Book review: The Talent Code

It's rather maddening in hindsight, all that time and longing wasted on wishing for smarts I didn't have but thought I needed to achieve what I wanted.

If only I'd applied more of that time and energy to the actual building blocks of greatness: to deep practice, with its excruciating but completely engaging try-fail/try-fail/try-fail/(etc.)/try-succeed/learn, lather-rinse-repeat chain of events; to finding the source of ignition, the tiny thread I could worry down to the source of my deepest and most fulfilling passion; to seeking out the coaches who could, thanks to the masterful acquisition of skill and knowledge themselves, coax out the best in me.

Oh, wait, I did. I do.

The most of many wonderful things about The Talent Code, Daniel Coyle's fantastic look into what makes greatness is the triumphant matter-of-fact-ness with which Coyle lays out, over and over again, his two central theses:

First, that the joy is truly in the journey, as there is no destination; the greatest of the greats is never "there" yet, because as long as one is alive and driven by passion, there is a way to learn/tweak/grow. The trials and failures become both more and less significant, because they're happening at a master level, but there's always always always something left to master. Such good news. Can you imagine how eye-stabbingly boring it would all be otherwise?

Second, that you can start anywhere, with anything, so long as the thing lights your fire and you put in your time properly. The "deep practice" Coyle talks about, the actual quality of work and attention applied to those now-famous 10,000 hours Malcolm Gladwell pointed to a bit ago in Outliers, helps build myelin, that stuff that coats the wires all your crazy neural impulses fly around through. More myelin, faster-traveling impulses, better skill, more mastery. (And more enjoyment, which brings us back to Thesis #1.)

There is a little bit of luck to greatness, at least, there is in an uninformed world where we don't know how to make "magic" happen. In quotes because of course, it's not magic, it's science and awareness and commitment (a ton of commitment) and love (so much love). But that is what The Talent Code is for: to get the word out there, to spread that love. It's a map studded with neon signs pointing the way to the possible, a signal shot up in the sky, saying, "Look here! Do these things deliberately, create these spaces where young people can see what is possible, and magic can happen! You can make star athletes and scientists and cellists and poets! You can coax the genius out of anyone, yourself included!"

The book is filled with stories of talent "hotbeds" and genius coaches and methodologies for deep practice that both illuminate and inspire. You will pick it up and not be able to put it down. You will start communicating with people from a place of deeper curiosity.

You will want to tell everyone you know about it, immediately, and urge them to get it, to read it, to share it with everyone they know.

And then, if you're like me, you'll probably want to go practice whatever it is you do that really, truly lights your fire...

xxx
c

• Buy The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle on Amazon
• Visit The Talent Code site & blog

Images (left to right): Photo of Daniel Coyle © Scott Dickerson; © 2010 Bantam Books; Design: The DesignWorks Group.

Yo! Disclosure! Links to the books in the post above are Amazon affiliate links. This means if you click on them and buy something, I receive an affiliate commission. Which I hope you do: it helps keep me in books to review. More on this disclosure stuff at publisher Michael Hyatt's excellent blog, from whence I lifted (and smooshed around a little) this boilerplate text.

Book review: The Guinea Pig Diaries

My favorite kind of learning is the stealth variety: where you don't realize you've learned something because you're too busy being engaged and (God willing) entertained.

With The Guinea Pig Diaries, nine immensely readable stories (and a clutch of highly enjoyable appendices, end notes and other writerly add-ons), A.J. Jacobs jumps straight to the top of my list of People I Officially Endorse Learning From. This book is smart as hell and you can dance to it, proving that you don't have to be a pompous gasbag (or even an earnest gasbag) to assist your fellow travelers in their quest for useful information.

Jacobs' not-so-secret approach to researching his stories is, as the title suggests, that he approaches his job as a journalist by treating his life as a series of experiments.¹

The sly awesomeness to this approach is that it allows him to deeply explore topics that would otherwise be dangerous territory for an upper-middle-class, educated, Anglo male from the First World. When you're at the top of the privilege food chain, you risk alienating a huge portion of your audience by even broaching the subject of the subjugation of women; if, on the other hand, you can truthfully recount your real-life experience with being treated as an object (posing nude at the behest of a female celebrity) or a "wife" (ceding full control of decision-making to your own, real-life spouse), not only do you gain credibility, you garner some enormous good will. Especially if you're hilarious at your own expense in the recounting.

Not all of the topics are especially inflammatory: there's great, thoughtful stuff in there about nature and purpose of truth, courtesy of an experiment in something called "radical honesty", and some wonderful observations about the importance of character from a delightful piece on George Washington (who apparently didn't start out with much of the stuff, go figger!).

Even the essays you might consider puff pieces going in end up being substantial in their insights. "My Outsourced Life," a piece that in a slightly different form ran in Esquire several years ago, took a trendy topic, the growing number of Western folk who were turning to the Far East to get their dirty work done more cheaply, and without any big fuss managed to make some really good points about power, mutual respect and personal responsibility without ever veering into...well, pompous (or earnest!) gasbaggery. This is like the non-consumer-object version of what I've come to call "selling-fu": Jacobs invites you into his conclusion not by ramming his thesis and data down your throat, but by lining them up in an irresistible (yet truthful! and transparent!) fashion.

The older I get, the more I realize that there really is no way to change any mind that's not ready to be changed. But you can start building bridges with the right thoughts and techniques, so they're there to cross when the people on the other side are ready. A.J. Jacobs is building excellent bridges to further conversation, and I, for one, am happy to cross over and keep talking...

xxx
c

• Buy The Guinea Pig Diaries by A.J. Jacobs on Amazon
• Visit A.J. Jacobs' website
• Watch A.J. Jacobs' talk on his Year of Living Biblically at the 2007 TED-esque EG Conference

¹It's even got a name, "immersion journalism", and plenty of modern practitioners: Barbara Ehrenreich, for example, who wrote one of my all-time favorite read-and-re-read books, Nickle And Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. Although AJ is way funnier. At least, in the book.

Images (left to right): Photo of A.J. Jacobs © Nigel Parry, originally in Esquire; © 2009 Simon & Schuster; Design: Jason J Heuer, Photo: Michael Cogliantry.

Yo! Disclosure! Links to the books in the post above are Amazon affiliate links. This means if you click on them and buy something, I receive an affiliate commission. Which I hope you do: it helps keep me in books to review. More on this disclosure stuff at publisher Michael Hyatt's excellent blog, from whence I lifted (and smooshed around a little) this boilerplate text.

Book review: The Book of Awesome

The Book of Awesome will not make you more so.

It's neither prescriptive nor is it wildly illuminating. After all, most of us can sense the difference between good and bad, easy and difficult, delightful and not-so-much, and when we're thinking clearly, we know how to open ourselves up to the light and steer clear of the stuff that pokes, stings, smarts, bogs or otherwise makes life, well, less awesome.

Here's the thing, though: it's easy to forget how colossally awesome life is most of the time. How almost unbearably fortunate most of us are in so many ways just because we get to wake up in the morning, stretch our relatively healthy and make our stupid beds. That whole Be Here Now thing the Buddhists are always (gently, patiently, eternally) harping about? If we were wired for it, we wouldn't need those pesky Buddhists; we'd just BE.

Fortunately for himself, blogger-newly-turned-author Neil Pasricha remembers to remember, and fortunately for us, he is HI-larious while doing so. Oh, yes, my friends: while reading The Book of Awesome, I laughed loud enough to startle the neighbors no less than a dozen times. TWELVE TIMES. Which made me physically feel awesome in addition to being freshly able to appreciate additional awesomeness around me because, as Pasricha and many others have pointed out, laughing is quite good for you, physiologically-speaking.

Some of the entries (chapters? items?) are also quite moving. There's a beautiful piece toward the end serving as a tribute to an awesome friend of Pasricha's who died tragically young, and the piece that closes the book, well, I won't give it away, but I will say that it alone is possibly worth the cost of admission. Well, it and the HI-larious laughing parts.

If you're already a longtime fan of the blog, you'll notice some duplication of entries, although the book is carefully edited for the best of the best, plus what I felt was really great flow. As a fan of the intimate and thus far irreplaceable something that happens when you read words on pulverized dead trees, I would consider getting a copy to dip into as needed, to remind yourself to BE HERE NOW (and maybe, just maybe, find the AWESOME in the moment). Even better, I would definitely consider getting it as a gift for your sad friend or your Internet-free friend, or even your sad, Internet-free friend.

AWESOME is as AWESOME does...

xxx
c

• Buy The Book of Awesome by Neil Pasricha on Amazon
• Visit 1,000 Awesome Things on the interwebulars

Yo! Disclosures!

1. The advance review copy of The Book of Awesome upon which I based this review was provided to me for free, and may vary from the book you purchase (although I didn't find any errors of a spelling or typographical nature, so, you know, kudos to Neil, Amy Einhorn and Team Awesome.

