How has Google done it? Veteran technology reporter Steven Levy was granted unprecedented access to the company, and in this revelatory book he takes readers inside Google headquarters—the Googleplex—to show how Google works.While they were still students at Stanford, Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin revolutionized Internet search. They followed this brilliant innovation with another, as two of Google’s earliest employees found a way to do what no one else had: make billions of dollars from Internet advertising. With this cash cow, Google was able to expand dramatically and take on other transformative projects: more efficient data centers, open-source cell phones, free Internet video (YouTube), cloud computing, digitizing books, and much more.The key to Google’s success in all these businesses, Levy reveals, is its engineering mind-set and adoption of such Internet values as speed, openness, experimentation, and risk taking. After its unapologetically elitist approach to hiring, Google pampers its engineers—free food and dry cleaning, on-site doctors and masseuses—and gives them all the resources they need to succeed. Even today, with a workforce of more than 23,000, Larry Page signs off on every hire.But has Google lost its innovative edge? With its newest initiative, social networking, Google is chasing a successful competitor for the first time. Some employees are leaving the company for smaller, nimbler start-ups. Can the company that famously decided not to be evil still compete?No other book has ever turned Google inside out as Levy does with In the Plex.

    How can it be possible that the world we see is not objective reality? And how can our senses be useful if they are not communicating the truth? Hoffman grapples with these questions and more over the course of this eye-opening work.Ever since Homo sapiens has walked the earth, natural selection has favored perception that hides the truth and guides us toward useful action, shaping our senses to keep us alive and reproducing. We observe a speeding car and do not walk in front of it; we see mold growing on bread and do not eat it. These impressions, though, are not objective reality. Just like a file icon on a desktop screen is a useful symbol rather than a genuine representation of what a computer file looks like, the objects we see every day are merely icons, allowing us to navigate the world safely and with ease.The real-world implications for this discovery are huge. From examining why fashion designers create clothes that give the illusion of a more “attractive” body shape to studying how companies use color to elicit specific emotions in consumers, and even dismantling the very notion that spacetime is objective reality, The Case Against Reality dares us to question everything we thought we knew about the world we see.

    Creating something from nothing is an unpredictable journey. The first mile births a new idea into existence, and the final mile is all about letting go. We love talking about starts and finishes, even though the middle stretch is the most important and often the most ignored and misunderstood.    Broken into three sections with 100+ lessons, this no-nonsense book will help you: • Endure the roller coaster of successes and failures by strengthening your resolve, embracing the long-game, and short-circuiting your reward system to get to the finish line. • Optimize what’s working so you can improve the way you hire, better manage your team, and meet your customers’ needs. • Finish strong and avoid the pitfalls many entrepreneurs make, so you can overcome resistance, exit gracefully, and continue onto your next creative endeavor with ease. With insightful interviews from today’s leading entrepreneurs, artists, writers, and executives, as well as Belsky’s own experience working with companies like Airbnb, Pinterest, Uber, and sweetgreen, The Messy Middle will outfit you to find your way through the hardest parts of any bold project or new venture.

    It doesn't shy away from the full range of viewpoints or from the most controversial issues--from superintelligence to meaning, consciousness and the ultimate physical limits on life in the cosmos.

    The world would be a better place if we were as tough-minded in how we donate money as in how we make it."—Nicholas Kristof, New York Times "Bold, fresh, inspired, reasoned, optimistic."—Walter M. Bortz II, MD, Huffington Post Blog Peter Singer’s books and ideas have been disturbing our complacency ever since the appearance of Animal Liberation. Now he directs our attention to a new movement in which his own ideas have played a crucial role: effective altruism. Effective altruism is built upon the simple but profound idea that living a fully ethical life involves doing the "most good you can do." Such a life requires an unsentimental view of charitable giving: to be a worthy recipient of our support, an organization must be able to demonstrate that it will do more good with our money or our time than other options open to us. Singer introduces us to an array of remarkable people who are restructuring their lives in accordance with these ideas, and shows how living altruistically often leads to greater personal fulfillment than living for oneself.The Most Good You Can Do develops the challenges Singer has made, in the New York Times and Washington Post, to those who donate to the arts, and to charities focused on helping our fellow citizens, rather than those for whom we can do the most good. Effective altruists are extending our knowledge of the possibilities of living less selfishly, and of allowing reason, rather than emotion, to determine how we live. The Most Good You Can Do offers new hope for our ability to tackle the world’s most pressing problems.

