A homemade sign from a tough-minded (but not litigious) parent:

An official sign from the hilly state of Himachal Pradesh in northeast India:

(If your Hindi is rusty, this translates to “If you fancy speed, become PT Usha. Speed driving is a sign of stupidity.” If your Indian sports history is rusty, PT Usha is one of the fastest runners the country has ever produced.)

And a new-fangled centaur-style police car that’s apparently being widely used in Texas to deter drunk driving.

(HT: Jeremy Epstein, R. Ganesh, and Chris Nute)

Join us on Monday, May 14 at 2pm, EDT, for what promises to be a terrific Office Hours episode. I’ll talk with Tom about the state of the economy, the new rules of work, and his recently released “mother of all presentations.” And as always, you’ll be able to call in and ask him anything you want.

(Don’t know what Office Hours is?
Click here. Or repeat after me: “It’s Car Talk . . . for the Human Engine.”)

To listen live, just dial 703.344.2171 and enter the passcode 203373 on Monday at 2pm, EDT. We’ll give you directions for how to ask your questions during the hour.

If you’ve never heard Tom before, you’re in for a treat. If you’ve never asked him a question, you’re in for an education.

You can listen to some of our past shows, featuring guests like Marcus Buckingham, Jim Collins, Jonah Lehrer, and Susan Cain, on the Office Hours page. You can also subscribe on iTunes.

Chris Guilliebeau thinks Facebook is cool. But he urges the rest of us to concentrate on a smaller number: a hundred bucks. Let’s write out that one, too. $100. See? It’s a lot more manageable.

In his new book, The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future, (Buy it on Amazon, BN.com, or IndieBound), Guillebeau examines a slew of people who’ve started enterprises with extremely modest investments — and managed to build both a business and life.

With the book launching today, Chris agreed to answer some questions for Pink Blog readers about risk, reward, and revolution.

***

1. In the book, you talk about the freedom of leaving a soul-sucking job to begin an entrepreneurial adventure. It sounds wonderful, but in rough economy, why would someone with a steady job want to take a chance on self-employment?

In a time of uncertainty, many of us are thinking about security and redefining risk. I don’t believe that pursuing self-employment is “taking a chance,” at least not compared to taking a chance in a highly competitive, difficult job market that offers few opportunities for independence. Many of the people I talked with for the book found that their own competence was their best security.

Furthermore, lots of big businesses—Microsoft, GE, and HP to name a few—were all started during recessions. So in my mind, while there are certainly some bad things about an economic downturn, there is also a great deal of opportunity.

2. What is one thing Pink Blog readers could do today to take that first step on the road to freedom?

I bet that the astute Pink Blog readership has a lot of ideas for a business. Some of them are probably great ideas, but one thing I’ve learned is that most “business ideas” are actually too general. So the one thing these astute readers can do is convert that general idea into a specific offer. What will you actually offer the world, and how will you get paid for it?

Starting a business isn’t that complicated. You don’t need an MBA or a 60-page business plan that no one will ever read. You do, however, need a few things:

a) A product or service
b) A group of people willing to buy it
c) A means of getting paid

When thinking about business ideas, always think in this framework: what it is, who it’s for, and how you’ll get paid?

3.  Anything they should not do?
Yes. Don’t feel like you have to have everything in place before starting. I often hear from people in cubicle-land who want to “quit their jobs” but have concerns about income and providing for others. These are valid concerns!

So if that’s your situation, don’t quit. But don’t wait in paralysis either. The sooner you can create a side project that will bring in some extra cash, the better. A little extra cash from an all-new source can be highly empowering. It creates the potential that, one day, you may indeed be able to walk away from that soul-sucking job.

The first is Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in the Mumbai Undercity. Boo, a New Yorker writer, spent three years observing life in a slum adjacent to the airport in Mumbai, India. She returned with a riveting story that’s centered around a self-immolation and ensuing false accusations, but is ultimately about family, poverty, justice, and being human. This work of non-fiction is as gripping as a classic novel, a book that people will be reading for many years.  (Amazon) (BN.com) (IndieBound)

Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi, by NPR journalist Steve Inskeep, hasn’t gotten as much press as Boo’s book — but it’s just as good. Instead of Mumbai, Inskeep takes us to Karachi, Pakistan — and describes how a once-sleepy enclave became a sprawling 13 million person metropolis, rife with violence, terror, and even a little hope. The reporting is so rich and the writing so vivid, you can almost smell the streets. Instant City deserves to be a huge bestseller. (Amazon) (BN.com) (IndieBound).

