30/07/2010 by Simon Tomey.

Since reading this I’ve started shaving my legs, eating poached eggs and powering up hills.The message of this book is that we could all have hope and determination.

The message of this book is that we could all have hope and determination.

• Lance Armstrong had less than a 3% chance of surviving cancer but did and within sixteen months of being discharged from hospital won the Tour de France.
• He attributes his significance not to being a seven times winner of the Tour de France, but of being a cancer survivor.
• A fellow cancer patient had written “You don’t know it yet, but we’re the lucky ones”. I understand this to mean that we are designed to overcome apparently defeating setbacks and that great suffering can produce great character, but most of us never have this “opportunity”.

Certainly Lance attributes much of his maturity as a rider to the endurance he learnt as a cancer patient.

• Lance overcame great suffering and didn’t give into despair and fought like it was him against the world.
• It must have felt very black indeed as day after day under Chemotherapy he was overcome by nausea and had strength only to lie still. He had a clear vision and the determination to make it happen.

A quote I like is:

“I can deliver motivation, inspiration, hope courage and counsel, but I can’t answer the unknowable…In a way we are like the guy on the rooftop [who is in danger of drowning]…Things take place, there is a confluence of events and circumstances , and we can’t always know their purpose…but we can take responsibility for ourselves and be brave.

And remember…Pain is just a signal.

See this book on Amazon »

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09/06/2009 by Simon Tomey.

Defiance: The Bielski Partisans by Nechama TecThis is the remarkable story of four Jewish brothers who defied the Nazis and saved One thousand Two hundred Jews from death. See this book on Amazon »

Some of my reflections:

• The brothers had the right gifts to make it work
• Those in the ghettos pinned their hopes on being allowed to stay alive and were deterred by the pain and uncertainty of the forest. Their Nazi guards crushed their spirit and persuaded them they had no chance of survival outside of the ghetto.
• The brothers were determined not to be imprisoned. It was something outside of them that prompted them to go to the woods, but it was something inside them that lead them to lead the 1,200 for 3-4 years.
• The brothers faced seemingly insurmountable difficulties, but they overcame them each time.
• Even thought the prospects for survival were meagre, the brothers did what was right, rather than just what was expedient for their survival. They welcomed the old, the young, and the sick and they looked after them.

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29/05/2009 by Simon Tomey.

by Peter M. Senge See this book on Amazon »“Metanoia” - a shift of mind. Some great ideas in this book and the one I love the most is systematic thinking.

• Senge explains that while we are in the habit of understanding life as separate events which happen to us, the reality is that systems in life are interconnected, often in a (delayed) feedback loop.
  • Good results come only come from persevering with responsibility and foresight in the context of delayed feedback
    (”what goes around comes around”, and the short term results might be misleading).
  • Perhaps a warning against chosing the cost advantages of outsourcing business processes and ignoring the crippling cost to the business of dis-integration.
• In “Personal Mastery” Senge introduces
  • how we should develop more comprehensive view of issues by being aware of our fixation with our own perspective and
  • how we can harness the power of the emotional and rational intelligence to benefit from the understanding of others.
  • a great outline of many of the ideas now classed as “NLP” or emotional intelligence.”
• I love the fact that this book was written 19 years ago, but many of the ideas are currently touted as a novelty.

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