Been reading this the last few days and really enjoying it. It’s making me think about my own story…

Doug got it for me for my birthday. I’ve been nibbling away at it since.

Follow my progress on Readernaut.

Misty and I went to Barnes & Noble today after lunch with Stephen, and well, it as sitting on the new fiction paperback shelf, calling to me. Griffin is a guilty pleasure—Clancy without all the hammering over the head of his politics plus better characterization. Back to 1940s Argentina I go!

Follow my progress on Readernaut.

My progress on Readernaut.

I read about 3/4 of this last night while listening to XO, which we all know is one of my favorite records. It was a worthwhile endeavor, even if it’s a tiny book at only 120 pages and also physically small. Each page is maybe half your usual paperback. That said, as much as I love XO, this is giving me more insight, and that’s always good.

Is anyone interested in reading my thoughts on books previously read? I finished Supercapitalism tonight, thanks to endless nagging by leaving a browser tab open to Readernaut [where I am, predictably, gfmorris] and the arrival of BP2k9 on my doorstep today. All in all, I found Reich’s argument to be cogent if, at times, overly labored; I’m not a book reviewer per se, but I reckon that I am a thinker and a person who talks about such things after being informed, so maybe it’s worth reading? I don’t know. Let me know in the comments.

I’ve actually been reading on this one for a week or so now; I read some over Christmas when I was in Guin, but I haven’t really picked it back up since I’ve been home. I’ll work on it some more tonight. [Still reading on Panic, too, but that's a book of essays, so it's getting read in fits and spurts.]

As I’ve been reading and thinking about the financial markets of late, it’s just so obvious that it’s gotten to be less about investing one’s money wisely in companies one believes in and far more about beating the market in the short term. And, well … look how well Warren Buffett has done by doing the former, and how poorly the market has done by doing the latter.

Sure, Gladwell gets criticism—much of it warranted—for relying on anecdotes and selective theories, oversimplifications, etc. But Gladwell gets people to think and engage, which is, I believe, the true value of a non-fiction writer.

I’m not deep into it, but I did find the bit about the age cutoffs providing an arbitrary selection bias in year-grouped populations. As someone born 1 Oct in a state that, at the time, had a 30 Sep cutoff for kids starting school, I’ve always been one of the oldest folks in my classes. Now, I was offered a couple chances to skip grades [second, as I remember it, and probably eighth as well if I'd pushed for it], but I never really thought it worthwhile, and my parents never pushed the opportunity at me. I think that it’s been an advantage for me.

Now, do I think I’m smart because I had a good birthday, one that let me be more mature than my peers when it came time for school? Is there a reason for the skew of my nerd friend group to early fall birthdays? Perhaps. It’s making me think about it, critically, and that can’t hurt.

Here’s how it works:

1. Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2. Italicize those you intend to read.
3. Mark in red the books you LOVE. [Ed.: I'll cheat and boldly italicize the ones I love.
4. Reprint this list in your blog.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte -- and before you ask, Jeff, no ... I don't like Wuthering Heights either.
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible - I haven’t read all of it, I admit.
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte - Meh.
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams --- oh, I do believe I just lost all my geek cred.
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll -- I've started but not finished it.
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis --- I just lost all my hipster Christian cred.
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens -- or at least I'm fairly sure that I have. If I did, I read it at MSMS, and I'm surprised I remember my own name after that.
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville --- started it once.
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett --- but so, so long ago that I might as well not have.
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath - I'll skip on advice of my psychiatrist.
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt --- I failed to read this when Kari did a virtual book club about it. I am ashamed.
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens --- dammit, I've read more Dickens than I thought. Must be a Mississippi thing?
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web - EB White --- quite some time ago. Age in the single digits.
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom --- Seriously? I love the big-eared dude, but ... really?
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl --- again, forever and a day ago.
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Do you have suggestions for what I should read on this list that I haven't indicated that I would? [Yes, Kari, I hear you yelling for Pride and Prejudice. All the way over here. And my window's closed. ]

While the whole of the idea is to take the reader through the narrative of what it’s like to be a waiter—the lifestyle, the business environment, and how waiting tables seems to attract all sorts of misanthropes and social deviants—The Waiter also takes the reader through his own narrative: how he became a waiter, how he rose to the top, how he was beloved, and how he ended up becoming a minor tyrant at The Bistro. The whole book has a nice arc and speaks well of The Waiter’s newly-chosen career. The advice often given to writers is to write what they know, and The Waiter knows the restaurant biz well enough to tell the front-of-house story engagingly.

