Drive is now six months old — and we’re off to an outstanding start. To celebrate the success, and to provide ever more good stuff for readers, I’m happy to announce two free — the world’s favorite price! — offers for you.
1. Bookplates. We now have custom-made, hand-signed Drive bookplates. They’re pretty cool, if I do say so myself. If you’d like one, just visit our new bookplate page, enter your name and address, and we’ll send you one at no charge.
2. Reading list.Daniel Cornwall, a librarian in Juneau, Alaska, wanted to make Drive‘s reading list of 15 essential books (see p. 185) more accessible. So he entered the list into a global library catalog called World Cat. Just click this link — and you’ll be able to locate any of the books at your local library or from your favorite online bookseller. But please, for my sake, don’t stick your bookplate into a library book.
Thanks to a short vacation, a brief respite from traveling, and my general inclination to avoid real work, I’ve been able read a lot the last few weeks. Here are two more books — neither of which has much to do with business, motivation, or talent — that I really enjoyed.
The first is Barbara Demick‘s book, Nothing to Envy, about day-to-day life in North Korea. It is — in a word — riveting. Demick interviewed about a dozen people who escaped North Korea and she uses their stories to recreate what daily life is like in one of the world’s most repressive (and downright bizarre) places. What amazed me most is that because the government controls all media — and the Internet, television, and foreign books are essentially forbidden — the people of North Korea often lack a sense of how dire their situation is. One character doesn’t fully understand until she crosses the river into China and sees that the food a family there has set out for it dog is more plentiful, tasty, and nutritious than anything she’s eaten in months. This book will linger in your mind for a long while.
The other book is The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman. This one’s a novel — and a unique one at that. Each chapter focuses on a single character, all of whom work at a sinking international newspaper in Rome. Their lives are sad and comical at the same time — giving the novel a bittersweet flavor that reminded me of And Then We Came to the End. Rachman also uses short italicized passages at the end of each chapter to tell the backstory of the newspaper. But The Imperfectionists is more than a tour de force of clever structure. The structure serves the narrative beautifully and deepens and intensifies the story. For a taste, check out this excerpt.
One of the strange rituals of life in 2010 is what I call the “Shootout at iPhone Corral.” It’s the moment in a conversation when two people who aren’t normally given to gun-slinging unholster their iPhones for a showdown over who has the coolest apps.
To spare you that encounter, herewith are 5 apps that I find myself using all the time and that I recommend to every dueling partner.
1. Flight Status. If you travel much, you need this app. It’s usually more up-to-date than the status boards in the airport. It also gives you info like arrival gates and flight times.
2. The app formerly known as Tweetie. I love Twitter. And Twitter loves Tweetie, so much that it recently bought the company that produced this app, which is the perfect way to get your TwitFix even when you’re mobile.
3. ESPN ScoreCenter. Sometimes a man (and his son!) need to know the Nats score. Now.
4. NPR News. This app allows me to listen to the NPR stories I find interesting — and avoid those I don’t. (Hooray, no more 7-minute pieces about ladies who whittle Civil War figurines from rutabagas!) This might also be the best designed app around.
5. Faces iMake. I’ve actually begged magazine editors to commission Hanoch Piven to illustrate my articles. (If you don’t know Piven’s work, check it out here.) Now he’s got an app that allows civilians to create Pivenesque portraits on their phones. It’s fun and addicting — if you can get it away from your kids.
Any apps you want to add to this (virtual) shootout?
Where the last book focused on how poor reasoning can lead us astray, this one explores dozens of cool experiments that offer some guidance on using our irrational tendencies for our benefit at work and at home. Ariely also threads the book with his own story — especially his experience being severely burned in an explosion as a young man — which gives this book a more personal feel than its predecessor.
Here are five insights (mostly in Ariely’s own words) that I’ve found particularly compelling and that I’ve been badgering people with the last few days.
1. Bonuses can impair performance. “Paying people high bonuses can result in high performance when it comes to simple mechanical tasks, butthe opposite can happen when you ask them to use their brains.” (Careful readers will note that I wrote about one of Ariely’s experiments on this front in Drive.) “[T]hough a large amount of money would most likely get you to work many hours (which is why high payment is very useful as an incentive when simple mechanical tasks are involved), it is unlikely to improve your creativity.”
2. Seeing the fruits of our labor is inherently motivating. In an experiment where people who loved Legos were paid to create Lego figures, having their creation disassembled before their eyes dramatically reduced their interest and their persistence. “[I]f you take people who love something . . . and you place them in meaningful work conditions, the joy they derive from the activity is going to be a major driver in dictating their level of effort. However, if you take the same people with the same initial passion and desire and place them in meaningless working conditions, you can very easily kill any internal joy they might derive from the activity.”
