REBUILDING MILO by Aaron Horschig, Kevin Sonthana

• To develop strength, you must strike a balance between stress and recovery.
• To progressively develop more and more strength, the demands of your training must not exceed the adaptive capabilities of your body.
• When you train hard and don’t give your body enough time to recover, the stresses of training begin to accumulate.
• There is always a reason for pain. It doesn’t develop out of thin air.
• When a radiologist sees a bulging disc on an MRI scan, they have no way to determine whether it is due to a recent event (a wound) or is 20 years old (a scar).
• Your body is resilient to injury when the power generated at your spine remains low.
• if you want to lift heavy weight (placing load on the spine), it is best not to move your spine and keep it within the neutral zone. Lock it in place and keep it stiff while you move at the hips.
• Every spine has a breaking point, and the quickest way to find it is to load your spine with a ton of compression and perform rep after rep with poor technique.
• If given time to adequately recover after being overloaded during a heavy training cycle, the body can adapt and replace a microfracture with stronger bone.
• While your hip joint is meant to move under load, your spine is not.
• Working every day to improve ankle mobility should be a priority if you wish to return to deep squatting pain-free!
• Learning to stiffen your trunk anytime you move a load (picking up a box off the ground or squatting a barbell) needs to be your first priority.
• Stiff hips affect the role of the joint complex directly above: the low back.
• Poor mobility in either the thoracic spine or the shoulders often causes the low back to move excessively as compensation when the arms are raised overhead, such as when placing a box onto a high shelf, pressing a barbell, or performing a snatch.
• Understanding how your injury presents will help you figure out what you need to do and what you need to avoid in the short term to decrease your symptoms.
• Nearly all back pain can be controlled and altered by changing the way you move.
• While exercises like Russian twists, sit-ups, and back extensions from a GHD machine may be great at increasing strength, they do little to increase core stiffness.
• To enhance the quality of stiffness, you must train the core differently. This comes through the second approach of using isometric exercises built to enhance muscular endurance and coordination.
• The definition of stability is the ability to limit excessive or unwanted motion.
• One key to fixing injured backs is to use exercises that enhance stability but place minimal stress on the spine while the exercises are being performed.
• This group of exercises has become known as “the Big Three”: • Curl-up • Side plank • Bird-dog
• Before you begin core stability training, I recommend addressing mobility restrictions at the hip and/or thoracic spine.
• After addressing mobility restrictions in those areas, Dr. McGill recommends that you perform the cat-camel before the Big Three to reduce low back stiffness and improve motion of the spine. Unlike other stretches for the low back that can place harmful stresses on the spine, this exercise emphasizes mobility in a spine-friendly manner.
• Unlike training for pure strength or power, the endurance component of stability requires the body to perform many repetitions of an exercise to see improvements.
• As this rep scheme becomes easier, increase the number of repetitions rather than the duration of the holds to build endurance without causing muscle cramping.
• The McGill Big Three has been highly effective since I started using it with my patients who come in for low back physical therapy.
• The side plank is a unique exercise because it activates the lateral oblique and QL muscles on only one side of the body, making it an excellent choice for addressing weak links in stability while placing minimal force on the spine.
• Stretching the low back stimulates the stretch receptors deep inside the muscles, giving the perception of pain relief and the feeling of less stiffness.
• Most of the muscle pain and stiffness you feel in your back is a consequence of a chemical reaction called inflammation that occurs from the real injury located deeper in the spine (disc bulge, facet irritation, etc.). 76 This underlying injury is what causes the secondary contraction or spasm of the surrounding muscles.
• Stretching the low back only treats the symptoms and does not address the true cause of the pain.
• No rehabilitation plan or corrective exercise program will truly fix your pain and restore your body in the long term if you are too stubborn to deviate from a training plan that is creating pain.
• One of the most common reasons for developing back pain is an inability to use the hips properly.
• As you work through each exercise, be cautious of how quickly you increase load. An efficient rehab program slowly applies load to the body.
• When attempting to lift heavy weight, I recommend taking a large breath in and then holding that breath throughout the entire repetition. When you combine this breath with a strong bracing of your core, your trunk will instantly become more stable and capable of handling tremendous weight.
• Many athletes who develop back pain when deadlifting do so because they fail to use their legs sufficiently and end up relying too much on their backs.
• The inverted row, performed with a suspension trainer or gymnastic rings, has been shown in research to elicit a high amount of upper and mid-back muscle activation while placing minimal stress on the spine.
• Performing a suitcase carry with the weight in one hand is significantly harder and poses a greater challenge to your core than performing the exercise with weight in both hands.
• The upside-down kettlebell carry is one of the most challenging variations.
• Proper use of a belt involves much more than just wearing it tightly! To use a belt, you must breathe “into the belt.” If you only cinch it tight, you will miss out on the benefits it has to offer. Always think about expanding your stomach into the belt and then bracing against it.
• I highly recommend keeping belt use to a minimum.
• A belt should never be used with the goal of taking away back pain or soreness.
• For those who do not have access to a specialized machine like the reverse hyper, a kettlebell swing is a great late-stage rehabilitation exercise that emphasizes and trains dynamic hip extension in a similar cyclical motion.
• Contrary to the exercise name, I recommend performing back extensions in a very hip-centric manner.
• If you want to see significant changes in flexibility of any muscle or group of muscles, you must be consistent with your stretching.
• Mobility should always be evaluated before flexibility.
• If you want to stretch before a training session or competition, I recommend short-duration stretches (less than 30 seconds), which have been shown to have no harmful effects on muscular performance.
