To make an important ethical disclosure right away, let me mention that I actually got paid to be one of this book's editors, so it would be impossiblTo make an important ethical disclosure right away, let me mention that I actually got paid to be one of this book's editors, so it would be impossible for me to write anything resembling an "objective review" like is typically shared at this website. So instead, let me point you to an interview I recently did with Steve for my newsletter, in which we got to talk in depth about how this book came about and what it was like to publish it. I strongly encourage you to check that out, and then pick up a copy of the book yourself! ...more
2023 reads, #99. I'm getting geared up to finally write out the post-apocalyptic Proud Boys BDSM "dubious consent" erotic romance novel I've had outli2023 reads, #99. I'm getting geared up to finally write out the post-apocalyptic Proud Boys BDSM "dubious consent" erotic romance novel I've had outlined for the last six months (the project being an attempt to advertise my skills as a freelance romance editor); and to get myself more into the mindset of the alt-right guys who run the "New Sparta" post-apocalyptic settlement where my story takes place, I've started tearing through a bunch of books I once found grouped together on the Pirate Bay under the title "The Red Pill Collection." This particular title is not that political per se, but instead is a more general book on personal finance; for those who don't know, the collective reading habits of red-pillers don't just consist of "Dark Enlightenment" philosophers like Jordan Peterson, but are supplemented with books about how to become financially independent, how to bodybuild and rapidly add muscle, how to trick women into having sex with you, and other kinds of highly specific how-to guides for achieving all the tertiary traits of the so-called "Perfect Man" such Red Pillers picture in their heads (and that you've seen yourself) when thinking about the end goal of this entire process.
And indeed, this isn't actually a bad book on the subject at all, although author MJ DeMarco's plan for becoming a millionaire in five to ten years is a highly, highly specific one: in a nutshell, it starts with opening your own C-corporation focused on one of five specific types of passive income detailed in the book (such as real estate, publishing or software, to name three examples); considering that your main asset in life to which you devote 100% of any extra time or money you might find yourself with, constantly increasing its value as much and as often as you possibly can; considering all the personal revenue the business generates as your "wealth" that you should never spend under any circumstances; then investing that wealth into things that pay dividends and interest, and using that money for your actual day-to-day living expenses. The goal here is a smart one that actually works, which is to convert your hard labor into products that continue generating revenue even after the labor is done, increasing your hourly pay rate as quickly as possible; then investing 100% of that revenue into things that pay compound interest, since as he rightly points out, compound interest is almost like magic once you have millions to invest, so the goal is to get to that million in investment money as quickly as humanly possible, instead of the conventional wisdom of putting aside just a little money each year over the course of your entire career, thus ensuring that you won't have your million to start doing actual magic with until an entire three decades or more of working your slave-wage salaried job at an office you can't stand, dutifully putting aside your $5,000 a year in 401(k) money like your masters told you to.
As you're starting to see, this is the main thing that separates just a personal finance book from a Red Pill finance book, that it's not enough just to come up with a plan that works, but that you must devote a large amount of the page count (like DeMarco does here) to berating all the stupids of the world who don't know this secret to fast wealth (or even worse, can see it but are too much of pussies to go for it), and ensure your readers that they're smarter, better, and more deserving of this money than all those cucks, snowflakes and other undesirables out there, blindly believing in their 5% Roth IRAs as they toil for decades in service of the GigaChad who actually runs the company. So although DeMarco's advice here is very smart and realistic, wisely devoting the majority of the page count to all the things Red Pillers see in the popular culture that they should instead absolutely not do (waste money on bling-bling, invest in penny stocks, listen to cable-TV pundits, buy what everyone else is buying, etc.), and reminding readers that "getting rich fast" is not the same thing as "getting rich easy," which is what most "get rich quick" scams are actually promising (under his plan, you will easily be working 80-hour weeks for those five to ten years you're building wealth as rapidly as humanly possible), he shares this advice in a purposely more opinionated and obnoxious way than he needs to, setting up his arguments in a way that's often seen in Red Pill books across the rainbow of genres and subjects, that there are objective "winners" and "losers" in this world, and that those who follow his advice will be one of these winners, while ignoring his advice proves you to be one of life's losers.
