Welcome to the fifth installment of “It’s not a bird” posts. I can feel the love from all you bird haters out there hehehe. Clearly my reading as of late has taken a backseat due to having way too many projects in progress at the moment. Luckily I was able to get a quick book in during our last vacation to the Georgia swamps. Today’s recollection is their third book in the Freakenomics series from Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. The first book was extremely entertaining and informative. I recommend it to all my friends and anybody who wants to understand the power of economics to solve everyday issues. Then came Super Freakenomics which I listened to via audio book. That was a bit of a letdown but I still had some takeaways. I am not as apt to recommend that book to people unless they are absolutely craving additional economic insights. To be honest, I thought it rehashed too much of Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers offering (link here). If you want to know what it takes to be a pro or tops in your sport read that book instead. Then the third book came out and decided to put it on my wish list. Linda ended up surprising me and getting it for me as a gift so I saved it for the upcoming trip. First thing is the book didn’t last me the trip – only about three short days of travel and I was done with it. This was especially irritating since I had not brought a backup which resulted in wasted reading days. The second comment is it was found wanting. In my opinion, a definite step down from the other two offerings. It felt like they were just cranking out a book with material that didn’t make the other two and decorating it with a narrative about how you could learn to think like a freak. Now that I’m done with it I can summarize my key takeaway as .. quitting is a viable option. Apparently to think like a Freak means to consider quitting endeavors. I can’t even begin to tell you how much this contradicts with my personal philosophy. I do not believe in quitting unless that is the absolute last option and I’ve given everything available to try and push it over the goal line. It isn’t so much the effort at hand as it is the impact it has on everything you undertake from that point on. The minute you let the option of quitting get added you have involuntarily added that as an option in everything you do. Miss a post quota – eh, I get it next month.. next month.. well, it doesn’t really matter since I already missed it last month and next thing you know you are Googling for the next time I am Cait instead of looking through your picture archives for interesting material. As soon as you give up on a race every time it gets difficult you’ll be debating the option of stopping instead of putting the next foot in front of another. Convince yourself you don’t need to go out and train for a race and quickly find out you’ll be hitting the snooze button instead of putting your bib on. It may take longer, it may not look exactly as planned but to the very best of my ability it is going to have a bow on it. To look forward to this book only to read a contradictory philosophy is a nasty kick. Note, it isn’t that I do not get their point but they fail to understand the benefits that would have been obtained by not quitting – just example after example of someone who did something else.
There were a couple of interesting chapters. The concept of admitting you do not know something is a refreshing approach to difficult decisions/expectations. There are times when you do not have all the information or knowledge to weigh in on a decision. It might take some extra time to obtain that or need to consider some alternatives before jumping to conclusions. Whenever I hear someone that I trust admit they do not know the answer at that point in time I inherently trust them that much more. This is something I’ll definitely take forward. The other story took a fact I had known to a new level. Somewhere in the past I read how ulcers were not due to stress (the early hypothesis) and instead became treatable with antibiotics. This brought an end to a multi-billion industry that was treating the symptom and not the cause. Turns out there was more to the story. It is too disturbing to really go into detail here, but let’s just say the discoverer of this solution found it by testing HIMSELF. This topic eventually drove down into a concept of shit swapping or more clinically sounding transpoosion. This is probably a good time to get to the takeaways. There were more than expected, but a lot of them were more reminders for future Trivia Crack questions as to true takeaways. I’ll leave the choice up to you, but I’d probably find another book to invest time in. It is always a bigger let down if you let your anticipation get too high which is probably coming into play here.
Hit the jump to read the takeaways
Continue reading Book Recollection: Think I’ll Take Advice and Give Up
Life Intrigued 