• I’m going to share a little secret with you: most elite athletes have abnormal traits that give them the ability to do things most of us “normal” people cannot.
• The squat is a movement first and an exercise second.
• To squat to full depth with your toes straight forward, you must have adequate ankle and hip mobility and sufficient pelvic/core control. You also must have acceptable coordination and balance.
• Research shows that knee pain associated with barbell training is often due to overuse injuries. 3 These nontraumatic injuries can become nagging and often lead to further issues down the road.
• The most common reason strength athletes develop pain around the kneecap is a lack of ability to control for rotation at the knee (i.e., demonstrating poor knee stability when lifting).
• You need to stop using ice on injuries and sore muscles.
• Ice does not do what you think it does. It does not aid the process of healing from injury; in fact, an overwhelming amount of research shows that it does the opposite! Other than temporarily numbing pain, ice delays healing and recovery.
• There is no denying that ice provides temporary pain relief. Slap an ice pack on an area of your body that hurts, and you’re going to feel better instantly.
• But here’s the deal: Just because the pain is decreased does not mean that you’re fixing the injury. In fact, you’re doing more harm than good.
• inflammation and swelling are normal responses to injury.
• Plain and simple, healing requires inflammation. It isn’t a bad thing at all; it is an essential biological response to injury.
• Placing ice on an injured area essentially puts a roadblock in front of the white blood cells trying to get to the area. You think you’re helping the healing process by placing a bag of ice on your body, but you’re actually delaying its start by preventing your body from doing what it wants and needs to do.
• Swelling is merely the buildup of waste around an injured area that needs to be evacuated via the lymphatic system. It is a natural response to injury that becomes a problem only when the waste-filled fluid is allowed to accumulate.
• Scientific research does not support the use of ice.
• Despite conventional “wisdom” telling us that ice is a good idea, research shows that icing delays muscle repair after injury and gives us direct evidence that icing can lead to increased scarring!
• swelling accumulates around an injured area because you stop moving!
• Exercises performed in a relatively pain-free manner not only accelerate the removal of swelling through muscle contraction but also optimize the healing process without causing further damage.
• While voluntary exercise is undoubtedly the most effective way to preserve muscle mass, reduce swelling, and kick-start the healing process after injury, neuromuscular electrical stimulation (NMES) devices come in a close second.
• NMES devices work by stimulating muscle contraction through electricity.
• Simply put, after injury, we want to promote movement (even if it’s as little as stimulated muscle contractions through the use of an E-stim device) to optimize healing and safely return to the sports we love.
• While you may feel less soreness after icing, you’re not necessarily recovering any faster physiologically.
• Instead of reaching for that ice pack or jumping into a tub filled with ice, I recommend using an active recovery approach.
• If you’re extremely sore the day after an intense workout, I recommended performing a few minutes of soft tissue mobilization.
• Research has shown that a few minutes of rolling on a foam roller or small ball (such as a lacrosse or tennis ball) can significantly reduce delayed-onset muscle soreness (DOMS).

MYTHOLOGY 101 by Kathleen Sears

• The ancient Greeks and Romans used myths to explain the wonders of the world, including the rise of humanity, the causes of natural phenomena, and the origin of the Earth and the universe.
• A myth, defined simply, is a fictitious story or half-truth, but it goes much deeper than that.
• A myth evolves as it’s told, over and over again.
• Because myths are told and retold, passed from one person to the next, there is often more than one version of the same story.
• The Greek victory over Troy was a defining moment for the Greeks and the catalyst for the foundation of Rome.
• Virgil is best known for the Aeneid. This epic poem, which tells the story of the origins of Rome, follows the Trojan hero Aeneas after the fall of Troy, as he travels and then settles in a new land, where he founds a new race: the Romans.
• Like many modern religions, classical mythology explores the relationship between humanity and a higher power.
• Mount Olympus was more than the dwelling place of the gods and goddesses. It was also their command center, the place where trials were held, laws were created, and important decisions were made.
• As ruler of gods and men, Zeus had the duty of bringing ultimate order to the universe.
• Often considered second in command to Zeus, Poseidon was the powerful god of the sea, a god who garnered more fear than respect. He controlled the seas and could create earthquakes.
• Although the ancients often described Hades as cold, he was never associated with evil. He was simply the ruler of the dead, and he performed his duties efficiently and with an unrelenting sense of responsibility.
• In Greek mythology, the Underworld was divided into different regions. One region was for the most exceptional mortals (such as heroes), another region was for the common folk, and a third was for evildoers.
• When a person died, Hermes came to collect that person’s shade (or soul) and lead him or her to the Underworld. To get to the Underworld required crossing one or more rivers. To cross a river, the shade had to engage the services of Charon, the ferryman of the dead. Charon didn’t work for free; he required a coin as payment. If a would-be passenger could not pay Charon’s fee, that shade was doomed to wander the shoreline for a hundred years before being allowed passage. Even after they’d paid and boarded the boat, the shades had to do most of the work—they rowed, while the ferryman merely steered.
• Elysium (sometimes called the Elysian Fields) was the dwelling place of the exceptional. This island was where heroes (and other extraordinary mortals) were sent after death.
• According to Greek mythology, all shades (souls) traveled to the Underworld, Hades’s realm, after death.
• The hearth was the source of warmth and nourishment because it provided heat for cooking. As a result, to the ancients, the hearth represented the epicenter of the family and one of the most important places in the home.
• Of all the things that mortals might do to offend the gods, blatant violation of something sacred was one of the worst. The sacrilege usually resulted in the offender’s suffering and death.