2. Links to the books in the post above are Amazon affiliate links. This means if you click on them and buy something, I receive an affiliate commission. Which I hope you do: it helps keep me in books to review. More on this disclosure stuff at publisher Michael Hyatt's excellent blog, from whence I lifted (and smooshed around a little) this boilerplate text.

Image (left) by beadmobile via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license. Image (right) ©Amy Einhorn Books/Penguin Group Inc.

Book review: Epilogue

A part of me wondered why I was drawn to pick up Epilogue, Anne Roiphe's memoir about the year-and-change (some pun intended) she experienced as a newly-widowed woman, when I spied it on the library shelf.

And, I confess, that part of me continued to wonder as the rest of me worked through the inevitably sorrow-filled stories of Roiphe's earliest days post-loss: the mundane acts rendered surreal by the combination of shock, numbness and grief; the creeping realizations that however much of a life she had left, it was suddenly all she had left, the only certainty left to her. I am going through a phase of loss and loneliness and uncertainty in my own life, albeit one brought on myself; was I looking for clues on how to behave? Or of what lies ahead? Or of how to behave based on what lies ahead? Roiphe is 26 years older than I am; she is also almost exactly  one month older than my mother would have been. Am I just (foolishly) trying to assemble clues about my future by mining someone else's past?

Slowly, page by page, anecdote by anecdote, the reason for reading, and for writing, is revealed: the stories are connection, and connection is everything. The stories are vehicles of truth, and truth, however painful, is the only way to bring light to life. Truth and love. Roiphe's memoir is strung together by a hundred tiny stories of telling the truth rather than shrouding evil with silence, but it is also peppered with wonderful, hopeful story-lets describing the healing power of music, the crazy grace of a perfect, random moment, the perverse persistence of biological desire one alternately wishes for and away.

Funny, touching, shocking, enraging stories: a nightmarish story of attempted strangulation by lawsuit, which is strangely balanced by the nonsensical, stubborn insistence of her deceased husband's ex-wife to receive the full month's alimony for the partial last month of his life. A woeful story of a former friend who turns away; a string of new romances that mostly stop before they get a chance to start; a crushing story of a family rent by first the hiding, then the revelation of a family member's secret.

Threaded through are the gems good and modest writers leave without fanfare for our surprise and delight, that "trying is not the way to loving", or that psychoanalysts are the archenemies of the secret (lowercase, please, there is not an ounce of New-Age-rhymes-with-"sewage" in first-wave feminist Anne Roiphe). I am already dreaming up capes and costumes for Leslie and my first-shrink-slash-astrologer, both of whom are absolutely superheroes with attendant superpowers, IMHO.

Maybe you, like me, will have to apply yourself to the early-on pages of Epilogue with a bit of faith. This will come together; the glimmers I see here and there in these threads of stories will weave themselves into a whole that offers support, that helps carry me forth through this rough spot to the next bit of smooth going.

Roiphe herself is not much for faith. At first, she soldiers on for practical reasons, because not to do so would devastate those she would leave behind. She neither believes in a hereafter where she and her beloved "H." will be reunited, nor is she at all certain that a renewed interest in (or availability of) earthy delights is around the corner. But her stories, and their messages, and their energy, finally carry her forward, too. And somehow, in the end (or at least, by the end of her story here), we feel it together: that the point of a life, to paraphrase Jonathan Swift, is to live all the days of it.

xxx
c

• Buy Epilogue, by Anne Roiphe, on Amazon
• Read Wikipedia entry on Anne Roiphe

Book cover design by Christine Van Bree, © Harper Collins; photo of Anne Roiphe © Deborah Copaken Kogan

Yo! Disclosure! Links to the books in the post above are Amazon affiliate links. This means if you click on them and buy something, I receive an affiliate commission. Which I hope you do: it helps keep me in books to review. More on this disclosure stuff at publisher Michael Hyatt's excellent blog, from whence I lifted (and smooshed around a little) this boilerplate text.

Book review: The Color of Water

I am sure I was doing many valuable and useful things with my time back in 1996, but it's clear to me that one thing I was not doing enough of was the reading of excellent memoirs, nor even the reading about the reading of them.

How else to explain my egregious oversight in picking up one of the most engrossing, uplifting and flat-out amazing stories of true life to have hit the bestseller list so late that the 10th anniversary edition has already been in print for four years?

Fortunately, I'm fairly sure it's never too late to read The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother, by James McBride. For those of you who weren't of reading age when it first came out (or who, like me, simply had your head stuck somewhere it shouldn't have been and missed it), The Color of Water tells the story of one Ruth McBride, née Ruchel Dwara Zylska, redubbed Rachel Deborah Shilsky by her Polish-Jewish immigrant parents upon their arrival in the U.S., a name the Orthodox-raised Ruth further Anglicized when she did the unthinkable for a rabbi's daughter born in the early part of the 20th century and broke away from her family. To marry a black man. And, after his death and the death of her subsequent husband, ultimately raise 12 children on her own, putting all of them through college.

Such a break! Such a story! And most of all, such a woman! At the core of Ruth McBride's story is the animating truth of the universe, love, love, love, which she freely admits and burns so brightly with, it's positively dazzling, dazzlingly positive. I confess to a certain grudging determination when I picked up the book from a stack of autobiographies at Bart's: I'm reading to learn, I told myself, and I can't learn about what makes a good memoir work unless I read the good memoirs.

Happily, steeling myself for an earnest-but-plodding slog was not only unnecessary, but a dazzling reminder of what a jackass I am, still making assumptions at the ripe old age of almost-49. "Page-turner" barely does this book justice; The Color of Water bubbles, crackles and glows with life, as much because of the brilliant writing skills of Ruth McBride's journalist/jazz musician son, James, as it is because of Ruth's own story. McBride flips between the stories of mother and son, the older story lending perspective to the modern one, the two intertwining in a vivid, real-life display of how our most difficult earthly clashes can become our most glorious heavenly gains.

It's a brilliant accomplishment and a huge gift to the world. If I could travel back in time to have read this 14 years ago, I would. The next best thing I can do is recommend that if you haven't yet, pick up a copy and read it today...

xxx
c

• Buy The Color of Water by James McBride on Amazon (affiliate link!)
• Visit author James McBride's website

Yo! Disclosure! Links to the books in the post above are Amazon affiliate links. This means if you click on them and buy something, I receive an affiliate commission. Which I hope you do: it helps keep me in books to review. More on this disclosure stuff at publisher Michael Hyatt's excellent blog, from whence I lifted (and smooshed around a little) this boilerplate text.

Photo of James McBride and Ruth McBride Jordan © Judy Lawne, via Oberlin College's website; image of book cover © Riverhead Books.

Book review: Improv Wisdom

Every once in a while, you read a book you wish came bundled in stacks of 11, so that you could keep your own copy but immediately, or maybe even upon finishing Chapter 2 or 3, share the experience with a solid two handfuls of people.

Improv Wisdom by Patricia Ryan Madson is exactly that kind of book. By her own admission (an adorable mea culpa in the epilogue, reflecting on the irony of taking 20 years to write a book about improv), it's the work of a lifetime, her own lifetime of learning and teaching improv to a variety of students, "civilians" and thespians alike, and folding into it the other modalities of learning and living she picked up along the way: tai chi chuan, Zen Buddhism and Constructive Living, to name a few.

The book fuses all these modalities but uses 13 core tenets of improvisation to suggest a simple, sturdy framework for living. "Just show up" winds faith and action together into something more useful and beautiful than either is on its own (and, as any adherent of Woody Allen knows, is 80% of success). "Pay attention," a chronically underutilized tool that will change almost anyone's game in startling ways, makes for what is probably my favorite chapter: in addition to some especially useful (and illuminating) exercises, it includes a moving story of epiphany and a number of surprises that absolutely got my attention.

I think that was the biggest surprise of the book, how delightfully light and unexpected the lessons were. As a survivor of the improv-as-career-propellant school, I girded my loins for Chapter One, which of course draws on the cardinal rule of all improv: "Say yes" (or, as the game goes, "Yes, AND..."). But rather than a heavy-handed, in-your-face talking-to about the necessity of throwing yourself off a cliff over and over again, it is a series of simple and slyly compelling nudges towards taking the kinds of small risks which will instantly and forever change your world. The words took me back to the pure joy of those early days of improv, when glory was so non-imminent the only sane reason to do it was for fun, and reminded me that when I apply those lessons to my daily life, waking up, releasing attachment to outcome, turning my attention outward rather than inward, how much more joyful and rich are my experiences.

Some chapters will resonate more or less, depending on where you're at in your journey. Some people will want to use Improv Wisdom as a guidebook, doing the exercises chapter by chapter, turning their focus to a different aspect of awareness-sharpening each week (or month or day). Some will read it all the way through for inspiration and insights; some will dip in here and there for the same reasons.

