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.

“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.)

In July, it will have been two years since the original road trip was planned.  In fact, living in that van was the most certain I’ve been about my living situation for more than five weeks at a time.

That ended in December of 2007. I barely moved back into my house when I had an offer on it.  I was out shortly and immediately decided to drive up and down the East coast for a few weeks.

Seeing that work – as in, I still paid my bills – I decided to drive around the country for a full six months, living in single month sublets I would find on Craigslist…more than once, I finished a 40 hour drive into a new city without a completely finalized living location.

I decided to settle down with a ladyfriend, just outside of Boston, planning on putting my roots down for a few years.

That didn’t happen.

Last week, I made a contractual commitment to one year in the same city and same residence.

Austin, Texas.

Those who know me know much I love Austin. (The capital of the greatest nation in the world.)  It’s the heat that’s kept me away.  I decided to deal with it and live where I always wanted to live….with the other weirdos.  And the ladyfriend is coming, too.

All of this happened during a time when (not “because”…”when”) I started reading the stoics.  Seneca floored me in his first lesson:

… do not tear from place to place and unsettle yourself with one move after another. Restlessness of that sort is symptomatic of a sick mind. Nothing, to my way of thinking, is a better proof of a well ordered mind than a man’s ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company.

- Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

The truth is, my mind had been sick.

I had reached a point after years of being “driven” toward decisions that I had haphazardly made.  That only leads to one place…and that place was discovered three years ago.  I had poisoned myself with my own haphazard thinking.  My life around me turned into a house of cards.

I found myself that summer, literally, swinging from the rafters in my garage through a terribly hot July and August, tearing down the drywall in the ceiling.  I was putting up a rock climbing wall….anything to unleash my anger and frustration, while feeling some sort of surface satisfaction.  I refused to think about it on a deeper level out of self-preservation.

It would be eight months before I began to get over myself.

I didn’t know what to do there anymore, so I left.  Only, I didn’t know where I wanted to go.  So, I went everywhere.  Whenever people asked, I found some sort of rationalization to create as a context for my decisions.  It was a lot easier than figuring out what was beneath all of the junk that I had let accumulate in my life.

The common wisdom is that those who travel a lot, who go along with the wind, are looking for (or running from) something.  The common wisdom follows to say that what they are looking for is inside of them all along.

When I put myself in this context, the only thing that makes sense to me is this:

And in that shifting form, you’ll find a truth that doesn’t change
And that truth is living proof of the fact that God is strange

- Saul Williams, Talk to Strangers

It’s been a fantastic three years of questions and answers and perpetually recursive exploration and evolution.

I’ll keep reading the world’s religions and obscure philosophies, appreciating meanings and connections through all of it.  I’ll keep studying myself and people as a whole, their decisions, their cultures, and their values.  I’ll keep traveling, and always return to the two places that I call home.  I’ll keep seeking out others who constantly challenge themselves and seek out challenge from others.  I’ve even begun reading fiction (Shock! Horror!).  I’ll keep making the distinction that “If I can’t, I must.”  And I’ll keep doing the things that defy conventional wisdom, but so obviously provide very real utility and value in my life.

I’ve found some of those truths that haven’t changed, and I’ve even turned some into action.  Ontolo is one of those, Austin is another, and some other things that you might be closer to than you realize.

I’ve spent the last three years consulting those who have devoted their lives to “figuring it out.”  There are a lot of answers out there.  But they’re all someone else’s answers.

I’ll keep trying to find my own.

Let me explain….

When you start a company, you don’t just start a company.  It’s not like consulting where you immediately take on jobs.

When you start as a consultant, you are the identity.  Your history, your accomplishments, etc.

When you start as a company, the company is nothing and its identity is nothing.  The company didn’t exist.  People don’t have a history for the company because there isn’t one.  No one knows what the company does – sometimes, even the founders don’t know.

Add on top of this the practice of radical innovations, and you also have a long period of time that it takes to speak an identity for the company.  And you also have to figure out – before then – what people listen, so that you can speak your message how they will listen.

The problem, though, is that you’re telling them all of this new stuff.  So, they have to learn.  That takes time, too.

And before any of this happens, there’s usually *something* that is being designed.

In our case, that “something,” has been a web application solving an old problem in a way that no one has done so (that we know of).  It’s not like when you’re building a house, and you can look at all of the other homes being built and say “that’s how you do it.”  When you’re building something that never existed before – inventing something new – there are no directions, instructions, or histories of how to do it well.  So, there is a lot of learning.

All of this comes back to time invested.

…

I was just thinking about how much revenue ontolo has accrued in the past 5 months. It’s admirable…we’re “ramen profitable”…ish.