    Christensen says outstanding companies can do everything right and still lose their market leadership -- or worse, disappear completely. And he not only proves what he says, he tells others how to avoid a similar fate.Focusing on "disruptive technology" -- the Honda Super Cub, Intel's 8088 processor, or the hydraulic excavator, for example -- Christensen shows why most companies miss "the next great wave." Whether in electronics or retailing, a successful company with established products will get pushed aside unless managers know when to abandon traditional business practices. Using the lessons of successes and failures from leading companies, "The Innovator's Dilemma" presents a set of rules for capitalizing on the phenomenon of disruptive innovation.

    Hundreds of miles away from her home, the immortal Guru and His secret disciples meet in a forested mountain to discuss metaphysical ways of steering her soul back to a life of happiness and prosperity. This treasure is the second instalment in the Immortal Talks book series. It contains six priceless chapters: A Thousand Lives; The Linga Code; Incomplete; The Invisible Four; The Awareness Setting; Continuity.

    Tracing the lives of Zenon and Natalka Zabobon, who marry in the Ukraine on the day Archduke Ferdinand is shot in Sarajevo, 'What is Told' describes how they survived the hardships of war and emigration.

    Robbins shows through his experience and abusive childhood background as guidance for the people who are ‘lost’ to find their way into success, even when themselves thought it impossible before. At the beginning, Robbins opens the book with one firm statement. “We all have dreams.” Throughout the book, predictable enough, he tries (and succeeds) to prove that all dreams that we have can be realized. Most of his theories may sound cliché and exaggerating at the first, but as you keep on reading Awaken the Giant Within, you will find that all the steps to make your life better are as easy as deciding to routinely make your bed every morning before you go to work, yet bring astounding effect to your future and self-development. Inside: About the Author Into the Book (The Power of Concentration and Decision) What Pain and Pleasure Do to Our Actions Neuro-Associative ConditioningTM How to Get What You Really Want in Life? Saying the Right Thing Reticular Activating System (RAS) The Master System The Seven Days to Shape Our Life Buy NOW, don't waste another day, because it will cost $4.99 soon.

    At ten kilometres in length, the Mazeno is the longest route to the summit of an 8,000-metre peak. Ten expeditions had tried and failed to climb this enormous ridge. Eleven days later two of the team, Sandy Allan and Rick Allen, both in their late fifties, reached the summit. They had run out of food and water and began hallucinating wildly from the effects of altitude and exhaustion. Heavy snow conditions meant they would need another three days to descend the far side of the ‘killer mountain’. ‘I began to wonder whether what we were doing was humanly possible. We had climbed the Mazeno and reached the summit, but we both knew we had wasted too much energy. In among the conflicting emotions, the exhaustion and the elation, we knew our bodies could not sustain this amount of time at altitude indefinitely, especially now we had no water. The slow trickle of attrition had turned into a flood; it was simply a matter of time before our bodies stopped functioning. Which one of us would succumb first?’ In Some Lost Place is Sandy Allan’s epic account of an incredible feat of endurance and commitment at the very limits of survival – and the first ascent of one of the last challenges in the Himalaya.

    But when he becomes involved in the search for priceless emeralds stolen from the Iranian treasury, he might be in over his head. Caught in the diamond district world of 47th Street, Mitch must confront mobsters, a disillusioned cop, a half-mad fence, and informants of all shades, not to mention shadowy emissaries from Iran. Fighting for their lives, Mitch and his wife Maddie are determined to beat the odds.

