Practice makes permanent.

Are you practicing the way you want to perform?

Knowing how to learn is one of the most valuable skills you can have, and I think it’s one that most people are worst at. A big part of learning is practice, and how you practice makes a huge difference in how fast and effectively you can learn something new.

I often get complacent in an area of my life and assume that as long as I’m putting in the time, things will turn out fine. It’s true that showing up puts one ahead of most people (sadly), but that’s not enough.

A key thing that applies to most endeavors is to find out what your bad habits or techniques are, and first eliminate those. Otherwise, you’re not only inefficient, but you put a cap on how much you’re going to be able to accomplish. This was nicely illustrated by another blogger in a recent post (warning: language).

The bottom line is that habits are powerful, and we’re always building them. If we’re not making a conscious effort to build good habits, we’re making an unconscious effort to build bad ones.

How are you practicing?

Related posts:

1. My practice 10k across the Golden Gate bridge
2. Research on procrastination
3. Why we don’t teach ourselves more new things

“Don’t accept no from someone who can’t say yes.”

This stuck in my mind and has served me well ever since. Bureaucracies are built on the back of rigid rules and hierarchical structures, but even the most rigid systems need room for exceptions. But empowering individuals at all levels to make those exceptions is the antithesis of what bureaucracy stands for, so these organizations only give the exception-making ability to those at the top. But the hapless victims of the bureaucracy constantly want more exceptions than those at the top have time to handle, so the solution is simple: have the minions at the bottom just turn down any requests for exceptions to the rules as a matter of course. It doesn’t matter that those minions couldn’t approve the exception if they wanted to, because the victim asking for the exception probably won’t push it.

But if you do push, even a little, you can often get what you want. I left the Navy with about a year’s worth of college credits, across a hodge-podge of subjects. They didn’t fit the requirements for my degree at the University of Colorado, so they told me I’d lose some of them and have to take other classes instead. Unacceptable. So I fought and cajoled and bugged them until I got the decision-makers and got them to accept every last class. I didn’t lose a single credit.

Another example of this is customer service call centers. Roughly 90% of my interactions with customer service agents are negative, because I avoid calling unless there’s a problem. And they almost never solve the problem to my satisfaction. So I request to speak to their manager, at which point they balk and explain how there’s nothing better that can be done, that’s their policy, blah, blah. About 50% of the time when I get the manager on the phone, they offer me a better solution than the customer service guy at the first level did. If that’s still not good enough, I go to *their* boss, which is almost always very difficult. They very often just refuse to connect me, in which case I have to do some digging and cold-calling. But when you get that person on the phone, they’re completely empowered to solve your problem, and they often do. Kind of sad that corporate America has this kind of relationship with their customers, but that’s another story.

So decide what you want and ask for it. And don’t stop when they tell you no, especially if they’re not able to tell you yes.

Related posts:

1. Twenty-five tomatoes: experiments in micro-startups
2. How to get a customer for life
3. Why I Don’t Answer My Phone

How many times have you heard that you should “just do it”? How many times have you felt like you should just get over your various hangups and limitations and just get out there and kick ass? How many times have you tried? How many times have you failed?

Maybe for people who find it easy to accomplish things, “just do it” is somehow useful advice, because they’ve been holding back because of doubt, rather than a lack of willpower. Or maybe it’s the kind of hackneyed, useless advice that’s never really worth much to anyone, because the only people who can apply it are those who don’t need it.

Regardless, it doesn’t seem very helpful to me.

Surely even the superhumans among us who have discipline like steel would agree that it’s more complicated than “just do it”, that there is an element of strategy involved in self-improvement and accomplishment. After all, who would propose that it would be a good idea for a chronic over-eater to get a job in a donut shop? Who would suggest that a recovering alcoholic get a job as a bartender?

But do these tricks and strategies really make any difference in the long run for normal people? Or are we just avoiding the terrible truth that we’re simply lazy and weak?

Let me tell you about one of the most fascinating and terrifying research studies I’ve ever heard of. In the late 1960s, a psychologist at Stanford named Walter Mischel designed a series of experiments to understand delayed gratification in children. Almost 700 children participated in the experiments over a period of several years, which consisted of leaving a child alone in a room with a marshmallow or cookie or some other kind of treat, with the instructions that they could have the single treat now, or they could wait a few minutes and have several.