I'm hard-pressed to think of the person who could gain nothing from reading this wonderful little book, though. It's gentle, kind and inspiring in exactly the way you'd expect the work of a lifetime to be.

xxx
c

• Buy Improv Wisdom: Don't Prepare, Just Show Up by Patricia Ryan Madson on Amazon
• Visit the Improv Wisdom website
• See what Patricia Ryan Madson is reading via LibraryThing

Watercolor ©2010 Patricia Ryan Madsen.

Yo! Disclosure! Links to the book in the post above are Amazon affiliate links. This means if you click on them and buy something, I receive an affiliate commission. Which I hope you do: it helps keep me in books to review. More on this disclosure stuff at publisher Michael Hyatt's excellent blog, from whence I lifted (and smooshed around a little) this boilerplate text.

Book review: Sweeping changes

Many moons ago, going solely on a hunch, I stumbled upon doing the dishes as a way of setting things right.

It was a magical bit of accidental reframing for me. Dishes were an especially loathed task growing up, for all sorts of reasons having to do with feminism and feeling trapped in a life and a house not of my choosing.

Ironing, on the other hand, was a quieting, calming task I chose. Like most of my favorite soothing things, it required just enough attention to disengage my brain from whatever it was currently sweating out, and not so much that I couldn't have Brady Bunch reruns on in the background.

Sweeping Changes: Discovering the Joy of Zen in Everyday Tasks, helps reframe all kinds of potentially irritating chores into balm for the soul (not to mention actions that get the house nice and clean.) Author Gary Thorp, a lay-ordained monk in the Shunryu Suzuki Roshi tradition, explicates the dull to-dos of maintaining one's life and space, the scrubbing of toilets, the preparation of meals, and yes, the sweeping of surfaces, in Buddhist terms: how we care for the things around us determines how we care for ourselves and the world around us.

If we approach a dirty sink, or carpet, or even (or especially) a toilet with loving kindness and our full attention, we improve our ability to approach the more complex challenges of life the same way. And if we go one level deeper, we start getting in our bones that the Buddha lives in everything: not just the clean sink underneath, but the dirty water that fills it. We honor the space walled off arbitrarily by the exterior of our home but not at the expense of the space outside of it, because we see that everything, the floor, the dust, the mites living in the dust, are all part of one, big, interconnected system.

I loved Thorp's friendly, light, easygoing style so much, I probably read the book too fast. If you pick up your own copy (there are new hardcover and paperback copies available starting at $5.99 and $10.90, respectively, with abundant used copies for far less), I'd keep it by the bed or other (ahem) temporary reading station to dip into here and there, for inspiration. Maybe it's different for zen cats, but us civilian kitties can get balled up in our Buddhist underwear pretty darn quick.

If you take nothing else from it, I'd suggest taking these two things: pay more attention to your tasks, and less to how perfectly you do them.

Easier on the surfaces and what lies beneath yours...

xxx
c

• Buy hardcover version of Sweeping Changes by Gary Thorp on Amazon
• Buy paperback version of Sweeping Changes by Gary Thorp on Amazon

Image by CarbonNYC via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

UPDATE (8:51 am): In my rush to post, I neglected to mention that John E. Simpson's comment on a previous post originally pointed me to this wonderful book. I'm horrified, not only b/c I'm such a credit-where-credit-is-due apologist, but b/c I want to maximize the chances I'll find other great book (and other) suggestions in the comments section. My apologies, John!

Yo! Disclosure! Links to the books in the post above are Amazon affiliate links. This means if you click on them and buy something, I receive an affiliate commission. Which I hope you do: it helps keep me in books to review. More on this disclosure stuff at publisher Michael Hyatt's excellent blog, from whence I lifted (and smooshed around a little) this boilerplate text.

Book review: The Four Agreements

For someone who never actually read The Four Agreements, I have thought an awful lot about it in the three years since I didn't actually read it.

Generally, I thought about how great it would be if there really was some very simple and straightforward "Practical Guide to Personal Freedom," as the subtitle promises, a four-part pact one could make with oneself that provided a clear-cut path of guided self-instruction.

Specifically, I kept turning over Agreement #1, "Be Impeccable with Your Word", in my head, wondering if its stickiness meant that for me, that particular agreement was the key. In the three years since I've been paying attention to my habits, I've noticed that my mouth gets me in more trouble than any other part of me after my brain: I'm forever over-promising and under-delivering, when every smart business guide out there advises doing exactly the opposite. So when a copy jumped out at my on the "Most Requested" shelf at my beloved Bart's Books on a recent trip to my equally-beloved Ojai, I figured I'd pick it up and use it in tandem with my friend Jason Womack's new book, The Promise Doctrine, and once and for all, I'd whup this over-promising thing.

Imagine my surprise when I found that for three years, I've had the wrong takeaway rattling around in my poor, overloaded brain. Memory is faulty, but it's faulty in reliably illuminating ways: what I'd conveniently forgotten was that being impeccable with one's word meant not using it in vain, against yourself or anyone else. Negative self-talk? The root of most problems, since the Toltecs (the tradition author don Miguel Ruiz hails from) believe that you need to get right with yourself before you can truly get right with the rest of the world. Being impeccable, literally, not doing harm with one's word means not using it as a destructive force in any way, but instead using it to tell the truth, to express love (which, in a bit of sneaky-pete dovetailing, turns out to BE the Truth) and build good things, like bridges of communication.

And there's a special circle of hell reserved for those who use their words to gossip. Bonus-extra? You're living in it. No, really, you're making a hell on Earth when you participate in word slime, either by spreading it or letting it land. Very practical, those Toltecs, to hell with the Hell of certain religions who shall go unnamed: let's get this man-made hell sorted first, anyway.

The other three agreements, not to take things personally, not to make assumptions, and always to do one's best, fall naturally from the first. While any one of them could certainly stand alone, it seems like they work especially well as buttresses for that primary agreement. Not taking things personally, in this context, is the inverse of being impeccable with one's word: if you adhere to it, it stands to reason you'd have some protection against other people not being impeccable with their word. Not making assumptions works the same way (as if Felix Unger's stunning bit of definitive logic wasn't enough to convince you). And always endeavoring to do one's best is not just supportive of the first agreement, it's Do-Bee 101.

One warning for those interested in a four-simple-steps approach: if I haven't made it obvious, simple doesn't mean easy, especially here. I've screwed up enough times at both really simple and really easy stuff to know. It's not even easy to get through: at 138 pages, The Four Agreements is a short book but not an especially breezy read.

Or perhaps I should say that for some of us who could really use the information contained within, extraction will be easier if we take it slowly...

xxx
c

• Buy The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom, A Toltec Wisdom Book on Amazon
• Read don Miguel Ruiz entry on Wikipedia (the personal site is down as of this writing)
• Read descriptions of the four agreements on Wikiquote

Image by midiman via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Yo! Disclosure! Links to the books in the post above are Amazon affiliate links. This means if you click on them and buy something, I receive an affiliate commission. Which I hope you do: it helps keep me in books to review. More on this disclosure stuff at publisher Michael Hyatt's excellent blog, from whence I lifted (and smooshed around a little) this boilerplate text.

Book review: The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb

I am not one known for my godliness. Church makes me itch, I've been a doubter from way back before I knew there were such things, and, while I've been exposed to big, honking chunks of it thanks to eight years of Catholic school, I've never read the Bible all the way through. Those "begats," they always put me to sleep.

I've always found the idea of comic-book renditions kinda suspect, as well. Sure, there are some stories in there that lend themselves to literally graphic retelling: look what DeMille did with Exodus and 4 million extras; I do, at least once a year. But the various panels I'd seen made these efforts seemed more like sucker bets, ways of roping in kids and the egregiously impatient, more like Jesus porn than anything really illuminating. Illustration, like design, should earn its keep, not be reduced to cheap gimmickry or decoration.

Revelations from the genius of documentation

R. Crumb's cartoons have been illuminating things for me since I stumbled on them at the tender age of seven or eight, in a stack of other grownup-type reading material at my grandparents' apartment.¹ It took a while for my baby brain to catch up, but I now realize that Crumb's work was my first exposure to drawings carrying equal weight with words in grownup storytelling. Plus, you know, there were all of those great, dirty pictures. Way more interesting than the back issues of Playboy I also unearthed in Grampa's study (which to an eight-year-old were already pretty interesting).

Dirty subject matter will only get you off so far, though. Once you'd burned through the material a first time, for the naughty bits, you could go back and pore over the minutiae. I'm a fan of minutiae, by which I mean I can get a little OCD at times; re-reading early Crumb is very soothing, and it only gets better as he gets older and his talent deepens and his scope widens, not a lot, just enough to incorporate his other interests, like old-time blues and jazz, or the creeping industrialization of the countryside, or, now, really old stories about where we come from.

The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb is book-ended by an illuminating forward, where he documents (in hand-drawn lettering) his impetus for creating the book and acknowledges the great amount of help given him in bringing it to life, and an equally illuminating commentary (in mercifully legible typeset characters) at the end, where he discusses various pertinent items concerning the content and background of the chapters.

