Monthly Archive for June, 2009

Making the Case for Textbooks: Calling Out Seth Godin’s Rant

Seth Godin recently wrote a blog post where he rants about the uselessness of textbooks.  His rant concludes with this paragraph:

This industry deserves to die. It has extracted too much time and too much money and wasted too much potential. We can do better. A lot better.

I’m here to tell you that Seth is being very conveniently ignorant.  I mean this in the very literal sense, not the jealous girlfriend sense.

First a bit of background about my own history of education so that you know who you’re reading:

  1. In elementary school, I decided the education system was ineffective for me.
  2. Despite being in all “Honors” and most AP courses, I only ever did enough homework and studying to pass, often cramming for a final to get a 72 for the semester.
  3. I remember only ever reading one book in all of middle school and high school.  The rest, I would skim Cliff’s Notes or study summaries I could find through Webcrawler (this was in the mid and late 90s…before Wikipedia and Google).
  4. I skipped as much class as I could my senior year, to the point of almost not graduating.  I also slept in as many classes as I could.  In fact, I took lax “zero-hour” classes at 7:45 so I could sleep through at least one class a day.  Physics was next, and you bet I slept through that.
  5. I was in college for one year before being asked to leave with a 0.3ish GPA.

In short: I never cared about formal education or the textbooks assigned to me.

It’s been almost a decade since I dropped out of college.  Since then, I have run more than one business, currently run an online marketing company, been Vice President of another online marketing company, and Senior Director at another that did more than $20M in revenue when I left.

So why did I just spend $50 on used textbooks after selling over 100 “typical” business and marketing books, including several of his books…you know, the ones you see on the bestsellers lists?

Because the point of a textbook is to organize and present the information in a way that is easy to navigate and to bring that information to your memory. The point of Seth Godin’s books is to sell as many as he can; he has figured out how to do this by helping you to work with your thinking.

Are Seth Godin’s books useless?  Not at all.  But Seth takes the responsibility of trying to change your thinking, not the information you store in your memory.

Which is more useful?  Changing your thinking or changing the information you have?

Perhaps a better question is this: Would you rather have a lawyer representing you in court that has only read all of the law textbooks in and out and knows the law and isn’t passionate about upholding justice, or someone who is only really passionate about upholding justice and hasn’t read any textbooks about the law?  If you think you’d rather have the latter, let me ask you: Do you think a judge is going to want to hear someone in their court who is only passionate or only knowledgeable?

Do you think I’m being too extreme by pitting two lawyers against each other who have only one or the other, passion or knowledge?  Consider that this is exactly what Seth is doing when he says that an industry that takes the responsibility of passing along information “deserves to die.”  Because, obviously, you want a lawyer who is both passionate and knowledgeable.

Let’s expand the context of this conversation beyond the logical argument and into the realm of motivation.

The first thing to understand is that Seth doesn’t sell textbooks, he sells business entertainment literature.  Don’t think it’s entertainment?  Then why does he also do interviews with magazines that sit right next to magazines about fashion and movies and sports and celebrities?

Let’s look at it another way.  Do you find Seth’s books as standard literature inside of institutions whose responsibility it is to educate its students, with worksheets and lesson plans and semesters dedicated to his books?  Or do you find Seth’s books as standard literature inside of institutions whose responsibility is to sell as much product as possible?

His responsibility isn’t one of educating you, it’s to entertain you.  And if you really like Seth’s books, it’s because you find it entertaining to have your thinking changed through reading.  If you disagree with this, I encourage you to consider how many times you have specifically used the thinking and principles in his books over the last three months.  Compare that to how many times you’ve used what you learned from language and grammar classes, or math classes….you know, the classes that leverage the utility of how that information is presented in textbook format.

I don’t completely disagree with the spirit of Seth’s argument, but I do think he’s being conveniently ignorant of the benefit that textbooks bring.

If Seth’s point is that as a marketer you will benefit more from changing the way you think moreso than you benefit by changing the information you have in your memory, I wholeheartedly agree.  In fact, I don’t particularly like marketing textbooks.  At the same time, you’re only as good at thinking about something as the information you have in your memory.  Textbooks provide that help with learning the information.  People like Seth provide that help with learning that thinking.

So why did I just get rid of almost all of my business entertainment literature and buy some textbooks?

Because changing your thinking can only get you so far.  I’ve reached a point where I now need to expand the information that I store in my own memory.  And once a new limit is reached there, I’ll go back to working on my thinking.  And after that, I’ll go back to working on the information in my memory.

But I’ll never only work on my thinking.

And yes, I sold all of Seth’s books.

…Before I read his post.

Google Maps: Get it Together (To put it politely…)

“****!  They got it wrong AGAIN! This is ****-****!”