This is a key element of Red Pill thought, I'm realizing as I make my way through more and more books in this collection, that the Red Piller is not just living the best life they can but rubbing it in the face of all the people who's told them over the years they can't, a Forever War mindset in which all of us humans are in a constant state of battle with all other humans from birth until death, and that for each battle won there must by definition be someone who lost that battle as well. So it's not enough to become rich; you must also be given the opportunity to gloat in the knowledge of all the IDIOTS who DIDN'T because they're not a DISCIPLINED GENIUS like you. It's not a coincidence, after all, that nearly every Red Pill-focused personal finance book I've now read (including this one) eventually has a section that reads, "Now, I'm not a believer in big flashy expensive empty symbols as proof to all the betas that you're one of the alphas of the world; but that said, let me tell you the story of the Lamborghini I bought at the age of 26, not because I really wanted it but just to rub it in all the fucking faces of everyone in college who told me I'd never be able to own a Lamborghini by 26."
It's this open hypocrisy and desperate passive-aggressive chasing of status that largely defines the Red Pill community (and really the far right altogether, no matter what the age or lifestyle); so no matter what the subject, you must expect some of this behavior in any book that's been included by Red Pill enthusiasts in a Red Pill collection. That's the case here as well; so although the advice itself is very practical, smart and realistic, you might want to take a pass on it anyway, depending on who you are. That would normally get the book three and a half stars, which I'm rounding down to three here at the no-half-star Goodreads....more
2023 reads, #81. For the sake of ethical disclosure, let me mention upfront that I was the editor of this book, and was paid to make it read the way i2023 reads, #81. For the sake of ethical disclosure, let me mention upfront that I was the editor of this book, and was paid to make it read the way it now does, so my thoughts of course will be biased because of this, which you should keep in mind when reading my review. That said, I rather enjoyed this small children's book that covers the basic issues of personal finance (how to save money, how to budget, how to invest, how loans work, etc.), told through the filter of two preteen kids who one day discover a time machine in the back woods behind their house, and end up visiting Founding Father Benjamin Franklin right on the eve of him publishing his 1758 The Way to Wealth.
We were careful to keep the language in a style that will be understandable and enjoyable for fellow preteens from 8 to 12, so it's a testament to Simbert's financial skills that he was able to take sometimes complicated subjects (such as the concept of interest rates and why they change from one loan to another) and make them understandable for even most third-graders and then going up from there. It's written in what will perhaps be perceived as an old-fashioned style, which is why it's getting 4 stars instead of 5 -- like all good Victorian children's books as well, the children on display here are always deferential to and obedient of all the adults in their lives, and display a "gee whiz!" attitude about virtually every subject they come across that is a little out of step with the contemporary mores of 21st-century children's literature. But as long as you have kids who don't mind that more formal style of characterization, there are a lot of good lessons to be learned here about financial prudence, gratification delay, how the early bird gets the worm, and all kinds of other practical wisdom still to be gleaned from the writings of this centuries-old inventor and statesman. It comes warmly recommended in this spirit. ...more
2023 reads, #71. I wish this book would've existed when I was 18 years old, and that some well-meaning relative had bought it for me as a high-school 2023 reads, #71. I wish this book would've existed when I was 18 years old, and that some well-meaning relative had bought it for me as a high-school graduation gift; for it's not only a very well-done Personal Finance 101 primer, full of practical advice you can start doing right this second even if you have almost no money and no income, but author Anna Jo Beck spends an equal amount of time explaining why you should care about personal finance, even if you're an 18-year-old art major and anti-consumerist social activist, which was exactly what I could've used back in my young "my credit score doesn't matter because I'm never going to buy one of your bougeoise fucking McMansions in the first place" phase. It's best to think of this short, well-written guide in this way, as a gift to the young antifa in your own life, to help explain to them why they should be starting a Roth IRA as soon as possible anyway. ...more
2023 reads, #69. I've had several of my nonfiction freelance clients rave about this 2017 book by hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio, so I thought it'd 2023 reads, #69. I've had several of my nonfiction freelance clients rave about this 2017 book by hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio, so I thought it'd be worth reading just so I'd have a better understanding of where they're coming from when they mention a title like this. I had expected it to be like those other "guiding principles" books by rich and famous C-level executives -- that is, just a bunch of sloppily written nonsense, one-paragraph Instagrammy platitudes dashed off in their phone's Notes app during bathroom breaks -- so I was surprised and pleased to learn that it's an actual real book of philosophy, always logical and always smart, that made even me look at the struggle to achieve personal success in a new way I hadn't thought of before. (Perhaps his greatest insight here is simply that the fundamental difference between people who succeed at their goals and those who don't is whether you're able to overcome your fears -- about failing, about being publicly humiliated, about losing things in your life because of this failure -- which he essentially defines as "moral courage" and states is the ground-floor hurdle you must get past before you deal with anything else, when it comes to any success you might want to have in life.)
