Tag: self-improvement

Lynn Visson “What Mean?: Where Russians Go Wrong in English”

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As unfortunate as it is to admit, foreign language education in the USSR was of very poor quality. Of course, there were specialized schools, but overall, most of us were taught in a rather sloppy and ineffective manner. I am a typical product of this education system: after seven years in school and then several more years at university, I could barely say anything in English (except for memorized phrases like “London is the capital of Great Britain”). However, I needed the language for work, so I turned to self-study. And I know many people who went through a similar path. Unfortunately, with this approach, people often carry a lot of accumulated problems that either stay with them forever or require careful correction, sometimes with the help of a good teacher.

Year after year, I’ve been actively working on improving my English, but it’s still far from perfect. Moreover, it’s impossible to fully master a foreign language once and for all. It’s a never-ending process—you will always be learning something new. That’s why I am very interested in how to improve language skills, what typical mistakes we might make, and why.

Then, unexpectedly at the end of 2019, a colleague recommended the book What Mean?, subtitled Where Russians Go Wrong in English. The author, Lynn Visson (née Elena Vladimirovna), grew up in the U.S. in a family of Russian-speaking emigrants. Her husband is also an emigrant from Soviet Leningrad. She holds a PhD in Slavic studies and worked for many years as a simultaneous interpreter at the UN from Russian to English. So she has an excellent grasp of the Russian-English language pair.

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Lyudmila Petranovskaya “If It’s Difficult with a Child”

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The book If It’s Difficult with a Child by Lyudmila Petranovskaya is part of the “Close People” series. I decided to read it almost immediately after finishing the first book in the series, The Secret Support: Attachment in a Child’s Life. The first book focused on the various stages of a child’s development and how their behavior changes significantly during each stage. In this new book, the focus shifts to something else—how to deal with challenging situations when “it’s difficult with a child.” Both I and Lyudmila Petranovskaya are careful not to say “a difficult child” because it’s usually the situations that are difficult, while the child often becomes difficult due to the circumstances.

In this book, the author also addresses various situations, but one of the main messages is to try to see things from the child’s perspective and to understand why they act the way they do. Often, once you do, their behavior seems much more logical and even obvious.

This applies to many situations where something is forbidden for the child but allowed for adults. There are countless examples, starting with “you have to go to bed at 9 PM” or “you can only play on the computer for half an hour.” The child sees that their parents don’t go to bed that early, so why should they? Or if their father spends most of his time in front of a monitor (regardless of what he’s doing), why should the child be limited to just half an hour? Simple prohibitions no longer work in such cases, as the child doesn’t see any logic behind them.

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Patrick Lencioni “Death by Meeting”

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Before diving into the book Death by Meeting, I’d like to share how I first became acquainted with the author’s work.

Patrick Lencioni is a very unconventional business writer and consultant. He is best known as the author of the bestseller The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. This isn’t a typical management book—many refer to it as a business novel. I’m not sure if Lencioni invented this style or if someone else had done it before him, but when I read the book, I found the approach intriguing. It’s a book about management, but written as a work of fiction about the life of a team. Essentially, he takes a business problem, “creates” a company and characters around it, and tells a story that illustrates how to solve the problem in question.

I read The Five Dysfunctions of a Team about five or six years ago, and I really liked it. That’s when I realized the author had earned his own spot on my “to-read” list.

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Brandon Webb, John David Mann “Mastering Fear: A Navy SEAL’s Guide”

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We all fear something—some things more, some less. And some fears begin to eat us up from the inside. The recently released book Mastering Fear tries to show how to change our attitude toward fear. Not to defeat it, because fear will remain, but to stop falling into a state of shock or paralysis because of it.

Formally, the book has two authors, but all the descriptions state that it’s a book by former Navy SEAL Brandon Webb, and the narrative itself is built as though it’s told by one person. So, let’s assume that John David Mann simply helped Webb “package” his thoughts properly.

Webb did indeed serve as a U.S. Navy SEAL, was a sniper, and later trained snipers. So, he’s immediately seen as someone who “knows no fear”—a real macho who eats fears for breakfast by the hundreds.