The researchers took footage of these children trying to resist temptation, and the various degrees of anguish displayed while they tried to avoid giving in. As you might expect, many of the children weren’t able to wait more than a few minutes before grabbing the treat; some weren’t able to wait more than a few seconds after the adult left the room before they gave in to temptation. But there were kids who displayed a penchant for restraint, waiting as long as 15 minutes until the adult returned to give them the reward of several cookies.

There are two interesting things about this study.

The first is that the kids who displayed the greatest self-restraint didn’t just sit there and stare at the cookie for 15 minutes. They employed some mental “tricks” to distract themselves from the temptation, tricks which seem to have been effective. Even something as simple as just not looking at the treat seems to have been effective. This skill of understanding how the mind works is called metacognition, and no one explicitly taught it to these kids. They just had it.

The second interesting thing about this study is that this wasn’t the end of it. Milschel (the psychologist) had recruited kids his daughter went to school with, and over the years he periodically asked her how the kids were doing as they grew up. He began to notice some patterns emerging.

Milschel was curious, so he put together a series of surveys and sent them to all the students who participated in the study, asking for info on what they’re doing, their grades, their SAT scores, etc. And he continued doing this over the next thirty years, tracking these people through their teenage and young adult years, right up to the present.

And here’s what he found: the kids who displayed self-restraint all those years ago tended to do better at…everything. They had better grades, fewer behavioral problems, better focus, better friendships, went to better colleges, had better careers, better marriages, a higher socio-economic status, better health, fewer addictions, etc. A kid who was able to wait the full 15 minutes (ten years ago!) had an SAT score, on average, 210 points higher than a kid who could only wait a minute. 210 points.

Let me tell you why this is terrifying: it implies two very, very important points:

1. Self-control supersedes raw intelligence

A related study has shown that ability to delay gratification is a better predictor of academic success than IQ. And that makes sense, because no matter how smart you are, you still have to put in some amount of work to learn the things you need to learn. But that’s not the terrifying part:

2. Self-control may be ingrained in our personality, even genetic in origin

That self-control supersedes raw intelligence is only terrifying to a super-genius, but that self-control may be outside of our control is more sobering. There’s an aspect of fatalism that these experiments reveal that really makes me uncomfortable. The behavior and self-control (or lack thereof) of these kids at the age of four had a strong correlation with their path through life, including their grades, careers, income level, health, even relationships.

So what if, like me, you’re not one of those people who would have done well in this test at the age of four? Is there any hope for us?

Honestly, it’s probably too early to tell how big of a disadvantage we’re at. But there are some bright spots that may provide some solace:

1. The variance isn’t given – The results of this study that I’ve read give the average performance of the subjects, but not the variance. So it could be that the kids who lacked self-restraint did worse as a whole, but there were individuals in that group who did much better. If so, maybe you can be one of those individuals.

2. Maybe we’re tracking the wrong things − It could be that these survey results are tracking all the wrong variables, and that the people who did not display delayed gratification are actually happier, despite being poorer, less educated, unhealthier, and more likely to abuse drugs. However, I think it very unlikely that this is the case. If it was just tracking income, then that might be a possibility, but tracking relationship status, health factors, and propensity to abuse drugs makes me think that there’s probably a pretty strong correlation between the survey results and overall happiness. But you never know.

3. This link between delayed gratification and performance at life wasn’t known to the subjects, but it is known to us. Now that we’ve observed this principle, perhaps we can change the outcome. Maybe impulsivity and self-control are things that we can learn to control: there’s evidence to suggest that willpower is a resource that can be depleted, just like a muscle. If that’s true, then perhaps like a muscle, strategic exercise of willpower over time can strengthen it. Just like the successful kids employed some mental tricks (metacognition) to overcome temptation, maybe we can learn more about how our minds work and surpass our baser instincts.

Who knows why some of us have trouble avoiding junk food, oversleeping, or saving for retirement? It might be the way we were raised or it could be simple genetics. Regardless, there seems to be some hope: Milschel has had success in teaching children some simple tricks to learn how to avoid giving in to temptation. And they work; after just a few minutes of coaching, the kids display a greatly improved ability to delay gratification.

