The way we learn from books (Part Two)

It’s actually quite common to enjoy a book like Maya Shankar’s “The Other Side of Change” yet walk away feeling as if nothing stuck. And that “zero‑takeaway” sensation is not my failure of comprehension, but rather a clue about the way my mind processes ideas. 

Let’s try to explore that issue of style of communication, and then offer a more powerful way to think — and debate — the aftermath of change. There is no framework in the stories that were offered to me in that book, still it was pleasant to read, emotionally touching, but hard to retrieve and cognitively slippery. I must be someone who thrives on frameworks, systems, and meaning‑making. 

A book that doesn’t offer those explicitly typically never leaves a strong imprint in me. To begin with, the topic (change) is too universal When a book describes something we’ve lived deeply — and many of us have lived a life full of reinvention, adaptation, and resilience — the ideas can feel like things we already know intuitively. 

As a result, our mind goes: “Yes, yes, I’ve lived this. Nothing new here.” True, familiarity reduces memorability. Another way to look at how books impact our minds is that without friction there is no retention. We all tend to remember ideas that challenge us, provoke us, or contradict our assumptions. When the tone of a book is gentle, validating, and non‑confrontational, it doesn’t push back against your worldview and provoke us to pay attention. 

We could say that pleasant reading creates almost no cognitive tension and doesn’t make much of an imprint on us. A book too easy to read works more like a reflection and less as a mind-opening tool. In that particular subject of “Change”, a book should be philosophical (why change matters), psychological (how change affects identity) and practical (how to navigate change). 

That book covered these two first points but left me hoping for the third one. In a next blog, we’ll return to the subject of that book and this time, explore how to actually debate the aftermath of change.

The way we learn from books (Part One)

I just finished reading “The other side of change”, a book by cognitive scientist Maya Shankar that explores how major, unexpected life disruptions can lead to profound personal transformation, blending personal stories with scientific research to offer a guide for navigating upheaval and finding new meaning and potential within ourselves. 

Shankar, host of the “A Slight Change of Plans” podcast, uses narratives of people facing events like job loss, illness, or relationship endings to illustrate universal lessons about resilience, identity, and growth, encouraging readers to see change as an opportunity for reimagining who they can be. 

I enjoyed reading the book, but must admit that its contents glided on me like water over ice. The book was experiential, not instructional as the author wrote it in a reflective, narrative style. It’s warm, empathetic, and story‑driven but not prescriptive. 

My brain brain enjoyed the flow but didn’t get any clear “hooks” to store. Has this ever happened to you? This aspect of book retention is a subject I need to dig a bit deeper into, and report my findings to you, so expect that subject to populate my next blog…

Albert Camus and me…

If someone had asked me what Camus meant to me several years ago, I would have said that he was a famous French writer (1957 Nobel Prize of literature) who died in his Facel-Vega automobile in 1960. At the time, his publisher Michel Gallimard, was behind the wheel when the car hit a tree near Sens, France, following a tire blowout. 

At the time, I must have been more fascinated by Facel-Vega cars than Camus himself. Little did I know about his view on the meaning of life or lack thereof. Over the years I had read The Stranger and The Plague, but must have missed their meaning altogether. 

In fact, I’ve come to find Albert Camus' philosophy centered on the confrontation between the human need for meaning and a universe that is indifferent and doesn’t care about humanity, a concept he called "the Absurd". 

His central argument, was not that life was objectively meaningless, but that meaning was unattainable through traditional means like religion or absolute truth, something I agree with. Rejecting nihilism, Camus proposed instead that the only way to live authentically was to embrace and rebel against the Absurd. 

That concept isn’t something I share as I understand the irrational clash between our rational minds seeking order and a chaotic, indifferent world that I have little choice but accept as a given environment I must live within. 

Where I’d agree with Camus is by choosing to live intensely, in embracing the fullness of human experience on Earth, as this life is all I have despite the vagaries of life. I also agree with the need to liberate myself from the need for external validation or predefined purpose, something I continuously keep fighting for. 

I guess that just as Sisyphus, eternally pushing a big rock up a hill, I find ways to create my own happiness, because I’ve come to accepts my fate, owning my reality and making this struggle very much bearable. I consider myself extremely lucky to have been born, much better of as a human than any animal, I accept life’s absurdity and I even find ways to enjoy it.

A good book about avalanches

Randomly I recently chose to read “Throwing Stones in a Glass House” an autobiographical book by Liam FitzGerald, who at 23, in 1968, started a career as a ski patrol and snow avalanche worker at Squaw Valley (now Palisades Tahoe). 

