Monthly Archive for June, 2009

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.