However, using his own past as an example, he shows that soldiers are simply trained to control their fear. He then shares his method for managing fear. He says: “You don’t need to fight fear. You need to accept it.”

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Kenneth Blanchard, William Onchen, Jr., Hal Burrows “The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey”

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Just a couple of weeks ago, I knew nothing about The One Minute Manager until a colleague told me about a book he had just read. He mentioned that, in his opinion, as a manager, I was already following all four rules for “managing monkeys.” That piqued my curiosity, and I decided to figure out what kind of monkeys I was supposedly dealing with.

Ken Blanchard, a well-known author of management books, coined the term One Minute Manager in his book of the same name. By this term, he refers to a highly productive leader who follows some fairly simple rules. Blanchard’s first book, co-authored with Spencer Johnson, sold millions of copies and has been translated into nearly 40 languages worldwide. It kicked off a series under the same name, in which Blanchard, collaborating with various business authors, presents different productivity methods.

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Lyudmila Petranovskaya “The Secret Support: Attachment in a Child’s Life”

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As an experienced father, I hadn’t heard of Lyudmila Petranovskaya. Turns out, my wife has known about her for a long time and reads her articles. I discovered her book on the recommendation of a colleague, a man. That’s when I learned that L. Petranovskaya is a well-known child psychologist in the modern world. And her book The Secret Support: Attachment in a Child’s Life introduced me to her as an author.

The book’s main message is to show that children always need their parents and that they seek support from them. However, they do this in different ways during different stages of life, which is why certain behaviors and “problems” manifest.

What really stood out from the first pages is that the author doesn’t try to present her opinion as the only correct one. She immediately states:

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Mike Pritula, Roman Zhikharev “Résumé for a Million”

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I have an interesting story connected with the book Résumé for a Million. I know both authors personally, as we worked together at Wargaming. I had already read some of Mike’s articles on résumés and hiring before, and as a manager who has conducted many interviews myself, I strongly disagreed with many of his conclusions and advice. We even had a few debates on the topic.

So, when it came to this book, I wasn’t just cautious—I was rather pessimistic. However, it’s not fair to criticize without reading. That’s why I decided to buy the book, read it, and then form my opinion.

From the title, you might expect the book to teach you how to write a résumé that will sell you for the highest price. This was, in fact, the general tone of Mike’s earlier articles on the subject. However, the book turned out to be much more than just about résumés—the authors themselves divided it into three parts.

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Don Norman “The Design of Everyday Things”

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The book “The Design of Everyday Things” by Don Norman absolutely did not meet my expectations. The reason for this was a misunderstanding of the synopsis on my part. I expected a book filled with numerous examples of good and bad design, a sort of entertaining read, and perhaps even colorfully illustrated. But the book turned out to be something entirely different.

This book is about proper design. And it’s not limited to just objects: it covers anything from the things around us to technological devices, rules, and procedures. The key idea is that the solution should best fulfill its purpose.

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Peter Bregman “18 minutes. Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done”

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The book “18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done” by Peter Bregman had been recommended to me several times, although I no longer remember by whom. It’s about improving focus, avoiding distractions, and accomplishing what you set out to do.

Even though it’s written in a fairly easy-to-read style, I didn’t like the first half at all. It felt like a typical business book, full of fluff, self-praise, and similar things. Something along the lines of “I was a loser, but then I saw the light, and now everyone should follow my lead.” I’m exaggerating, of course, but that’s the feeling I got from the tone between the lines.

However, later on, the author switches to practical examples and more actionable advice.

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Misconceptions about Feedback

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One of the best articles on employee training and feedback. It challenges much of what we are taught by various “gurus” and what many companies implement in their corporate processes. It offers a fresh perspective on what happens within teams and with individuals. Interestingly, I have personally discovered and applied some of these principles intuitively, even when they contradicted official doctrine.

I highly recommend reading it: https://hbr.org/2019/03/the-feedback-fallacy