2023 reads, #42. Digested as a synopsis through the summarizing service Blinkist. A kind of cartoonishly simplistic advice guide for writing novels (d2023 reads, #42. Digested as a synopsis through the summarizing service Blinkist. A kind of cartoonishly simplistic advice guide for writing novels (did you know that your readers will identity more with your hero if they can get a sense of what's going on inside your hero's head?), whose entire marketing gimmick is that author Lisa Cron occasionally throws in, "And this has been proven by science!" Neither a satisfying writing guide nor a satisfying look at the human brain....more
2023 reads, #33. Digested as a synopsis through the summarizing service Blinkist. This is one of the books at Blinkist that makes me really curious to2023 reads, #33. Digested as a synopsis through the summarizing service Blinkist. This is one of the books at Blinkist that makes me really curious to see what the full 300-page version of it is like; because I gotta say, the 15-minute spoken summary I listened to made it sound like one of the most freaking pointless books that's ever existed, and I'm now really curious to read other Goodreads reviews and see if those who tackled the full book came away with this impression too. Turns out co-authors (and conveniently now co-hosts of a podcast about the subject of this book, alluded to endlessly in this book) Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey used to be two unknown young actresses forever auditioning for sitcoms! Until one day they both book one! And then they meet and become friends! And then the show's a huge success! So now they're famous! FAMOUS FRIENDS! Who do things for each other and hang out with each other, oh, and they're just such good friends with each other, and did you know by the way that the entire cast of The Office was like this, no fights or drama on set, just nine straight years of a big giant GROUP OF SUCH GOOD FRIENDS OF ALL OF ONE ANOTHER!!!!
Sheesh, really? It's specifically books like these that make me feel not even the tiniest fucking goddamned bit guilty about belonging to a summary service like Blinkist (which, after all, is nothing more than the 21st-century smartphone version of Cliff Notes), because there is just so little intriguing unique content here that I would feel actively ripped off if I had spent $30 and three days of my life getting through it. Blinkist wouldn't exist if there weren't so many writers and publishers willing to put out books that can be so easily summarized in 15 minutes in the first place, so that's a snake-eating-its-own-tail dilemma for a traditional publishing industry currently going through its last spasming throes before death, when it finally gets suffocated for good under the weight of 400 million new novels coming out on Amazon next year that were all written by AI chat programs. I mean, maybe I'm wrong, and I'll see in other people's reviews that there was actually a whole bunch of fascinating content in the full book version that got unfairly cut out during the Blinkist synopsis, but I'm willing to bet right now that I'll actually find quite a bit of reviews that agree with my own look at the summary, that this is essentially a cotton-candy-weighing piece of supplemental fluff to support what's an equally cotton-candy-weighing supplemental fluff podcast, one that has the audacity to cash in on retro love for The Office not even ten years since it went off the air, both these projects threatening to fly off into the obscure horizon just the moment a big enough cultural wind comes through and knocks them on their way. In this case, I'm glad to have gotten through it all as quickly as I did....more
2023 reads, #32. Digested as a synopsis through the summarizing service Blinkist. In fact, this is my first week on Blinkist, and one of the things I 2023 reads, #32. Digested as a synopsis through the summarizing service Blinkist. In fact, this is my first week on Blinkist, and one of the things I only realized today is that sometimes your automated playlist in the app can suddenly switch over to "recommended listens," where suddenly it's Blinkist's algorithms that are picking new 15-minute book summaries then automatically starting to play them on your phone while you're out on a walk. That's how I ended up accidentally listening to a Seth Godin title today, a marketing pioneer who I have this very complicated relationship with. Initially one of the early intellectual gurus (i.e. "thought leaders") of the Startup Age, along with, oh, let's see, productivity obsessives like Merlin Mann and cultural publications like Boing Boing, I really dug his first several books when they originally began appearing in the early '00s, giving a kind of blueprint as to how to promote and sell the bizarrely science-fictiony products and services that were starting to emerge out of the first big wave of online innovators of the '90s "Dot Com era," as they transitioned into the "Web 2.0" of Google, Facebook, Twitter and the like.