• The Parthenon is one of the best-known temples of ancient Greece, partially due to the fact that remains of the temple are still standing today.
• The Judges of the Dead decided the destinies of those who dwelled in the Underworld. Although the Judges were symbolically important to the Underworld, they didn’t have much real power. The gods themselves decided whether a person had been wicked enough to send to Tartarus or brave and good enough to spend eternity in Elysium.
• Ancient battlefields were places of confusion, bravery, violence, brutality, and bloodlust.
• The Thracians were skilled, savage warriors who wielded heavy swords and were ferocious in battle.
• To the ancients, the world was inhabited by thousands of deities and spirits that controlled nature and interacted with humans.
• The Muses, daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, were the goddesses of music, art, poetry, dance, and the arts in general.
• The Fates: Three goddesses in charge of determining a person’s lifespan.
• Greek mythology was assimilated into Roman mythology to fill in gaps in the latter; eventually, Romans adopted (and adapted) Greek myths on a broad scale.
• While many of the stories are essentially the same in Greek and Roman mythologies, the names are different.

DINOSAUR TRAINING SECRETS: VOLUME III: HOW TO USE OLD-SCHOOL PROGRESSION METHODS FOR FAST AND STEADY GAINS IN STRENGTH, MUSCLE AND POWER by Brooks D. Kubik

• Strength training used to be called "Progressive Resistance Exercise." That's an excellent term, because it places the emphasis exactly where it belongs – on progression.
• The principle of progressive resistance training is the foundation for all gains in strength and muscle.
• There are seven basic progression methods that build strength, muscle and power: 1. Adding weight to the bar. 2. Performing more reps in each exercise. 3. Performing more work sets of each exercise. 4. Performing each rep in stricter, better, tighter and more precise form, with greater concentration and deeper focus. 5. Performing more difficult and more demanding exercises, or performing your exercises in a more difficult fashion. 6. Performing additional exercises for each body-part. 7. Any combination of 1 – 6.
• It's much better to start light and easy and allow the new trainee to experience steady progress for as long a period as possible.
• Beginners should train three times per week on a total body workout, and follow a basic training program that uses either single progression or double progression.
• Start with 5 reps on upper body exercises and 10 reps on gut work and lower body exercises. Do one set of each exercise. Use 8 to 10 different exercises.
• That's the beauty of progressive strength training. If you follow a sensible progression system, your initial progress comes fast and easily.
• Beginners do NOT need to do a variety of different exercises, and will do much better by training on the same exercises.
• As far as sets and reps go, the 5 x 5 system is perfect for intermediates. It provides the right amount of volume, and allows you to work with heavier weights than you used in your beginner programs.
• For long-term progress and lifelong training, it's a good idea to work up, drop back down, and work back up again. You don't have to stay at the hardest possible program all the time.
• Modern bodybuilding programs typically amount to specialization programs on all of the different muscle groups at the same time. That gets you nowhere, because all you do is over-train. It's much more effective to combine an all-around training program that provides adequate work – but not excessive work – for all of the major muscle groups, together with a period of specialization on one or two muscle groups. Over time, you end up specializing on all of the major muscle groups – but not at the same time.
• Remember, dropping back to the easier program (with one exercise on the days that you do heavy, awkward object training) is NOT a step backwards. It's a way to maximize your recovery and recuperation from hard training, and a way to help recover from any dings and dents that may be bothering you.
• Doug Hepburn believed that no matter what you did, what you ate, or how you trained, there was a limit on how fast you could build strength and muscle.
• The answer, Hepburn believed, was to limit yourself to gains of one rep per workout.
• As your strength increases, your progress will slow down. This happens to everyone, so don't worry about it. When it does, try using double progression rather than single progression.
• Starting light is good because it allows you to concentrate on doing your reps in good form.
• Older trainees should always use some sort of simple cycling system that lets them alternate between harder workouts and easier sessions.
• Slow and steady is ALWAYS the way to go.

DINOSAUR TRAINING SECRETS: VOLUME II: HOW STRONG ARE YOU? by Brooks D. Kubik

• The ability to put 200 pounds over your head was the mark of strength back in the day.
• In the modern world of drug-free training, we have Stuart McRobert's 300/400/500 standards. The goal for an advanced trainee weighing about 190 pounds at a height of 5'9" would be a 300 pound bench press, 400 pound squat and 500 pound deadlift. These lifts are drug-free and without any lifting gear other than a belt. In other words, they're "raw" lifts.
• Most lifters of the era used a power clean when they did a press.
• The crucifix is a tremendous test of shoulder, arm and upper body strength.
• strength training is one of the most important keys to lifelong strength and health – and as you grow older, it becomes more and more important.
• Many regard the standard deadlift as the best measure of over-all body strength. It's a very effective movement, and one of the best exercises to include in your training program.
• The back hand or reverse curl was one of the exercises in the York Barbell training courses, and it was widely practiced back in the day. It's not used nearly as often today, and that's a shame. It's a very good exercise, and a terrific test of arm, forearm, and wrist strength.
• Pressing exercises build real-world "stand on your feet" strength. They are a very important part of a strongman's training, and should be a regular part of your workouts. And they're a great way to match your strength against the legendary strongmen of the past.
• The alternate dumbbell press is a terrific exercise for the pressing muscles, as well as the abdominals and obliques, and even the lower back muscles. You perform the exercise by cleaning the dumbbells to the shoulders. From there, you press the left arm to the extended position. Now press the right arm up – and as you do so, lower the left arm. Continue until you perform a total of 10 reps – five reps with each hand. Finish with both arms overhead, and hold for a count of two.
