Book: Linchpin by Seth Godin
Rating: Great
Lesson Learned: It’s your job to make yourself indispensable.
Steven Pressfield wrote the War of Art which explained how the resistance holds us back from doing the things that we really need to be doing artistically. It is a pep rally book, it makes you think and then go and do something because you cannot read it and not be motivated.
Seth’s new book Linchpin is a response to Pressfield. It takes the war of art and transfers the battle to the workplace. The premise is that only artists will survive in the new economy because they are the most valued and the hardest for employers to replace. In typical Godin style you are left inspired and excited to go to work understanding that in the end you are your own boss because your actions decide whether you keep your job or get fired.
A lot of what Godin wrote about I too wrote about in Breaking Into the Creative Class so it excites me a big timer would agree (in that the premise of my ebook is the same) with me. He is writing to a generation of workers who are tired of work and I am writing to a generation entering into the workforce.
You need to buy this book.
Book: The Art of the Idea and How it Can Change Your Life by John Hunt
Rating: Great
Lesson Learn: Ideas are organic and need to grow
Beautiful book, great message. I enjoyed reading this easy book which is graphical and enjoyable. I think it is a preach to the choir book about how to nurture creativity, but it doesn’t make it any less relevant.
Book: What the Dog Saw and other adventures by Malcom Gladwell
Rating: Great
Lesson Learned: How to think differently
This is a collection of Gladwell’s articles from the New Yorker. Therefore, you get to read great nuggets of truth without having to read the entire snarly magazine. This is way worth the money and is a great book to read over a couple of weeks since it is broken up into easily digestible articles. This is a must read for people who live in New York and go to those parties with the expensive wine.
Things to do today:
1. Subscribe to Fast Company Magazine
2. Let them send you there four emails a day to stay up on current topics. You’ll delete 100 of them but then you get a jewel described in step 3.
3. Read this article by a Fast Company person. I am fascinated by creativity and the rip-off effect. What have you done that looks eerily similar to something already created…is there original thought?
Book: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield
Rating: Amazing
Lesson Learned: Recognizing the secret things keeping me from creative mastery
This book is amazing. I am not even going to say anything about it because you need to go read it, but here is the best part:
Aspiring artists defeated by Resistance share one trait. They all think like amateurs. They have not yet turned pro…When I say professionsl…I mean the Professional as an ideal. The professional in contrast to the amateur. Consider the differences. Amateur plays for fun…the professional plays for keeps. To the amateur, the game is his avocation. To the pro it’s his vocation…The conventional interpretation is that the amateur pursues his calling out of love, while the pro does it for money. Not the way I see it. In my view, the amateur does not love the game enough. If he did, he would not pursue it as a sideline, distinct from his “real” vocation. The professional loves it so much he dedicates his life to it. He commits full-time. Pressfield 62-63
What have you not committed full-time to?
Book: The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer
Rating: Lesson Learned
Lesson Learned: Need brings Creativity
Someone younger than you brought electricity to his poverty stricken famined land and changed agriculture for their community…. It is an amazing story of ingenuity bread out of scarcity. It will move you to action.
Book: Drops Like Stars by Rob Bell
Rating: Earth Shattering
Lesson Learned: Creativity is born from suffering
The premise is that we all have certain insulators that provide the context for our actions and our thinking, the insulators make the box. When we go through a time of suffering these insulators are bashed to bits which makes us start to think creatively. We aren’t thinking outside the box because the box has been completely taken away from us. It is an amazing book and it is wildly designed and illustrated. Kudos to Bell for keeping Creativity alive in Christianity. Worth buying because it looks beautiful and it is a twinty minute read.
Book: The Creative Economy: How People Make Money from Ideas by John Howkins
Lesson Learned: ?
Rating:?
This book sucked all the fun out of creativity. It talked about patents and intellectual property rights and other sorts of nonsense. I guess if you are uncreative and need a systematic approach on how to get there it might work…? I wouldn’t recommend it.
Book: Exploiting Chaos: 150 Ways to Spark INnovation During Times of Change by Jeremy Gutsche
Rating: Cool
Lesson Learned: Trend Spotting
Jeremy Gutsche runs the website TrendHunterand wrote this book as a way to describe what he has learned about spotting trends. The book is fun because it is written like a 200 page exciting PowerPoint. It provides an excellent explanation of how to spot and create trends. The lessons he teaches are substantive and the way the book was published is as unique as Bell’s Velvet Elvis. (I’m talking about the Velvet Elvis- pre-weird guy falling on the cover.)
Book: Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone is Connected. Connect Your Business to Everyone by Mitch Joel
Rating: Meh
Lesson Learned: The internet has closed the gap
This was a good book and would have been a fantastic book had I read it at the beginning of my quest to learn everything about online marketing and building brand awareness. However, I didn’t and so I was re-reading a lot of stuff I had already heard. It seems like the new deal for marketing agencies is to have their higher ups write really good books. I’m down with that. I think the real story here is that if this book was published there are still people out there that don’t know and understand the power of the internet.
Don’t misunderstand me the book is worth reading if you are beginning your exploration into online marketing and understanding electronic community, but if you are in your 20s you have grown up with this stuff.
