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The Codebreaker

Walter Issacson’s words formed my understanding of Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs and Leonardo da Vinci. Given his habit of writing engaging biographies from the most well known people on the planet, I was surprised to hear that his latest book was about someone I’ve never heard of: Jennifer Doudna. This is probably both because she isn’t yet a household name, but also because biology and chemistry are fields that I’m just not familiar with.

All the more reason to love this book. First, as much as he tried to make this a Jen Doudna biography, it really was a story about the community leading biosciences today, a discussion of the core questions of bioethics, scientist’s battle against the novel coronavirus and a dual biography of Doudna and Charpentier — one American, the other French. The subtitle belies the scope of the book: “Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race.”

Issacson doesn’t abandon his previous themes: science, genius, experiment, code, thinking different, but this is his first full length book to a female subject for the first time. While some may suspect Isaacson is guided by social pressure to focus on a female subject, Jennifer Doudna is a genuine heroine for our time.

Unlike his other books, where Issacson is a fairly distant chronicler and researcher, here Issacson is on the stage, in the mix. The whole book is filled with first-person appearances. While these may demonstrate his diligence as a reporter, they definitely bring the reader into both his world, but also into the scientific conferences, labs, and discussions with experts on both sides of disputes. At one point he even facilitates an important phone call that re-establishes a friendship between Doudna and Charpentier. However, a certain clubbiness attends some of these references, as when he names the restaurants where key conversations occur and he made me aware of the stratospheric level he operates in in society. By opening the curtain on his life, Issacson highlights how he is the grand doyen of American journalism who has headed TIME magazine, CNN and the Aspen Institute, and who treads easily in the corridors of power.

Doudna and Charpentier

They are the sixth and seventh women to win the chemistry Nobel in its century-plus history. (Marie Curie was first, in 1911, followed by her daughter Irène in 1935.) The names Doudna and Charpentier had already been notably paired in 2015, when they jointly won the $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, and again in 2018, when they collected the coveted Kavli Prize in Norway.

This was both a tale of friendship, but also highlighted the frictionless collaboration that has been accelerated in the last year. Although Doudna and Charpentier never belonged to the same research institution, they formed a successful collaboration with each other and numerous colleagues in several countries by building on shared interests, camaraderie and competition.

We are able to get to know Doudna from her childhood, through her career, meet her competitors and collaborators, and fret with her over the future fallout of the CRISPR revolution and marvel at its positive potential.

She was inspired early on from reading “The Double Helix,” by James Watson. Though in this book Watson is the villain who becomes a projection of racism and patriarchy. Issacson highlights his snarky comments about the structural biologist Rosalind Franklin’s looks. His discussion makes me want to read Doudna’s own book, A Crack in Creation written with her former student Samuel Sternberg and published in 2017. Its subtitle, “Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution,” doesn’t understate how critical this field will be for my generation.

Doudna was raised by academic parents who encouraged her fascination with science, she flourished in college and went on to earn a doctorate in biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology from Harvard. After fellowships and postdoc programs at the University of Colorado and Yale, she joined the faculty at the University of California in 2002. In 2006, she learned about CRISPR, a system of identical repeated DNA sequences in bacteria copied from certain viruses.

Others had discovered that this was a defense mechanism—CRISPR DNA generates enzymes that chop up the DNA of the infecting virus. With collaborators, she discovered how CRISPR operates and invented a much simpler technique for cutting DNA and editing genes. Although known since the 1970s, “genetic engineering” was a complex, tedious process. CRISPR made it much simpler.

Traditional gene therapy is an insertion of a functional gene in the location of a dysfunctional gene or neighboring to it. CRISPR Cas-9 makes it possible to carry out genetic engineering on an unprecedented scale at a very low cost. How it differs from previous genetic engineering techniques is that it allows for the introduction or removal of more than one gene at a time. This makes it possible to manipulate many different genes in a cell line, plant or animal very quickly, reducing the process from taking a number of years to a matter of weeks. It is also different in that it is not species-specific, so can be used on organisms previously resistant to genetic engineering.

Doudna and Charpentier the two scientists co-authored a seminal paper in 2012 that galvanized the scientific establishment and led to a torrent of awards, culminating in the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry. This starts the race to apply gene editing to altering life and curing diseases, the intense debate over its morality, and the often childish quarrels over credit and patents.