So don’t give up; just keep learning how your mind works and devising strategies to trick it into submission. Maybe someday we’ll be able to match those amazing four-year-olds who could sit in a small room, alone, with a delicious marshmallow in front of them, and not budge.

Don’t look at that marshmallow!

Related posts:

1. Why we don’t teach ourselves more new things
2. The year 2050, according to scientists and Hollywood
3. How would you accomplish the impossible if your life depended on it?

One of the quotes that stood out to me was this one from a teacher of Ms. Portman:

“I’ve taught at Harvard, Dartmouth and Vassar, and I’ve had the privilege of teaching a lot of very bright kids…there are very few who are as inherently bright as Natalie is, who have as much intellectual horsepower, who work as hard as she did. She didn’t take a single thing for granted.”

She didn’t take a single thing for granted. Here’s someone who had the start of a fantastic career and a clear road to stardom. The most natural thing to do with her academics would be to just coast. Or hire a private tutor to complete high school, like many underage celebrities do. But she didn’t do that. She pushed forward and accomplished as much as she could. She even published in a peer-reviewed journal while at Harvard (giving her an Erdős–Bacon number of 7).

She’s not alone though; many celebrities are incredibly smart, driven people off the screen as well. James Franco, nominated for an Academy Award for his performance in 127 Hours, apparently wasn’t satisfied with his film career and reenrolled at UCLA in 2006, receiving permission to take up to 61 (!) credit hours (as opposed to the normal 19) while still acting. He graduated in 2008 with a 3.5 GPA and moved to New York to simultaneously attend graduate school at Columbia University’s MFA writing program, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts for filmmaking, and Brooklyn College for fiction writing. Naturally, he also occasionally committed to North Carolina’s Warren Wilson College for poetry. He received his MFA from Columbia and is now a PhD student at Yale and planning on attending the Rhode Island School of Design as well.

How depressing

I could go on…check out Dolph Lundgren or Mayim Bialik (now playing Dr. Farah Fowler on the hit sitcom The Big Bang Theory).

These people had already arrived in one sense. They had every reason to relax and just enjoy their success in their field, but they didn’t. They kept pressing forward, learning new things, reinventing themselves.

This is a lesson I constantly have to remind myself of. (Warning: egotistical statement coming up)  I’m not a big success yet, but I’m doing OK. In the last five years I’ve seen my income more than quadruple and earned the freedom to work when and where I want, on what I want. And I’m in the process of separating my time from my income. But sometimes I catch myself slowing down, subconsciously thinking that I’ve arrived somehow. Nothing could be further from the truth.

As the Apostle Paul said:

“I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.”

Paul is obviously not talking about his career here, but this isn’t taking his words out of context. I think that being on guard against complacency is a principle to be applied to every area of life. It’s a constant danger that we have to be aware of.

On the other hand, where does contentment fit in? There’s a lot to be said for being grateful for what you have, instead of always striving to have more. There must be a sense of balance in terms of striving to be our best and not holding ourselves to an impossible standard; we should be proud of our accomplishments if we worked hard and did our best. So where is the line between contentment and complacency?

After some reflection, I think the difference is in the distinction between what we have and who we are. None of us are perfect, so while we shouldn’t beat ourselves for our limitations, neither should we be satisfied with them. We should always be pushing ourselves to new challenges and opportunities for growth, whether that’s taking a full-time course load at an Ivy League school while being cast in an Academy Award nominated performance, or just applying for that management position that’s just a little outside our comfort zone.

Just keep pushing forward and never be afraid to reinvent yourself. Who knows what your wikipedia entry might read someday?

Related posts:

1. My MBA picks
2. Why free online education won’t replace traditional college anytime soon
3. Why startups are better than business school

The hard part with self-learning new programming languages is that there’s a hump between the first few steps, which are relatively easy, and the point where you feel like you’re starting to understand what you’re doing and you can make forward progress, even if it’s slow. This effect is much worse if you’re going from a type of programming you understand (like web application development) to a completely new paradigm (like native mobile application development).

In that zone in the middle, it’s hard to move in any direction, because you don’t really know enough to overcome even the slightest barrier. Even worse, you know that the answer is probably only a Google search away, but you can’t access that answer because you don’t know what question to ask. And you don’t know who to trust and wouldn’t recognize the answer if you saw it. And you have no idea how to test it. What you really need is a step-by-step plan of action, but if it differs in any way from your setup, you’re likely to get lost.

