Idiologie / branding & everything else

6 books that will not change your life

Books don’t change us. So if you’re one of those people secretly hoping that all this time lavishly spent reading did not go in vain, well, acceptance is the first step. As Hemingway once expressed it: never confuse action with movement. Books may entertain, inform or even inspire us to do something but sadly, they themselves are rather on the action side.

On the positive side, this tiny drawback might be the only thing preventing excessive exposure to brainwashed hordes of sociopaths. Obviously, this is precisely what would happen if all those avid students of “The Art of War” (supposedly all time bestseller on Amazon self-help books list) started actually living according to the “Lure them in with the prospect of gain, take them by confusion” maxim. As for now we only have to put up with it during elections.

The following books will neither change you, nor your beliefs (unfortunately, hardly nothing can change the latter), but I’ve found them interesting or useful enough to recommend each to someone at least once. Not to mention that I’d rather keep my self-delusions nourished and nurtured; writing about what I’ve read provides a good excuse for reading on.

Twyla Tharp: The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life & The Collaborative Habit: Life Lessons for Working Together

Being creative for some time takes a lot of work and passion. Staying creative for years takes an awful lot of discipline and really hard work; there’s little romantic about it. As for collaboration, I’ve always thought that was what Beckett had been thinking of when he famously said: ‘Fail, fail again, fail better’.
Don’t let the titles mislead you; neither of these books is a traditional self-help book. Still, the Habits are one of the wisest and most pragmatic books on the subject I’ve ever read. I cannot recommend them enough.

James Gleick: The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

Books that are thorough rarely are gripping (unless you’re a nerd). In either case: it’s an excellent read.

Sándor Márai

I love Sándor Márai. With all my heart. His most popular ‘Embers’ is a masterpiece that kept me mesmerized to the very last page and that does not happen often (over-read, blasé and proud of it). His Diaries are the only book I’ve bought recently in paper (!) and decided not to give away after reading. So on and so forth.

Steven Pinker: The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language and Antonio Damasio: Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain

To my best guess pairing psycholinguistics with neuroscience is like coupling css and product design just because in some general sense they both do with design. Regrettably, these volumes are too nerdy and geeky to put them separately and they don’t exactly fit smoothly into ‘easy summer reading’ category. Just as a sum up of both: “The brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side, The one the other will contain With ease, and you beside.”

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Instapapers (would have fallen under tl;dr tag unless they hadn’t been actually worth reading):

The Local-Global Flip, or, “The Lanier Effect” Somebody should have invented ‘too good for web’ tag. This interview would utterly fit.

How Online Companies Get You to Share More and Spend More. I truly abhor so-called ‘gamification‘, nonetheless this is how a relevant approach to this trend looks like or how posts would have been written if blogging as a genre had not signified “substance watered down to a week of posts”.

Anonymous: From the Lulz to Collective Action, best read with: Designing for Social Norms (or How Not to Create Angry Mobs).

The Possibilian: What a brush with death taught David Eagleman about the mysteries of time and the brain. Rather unfortunate title for quite interesting article on our perception of time.

Accessibility vs. access: How the rhetoric of “rare” is changing in the age of information abundance On unfotunate titles again, still worth a few minutes.

If you’ve read up to this point, it may indicate that you’re seriously procrastinating. So last but not least: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield is a rather short (and consequently procrastinate friendly) book that will help you get out of your own way and just do it. With just a few more pages:)

Elegant ideas — products, services, performances, strategies, whatever — all have some degree of these four elements: symmetry, seduction, subtraction, and sustainability. Guy Kawasaki interviews Matthew E. May on his recent book: The Pursuit of Elegance. +.

M. Gladwell: Outliers and Chip & Dan Heath: Made-to-Stick

If Truman Capote was like a semantic Paganini, then Malcolm Gladwell is undoubtedly a Paganini of anecdotes. Much has been already written on Gladwell’s recent Outliers: The Story of Success. If a summary can be made before the book is actually written, then the best one was given by Richard St John in his 3-minute TED talk: “8 secrets of success”: [continue reading]

Please recommend a book that you have found particularly inspiring or meaningful to your development as a creative person? Outstanding graphic designers and their reading list: Inspired reading.

The science of Shopping by Paco Underhill

A store has 3 distinct aspects: design (the premises), merchandising (whatever you put in it) and operations (whatever employees do). They’re closely intertwined, interrelated and interdependent, so changing one of them will affect the other two as well. Their correlations are thoroughly covered in Paco Underhill’s analysis of an evolving shopping culture. It’s one of these books that in addition to substantial advice on customers’ tastes and habits is able to entertain us with witty anecdotes and gripping details.
The book has been incredibly well summarized by Malcolm Gladwell in his New Yorker article: The Science of Shopping, so instead of writing a mere ersatz of Gladwell’s review (which definitely is a must-read), I’ll focus on the book’s guidelines for designers. [continue reading]

An Ingenious Way to Understand Why People Around the World Live and Buy as They Do

“The Culture Code is the unconscious meaning we apply to any given thing — a car, a type of food, a relationship, even a country — via the culture in which we are raised. The American experience with Jeeps is very different from the French and German experience because our cultures evolved differently (we have strong cultural memories of the open frontier; the French and Germans have strong cultural memories of occupation and war). Therefore, the Codes — the meaning we give to the Jeep at an unconscious level — are different as well. (…) It is obvious to everyone that cultures are different from one another. What most people don’t realize, however, is that these differences actually lead to our processing the same information in different ways.”

However trivial the starting point of Clotaire Rapaille’s “Culture Code” may seem, the marketing (and cultural) guidance deduced from the anthropological study is quite puzzling. The analysis of several fundamental archetypes (ranging from shopping to sex), abundant in examples from Rapaille’s practice, seems to assure consistent results in any commercial endeavor. [continue reading]

How Product Evolution Creates Endless Possibilities for New Brands

“One of most difficult things to understand is the dynamics of marketplace. Why some companies win and others lose. Why some consumers prefer one brand and other consumers prefer another brand. Why a brand that is hot today can get cold tomorrow. Charles Darwin provides the theoretical concepts to understand the dynamics of the marketplace. The laws of nature apply equally as well to brands and categories.”

The idea behind Al & Laura Ries’ “The origins of brands” is quite simple: take Darwin’s idea of evolution and apply it to the branding process. Captivating as it is as a purely intellectual pursuit, the analogy results in four basic rules to follow: [continue reading]

“I heard a nice little story the other day,” Morrie says. He closes his eyes for a moment and I wait.
Okay. The story is about a little wave, bobbing along in the ocean, having a grand old time. He’s enjoying the wind and the fresh air — until he notices the other waves in front of him, crashing against the shore. ‘My God, this is terrible,’ the wave says ‘Look what’s going to happen to me!’ Then along comes another wave. It sees the first wave, looking grim, and it says to him, ‘Why do you look so sad?’ The first wave says, ‘You don’t understand! We’re all going to crash! All of us waves are going to be nothing! Isn’t it terrible?’ The second wave says, ‘No, you don’t understand. You’re not a wave, you’re part of the ocean.’”

[Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom]