In 1948, Bumpy Johnson was the Godfather of Harlem. As a favor, he took a boy under his wing named Flash. He let him live in his house, had him running errands, let him tag along when he picked up protection money – all the stuff that Frank Lucas claimed do to for Bumpy in American Gangster.

Flash got ahead of himself and started running bad checks through Bumpy’s clean bank accounts and allegedly hit on his daughters. He got caught up and over his head and made a succession of unforgivable mistakes. The hammer fell quickly. He beat Flash within an inch of his life on a public street corner. He never even raised his hands to resist. And after a final kick to the head, Bumpy never looked at him again.

Bumpy’s crew pleaded that he kill him. With an ass-kicking like that, they said, he’d made himself an enemy for life. He had. Within just a few weeks, Bumpy caught a young woman sent to plant heroin in his house. Later, Flash flipped to the police and snitched on crimes that he’d never even committed. Bumpy did ten years in Alcatraz.

I don’t think the lesson is that he should have killed him, although Robert Greene is often right. Maybe he shouldn’t have beaten him in the first place. Responding emotionally, as I’m quickly learning, is rarely a good idea. Are the consequences of publicly humiliating someone really worth that soothing rush of adrenaline? It probably says more about you than it does about them. That whole, “I’ve got to assert my dominance or I won’t feel good about myself,” is as much weakness as it is anything else. A lot is said about ruthlessness and power, but maybe not enough about restraint.

“A young guy asked, “When you were my age, what did you to elevate yourself among all of your other associates? How did you stand our from the crowd of other, young, ambitious and driven colleagues of your day?” Jack responded “Great question, young man. And this is an important point for every person to hear. The first thing you must understand is the importance of getting out of ‘the pile.’ The only way you’re going to stand out to your boss is to understand this simple principle: When your boss asks you a question, assigns a basic project or sends you out to gather some data, you must understand that your boss already knows the answer he is looking for. As a matter of fact, in most cases, he simply wants you to go out and confirm what he already believes is true in his gut.

Most people simply go out and do just that,” Jack continued, “confirm what their boss believed to be true. But here is the difference maker. You must understand that the question is only the beginning. When your boss asks you a question, that question should become the jumping off point for several more ideas and thoughts. If you want to elevate yourself, you must sink your thoughts and time into not only answering the question but going above and beyond it to add value to the train of thought your boss was on.

Practically speaking, that means coming back to the table and presenting to your boss not only an answer, but three or more other ideas, options, and perspectives that were probably not considered by your boss. The goal is to add value to the idea and the thought by exceeding expectation when the question is given to you. This is true not only with questions but assignments, initiatives and everything else ever given to your to run with by upper management.

So if you understand that the question is only the beginning, you will get out of the pile fast, because 99.9 percent of all the employees are in the pile because they don’t think.

Thinking for a Change, John C. Maxwell (stolen from Tucker)

Theory of War, Joan Brady

This book is insane. It’s the story of a white boy sold into slavery after the Civil War and uses von Clausewitz to follow his lifelong vendetta against his captors – sort of a reverse Gladiator plot. And then we see emotional wreckage with four of his seven children ending their own lives in suicide. All credit goes to TheExecutive here because this book is fucking amazing.

The Correspondence Of Marcus Cornelius Fronto to Marcus Aurelius (free) Marcus Aurelius

I am so disappointed in myself for not finding this earlier. This is a collection of letters between Marcus Aurelius and Fronto, his mentor and friend. Fronto is the person who introduced Marcus to Epictetus – in fact, it’s widely believed that Fronto actually attended Epictetus’ lectures and gave Marcus his personal class notes. If you liked Meditations, you will shit yourself reading these. He pesters him to make sure he has been writing his daily maxims (the Meditations), chastises him for being lazy and they joke about interesting new words they’ve found. If you have a mentor, this book will make so much sense to you. I am fairly certain this is the only other thing Marcus Aurelius has ever written and it has been almost totally ignored by history. I wish I could do it justice – you just have to read it.

The Economics of Open Access Law Publishing (pdf) by Jessica Litman

I am only just starting to understand this but it is becoming a lot clearer. The paper is loose support for what I wrote about a few weeks ago. We’ve always believed that monetary incentives were the most powerful motivators of people but the internet realigns some of those priorities. A lot of people are using the word ‘love‘ but I think passion might be a better term. I think if you can start to think that way, it puts you miles and miles ahead of the prevailing backwards mindset.

Nobody who participates in any way in the law journal article research, writing, selection, editing and publication process does so because of copyright incentives. Indeed, copyright is sufficiently irrelevant that legal scholars, the institutions that employ them and the journals that publish their research tolerate considerable uncertainty about who owns the copyright to the works in question, without engaging in serious efforts to resolve it. They do this because they view the production of legal scholarship as within their core mission, as important to the legal academy as their function of educating lawyers. Once that scholarship is generated, moreover, its investors get the most bang for their buck if it is disseminated, read, and cited as widely as possible

This article from Tyler Cowen talks more about the economics of it. This thread is also getting good.