In 1971 he moved to Snowbird at its opening and became Snow Safety Director until 1998 when he moved on to the Utah Department of Transportation, where he managed the highway avalanche program in Little Cottonwood Canyon, Alta and Snowbird’s access road, one of the most prone roadways in North America. 

If you love the mountain industry and skiing as much as I do, and of course if you have skied Alta, Snowbird and driven countless times on highway SR-210 to get there, I encourage you to pick up this book that you’ll find to be a page-turner. 

In it, you’ll discover that Liam’s life is a perfect illustration of “Passion, Courage and Imagination” and will conclude that avalanches are before anything, unpredictable, and when you dare venturing outbound into suspicious or even harmless-looking snow condition, you’ll never know what might happen to you. 

That’s the big takeaway of that book encapsulated by Switzerland’s André Roch best known for having planned and surveyed Aspen in Colorado, an expert himself on avalanche management whose expertise was sought throughout the world. He liked to say: “Be careful, because the avalanche doesn’t know you’re an expert!”

Painting the skiing experience

Recently, I picked up a coffee-table, picture book revealing over 30 years of painting work by James Niehues. 

He is a Colorado artist that created many maps that have been the companions of millions of skiers and snowboarders at resorts and mountains across the globe, but mostly here in North America. 

That heavy, 5 lbs book, titled “The Man Behind the Maps”, displays more than 200 individual trail maps Niehus has hand-drawn and painted. 

It has also became the number one Art-Illustration Kickstarter campaign of all time and is loved by skiers and snowboarders who have been familiar with his artsy as well as unique trail maps.

I personally agree than they’re much better than computer-generated map and compared favorably when put side by side with those (see Telluride vs. Morzine-Les Gets) and constitute a very effective blend of artistry and a complex creative license to fit complex mountain reliefs into a flat map and for rendering a pretty realistic experience of what’s in store for the user. 

Great job! I almost wish I had pick James Niehues’ job as a career...

Review of Bill Gates’ book on climate

Just before his marital problems surfaced, Bill Gates had introduced his book “How to avoid a climate disaster” on the various American radio and TV talk shows. 

It probably would have been more successful had his troubled marriage not thrown a monkey-wrench into his work. Still, it sounded both intriguing and interesting, so I decided to read it. 

In it, Gates explains what’s happening with greenhouse gases and brushes up a pretty strong case for completely getting rid of them by 2050. 

Yet, like the rest of the so-call experts in the field, he totally ignores the real cause of all the ills that are causing pollution and global warming, namely the planet overpopulation. 

He’s a businessman who believes that quantity of people is what keep the economy afloat, regardless of what a more qualitative measurement could contribute positively. He also counts on governments to take the lead at implemented the policies he advocates. Good luck with that one too. 

In summary, some great information about the subject, some good intentions in terms of tackling the problem, but a systematic denial of what messes up the planet: Continuing to add too many polluting humans into its limited space!

Let me revel “The Secret” to you!

I’ve been so much influenced by one positive-thinking book, “Think and Grow Rich”, back in the days, that I wanted to read “The Secret”, the updated standard bearer of that life philosophy. 

From the get go, the fancy presentation of the book, its questionable rooster of so-called experts, as well as the professed belief that eyesight or health problems could easily be fixed by the “Law of Attraction”, rang warning bells in my mind! 

In fact, the few good advice contained in the book could be dispensed by a short, 25 page outline, and the rest is all marketing fluff, feel-good prose and borderline fraudulent. 

And where is the “secret” in all this? The good advice is just common sense and isn’t locked inside some remote vault! 

This book is totally forgettable and some research on Wikipedia about Positive Thinking, or the New Thought Movement, and its beneficial effects as well as its pitfalls might be a good alternative primer...

Inspiring books about mountaineering exploits

Recently, I’ve been reading a series of high altitude climbing-mountaineering books relating exploits and mishaps taking place in Asia, between the Karakorum and the Himalayas, and must say that not only this adventure reading keeps me on the edge of your seat, but is for me, also highly addictive. 

If I were not in my early 70s, I would get involved at once in that wonderful endeavor! No wonder then, that many climbing vocations have been ignited by the revelations contained in a regular dose of this kind of reading. 

I can vividly remember that, as an 8 to 10 year old child, I spent time in the summer in my Alpine pasture with a city-kid my age, from nearby Thonon, on Geneva Lake’s south shore, who had been totally raptured by reading the work from Roger Frison-Roche, that French prolific mountain writer who gain celebrity through “Premier de cordée” (First on the rope) in1944. 

That reading triggered his life-long passion for climbing and for trying to getting me bouldering on local cliffs. At home we had no such books, let alone nothing to read but the newspaper! Fortunately or unfortunately, I had no access to such books, and I obviously missed getting sucked into hard-core mountain climbing. 