I think this zone probably exists for most topics, it just occurs with more severity in some, and its position in the learning cycle differs by topic. It’s a very frustrating point, and I suspect it’s the point where most people give up on whatever they’re trying to learn how to do. The difficulty of trying to struggle through that zone without any external guidance is just too hard.

But that’s only one reason that people don’t self-learn more topics; the other one is motivation. Self-learning is generally self-paced, which is often touted as a benefit. However, anyone who has tried to learn something (or just do something) on a self-pacing basis quickly finds out that there’s an inherent problem: few other things in life are self-paced. For most things, there’s someone else expecting what you’re working on, so you have an external motivator. But just doing something on your own doesn’t bring that benefit. Just like a workout buddy for the gym, this is why learning something with someone else is so effective. I can’t tell you the number of people I know who have tried to learn something new and ended up frustrated and decided to just take a class. And it makes total sense: you show up in a class every week for a few months and go through the step-by-step plan, knowing that at the end of it you’ll have learned the thing you want to learn. It’s not easy, but it’s predictable.

(Shameless plug: this is the reason I started DailyPath with Ben Rasmusen. We’re both self-learners and we’re building a platform to help people learn and accomplish new things together while side-stepping some of the traditional difficulties with self-learning. If there’s something you’d like to learn, please check out DailyPath.com and sign up.)

If you’ve tried self-learning, what kind of results have you gotten? What works or doesn’t work for you?

Related posts:

1. What a bunch of marshmallow-loving 4-year-olds can teach us about winning at life
2. Why don’t we teach time management or other productivity methods in school?
3. How to always have work

I wrote a post a couple months back about 21times, a new project I’ve been working on with Ben Rasmusen. We launched as a course for application developers to build and launch an app in 30 days. The response has been overwhelming, and we’re expanding in the near future. If you’re not a developer, don’t worry, because we’re including some non-technical courses and topics as well.

As part of this change, we wanted a new name, and we’ve decided on DailyPath. The domain isn’t active yet because we literally just got it, but I was too excited to wait to share. Let me know what you think of the name and the logo. And if there’s something you’d like to learn or accomplish, let us know!

Related posts:

1. Introducing 21times: Build and launch an app in the month of November
2. Check out the new DailyPath Trail Guide (a daily guide to moving forward)
3. 21times startup sprint wrap-up

At first glance, the parenting method espoused by Amy Chua, a professor at Yale Law, in a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal seems completely cruel and unbalanced. She describes her parenting method as “Chinese”, and opens with this list of things her kids were never allowed to do:

• attend a sleepover
• have a playdate
• be in a school play
• complain about not being in a school play
• watch TV or play computer games
• choose their own extracurricular activities
• get any grade less than an A
• not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama
• play any instrument other than the piano or violin
• not play the piano or violin

About half of these aren’t the worst thing in the world. But she seems to have a personal vendetta against any form of creativity or self-expression that isn’t classical music on piano or violin. And you’d think that someone so smart would realize that millions of Chinese mothers insisting that their kids be #1 in every subject isn’t really a workable plan, unless they happen to be the only Chinese person in the class. More troubling, however, are her methods of enforcing the above list of rules, which in some cases are downright abusive. She asserts that calling her children “garbage” is a legitimate form of motivation, as is berating an overweight child with taunts of “fatty”.

To be fair to Ms. Chua, there are reports that her book is much better and more nuanced than the article that appeared in the WSJ. I haven’t read it, but it may be worth your time.

The blogosphere has been humming with posts by Asian-Americans who were raised in similar ways, as well as those who weren’t. I’m not Asian, but I thought I’d share the way I was raised, because I think it offers a valuable counterpoint to Ms. Chua’s portrayal of typical American children as spoiled and lazy.

I can remember three relevant lessons that I heard over and over growing up, primarily from my father:

• A job worth doing is a job worth doing well. (so do your best at even the smallest and most menial tasks)
• Winners concentrate on winning. Losers concentrate on getting by. (strive for excellence, not adequacy)
• You can do anything you set your mind to. (believe that you’re capable of what you want to accomplish, and don’t give up)

It’s taken me a long time to realize the unique value contained in each of these lessons, as well as the degree to which I’ve internalized them. Not that I’m perfect at them (they’re hard!), but I believe them all to be true, in a deep way.

