Conventions are all around us. Conventions will guide our actions and rather than not choose any conventions, we can choose conventions to guide us in the right direction. Good conventions will eliminate a choice and bring focus to one thing.
If you want to be more productive, spend more time on your core work. If you want to lose weight, eat less and exercise more. If you want to have a better relationships, hear what the other person says. If you want to use social media, match the message with the medium. This last sentence is the summary of Gary Vaynerchuk’s’ three books, but like the other insipid advice that precedes it, that tells you everything and nothing.
A book review of Shane Snow’s Smartcuts what what riding waves can teach us about spotting trends, how to hack the corporate ladder, and knowing just enough about the right things.
We are knowledge workers. We get paid to think. Engineers construct, writers argue, lawyers debrief, chefs fuse. Each of these – and an ever growing list of careers – involve a person bringing value by what they know and how to apply it. If you can improve what you know and learn to apply it better, you can increase your value. A carpenter can do more with more tools but needs to learn to use them first. The same goes for our mental toolbox.
A great thing about reading books is finding smart people. I first realized this reading Malcolm Gladwell a decade ago and thinking “Wow, this guy is really smart,” and the same thing when I finished Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good For You. The conclusion of this book is that your vice, while not nice, may not be so bad. A secondary takeaway is to think about reframed, redefined, and updated views and when we do this we can see where things are going rather than where they’ve been.
Keeping track of everything that might make you more productive can be unending. Add this but not that? Is the newest app the best tool? An easier question to answer is what isn’t making me productive. What can I remove that will have a positive effect. Drawing in research in psychology, we have a few answers.
Until now I had never read the Heath brothers, which is a shame. Their books are good. Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard is a mix of business experience, academic research, and productivity tools that anyone can apply.
A great thing about Evernote is that it keeps everything organized for me. The bad thing about Evernote is that it’s like my junk drawer – stuff is in there, if only I can find it. Enter Reflect.
Beyond being my favorite book of the year (and one of the best I’ve ever read), The Fish That Ate The Whale has everything a nonfiction story needs.
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