That said, he's also an unapologetic believer in that list of things I call "Stuff That Logically Everyone Should Be Into But For Some Reason Only Creepy Straight White Males Are Into" -- such as the importance of personal accountability, the benefits of meritocracy, and the wisdom of the philosophy known as Stoicism -- so this book is bound to rub many people the wrong way, no matter how smart and practical his actual advice is here. (For one glaring example, he states that at his hedge fund brokerage, anytime a mistake is made, it's determined who specifically made that mistake, and then the person is specifically called out for making the mistake, with Dalio claiming that the person doesn't actually get in trouble as long as they demonstrate that they learned a lesson from the mistake, but with all of us out here in the real world knowing exactly how such "promises" usually play out in a corporate atmosphere.) So while I found this book informative and interesting, I can't in good conscience give it 5 stars, because I know that there's going to be a huge amount of people who will read a book like this and have only the reaction, "What an entitled piece of shit THAT guy is." You probably know in advance whether you're this type of person or not, so let your own intuition guide you when it comes to whether or not to read this book yourself. ...more
2023 reads, #64. Many men get to their late-middle-aged years like I currently am (I'm 54 this year) and still obsessively think about the natural int2023 reads, #64. Many men get to their late-middle-aged years like I currently am (I'm 54 this year) and still obsessively think about the natural interest and curiosity they had when younger regarding kinky sex, which has still stayed with them all this time because they had actually been quiet suburban husbands in those years and never actually had a chance to have kinky sex. Would they have enjoyed it? Would they have been any good at it? Would it have changed their entire life trajectory? And thus does this lead many middle-aged men to actually try it in their forties and older, for better or for worse. I, on the other hand, as a professional artist for most of my youth (and a paid sex columnist for a few years of that), got to sow all my wild oats back in those salad days, and thus no longer have a curiosity for it; so I instead have an obsessive fascination with the stock market, and ask myself all the same "what if" questions about it that most fiftysomething men ask about the idea of being in an orgy.
I just thought about it again this week, in fact, when a character in a novel I'm editing right now turned out to be a day trader himself; so on impulse, I jumped over to Amazon right that moment and bought the Kindle version of the number-one absolutely highest rated book out of their entire system on the subject of day trading. That turned out to be the unwieldy titled Trading Experts Presents Getting Started: A Beginner's Guide to the Stock Market, Step 1, by Bennett Robert Zamani and Matthew Pryzby (although to be clear, it's Zamani who actually wrote this, which you can tell because he wrote it in first person; his co-founder of the educational group "Trading Experts" I think is just included because both of them likely came up with the lessons). And folks, let me tell you, it was one of the more fascinating books I've read in some time, although in many cases not for the reasons Zamani and Pryzby want it to be.