Sometimes the rivalries prove fierce. Doudna and Zhang, after initially attempting to commercialize their discoveries jointly, found themselves in a fierce legal battle over intellectual property. At the heart of this dispute is the question of whether orchestrating CRISPR-Cas9 to work in human cells (Zhang’s contribution) was an essential feature of the discovery, or whether this advance was a relatively obvious and inevitable step after its efficacy had been demonstrated in a test tube (Doudna’s and Charpentier’s contribution). At stake is not only money, but also prestige and legacy.

Ethics

Isaacson devotes much anguished discussion to the ethics of gene editing, especially when it comes to “germline” changes that can be passed on through generations and “enhancements” such as green eyes or high I.Q. that prospective parents could insert into their offspring’s genomes.

Isaacson also examines the case of Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui, who in 2018 defied the norms of the international scientific establishment by using CRISPR-Cas9 to alter the human germline—producing three genetically engineered babies. He Jiankui anticipated a heroic reception of Watsonian proportions, and the Chinese media was initially supportive. Yet the backlash from the scientific community proved ferocious, and He Jiankui ultimately found himself fired from his university and imprisoned for his research. One man’s iconoclasm, it seems, is another’s grave misconduct.

Issacson uses biography to provide an introduction to the complex moral and sociological questions that stem from these advances. He explores the potential for curing scourges like Huntington’s disease and sickle cell anemia, but also the slippery slope that might lead to creating offspring that are more intelligent or athletic. In doing so, he makes eloquent and succinct work of laying out the parameters of the debate between advocates of individual liberties and of collective welfare, introducing readers to the ideas of philosophers John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and Michael Sandel. As in his past volumes, Isaacson displays his gift for making complex material enjoyable to read.

Of particular concern to Isaacson and his community are the implications of gene editing for human equality, the fear that those with plentiful resources will use these technologies to expand the gap between wealthy and indigent. (Of course, the opposite might prove true: Carefully managed, such advances could be harnessed to level the playing field between rich and poor, adding a genetic boost to those who cannot afford SAT tutors and tennis lessons.)

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Crossing the Chasm

Crossing the Chasm is a marketing book by Geoffrey A. Moore that explores the dynamics of marketing high tech products in early stage startups. While an older book, it continues to be read because the exploration and expansion of the diffusions of innovations model continues to have a significant and lasting impact on high tech entrepreneurship.

I would summarize the book into three main lessons.

  • The chasm is a gap between visionary early adopters and the pragmatic majority.
  • Crossing the chasm requires securing a specific niche as a beachhead first.
  • Position yourself as a market leader in your niche by making a strong claim.

Lesson 1: What is the Chasm?

Visionary early adopters start outside the space of the pragmatic majority. To change that, the book explores the technology adoption life cycle and concludes the states that new technology makes its way through the population in a bell curve distribution.

First, Innovators jump on the product, followed by early adopters, the early and late majority, to finally reach the laggards. Specifically, the chasm is the gap that lies between the early adopters and the early majority, when a product is very disruptive and requires behavioral changes.

This is due to differing motivations for buying a product. The visionary early adopters want huge changes and are willing to bet on them against the odds.

People in the early majority are much more pragmatic though. They don’t want big changes and huge innovations, but rather incremental improvements based on using proven products and solutions. But!, most arguments visionaries make to get the majority to buy aren’t appealing.

The majority wants to buy from established brands and companies, but without having the majority buy your product, you can’t become an established brand.

This dilemma is what Geoffrey Moore calls The Chasm and it’s something all high tech companies must overcome, if they ever want to see their product become successful and reach the majority of the population.

Lesson 2: How is the Chasm Crossed

This book claims that one can only cross the chasm by targeting a specific niche first. To make this happen, you start small.

This also resonated with me in reading Zero to One. Thiel insists that every startup should start small, because it’s easier to dominate a niche market than a larger, pre-existing one. Citing one of his earlier mistakes, Thiel recalls that PayPal initially let users send each other money via PalmPilots–a market that was, ultimately, too large and too spread out for them to control. PayPal then pivoted to work with eBay auctioneers instead, a smaller grouping of a few thousand "PowerSellers" who were easier to reach.

Here, Moore recommends to pick a very targeted and specific niche of customers inside the early majority to focus on and then expand into other niches later on until you cross the critical threshold.

Think of it as first securing a beachhead in an invasion, to take a stand and then build from there.

In order to convince your target segment you’re selling a holistic, well-supported product with good references and establish yourself as the market leader, you have to strictly sell to only your target group.

Don’t expand too early or sell to outsiders, just because you have the chance to. You’ll end up adjusting and customizing your product to death to make it fit for every individual purchase.