I’ve never worked in the restaurant business, but I’ve lived with folks who have. Understanding the economics of that back when I was co-oping and making ends meet most of the time helped me to recognize that, if I was going out to eat, I could afford to tip well. [And if I couldn't afford it, I'd keep my happy ass at home.] I like to think that The Waiter would find me to be a nice customer. I certainly try to be.

If you like a good narrative, are interested in the food business, or just like supporting bloggers-turned-dead-tree-product pushers, Waiter Rant is an excellent choice. I’ll admit: when I first saw the URL, I thought it was “Wait Errant”, like a knight errant. That mental image has always colored how I read The Waiter, but I also think that it fits.

When I decided that I could safely leave the house for longer than a half-hour, I headed to my local Books-A-Million and returned to a pulp fiction favorite of my youth: W.E.B. Griffin. Griffin is no master of detail—characters’ names and linguistic abilities change [most notably in The Corps series], personalities don’t always seem to line up—but yet his characterizations are always interesting, and the prose lends itself to being swiftly read. To wit: where I have certainly fallen out of the habit of reading books for long stretches in the last five years, I pounded 400 pages today like it was nobody’s business.

If you’ll excuse me, I have a book to finish …

It goes on from there, documenting everything Child Protective Services is going to need to put me away for a long time.

Reading the book, I’m astonished at the quality of every essay that wasn’t written by me. Some are sweet, some are heartbreaking, all are funny — it’s a wonderful book, and it truly is an honor to be included. I’m now forever squatting squarely next to some of the best writers on the Web, and they can’t do anything about it, ha ha ha ha.

Told you I was kind of an asshole.

Yeah, well, he is. But he’s an endearing one [at least to me].

Being single myself, you might wonder what attraction a book like this has for me. Well, several of my friends have kids now, and they write about them. It’s fun, because I can go back and look at entries they’ve written and have good memories, even if I’m just barely a part of these kids’ lives—being as, you know, I’m just some dude that’s friends with their parents that comes over from time to time and takes attention away from the star of the show [them] because–GASP!–I want to talk to the parental units. Heh.

Heather Armstrong, Dooce herself, edited the essays and contributed two of her own. As I’ve read the monthly newsletters that she’s written her daughter, Leta, I’ve felt a lot of emotions—most of all, jealousy. In this month’s letter, Heather talks about the stresses of criticism of people writing about their kids and all the obvious critiques that come of it:

But I guess there are some people who are very uncomfortable with the fact that I and many other women are writing about our children on our websites. How dare we violate your privacy like this, how dare we endanger you like this, we obviously care more about ad revenue than what this is going to do to your adolescence. And I have been asked countless times if I am at all worried that you will totally resent me for the details I have shared here. Of course you will you resent me. I have no doubt that you will spend years of your life resenting me and being embarrassed that we have the same last name, despite the fact that I have and will spend years of my life writing love letters to you on the Internet. Despite the fact that I have declared to millions of people that you are the most amazing thing that has ever happened to my life.

You will resent me for your curfew and the fact that I will not let you leave the house in that mini-skirt. You will resent me for showing up to your school in my pajama bottoms and for raising my hand in a PTA meeting when I hadn’t brushed my hair. You will text message your friends to tell them that I am the most horrible person on the planet because I’m forcing you to study for your exam in the morning. You are going to think that I cannot possibly understand what you are going through, and you will slam the door in my face.

Will you resent me for this website? Absolutely. And I have spent hours and days and months of my life considering this, weighing your resentment against the good that can come from being open and honest about what it’s like to be your mother, the good for you, the good for me, and the good for other women who read what I write here and walk away feeling less alone. And I have every reason to believe that one day you will look at the thousands of pages I have written about my love for you, the thousands of pages other women have written about their own children, and you’re going to be so proud that we were brave enough to do this. We are an army of educated mothers who have finally stood up and said pay attention, this is important work, this is hard, frustrating work and we’re not going to sit around on our hands waiting for permission to do so. We have declared that our voices matter.

Let me be honest: if we’d have had the Internet in the early 1980s, my mother would have blogged the shit out of me and my older brother. You would’ve read all sorts of interesting, hilarious, and terrifying stories about us.

I don’t want to get too much into our family dynamics here, but suffice it to say that, growing up, my older brother wasn’t classically gifted in academic ways, and I was. He hated school; I loved it. He was [and still largely is] an introvert; I, well, I never frickin’ shut up. If you read all the bunk of the birth order folks, you’d think we were born out of order—but hell, no, people. Doug and I are who we are because of the sum of our experiences, as varied as they are. Because of the spread between us [five years, ten months] and the fact that Dad was Air Force [meaning we moved every four years, most of the time], we never went through the same stages in life in the same places. We never had the same teachers; only once, when I was in kindergarten and he in sixth grade, did we attend the same school. We are, functionally, two only children who happen to have the same parents. Doesn’t mean that I don’t love him, ’cause I do. We’re just … startlingly different.