But as the years have continued and that entire community then became an industry, then a juggernaut, then eventually a sour toxin slowly poisoning our entire society, Godin and his "you can sell anything with enough clever bullshit" antics has started leaving more and more of a bad taste in my mouth, and I'm starting to look back at his in-hindsight sometimes very morally sketchy advice as maybe one of the things that was actually making America start to come apart at the seams in these years, along with an increasingly draconian tech industry that used Godin's smart-alecky thoughts about how you can sell anything with a good enough yarn to start forcing more and more evil things onto their customers, and along the way financing a series of extreme right-wing politicians vowing to make it easier and easier for these draconian companies to operate in such a manner. Is it fair to lump Godin in with all of this? Maybe or maybe not, as is the following, that I seemingly can't hear Godin's name anymore without conjuring up the putrid little pig-face of Nazi higher-up and propaganda master Heinrich Himmler, whose audacious acts like the deliberately terrifying design of Gestapo uniforms and strategically far-away locations of concentration camps is nothing but a highly effective early form of modern 21st-century marketing. If you read one of Godin's early-'00s books now with the specific mindset that you want to do something evil with what you're learning, they're actually kind of terrifying reads, which is why I would not have deliberately picked this 2004 book's inclusion in my Blinklist booklist if their algorithms hadn't thrown it in without me noticing. There's a bunch of these kinds of books at Blinkist, to be honest, from these always-be-grinding "side hustle/startup years" of the '00s and '10s, and they're starting to make me see these years now here in the '20s in a whole new light....more
2023 reads, #31. Digested as a synopsis through the summarizing service Blinkist. This was of standard quality for the kind of short business book tha2023 reads, #31. Digested as a synopsis through the summarizing service Blinkist. This was of standard quality for the kind of short business book that gets summarized regularly at these synopsis services like Blinkist (aka the same kind of short business books that do well at Kindle Unlimited), a solid and fundamentals-filled guide to how to get a paid job the way that entrepreneurs do it, which was basically the way we were taught to do it during the career week of the computer coding bootcamp I attended in 2015, then finally was able to put into successful practice when becoming a freelance book editor starting in 2020. Basically, that starts with throwing away everything you've known up to now about "applying" for jobs, because competing against thousands of others while bumping heads with HR filtering software is a sucker's game from the start. Instead you start by figuring out what you really want to do, and what you're really good at, then going out and convincing someone to make that specific job for you exist, whether that's a traditional company creating a new role for you or becoming a freelancer and soliciting your salary directly from your end customers. There's a fine art to that, and a lot of specific steps, so this book is as good a basic guide as any to them, which I can attest work when put into practice exactly as recommended. It comes recommended in that "self-taught textbook" spirit....more
2023 reads, #30. Digested as a synopsis through the summarizing service Blinkist. This is one of those unfortunate relics from the so-called "side hus2023 reads, #30. Digested as a synopsis through the summarizing service Blinkist. This is one of those unfortunate relics from the so-called "side hustle era" of the 2010s, in which an endless amount of well-intentioned people started convincing millions that they too could start doing a "second job" that would involve almost no time (in this case, for example, Guillebeau declares right at the beginning that you shouldn't have to do a minute over 5 hours of work a week for his plan to be a success), but somehow provide the supplemental income that would usually only come with 20 to 25 hours a week at a traditional job (here, for example, Guillebeau immediately follows up this 5 hours per week declaration with some examples of side hustles that went on to make their creators thousands of dollars every month, not disclosing that they didn't ramp up to those revenue levels until after they'd already become enough of a success as a side hustle to decide to start putting in full-time hours on it), this sort of magic Hogwarts land where tech innovations and a global economy was going to let all of us have this superhuman ability to make endless money while putting in almost no work at all, with buzzterms always being thrown around by these well-meaning "thought leaders" about "passive income" and "the long tail" and "virtual assistants" and "remote working" and "the gig economy" and "algorithm-derived search engine optimization," as they closed their Moleskine and packed up their electric scooter so to make it on time to the latest TED Talk about how they should always be grinding.