One of the best reasons for this, is the scarcity of time, people and money for early stage startups. It is critical to have forward motion.

Lesson 3: Make a strong (defensible) Claim

Position yourself as the market leader in your niche by making a strong claim.
Positioning is extremely important when it comes to customers making purchase decisions.

For example, when I mention Lamborghini, you immediately recall certain attributes in your head, like “expensive”, “luxurious”, “high-end”, “sportscars” and “rare”.

That’s great positioning in action.

Pragmatists want to know where you stand with respect to your competition (as they’re only interested in established brands), but you’re the high tech newbie, and there might not even be direct competition, so what can you do?

You define your competition yourself.

When you contrast yourself with a market alternative (the traditional way of doing things) and a product alternative (a competitor, who uses the same technology, but in a different industry), you can easily position yourself as the leader in the new, combined field.

For example, Dropbox could’ve positioned itself by saying: “For private PC users, who are sick of carrying files from one PC to the next via USB stick, we offer a hardware-free file syncing solution. Our service makes your files available on any device with an internet connection, just like YouTube does with video, but with any type of file you choose.”

These 2 sentences are all it takes to give you a powerful position – in fact, it shouldn’t take more than 2 sentences to make it clear to everyone in your target niche.

This claim will allow you to focus exactly on your initial niche and eventually take the majority of the market share there, so you can then expand and dominate the rest of the market as well.

Crossing The Chasm Review
I’ve heard the concept of Crossing The Chasm several times before, and I keep wondering whether it translates into other segments as well, where the products aren’t as high-tech.

If you want to learn more about it, Simon Sinek integrates it well into his TED talk. He says:

The problem is: How do you find the ones that get it before doing business versus the ones who don’t get it? So it’s this here, this little gap that you have to close, as Jeffrey Moore calls it, “Crossing the Chasm” — because, you see, the early majority will not try something until someone else has tried it first. And these guys, the innovators and the early adopters, they’re comfortable making those gut decisions. They’re more comfortable making those intuitive decisions that are driven by what they believe about the world and not just what product is available. These are the people who stood in line for six hours to buy an iPhone when they first came out, when you could have bought one off the shelf the next week. These are the people who spent 40,000 dollars on flat-screen TVs when they first came out, even though the technology was substandard. And, by the way, they didn’t do it because the technology was so great; they did it for themselves. It’s because they wanted to be first. People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it and what you do simply proves what you believe. In fact, people will do the things that prove what they believe. The reason that person bought the iPhone in the first six hours, stood in line for six hours, was because of what they believed about the world, and how they wanted everybody to see them: they were first. People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it.

Mr. Moore’s blueprint works, dozens of companies have proven it over the years – most recently Uber, who initially targeted the techy hipsters at the SXSW conference, video drones, who are becoming a standard tool for shooting video and of course Facebook, who collected college campus after college campus in his user base until everyone wanted to get an account.

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Review: Abundance

Humanity is now entering a period of radical transformation in which technology has the potential to significantly raise the basic standards of living for every man, woman and child on the planet.

The future can be a scary place

It can be easy to develop a gloomy view of the future. Malthus was the first public voice that compared population growth to the world’s diminishing resources to arrive at the conclusion that our days were numbered. Jared Diamond has argued well that we are gorging ourselves way past sustainability and flirting with our own collapse. Other books I’ve read recently to include a Short History of Nearly Everything and Sapiens take a long view of history and produce a masterful explanation that humans dominate the planet and that we are in the midst of an unprecedented experiment with our ecosystem, the world economy and even our own biology.

Add this to the angst in my conservative evangelical community that is beset with rapid culture change1, secularization and nearly complete societal swap of epistemology based on transcendent (i.e. God’s) design with a fluid soup of cultural opinion and emotion. But pessimism isn’t limited to my crowd, it’s practiced well on both sides of the aisle with Jeremiads about income inequality, environmental destruction and corporate power and malfeasance arriving daily from both the Clinton and Sanders camps. 2

Economically, the risks are also very real. The 2008 financial crisis highlighted the systemic risk, addiction to growth and optimistic future projections that are baked into our system. Just as our epistemology now rests on emotion, it seems that our economic theory does as well. It is becoming increasingly difficult to track all of the bubbles and capital mis-allocations that have resulted from 7 years of ZIRP, NIRP and QE. How much more can we print money before the serial, or parallel, and long overdue day of reckoning arrives? In 2008/9, while the equity markets went down, the bond markets compensated. What if next time, there is a concurrent bond market and equity collapse? By some calculations, interest rates are at seven hundred-year lows and a third of Europe is now at negative rates. The high yield market is precarious, and if that falls treasuries will get bid to the stratosphere and at some point you’ve got to get a real return and that is a long way down from the market’s current position.