If that had been the case, I might not be alive today to tell that story...

A perfect Christmas gift!

Ever since I can remember, I have received plenty of Christmas presents, except perhaps when I was a child when what I got was limited to an orange and some candies. My godparents, who owned a grocery store, once gave me a toy airplane that I really cherished… 

The rest of the time, Christmas presents were objects that my wife and I purchased together, killing any element of surprise as we opened the package on Christmas Day. It was until this very Christmas Eve, when my daughter-in-law found for me a brand-new looking, used book about planning and architecture of French ski resorts. 

She couldn’t have picked a better book for me, and the fact that she stumbled on it at a local store makes it even more remarkable. This richly illustrated nine pound volume tells the story of French winter sports resorts built between 1920 and 1980, with emphasis on places like Megève, Courchevel 1850, Flaine, Avoriaz, Les Arcs and Les Karellis. 

The authors show how planners and architects addressed their real estate developments with solutions specific to each location. For each place, the book covers a time span ranging from the conception to the birth and the completion of these destination resorts, detailing multi-family to single family dwellings and common areas, plus including original drafts and an impressive array of interior photographs. 

I’ve already began to read it and can’t wait to dig further into it!

A book just written for me…

As I was searching for information about some older Salomon products, I stumbled upon a book written by a former Salomon’s manager, namely Walter Zibung, former Swiss subsidiary director for the French ski company. 

In B USELESS ;-), as his book is named, Zibung paints a fascinating picture of an evolving career that took him from accounting apprenticeship in his hometown of Switzerland, to backpacking around the world, just enough to whet his appetite for international business, to a decade working in Japan before landing his beloved job at Salomon. I immediately purchased the book on Amazon. 

A page-turner written with wit and some reasonable exaggerations, that autobiography uncannily mirrors my own career path, indirectly pays homage to Georges Salomon, the genius entrepreneur that, with his dad François, built Salomon to the number ski company in the world. 

 It shows that the late leader was chuck-full of common sense, knew how to pick the right associates as well as observe intensely and listen extremely well to the market. 

It also shows that the company successive take-overs, beginning with Adidas, was the poison pill that killed the culture and the creative juice that ran through that company. 

It’s also a reminder to all of us who were privileged to work in the ski industry as much as we did, that we're indeed a very lucky bunch…

Ready for a 20-hour flight?

The first times I flew to and from Australia was not in just two flights. I remember once that I began in Geneva, then Vienna, Bahrain, Shri Lanka, Kuala Lumpur, Sydney and finally Melbourne.

This was a long and tiring trip, in different airlines and claustrophobic tube-like planes like DC8 and 707. How long did that trip take? I don’t even want making an attempt to remember.

Things have changed a lot since these days and the last time I went to Australia, the trip was in comfortable wide-body jet, but still was a long 15 hour flight between Sydney and Los Angeles.

This past week, I just heard that Qantas Airways has just announced that it will test its 20-hour direct flights from New York and London to Sydney as early as October 2019, using its employees as guinea-pigs.

Unless the airline as a plan to keep its passengers fully occupied or distracted for close to one day, they might all go crazy before they reach their final destination.

As for me, if I’m still adventurous enough to sample one of those direct routes, I’ll make sure to pick up a copy of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” that I’ve yet to read, and hope to break a record of my own in getting through “War” on the way in and “Peace” on the way out!

My buddy, the writer...

Many of us, including myself, often “threaten” their friends and the world that we'll write at least one great book, but very few do it, and of course, I can be found among those who fall short of meeting their lofty goals.

Thank God, some exceptional individuals accomplish what they say they will, write the next great American novel as this seems to be the case for my friend William Bocq that has already written a handful of books and get them out at an impressive rate.

His last novel, “Le Nécromantique” is in French and blends a romantic story with what appears to be a very somber plot.

If you can read French, you'll love the down-to-earth characters that inhabit this page-turner chuck full of details, and you'll find yourself devouring the book to discover who's the mysterious character that sets-up an unstoppable and life-changing chain of events!

My buddy, the writer

A few days ago, I received a brand new book, in French, titled “The Improbable Ulysse”, written by one of my countrymen who also happened to have been my buddy during high school in that French, highly regimented technical college that was supposed to turn us all into mechanical geeks.

I had read the manuscript several years ago, found the story excellent as well as very well written, and was amazed to finally see it turned into a real, fresh-from-the-press book.

I've threatened to write several books in the past and still have nothing to show for it. while my friends has put his own inspiration into a tangible volume that I plan to devour as soon as I'm done with the book I'm currently trying to read.