Of course, here in the 2020s, we now know that this mostly amounted to just a bunch of hot air, and got millions of desperate Americans nothing for their trouble but even further into debt than they were before. And even when it theoretically worked, like was the case with me in the 2010s with a series of side hustles (making handmade notebooks at Etsy, selling rare books at eBay, being a personal chef for dinner parties, and more), at the "5 hours a week" level I was lucky to make even 50 bucks a month from any of these activities, and had to ramp up into 20-hour part-time-job territory before any of them broke a thousand dollars in profit for an entire year. In fact, it looks like the only people who actually made out like bandits in the side hustle era were the people like Guillebeau selling people on the side hustle idea itself, a grandly traditional pyramid scheme in which the only way to make real money is from convincing other people that there's a way for them to make real money. That makes this particular book not worth your time anymore, since all the smoke and mirrors of the side hustle era have been nakedly revealed by now, in our current sour world of evil social networks run by right-wing sociopath supervillains and a resulting bankrupt nation (financially and spiritually) on the brink of collapse (both metaphorically and literally); although for sure I still recommend other Guillebeau titles from this period I've also digested through Blinkist, such as The $100 Startup and the job-search guide Born for This, which provide much more traditional advice and therefore are a lot more evergreen than titles like today's, which might as well be subtitled Move Fast and Break Things...Oops, We Accidentally Destroyed Society, Our Bad, I Guess Hindsight Is 20/20....more
2023 reads, #28. Digested as a synopsis through the summarizing service Blinkist. I was worried at first with Blinkist that I wouldn't be able to tell2023 reads, #28. Digested as a synopsis through the summarizing service Blinkist. I was worried at first with Blinkist that I wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a good book and a bad book, but thankfully it's actually much easier than I anticipated; for even in synopsis form, a bad book makes you think throughout the 15 minutes of bullet points, "Yeah, this still sounds like a bunch of bullshit even as a synopsis," while a good book makes you think, "Hmm, that bullet point was intriguing; I'd like to read the full book now and see more about what exactly they're talking about." That's the case here, for example, with this book from 2012 (aka "the side hustle era"), which argues that simply trying out an idea for a small business can actually take a lot less money and work than you might think at first, especially when you take advantage of all the "new" tech the startup world is introducing on a yearly basis.
That's of course the big drawback of books like these too, that barely a decade after its original publication, its breathless recommendations of then cutting-edge technology is laughably outdated by now. For example, did you know that if a bank won't give you a traditional loan to try out your micro-business, you can go to this amazing new website called "Kickstarter" and ask for the money directly from your future customers? Holy crap, what a brave new world we live in! That said, I'm giving the book 5 stars anyway, because most of the book is actually based on much more fundamental advice not tied to techie gimmicks, and says refreshing things like that a one-person business doesn't need any more than a one-page business plan, a one-page marketing plan, and a mission statement absolutely no longer than a tweet (and an old-school tweet at that, literally just 140 characters).
Things like that are inspiring and energizing to read, and this book still works as a great motivator even a decade later for someone who's unhappy at their office job and dreams about one day being their own boss. That of course isn't quite true -- every human being who wants money from another human being has a "boss," that boss being the person who has the money you want -- but certainly this book makes the case that it's at least easy to try working directly for your customers instead of spending your life pleasing some Dilbert piece-of-shit brain-dead middle-manager supervisor (what most people actually mean when they say they "want to be their own boss"), and that if the idea fails, at least you haven't wasted anything more than a hundred bucks and a hundred hours of your time. It comes recommended in this practical, motivational spirit. ...more
2023 reads, #27. Digested as a synopsis through the summarizing service Blinkist. This is a pretty interesting if not insanely basic guide to how to g2023 reads, #27. Digested as a synopsis through the summarizing service Blinkist. This is a pretty interesting if not insanely basic guide to how to go from having an idea in your head to actually being a money-making entrepreneur, and why this is actually the best moment in history to do so. Full of useful tips, with the caveat that your definition of "useful" needs to be things like, "The best way to be an entrepreneur is to do something you're passionate about, but also realize that you can't actually follow your passion for money if no one is willing to pay you to do it," meaning that your "passion for international travel" might likely end up with you sitting behind a desk every day, booking international trips for your clients, and that this is essentially what the reality of entrepreneurialism is. The book is full of such clear-headed yet often simplistic advice, so decide whether or not to approach it yourself with this in mind....more
2023 reads, #26. Digested as a synopsis through the summarizing service Blinkist. This is going to be kind of a worthless book for most people, which 2023 reads, #26. Digested as a synopsis through the summarizing service Blinkist. This is going to be kind of a worthless book for most people, which concentrates almost exclusively on how bad those poor little corporate CEOs have it, and all the terrible, terrible things you'll have to do to justify your hundreds of millions of dollars. Especially infuriating, the section where he goes on and on about how mass-firing a bunch of plebes is one thing, but being forced to fire a single fellow executive, now THAT's when a CEO truly makes their money! Fun if not eye-rolling to consume for exactly 15 minutes, this would've been intolerable to read in its full form, one of the big reasons I've ended up enjoying Blinkist so much here in my first week of using it....more
2023 reads, #25. Digested as a synopsis through the summarizing service Blinkist. This was more of a general-interest book than I would expect for one2023 reads, #25. Digested as a synopsis through the summarizing service Blinkist. This was more of a general-interest book than I would expect for one specifically mentioning that it's advice for entrepreneurs only, and most of the tips here seem to be ones more for running a business in general, not for dealing with the specific ups and downs of just entrepreneurship, like the title promises. ...more
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