And technology seems to make it all worse. Communication, information and transportation technology pulls us all together into one collective mush that is controlled by the market and state as we all slavishly let world-fashion trends define what we see in the mirror. Everything from the climate to the markets is influenced by a common mass of humanity participating in the same economic dance. What we are left with is an ersatz diversity based on skin-color and political preference, instead of the truly distinct cultures that marked the pre-communication and global transportation revolutions of the last 100 years.

What this perspective misses is that technology has saved our bacon many times and it might just do it again. Mr. Diamandis, the chairman and chief executive of the X Prize Foundation and the founder of more than a dozen high-tech companies, boldly makes the case that the glass is not just half-full, it is about to become much bigger. He makes his case in his latest book: Abundance.

Technology to the rescue

How awesome would it be if technology is about to solve the challenges provided by overpopulation, food, water, energy, education, health care and freedom? If we carefully look back instead of nervously forward, technology has clearly made some amazing contributions. Take one of the most talked-about societal problems that is driving a lot of the progressive tax-policy discussion: income inequality. Here Diamandis discussion of poverty is especially insightful.

If you look at the data, the number of people in the world living in absolute poverty has fallen by more than half since the 1950s. At the current rate of decline it will reach zero by around 2035. Groceries today cost 13 times less than 150 years ago in inflation-adjusted dollars. In short, the standard of living has improved: 95{aaa01f1184b23bc5204459599a780c2efd1a71f819cd2b338cab4b7a2f8e97d4} of Americans now living below the poverty line have not only electricity and running water but also internet access, a refrigerator and a television—luxuries that Andrew Carnegie’s millions couldn’t have bought at any price a century ago.

You can make other comparisons such as information wealth. I’m eager to plot when the average citizen gained near information parity with the president. (I’m thinking that a basic citizen with an iPhone today has more access to information than George Bush had when he started his presidency.) And who would have dreamed that a family could consolidate their GPS, video camera, library and photo-albums in 112 grams in their pocket?

Through a mix of sunny-side up data and technical explanation, Diamandis makes a good point that a focus on immediate events and bad news and often blinds us to long-term trends and good news. A nice surprise of the book is that he doesn’t just preach the technology gospel, but he delves into our cognitive biases bringing in Daniel Kahne­man into the mix and explaining how our modern analytical minds aren’t incentivized by see the beautiful wake behind us, but rather focus on the potentially choppy waters ahead. While prudence is always advised, Diamandis makes the case that the resultant pessimism is easy to overstate and can diminish our potential.

Through many historical examples, he makes the point of the massive goodness results when technology transforms a scarce quantity into a plentiful one. One fun example is aluminum. In the Atlantic Sarah Lascow describes that while aluminum is the most common metal in the Earth’s crust, it binds tightly to other elements and was consequently very scarce. It wasn’t until 1825 that anyone was able to produce even a sample of aluminum, and even that wasn’t pure. Napoleon honored guests by setting their table places with aluminum silverware, even over gold. It is a fascinating story that two different chemists3 figured out how to use cryolite—an aluminum compound—in a solution that, when shot through with electricity, would produce pure aluminum. The data show the resultant price drop from \$12 a pound in 1880, to \$4.86 in 1888, to 78 cents in 1893 to, by the 1930s, just 20 cents a pound. And technology leads to more exciting technology in unanticipated ways. In 1903, the Wright Brothers used aluminum to build a lightweight and strong crankcase for their aircraft, which further connected the scientific community around the world to make even more rare things plentiful.

Diamandis certainly plays his hand well and I’m inclined to side with him on many of his arguments. I’ll always side with the definite optimists before I join the scoffer’s gallery. After all, the pessimists were the cool kids in school, but it is the nerds who get things done. I’m a big believer that engineers are the ultimate creators of all wealth, and here Diamandis is preaching to the choir.

The case for abundance from technology

To summarize his argument, he makes four basic points:

First, we are both individually and collectively terrible at predicting the future, particularly when it comes to technology, which often exceeds our expectations in producing wealth. He claims technologies in computing, energy, medicine and a host of other areas are improving at such an exponential rate that they will soon enable breakthroughs we now barely think possible. Yes, we don’t have HAL, jet-packs and our moon-base in 2015, but we do have rapid DNA sequences, an instant collection of the world’s information and weapons that can burn up whole cities under a second.