Do yourself a favor and read the book all the way through first, without skipping ahead to peek at what are basically extended footnotes. While the commentary helps make some sense of a few really impenetrable parts, for the most part, I found myself fully sucked into these ancient stories, begats inclusive, in a way I never have before. I wondered about all the people I sprang from (at least half of them directly descended from Noah's son, Shem, according to this particular history); even more, I started to wonder about all the people and stories who weren't in the book, the ladies doing the begatting, for instance, and how some of their stories really, really didn't add up. Crumbs drawings pull you in and slow you down even as they make you want to race through and gobble the story up whole. Reading this version of some of the greatest stories ever told is maddening and intoxicating and, yes, interesting.

"Goddammit, this is a good book!"

As God is my witness, those are the exact words I spoke, out loud and without thinking, when I finished the whole shebang, and, I think, why Crumb's work is a triumph: it engages people who might not otherwise engage with these ancient stories, and provides a way for us to plug into the ancient throughline of humanity. Despite predictable accusations from certain quarters, the book is as far from titillating as you can get when you're talking about a work where every five seconds, it seems, someone is either smiting someone or begatting with them. As more reasonable members of the religious community seem to have pointed out, it ain't like the stuff isn't written in there, people.

It's unlikely that I'll have a conversion experience even having had my first connection with a holy text. But like my brothers and sisters on the other side of this great religious divide, I now have an interest in a story we share. That's a shared place, and shared places can be the beginning of mutual understanding, right?

Or not. But either way, it's a helluva good read...

xxx

c

• Buy The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb on Amazon (affiliate link)
• Watch video interviews of R. Crumb with Francoise Mouly (co-editor of the amazing RAW magazine)

¹By piecing together various stories, dated documentation and memories, I finally deduced that the underground comix in question had been a gag gift for my grandfather's massive 60th birthday bash, although given his interest in keeping up with the times as they were a-changin', he may have bought them himself: Gramps was hip to Dylan when Dylan was coming up on the scene, and had the ancient LPs to prove it.

Images by Rachel Kramer Bussell and ideowl via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Yo! Disclosure! Links to the books in the post above are Amazon affiliate links. This means if you click on them and buy something, I receive an affiliate commission. Which I hope you do: it helps keep me in books to review. More on this disclosure stuff at publisher Michael Hyatt's excellent blog, from whence I lifted (and smooshed around a little) this boilerplate text.

Book review: Official Book Club Selection: A Memoir According to Kathy Griffin

I think I understand why people say they don't like a particular slice of culture, vampire fiction, for example, from the bookish point of view, or reggae, from a musical one, but it's always made me a bit sad.

By all means, bypass the crap, life is too short to read shitty science fiction, and the drive from your garage to the street is too long to listen to most Contemporary Country, but closing yourself off from all of it? That means you lose out on losing yourself in the far-out worlds of A Wrinkle in Time, one of the most enjoyable books from my childhood (and one I reread in adulthood) or singing along to Carrie Underwood's Sonny & Cher Show-era story song, Before He Cheats. So why would you do that?

I'm a shameless consumer of fine-quality "crap," by which I mean only "that which is not generally regarded as highbrow by anyone." I love Valley of the Dolls, The Brady Bunch, Showgirls and a slew of confectionary mid-century movies, not to mention my beloved Play Misty for Me. And really, I think my view makes more sense: is Take the Money and Run the "lesser" Woody Allen movie for being funnier, or am I really supposed to like Shadows and Fog more for its impenetrable artsiness?

I say roll with the finest in every genre and you can't go wrong! Balls-out comedy? Try Caddyshack or Blazing Saddles: well-written, well-acted and rollicking fun from beginning to end. Hot Western action? Take your pick, but I'd start with Shane or Deadwood (unless you're looking for campy, noirish Western, in which case it's Johnny Guitar all the way. There are great musicals (Singin' in the Rain), great chick flicks (Thelma & Louise), great horror films (Psycho), great melodramas (Gone with the Wind). There's even great porn, and if you don't believe me, you  haven't seen Deep Throat (but you should, unless you're really delicate).

I feel the same way about books, including celebrity tell-alls. Yeah, most of them are junky, but that just makes the good ones, I'm with the Band, Pamela Des Barres' super-dee-duper autobio chronicling her days on the Sunset Strip in groovy, rock-a-licious, '60s L.A., that much better.

This is my long-winded way of teeing up comedienne/actress Kathy Griffin's new memoir, ingeniously titled Official Book Club Selection, as the true slice of hilarious awesomeness it is. Okay, how awesome? It's I-read-the-whole-thing-on-my-Kindle-app-for-iPhone awesome! It's "I laughed out loud 25 times!" awesome. It's even well-written awesome. (Not that I think Griffin would be a bad writer, just that with everything she has going on, I figured there's no way she'd have time to write it. Maybe that's why she brought on Robert Abele to write it with her, uncredited up front, but credited front and center and in no uncertain terms in the acknowledgements. That, my friends, is the mark of a class act.)

I will confess that however prickly I may have found Kathy Griffin to be when I knew her at the Groundlings (her star was well on the rise during my tenure), she was always nothing but classy. She offered up her house for a mutual friend's memorial service, I'm not 100% certain she knew him well. And when I got my ass kicked to the curb and ran into her at a play elsewhere, she was the perfect combination of "That sucks" and matter-of-fact, allowing for bitterness but with a laugh, and always with compassion.

So yes, there's dish in this book. How could it have the Griffin imprimatur and not? But there is also tremendous heart and genuine humor, as well as a stunning example of the kind of tenacity and work ethic necessary to get from any old place to somewhere special.

I loved the hell out of this book; if you can tolerate the outré with your humor, I can't imagine that you wouldn't, too...

xxx
c

• Buy Official Book Club Selection: A Memoir According to Kathy Griffin on Amazon
• Visit Kathy Griffin's website

Image ©Random House or Kathy Griffin or someone else, but not me.

Yo! Disclosure! Links to the books in the post above are Amazon affiliate links. This means if you click on them and buy something, I receive an affiliate commission. Which I hope you do: it helps keep me in books to review. More on this disclosure stuff at publisher Michael Hyatt's excellent blog, from whence I lifted (and smooshed around a little) this boilerplate text.

Linchpin: An interview with Seth Godin on fear, change and the importance of making art everywhere

That Seth Godin has a new book coming out is generally a cause for celebration. Seth has a knack for teasing out one big, necessary idea and illuminating it in a way that makes it seem obvious, post-reveal, without ever coming across as obnoxious. That, my friends, is a gift.

So, too, is the way he chooses to share his gifts with the world. Seth regularly throws his weight behind people and ideas worthy of support, and has a special fondness for the Acumen Fund, an innovative, can-do nonprofit with a similarly iconoclastic chief executive, Jacqueline Novogratz. Moreover, he combines his various loves and interests in innovative ways, modeling the very behavior he describes so well in his books about marketing: for his latest book, Linchpin, he offered 3,000 early review copies to his readers willing to donate a minimum of $30 to the Acumen Fund; so eager/loyal are his readers, he hit his mark just 48 hours in, raising over $100K for Acumen.

In a further example of walking the walk, Seth reached out to a group of his regular devotees (or, in my case, an irregular one) to assist with promotion: would we read even earlier, advance portions of his book, and interview him about the material on our blogs, and post them all on one day in a big, glorious, central round-up of semi-anarchic, semi-choreographed promotion?

Uh, yeah. Yeah, we would do that.

So here is my interview with Seth on the themes of his latest book, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? The interview questions are based on the advance pages I read; I've since read the entire book, and could have a whole other interview based on the chapters about Resistance and "There Is No Map." Who knows? Maybe I will!

But don't wait: buy your copy now. Like The Dip and Tribes before it, Linchpin is one of those "must-reads" that, thankfully, doesn't read like one.

xxx
c

THE INTERVIEW

Colleen Wainwright: It seems like a central theme of your book is that we've fallen asleep: as creative beings, as free thinkers, as true individuals. Do you have any practical tips on waking the hell up? Or accurately gauging whether or not you're asleep?

Seth Godin: We haven't fallen asleep, we've been put to sleep. Actively brainwashed and hypnotized by industrialists in search of compliant factory workers and eager consumers. Of course, our genes were complicit, but please don't blame yourself.

And we're all asleep. Some are more awake than others (Spike Lee or Shepard Fairey or the guys who started the Four Seasons). Still, we stick with the status quo way more than there is any reason to. We do this because the system has persuaded us it's the only way.

As you guessed, the theme of my book is not to tell people what to do, but to identify the hypnosis and give us words and concepts we can use to wake each other up. Either that or we can keep shopping at the mall, driving an SUV and figuring out how to pay for our McMansion while we stress out doing by-the-book work at our by-the-book company that's getting its ass kicked by some startup with no overhead.