Just to be clear about the logistics, it's actually one massive book they're offering here, for a total price of $36; but they've split it up into 12 small books that are $3 apiece, I think because their main purpose is as giveaways at the educational program they run through their website, and I imagine are also used as a "lead magnet" for their popular newsletter. This first one doesn't actually go that much into the nuts and bolts of trading itself, but instead talks a lot about the fundamentals of being a trader when it comes to personality, focus, the habits you need to develop, the things you need to unlearn from watching stock market shows on cable television, etc. For example, an early basic thing I learned is that "day trading" is not actually a general term for anyone who trades stocks from home during the day, like I thought it was; it actually means specifically a trader who will buy a stock in the morning and then sell it that same day before the markets close. Trading Experts, on the other hand, teaches "swing trading," which is where you learn through math and statistics when to determine that a stock's value is about to "swing up" to a new level (at which point you buy it), and when it's about to "swing down" back to a low level (at which point you sell it), a process that can sometimes take weeks or even months.
It's full of very useful, very practical advice, and it's easy to see why it still has the astonishing average score of 5 out of 5 at Amazon, despite there now being thousands of reviews posted. But what's funny and fascinating is that it still can't help but be such a naked glimpse of the "Finance Bro" world that constitutes Trading Experts' core customer base, all those incels and meninists and Boiler Room dudes who gather at places like r/WallStreetBets and follow Jim "Mad Money" Cramer like a god, guys who use the word "beast" as a verb, who always refer to stocks as women and then always say things about those women that are borderline criminal ("I fucked AMZN in the ass like the bitch she is!!!!"), who do shit like buy million-dollar sports cars and then get the interior all gunked up with Cheetos dust from their pudgy little no-class fingers. Zamani very admirably trashes Finance Bro culture himself in his book, saying among other things that you will never be a success if you're buying what everyone else is buying, that arrogance about being "the smartest one in the room" pretty much 100% guarantees a giant loss, and that there's no way you can compound your profits if you keep pulling out cash to bling-bling up your life; yet he also tells us with pride about the Aston-Martin he bought at 22 as a college graduation present just because he felt like it, and makes it clear that he primarily sees the world in terms of "winners" (people like him and his friends) and "losers" (anyone who doesn't follow his advice).
It's such this riveting glimpse into Finance Bro culture, one Zamani I think doesn't realize he's giving us, where like the poker world pretty much every term for every single thing you can do has a slang term that has nothing to do with the actual activity, so that people like Zamani and his friends can rattle off these monologues that sound like gobbletygook to everyone else and thus exclude all of us from their little elite circle (and I mean a literal elite circle, one they run through their website and that costs people hundreds of dollars a month to join, and that they literally named "The Alpha Chat," sheeeeeeeesssshhhh, bro, c'mon). It's also telling that the book has so many grammatical errors that it feels like a ten-year-old wrote it, because that's part of the Finance Bro mystique too; because this bro is making too much money to worry about fucking commas, bro, which is why you should trust all the advice this particular bro is giving you. That's brilliant and evil in equal measures simultaneously, and a better historical record of our times than a thousand Trump indictment documents added together.
I want to be very clear about this, that the book itself actually has incredibly smart and insightful things to say about the subject of unlicensed home stock trading (which turns out is the general term for it, "unlicensed trading," because if you want to trade stocks on behalf of someone else for a fee, you have to get a literal license from the SEC to do so, a rule not coincidentally invented three years into the Great Depression), and I absolutely plan on using this 12-book series as my initial rabbit hole into actually trying out stock trading for the first time later this winter. (Currently I'm busy training to get a formal certification in traditional academic editing, so that I can start taking on things like doctoral dissertations and medical books that pay five times as much as what I'm currently making as a freelancer, but one infuriatingly tedious thing at a time, I suppose.) But even if you have no interest in stock trading at all, this first book that only touches on the technical topics of trading is such an amazing read anyway, a chance to crawl up inside the head of one of these Jordan Peterson-loving, Stoicism-reading, Joe Rogan-listening, Tim Ferriss-quoting BROOOOS and see all the fucked-up shit going on up there. It comes recommended in that spirit if nothing else, and as an added bonus will actually teach you how to become quite a successful swing trader too. AND THEN YOU CAN MAKE AAPL YOUR BITCH, BRO!!!!!!!1!! ...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, #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