• The military press is a tremendous exercise, and one that every trainee should do. It builds the kind of rugged, total body strength that is very rare nowadays.
• The repetition press begins by cleaning the bar to the shoulders. After a two-second pause, the lifter presses the weight for five consecutive reps.
• Of course, if you prefer to do so, you can make the exercise harder and more demanding by performing one clean and one press on every rep.
• The repetition clean and press is a real man-maker.
• However you do it, the snatch is a wonderful exercise.

DINOSAUR TRAINING SECRETS: VOLUME I: EXERCISES, WORKOUTS AND TRAINING PROGRAMS by Brooks D. Kubik

•  devote all or substantially all of your training time to the very best and most effective exercises. The best and most effective exercises are the basic, compound exercises such as squats, presses, bench presses, deadlifts, etc.
• There are no "secret exercises," so don't waste time looking for them. Stick to the basics.
• Of course, the sad reality is that most trainees spend almost all of their training time on isolation exercises, and some "gyms" even prohibit their members from performing some of the most important and most effective compound movements, such as squats, deadlifts, military presses and push presses.
• The basic, compound exercises are best because they allow you to work several muscle groups at the same time, and thus, to work up to substantial amounts of weight in your different exercises.
• Over time, hard work on the basic, compound exercises leads to enormous increases in strength and muscle mass.
• Your best compound exercises are squats, front squats, deadlifts, Trap Bar deadlifts, standing presses with barbells or dumbbells (or a single dumbbell), barbell and dumbbell bent-over rowing, pull-ups, chin-ups, pull-downs, weighted push-ups, bench presses (performed with barbells, dumbbells, or a single dumbbell), incline presses (performed with barbells, dumbbells, or a single dumbbell), shoulder shrugs (performed with a barbell, two dumbbells, one dumbbell or a Trap Bar), deadlifts from the knees (performed with the bar or Trap Bar elevated by resting the plates on sturdy wooden blocks), hand and thigh lifts, and Hise shrugs.
• Grip work, gut work, and neck work are all important.
• Altogether, there are about 20 basic, compound exercises.
• So do this: pick one squatting exercise, one deadlifting movement, one or two upper body pushing movements and one or two upper body pulling movements. That gives you four to six "big" exercises to focus on. Train these exercises hard for six to twelve weeks, and then, if you want some variety, switch to other movements.
• Contrary to what many mistakenly believe, there's no need to change exercises as long as they're working for you and as long as you are motivated to train hard and heavy on them.
• Many very strong and powerful men have performed the same exercises for pretty much their entire training careers.
• Your job is to train hard and heavy on the basics, and that's where the lion's share of your time and effort needs to go.
• The simplest way to train with heavy, awkward objects is to carry them as far as you can, put them down, rest, and then carry them back to where you started.
• The farmer's walk is the simplest and best of the lot, and doubles as a very effective grip builder.
• By building your back muscles and avoiding over-development of the chest muscles, you develop a tall, erect posture.
• Heavy dumbbell training is a lost secret of strength, power and muscular development.
• The two-dumbbell clean and press is an excellent dumbbell exercise.
• Over time, thick bar training will make your entire upper body much more massive and more heavily developed than would ever happen otherwise.
• The only caveat is to be careful when lifting thick-handled dumbbells. Don't hold them over your head or feet, and make sure you get out of the way fast if you drop them.
• Understand that with the right kind of training, you can make incredible gains with nothing other than a barbell.
• Unless you are an advanced trainee who plans to enter a bodybuilding contest, training for "cuts" is a waste of time.
• Instead of training for "cuts," train for strength. Strength is a positive quality. It's something you build.
• A healthy diet is one that promotes recovery from your workouts, builds muscle and keeps you from adding unwanted body-fat.
• Don't get hung up about training for "cuts" or extreme definition. Train for strength instead.
• As your strength increases, so will your muscle mass.
• There are many excellent exercises for the midsection. I've always preferred leg raises to anything else.
• Hanging knees to chest, leg scissors, leg raises, and windshield wipers are all excellent exercises.
• Planks are excellent for mid-section training.
• The gains from workout to workout are extremely small, but over time, they add up to enormous increases in strength and muscular development.
• If you train too much, too hard or too often, you outrun your body's recovery system. It's that simple.
• The biggest challenge for most older trainees is finding the right balance between training hard enough, heavy enough and often enough to build strength and muscle without training too hard, to heavy or too often.
• Abbreviated programs work far better than longer, more complicated, more demanding workouts.
• There's no magic about 5 x 5.
• Always use what works best for you in terms of sets and reps.
• The key to building great strength and muscle mass is to add weight to the bar whenever you can.
• Do gut work to finish the first workout, grip work to finish the next workout, and neck work to finish the first workout of week two.
• I've suggested that you use the 5 x 5 system. Try four progressively heavier warm-up sets and one set with your working weight for the day.
• The squat and deadlift are especially good for building all-around strength and muscle mass.
• Diet and nutrition helps you recover from hard workouts, but there quickly comes a point where diet and nutrition can’t do anything more.
• If you've been paying careful attention, you will have noticed that the primary message of this book is to train hard and heavy on sensible, low-volume training programs that focus on the basic, compound exercises.
• Devote yourself to hard, heavy training on a small number of the very best exercises.

Measure What Matters by John Doerr

• As much as I hate process, good ideas with great execution are how you make magic. And that’s where OKRs come in.