    When a man tells you he has “commitment issues”, there’s a good chance that what he REALLY means is he’s not that interested in you and is just using you to pass time with until he meets someone "better." When a man isn’t interested in a relationship with you, his “commitment issues” are nothing more than an excuse to waste your time and reap the benefits of your decision to stay with him in order to “see where this thing goes.” It’s at this point where many women make one of the worse dating decisions possible, as they choose to remain with a half-interested man, hoping that over time they’ll be able to “lull” him into a serious commitment. The Biggest Reason Why Men Pull Away and Suddenly Lose Interest Women often wonder why men pull away and lose interest in a blossoming romance without so much as a warning. Though there could be a ton of reasons why a man might pull away, the most common reason for his loss of interest is this: he wasn’t THAT interested in you to begin with. In general, even though men are more than able to commit to a woman once certain conditions in their life are met, they will not directly inform you when you’re not the right girl for them or that now isn’t the right time for them to take a woman seriously. And because men are far more opportunistic when it comes to dating, a lot of guys won’t hesitate to take advantage of a dating situation that reaps high rewards (good for him) with as little effort possible (bad for you). How to Avoid Dating Men Who Will Keep You Unloved and Perpetually Unclaimed No matter which way you look at it, even though men don’t really have commitment issues, they don’t find it necessary or in their best interest to inform a woman when she’s nothing more than a beautiful distraction, a way to earn the respect of his peers, or just a target to sharpen his seduction skills so that he’ll be primed and ready when a “better” woman comes along. This is the ugly truth, but there’s hope. In this book, you’ll get an inside look at how a man thinks and interacts with a woman when he’s not that interested in her. This sort of male behavior is actually easy to spot IF you know what to look for. It’s extremely difficult for a man to waste your time and treat you like a short-term plaything without exhibiting certain unmistakable behaviors that clearly communicate that he’s trying to keep you interested…but unclaimed. Here's what you're going to learn inside: The seductive language men use when they want to discourage you from wanting a COMMITTED relationship. How quickly learning this ONE thing about him can tell you if he’s “unequipped” to handle a serious relationship. The pattern in a man’s dating history that IMMEDIATELY reveals if he’s a commitment-phobic time waster. How to avoid being confused by men who might love you tenderly, but would NEVER make you their girlfriend. How to stop losing sleep wondering “DOES HE LIKE ME?” and get him to either take you seriously or take a hike! How observing this simple behavior reveals if he thinks you’re “TH

    After 3.8 billion years humankind is about to start evolving by new rules...From leading geopolitical expert and technology futurist Jamie Metzl comes a groundbreaking exploration of the many ways genetic-engineering is shaking the core foundations of our lives -- sex, war, love, and death.At the dawn of the genetics revolution, our DNA is becoming as readable, writable, and hackable as our information technology. But as humanity starts retooling our own genetic code, the choices we make today will be the difference between realizing breathtaking advances in human well-being and descending into a dangerous and potentially deadly genetic arms race.Enter the laboratories where scientists are turning science fiction into reality. Look towards a future where our deepest beliefs, morals, religions, and politics are challenged like never before and the very essence of what it means to be human is at play. When we can engineer our future children, massively extend our lifespans, build life from scratch, and recreate the plant and animal world, should we?

    They drive us to act out our dreams and ambitions, and shape our politics and beliefs. We use them to construct our relationships, to keep order in our law courts, to interpret events in our newspapers and social media. Storytelling is an essential part of what makes us human.There have been many attempts to understand what makes a good story – from Joseph Campbell’s well-worn theories about myth and archetype to recent attempts to crack the ‘Bestseller Code’. But few have used a scientific approach. This is curious, for if we are to truly understand storytelling in its grandest sense, we must first come to understand the ultimate storyteller – the human brain.In this scalpel-sharp, thought-provoking book, Will Storr demonstrates how master storytellers manipulate and compel us, leading us on a journey from the Hebrew scriptures to Mr Men, from Booker Prize-winning literature to box set TV. Applying dazzling psychological research and cutting-edge neuroscience to the foundations of our myths and archetypes, he shows how we can use these tools to tell better stories – and make sense of our chaotic modern world.

    They employ what psychologists call "lateral thinking: to rethink convention and break "rules" that aren't rules.These are not shortcuts, which produce often dubious short-term gains, but ethical "smartcuts" that eliminate unnecessary effort and yield sustainable momentum. In Smartcuts, Snow shatters common wisdom about success, revealing how conventions like "paying dues" prevent progress, why kids shouldn't learn times tables, and how, paradoxically, it's easier to build a huge business than a small one.From SpaceX to The Cuban Revolution, from Ferrari to Skrillex, Smartcuts is a narrative adventure that busts old myths about success and shows how innovators and icons do the incredible by working smarter—and how perhaps the rest of us can, too.