Category Archives: Books

Ignore Everybody (Hugh MacLeod)

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Telling someone how to be creative is like explaining how to wiggle your ears. But Hugh MacLeod’s little blog-to-book (Ignore Everybody – And 39 Other Keys to Creativity) has some useful insights. Here are my favorites:

  • The more original your idea is, the less good advice other people will be able to give you.
  • Good ideas alter the power balance in relationships. That is why good ideas are always initially resisted.
  • The sovereignty you have over your work will inspire far more people than the actual content ever will.
  • It was so liberating to be doing something that didn’t have to have some sort of commercial angle, for a change.
  • Doing anything worthwhile takes forever.
  • Companies that squelch creativity can no longer compete with companies that champion creativity.
  • Like the best jobs in the world, it just kinda sorta happened.
  • Art suffers the moment other people start paying for it. The more you need the money, the more people will tell you what to do. The less control you will have. The more bullshit you will have to swallow. The less joy it will bring.
  • The only people who can change the world are the people who want to. And not everybody does.
  • Selling out is harder than it looks (It’s hard to sell out if nobody has bought in)
  • If you’re arranging your life in such a way that you need to make a lot of fuss between feeling the (creative) itch and getting to work, you’re putting the cart before the horse. You have to find a way of working that makes it dead easy to take full advantage of your inspired moments. They never hit at a convenient time, nor do they last long.
  • The best way to get approval is to not need it.
  • Part of being creative is learning how to protect your freedom.
  • The size of the endeavor doesn’t matter as much as how meaningful it becomes to you.
  • If you are successful, it’ll never come from the direction you predicted. Same is true if you fail.

From blog to book

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henry-book200My friend Henry has self-published a book (Picture of Health, Handbook for Healthcare Art). The term usually applied to self-published books is “vanity press,” but there’s nothing vain about my friend Henry and the story behind the book is interesting.

With a little help and encouragement from me (and others, I’m sure), Henry started blogging a couple of years ago. He wrote about health care art (his specialty). He was a natural but a little more serious than your typical blogger. His posts were more like essays than blog posts and took more time to write. He clearly saw the blog as a complement to his art business.

Somewhere along the way, I told Henry about services that convert blogs to books. He was immediately interested and began researching the idea. The result is Picture of Health.

The book is beautiful. Henry spared no expense. Heavy paper, embossed cover. It felt like it weighed five pounds. God (and Henry) knows what it cost to print.

Now here’s the part I like: The book is not for sale. At least not on Amazon or at Barnes & Noble (I see that you can purchase a copy from his blog). Henry published the book to give it away. Of the thousands of names in his client database, Henry selected just over 18-hundred to receive a copy of the book. (Do the math)

Henry is using the book to build on his relationship with important clients. By keeping the book (relatively) rare, he hopes to increase its value. It’s an expensive gamble and he has promised to share the results.

The part that I found most interesting about this blog-to-book story is that the book is the ONLY book about health care art. I couldn’t believe that when Henry told me but he insists it’s true. Not one book about a multi-million dollar business. Somebody else is writing one but Picture of Health is one of a kind for now. This blows me away. I mean, how many topics don’t have at least ONE book about them?

On the bedside table

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The Increment, David Ignatius

“The CIA has zero assets in Iran until a message is sent to the agency’s Web site that indicates that the Iranians are making real progress toward a bomb. It falls to veteran spy Harry Pappas to identify the sender and weigh the validity of the information, while the bellicose White House gears up for war. Pappas is disheartened and disaffected; he knew the Iraq War would be a disaster, and he lost his marine son there. To carry out his assignment, he must go rogue and seek the aid of British intelligence.”

Life, Inc., Douglas Rushkoff

“In the twenty-first century, we continue to consider corporations as role models and saviors but engage other people as competitors to be beaten or resources to be exploited. Our lives are overextended, and there is no time, energy, or commitment to do anything but work and perhaps consider family.”

Choosing what we don’t want to see

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“For the first time in our lives we were being exposed to more information than we could consume. In the age of newspapers we had to choose what we wanted to see. But in 2004 we had to choose what we didn’t want to see. This had a devastating effect on the traditional forms of information. In the past, you could get people’s attention simply by making something. People wanted more choices, so you simply had to give them another choice. But in 2004 this changed. People started to have enough, and now you actually had to make something better. It was not enough that it was different.”

From Thomas Baekdal’s Where Is Everyone? A brief tour of the history of information.

When fiction becomes reality. Gulp.

