The Free Electron blog post was written by Michael Lopp 19 years ago and later published with additions to the book Managing Humans. It tells the story of extremely productive engineers and how to use that force of nature from a team lead point of view. I look back to it whenever I encounter genius work perhaps with a bit of an unexpected direction. Give that story a chance.
Tag: reading
Umberto Eco’s Criticism of Dale Carnegie
I never imagined I’d ever read criticism of Dale Carnegie’s ideas in “How to Win Friends and Influence People”. However, this happened last month while reading a collection of essays by Umberto Eco. The collection is called “How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays”, and the essay in question likely translates to “How to Be Famous”.
Eco mocks Carnegie and summarizes his famous book down to the idea that if you want to be successful, trick strangers into feeling famous. He uses the example of TV shows that invite regular folks as guests—so many shows, and so successful, that eventually, every person ends up on TV. However, I’m thinking of YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitch, and so on. The success of these apps depends on how famous they make the average user. Give a 10-year-old 1000 likes, and they’ll stay on the platform for years, building a mental image of themselves as the next MrBeast.
Eco brings up the problem that Carnegie’s advice encourages non-genuine behavior. However, having watched The Flintstones, I suspect that genuine human behavior involves frequent fights with clubs, living in caves, and an average life expectancy comparable to squirrels. I’d rather stick to what Carnegie says.
Eco is at least partially right about one thing – most people on the Internet love likes, myself included 🙂
Why reading books matter
A brief essay as a response to this comment thread here, thanks to weirdo82.blog.
Books can make things happen, prevent things from happening, and shape the thoughts of large groups of people. They allow you to see through the eyes of real and fictional characters who have experienced great success and failure. Through books, you can learn, unlearn, and simply relax. They let us crack open doors and look at what’s behind long before these doors were built. The view remains in the shared memory of the readers, it can be analyzed, expanded, disproved, reimagined, or shot as a movie.
Reading books helps you talk with other bookworms, builds your Goodreads ranking, and is an infinite source of topics for blog posts. It also ensures you can read. It’s a challenge with no judgment, just you and the pages. They won’t ping you or complain if you don’t read them and won’t criticize if you don’t read them well.
Reading a page has the impact a fish has when swimming in water. It’s like the impact a bird has when she swings her wings. However, the combined force of all the books written and read led to our present-day civilization, good or bad. Will it disappear if we stop reading? Who knows. Maybe.
Legends & Lattes
Viv is a lady orc, giant and strong. She wants to retire from the bounty-hunting business and open a coffee shop. There will be challenges, mainly from doors to the past that are not closed.
This book is written with the intent of being sweet. The author got tired of Epic Fantasy and wrote an un-epic Fantasy. There’s nothing dramatic in opening a coffee shop. It’s like the first Thraxas, just that the city of Thule is far more ordered than Turai. It feels like an American suburban area.
5*/5
Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem
4 orphans are hired by a low-level Brooklyn crook and grow up under his wing to become his employees. One day he’s murdered, and the biggest misfit decides to go after the killer. The only issue is that our investigator has Tourette, OCD, and has severe problems interviewing witnesses as he just can’t stop touching them, barking at them, and yelling profanities. This is not necessarily bad, as long as you know the book is about Lionel’s life with Tourette’s rather than a crime story.
Motherless Brooklyn pushed my boundaries in a variety of ways. It’s an intimate read. It shared information about the characters which I didn’t want to know. At the same time, this is what makes it special. Most fiction writers describe characters with mild flaws, like the notorious missing pinky finger. Lionel’s problem is like missing a head compared to it.
Overall, I enjoyed it. 4*/5.
Veselin.blog 