3. We overvalue what we make ourselves. Airely calls this the “IKEA effect.” But this irrational valuing can actually help us. “[T]o increase your feelings of pride and ownership in your daily life, you should take a larger part in creating more of the things you use in your daily life.”
4. We adapt to new conditions — both good and bad — remarkably quickly. This leads to a piece of counterintuitive advice. “You may think that taking a break during an irritating or boring experience will be good for you, but a break actually decreases your ability to adapt, making the experience seem worse when you have to return to it.” Likewise, it’s helpful to “slow down pleasure” and actually interrupt or space out pleasurable experiences so you don’t adapt to them too quickly.
5. Acting on our negative feelings can be dangerous — even in the long run. “[I]f we do nothing while we are feeling an emotion, there is no short-term or long-term harm that can come to us.” However, if we make a decision based on that emotion, “we may not only regret the immediate outcome, but we may create a long-lasting pattern of [decisions] that will continue to misguide us for a long time.”
That’s just a taste. Read the whole book. (You can buy it here, here, or here.) It will be one of the most rational decisions you make this summer.
Last year, the folks at Volkswagen and Fun Theory devised an engaging (and musical!) way for people to exit a subway station. Now they’ve come up with a equally engaging way for people to enter a subway station. (Someone should do a story about subterranean behavior modification. There are lots and lots of examples – Ed.)
“I was offered a very nice contract from the Yankees [after the 2007] season but it was a reduction in pay. I could get the money back if we won this, that, and the other thing. I was insulted that they thought I needed to be motivated financially to go out there and do a better job. That’s when I walked away.
The second comes from Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project (buy it here, here, or here), who emailed me a short passage from Stephen Spender‘s autobiography World Within World, in which he describes a solider he calls “Jimmy”:
“As with most soldiers, the army had disciplined him at the price of breaking down any power of self-discipline which he might once have had. Outside the Army he seemed lacking in will and purpose, because these had been forced on to him by punishments and drills.”
In 2003, my pal Mark Frauenfelder (one of the impresarios behind Boing Boing) and his wife Carla Sinclair — two young parents suffering from dot-com bubble burnout — distilled their frustration into a brief manifesto. They made a vow:
To take more control of our lives;
To cut through the absurd chaos of modern life and find a path that was simple, direct, and clear;
To forge a deeper connection and a more rewarding sense of involvement with the world around us.
With these aspirations buzzing in their heads, they did what anyone in their situation would do: They moved to Rarotonga. (Search it in Google Maps. You’ll find it right there in the middle-of-frickin-nowhere.) They lasted just four and a half months before returning to Los Angeles, but the experience trying to adapt to the island became Mark’s launching pad for a grand project to remake his family’s life. Made by Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World, his amazing new book, is the story of that quest.
We watch Mark raise chickens (in a remote-controlled chicken coop!), make musical instruments (a cigar box guitar!), plant a garden (watch out for the evil gophers!), keep bees (smoke makes them drowsy!), and do a bunch of other strangely inspiring things to recast his life around a greater dose of self-direction and a deeper sense of purpose. Along the way, we learn several valuable lessons that apply even to those of us who aren’t exactly running out to buy an Alexander veil.
The new do-it-yourself culture is all about taking back responsibility for your life in ways big and small. Mark’s quest for the perfect espresso drove him to open up his perfectly adequate, very expensive, espresso machine, and hack it into an even better one. DIY means you control your gadgets, and by extension, your life — they don’t have to control you.
You will make mistakes. Lots of them. But the only way to achieve mastery in any area is to set goals beyond your reach. Mark is honest about chronicling his failures as well as his successes.
We spend so much time in online worlds that it becomes habitual. Making things by hand breaks that virtual spell. Mark found his projects to be the perfect antidote to the “uneasiness” that crept in after too much time disconnected from concrete reality.
You can watch an interview with Mark at Boing Boing, or learn more at the Made by Hand website. You can also buy the book here, here, and here. Check it out. It’s real treat.
Above is a remarkable 10-minute animated video about Drive. Over the past few weeks, several people who’ve watched it have asked me how I created such an elegant and compelling piece. Today I provide the answer: I had almost nothing to do with it.
In January, I did a book talk at the RSA in London. A few months later, the RSA carved out some sound bites from that talk, commissioned Cognitive Media to add some groovy whiteboard cartoons to accompany the words, and then posted the video on YouTube. That’s it.
I didn’t know it was in the works or even see the final project myself until a couple of weeks ago, after it had gone live. But now, to my amazement, it’s been viewed more than 1 million times. (That’s, er, slightly more views than my video travel tips.)
Thanks, RSA, for being so innovative. And thanks, Cognitive Media, for such amazing work and for scaring the crap out of the UPS whiteboard guy.
