarchy. In philosophy this is known as the difference between self-regarding acts and other regarding acts. Laws exist to set grown rules on other regarding acts. A self-regarding act is when you decide to jump off a cliff. You can die but it is your decision. An other-regarding act is when you push somebody else off that cliff. Other regarding acts need laws and consequences for the actions.

4. Government - Government is not designed and will ultimately fail if they try to support people. Entitlement breads laziness. People support the government. Again this is a balance because when government garners too much power, bad things happen. We are seeing this right now in the U.S. For every dollar the government spends to sustain itself, it borrows 40 cents. This model will crumble in the long run and will change.

The Mainspring of Human Progress is an interesting book and a look back in history. The main point is human progress flourishes under freedom. I hope you have found this short summary useful. The key to any new idea is to work it into your daily routine until it becomes habit. Habits form in as little as 21 days. One thing you can take away from this book is genius thrives on rivalry. This concept is a good way to rally your troops or your own self-motivation to achieve something great.

Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World - Book Review / Summary

In this book James Carroll, an award winning author, columnist and scholar, discusses exhaustively what lies within the two histories of what the three major faiths consider as their holy city, Jerusalem... the ethological history of Jerusalem and the actual history of the physical city. Throughout the book he distinguishes among the three faiths that occupied the holy city throughout its tumultuous past and how each sanctified the City as their own both literally and spiritually. Unlike any other city... only Jerusalem can claim such inspiration.

"Only Jerusalem, not Athens, Rome, or El Dorado, or the New York of immigrants' dreams - only Jerusalem occupies such a transcendent place in the imagination."

Indeed, the city is standing on holy ground... Carroll will take you on a journey from the "rock" that the primitive sacrificed other humans, "the rock" where Abraham was stopped from sacrificing his own son Isaac on Mount Moriah, where King David built his house on Mount Zion, or where Christ was crucified at Golgotha, and the Rock that Islam's Dome of the Rock enshrines.

What makes this read more engaging is that Carroll goes beyond the history of the city and its religions and characterizes how this city has become the symbol for a universal human condition: violence, which he refers to as "Jerusalem fever". And through human machinations and constructs, this primal and universal propensity for violence infects religious groups, political parties, and economic policy for the whole middle east and beyond. Carroll goes on to explains that while it seems intuitive that violence and religion are separate in their nature, the reality is that they are, in fact, inseparable, and shows the direct correlation of violence and the sacred. He goes on to write that this reality is evident in the historical developments of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, which we all can agree have their own bloody story.

Carroll also eloquates how this city stands as "the fulfillment of history". Each of the major monotheistic faiths believe that Jerusalem holds the key to their apocalyptic hope where God finally answers his own mysteries. What began, Carroll explains, as a immeasurable and internal revelation evolved into a revelation centered around a space (the actual city of Jerusalem), and finally into a revelation of time - the End Time. Carroll really does make plain how Jerusalem inspires revelation in all dimensions for all people.

"For Jews, Muslims, and Christians, this real estate - "holy land" - is a magnet that draws to itself, and thereby organizes, the shaving of a million impressions of the transcendence".

This book is beautifully and exhaustively written that exposes the good and bad in religion and personal faith (of any religion), and I don't think that I poured over, or pondered over as much as any book as this one. As one who has read hundreds of history books over the years I will have to read this particular book over and over to peal back each layer of information and understanding. Excellent book! I recommend this read to anyone interested in learning more on the city itself, the Middle East conflict, world history, and yes, maybe even learning a little more about yourself!