• Ideas are easy. Execution is everything.
• The practice that molded me at Intel and saved me at Sun--that still inspires me today--is called OKRs. Short for Objectives and Key Results. It is a collaborative goal-setting protocol for companies, teams, and individuals. Now, OKRs are not a silver bullet. They cannot substitute for sound judgement, strong leadership, or a creative workplace culture. But if those fundamentals are in place, OKRs can guide you to the mountaintop.
• An Objective is simply what is to be achieved, no more and no less. By definition, objectives are significant, concrete, action oriented, and (ideally) inspirational. When properly designed and deployed, they’re a vaccine against fuzzy thinking--and fuzzy execution.
• Key Results benchmark and monitor how we get to the objective. Effective KRs are specific and time-bound, aggressive, yet realistic. Most of all, they are measurable and verifiable. You either meet a key result’s requirements or you don’t; there is no gray area, no room for doubt.
• Where an objective can be long-lived, rolled over for a year or longer, key results evolve as the work progresses. Once they are all completed, the objective is necessarily achieved.
• OKRs surface your primary goals. They cannel efforts and coordination. They link diverse operations, lending purpose and unity to the entire organization.
• For anyone striving for high performance in the workplace, goals are very necessary things.
• In the technology sector, two out of three employees think they could find a better job inside of two months.
• An effective goal management system--an OKR system--links goals to a team’s broader mission. It respects targets and deadlines while adapting to circumstances. It promotes feedback and celebrates wins, large, and small. Most importantly, it expands our limits. It moves us to strive for what might seem beyond our reach.
• The higher the ratio of reports, the flatter the org chart--which means less top-down oversight, greater frontline autonomy, and more fertile soil for the next breakthrough. OKRs help make all of these good things possible.
• High-performance organizations home in on work that’s important, and are equally clear on what doesn’t matter. OKRs impel leaders to make hard choices. They’re a precision communication tool for departments, teams, and individual contributors. By dispelling confusion, OKRs give us the focus needed to win.
• Andy Grove’s quantum leap was to apply manufacturing production principles to the “soft professions,” the administrative, professional, and managerial ranks. He sought to “create an environment that values and emphasizes output” and to avoid what Drucker termed the “activity trap”.
• On an assembly line, it’s easy enough to distinguish output from activity. It gets trickier when employees are paid to think.
• “Bad companies,” Andy wrote, “are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them.”
• An effective goal-setting system starts with disciplined thinking at the top, with leaders who invest the time and energy to choose what counts.
• Leaders must get across the why as well as the what.
• Don’t allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good.
• Remember that an OKR can be modified or even scrapped at any point in its cycle.
• Sometimes the “right” key results surface weeks or months after a goal is put into play. OKRs are inherently works in progress, not commandments chiseled in stone.
• A few goal-setting ground rules: key results should be succinct, specific, and measurable.
• As Steve Jobs understood, “Innovation means saying no to one thousand things.”
• In most cases, the ideal number of quarterly OKRs will range between three and five.
• Too many objectives can blur our focus on what counts, or distracts us into chasing the next shiny thing.
• We learned the three watchwords for entrepreneurs:
• Solve a problem
• Build a simple product
• Talk to your users
• Research shows that public goals are more likely to be attained than goals held in private.
• One underrated virtua of OKRs is that they can be tracked--and then revised or adapted as circumstances dictate.
• Annual performance reviews are costly, exhausting, and mostly futile.
• In short, we need a new HR model for the new world of work. That transformational system, the contemporary alternative to annual reviews, is continuous performance management.
• It is implemented with an instrument called CFRs, for:
• Conversations: an authentic, richly textured exchange between manager and contributor, aimed at driving performance.
• Feedback: bidirectional or networked communication among peers to evaluate progress and guide future improvement.
• Recognition: expressions of appreciation to deserving individuals for contributors of all sizes.
• For companies moving to continuous performance management, the first step is blunt and straightforward: divorce compensation (both raises and bonuses) from OKRs. These should be two distinct conversations, with their own cadences and calendars.
• Feedback can be highly constructive--but only if it is specific.
• Continuous recognition is a powerful driver of engagement.
• Recognize people for actions and results.
• Corrective feedback is naturally difficult for people. But when done well, it’s also the greatest gift you can give to someone--because it can change people's mindset and modify their behavior in the most positive, valuable way.
• People watch what you do more than what you say.
• Ideas are easy; execution is everything.
• Poorly done/managed OKRs are a waste of time, an empty management gesture. Well done OKRs are a motivational management tool that helps make it clear to teams what’s important, what to optimize, and what tradeoffs to make during their day-to-day work.
• Objectives are the “Whats”. They:
• Express goals and intents.
• Are aggressive yet realistic.
• Must be tangible, objective, and unambiguous; should be obvious to a rational observer whether an objective has been achieved.
• The successful achievement of an objective must provide clear value for Google.
• Key results are the “Hows”. They:
• Express measurable milestones which, if achieved, will advance objectives in a useful manner to their constituents.
• Must describe outcomes, not activities.
• Must include evidence of completion.
• OKRs have two variants, and it is important to differentiate between them: commitment OKRs and aspirational OKRs.
• OKRs are often written principally based on what the team believes it can achieve without changing anything they’re currently doing, as opposed to what the team or its customers really want.
• If your objective doesn’t fit on one line, it probably isn’t crisp enough.
• Four superpowers of OKRs:
• Focus and commit to priorities.
• Align and connect for teamwork.
• Track for accountability.
• Stretch for amazing.
• Too many OKRs dilute and scatter people’s efforts.