But divide the hours that I have put into it (this isn’t even counting Garrett’s hours), and I’m pretty sure I’m pushing $4 an hour.

…

If you want to start a new company that produces a new innovation, be prepared.  You’ll be raking in the dough in no time.

Basically, Spanish class taught me to multitask…”If I’m going to be looking out the window, I might as well fawn over a cute girl while I’m at it.”

Spanish homework was quite easy.  It wasn’t supposed to be, but it was taken only as seriously as each student decided to take it.  Lucky for me, I picked up Spanish well and homework was simply an exercise in efficiency.

With the homework, it was usually some fill-in-the-blank series of exercises.  Like a drill sergeant, each exercise was grouped and systematized.

For example, you might have a group of six questions where you simply insert each section’s verb conjugation – always in the same order in each section.  Those same answers might appear through twenty sections in your homework.  You might simply have to write “Yo,” “Tu,” “Es,” etc, over and over and over, twenty times for the first part of each question.

The next blank after Yo-Tu-Es, would be whatever verb was there for the section – that’s where the real thinking came in.

Well, CrushGirl and I would often race to see who would finish their homework during class, first. (Charming, I know.)

And she always won.

And I hated it.

And then I figured out what she did.

First, she would simply go through each section and write “Yo,” “Tu,” “Es,” etc.  With that knocked out, it was just a matter of filling in the rest of the blanks.

I, on the other hand, would write “Yo,” then the conjugated verb, then move to the next question.

I followed “the rules”.  I worked in series.

She broke “the rules.”  She worked in parallel.

As simple and seemingly insignificant as it was, she always won.

Always.

I think the idea of “living well with less” is terribly flawed.

First, it presupposes that you should have more.  Perhaps even that you deserve, or are entitled to, more.  I won’t get started on entitlement, but I don’t believe it to be a very useful mood.

Second, it brings forth the notion that you will be going through a time of sacrifice.

And, third, it when you believe you are in a state of crisis or sacrifice, a whole lot of other things begin to fall into place that support this belief.  I’m not saying that some crises aren’t real.  But what I am saying is that your beliefs create the context within which you view your life.  That context defines what you can and can’t see, your thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and memories.

Back to “living with less.”

This article would never be published in many other countries who have less, and have had less than the US and other similarly prosperous countries.  Yet, here, we find it to be a novelty, inconvenience, and effort to live with prudence.

Wikipedia states that Prudence is the exercise of sound judgment in practical affairs.

To find an article about “living with less” to be useful, in and of itself, constitutes a lack of prudence.  At the same time, finding an article like that to be useful, constitutes that the person does wish to produce change in their life.

Someone who is not already living with “sound judgment in practical affairs,” perhaps should be educating themselves on prudence, instead of sacrifices wrapped in a context of temporary and inconvenient change.

All is not lost here, however.  Regardless of how you view your own economic situation, we are no doubtedly in a different situation from the recent past that catalyzes a change in thinking, and hopefully in future behavior.  Some things have not, and will not change; such as structures of money, power, help, value, etc.

If you feel you must read articles on “Living well with less,” take some time to really think about what that means.  Ask yourself why you’re reading that information, why you care, and what outcome you genuinely desire from it.  Then, ask yourself if you wish to make that change temporarily, or permanently.  If it’s permanent, ask yourself if that’s how you should be educating yourself, or if there is a more powerful context from which to view and educate yourself on the situation.

If you’re prudent to begin with, you don’t need help learning “how to live well with less.”  You already live well, and you already have what you have.

Since Google Alerts added the ability to send alerts to feeds, the world got a lot easier…at least in my book. (I had started writing an email parser for Google Alerts…now I don’t have to.)

What I love about Google Alerts is that it lets me do research without doing any work.  The research comes to me.

That kind of research is useful if you’re looking for a new job, looking for freelance/consulting work, or looking for rare items.  Instead of setting alerts with multiple websites and services, you can use Google Alerts to send them all to one place, with one management interface, from the most comprehensive search service in the world.