But even putting these lessons aside, the other thing that my parents both taught me, through example, was that chasing “success” and “achievement” is not what life is about. This is the hardest lesson of all for me, and one I struggle with daily. Aside from all the issues I listed above with Ms. Chua’s parenting style, the thing I dislike about it the most is the enormous emphasis placed on external validation and achievement. Don’t get me wrong, there’s great value in playing piano or violin, going to Harvard, getting straight A’s. But to limit your definition of excellence to those pursuits that have been deemed “acceptable” is a great tragedy. It produces automatons with brains but not heart, with accolades but not soul. (Ironically, Harvard knows this and only takes so many of these cookie-cutter applicants each year, opting to also fill the class with vagabonds and adventurers who have spurned the common path for the one less traveled.) One wonders how many people raised this way are now in their thirties and forties, Harvard-educated, accomplished at piano, and utterly dead inside.

These are hard questions, and I sympathize with parents everywhere who wrestle with them. But ultimately, as with most things in life, I think that a balanced approach is necessary. Specifically, it seems that there are three things that great parents do:

1. Give their kids freedom and space to discover their interests and aptitudes
2. Provide structure and discipline to teach and encourage kids to work hard within the areas discovered in #1
3. Avoid screwing up the kids before they’re adults via abuse, divorce, etc.

Note: Love isn’t on that list, not because it doesn’t matter, but because almost all parents love their children. And those that don’t could hardly avoid breaking rule #3.

Ms. Chua focuses on the lack of #2 with American children, a concern that I share. There will always be a struggle between #1 and #2 on that list, but I think the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of #1 in America right now. There are too many kids in America playing on sports teams that don’t keep score and getting trophies just for showing up. This is fundamentally stupid, not because self-esteem is bad, but because life just doesn’t care about you and you’ll find that out once you graduate and there are no more trophies and participation points.

But judging by the outpouring of bitter emotion by Asian-Americans raised by parents like Ms. Chua, her parenting method focuses only on #2 and is thus hardly better than the one she dismisses. She would be well-advised to drop the verbal abuse and switch her focus from pushing her kids to do things she cares about, to pushing them to do things they care about.

What do you think? Comments from parents are especially appreciated.

Related posts:

1. An American Creed
2. My kids
3. Your 2008 in review and your goals for 2009

Disclaimer: This is a review of The Personal MBA. I have no prior relationship with Josh Kaufman, the author, and I am not being compensated for this review. However, Josh did send me an unsolicited pre-release copy of the book.

I started writing a long book review of The Personal MBA , but let’s face it, you don’t really care about this book. But you do probably care about results, and whether you’re an entrepreneur, soon-to-be entrepreneur, or even just a manager at BigCo, this book can help you get 80% of the knowledge that you’d retain a couple years after getting your MBA. The book isn’t perfect, but it’s definitely a very useful guide for understanding business at a high level, so if you’re not interested in the whole review, just get the book. Otherwise, read on:

What It Covers

The Personal MBA is actually three books, in my opinion. The first third covers the major business functions like product development, marketing, finance, and overarching concepts of value creation and delivery. The second third of the book is an excellent overview of a lot of different personal and group productivity systems and theories. Finally, the last third of the book covers business systems and how to create, analyze, and optimize them. This last section is the most abstract, but the author does a good job of giving examples to help the reader from getting too confused.

Who It’s For

You should read this book if you want to have a solid grasp of the different business functions and how they interact, as well as a lot of practical ideas and knowledge on actually getting things done. A good friend of mine quit her job earlier this year to branch off on her own, but she’s also been toying with going back to school, perhaps for an MBA. She feels like she doesn’t have a solid enough foundation in business fundamentals, and that’s exactly the type of person this book was meant for (I’m giving her my copy, in fact). But even if you do have a strong background in business and read lots of books about business, you should still read this book, because it does an excellent job of tying together a lot of concepts that you’re already familiar with.

Why It’s Different

My undergrad degree is in business and getting my MBA is a long-standing interest of mine, so I assumed that The Personal MBA would be an overview of the standard business theories and fundamentals, and that i would be familiar with all of it. Well, I was familiar with most of the concepts, but the way the book covers them adds a lot of value.