Second, these technologies have empowered do-it-yourself innovators to achieve startling advances — in vehicle engineering, medical care and even synthetic biology — with scant resources and little manpower, so we can stop depending on big corporations or national laboratories.

Third, technology has created a generation of techno-philanthropists (think Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg) who are pouring their billions into solving seemingly intractable problems like hunger and disease and not hoarding their wealth robber-baron style.

Fourth, “the rising billion.” These are the world’s poor, who are now (thanks again to technology) able to lessen their burdens in profound ways and start contributing. “For the first time ever,” Diamandis says, “the rising billion will have the remarkable power to identify, solve and implement their own abundance solutions.”

Ok, should we bet the farm on this?

Diamandis is banking on revolutionary changes from technology and from my perspective, expectations are already sky high. (Really, P/E ratios close to 100 for companies like Amazon and Google?) In fairness, by a future of abundance, he doesn’t mean luxury, but rather a future that will be "providing all with a life of possibility". While that sounds great, to those of us in the west, this might just be a reversion to the mean from the advances of the last 100 years.

However, I loved the vision he mapped out. Will there be enough food to feed a world population of 20 billion? What about 50 billion? Diamandis tells us about “vertical farms” within cities with the potential to provide vegetables, fruits and proteins to local consumers on a mass scale. Take that Malthus.

While he does a good job of lining up potential technical solutions with major potential problems, he doesn’t address what I consider the elephant in the room: are we developing morally in a way that leads us to use technology in a way that will broadly benefit the world? Markets are pretty uncaring instruments, and I would at least like to hear the case that the future’s bigger pie will be broadly shared. As it is, I’m pretty unconvinced.

Also, his heroes are presented as pure goodness and their stories are a big hagiographic for my tastes. For example, Dean Kamen’s water technology is presented as an imminent leap forward while in reality his technology is widely considered far too expensive for widespread adoption. While he exalts the impact of small groups of driven entrepreneurs, how much can they actually do without big corporations to scale their innovations? In all his case studies, the stories are very well told, but the take-away is not quite convincing against a backdrop of such a strong desire for technology to guide us into a future of global abundance. And even though he acknowledges the magnitude of our global problems; and he hints, in places, at the complexity of overcoming them, he doesn’t address that these systems can have negative exponential feedback loops as well. In my view, technology is just an amoral accelerator that requires moral wisdom.

No, but you should read this book anyway

spidy

In all, this was a great read and his perspective is interesting, insightful and inspiring. It forces us to at least consider the outcome that the glass half full might actually overfill from technology and that it certainly has in the past. Who can argue against hoping for more “radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity.” All considered, this book is a great resource for leaders, technologists and anyone in need of some far too scarce good news.

  1. Ravi Zacharias writes that “The pace of cultural change over the last few decades has been unprecedented in human history, but the speed of those changes has offered us less time to reflect on their benefits.” ↩
  2. Consider that about 30 percent of the world’s fish populations have either collapsed or are on their way to collapse. Or, global carbon emissions rose by a record 5.9 percent in 2010, a worrisome development considering that the period was characterized by slow economic growth. ↩
  3. Charles Martin Hall was 22 when he figured out how to create pure globs of aluminum. Paul Héroult was 23 when he figured out how to do the same thing, using the same strategy, that same year. Hall lived in Oberlin, Ohio; Héroult lived in France. ↩
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Review: How we Got to Now

How we got to Now

Stephen Johnson loves making broad and interdisciplinary connections. He describes the complex evolution of technology, and the interactions of events leading to our modern world with an emphasis on understanding the true nature of role of innovation. In 289 pages, he surveys history, through the lens of the causal factors for science and technology in an engaging narrative. He takes you through such diverse places as the secret chambers within the pyramids of Giza and foul trenches in the sewers of old Chicago. The journey covers six thematic areas: glass, cold, sound, cleanliness, time and light.

Each of these six facets of modern life are described through their causes and practical impact (refrigeration, clocks, and eyeglass lenses, to name a few). Johnson highlights the role of hobbyists, amateurs, and entrepreneurs play over centuries on their non-linear path to discovery. Of course, he loves to highlight surprising stories of accidental genius and brilliant mistakes-from the French publisher who invented the phonograph before Edison but forgot to include playback, to the Hollywood movie star who helped invent the technology behind Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

The book is strongest when Johnson examines unexpected connections between seemingly unrelated fields: how the invention of air-conditioning enabled the largest migration of human beings in the history of the species-to cities such as Dubai or Phoenix; how pendulum clocks helped trigger the industrial revolution; and how clean water and air filtration made it possible to manufacture computer chips.