“You’re really selling me on this iPhone-thing, Ben,” my brother cheerfully chimed in.

I was pissed.  I’d been in Austin for a week and was at the wrong place again.

Why?

Google Maps.

In July of 2007, I made a spur of the moment decision with a friend to buy a van and go on a road trip for three months.  On the trip, we lived in that 17 year old van for three months and 15,000 miles.  My traveling buddy had a phone that plugged in to Google Maps and put your location on the map using cell phone triangulation.  It was hardly precise, but it was useful to finish about 80% of the job…sometimes.

There was a specific moment in New Orleans when we were looking for a restaurant in the area.  The triangulation had us a few blocks away, but the Google Maps function kind of helped us find the place.  The situation begged the discussion of integrating GPS into Google Maps, allowing you to always know where you were and what was around you.

I soon found out that the second generation of the iPhone would have GPS integrated.  Having destroyed my cell phone and cancelled my service for four months, I later signed up with AT&T even though their coverage isn’t the best and I would be waiting more than six months to get the iPhone.

By the time I got my iPhone, I was on yet another road trip…this one lasted six months, going solo, and going to fewer cities.  During the second month while I was in Chicago, I bought my iPhone nearly as soon as it came out.  I immediately justified the cost in terms of my savings of time and energy by not needing maps, always knowing where I was and where various shops/restaurants/etc are located.  In other words, I decided that the iPhone would save me more than $400 in time and energy because of its integration of GPS and Google Maps.

I was right.

I loved that thing.

I always knew where I was, where I was going, and could always find a late-night, last-minute place to crash in the middle of a 40+ hour drive, say, from Denver to Boston.

But all of that glory, that ease of use, that always-on-pointness…it all changed when I moved to Austin a week ago.

To digress, here’s the difference between tooling around in cities I don’t know, and tooling around Austin: I know Austin.  I know the major roads, the various areas and neighborhoods, and what is generally around.  I lived here for two years from ‘99-’01 and have visited at least once or twice a year since I left.

Anyway, back to how Google Maps has made my life worse…

Looking for Torchy’s Tacos (best tacos in the world, btw) the other day, Google Maps shows two downtown locations for Torchy’s.  One of those locations has been closed for quite some time, and the other – to my understanding – never existed.  (And it’s not labeled as “Unverified.”)

Last night, we came back from a day of toobing on the Comal and wanted to make margaritas for my brother and a buddy who was in town.  Easy.  Head to the grocery store for the necessary ingredients.

With Google Maps?

Not so easy.

First, I searched for an HEB that I thought was in my area.  Google Maps shows me where it is, I go there, it’s not there.  Whatever.  There’s another just up the road.  Whoops!  No there isn’t!  I head home.  Pissed.

Today, we need to go to an auto parts store to replace a broken headlight for my brother’s car since he’s heading back home across the country.  We find a shop, head there, and…Nope!  Not there either!  Whatever.  We head to Fry’s (it got that right), but end up passing another auto parts store that I had specifically searched for.  That’s even more ridiculous.

After that, we look for the outlet malls with several different search terms (specific companies and outlet-related keywords), and it never found the mall.  We had to stop to ask for directions to a place that Google Maps should have known about.

On the way to the exit that we are supposed to take, we see this beautiful map.

Going North on I-35:

  • Exit 253A
  • Exit 254
  • Exit 253
  • Exit 256
  • Exit 254
  • Exit 257
  • Exit 256
  • Exit 259
  • Exit 257
  • Exit 259

Seriously?

If someone were to tell me all of this, I might be inclined to say “Well, Austin is definitely growing and changing, maybe Google Maps just hasn’t been updated?”  This would be acceptable if the places I was looking for were new…and none of them are – they’ve all been there for years.

In defense of Google Maps, they’re right half of the time and I get right where I want to go.  The problem is that the other half of the time that they’re wrong ends up being a complete waste of time.  As a customer, it becomes expensive to use Google Maps.  There is a cost: Time, Energy, and Lost Opportunity.  I’m now more inclined to actually do research online to get physical addresses rather than use the search functions on Google Maps.

While putting more of my own time and energy into making Google Maps work in order to compensate for its inaccuracies, it’s certainly not the intent of the product’s use.

I love Google’s products.  I use GMail for my personal email, I use Google Apps for my businesses, I exclusively use their search engine, I’ve been a consistently-producing AdSense publisher since it came out, I use Google Docs almost every single day, and I will soon be moving my scheduling and task management to Google Calendar.

I love Google’s consistency and their top-notch quality.  As a consumer I love them and as a business-person I have utmost respect for them.

But when it comes to Google Maps, to put it politely: Get it together.

(p.s. One other request: Add Interstate Rest Areas to your maps. It would be much appreciated by us weary road travelers.)