1. How did you get your start in the widget business?
2. What do you enjoy most about your profession?
3. What separates you and your company from the competition? (permission to brag)
4. What advice would you give someone just starting in the widget business? (the mentor question)
5. What one thing would you do with your business if you knew you could not fail?
6. What significant changes have you seen take place in your profession through the years?
7. What do you see as the coming trends in the widget business?
8. Describe the strangest or funniest incident you have experienced in your business.
9. What ways have you found to be the most effective for promoting your business?
10. What one sentence would you like people to use in describing the way you do business?

They can become:

• Recorded as An Audiobook
• Rejacketed with a New Cover for a Special Audience
• Shortened into A Book Summary
• Lengthened into A Trilogy
• Translated into other languages
• Composed as an FAQ
• Adapted as A Graphic Novel
• Shot as A Video
•  Laid out as A Magazine
• Published as A Newspaper
• Divided out onto A Deck of Cards
• Released as An App
• Extended into A Workbook
• Constructed as An Assessment
• Illustrated as A Poster
• Printed as A T-Shirt
• Die-cast as A Pin
• Converted into A Training Class
• Presented As A Slidedeck
• Delivered as A Speech
• Scripted into A Movie
• Staged as A Musical [it sounds crazy until you say Hamilton]
• Coded as Software
• Made Into Other Art
• Molded as Vinyl Dolls
• Shipped In A Milk Carton [also sound crazy until you read Seth Godin’s story]

I was watching a segment from The Stephen Colbert Show, where Malcolm Gladwell visits to promote the launch of his podcast Revisionist History. Colbert asks him why he wanted to create a podcast and Gladwell replies:

This is what my friend Charles always says, ‘You think with your eyes and you feel with your ears.’

After a quick Colbert joke he continues:

If you write a book, you can communicate very complicated ideas and people will grasp them, but you can’t move people emotionally…it is very hard.

The whole segment is great, but it kicked off me thinking a bunch of things.

• How true is that? Memoir is a pretty effective at generating emotion and connection in readers.
• This American Life, The Moth, RadioLab, WTF and Revisionist History all generate emotion with their amazing auditory storytelling.
• Aren’t photographs good at conveying emotion visually?
• Does this push even further towards the power of having the author narrate their audiobooks?
• Should books and audiobooks have the same content?

I am convinced that good books draw us in using both thinking and feeling, but now I am thinking about what makes one form working better than another for certain kind of material.

In the final weeks of being seventeen, I moved to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to start college as a mechanical engineering undergrad.

In the final weeks of being twenty-seven, I was working on the last details of my wedding in Columbus, Ohio.

By thirty-seven, we were living outside Milwaukee, had three kids and I was turning in the manuscript for The 100 Best Business Books of All Time.

Today, I turned forty-seven. This last decade has been defined by our move to Portland, Oregon. Amy went back to school, graduated and started her energy medicine practice. Our kids grew up here. I started a publishing practice. I started a zen practice.

Been wondering today what I’ll be writing when I turn fifty-seven.

Mary Roach writes books about the science of being human.

The titles are one word and each offers a hint of humor.

• Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
• Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife
• Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
• Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal

Early in her career, she was a copywriter and then worked in PR for the San Francisco Zoo. As a freelance writer, Mary found the stories about science were always interesting.  For the books she writes, she looks for a combination of science, history and humor. She also says she had no idea she’d have a career writing about science.

What can we learn?

• The titles are crystal clear and memorable.
• Each topic of each book is universally human and a little surprising.
• The utility the reader gets is entertainment for the curious mind.
• The books she writes are uniquely her. Do same in your books.

Bonus: Mary visits with AV Club and talks about one syllable book titles.

I started a daily writing practice seven weeks ago.

You are reading the 35th post in the series.

If you have been following, I have been talking about books and publishing for the most part.

On Fridays, I opened it up a little more to things like tower defense games, World Cup and Sense8.

Writing every day is a good exercise in both becoming a better writer and seeing what has your attention.

Expect more posts 🙂

A common problem in the manuscripts I look at is the author moving too fast through the opening section. Like screenplays for movies, business books should have three distinct acts.

Authors too often want to go running through the opening of the book. They assume the reader is with them based on the fact they opened the cover. Authors forget that no one will be there is explain why this book is important. The reader only has what is written on the page.

I like how Michael Arndt, the screenwriter behind Little Miss Sunshine and Toy Story 3, describes what the beginning of a film needs to do. He says writers should:

• Show the main character
• Show them in their environment
• Show them doing what they love
• Then show them their biggest flaw based on their love

If we translate Arndt’s ideas to business books, the author needs to throughly describe the world the reader lives in. What sort of problems are they working with? What is the reader afraid of? What do they want more than anything? And finally, what does the author believe is keeping the reader from their goal?

Readers are coming to your book already with the sense that they have a problem and are not sure how to solve it.

Make sure you are clear about the problem and they will trust you to lead them to a solution.

Today is Independence Day in the United States. Flags and fireworks fill stores ahead of the holiday.

For Valentine’s Day, we buy cards and roses.

For Halloween, we purchase costumes and candy.

My family baked me a chocolate cake for Father’s Day (the perfect gift this year).

