Read Books This will provide a list of the books I've read with a brief review. Users are blocked, contact me for access. I welcome discussions, but I'm tired of spam.

Drive proposes that motivation can be strongly tied to creativity. Daniel Pink argues that our traditional understanding of motivation is flawed, and provides a more complex view. Whether at work, family, or self-motivation is the issue, allowing your creativity and personal preferences to come into play can increase your success.

Daniel Pink argues that current motivational methods, those used primarily in schools and in business, are ineffective at best and counterproductive more often. These methods come from mostly 19th century understandings of motivation, based on a carrot and stick approach to motivation.

Science has progressed far from this perspective, but society is lagging behind. Mr. Pink makes a case for updating our playbook to improve our ability to do any tasks we put ourselves to.

The first part of the book discusses the carrot and stick analogy and how we typically use it. He shows its shortcomings with plenty of examples that we are well familiar with. He divides tasks into two categories, then shows how traditional motivational techniques affect people in each. Then describes how an updated technique can improve the outcomes.

The book continues to develop the new motivational techniques into different circumstances, discusses how to motivate people in a work environment, motivate children, and self motivation.

The book ends with plenty of suggestions for further reading, websites, suggested schools, exercises, step-by-step improvement suggestions, and more.

Although much of the information was not new to me, I found it stimulating, thought provoking, and encouraging me to study more. I do recommend this book to anyone interested in motivation.

I enjoyed this book. The book develops the premise that crowds, under the right circumstances, can make extraordinarily good decisions. He make a number of studies showing the average of all people’s inputs is surprisingly more accurate than the best member of the crowd. He also touches on when this crowd wisdom breaks down, citing such occasions as the stock market bubble, housing bubbles, and mob rule. The breakdown of crowd wisdom is only touched on, and if I have one complaint about the book, its that this is an important aspect of crowd wisdom and deserves more attention.

I was disappointed overall, Thomas Friedman is too long-winded. I felt like he made his point, but had to keep driving it home for too many pages.

His analogies strike me as weak and often pointless. In one chapter he referred to an effort as the equivalent of 1,000,000 Noahs in order to stress its difficulty. Then repeatedly refered to ‘leaking arks’. The analogy had no other significance – aside from religious symbology.

His understanding of human nature seems weak at times, too. He only devotes a few pages to explaining to the green resistance why global warming is real. He seems to trivialize their position without providing any new proof of climate change.

He further goes to explain how the new technology to deal with our environemntal problems will be inevitably good for the companies, and how we will eventually pay lumber companies not to cut wood, and how concrete is bad for the environment without ever discussing what we’re oging to replace as new building materials.

He does have a lot of good information and ideas, though. But it seemed overly difficult to read this book to get to them. And I don’t feel he has provided any real insight as to how to address them. But he is avidly pronouncing that we cannot continue business as normal.

I don’t think he will reach the ears he needs to reach. Only the already-green public is likely to pick up this book.
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I wrote this yesterday, upon rereading it, I feel its accurate but overly negative. I did enjoy most of the book and value the information I got out of it. Most of my complaints are about the presentation. Overall, I would prefer Al Gore’s books and writing style.

The book discusses people at the extreme ends of society, and what events lead to that position. He makes the point that luck and timing are far more important than skills and knowledge.

It was an interesting read and the author makes some good points. But I suspect he is cherry-picking his data. Some of his assumptions didn’t seem reasonable, although the arguments ultimately didn’t rely heavily on them. however, it makes we want to see some raw data.

I think he goes to an excess in denying personal ability and interest in the drive toward success. But he drives a good point home that they can’t be all important as we are lead to believe.