Though I didn’t realize it at the time, much of my undergrad classes and texts covered business from a 1950s perspective, assuming that you’d be getting a job in a large corporation and you’d have to go really deep into the subject of operations management, or international finance, for example. And now that i look back and compare the last few years since I graduated with what I learned in school, I realize that the theory was solid, but it was missing two things:

First, I never had any kind of class that looked at business from a more holistic position and really tried to weave together all the functions like operations, marketing, and finance to explain how they work together in enterprises of all sizes, especially small companies.

Second, my classes prepared students to be employees of business, not to create them. Even my classes on entrepreneurship weren’t reflective of what entrepreneurship looks like in the 21st century, particularly in a knowledge economy. I don’t think any of my classes mentioned shadow testing or dry testing, for example, and if they did, they really dropped the ball on explaining how important and valuable they can be.

The Personal MBA does a really great job at explaining business in a way that would be relevant for the majority of people starting a small business today, especially a technology or web startup. It’s chock full of recent examples of startups and small businesses that have used the principles discussed to win.

Problems

I have a few nitpicks, like it would have been nice to see a book recommendation at the end of each concept rather than all clumped together into an appendix, and I think the book could have benefited greatly by a running narrative of two or three friends each starting or purchasing different types of businesses that the trickier or more abstract concepts could have used as running examples. But these are relatively minor issues in an otherwise well-executed book.

Conclusion

Overall, I’d give the book a 4/5 and recommend it for most readers. It’s a good reference and refresher even for those who already know the concepts, and for those without a good understanding of the concepts, it’s an invaluable look at business from a holistic point of view. Order it here.

Ultimately, this is a very practical book about how we can create more value, which is something that all of use could use more of. I wish I’d had it before starting my business degree.

Related posts:

1. Why startups are better than business school
2. My assessment of the benefits of an MBA from a top school
3. A Few Favorite Personal Finance Books

In 1869, the GDP / person was $2310. In 2005, it was $37,600 [1]. I know what you’re thinking: inflation! Nope, both of those numbers are adjusted for year 2000 dollars. That means that the US produces 1500% more per person every year than it did 140 years ago. That would mean that the average person [2] is 1500% wealthier than they would have been 140 years ago. That’s pretty amazing. Where is this wealth coming from? We’re creating it out of thin air.

There’s a scene in the movie “Lord of War” where a cargo plane is emergency-landed on a dirt road in a poor country in Africa. In 24 hours, the plane has been completely stripped down to the carcass, as locals literally dismantle it and cart off the pieces. It reminds me of those old movies where an army of ants devour a dead bird or something.

Anyway, I was watching and I was thinking about how that scene is a good example of wealth destruction in practice. That plane had tremendous value as a cargo plane, worth millions. But by breaking the pieces apart, it was reduced to being used for makeshift shelters and other purposes that plywood and scrap metal would do for.

The same process is true in reverse: what’s the value of the raw materials that go into an Airbus A-380? I have no idea, but I know it’s a hell of a lot less than the $350 million that each one costs. By combining the materials in an innovative way, we’re creating true wealth.

The growth in wealth is because we’re creating wealth itself. Human creativity and ingenuity has incredible power and promise. Think of what life was like 140 years ago, and what it’s like today. Is it any wonder that we’re 1500% wealthier? And this process is actually accelerating; we’re building wealth faster now than at any point in history (the recession notwithstanding).

And it’s not like we’re getting close to the end; I firmly believe that by the end of the 21st century, we can build the global GDP per person to be more than $1 million. And that’s inflation-adjusted 2000 dollars. But it might not happen, and if it doesn’t, it will likely be for one or more of these reasons:

• We don’t invest in education like we should, and human innovation declines
• Wars or other mass casualty events destroy wealth faster than we can create it

After decades of gloom, it looks like poverty in Africa might finally be falling. If they have the chance, if wars and plagues and famines don’t wipe them out, if Africa stands up, can you imagine how much wealth the people of Africa will be able to create over the next century? I can’t, but I hope we get to find out.

And seriously, watch Lord of War if you haven’t seen it.

1. http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic448946.files/lecture_facts_growth.pdf
2. Note I said that the “average person” is 1500% wealthier. Not everyone is.