• Expand your effective capacity by deciding what not to do, and discard, defer, or deemphasize accordingly.
• In choosing OKRs, look for objectives with the most leverage for outstanding performance.
• When leaders openly admit their missteps, contributors feel freer to take healthy risks.
• Establish an environment where individuals are free to fail without judgement.
• To get leaps in productivity or innovation, follow Google’s “Gospel of 10x” and replace incremental OKRs with exponential ones. That’s how industries get disrupted and categories reinvented.

Smart & Gets Things Done by Joel Spolsky

• The process of hiring great technical talent is an elimination course.
• But there’s a silver lining, if you will: a bright side to all this meandering mathematical moroseness. And that is this: if you can eliminate one obstacle--just one!--you can double the number of people you hire. Eliminate two obstacles, and you quadruple the number that make it past the remaining obstacles. And so on, and so forth.
• But there is no silver bullet. There is no magical single thing you can do to solve all your hiring problems and get great developers working for you tomorrow.
• What you have to do is look at the whole process as an obstacle course and start to think about how to eliminate as many obstacles as possible.
• Duplication of software is free. That means the cost of programmers is spread out over all the copies of the software you sell. With software, you can improve quality without adding to the incremental cost of each unit sold.
• Essentially, design adds value faster than it adds cost.
• The quality of the work and the amount of time spent are simply uncorrelated.
• A single good programmer working on a single task has no coordination or communication overhead. Five programmers working on the same task must coordinate and communicate. That takes a lot of time.
• The real trouble with using a lot of mediocre programmers instead of a couple of good ones is that no matter how long they work, they never produce something as good as what the great programmers can produce.
• The mediocre talent just never hits the high notes that the top talent hits all the time.
• People like to feel in control. It makes people happy to feel in control.
• It’s not just a matter of “10 times more productive”. It’s that the “average productive” developer never hits the high notes that make great software.
• The software marketplace, these days, is something of a winner-take-all system.
• The great software developers, indeed, the best people in every field, are quite simply never on the market.
• The average great software developer will apply for, in total, maybe four jobs in their entire career.
• The great college graduates get pulled into an internship by a professor with a connection to industry, then they get early offers from that company and never bother applying for any other jobs.
• The corollary of that rule--the rule that the great people are never on the market--is that the bad people--the seriously unqualified--are on the market quite a lot. They get fired all the time, because they can’t do their job.
• Numerically, great people are pretty rare, and they’re never on the job market, while incompetent people, even though they are just as rare, apply to thousands of jobs throughout their career.
• Think about where the people you want to hire are hanging out.
• The corollary of this rule is to avoid advertising on general-purpose, large job boards.
• One good way to snag great people who are never on the job market is to get them before they even realize there is a job market: when they’re in college.
• Even though only about one in three applications who make it to the in-person interview stage passes all our interviews, it’s really important that the ones who do pass have a positive experience.
• An internship program creates a pipeline for great employees, but it’s a pretty long pipeline, and a lot of people get lost along the way.
• We basically calculate that we’re going to have to hire two interns for every full-time employee that we get out of it, and if you hire interns with one year left in school, there’s still a two-year pipeline between when you start hiring and when they show up for their first day of full time work.
• That means we hire just about as many interns as we can physically fit in our offices each summer.
• No programmer in their right mind should ever sign a non-compete agreement, but most of them do because they can never imagine that it would be enforced, or because they are not in the habit of reading contracts, or because they already accepted the employment offer and moved their families across the country and the first day of work is the first time they’ve seen this agreement and it’s a little bit too late to try to negotiate it. So they sign, but this is one of the slimiest practices of employers, and they are often enforceable and enforced.
• [...] if the great programmers don't want to work for you, they ain’t gonna come work for you.
• Peopleware is a great book.
• There’s a strong culture in Silicon Valley that requires you to jam a lot of programmers into a big open space, despite a preponderance of evidence that giving them private offices is far more productive.
• No matter what you think about productivity, and no matter what you think about egalitarian workspaces, two things are incontrovertible:
• Private offices have higher status.
• Cubicles and other shared space can be socially awkward.
• A lot of tech people are remarkably unaware of the general condition of their office.
• There is simply no reason not to get your developers top-of-the-line computers, at least two large (21”) LCD screens (or one 30” screen), and give them free rein on Amazon to order any technical book they want.
• These are obvious productivity gains, but more importantly to our discussion here, they’re crucial recruiting tools, especially in a world where most companies treat programmers as interchangeable cogs, typists. Really, why do you need such a big monitor and what’s wrong with 15” CRTs?
• Software developers are not really all that different from regular people.
• All else being equal, developers are going to prefer an organization that treats them like stars.
• Keep reminding yourself that when your candidate goes home and has to make a decision about where to work, if everyone they met was glum, they are not going to have such a positive memory of your company.
• By the way, the original hiring rule for Fog Creek, stolen from Microsoft, was “smart, and gets things done.” Even before we started the company, we realized that we should add a third rule: “Not a jerk.”
• Who wants to work at a company where jerks are tolerated?
• Basically, if you’re going to hire smart people, you’re going to have to let them apply their skills to their work.
• Developers want to be hired for their skills, and treated as experts, and allowed to make decisions within their own realm of experience.
• Actually, politics happens everywhere that three or more people congregate, and it can be completely harmless.
• Programmers have very well-honed senses of justice. Code either works, or it doesn’t.
• And this is the kind of environment you have to create to attract programmers.
• When a programmer complains about “politics”, they mean--very precisely--any situation in which personal considerations outweigh technical considerations.