Kudos, Bill!

The (real) art of the deal

I have yet to read “The Art of the Deal” that best seller Trump has had written for him back in 1987 by Tony Schwartz. I plan to read it as soon as possible, because I can't understand that a self-proclaimed sales or business guru like Trump would fail at repealing and replacing Obamacare as he did a few days ago.

Maybe when I'll read his famous book, I'll change my mind about what selling is all about.

That's true, I've always thought that successful selling (or deal-making for that matter) began by listening to the customers, always doing one's very best to be polite and considerate with clients, always looking forward to establishing a strong and lasting rapport and, as much possible always attempting to hide one's ego and arrogance.

To me any other for behavior was that of a jerk, but again, once I've read the masterpiece I might be proven wrong!

Does practice make perfect?

I am the first to say (with great conviction) that the more one practices, the better one gets.

This probably goes hand-in-hand with the “10,000 Hour Rule” that is promoted by the pop writer Malcolm Gladwell in his book “Outliers” and that says that at least 10,000 hours of deliberate practice are needed to become world-class in any field, citing the Beatles and Bill Gates among other examples.

This assertion is based on a study by Anders Ericsson. So when I apply it to skiing, after tallying how many hours I've spend on skis since I learned as a kid, I get to 12,500 hour, so I feel I can claim that I master the art of skiing.

This said, a recent Princeton study just debunked that theory. In a meta-analysis of 88 studies on deliberate practice, the researchers found that practice accounted for only a 12% difference in performance in most domains, and only 18% in sports.

Of course, I don't buy this and remain a staunch proponent of the 10,000 hour rule. Do you want me to substantiate my hunch? I may, but will only do it when I'm done practicing and finally have more time on my hands!

Are we curious enough?

...Probably not as much as we should. I'm currently reading “A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life” by Brian Grazer and Charles Fishman.

I wish I would have known what I found inside its pages when I was in my 20s, but I guess, better later than never! This book re-frames everything not just in terms of curiosity, but most importantly in the form of questioning, that is obviously the by-product or better yet, the main vehicle for curiosity.

We spend our lives giving orders, telling people, making comments, explaining ourselves, but not asking enough questions and by doing so, we're missing on so many things.

Time to get started, I guess...

Good name, bad book

I just finished reading “The Only Game in Town”.

Since it was authored by Mohamed El-Erian, a financial “celebrity” that hangs around all serious economic TV talk shows and has been involved with the IMF, among other institutions, I thought I would learn even more about the role of central banks and get a better grasp of their functioning, power, margin of maneuver and future options as the title led me to believe.

Instead, I was treated to a mishmash of senseless sentences and obscure words stitched together to get me 250 pages later with nothing understandable that could add to my knowledge. Gobbledygook at best plus an almost total waste of my time.

Another lesson about never to ever judge a book by its cover, all the nice compliments written about the author and the stunning reviews found on Amazon, mostly made by folks who probably didn't have the understanding, the patience or the determination to push to the end of this pointless essay.

A good book

For quite a while, I had been looking for a good book on video and discovered one totally out of luck last week as I was just browsing inside a large book store.

I picked it up and realized that I really had found the rare gem I wanted all along. A very rare occurrence and another proof that serendipity is alive and well...

The end of growth

I just finished reading a wonderful book that explains very clearly and comprehensively the bind humanity finds itself into today. I found the reading fascinating and could only agree with its main premise: Quantitative growth is now over, time to do something about it!

I have in fact held that view for quite a long time and was only disappointed in the lack of urgency Richard Heinberg, the author, seems to place on overpopulation and wasn't impressed on its “prescription” for addressing the unavoidable shift.

I found his solutions to be less than convincing and on the “light” side. We'll all need to work on them! This said, this is a book everyone should read to seize the shape of things to come into their future lives...

Excellent book about the “Stones”

I just finished reading “Life,” by Keith Richards and James Fox . This is an interesting account of the Rolling Stones' life and tribulations seen by one of its original founding members. If you like rock and roll and remember life in the late 60s and early 70s, the 550 pages of this book are another account about these crazy times well worth reading. The book sheds an interesting light on Richards who attempts to prove his key influence on the band's success, tries to hoist himself to Mick Jagger's level, his even more flamboyant and highly visible sidekick, without convincing me entirely, on the accounts of a musical career deeply marked with excessive drug use and countless erratic moves. What's remarkable is that Keith Richards manage to survive the very harsh treatment he imposed upon his body. Quite a statement about the quality of his own genes! A well written book and a page-turner if you appreciate the Rolling Stones and their seemingly endless saga...