You say flat-out that one doesn't have to quit one's job to start effecting meaningful change. My own experience with trying to do that, back in advertising, was akin to banging my head against the proverbial wall. Does it only work for certain industries? For people higher up on the organizational food chain? Isn't there a point where we have to say, "Nope, not gonna happen here," cut our losses, and move on?

I think there may very well be times you need to quit, but most people never even get close to that. Most people say "my boss won't let me" and give up because they've bought into two myths: the first is that (as we saw above) the safe thing to do is play it safe, and the second is that your boss is crazy enough to take responsibility for your art. Why would she? You can't go to her and say, "I feel like doing something remarkable, if it doesn't work, will you take the blame?" Not the way it works. It turns out that if you start smallish and do remarkable stuff every day... make connections, be human, do the work, focus on things that matter, go the extra mile... then every day you'll get more chances to make things change.

Sure, it's possible that your boss will fire you. But if she does, is that the place you wanted to be anyway? Fired for delighting a customer? Fired for making a difference?

Odds are, not only won't you get fired, you'll get asked to let others in on your secret.

I love the concept of "emotional labor": that it's both mission-critical and wildly difficult. Also--and possibly even more significant--is that emotional labor is the Rodney Dangerfield of efforts, rarely garnering respect. How do we change that? Or does everyone signing onto the program have to get down with being the nutty Van Gogh of their endeavor or organization, only (if ever) appreciated after the fact?

There's not nuttiness on the table here. I'm proposing that you embrace the fact that the only thing you get paid for (unless you're a brilliant programmer, chemist or race car driver) is doing emotional labor. Bringing guts and ideas and love to work when you and others don't feel like it. That's your job. And the people who do that the best keep getting rewarded for it. Dishwashers don't get to whine about their chapped fingers, and white collar workers like us shouldn't whine about how hard it is to be generous and creative and flexible.

Speaking of "emotional labor," your statement that "Work is nothing but a platform for art and the emotional labor that goes with it" may be my favorite phrase you've ever coined (and you've coined a lot of good ones). It's basically saying that *anyone* can create art with what they do, right? But is that true? Can you be a corporate cog--a very small piece of the machinery, with a very unsexy job--and make art? What does that look like?

If you work for a company that truly prizes cog-hood... say you're an insurance actuary, or someone assembling pacemakers... I'd argue you should get out, now. Why? Because every day you spend there is a day where you give up value and a bit of your life. On the other hand, at just about every other job there's a chance to lead and make change and connect and create tiny breakthroughs. Which lead to more than tiny ones. I know people at giant famous companies that get to do this all day, every day. How'd they get that job? Because they started, and they continued and they pushed until it was their written role.

So, for example,

• Laurie Coots at Chiat Day spends most of her time causing trouble, disruptions and the creation of opportunity.
• When Robyn Waters was at Target, her job was to transform the organization from a K-Mart wannabe to Wal-mart challenger by bringing style and art and color to the inventory and mindset of the company.
• Donna Sturgess gets to do similar work at GlaxoSmithKline. She finds high bars and encourages people across the organization to jump over them. She makes art and change for a living.
• And at Starbucks, Aimee Johnson runs the group that developed both the high-end coffee maker they acquired and the new line of Via coffee.

I've met similar people at banks (!) and even General Electric.

Okay. Let's talk about fear, one of my least favorite (and most consuming) topics. If lizard brain, the thing that makes us react in the scared, small, self-preserving way, that just wants "to eat and be safe", is the source of resistance, it's pretty important to resist succumbing to it. How does one do that? It's not like you can sit down and have a heart-to-heart.

My other goal here is to scare you to your toes. To scare you NOT of standing out, but to scare you about fitting in. To scare you about your diminished role if you refuse to do emotional labor. To create a new fear, a fear that's greater than the fear of being your artistic genius self. Boo.

Giving, "free" and the honored Native American tradition of potlatch are all good, but where does it stop? We may no longer equate dying with the most toys as winning, but a gal's gotta make a living...right?

The more you give away, the more you get. This is actually a secret plan to have what you want and need and hope for, because the market (bosses, hiring companies, the market) love free stuff, and they'll stand in line for more... they'll bid for more... they'll pay for more... if you're the one who can deliver it. Be generous, make art, make connections, do work that matters and you don't have to worry about making a living. The secret of potlatch was that the big chief could give away EVERYTHING and he'd be even richer the next week.

• Read the rest of the Linchpin interviews with Seth Godin at this Squidoo page
• Buy Linchpin on Amazon.com
  

Image by jurvetson via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Yo! Disclosure! Links to the books in the post above are Amazon affiliate links. This means if you click on them and buy something, I receive an affiliate commission. Which I hope you do: it helps keep me in books to review. More on this disclosure stuff at publisher Michael Hyatt's excellent blog, from whence I lifted (and smooshed around a little) this boilerplate text.

Book review: Outliers

Love him (I do) or hate him (many do), what most people find most vexing about Malcolm Gladwell's books are the conclusions he draws in them.

Connecting a to b to c and coming up with 9. Telling story after fascinating story only to sum them up hastily with a big, fat WTF? Because, as others have pointed out, the same interesting and facile mind that skitters across the surface from topic to interesting topic can't possibly dig deep into any one of them, much less be a schooled expert who has been soaking in the stuff since she was knee-high to a grasshopper, statistics at her fingertips and facility with fusing them into insights which are both truly new and truly supportable.* Because hey, he may be quicker and a better wordsmith, but he gets the same daily ration of 24 hours as the rest of us mere mortals.

So if the news isn't so newsy and the conclusions a bit iffy, why read Gladwell? Aren't those books over there in the business section, away from the "fun" sections, meant to edumacate ourselves with?

I say read Gladwell for two reasons. First, because he's ridiculously readable. Eminently readable. Deliciously, dazzlingly readable. You can devour his books in a sitting or two, smacking your lips all the way, because they're loaded to the gills with well-told, interesting stories. Avoid accepting anything as gospel (gospels very much included) and you can enjoy a whole lot more of everything, especially most business books.

The other reason to read Gladwell is because within the wonderfully-told stories are many, many useful nuggets you can take with you and muse on later. I may or may not buy into the broken windows theory of crime prevention, but I like that it stops me in my tracks and makes me wonder, "Well, what of this?" I like that it starts a conversation in my head.

Similarly, in Outliers, one particular exchange stuck in my head. It's a conversation between a Korean employee and his higher-up, and it's soaked in the kind of rich subtext that kept Pinter in business. I won't quote the dialogue here (too lazy to type, plus that copyright thing), but here's the salient point: what looks on the (Western, non-Korean) surface to be one thing is, in the context of the speakers' native land, something entirely different.** And, well, that makes me think quite a bit about my own, supposably rock-solid communicationz skillz, and how I should maybe-possibly watch out for the assuming and get better at the communicationz-ing.

Do not read Outliers, then, to discover the secret of success. You already know it: be lucky, be good, and work hard. Gladwell seems to be pointing to luck as the x factor, which right there is kind of a no-duh conclusion, but he is also saying (and says he's saying, so we're clear) that each of us can factor into one another's success. Done and done.***

Read it to find the stories that will inspire you to do or think the next good thing in your life.

Done. And done...

xxx
c

• Buy Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell on Amazon
• Watch a crapload of free video featuring Malcolm Gladwell (he really shines as a speaker)

*Via Gladwell's wikipedia entry, this NYT piece by Steven Pinker and this brutally cold takedown by Maureen Track for The Nation.

**The cultural anthropologists call the detangling of codes like this unpacking, which I love. My favorite unpacking story ever was related by Grant McCracken on his blog, which has been on my "read first" list for years, and which you should subscribe to right now. And if you're in business, you should also buy his latest book, Chief Culture Officer, which I'll review here at some point in the next couple of months. Go! Go!

***For example, you are my success and (hopefully), I am yours. Plus, if you click on one of these links, I get a nickel or something, which is helpful right now, I won't lie.

Book review: Writing About Your Life

For the first 24 or so years of my life, my literary drug of choice was the novel.

I liked stories, you see, making them up, having them read to me, hearing old ones of my grandfather's over and over again. (Maybe that's the secret behind the strength of the bonds that can happen between the very old and the very young who love each other: the comfort-need to tell over and over neatly intersects with the reassurance that repetition brings with it.)

All that changed when I met Kate O'Hair, my first art director at Young & Rubicam New York. Kate was from Detroit originally, but had already lived in San Francisco and beat me to New York City by a few years. She was that good kind of worldly, accomplished and accessible, that made learning about cognac, Ry Cooder and the Hitchcock canon fun. (Believe me, a pedant could fuck up even the Cooder.)

Kate made everything seem fun and interesting and worth learning about, and it was from Kate that I learned how much fun non-fiction in general, biographies in particular, could be. She got me started with Zelda and A Moveable Feast and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas*; somewhere between Growing Up, Remembering Denny and Shock Value, I was hooked. Because while fiction can be engrossing and illuminating in its own way, non-fiction stories of the people who came before us shine that light, connect the dots and inspire into the bargain.