All of those holidays were triggers for something else.

Jonah Berger talks about the power of triggers in his book Contagious. He says triggers work best when they are frequent and there is a strong link between trigger and the desired action.

The folks at Kit Kat found that people eat the candy bar during a break and with a hot beverage. They built an ad campaign called “a break’s best friend” that connected coffee and Kit Kats. The campaign was a hit and took the brand from $300 million to $500 million a year in sales.

Book publishing uses triggers too. In January, you will see publishers release titles that fit a “New Year, New You” themes like diet and personal empowerment. “Summer Reads” start to appear in May as readers make book picks for mid year vacations to the beach. And in September and October, the “big” books are released as everyone heads into the holiday gift giving season.

Is there something you can tie your book to?

We all have notions in our heads for how much things cost.

Sometimes, they are right and sometimes, they can be very wrong.

I am a big fan of comic books, so I have a good sense that single issues cost around four dollars and the complied paperbacks are roughly seventeen dollars.

Would you pay $140 for a comic book?

On first thought, you probably wouldn’t.

Or you might if it was issue #1 collector’s edition signed by the artists.

I Am Built created a comic book to illustrate the 12 week training program that Josh Brolin used to prepare for his role as Cable in Deadpool 2. The comic book called CableBuilt covers staged workout routines and diet regiments for the program.

The description doesn’t say how long the book is or show any samples what it looks like inside.

So, would you pay $140 for that comic book?

With the right felt need, you might.

If you live at the intersection of gym rat and cosplay, you might.

P.S. Did I mention it is electronic? So it’s a $140 ebook.

My Notes posts are the key ideas I jot down about books after I read them. They capture what caught my attention and I want to remember. I post them here to share them with you.

Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

• Consistent theme in success:

  • “In sum, no matter what domain, the highly successful has a kind of ferocious determination that played out in two ways,. First, these exemplars were unusually resilient and hardworking. Second, they knew in a very, very deep way what it was they wanted. They not only had determination, they had direction.” p8

• Specific domains need other things –
  • salespeople->prior experience,
  • students->supportive teacher,
  • Green Berets->physical fitness
  • BUT grit still mattered for all of them
• Talent x effort = skill
• skill x effort = achievement or talent x effort x effort = achievement
• Take the Grit Scale Test.
• From Stanford psychologist Catharine Cox 1926 study of high achievers: key difference of successful “geniuses”
  •  Degree to which one works with distant objects in view (as opposed to living from hand to mouth). Active preparation for later life. Working toward a definite goal.
  • Tendency not to abandon takes from mere changeability. Not seeking something fresh because of novelty. Not “looking for a change.”
  • Degree of strength of will or perseverance. Quiet determination to stick to a course once decided upon.
  • Tendency not to abandon tasks in the face of obstacles. Perseverance, tenacity, doggedness.
• 1 and 2 are passion, 3 and 4 are perseverance
• Genes predict 37% of perseverance and 20% of passion
• Experience matters, we appear to get more grit over time, starts on Grit Scale at 3.4 in our 20’s and ends up at 3.9 in our 60’s
• Interest
  • Before hard work comes play
  • Early Years – relaxed, playful interest, discovery, development
  • See work from Benjamin Bloom
  • Paul Silvia
    • For the beginner, novelty is anything that hasn’t been encountered before
    • For the expert, novelty is nuance
  • Angela’s suggestions
    • What do I like to think about?
    • Where does my mind wander?
    • What do I really care about?
    • What matters to me most?
    • How do I enjoy spending my time?
    • What do I find absolutely unbearable?
• Practice
  • World class people practice more
  • But Anders Ericsson research shows they practice in a deliberate way:
    • They find a specific stretch goal
    • Give goal undivided attention and great effort to achieve
    • ASAP, they gather feedback on how they did.
    • Repeat, repeat, repeat with reflection and refinement
    • Tends to requite more effort and is less enjoyable
  • Connecting to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Flow…
    • Gritty people do more deliberate practice and experience more flow
• Purpose
  • Gritty people are dramatically more motivated by meaningful, other-centered work
  • The three bricklayers story
  • Yale professor Amy Wrzesniewski finds that people naturally split evenly into the three groups
  • Recommends “thinking about how, in small but meaningful ways, you can change your current work to enhance its connection to your core value.”
  • Teenagers who connect self and others to their future calling are more motivated
• Hope
  • “Fall seven, rise eight.” -Japanese saying
  • Optimists can find reasons something didn’t work
  • Pessimists blame themselves, the conditions are permanent (learned helplessness)
  • Sales – Optimists outsell pessimists 20-40%
  • Carol Dweck – Fixed vs. Growth Mindset (people can change)
    • Growth mindset people are grittier than fixed mindset.
    • Growth Mindset -> Optimistic Self-Talk -> Perseverance Over Adversity
• Parenting for Grit
  • Successful (“Wise”) parenting involves being supportive AND demanding
  • Consistent activity outside of class is predictive of grit.
  • This involves multiple years and receiving achievement for success
  • Her family has The Hard Thing Rule
    • Everyone has to do a hard thing
    • You can quit (when the season is over)
    • You can pick your hard thing
• People are more satisfied with life when they have higher grit.