I enjoyed his weird and amusing examples, more than his causal analysis, which is notoriously hard to be conclusive. And Johnson is off course too reductive in a book for such a lay-audience, but he always leaves the door open a crack for reasonable disagreements and his arguments are intriguing. I especially enjoyed the strange interconnected tales of how the things that we take for granted were developed. Johnson calls these interconnections “hummingbird effects”, which he highlights as: “An innovation, or cluster of innovations, in one field end up triggering changes that seem to belong to a different domain altogether.”

The first innovation Johnson covers is Glass. He starts with its initial discovery in the Libyan Desert to the final perfection of its manufacture in applications as broad as microscopes and mirrors. Through all of this he discusses the interconnections at each step in incremental innovation, always underscoring that the right pieces must be in place before anyone can put a new technology together. Regarding the transformation of silicon dixoide into glass, furnace building and the segregation of the Venetian glassblowers to the island of Murano had to occur concurrently. Once he pulls a thread, the connections start flying.

Johnson, for example, presents the printing press, which made books readily available, which in turn resulted in many people realizing that they were farsighted and could therefore not read them. This resulted in spectacles and spectacle makers who experimented with the lenses resulted in the invention of the microscope and telescope, which in turn altered our concept of the microscopic world and the cosmos. Glass also led to better mirrors, which in turn altered one’s view of self in full circle and had a good bit to do with the introspection that characterized the renaissance and initiated the artistic style of self-portraiture.

Threads like this make for interesting story telling, but I cringe at the implict assignment of causation his arguments imply. However, it is exciting and insightful to see a smart polymathic researcher present an opinion. The stories alone are worth reading the book. Each thread is plausible, if none of them are conclusive.

For example, with “Cold”, Johnson highlights Fredric Tudor’s troubled but ultimately successful obsession to bring ice from the frozen lakes and ponds of New England to the tropics. Ice eventually led to refrigeration and to changes in the living patterns in the US and now in much of the rest of the world because tropical climates were now made more habitable. Cold is also the story of frozen food and how this has changed eating habits and daily routine. While I’m less confident in the causality claims made, I found incredible value in the contrasting case studies of Fredric Tutor and Willis Carrier. Each were successful, but with different ingredients, and in different ways.

In a sense, “How We Got to Now” is a stellar history book regarding the technical development of six different areas, and a mediocre explanation of how we actually got to now. For that, I recommend you give it a priority that lands it somewhere in the middle of your stack.

 

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Review: First by Rich Froening

CrossFit is still a new and growing sport which is misunderstood by many to be a place only for the elite. Rich Froning brakes down the barriers between the most elite tier of the sport and the most casual reader as he lays out his life and worldview in an amazingly fast and engaging read. His book has three main themes constantly woven together in an interesting narrative: (1) explaining CrossFit, (2) telling us about his life and (3) sharing with us insights about his faith and philosophy.

It is rare to find such an honest and optimistic account from someone with so much fame and talent. While his readership will most strongly come from CrossFit fans, he packs some great lessons for all of us that have broad application well beyond CrossFit. Like his fitness training regimen, he doesn’t hold back or shy away from the key principles that guide his actions and frame his world. All this results in an intimate portrait of his strengths, weaknesses and casual thoughts. Part of what makes this narrative so engaging is the casual style he engages you with as he takes you through the CrossFit victories and defeats that define his nascent career. You have to keep reminding yourself that he is winning first place (consistently now) among roughly 100,000 athletes. While he takes you into the action, you are motivated by the thought that you too could compete at his level if you just were willing to work hard and get your mental house in order. Unfortunately, reality reminds you that Rich has something very rare that remains incredible from a fitness perspective. You are aware of the power of context in his life — he gives due credit to his friends and family for providing rare and outstanding counsel, love and wisdom.

Out of the roughly 30 books I’ve read this year, I have to say I’ve really enjoyed reading this one the most — both my wife and I read it in about a day as we fought for the book. Most modern biography seems to make the subject more inaccessible as details of their life unfold. Here, Rich has done the opposite, by the end of the book you know that you would be instantly comfortable around him and are inspired to make your life look a little more like his.

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