Summer reading: Three books I recommend

Bad Blood: Secrets and lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (John Carreyrou) 

Looking for a book about a Silicon Valley startup that reads like a fast-paced thriller?  Consider Bad Blood by Wall Street Journal’s investigative reporter, John Carreyrou.  Carreyrou chronicles his harrowing efforts to uncover the truth about famed founder, Elizabeth Holmes, and her startup, Theranos.  Billed by major publications as the new Steve Jobs and Apple of the medical device industry, Holmes seemingly embodied the quintessential successful Silicon Valley start-up founder:

·       Attended famous college/university (Stanford) – Check

·       Dropped out of college to change the world via startup (Theranos) – Check

·       Sought to disrupt/revolutionize a big, antiquated industry (healthcare) with innovation (blood testing device) – Check

·       Had a unique personal style: black turtlenecks and baritone speaking voice – Check

 

Tipped off by an anonymous source (a former Theranos employee) concerned about the company’s unethical and dangerous practices, Carreyrou sought to ferret out fact from fiction.  Threatened by Theranos’ pit bull legal team, Carreyrou and a handful of Theranos whistleblowers persisted in the face of possible professional and financial ruins. Through a series of high-profile articles, Carreyrou revealed that both Holmes and Theranos were frauds.  Rather than use investor money to create revolutionary product(s), Holmes leveraged it to hide the fact that Theranos was really using a competitor’s product to conduct blood tests, which often produced faulty diagnoses due to lack of scientific standard and procedure. 

 

Like any great book, Bad Blood brings up as many questions as it answers.  What is the line between ambition vs fraud; innovation vs imitation; fact vs fiction; marketing vs deliverable; bro culture vs popular culture?  In her relentless drive to achieve success, Holmes increasingly relied on spin and Theranos’ powerful legal team to create and uphold a false narrative about herself and her company, rather than put in the necessary blood (no pun intended), sweat and tears to bring her vision to life.  Unlike real trailblazers, Holmes seemingly got lost in her own house of marketing mirrors and forgot one of life’s cardinal rules: you get out what you put in.    

Becoming (Michelle Obama) 

When Becoming first published, I put off reading it.  I distrusted the fawning celebrity endorsements, which were seemingly made to signal to fans: “Hey!  I love to read…and I hate racism.”   

 

I recently came across Becoming at the local library and decided to give it a try.  In her autobiography, Obama covers her life from birth until the end of her husband’s Presidency. There were three things that stood out for me.  First, the book reads less like an autobiography and more like an intimate conversation with a close girlfriend, whose name is Michelle Obama!  Obama’s casual writing style helps lower any sense of barrier or reservation readers may have towards a writer who’s also a modern-day icon.  Surprisingly, I found it easy to relate to her life story personally. 

 

Second, rather than moralize about the ills of racism, Obama personalized it by recounting the subtle, but corrosive, effect it had on her family, extended family, neighbors and neighborhood.  Raised in Southside Chicago, Obama observed its transition from a well-to-do white neighborhood to a working-class black neighborhood as reflected in the changing skin color of her elementary school classmates.  She also shared how the lack of education and employment opportunities eluded her family’s older generation, who were caught in a socio-economic catch-22: they couldn’t get better paying jobs without a good education, but they couldn’t afford to give themselves or their children a good education without better paying jobs.  Obama noted the succession of men in her family – grandfather, uncle, father – who had to take whatever jobs (often menial labor) were available to them in order to support their families.     

 

Third, rather than be held back by racism, Obama was seemingly motivated by it to rise higher and higher: from public elementary school to charter high school to ivy league college (Princeton) to ivy league law school (Harvard) to white-shoe law firm to city government to the White House to famous author and one of the most trusted public figures in America, if not the world. (Damn, girl!)      

 

Rather than be held back by circumstance, Obama seemingly used it as a launching pad for her life and work.  In so doing, she demonstrates to all of us (especially women) how much one can accomplish in…less than a lifetime.      

The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self (Martha Beck) 

Depending on who you are, this book’s author (life coach, Martha Beck) and title could either draw you in or put your off.  Like many genres, most self-help books are typically rehashed psychological mumbo jumbo with the exception of a precious few.  In my opinion, this is one of the few. 

 

Beck observes that while we embodied nature at birth, we became increasingly conditioned by nurture (or culture – family, religion, politics) as we grow up.  Over time, nurture obscured nature, and left us feeling divided and loss.  Inevitably, the end result is our increased suffering.  

 

According to Beck, “integrity” is “wholeness,” which can only be reclaimed when we realign ourselves with our nature.  Beck leverages Dante’s Divine Comedy as a literary device to illustrate the individual’s journey from inferno back to paradise; nurture back to nature; division back to wholeness.    

 

Respecting her readers, Beck highlights how difficult this journey often is.  It typically requires us to abandon the people, circumstances and cultural conditionings that have come to define us and our lives.  What gives credibility to Beck’s observations and insights is her own brave and dangerous journey back to nature.  Raised in a conservative Mormon family, Beck eventually had to abandon her faith, family, academic career and marriage so as to reclaim her integrity (wholeness) and live out her life as a non-Mormon, life coach and lesbian. 

 

To help address the fear and uncertainty that arise in the journey back to integrity, Beck shares a “formula” that has worked for her and her coaching clients: State what you think will happen if you do something that’s aligned with your integrity.  Then, realize that the opposite will happen.  For example, after publishing Leaving the Saints wherein Beck called out patriarchy and the rampant abuse within the Mormon church, she recalled receiving a lot of death threats.  Wracked with fear and anxieties, Beck predicted: “Something horrible is going to happen to me.”  As reality unfolded, she realized that the opposite happened: “I’m going to happen to something horrible.”  By exposing the Mormon Church’s mistreatment of women and girls, Beck did, indeed, happen to something horrible.  

 

According to Beck, while the journey back to integrity is hard, the final destination is peace.  Moreover, Beck observes that when we begin to lead a life of integrity, not only does our life become the truest and highest expression of ourselves but also one of the greatest contributors to the collective good.