Omtrent Polaroids – Douglas Coupland

In een Douglas Coupland oprisping herlas ik Shampoo Planet en nu ook Polaroids.

Wat me nu opvalt: stijl en onderwerp van Coupland zouden nooit Europees kunnen zijn.

De beschrijving van “spullen”

Bret Easton Ellis overdreef het in American Psycho met het al te uitbundig beschrijven van de merken van de spullenboel van Bateman. Maar ook in Coupland merk je die rare voor ons Europeanen toch wat exotische manier van consumptiegoederen beschrijven.

Polaroids, Douglas Coupland

Zijn wereld is voor ons zo onvoorstelbaar jong

Een legacy van een paar honderd jaar is al onmetelijk diep. Na de vrijheidsstrijd is de belangrijkste gebeurtenis in de geschiedenis van de Verenigde Staten (ja ik weet Coupland is een Canadees) opeens 9/11. En 9/11 wordt als een aanval op de Verenigde Staten beschreven. De Europese geschiedenis wemelt van de 9/11 gebeurtenissen. In de VS wordt af en toe een president vermoord, maar Delaware, Arizona of zelfs Texas hebben zich niet afgescheiden van de VS. In een documentaire over illegalen hoor ik de Amerikanen praten over “our country” als iets dat op een eeuwenlange historie is gebaseerd. Maar de meeste Amerikanen zijn de afgelopen honderd jaar naar het land geemigreerd.

Afkicken

Coupland:

Als er een electriciteitsstoring is zingen we liedjes, maar zodra er weer electriciteit is, vernevelen we weer.

Zo is het ook tijdens deze vakantie. Er is bijvoorbeeld geen televisie. Je merkt dat je makkelijker een boek leest en meer met elkaar kletst, en je veel vrijer voelt dan wanneer dat blauwe oog zijn aandacht opeist. Het lijkt als bij het stoppen met drank of met roken: een TV verslaving zit in je dagelijkse stramien, en er is een paradigmaverschuiving nodig om er van af te komen.

Over legacy: even verderop lees ik dat Palo Alto 100 jaar oud is. I rest my case.

The Creativity Leap – Natalie Dixon

Via Seth Godin’s podcast. He called The Creativity Leap “even better” then his own, at that time not yet published book The Practice.

The Creativity Leap

The Creativity Leap is about activating the creative process in individuals and in organizations, and how creativity can transform people and organizations.

Invest in hobbies. Learn new things, cultivating a childlike, open outlook.

Seek out ideas from outside your normal world.

Creative ideas are formed during daydreaming, during doing nothing. On the other hand: practice makes perfect, without a lot of practice there is no mastery.

Learn to ask better questions. Start with “big picture” questions and then descend to specific questions.

Open-source collaboration and informal structures lead to cross-pollination and better solutions.

Research leads to better questions.

Practice improvisation and out-of-the-box thinking.

Have explicit attention to intuition; intuition is also a data point.

Work in communities.

Facilitate hybrid thinking; combine tech and artistic thinking, analog and digital.

Reuse, remix what is already there.

Make things within the constraints that are there. Creativity works best within constraints.

Get out of your brain. Look at yourself and things from a different angle. Get messy. Combine deep specialization with broad experience. Combine rationality with ambiguity. Combine a tight organization with a loose network organization.

Drift.

Unreasonable Success and How To Achieve It – Richard Koch

I think it was Tim Ferriss’ podcast episode with Richard Koch that put me on Richard Koch’s trail. First I read The 80/20 Principle, then bought Unreasonabe Success.

In the book, Koch describes the wisdom he has extracted from the lives of amazing people such as Nelson Mandela, Bob Dylan, Winston Churchill, Jeff Bezos, Albert Einstein, Victor Frankl, Leonardo Da Vinci, and others. Including, of course, Bill Bain and Bruce Henderson. Who. Bill Bain and Bruce Henderson, former Koch bosses at Bain and company and BCG, respectively. Of course, it is totally out of place in this list, but let’s just say this is Koch’s tribute to his former work

From the lives of the greats, Koch has identified 9 milestones on the road to success. These landmarks form the backbone of this book. Koch describes the landmarks and illustrates them in a highly entertaining way with stories about the greats of this world.

These are the landmarks that Koch identifies.

Self-belief. The courage to get started. Related to self-doubt. Self-doubt strengthens self-confidence.

Olympic expectations. Think big, think huge. Set expectations much higher than normal. Visualize that you are a great achiever, making success much more likely.

Transforming experiences. Learn unusual things from unusual experiences. The conventional path will not lead to unreasonable success. Special experiences do. Develop these experiences.

Breakthrough achievements are mostly innovative, sometimes strategic achievements. Combine extreme determination with extreme flexibility. Be innovative and laughably ambitious, and your ideas come from the soul.