2023 reads, #19. I had been all gearing up today to write a devastatingly insulting review of this utterly worthless book, one of those quickie Kindle2023 reads, #19. I had been all gearing up today to write a devastatingly insulting review of this utterly worthless book, one of those quickie Kindle Unlimited wastes of time that takes exactly one blog article worth of useful information and then pads it and pads and pads it some more until it finally reaches 30,000 words and is just exactly long enough that it can be justifiably called a "book;" but then I realized I didn't have the energy or heart for it today, so let me just warn you that this is pointless trash and let's just leave it at that. Onward next to something actually worth my time, thank God. ...more
2022 reads, #56. Let me confess right off the bat that my score here for today's book is somewhat of a misnomer, in that I only ended up reading one c2022 reads, #56. Let me confess right off the bat that my score here for today's book is somewhat of a misnomer, in that I only ended up reading one chapter from this collection of long-form journalism pieces by famed New Yorker financial reporter John Brooks; in fact, that's the entire reason I picked it up in the first place, because I recently read in someone else's book that Brooks in this book does one of the best jobs ever at explaining what exactly happened behind one of the most notorious failures in American business history, the release and subsequent tanking of the Ford Edsel in the late 1950s, a story I've always been curious to know more about. And indeed, it turned out to be as fascinating as you would expect, especially now when we've long forgotten what the state of the automobile industry was in the '50s when these events occurred, or for that matter what the state of the modern marketing and advertising industry was in these years as well.
Basically, in the '50s there were only three types of cars on the market, known as the "cheap" one, the "middle" one, and the "expensive" one, with the rapidly expanding American middle-class expressing their newfound wealth by officially "trading up" as soon as they could afford it; but while Ford had a good-selling cheap car and expensive car at the beginning of the '50s, they lacked a middle-priced car, which is how the idea for the Edsel first came about. Unfortunately for them, a sort of perfect storm of problems happened on the way to the car's release half a decade later, including a too-long development period that misjudged what the future of cars would be (the Edsel finally got released in 1957, just in time for the big new trend in "compact" cars, including Ford's own Falcon in 1960 which quickly eclipsed the Edsel in sales); a wasteful developmental period as well, which spent way too much money on frivolous details (including having armed guards manning the doors of Ford's drawing rooms as a form of publicity stunt, and hiring famed poet Marianne Moore to suggest names for the car [including such hilarious options as the Utopian Turtletop and the Pastelogram]); what at the time was a brand-new obsessive reliance on public opinion polls and customer psychological profiles (one of the very first examples of a type of marketing that was to eventually become the national norm); too much of an attempt to make the Edsel the everything car for everybody (after discovering that most Americans assigned their own mental beliefs to a car make no matter if the car company wanted them to or not, the Ford marketers decided to get ahead of the game and start aggressively promoting the Edsel as the car for young people and old people and men and women and rich and poor and everyone else, leading to four main lines of the car with 18 varieties apiece, or 72 different kinds of Edsels one could ultimately choose from); heavily overinflated expectations the car itself could never live up to (among other terrible decisions that sounded wise at the time, the company made a national public spectacle out of recruiting 12,000 new Edsel dealerships across the country, keeping the dealers' sneak preview of the car under lock and key, leading a frenzied public to believe that the new vehicle was essentially going to be a futuristic rocket car in the style of The Jetsons); massive overspending in advance of the car's release (today's equivalent of over three billion dollars before a single car had been sold, including an entire million dollars on one single press conference on release day); and simply too much overconfidence on the part of Ford's employees, who in a glorious postwar environment thought they were the business that could do no wrong, assuming as the saying goes that if they simply built it, "they would come."
