Category: Books
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Creating Art at Work
We are all artists. Or rather, we should be. What we pour into our work determines whether we are simply looking to get paid or are making art. I’ve long thought that the best way to grow is to look for tasks not being done and do them – to pour myself into the enterprise…
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Epistemology And Human Fallibility
I read quite a bit. I’m constantly energized by new ideas and books provide a way for me to swim in them. As I read, it’s fascinating to see interesting themes that tie different books together. I don’t recommend every book I read, but there are three books that I think are must reads. The…
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Book Worth Reading: The Inmates Are Running The Asylum
This week I got a rental car that had three buttons on the front of the dongle with the keys. In most cases, it’s lock, unlock, and open trunk. On this key chain, it was lock, unlock, and alarm. Seriously, the alarm was front and center and exactly where you would normally expect another function.…
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Corporate Welfare and The Motivated Bureaucrat
A related problem to the green fuzz of government debt-based spending, is the nature of accountability in the government. Here is what happens: the government decides to take on a social project, or perhaps is already owning a certain business (as in the case of socialist governments becoming less so). The argument is that government…
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Why Read Books?
How often have you heard someone suggest after reading a book: “The point of this book could have been summarized in a few pages and didn’t need a few hundred.” While this critique is valid of a large number of books whose ideas are simple and shallow, it often gives people an excuse not to…
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Book Worth Reading: Made To Stick
About a year ago, I read Made To Stick and would put this book up there with one of the must reads for anyone that is desiring to communicate and propagate an idea. The two authors, Dan and Chip Heath, were both trying to figure out what caused ideas to stick in the world of…
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What Motivates Us
Recently, I read this study regarding whether rewarding altruism causes it to disappear, and it reminded me of the two other examples that illustrate that our motives tend to be far more complicated then things first appear. For example, Freakonomics discusses a day care center which decided to start charging parents extra if they picked…
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Books Worth Reading: Getting Real
As we start doing more exploration into what makes a good web based applications, I’ve starting doing more reading on how to visualize data graphically and create a clean interface. The guys at 37signals.com have grown quite a reputation for their applications. They have a book called Getting Real that is available in several forms…
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Missing Experiences That Never Occurred
For some lighter reading, I have recently been reading “Ender In Exile” by Orson Scott Card. If you haven’t read, “Ender’s Game”, I highly recommend it, this book is really just filling in a little more in the story line and the more I think about it, is allowing Card to express some of his…
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Book Worth Reading: Rapt
Recently finished the book, “Rapt – Attention and the Focused Life” by Winifred Gallagher. I’ve recently been reading books on attention as I believe this will be an increasingly important theme in business and in life as the pace of change continues to accelerate. Winifred was diagnosed with cancer and this book really is about…