Make your own trail, create your own segment, Invent a new field, narrow that field, and develop a unique philosophy.
Find and drive your personal vehicle. Jump on a major current and stand out. Or create your own vehicle. We would call this a platform these days, I guess.

Thrive on setbacks. Be anti-fragile. Find risks and actions. No actions, no learning, no improvement. Reframe disasters and setbacks.

Acquire unique intuition. Intuition is unique when it is important, original, unproven, imaginative, and based on deep knowledge. Where is your opinion that most others disagree with? (forgot who said that – was it Peter Thiel?)

Distort reality. Apply extreme optimism and determination. Inspire others.

Company of One – Paul Jarvis

Some quick notes on the book Company of One by Paul Jarvis.

Company of One

Book is about staying small in business, and keep having fun doing it. It stead of growing to a monstrous bureaucratic organization, driven by shareholder value.

Companies of one have a clear sense of purpose, are more flexible, can change quickly, can give employees more autonomy and can have more focus.

Make customer relationships more important than customer growth (numbers).

Passion is overrated. Is a side effect of mastery, not the other way around.

Quirky product are not a problem. It distinguishes and provides focus.

More focus on customer success.

Teach everything you know.

Give away ideas.

Trust by proxy – referrals.

Launch quickly, and often.

Build a community.

Rereading, and Derek Sivers’ Hell Yeah or No

Halfway through December, I received my signed copy of Hell Yeah Or No. A good motive to re-read the book.

Derek Sivers - Hell Yeah or No

I had already read the ebook. I purchased in one same offer – ebook and signed paper copy. Given the work Derek has put into producing and distributed the signedhard-cover version, I can not imagine he made much money on it.

I seldomly re-read books. But this one is definitely in the re-reading category. As a sidenote, my re-reading category includes: Gerrit Krol (Dutch writer (probably one of the first people writing on Artificial Intelligence in De Man Achter Het Raam (1982!), definitely in the Netherlands, but probably also internationally), Douglas Coupland, Haruki Murakami, Tom Peters (not everything, but definitely The Little Big Things).

Kim Gordon – Girl In A Band

Somewhere on the great Interweb I found a review of Kim Gordon. I did not know the book. It had disappointed this reader. Nevertheless I purchased the book, being a long term lover of Sonic Youth and curious about Kim Gordon’s life.

Girl in a Band

I found the book very good. Nice details describing Kim’s environment, household things, stuff, music. Written in a loose style. The edition of the book I have – the pocket edition with the orange cover – is a bit grungy. A nice fit with the black and white pictures in the book.

Kim Gordon sketches an entertaining and informative image of punk-rock life in the 80s, 90s and 00s. There seems to be no end to the progress of Sonic Youth, until Thurston Moore falls into an affair with fortune hunter Eva Prinz (the name is not in the book, but it required little research to find out).

The tone turns from melancholic, in the description of het schizophrenic brother, to disillusioned in her marriage with Thurston Moore.

Beautiful book and woman, strange.

The Art of Doing – Camille Sweeney & Josh Gosfield

The Art of Doing was recommended here and there, so I put it on my list. The book turned out to be different than what I expected. Not in a negative way. I had expected a self-help book in the form of chapter by chapter advice. Instead, every chapter in the book shares 10 learning point from the achievements of high flyers in a wide variety of professions. The list of these person goes from author Stephen Dubner, tennis champion Martina Navratinova to soprano Anna Netrebko.

The Art Of Doing

A few common threads from these persons emerge. All have a vision, persevere through bad times, and have a collaborative nature. None of them a psychotic “leaders” you typically find in large bureaucratic organizations or egomaniac attention seeking media addicts. All are driven by a Why. All are hardworking and humble.

My highlights:

Martina Navratilova: don’t specialize, dream big, practice and exercise (do the work).

Simon Doonan (didn’t know who he was before reading the book – Simon is a world-famous window dresser): Go Niche, be the best at something.

Tony Hsieh: discover your values (first).

Mark Frauenfelder (by far the best entry in the book!): Make the blog that doesn’t exist, Be original, get an attitude, Don’t bullshit (don’t waste people’s time), mix things, find unexpected things.  

Kim Gordon – No Icon

Kim Gordon published a wonderful “artist’s scrapbook” called No Icon. As a somewhat shy artist she hesitated to create a book about herself, but it has become a beautiful authentic document.

American Gods – Neil Gaiman

I love books that read like the writer does not know yet where the story will end yet.

This quality I love in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, almost all the work of Haruki Murakami, and also Neil Gaiman’s American Gods.

American Gods reached a sort of cult status that I was unaware of when I bought a cheap pocket edition (9,90 euro). A television series was made based on the novel.

Read in two straight sittings. Incredibly good. At the level of Norwegian Wood, Voyage au bout de la Nuit, One Hundred Years of Solitude.