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“A deadly new swine flu strain that has killed at least 20 people in Mexico City and sickened more than 1,000 has “pandemic potential,” the World Health Organization chief said Saturday _ but some fear it may be too late to contain the outbreak.” — Associated Press

From Victor Gischler’s Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse:

“No single thing had doomed (the) planet. Rather it had been a confluence of disasters. Some dramatic and sudden, others a slow, silent decay.

The worldwide flue epidemic had come and gone with fewer deaths than predicted. Humanity emerged from that long winter and smiled nervously at one another. A sigh of relief, a bullet dodged.”

The premise gets even scarier.

What Would Google Do

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Jeff Jarvis’ new book, What Would Google Do looks like it might be a two highlighter read. I’ll be posting some of my favorite passages here but encourage you to buy and read the book.

“In retail, media, education, government, and health –everything– the link drives specialization, quality, and collaboration, and it changes old roles and creates new ones. The link changes the fundamental architecture of societies and industries the way steel girders and rails changed how cities and nations were built and how they operated. Google makes links work. Google is the U.S. Steel of our age.” – pg 27, What Would Google Do (Jeff Jarvis)

Scott Adams: God’s Debris

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I love the writing of Scott Adams. The Dilbert Principle played no small part in my escape from Management. His blog is one of the most thought-provoking I read. I just finished God’s Debris. Not a book for those who already have things figured out.

“Humanity is developing a sort of global eyesight as millions of video cameras on satellites, desktops, and street corners are connected to the Internet. In your lifetime it will be possible to see almost anything on the planet from any computer. And society’s intelligence is merging over the Internet, creating, in effect, a global mind that can do vastly more than any individual mind. Eventually everything that is known by one person will be available to all. A decision can be made by the collective mind of humanity and instantly communicated to the body of society.” pg 53

It is beyond the human brain to understand the world and its environment, so the brain compensates by creating simplified illusions that act as a replacement for understanding. When the illusions work well and the human who subscribes to the illusion survives, those illusions are passed to new generations. pg 34

The odd collection of molecules that make a human being will stay in that arrangement for less time than it takes the universe to blink. pg 35

What could possibly be interesting or important to a God that knows everything, can create anything, can destroy anything. The concept of ‘importance’ is a human one born out of a need to make choices for survival. pg 36

I love the writing of Scott Adams. The Dilbert Principle played no small part in my escape from Management. His blog is one of the most thought-provoking I read. I just finished God’s Debris and will post a few of my favorite bits here. Let’s start with this one:

We’re the building blocks of God, in the early stages of reassembling.

Time is a human concept of how things change compared to other things. pg 57

Morality and willpower are illusions. For any human being, the highest urge always wins and willpower never enters into it. Willpower is a delusion. pg 94

Your short-term payoff for contributing to God’s consciousness is fewer problems in your daily life, less stress, and more happiness. pg 101

Over time, everything that is possible happens. pg 102

“A replica of your mind and body will exist in the distant future, by chance. And the things you do now can either make life more pleasant or more difficult for your replica. pg 102

You can change only what people know, not what they do. pg 107

Awareness does not come from receiving new information. It comes from rejecting old information. pg 125

Henry Miller on “the awakeners”

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“As to salvation and all that… The greatest teachers, the true healers, I would say, have always insisted that they can only point the way. The Buddha went so far as to say: “Believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who has said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.”

The great ones do not set up offices, charge fees, give lectures, or write books. Wisdom is silent, and the most effective propaganda for truth is the force of personal example. The great ones attract disciples, lesser figures whose mission it is to preach and teach. These are the gospelers who, unequal to the highest task, spend their lives converting others. The great ones are indifferent, in the profoundest sense. They don’t ask you to believe: they electrify you by their behavior. They are the awakeners. What you do with your life is only of concern to you, they seem to say. In short, their only purpose here on earth is to inspire. And what more can one ask of a human being than that?”

— Henry Miller (Sexus)

Emphasis mine

Tripping over books

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Barb and I love our home. It fits the way we live perfectly. We seldom entertain so the place usually has what I think of as a “warm clutter.” You’re likely to find more than one pair of shoes on the floor and the stairs always has some of my pocket junk on it (keys, checkbook, etc)

And books. Lots of books. Barb and I both love to read and there are books scattered from one room to the next. The walls of my office (upstairs) are lined with bookshelves and a couple of times  a year I try to get organized. But, like the dogs, the books are part of our lives and I don’t mind having them close at hand.

I like audio books well enough but prefer the real thing. The weight, the feel, the smell. I think I sleep more soundly with a good book on my chest.