The key here is to use the “site:” search command.  What “site:” allows you to do is search within a single website.  An example is “SEO consultant site:craigslist.org“  This query will search all pages on craigslist that mention “seo” and “consultant.”  If you wanted to look only in Boston, you would search “SEO consultant site:boston.craigslist.org”

For finding rare products, setup an alert, but monitor Ebay.  The query would be “site:ebay.com”  If you’re looking for the rare 1909-S VDB penny, you would query “1909 S vdb site:ebay.com”

The key here is to refine your queries to find only the things you are looking for.  You can add negative search operators, a “-” before a word to remove listings that are irrelevant, or use quotes around groups of words to find an exact phrase.  Expect to spend a few minutes refining each query.  Your SEO consulting work might be refined to something like “SEO consultant -”graphic design” site:craigslist.org”

Here are the instructions:

1. Go to Google Alerts: http://www.google.com/alerts
2. Search term: seo consultant site:craigslist.org
3. Search that query in regular search to get an idea of what kind of consulting gigs are out there.
4. Choose “Deliver to Feed” from the dropdown.
5. Submit.
6. Add the feed URL to your reader.
7. Any time a new page is found on craigslist that has “seo” and “consultant” in the page text, it will update the feed.
8. You check the feed once or twice a day, and send your info to any relevant projects.

You can also use change “craigslist.org” above to “kijiji.com” or “monster.com” or “elance.com” to find other opportunities.

To feed it to a home page, use iGoogle: http://www.google.com/ig

Add a Google Reader widget, and use Google Reader to combine all of the feeds into one, then it’s part of a Google home page, if that is useful to you.

Often, these events would have drawings for prizes.

It was very simple.

You buy a ticket.  Then you put your ticket into the bucket in front of the item you wanted to win.

Organizers hold a drawing, choose a ticket, then announce that ticket number.

If you have the matching ticket number, bingo, you win.

It taught the same lesson as Candyland: It’s all up to chance.

Or so I thought…

…

I really wanted this foam paddle ball set.

Seriously.  It was the coolest prize out of all 20-something prizes.  Certainly out of the 10 or so that were for awesome guys like me.

I wasn’t about to try and win a My Little Pony.

I wanted the man’s toy.

The foam paddle ball set.

…

I had a younger brother at the time.  Maybe two.

The brother I definitely had, his name is Chris.  He’s 15 months younger than I am.

We competed at things.

If he wanted to play hockey, I wanted to play hockey.  If I wanted to play in the creek, he wanted to play in the creek.  If he wanted to make art….well, I didn’t want to make art.  And he didn’t want look for fossils either….

I digress.

Anyway, we only competed over the things that mattered.

Like, what color My Buddy we were going to get.  Or who would get the Speed Racer shirt, and who would get the He-Man shirt.

…

When it came to the fundraiser named after an ADD-inducing sweetfood and how we were going to strategerize our efforts to get what we wanted, we naturally devised separate plans.

I, being the older, obviously had the better plan.  Being older, naturally, gives me superior intelligence.

I would take all 10 tickets my parents got for me, and put them all into the bucket in front of the foam paddle ball set.

I didn’t want anything else.  If I happened to win something else, I wouldn’t be happy with it.  It just wasn’t as cool as the foam paddle ball set.

It was simple.  It was rational.  It made sense.

If I had 10 tickets in there, then I must *definitely* have the best chance of winning.

At least better than Chris’s strategy.

Chris’s strategy was dumb.  It didn’t make any sense.  It was haphazard.  Too loose.  Too immature.

He chose several things that he could be happy with winning.  I would imagine there were about five things. (Since just about anyone would find winning a box of rubberbands to be lame…except for some people I know who would still disagree with me.)

Chris took his 10 tickets and put two into each of the five prizes he would be happy to win.

I know, right?

Haphazard.

Dumb.

…

When the time for the drawing came, I was nervous and excited and anxious all at once.  But maybe it was the sweets.  Or maybe I had to go to the bathroom…really bad.

I couldn’t wait for them to draw for my awesomely blue and red and yellow foam paddle ball set.

They should’ve just skipped the first 14 drawings and gone straight to it.  Everyone knew it was the coolest prize anyway.

After what seemed like years of hearing random little girls screaming upon finding their number called, they finally got to the toys for real, eight-year-old men.

We didn’t let out a shrill shriek, no.  We let out a raspy “Yes!” as we fist-pumped in a pre-Tiger Woods era, marching up to get our prizes with a huge grin like we’d just been elected president.

Finally, it was time for the foam paddle ball set.

I was stoked.

I was sure I was going to win.

How could I not?  I had 10 tickets in there?  That HAD to be more than anyone else?

…

And my number didn’t get called.

I was as pissed as you could imagine Richard Simmons being pissed.

The fist-pump still happened.  But with out the pump.

At least Chris wasn’t going to win anything.

…

But he did.

In what I was sure was some sort of divinely-intervened spite (For what, I’m not sure…it could have been any number of ill-intentioned things I had done to my younger brother over the years), I’m fairly certain he won the very next drawing.

Yes! Fist-pump. Grin. March.

I hated my life.

And what did he win?  Something stupid I was sure.

I think it was some sort of foam pool noodle.

You couldn’t even do anything with it except for beat people with it.