Memoir gets a bad rap for a whole bookful of reasons. A story is only as good as the storyteller, for one, and not too many people know how to tell a good story anymore. It's a skill, like anything else, that requires a mix of instruction and immersion, and over a varying but always extended period of time, and who has that these days? Some of the skill lies in the mastery of nuts and bolts stuff, structure, grammar and tone, but a whole lot of the magical pixie dust happens with intent: what is the story trying to do? What is it there to illuminate? What are we supposed to see after engaging with it that we couldn't see before?

For as long as I've been at this game of writing, I'm really at the beginning of learning how to tell good stories, which require a whole different level of intention and restraint. My experience crafting the Ignite piece about my hospital-bed epiphany is a great example: some 20 hours went into telling that five-minute story, and most of the hours weren't about picking out good Flickr photos for my slides. It was telling and re-telling, pushing in and moving out, plucking this and condensing that. It was biting into the bits of every thing that happened, worrying the thread of the story, until I found the five minutes' worth that would engage people's attention long enough to pass along a truth I couldn't even articulate at the outset.

This is what William Zinsser talks about in Writing About Your Life, his book devoted to teaching the generalities and particulars of teasing out the true stories of your life. The material he uses to instruct comes from his life and his experience, and his methodology of explication is brilliant: tell the story, then stop to explain how he told you the story, what he left in the story and what he took out of the story, and finally, why he told you the story. There are many fine snippets of Zinsser's stories in the book, his boyhood school, his world travels, the unusual points on his career trajectory, but they never feel like random bits. Rather, like some kind of gentle word magician, he weaves all of the stories into a unified whole whose point is not just how to tell stories, but why we might want to, why we need to.

There are not enough stars in the world to shower upon this book, and I'm not yet the kind of storyteller I must be to do it justice. If you want to tell any kind of story, on your blog, to save for your grandchildren, to make sense of your own past, buy this book immediately. It's what I plan to do as soon as I return this copy to the library. It is an instruction manual and an inspiration, and something I want by my side as I move through this next phase of my journey...

xxx
c

• Buy Writing About Your Life on Amazon
• Read wikipedia entry on William Zinsser

Image by Greene/Ellis via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

*Which turned out to be not an autobiography at all, but the best kind of sneaky auto/bio mashup, and the only thing of Gertrude Stein's I've been able to get through to date.

Yo! Disclosure! Links to the books in the post above are Amazon affiliate links. This means if you click on them and buy something, I receive an affiliate commission. Which I hope you do: it helps keep me in books to review. More on this disclosure stuff at publisher Michael Hyatt's excellent blog, from whence I lifted (and smooshed around a little) this boilerplate text.

Book review: Confessions of a Public Speaker

I was prepared both to like and to loathe Scott Berkun's newest book, Confessions of a Public Speaker.

"Like" because I've enjoyed reading his blog off and on for a while now. Berkun is a forthright and engaging writer who not only shares a ton of good, practical information, but does it with stylish essays on the kinds of topics, like how to detect bullshit, that make me fall in love with the web all over again every time I find one. And hey, he's successfully made the transition from corporate gig to self-employment at something he loves, right there, that's something to like.

"Loathe" because, well, between the title that hinted at dig-me grandstanding and the godawful horrorshow that pretty much everything I've read on the topic has been thus far, my hopes weren't high.

What I hadn't expected is that I'd neither like nor loathe Confessions of a Public Speaker, but absolutely love it.

The book is every bit as smart and fun (and at times, outright funny) as Berkun is when he calls bullsh*t on the social media echo chamber on his blog or gives an Ignite talk about how to give an Ignite talk. It's generous and comprehensive and most importantly, it's both of these things while remaining page-turning-ly readable, if that's a thing. (And if it isn't, it should be.)

Because while Berkun shares valuable information like the importance of feedback (and of asking for it properly), the secrets to vanquishing stage fright and the mechanics of making the room work for you, he does it from the context of his own considerable experience, using stories and examples from his successes and flop-sweat failures to illustrate what works and what doesn't, and how to do the one while (mostly) avoiding the other. In this, his method is much like Gretchen Rubin's recent The Happiness Project, which I similarly loved for its humble-but-useful first-person narrative.

High signal-to-noise ratio isn't much use to me if the content is dull, dry and plodding. This is a rich and richly researched book that reads like a house afire because Berkun has done with the book exactly what he exhorts us to in the book: put the hard work into the prep, so the user experience is enjoyable without compromising on content. His meticulous care is there at every turn, if you care to look, the mix of lists and photos, of scientific and anecdotal evidence, but you won't notice it at first glance, because he's there to do the opposite of making himself look good: he's there for us, serving up the material we need in the best possible way for us to learn it. Like great skaters or dancers, you don't see the work that goes into the work; you just enjoy the well-crafted end result. (Well, until you get to the beyond-due-diligence, double-bibliography at the end. No, really: one is a list, and the other a weighted list. Ingenious and humbling.)

If you're a speaker on the path or just someone who wants to get better at relaying information out loud, you cannot do better than this wonderful book. But you will have to get your own copy: this is one I'm keeping, decluttering project or not...

xxx
c

• Buy Confessions of a Public Speaker on Amazon
• Visit Scott Berkun's blog
• Browse my bookmarked content by Scott Berkun

Image by Scott Schram via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Book review: The Happiness Project

Full disclosure: Gretchen Rubin is a friend. But I was a reader and fan of her blog long before we even met, and there's no way I'd have done an elaborate pre-launch pimpage post if I didn't think this book was so terrific. Also, this review was based on my reading of an uncorrected proof; there may have been minor changes in the book that ultimately went to press.

I have long had a love/hate relationship with self-help books: I love finding new ways to wake myself up, fresh strategies for altering the course of my life, novel frameworks that give me a real look at myself; I hate the dull and plodding style most of them are served up in.

Gretchen Rubin's newest book, The Happiness Project, escapes both the pedantry trap (i.e., scholarly tracts with snooze-a-licious prose) and the newage-rhymes-with-sewage, self-important, Lite Lifeâ„¢ Solutions b.s. of the quick-to-market "guru" book. Its content is both well-researched and delightfully served up, evidence of not only a fine mind and truly generous soul, but someone who reads lots of ACTUAL BOOKS for the purposes of ENJOYMENT and SELF-EDUCATION.

Like Aristotle! Montaigne! Schopenhauer!

But also A.J. Jacobs! Joan Didion! Daniel Pink!

Even Elizabeth Gilbert, that wonderful lady writer everyone now feels it's their bounden duty to crap on* because she committed the heinous sin of writing (gasp...the horror!) a P-O-P-U-L-A-R  best seller (and going on Oprah to talk about it). One of the most impressive parts of Rubin's book is the Suggestions for Further Reading, at the end, where she lists 76+ sources** that run the gamut, genre-wise, from philosophy to science to fiction.

Why is this so fantastic? Because Rubin is a synthesizer, one of that rare breed who can take things in from multiple sources, parse them wisely, and smoosh them into beautiful new ideas and practical suggestions the rest of us can benefit from. Most likely, she finds patterns without even trying, because she's trained her brain to note and sift so deftly. And then, in the case of a project like this, she finds ways to apply all this good learning to herself, further filtering it through her own experience, and finally reporting on it in such a clean, spry, engaging fashion, we don't see the work that went into it, we just get what we need out of it.***

And what do we need from a project about finding happiness?

Direction, for one. Effecting meaningful change is tough stuff, and if there's one thing that requires big-time change, it's moving from asleep to awake, from unhappy to happy, or, hardest of all, from asleep to happy. It's necessarily a self-directed, one-of-a-kind thing, since we're all special snowflakes; how do you go about teaching that?

I think we find our way by studying the great synthesizers before us, which is why I've long preferred biography and memoir to other forms of self-help nonfiction. Rubin agrees. As she says in her opening note to the reader, "I often learn more from one person's highly idiosyncratic experiences than I do from sources that detail universal principles or cite up-to-date studies."**** We read her well-told tales of struggling with exercise, with spending, with keeping her temper; we watch her apply her book knowledge in real time, see the ease that it brings, and start to look at how we might apply this learning to our own peculiar areas of fucked-up-ness. Are her solutions, a 20-minute circuit with a trainer, soliciting help from her mother to buy needful things in bulk, singing in the morning, mine? Nope. Not even close. But the process she goes through to find the solutions could be, and that she does it is inspiring.

Process and inspiration aside, the book is bursting with great, concrete ideas for changing your own life for the better. You may not recognize them as such, since Rubin is about as far from a proselytizer as you can get, but they're there, and in abundance. And there are even more at her blog, and in the communities that have sprung up around the Happiness Project Toolbox, her DIY-with-support site she's set up to complement the book. (And if you're wondering, no, the book is not repurposed content from the website, but longer stories told with more detail, with lots of never-before-seen material. It actually is an object lesson in the differences between good blog writing and good book writing.)