As promised, Brooks does a thorough, plain-spoken, and highly entertaining job covering the entire thing, including such delightfully snotty lines as, "Three days after release, an Edsel was stolen from a north Philadelphia dealership; it can reasonably be argued that the crime marked the high-water mark of public acceptance of the car." I imagine he does this in all the other chapters of this book as well, including stories about the meteoric rise of the Xerox Corporation, the Wall Street "mini-crash" of 1962, the history of the federal income tax, GE's Congressional antitrust hearings during the Kennedy years, and other such issues; but I'm so ridiculously behind on my reading at this point that I simply can't justify spending time on these subjects I just barely care about, so I simply finished up this Edsel piece and declared myself done with the book. It therefore comes strongly recommended, but with the understanding that this is based on only reading a small bit of it, with the suspicion but not the confirmed knowledge that the rest of it is as good as well. ...more
2022 reads, #51. At first I was going to give a low score to Angela Duckworth's 2016 self-help book Grit: The Power of Perseverance, because the first2022 reads, #51. At first I was going to give a low score to Angela Duckworth's 2016 self-help book Grit: The Power of Perseverance, because the first couple of chapters make it look like it's going to be yet another one of those recent spate of books by a child of Chinese immigrants, whose entire point is that virtually all successes we have in life are a direct result of how willing you are to work yourself relentlessly to the point of complete and total physical, mental, emotional and spiritual collapse. (I mean, look no farther than even the introduction for ample proof of what I'm talking about, in which Duckworth details how her own Chinese immigrant father berated her her entire childhood for "not being a genius;" then when she finally wins a MacArthur "genius grant" and can make him proud, he's so far gone into his Parkinson's dementia that he barely even knows who she is. That's not an inspirational story; that's a fucking tragedy.) Far from simply disliking such books, I think these kinds of books are actively dangerous to society, because their goal always seems to be to try to turn an entire generation into slavish, unthinking automatons, where happiness and personal fulfillment are to take a far-away back seat to the main aim to PRODUCE and SUCCEED and EARN and NOT LET DOWN YOUR PARENTS, YOU DON'T WANT TO LET DOWN YOUR PARENTS, DO YOU, YOU UNGRATEFUL LAZY PIECE OF SHIT??!!
Thankfully, though, I was on a long train ride while reading this book, so I didn't have too many other options but to either stick it out or just stare out the window for several hours; and it was when I got further in that I discovered that Duckworth's advice here is actually more complex and nuanced than simply, "Work yourself to the bone and maybe you too will finally achieve what your domineering parents told you you should achieve" (although, let's make no mistake, that's still the main message here). Instead, she argues that this sweat and effort should not just be put towards any ol' random subject, but one you find inherently fascinating and for which your interest is unlimited, something you could see yourself sticking with for 30, 40, 50 years or more, using all this hard work to slowly build up within this chosen profession you can't get enough of. And not only that, but this work should be applied systematically, in much the same way David Allen's "Getting Things Done" time-management system works, where first you envision what your ultimate goal is, then figure out all the small and medium goals you'll have to achieve first before you can ever get there. (This in fact is one of the seemingly obvious but deceptively insightful conclusions she makes in the book, that all the hard work in the world still amounts to nothing if it's being applied to a different, unrelated random subject every five or ten years of your life.) And not only that, but unlike natural talent, the criterion humanity has inaccurately used for centuries to try to predict who will and will not be successes in any given field, "grit" (which she defines as the two-step process of combining talent and hard work to develop skills, then combining those skills with more hard work to achieve your successes) is something that can be deliberately learned and cultivated, and that a large part of it simply boils down to such simple steps as not giving up when faced with obstacles and challenges, and making time for lifelong continual practice and study within whatever subject it is that you find obsessively fascinating.