Which is exactly what happened that summer.

The fundamental principle of Personal Social Awareness is very simple:

Personal Social Awareness is the accurate ability to think with another person’s or group of people’s thinking.

Social Awareness, then, is a context defined by the other person or group, not you.

With this, we might say that someone is socially aware of the Christian culture, but not of the Hindu culture.  Likewise, someone who is well-versed in all religious cultures might be considered to be socially aware in the context of World Religions.

The ability to do this accurately is absolutely necessary for the constitution of someone’s awareness.  This accuracy is not decided upon by the person, but rather by the person or social group by which the assessment of awareness is made.

With a definition of awareness, we may also look at the consequences and breakdowns of having this awareness or not.  These breakdowns, ones of being Ignorant, Inconsiderate, and Disrespectful apply to all contexts of social awareness.

The context of these assessments will be between an individual and a “group.”  In your own interpretation, substituting an individual for the “group” will maintain the accuracy of the assessment.

Ignorant: When one is not aware of the thinking a group holds.  The person may not even be aware that there is a “group.”

Inconsiderate: When one is aware of the thinking that a group holds, and disregards it in their language or actions.

Disrespectful: When one is aware of the thinking that a group holds, and the negative consequences of certain actions.  With this awareness, the person then knowingly acts in a way that causes the negative consequences.

The opposite of these assessments are then: Aware, Considerate, and Respectful.

If it is a concern to become aware, considerate, and respectful, what matters is that you design and implement your education and practices in a way that allows you to become aware of what social groups and standards exist, then learn to move effectively within those contexts.

Big deal, right?

Well, it is, depending on what you think you are reading.

The Promise of Business Entertainment Literature

Business entertainment literature makes only one promise: entertainment.

It does not promise to make you smarter, affect your education, or make your knowledge more useful.

The interest of book publishing companies, magazine publishers, and other periodicles is to sell their publication. It is often not to give you more useful knowledge.

Textbooks?  Textbooks are different; their purpose is to educate you.

An Example of Popular Business Entertainment Literature: The Tipping Point

The Tipping Point.  Everyone loves The Tipping Point.  I also enjoyed reading it.  This does not mean that it affects your useful knowledge.

What The TIpping Point does is create a new set of language and distinctions that, with that new language and distinctions, allows you to see something you did not see before.  The TIpping Point invents something that did not previously exist for you.

Education Literature does the same thing, inventing new language and distinctions that allow you to things that did not previously exist for you.  The difference is that educational literature promises to take responsibility for helping you to understand the concept in a way that is: useful, practical, and pragmatic.

To make this even more clear, how many of the personal distinctions can you recall that Gladwell defines in The Tipping Point?  Do you remember all three?  What were they?

Do you remember the single “law” that Gladwell declares?  Do you remember the factor that makes “tipping point ideas” memorable?  Do you remember that a “factor” or “law” was declared or exists as a part of the tipping point phenomenon?  What about the importance of context…do you remember what Gladwell states about it?

Let’s go another step further…

When was the last time you actually used or practiced what you learned in The Tipping Point?  You know…like, the last time you said “I want to accomplish X…and in order to accomplish X, I need to get together Mavens, Salespeople, and Connectors in the Context of what I am trying to accomplish because these are the people that are going to help me do this.  Then, I need to create a Stickiness factor that will allow for my idea to spread and stay spread.”

Really?  Never?

When was the last time you used Arithmetic?  Made use of fundamental Marketing strategies?  Used powerful Language?

Business Entertainment Literature is Not Useless

You might think that I am asserting that business entertainment literature is useless.  This is absolutely not the case.

I think that it is incredibly useful when bullshitting with people (you know what I mean by bullshit…where you talk about something without fully understanding the experience of the situation, as if you do understand…like talking about sports as if you know what it is like to be a quarterback in the NFL, or politics as if you know what it is like to be the President.) in order to build rapport, better understand where someone’s background exists, or to easily and comfortably pass the time in social situations.

If we did not have Business Entertainment Literature, we might otherwise find ourselves having a “casual” conversation at a meeting break about how we are using multiple regression analysis to find the cause of errors in our production process.  After a while, those conversations just get exhausting.  That we even feel the need to have conversation at all instead of silence, is an entirely different conversation.

Business Entertainment Literature is also useful in that it gives us another context from which to view the world.  It does give us new language and distinctions to make newer and (supposedly) more powerful distinctions of the world around us.

The contention is here:

Do not confuse Entertainment Literature with Educational Literature.  If you want to acquire useful information for the purpose of developing more powerful strategies and practices, seek out quality Educational Literature, not Entertainment Literature.