Before you even think about changing your own life, though, just read the book. Bask in the sunny pleasures of good writing on a useful topic.

If nothing else, this will make you happier...

xxx
c

• Buy The Happiness Project on Amazon
• Visit Gretchen Rubin's blog, The Happiness Project
• Visit the Happiness Project Toolbox

BONUS! Erin Rooney Doland, who writes at Unclutterer and wrote a really great book herself recently, posted an excellent review of The Happiness Project on her blog. In addition to thoughtful observations about Gretchen's process, Erin makes some really good points about the connection between happiness and decluttering and of getting clear on your goals before you get going with any project. A great read for the start of the new year.

*Yeah, I didn't like the "love" part so much either, but you know what? That book still kicks more ass than you'll ever admit. And I love Oprah.

**The "+" part, because she's read the entire Samuel Johnson canon, no doubt, and a slew of things that probably weren't 100% salient to the discussion, so she left them off. Because, as I said, this woman is about reading for the right reasons (ENJOYMENT! EDUCATION!), not the icky ones, like trying to impress people with her bowing library shelves.

***In acting, which Gretchen also developed an interest in learning about, because she is that way, we talk about "catching someone acting." You rarely catch Meryl Streep doing this; you catch people on soaps and three-camera s(h)itcoms and even Important Oscar-worthy Films all the time. If that example doesn't work for you, think of how ice skaters make it look easy, or of the difference between the very elegant Fred Astaire and the very muscular Gene Kelly: they were both terrific dancers, but only Fred made it look easy.

****"Or talk out of their opportunist, I-have-a-theory asses." , Colleen Wainwright

Image by juhansonin via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

eBook Review: What Matters Now

Yesterday, in a stunning example of demonstrating with your actions what it is you're trying to say with your words, Seth Godin released his latest mini-project, a free ebook called What Matters Now. Seth has been focusing more and more on what we can do, together and individually, to make a difference; he's also been a fierce advocate for pursuing new ways of doing this, from his stance on "free" (he's pro, and there are a couple of great pieces from other contributors on the subject, too) to his methodologies for teaching (cf. last year's un-MBA program) and marketing/promoting big ideas (cf. the way he promoted last year's program, as well as how he's promoting next year's new for-money book, Linchpin (which I've already pre-ordered).

Each entry is a brief music on some word, phrase or term. There are some nifty illustrated twists (oh, Hugh, you're so dreamy!), some cool "how-to"s, (I especially liked "1%", from Jackie Huba & Ben McConnell, of Church of the Customer fame), and lots and lots of straightforward, balls-out inspirational stuff.

Mainly, I love how generous the whole thing feels. Seth plucked that term from amongst many to muse on; it's clear that generosity occupies much of his thoughtspace, as well as his time and activity.

Yes, there's some business-y stuff and some marketing stuff in here. That's just one thin slice, though; most of the pieces are just wonderful ideas to keep in your head as the new year rolls around. And even the business stuff is either communications-centric or somehow involved with making the world a better place. All good, in other words.

Best of all? Free. Like I said, he's a generous (and smart) kinda fella.

xxx c

• Visit Seth Godin's site to download What Matters Now
• Visit the Squidoo page that lists all the contributors

Book review: Unclutter Your Life in One Week

There are two ways of looking at clutter, and they're equally important to getting a handle on it.

The first (which for most people ends up being the second) is the under-the-hood way: what's really going on between you and all that stuff you've stockpiled? What holes are you trying to fill, what anxieties soothe, what fears hold at bay? What, in other words, on the inside needs a little thought and attention. This is the kind of root-causes stuff that shrinks use to help facilitate change, the thought being (I think) that for many of us, identifying the root of the thing helps to illuminate the path out. (Or at the very least is that bell in your head that cannot be unrung.)

It's what I'd call the "inside-out" way: like Method acting, you work on the interior landscape first, which helps you to project the truth of the character on the exterior.

For this kind of examination, I fall firmly in the camp of my friend Brooks Palmer's clutterbusting ethos, as outlined in his excellent book and blog*. And there is a beautiful sort of symmetry to a decluttering methodology that is as spare and quiet as an uncluttered room itself.

The other way of looking at clutter, it follows, is an "outside-in" way.** This is the route traditional organizers have taken, before we all started drowning in so much shit that cramming it in ever more tightly-organized compartments became unfeasible.

The new wave of outside-in people definitely nod toward the inside-out folk, in that they recognize a lot of the attachment issues we have with stuff. But they're chiefly concerned with the mechanics of getting on with it.

For my money, and like most of us, I'm paying closer attention to it these days, Erin Rooley Doland's new book, Unclutter Your Life in One Week is an outstanding example of the practicality school of decluttering. By her own admission, Rooney Doland was a wretched clutterer before a desperate plea from her spouse woke her up; since then, she's worked assiduously to change her ways, and been quite methodical in her examination of useful techniques and the order in which they need to be done.

She's also really good at documenting and explaining them. Part of that, no doubt, comes from her conversion, but I think she's just a damned fine writer and thinker, besides. Her blog, Unclutterer, is daily proof of that, as well as of her generous attitude and cheery disposition. (Never underestimate the motivating powers of generosity and cheer when facing a self-made mountain of crap.)

Unclutterer, the blog, abounds with useful advice, and is a nice way to dip your toes in the waters of decluttering before you're ready to plunge in (and to keep you honest afterwards). Unclutterer, the book offers a detailed map of how to get there from here.

As the title suggests, it covers the decluttering process by breaking it down into days. The weekend counts as one, so there are six chapters devoted to step-by-step stuff, plus one that introduces the basic concepts ("a place for everything and everything in its place" figures prominently in the catechism) and another to prepare you for the aftermath (a.k.a. the rest of your life).

Rooney Doland admits that some of the tasks will take you longer than a day; having looped around this hill a few times, I think most of them would. But there are excellent exercises and ideas, along with detailed charts and checklists, making this one of the most actionable books on any self-help topic, not just decluttering. Some of the more interesting and potentially useful items in the book include:

• a quiz to determine the way you process information (visual, auditory or kinesthetic), which in turn reveals the best ways for you to order things for peace and sanity in the future
• an extensive system for re-thinking and reorganizing your paper filing system
• the most thorough and well-thought-out plan for processing stuff as it comes into your house I've ever seen (her "reception station" puts my landing strip to shame)

Having come from a blog, with its ruthless schedule of post post post, probably accounts for the wealth of juicy tips studded here and there throughout the book. There are scads of these little "lightbulb" tips, from creating triggers for certain tasks to a regular event she dubs the Sock Purge, which I am instituting immediately.

No system will work unless you're willing and ready. Once you are, though, you'll want to find a guide that really speaks to you. If you're an outside-in type, or looking for some help that elaborates on the core directives of a Clutterbusting approach, this might well be the book for you.

xxx
c

• Buy Unclutter Your Life in One Week by Erin Rooney Doland from Amazon
• Visit Unclutterer, the blog

*First-runner-up prize goes to Peter Walsh, who is the slick and edgy snarkster to Brooks' sly, gentle charmer. Not a bad thing, and his style has worked remarkably well for some people. Brooks' methodology was what made the tumblers fall for me, though.

**For those of you into the acting analogy, this is more of what the British school of acting is like. Yes, they care about the underlying emotions, but they spend a great deal more time working on the externals, movement, voice, etc., with the idea that creating the right external parameters informs interior behavior. The female cast of the magnificent Mad Men (an American program!) has said that you absolutely act differently in the trussed-up, high-maintenance clothes of the mid-century middle-class Western woman.

Image by Ssmallfry via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Book review: Way of the Peaceful Warrior (or, the book that woke me up)

First, it was stumbling across this shockingly timely quote by Christopher Isherwood, the beauty and truth of which made me cry.

Next, it was swapping out my first-of-three annual Nikki McClure calendars from 2009 to make room for the first-of-three McClures for 2010 and noting what had been buried under all those months for all these months. (See above.) No crying, but not a little, "Hahaha, LOOK WHO WAS TRYING TO SEND YOU A MESSAGE 11 MONTHS AGO!"

Finally, in the midst of a mad dash of decluttering to peel the poppies from my eyelids, I was able to actually wake up long enough to tell the Resistor to suck it, because I knew what I had to write about:

Waking up.

Not how to wake up, because if it's even possible, it's well beyond the scope of my powers and one little review of one little self-help book. Hell, it's probably what this entire blog is about, if it's about anything, and five years into this process I'm only starting to get a grasp of how to do it intentionally and usefully. Honestly, I can't imagine phrasing the purpose of the search (nor the perils of ignoring it, nor the pain of actually executing it) more beautifully and succinctly than Isherwood, which is partly why I burst into tears. (Hey, never claimed to be done with envy.)