Unfortunately, though, as you can see, I ended up giving the book a low score anyway, because it sadly suffers from one of the most common problems seen in this entire genre: namely, Duckworth only has about 30 pages of actual information to convey (or, you know, about a TED Talk's worth, making it no surprise that Duckworth's own TED Talk has been viewed over 28 million times at this point), but it's couched within a 300-page book, which means that the entire manuscript reads as, "And now here's my next point, which I can entirely make in 2 pages, and now here's 20 more pages of examples to back up that point; and now here's my next point..." That's always a bummer to come across, but I have to admit that it doesn't surprise me in the least anymore, because there are so many books in the self-help genre that are written exactly in this way, even the ones people hail as "brilliant" and drive to the top of the bestseller lists. (And on a related digression, when are we ever finally going to see a self-help guru's bio that reads, "His TED Talk was hailed by the New York Times as 'mediocre,' and it was watched by a couple hundred people"?) I mean, that's why we've seen the rise in recent years of a similar genre that's grown even bigger than the self-help one, which is "self-help summaries" genre, not just as endless standalone 99-cent ebooks at Amazon but now with entire apps that are devoted to the subject. I have to say with not a small amount of cynicism that I see a very valid reason for this "self-help summary" genre to exist, because it's a waste of my time to have to wade through 300 pages of prose just to find the 30 pages of actual information buried within it, just because some jerkoff at Scribner decided that no, I must pay $29.95 to learn these precious 30 pages of information, and how else could they get away with charging me $29.95 except to deliver a 300-page book that justifies the price? I can't stop the Scribner jerkoffs of the world from doing this, but I can certainly give their books a low score at Goodreads as punishment for taking me, the reader, so much for granted like this. Although there are some interesting things to learn here, do yourself a favor and just buy the 99-cent ebook summary instead. ...more
2022 reads, #14. There's a longer story here, but basically a recent freelance assignment from a sales training professional got me thinking about my 2022 reads, #14. There's a longer story here, but basically a recent freelance assignment from a sales training professional got me thinking about my own sales techniques as a freelance book editor, and how a more deliberate sales system might be put into place for increasing both clients and rates but without ever feeling cheesily salesman-like, the threat of which has so far totally put me off the subject in my life. This has me reading several foundational texts in this topic for the very first time, including Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People (my review), which turned out to be a lot more helpful and relevant than I would've ever initially given it credit; but then there was also today's book, which unfortunately was exactly as helpful and relevant as I initially gave it credit, that amount being "not a whole lot." Written in 1937 by a forerunner of the Tony Robbins school of personal guruing (that is, if you can't do something impressive yourself, at least get yourself seen in the company of a lot of impressive people, so to become "impressive by association"), a slim volume that promised how you -- yes, YOU! -- can achieve the heights and fortunes of such close personal friends as Franklin Roosevelt, Andrew Carnegie and Woodrow Wilson. (Like many of the other pioneers of the "self-help" movement -- and hell, I guess even to this day -- Napoleon Hill actually started as the dirt-poor child of some dirt-poor farmers in backwoods Appalachia, eventually becoming an unusually good salesman in Chicago and parlaying that plus personality into all the successes he had afterwards, who may or may not have actually known any of the people he claimed to be friends with. It's exactly these kinds of guys, the ones who first built the self-help industry, that people like Sinclair Lewis was parodying in his 1920s "Zenith" novels, and that Andy Griffith was portraying in Elia Kazan's 1951 black comedy A Face in the Crowd.)
Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, and I acknowledged in my review of How to Win Friends that this can still contain very interesting and useful information, like how Carnegie surprisingly turned out to be a forerunner in empathy, self-compassion, and other elements of the ultra-contemporary "wellness" movement. But while Hill's book shares Carnegie's habit of sounding like a sing-songy old-timey radio announcer ("Have you, friend, ever suffered from the monstrosity known as LONELINESS?"), Hill doesn't have nearly as interesting or penetrative of insights to share, a 14-point program that starts with such utterly generic things like, "Step 1: You really gotta want it! No, I mean you really, really gotta want it! Step 2: Now tell yourself what you want! That's right, really tell it to yourself!" before I started rapidly losing interest and skimming through the chapter titles to learn all the rest. So as such, Hill's book is not like Carnegie's, which can be considered a foundational text that eventually leads to contemporary books like The Tipping Point and The Black Swan; Hill's foundational text instead eventually leads to dreck like The Secret, and all the other books over the years whose main argument has been, "If you just really, really, really want it bad enough, you'll eventually get it! ...And if you don't get it, you must've not wanted it bad enough, so screw you, your fault." The sheer energy that often goes into that effort alone is enough for many people to become a success, but it's not really that he's teaching you that much, more that he's delivering a literary equivalent of a two-by-four to the back of the head while screaming, "GET GOING! GET GOING! GET GOING!" That's fine if that's what you need, but you're not actually going to learn any interesting modern lessons about the world from this book, which is why Carnegie's keeps getting read by the millions here in the 2020s, but Hill's book has largely languished into obscurity. ...more
2021 reads, #42. I picked this book up in my ongoing attempts these days to finally come to a resolution regarding the small press I used to run back 2021 reads, #42. I picked this book up in my ongoing attempts these days to finally come to a resolution regarding the small press I used to run back in the day, and which failed in a spectacularly public way and ended up closing back in 2017. I've never really processed my emotions over it all in the four years since, and I've recently found myself starting to have the urge to start up yet another small press, under the belief that I "still have something to prove," although I can immediately recognize that this is about the worst possible thing I could do in my life right now, not only because I'm still paying off the thousands and thousands of dollars in debt I went into with the first one, but because ultimately one of the big reasons I failed in the first place (I came to learn after the fact) is that I neither particularly like running a business, nor is a small press something that can feasibly be done for a living anymore. (It's no coincidence, I think, that the small presses around me that seem to thrive the best are the ones being run as fun weekend hobbies, in the same way that a middle-ager might make beer in their garage on the weekends, with no other goal than to break even and have some fun along the way.)