Then there’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain. Here’s the high concept pitch: Catch-22 meets Tom Wolfe . . . for the Iraq War. Billy Lynn is a Army private just back from a  firefight in Iraq, the video of which has gone viral thanks to Fox News and the Internet. Over the course of a Dallas Cowboys Thanksgiving football game, Billy encounters all manner of American weirdness. A Hollywood producer, drunken soldiers, rapacious capitalists, an amorous cheerleader, inert and clueless citizens, even Beyonce. This is one of the best novels I’ve read in years. (Amazon) (BN.com) (IndieBound)

PREVIOUS TIPS:
Tip #1 — Never get sick again
Tip #2 — The magic of earplugs
Tip #3 — Four road food rules of thumb
Tip #4 — The rule of HAHU
Tip #5 — More hygiene!
Tip #6 — Staying connected
Tip #7 — Zipping through security lines
Tip #8 — One thing you should never do in a hotel room
Tip #9 — The secret(s) to beating jet lag
Tip #10 — The first thing you should buy
Tip #11 – The hidden benefits of Mickey D’s

To write my previous books, I relied on tons of interviews, lots of traditional library and online research, and one kick-ass genie.

For the next book, I’m adding a new technique: Quantitative survey research. In an effort to add some statistical meat to the book’s analytic bones, I’ve enlisted the wonderful folks at Qualtrics and devised a brief survey on people’s work activities and attitudes.

Thanks to a bunch of tweets on Tuesday, several thousand people have already completed the survey. But because we’re working hard to make sure we have a fully representative sample, and because the huge response has given us a chance to assemble even representative subgroups, we’re looking for more participants.

If you’re interested in adding your experiences and opinions to the new project, just go to this link. The survey begins with some demographic questions to ensure we have valid sample. Then it moves to a handful of questions about how you spend your time at work — and what you think of certain aspects of it.

People who’ve completed the survey have said they’ve enjoyed it. And, seriously, it takes just four minutes.

So if you’ve got 240 spare seconds, give it a try. It would be a huge help.

(Source: The Week, citing Reason.com)

P.S. Seth also has some interesting thoughts on what this film tells us about the book industry.

The idea was that signs could be more effective — that is, they were more likely to produce the desired behavior — if they: a) expressed empathy with the viewer; or b) elicited empathy in the viewer. The concept has widened a bit since then, particularly with examples of signs using humor to make their point.

But last week Kathleen Curry sent us a sign that meets the classic, original definition. Driving on Coleman Blvd. in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, she spotted the sign below. It reminds me of what the town of Needham, Massachusetts, did not too long ago — and it’s apparently part of a national movement.

Hard to say for sure whether this sort of sign will change behavior, but I’m guessing it just might.

* Note: This creation myth, like many others, is somewhat embellished.

Lately I’ve been digging into this broad question of how of we move people and I consulted a fascinating book I’d read several months ago titled Instant Influence: How to Get Anyone to Do Anything – Fast! (Buy it at Amazon, BN.com, or IndieBound). The author, Michael Pantalon, is a psychologist research scientist at the Yale School of Medicine. And he’s generously agreed to share one of the tips from the book with us. If you get a chance to try this technique, let us know in the Comments section how it worked out for you.

Now here’s Dr. Pantalon:

What do you say when someone at work says, “No” to your suggestion?  You probably respond with a perfectly rational question like, “Why not?” Unfortunately, I’ve learned that rational questions are ineffective for motivating resistant people. Instead I’ve found that irrational questions actually motivate people better.

 For example, imagine you’re a manager at a major PR firm and one of your reports balks at revising an important part of the next big campaign.  Instead of asking rational but ineffective questions, try the following 2 seemingly irrational questions:

1. How ready are you to make the revisions, on a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 means not ready at all and 10 means totally ready? 

Make sure she gives you a number. On the rare chance that she says, “1,” surprise her by saying, “What would turn it into a 2?” In telling you what it would take for her to become a 2, she reveals what she needs to do before she is able to make the revisions to the campaign. That is what you motivate her to do first.

2. If she picks a number higher than 2, ask, “Why didn’t you pick a lower (yes, lower) number?”

Question 1 seems irrational, because you’re asking, “How ready are you…?” of a person who just said, “No,” which we can assume means not at all ready.  However, most resistant people have some motivation that they keep from us.  If you ask, “Are you going to take my suggestion, yes or no?” they continue to keep their motivation hidden.  But if you ask them the “1-10” question, they’re much more likely to reveal their motivation by saying a 2 or a 3, which is far better – you’ve now moved from a “No” to at least a “Maybe.”

Question 2 seems really irrational, perhaps even absurd. It’s the opposite of the rational and expected question, “Why aren’t you more motivated?” which only breeds more resistance.  However, by asking Question 2, you’re asking her to defend why your directive to revise the campaign is even the slightest bit important to her (e.g., deep down, she knows getting over her defensiveness around critique is an important career goal) rather than to defend her excuses why she won’t do it (e.g., too busy).  The answers she gives lead her to rehearse the positive and intrinsic reasons for doing what you asked, which, in turn, dramatically increase the chances that she gets the project done.