• Nothing is more infuriating than when a developer is told to use a certain programming language, not the best one for the task at hand, because the boss likes it.
• Nothing is more maddening than when people are promoted because of their ability to network rather than being promoted strictly on merit.
• Nothing is more aggravating to a developer than being forced to do something that is technically inferior because someone higher than them in the organization, or someone better-connected, insists on it.
• All in all, focusing on the social dynamics of your organizations is crucial to making a healthy, pleasant place to work that will retain programmers and attract programmers.
• To some extent, one of the best ways you can attract developers is to let them work on something interesting.
• If you can find ways for developers to get experience with newer languages, frameworks, and technologies, they’ll be happier.
• As a recruiter, your job is to identify the idealistic aspects of your company, and make sure candidates are aware of them.
• The real point of this section is to think of what your company stands for, how it’s perceived, and how it could be perceived. Managing your corporate brand is just as important for recruiting as it is for marketing.
• They don’t care about money, actually, unless you’re screwing up on the other things. If you start to hear complaints about salaries where you never heard them before, that’s usually a sign that people aren’t really loving their job.
• You do have to pay competitively, but all said, of all the things that programmers look at in deciding where to work, as long as the salaries are basically fair, they will be surprisingly low on their list of considerations, and offering high salaries is a surprisingly ineffective tool in overcoming problems like the fact that programmers get 15” monitors and salespeople yell at them all the time and the job involves making nuclear weapons out of baby seals.
• Sometimes a resume gives pretty strong negative clues that allow you to screen out applicants without going much further.
• We try to be selective about how we advertise our jobs, so as to limit the amount of noise in the resume pile.
• We look for evidence that the applicant is passionate about computers and really loves programming.
• That said, years of experience working with programmers have taught me that programmers who can communicate their ideas clearly are going to be far, far more effective than programmers who can only really communicate well with the compiler.
• Brilliant programmers who have trouble explaining their ideas just can’t make as much of a contribution.
• Another thing we look for on resumes is evidence that someone has gone through some highly selective process in the past.
• Our company criterion for selectivity is usually getting into a school or program that accepts less than 30% of its applications, or working for a company that is known to have a difficult application process, like a whole day of interviews. Getting into highly selective courses in the military or getting into highly selective units like the Marines, indicates someone who has made it through some kind of difficult application/selection procedure, and all in all this is a positive sign.
• People who have worked on operating systems or compilers are more hardcore than  people who have worked on simple database front-ends.
• Remember angina that I said that resume are a very weak way of judging programmers, and you only get the faintest signals from them; that said, some technologies are just harder than other technologies, and if you happened to have worked with them successfully, there’s a smidgen more evidence that you might be the right person to hire, so for the purposes of sorting resumes, difficult technologies tend to float you to the top, while claiming competence in say, Microsoft Word tends to float you toward the bottom.
• To top programmers, the most maddening thing about recruiters is their almost morbid fascination with keywords and buzzwords. The entire industry of professional headhunters and recruiters is bizarrely fixated on the simple algorithm of matching candidates to positions by looking for candidates who have the complete list of technology acronyms that the employer happens to be looking for.
• It becomes especially infuriating to realize that most of these recruiters have no idea what any of these technologies are.
• The reason recruiters do this is because it’s easy, it can be computerized, and it’s the only way they know how to judge developers. For almost all software development positions, though, it is the worst possible way to hire.
• Don’t start a new project without at least one architect with several years of solid experience in the language, classes, APIs, and platforms you’re building on.
• A phone screen has distinct advantages over a normal in-person interview. First, it’s cheap. [...] More importantly, it’s more fair.
• The bottom line in my interviewing technique is that smart people can generally tell if they’re talking to other smart people by having a conversation with them on a difficult or highly technical subject so that the interviewer’s judgement can form an opinion on whether this is a smart person or not.
• The very first thing you have to do right if you want to have good programmers is to hire the right programmers, and that means you have to be able to figure out who the right programmers are, and this is usually done in the interview process.
• You should always try to have at least six people interview each candidate, including at least five who would be peers of that candidate (that is, other programmers, not managers).
• It’s too easy to fake out one interview, especially when a non-programmer interviews a programmer.
• If even two of the six interviewers think that a person is not worth hiring, don’t hire them.
• Don’t try to interview a bunch of people at the same time. It’s just not fair. Each interview should consist of one interviewer and one interviewee, in a room with a door that closes and a whiteboard.
• In software, things change so often and so rapidly that you need people who can succeed at just about any programming task that you throw at them.
• Just say no! If you are on the fence, that means no hire.
• Don’t lower your standards no matter how hard it seems to find those great candidates.
• In principle, it’s simple. You’re looking for people who are:
• Smart, and
• Get things done
• People who are smart but don't get things done often have PhDs and work in big companies where nobody listens to them because they are completely impractical. They would rather mull over something academic about a problem than ship on time.
• People who get things done but are not smart will do stupid things, seemingly without thinking about them, and somebody else will have to come clean up their mess later. This makes them net liabilities to the company because not only do they fail to contribute, but they soak up good people’s time.
• How do you detect smartness in an interview? The first good thing is that you don’t have to explain things over and over again. The conversation just flows.
• Remember, smart does not mean “knows the answer to trivia questions.” Anyway, software teams want to hire people with aptitude, not a particular skill set.
• Any skill set that people can bring to the job will be technologically obsolete in a couple of years, anyway, so it’s better to hire people who are going to be able to learn any new technology rather than people who happen to now how to make JDBC talk to a MySQL database right this minute.