What I can do is write a long-overdue tribute to the one book above all others that helped me wake up. I'll consider it a closed loop, and maybe you'll find yourself a literary cup of coffee (or maybe you've already read it, are 100% sure it did and will do zero for you, and can move on to the next thing. Either way, good thing.)

A now-longtime friend pointed me to Way of the Peaceful Warrior, Dan Millman's classic self-help novel about a clueless youngster and the (I shit you not) mysterious gas station attendant who changes his life forever. It's a parable of awakening that's derived from real life (the protagonist's story mirrors Millman's own journey), containing mystical elements that may or may not be true. As with the consumption of most myths and parables, that sort of stuff is beside the point: what matters is what the stories in the book do to you as you take them in. Are you intrigued? Do you feel questions bubbling up? Recognition, self- or otherwise? Do you feel tumblers falling into place or a coating of dust being blown away? Do you want to climb in and disappear, or pull the characters out and ask them questions?

There is instruction galore, real, practical, tactical stuff, and you can take as much of it as you're ready for. I wasn't ready for much of it for the many annual re-readings I did of the book, nor, to be truthful, am I quite sure I'm ready for much more right now. I like my sugar and my coffee and my booze, I struggle with exercise and discipline in general, and we all know about my ongoing battles with clutter. Even if you're not quite ready to jump on the bandwagon, the story of someone just (or way) ahead of you on the path can be encouraging or inspiring. (Buddhist meditation teacher Jack Kornfield's talks, which I found via Joe Frank's "The Other Side" on NPR, served a similar purpose for me, and deserve a whole other post unto themselves.)

And if it is the right book for you, it will ring a bell that cannot be unrung: that reminder that yes, there's something else and yes, one foot after the other, given some purpose, luck and assistance, will get you there...

xxx
c

• Buy Way of the Peaceful Warrior: A Book That Changes Lives on Amazon
• Visit Dan Millman's website
• Bonus! Jack Kornfield's Dharma Talks, downloadable/playable for free at DharmaSeed

Book review: Who's Got Your Back

Retailers' ambitious notions of seasons aside, as of this week we officially slide into the most demanding part of the year, otherwise known as "that infernal holiday season."

Me, I like a good party and a wee bit of revelry as much as the next gal. But Thanksgiving-to-New-Year's here in the West is big, demanding and overly sprawling, full of relentless socializing, pernicious consumerism and eggnog. Okay, not so much eggnog anymore (and certainly not on the SCD), but you get my drift: there's a reason my holiday card from 1982 was about excess, and it's not because I was a college student rolling in dough.

Somehow, I've managed to opt out of a lot of the madness in recent years. Most of my immediate family either died or stopped talking to me (only the latter is my fault), and it's fairly easy to keep the commitments to a minimum when you're self-employed with only family of choice. It is not enough to cut things out, however: we must be generative and thoughtful, making things rather than just tearing them down (or locking ourselves in the bedroom with a stack of old MGM DVDs and a bottle of Pinot.) So I now use the holiday season for reflection and planning.

I've spoken before of my love for Ginny Ditzler's Your Best Year Yet. I've done her backwards/forwards, heart-centered goal-setting plan for several years now, and I can personally attest to the magic of it. While I cannot similarly vouch for my friend Chris Guillebeau's method, I think that his meteoric rise and staggering list of accomplishments is proof enough. (And if you're L.A.-local or up for a visit and like reading my stuff and are looking for some one-on-one help, I'm guessing my friend Peleg Top's retreat might be just the thing for you.)

If stuff isn't happening as quickly as you might like, and/or if you're just an overachieving, diehard-DIYer type like yours truly, I'm going to throw another book on the pile for you: Who's Got Your Back: The Breakthrough Program to Build Deep Relationships that Create Success, and Won't Let You Fail. (And now that we have the Mad, Mad World of book subtitles, can we go back to the good old days of Moby-Dick or even How to Win Friends and Influence People?)

As you might suspect, the business books I like the most are the ones that are only nominally about business. What I really want are great stories that help me unlock my brain, with maybe a few how-tos thrown in there to fill the newly-opened spaces. Most of Keith Ferrazi's latest book* is really well-argued rationale for finding that mirror you really need to look in, filled with great stories about how the light finally went on for him. (It's a great story involving former Sony Pictures chairman Peter Guber, and it actually sent chills through me, it was so startling and spot-on.) I was distracted and agitated while reading most of it, which may account for my not finding what I thought was enough in there about actually locating the right people to be on your accountability/guidance panel.

The section that makes it all worthwhile, though, is perfection: in Section Four, he lays out precisely how to conduct a meeting of your own, personal mastermind group (they're called "Greenlight Groups" in Ferrazzi-speak, including the principles that should be informing the group, rules of engagement, and a bit about recruitment/vetting/voting people in. It's pretty comprehensive for just being one piece of one chapter; nestled as it is in a book full of juicy stories delivering the "why," it's a pretty useful "how."

Other fine bits of useful information include learning to differentiate between the different types of support you need in your life and a really excellent section on goal-setting, complete with a distribution pie chart thingy that is amazingly close to the aforementioned Ginny Ditzler's. The similarity was so close, it made me wonder if Ferrazzi's book isn't the perfect companion piece to Ditzler's: use the latter to suss out your goals, and the former to find the right people to help keep you on track.

Before I even finished it, I recommended Who's Got Your Back to two friends who are at a point in their careers much like Ferrazzi was when he had his breakthrough around asking for help. They're established and successful and substantial at the first tier, ready to go nation- (or world-) wide. They are into a whole other level of biggification, as my friend, Havi, likes to call it.

But I can see that there is also valuable information in there for me, the slightly smaller lady cowering in my safe, rent-controlled abode of 10 years. Relationships, I finally realized this year, are the underlying structure that supports all growth, business or otherwise. So I'll definitely be reviewing that part of Section Four as I mull over how to improve my own group experiences in 2010. And I may re-read the rest of it, as well, to help goose myself into moving toward the bigger bigness, after all...

xxx
c

• Buy Keith Ferrazzi's Who's Got Your Back on Amazon
• Visit Keith Ferrazzi's website

*Ferrazzi also wrote Never Eat Alone, which I imagine is one of those Do One Thing Different(ly)** books, where you really only have to read the title to get the gist of the innards.

**Yeah, the "-ly" is mine. Can't help it.

Image by Gwennypics via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

List Wednesday: Great fiction for readers, writers and other story-curious folk

This blog isn't the only work of...well, something that had an anniversary lately.

Back in 2006, I started writing a column for professional and aspiring-professional actors about the non-acting aspects of the business. Over time, it's morphed into more of a marketing column, but I still try to slip in little bits of helpful info I feel they might not be getting from other sources. Because for some reason, and this is a sad thing that makes me a little bit crazy, most actors will not consume anything unless it specifically states "MADE FOR ACTORS." Such a shame, because not only are there so many other equally, if not more wonderful sections of the bookstore to learn from (and I'm using "bookstore" literally and metaphorically), we often learn more and better lessons about our areas of interest from sources outside of them: less at stake means less noise means more room for the stuff to sneak its way in.

A few months ago, I wrote a piece about the five non-acting books every actor should read. In it, I tossed off a remark about how smart actors (the ones I really write the columm for) can learn about how characters are drawn and their place in shaping story by reading great fiction. One smart actor wrote to me (see? it works!) and asked for a list, as long as I could muster, but at least 10. How could I not oblige?

Here's what I shared with him:

1. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
2. Diary of a Mad Housewife, by Sue Kaufman (the movie is also good)
3. Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates
4. Easter Parade, by Richard Yates
5. The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
6. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon
7. Harriet the Spy, by Louise Fitzhugh
8. The Long Secret, by Louise Fitzhugh
9. A Handful of Dust, by Evelyn Waugh
10. Sophie's Choice, by William Styron
11. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
12. Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis
13. Factotum, by Charles Bukowski

As a bonus-extra, I threw in some collections of short stories I particularly like for this exercise (and also because they kick ass):

• The Portable Dorothy Parker (all stories, esp. Big Blonde and Horsey)
• Nine Stories, by J.D. Salinger
• A Curtain of Green, by Eudora Welty (best: "Why I Live at the P.O.")
• The Angel on the Roof: the Stories of Russell Banks

This is by no means a list of all-time best fiction, although any of these could live there happily. This is a character-driven list, where characters are there not only as agents to move the story forward (magical realism, I'm looking at you!) but to illuminate certain aspects of the human condition that other tools of fiction might not. They're characters I find especially compelling and well-drawn, even though, or maybe especially because, in some cases, they reveal their clock springs slowly.

I figured that since it's NaNoWriMo, it might be a fun list to float out there. As Merlin says in his own pep talk from the sidelines, the important thing is not to let reading get in the way of your writing time. But to stay inspired? Hell, yeah, you should read!

Any other great characters out there that should be on the list (where the books themselves are also extraordinary)? Add 'em in the comments, and let's all commence to readin'!

xxx
c

Image by Tom@HK via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.