I thought, then, that this would make John R. O'Neil's famous book on the subject a particularly insightful read; for the "paradox" of the book's title is that by the time so many people put in the grueling hours and endless ethical compromises to reach "success" in the first place, they've become a miserable, burned-out asshole who can't actually enjoy any of that success they worked so hard to achieve. So in this, then, O'Neil actually has some really astute and interesting things to say; although the main problem here is that he seems to be a victim of his own success, for the futuristic perfect society he's envisioning here in his 1993 book, in which everyone has finally found a great work/life balance for themselves, sounds essentially like the exact tenets of the now mainstream "wellness movement" of the 2020s, which has been embraced now by everyone from the President of the United States to every smartphone platform that exists.
That makes O'Neil impressively prophetic, and he should be applauded for that, which is why I'm giving the book such a high score; but unfortunately for us contemporary readers, his prophecies have largely come true by now, which makes his book not really worth reading anymore, which is why it's not getting a fifth star from me despite it being a really well-done manuscript. You should keep it in mind when deciding whether to read it yourself. ...more
I checked this out as part of my ongoing efforts to find interesting things to read through the Kindle Unlimited program, after impulsively pre-purchaI checked this out as part of my ongoing efforts to find interesting things to read through the Kindle Unlimited program, after impulsively pre-purchasing a six-month subscription that was on sale earlier in the year, then immediately learning that barely any books I actually want to read (including all 98 titles in my TBR list at the time) are available through it. The rabbithole that led me to this particular title started with guides about collecting rare books, since I've been running my own eBay store on the subject for about a decade now, and I'm always looking for good new information I didn't already know; then thanks to Amazon's algorithms, that led me to the glut of guides that exist on how to run your own used bookstore through the "Fulfillment by Amazon" program, which along the way also recommended this short manuscript by Paula Berinstein about all the things you shouldn't do.
To be clear, though, Berinstein is not talking here about used books and FBA, but rather her attempt way back in 2003 to operate an actual Barnes & Noble-style store for brand-new books, before the invention of such convenient tools as Wordpress, WooCommerce, Stamps.com or virtually any of the other services that automate parts of the small-business ecommerce process. (To give you a little background, the chapters of this book apparently are transcripts of an old podcast Berinstein used to produce, back at the dawn of that medium; she's currently the author of a popular YA series.) So in one sense, the book is frustrating, because its cautionary tale contains almost no actual practical advice that still applies to the online world nearly twenty years later; but in another sense, it's one of the most interesting books I've now read through the Kindle Unlimited program, just from illuminating the sheer amount of headaches that used to be involved with this subject (not least of which being that, before the days of content management systems like Wordpress, Berinstein and her coder husband had to literally program their own database and shopping cart software from scratch, which blows my freaking mind). I can't really in good conscience recommend you spend money on this decade-old 44-page podcast transcript; but if you have Kindle Unlimited like me, certainly I recommend popping it onto your device for free soon, a fascinating historical document that you can read in its entirety in a single afternoon. ...more
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