Related posts:

1. Why Groupon could be bigger than Google
2. Book Review: “Crush It” by Gary Vaynerchuk
3. The aggressive advancement of genomics

Photo by emdot

I’ve written before about how I started reading a lot when I was pretty young, and I’ve kept reading throughout my life. Books have a very special ability to take you to new places, to open up new worlds, to introduce and explain fascinating things. It boggles my mind how few people are readers; how else do you find out about the world beyond your front door?

So I’ve been collecting books for a long time, on a wide array of topics, both fiction and non-fiction. I had between 500-1000 books in 2009 when I started getting rid of some, and that doesn’t count the many books I’ve given away, sold, or read via the library.

I’m not exactly sure what made me want to get rid of the books in the first place; I think a big part was just being tired of moving them around, and acquiring a taste for minimalism and owning less stuff. My books at the time made up the bulk of my possessions, so they were a natural place to start. The first step was just getting rid of all the books that I had no intention of reading again, which cut my collection in half. This was an improvement in terms of reducing clutter, and since I had no intention of reading those particular books again, I hadn’t lost much.

When you start to get rid of stuff, it’s very easy to get addicted. Throwing or giving things away is incredibly liberating, and after a couple days, you realize just how little you probably want or need a lot of other things that escaped the trash last time. So it was with my books; getting rid of half of them just left me dissatisfied with the huge pile that still remained.

But at the same time, I really do love books, and the books that were left on my shelf at this time represented some great memories. Each one was a little piece of me, something that had changed my life in some way, some small, some big, but they had all had an impact. How could I get rid of them?

Enter the Kindle. Ebook readers had been around for years Amazon released the Kindle in late 2007, but I kept hearing about it throughout 2008, so when they released the Kindle 2 in early 2009, I started taking a closer look. I really liked what I saw, especially since so many of my favorite books were already on the platform. This was a crucial part of the decision for me, since I do occasionally re-read books that I’ve enjoyed.

I finally got my Kindle in August 2009 and that was that. Within a few weeks, I had gotten rid of all the books that were available on Kindle (plus a bunch that weren’t). All my books now fit on one shelf in my small bookcase, and I expect to cut that in half again in the next six months. The only books I didn’t get rid of are some specific technical books that don’t work well with the Kindle format (more on this below) and some out-of-print books from my childhood.

The advantages have been numerous, but here’s the big ones:

I have much less clutter and stuff now. This is obviously a personal taste issue, but it’s so nice to have less stuff. It’s just so much more relaxing, and I highly recommend it.

I read a lot more. This is ultimately what it’s all about. I can now carry my entire library with me almost everywhere I got, and I do. This has enabled me to read whatever I feel like reading whenever I feel like reading it. I don’t have to choose between taking boots or books on vacation. I don’t have to lug heavy books on the subway. I can carry thousands of books with me everywhere I got, and access to hundreds of thousands more with just a few clicks.

Now, the transition hasn’t been without issues. Here’s a few of the disadvantages:

I miss the feel of an actual paper book. Another personal taste issue, but it is nice to be able to hold a physical book.

Not great for technical, visual, or reference books. Flipping around in the Kindle is a pain, and it doesn’t handle large diagrams or code formatting well, so I’ve still got a lot of technical and visual books. However, I expect this disadvantage to disappear somewhat quickly as the technology matures.

Can’t loan books to friends. However, this is a minor issue for me now.

Few actual books in our house. One of the things I do wonder about is the effect of a “bookless” house on my future children. Studies have shown that growing up in a house with more books has more of an effect on kids than their parents’ education level. Hopefully someone will do a study to verify if digital books have the same effect, and if not, I can go buy a few thousand books when we have kids.

Ultimately, though I think the benefits far, far outweigh the drawbacks. The purpose of books isn’t to impress friends or feel good every time you look at your bookshelf. They’re there to transfer information from one person to (many) others. Ebooks are more efficient at accomplishing that goal, and they come with some many advantages that I think they’ll own 95% of the market in ten years. Just like people still buy records, I think paper books won’t disappear completely, but our kids will have little exposure to them and will probably make fun of us for using them. At the end of the day, almost anything that can be digitized, will be. For better or worse, books are no exception.

If you love to read and you want to read more, get started today.

Related posts:

1. Why it doesn’t bother me that I can’t share Kindle books
2. A Few Favorite Personal Finance Books
3. How I filled two dumpsters and went paperless with the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500