Review of Daniel Pink's Drive

I am interested in motivation and drive in general. Who isn't? Getting up and going and convincing other people to do the same is a bit of a holy grail.
I have read a number of books on this theme so far. The main one is Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Yes I did look up the spelling of that). In it the author talks about that state we get into some times when we are learning something, carrying out a task that interests us intently. An example used is a man looking at his collection of rocks - geology is his thing. He starts nice and early and before he realises it the light has faded because its evening time. We have all been there at some time (just maybe not with rocks on our kitchen table), and we want to be there again. We are usually at our best in this flow state. Producing the most, being the most creative and generally just maximising what it means to be ourselves.
So one of the main themes in this book (Drive) is maximising this flow state as a way to improve the quality of our lives. To this end I am going to start monitoring how often during the day I am in a flow state. I am pretty much in control of my own time at the moment, so there is nothing to stop me doing the things that give me the biggest flow hit. I am going to put together an Android app which asks me on a few random occasions during the day if I am in flow or not. Tracking this over time should give me an idea of whether or not I am increasing the time spent in flow.
Flow for me will probably come from learning new stuff. Particularly programming tasks. We will see how that goes.
The other thing that Pink reckons improves the quality of our lives is control over what we do, when we do it and how we do it. Again I have nobody to blame but myself on this one. If I am not steering my one man boat in the correct direction, its my own fault.
If you want to grab a copy of this book it is available here.
There was not really anything new in this for me. I had even heard of variations of most of the stories used to illustrate his points, however it was still worth reading. I find that even if a book does not break new ground for you, if it reinforces some important points - and this book does - then it is worth the read.

Review of Seth Godin's We are all weird

I like Seth Godin's work. He has been putting useful ideas in my inbox for a few years now and although not everything he says applies to me directly, he rarely wastes the few minutes it takes to read what he has to say.
He started publishing books under his own label recently as part of the Domino project. This is a way of taking power back off the booksellers (apparently), although there are so many of them going bust these days I am not sure if they have all that much power left.
The Domino Project is run in conjunction with Amazon. I know who I think has the power in book selling :) To be fair to Amazon though, traditional booksellers did rather ask to be iTuned, so to speak.
Domino books are generally short and to the point. The physical books are beautifully produced - this does not happen often in the business and productivity category. Most books of this sort have template graphics on the front and chip bag pages. Dominoes do not.
So down to his most recent offering. We are all weird. I am inclined to agree. I for one have always considered myself a bit off centre, but having read this it may be more correct to say that there is no centre really any more. Well certainly not for most people. The interesting ones especially.
The premise of the book is that everything is based on a bell curve - the normal curve. The peak used to be tall and almost everyone clustered around it. Now it is flattening out. More people have 'strange' hobbies. And this is partially because they are realising that these hobbies are not that strange at all. Once you can find a cohort - crocheting molecular structures onto pillow cases seems like the most normal thing in the world. (I just made that up, but I want one already).
The internet is partially to thank for all this magnanimity. Once a weirdo has found a few more to blipple fight with. Blippling does not seem all that odd. Even if it's not your thing. Yet.
So overall I like the book. Think its worth a read (all of the Dominoes I have so far have been too) and worth the money. These books are short, but I think too many books 'are cut with crap' to fill up what the publishers think goes to make up a decent volume of paper to charge for. Maybe our divorce from how much paper volume we are getting for our euro is down to the web. We normally don't even bother to look at the pp number, so the mild surprise that this is a slim book is brief once we get into it.
Finishing a book with a cool idea in it is much more satisfying that struggling though an overly long one with a similarly weighted idea in it.
Life is just too short for filler. You will find the kindle edition here.