Thanks to the birth of our first son I’ve been granted a lot of reading/feeding time. You could say that this was baby Gabe’s first book. I can’t say what he thought about the book, but I can say that I really enjoyed it. It was the first book I’ve read using the Amazon Kindle service. I don’t have a kindle so it was 100% absorbed through my iPhone and the PC app. Along the way I highlighted some quotes and wanted to share them…
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“…Achkowledge to yourself that the factory job is dead.”
“Having a factory job is not a natural state. It wasn’t at the heard of being human until very recently. We’ve been culturally brainwashed”.
I love how Seth correctly describes how “white collar” work has been successfully converted to a factory system over the last 100 years and how that’s now made the majority of our workforce replaceable. There are even whole books dedicated to how you can create your own software factories. So not even “modern” jobs like software engineering are safe from the commoditization… and who wants to be a cog… which of course becomes the key part of the book. How to avoid being a cog.
“Answering questions like ‘when was the war of 1812 is a useless skill in an always on wikipedia world”
I found this in a chapter about how our educational system brainwashes us from the start to worry about questions like this. It made me very grateful that my parents rejected public schooling in my area. Most of my education focused on answering the why’s and hypothetical’s instead of the what’s. I missed out on brainwashing.
“Six-Sigma refers to the quest for continuous improvement, ultimately leading to 3.4 defects per million units. The problem is that once you’re heading down this road there is no room for amazing improvements and remarkable innovations. “
This explained, to me, why pursuing training in the ways of Six-Sigma never interested me. It’s learning a skill that takes you down the path of a solved problem for perfecting execution… which isn’t interesting to me. It’s the perfect example of how white collar work has been turned into a factory line.
“Artists think along the edges of the box, because that’s where things get done. That’s where the audience is, that’s where the means of production are (still) available, and that’s where you can make an impact. “
This statement tackles the absurdity of “thinking outside the box”. The real win is doing something on the edge of possible that keeps pushing the goal line at the intersection of innovation, audience, and possible to ship.
“You work with people who are totally at the mercy of the resistance. They assist the devil by being his advocate in meetings. They follow the rule book, even parts you didn’t know about. They love what worked before and fear what might be coming. “
There is a lot of talk about “the resistance” and “the lizard brain” that comes from our evolutionary heritage where survival comes first and change is scary. I thought there was some oversimplification of these points, but it served the book well. Everyone has a resistance in them that tries to prevent us from making forward progress, improving ourselves, and shipping something outstanding. The resistance could include fear, office politics, and generally worrying about things you have no control over. You do, however, have control over what you do every day and a chance to do something awesome with your time instead of 20 things that are merely good.
“In a world with only a few indispensible people the linchpin has only two elegant choices: 1. Hire plenty of factory workers and scale like crazy. Take advantage of the fact that most people want a map… 2. Find a boss who can’t live without a linchpin. Fine a boss who adequately values your scarcity and your contribution, who will reward you with freedom and respect. Do the work, make a difference”.
That sort of speaks for itself.
There were a lot more sections that I highlighted to share with you, but i committed that I’d ship something on a deadline so here we are. 🙂