Why, hello!
Just finished this book called Poke the box by Seth Godin and thought I’d share a short review here.
This was my first Seth Godin's book. Seth publishes very good short, articulate articles on his blog which I think you should definitely check out. His conversations with Tim Ferris are worth listening to. He is such an inspiring entrepreneur.
Poke the box_ the box as in the toy, the buzzer box children poke and hear different sounds depending on how they poke it_ is a manifesto cajoling people to be initiators.
Imagine that the world had no middlemen, no publishers, no bosses, no HR folks, no one telling you what you couldn’t do. If you lived in that world, what would you do? Go do that!
If money and access and organizational might aren’t the foundation of the connected economy, what is? Initiative.
The author thinks that people have been numbed into complacency and compliance that they forgot their duty to initiate and create things. We should always be initiating things and initiating on the way to initiating.
If there is no one starting stuff, then where does innovation come from? Not the ideas; no, there are plenty of those, but the starting.
Seth thinks that we should get into the habit of starting things and failing many times on the way to our eventual success. It is always better to start something and fail than to not do anything. We've been conditioned from back in the day to fit our preconceived roles in society and stay in a stasis for the rest of our life. Instead of waiting for a map to be handed to us, we should draw our own maps. Society reward individuals who draw their own maps. We see the creators, the innovators, and the change makers as a minority possessing super abilities not present in ordinary people. Seth argues that that notion is wrong; anybody can take the initiative and start things from as simple a thing as fixing a bulb in need of repair to starting a business.
The factory has programmed that adventurous impulse out of us. The economic imperative of the last century has been to avoid risk, avoid change, and most of all, avoid exploration of the new.
We need to ship things as fast as possible. In a fast paced environment, everybody should be starting things and failing and then starting again, ad infintium. The stakes are high and the costs of not starting are devastating.
If you start, you’ve got a shot at evolving and adjusting to turn your wrong into a right. But, if you don’t start, you never get a chance. 10,000 hours, hard work, and an overnight success.
We should always question the status quo, figure out what we can fix, start small, and then let the fruits of our labor speak for itself. Also, we should never settle for less or accept working at a place that doesn't give us the freedom to tinker, fail, and innovate on our own.
Okay, that was a short review, but like, would it be enough to read a book that tells you that you should start things to go and actually start things. I mean, I always wonder why I keep reading these kind of books that are trying to convince me that I can do it too. I can start new things. Maybe, it is to etch the idea of not settling for less into my subconscious so that every time I give up and surrender to the status quo, a voice from deep down whispers into my ear and tell me that no, you can do better than that. I don’t understand how one can be satisfied with doing less than they’re capable of. It is probably that things go south in one’s life and the spark inside increasingly dims. That sucks. I commiserate with these people. There should be a time in the future where opportunity is equal all over the world. I hope that time is soon.
On the other hand, I always struggle with finding better ways to allocate my resources; what is the best use of time for someone? I mean, there has to be a way to spend time in a way that yield the highest impact in the world. Can’t just be all accidents. There are obviously very low ROI ways of spending time that the majority of people are following. I guess I will have to keep experimenting and see the results. There is definitely not a single answer.