• Here’s a typical plan for interviewing a programmer:
• Introduction
• Question about recent project candidate worked on
• Easy programming question
• Pointer/recursion question
• Are you satisfied?
• Do you have any questions?
• Look for passion. Smart people are passionate about the projects they work on. They get very excited talking about the subject. They talk quickly and get animated. Being passionately negative can be just as good a sign.
• Bad candidates just don’t care and will not get enthusiastic at all during the interview.
• Good candidates are careful to explain things well, at whatever level. I often reject candidates because when they talked about their previous project, they couldn’t explain it in terms that a normal person could understand.
• If the project was a team project, look for signs they took a leadership role.
• The only way you’re going to be able to tell if somebody gets things done is to see if historically they have tended to get things done in the past.
• Most of the time in the interview, though, should be spent letting the candidate prove that they can write code.
• If the basic concepts aren’t so easy that you don't have to think about them, you’re not going to get the big concepts.
• 15 years of experience interviewing programmers has convinced me that the best programmers all have aptitude for dealing with multiple levels of abstraction simultaneously.
• I’ve come to realize that understanding pointers in C is not a skill, it’s an aptitude.
• The optimal time to make a decision about the candidate is about three minutes after the end of the interview. Far too many companies allow interviewers to wait days or weeks before turning in their feedback. Unfortunately, the more time that passes, the less you’ll remember.
• If you’re having trouble deciding; there’s a very simple solution. No hire. Just don’t hire people that you aren’t sure about.
• Remember: most normal recruiting in our society is structured as if the company has something precious (a job) that the individual wants. But when you’re recruiting top developers, the situation is completely reversed. Pay very, very close attention to the details of the entire recruiting, interviewing, and hiring process to make sure there are no accidental parts of the procedure that send any message other than “We’re not worthy!” to your star candidates.
• Great people are much, much more valuable than average people. In programming, they are three to ten times as productive, while only costing 20% to 30% more. And they hit high notes that nobody else can hit.
• An extremely people and seemingly scientific way to improve a team is with performance measurements and incentives. [...] This is a common management technique, and it’s devastatingly ineffective.
• In software development teams, everybody is working on something else, so attempts to micromanage turn into hit-and-run micromanagement. That’s where you micromanage one developer in a spurt of activity and then suddenly disappear from that developer’s life for a couple of weeks while you run around micromanaging another developer.
• The Econ 101 manager assumes that everyone is motivated by money, and that the best way to get people to do what you want them to do is to give them financial rewards and punishments to create incentives.
• Intrinsic motivation is your own, natural desire to do things well. People usually start out with a lot of intrinsic motivation. They want to do a good job.
• Extrinsic motivation is a motivation that comes from outside, like when you’re paid to achieve something specific.
• Intrinsic motivation is much stronger than extrinsic motivation. People work much harder at things they actually want to do. That’s not very controversial.
• When you use Econ 101 management, you’re encouraging developers to game the system.
• Developers are clever this way. Whatever you try to measure, they’ll find a way to maximize, and you’ll never quite get what you want.
• The biggest problem with Econ 101 management is that it’s not management at all: it’s an abdication of management. A deliberate refusal to figure out how things can be made better.
• Management, in general, needs to set up the system so that people can get things done, it needs to avoid displacing intrinsic motivation with extrinsic motivation, and it won’t get very far using fear and barking out specific orders.
• The real trick to management is to try to make people identify with the goals you’re trying to achieve.
• To be an Identify Method manager, you have to summon all the social skills you have to make your employees identify with the goals of the organization, so that they are highly motivated, then you need to give them the information they need to steer in the right direction.
• In general, Identify Management requires you to create a cohesive, gelled team that feels like a family, so that people have a sense of loyalty and commitment to their coworkers. The secondary part, though, is to give people the information they need to steer the organization in the right direction.
• The Joel Test
• Do you use source control?
• Can you make a build in one step?
• Do you make daily builds?
• Do you have a bug database?
• Do you fix bugs before writing new code?
• Do you have an up to date schedule?
• Do you have a spec?
• Do programmers have quiet working conditions?
• Do you use the best tools money can buy?
• Do you have testers?
• Do new candidates write code during their interview?
• Do you do hallway usability testing?
• If the [build] process takes any more than one step, it is prone to errors.
• Breaking the build is so bad (and so common) that it helps to make daily builds, to ensure that no breakage goes unnoticed.
• You absolutely have to keep track of bugs formally.
• “Zero defects” means that at any given time, the highest priority is to eliminate bugs before writing any new code.
• In general, the longer you wait before fixing a bug, the costlier (in time and money) it is to fix.
• There are extensively documented productivity gains provided by giving knowledge worker space, quiet, and privacy.
• Productivity depends on being able to juggle a lot of little details in short-term memory all at once. Any kind of interruption can cause these details to come crashing down.
• Top-notch development teams don't torture their programmers.
• Even minor frustrations caused by using underpowered tools add up, making programmers grumpy and unhappy. And a grumpy programmer is an unproductive programmer.
• To add to all this...programmers are easily bribed by giving them the coolest, latest stuff. This is a far cheaper way to get them to work for you than actually paying them competitive salaries!
• Do whatever you want during interviews, but make the candidate write some code.
• A hallway usability test is where you grab the next person that passes by in the hallway and force them to try to use the code you unjustly wrote. If you do this to five people, you will learn 95% of what there is to learn about usability problems in your code.
• Good user interface design is not as hard as you would think, and it’s crucial if you want customers to love and buy your product.