 Hello, YouTube. This is Roman's book reports. I'm still here. I'm still reading and I'm still making book reviews 2015 was a very dramatic year for me living in Ukraine. I was obviously very closely affected by the Ukraine's 2014 revolution and the subsequent war that followed. I had many friends fighting and I volunteered in some small ways to help and made donations. I think the only video I made in 2015 was a video about Russian propaganda in the libertarian press. 2015 I also got married to a fantastic girl and I got involved with the internet startup that was I was probably working on 60 hours a week and still am maybe a little less now. So with that new mind for business, I read a few business books including one that was recommended to me by a successful friend in finance who lives in Singapore. Malloy's live for success, and I want to talk about that briefly today. John T. Malloy is better known for his dress for success. I think that was his first book and then his second one was live for success. It was kind of general business advice and it's really a funny book. You can even see by the cover that it kind of speaks from a different era. So I guess the the helpful part of it was just placing an emphasis on upper-class and lower-class people. This whole this is a whole dichotomy that has been vanquished from present-day discourse because you're accused of all kinds of bad things once you start talking about classes, but it's it's very real. He acknowledges that the distinction is not exact, but in terms of people's success and their advancement to the higher echelons of a business, you can see a huge disparity in how upper-class people do to how a lower-class people do. He writes about some training that he did to to give people more upper-class habits. It has to do with posture walking, how well you speak and that sort of thing. He has diagrams of how upper-class people walk versus lower-class people, how how they sit, how they stand when they're having a conversation and that was that was the important part of the book and maybe that alone makes it makes it worthwhile to read. Just realizing that that exists and that that seems to have a huge impact on how you're perceived. The rest of the book and that's the majority of the book is valuable just just because it speaks to a completely different era of business. He has charts about if you're sitting at someone else's desk for a job interview, let's say, which parts of it you can consider yours, which parts of it you should ask permission before touching. He gives advice about your spouse. He gives advice to newly married couples on how to buy their first set of China when they don't yet have much money. Advice on how close you should stand to a male or female co-worker. Advice about dress, advice about aggression in the workplace and even though it was written in the early 80s, it's it's really to me it seems like it's really from from a different era. A couple more specific details from Moloiz live for success. He gives advice about how to be powerful and assertive in the workspace and first he asserts that when when you interview people at the top, they'll talk about never compromising and they'll talk about you know, just just having sort of the the bull in a China shop mentality and and having perfect integrity and stuff like that. But when when he interviews those people at the top, they imagine themselves advising people how they should behave. So this is this is not the true story of how they rose to the top. This is the them telling everyone else how they should behave so that so that it's easy for them. And he talks about how once he tells them because he conducts these interviews himself, it seems like he had a business that that sort of surveyed and advised large companies. So so once he tells them that he is also a CEO and once he gets them comfortable and once he gets them you know talking CEO to CEO, these businessmen who are at the top will acknowledge that no it was not it was full of their climb was full of compromises and and you know constantly following people that they didn't want to follow just because of the power structure and it was probably as complicated as an episode of survivor. Is that still is that still airing survivor? Yeah, so that was interesting. One funny detail in his discussion of power he mentions how one executive memorized where all the objects were on his desk. So when they wanted to impress somebody they would make eye contact with them and they would keep eye contact with this person, reach for something on their desk like a pencil in their pencil holder all the way in the far corner and pull the pencil out and bring it to themselves without ever breaking eye contact. I thought that was completely hilarious. Other advice in this book. Oh, this was interesting like bait somebody with a contract if you need somebody to sign a contract don't like pull it out and push it at them but like have it out on the table where they could see it so they could kind of warm up to it and then slide it in to them not straight at them but sort of from an angle. So it's full of those kind of that kind of advice. Maybe it's like the stereotypical salesman advice, but other stuff as well. I was a little startled at how alien this was because I remember the 80s. I was a child in the 80s, but I still remember them. This book was copyright 1981. In summary, the book is valuable for placing an emphasis on your social class in terms of how you're perceived and how successful you'll likely be in large corporate structures. That's number one. Number two, it's it gives just this sort of historical record of what seems to me like a bygone era of business and Third, it does have a few a few little gems like the whole the whole thing with a contract. I think that's that's even just good manners just having the contract out while you're talking to someone and then sliding it in to to you know to ask them to sign it and That's it. Malloy's live for success. I bought this used for one dollar Stay tuned for the next one another business book Peter Thiel's zero to one