I’m sure that Mom would’ve written a couple hundred things that would’ve mortified me when I read them at 14, but she also would’ve written a thousand more that would make me smile, laugh, cry, and appreciate what they went through that much more. And I admit … I would love to have those stories now as I near 30. Well, I do have them, but you don’t have them, Internet. And while it’s narcissistic to want you to read them, I am a blogger.

Anyhow, if you want to read engaging essays on fatherhood, Things I Learned About My Father (In Therapy) is terribly good and worth your time. [And for my friends who are parents and are broke because they're buying diapers, I'll let you borrow my copy as long as your kids don't gnaw on it. 'kay?]

Garrett Oliver’s The Brewmater’s Table: Discovering the Pleasures of Real Beer with Real Food

There is a fair amount to criticize in the book, though. For one, it’s awfully repetitive—understandable at some level, if it’s designed to be a reference text. Reading it even as I did in fits and spurts, I tired of the unending sameness. I think that a fair amount of the writing could have been replaced with some solid tables. Also, I found it a bit amusing that the best American producer listed for many European style beers was … Oliver’s employer, the Brooklyn Brewery. Admittedly, they do great work, but … come on. Also, I found the bicoastal nature of the American beer discussion to be a bit disheartening; yes, there’s great beer brewed on each coast, but there’s also a lot of great beer brewed in Middle America. I was disappointed that Abita in Louisiana got a mention but Shiner didn’t.

All in all, it’s a decent book, but I get the feeling that Oliver’s passion translates better in person rather than on the page. That said, I must thank Scott for getting it for me, because it convinced me that maybe I wanted to try an Irish red ale, and … well, I love Smithwick’s now. [Goal for the next year: have a few pints of Smithwick's with SOG.]

Now, if you know the subject [or the subtitle], you’re saying, “He’s a software middle manager. How does that relate to what you do, NASA nerd?” Please. Software is a high-cost, low-volume business—ignore the fact that one copy of software can be sold a million times. Ideally, software development of the style that Rands discusses is high-dollar, low-vol stuff—exactly the business that I’m in over in manned spaceflight hardware. If we build ten of something, it’s a lot. We’ve got a fundamentally creative process going on, and we get the same crunches and crazy stuff that software dev teams like Rands’s get. [Like, um, my week this week: deliver hardware to foreign customer tomorrow, finalize overseas shipment/export control paperwork on Tuesday, polish the program review charts on Wednesday, have a program review Thursday morning before hopping a plane to Houston for a system requirements review on Friday, then return back here Saturday morning and walk right over to the shop, because hey, next Monday? Fit check before we deliver that hardware in another ten days so it can fly on Shuttle in January. Hooah.]

Obviously, there are things that don’t really apply. [You might think that all the stuff about version control doesn't apply, but ... you've never seen NASA-level configuration management. Honestly, it stuns me that we don't have VCS stuff in place at the pre-deliverable phase. It would make lives much, much easier.] But there is so much that does apply, because … people are people everywhere, and the smart, gifted, creative that you see in software also flock to manned spaceflight, for the same “I want to change the world” reasons—just a different application.

Oh, for the record … I’m an organic, holistic, incrementalist Sally Synthesizer. Most of the time. This is a change for me in a couple ways—I used to be more of a completionist and more of an inward, but … well, the last year has changed me, in ways I will never blog about because doing so requires talking about work I’m doing that I won’t talk about in much more than the abstract or, well, posting press releases or something. But that’s not to say that I won’t tell you a story over a Smithwick’s at Mason’s Pub.

Well, after reading Bryan Peterson’s Understanding Exposure, I have some better idea now. It was a good read to get me to thinking outside of my photographic rut. It’s written with examples all throughout the text and ideas for things to try on your own. Heck, I’m thinking about going to go get a grey card this afternoon. It’s a book that should stand re-reads and references as I add skills to my photographic toolkit. I may never be more than a guy who takes photos at concerts, but hey, you never know. It’s a fun (if expensive) hobby.

That said, when Amy borrowed my camera this week, I had to laugh … I couldn’t remember how to re-engage the onboard flash. I just never use it.

I’d be interested to see what Kandel, an historian and a psychoanalyst by initial training and initial career, would have to say about my reading habits. I think that he’d argue that they’re an outcropping of my neuroses. I think that he’d also consider that, after my initial exuberance to plow through his tome, the death of my sister-in-law not two weeks later interrupted the reading and provided an unrelated but associated event in my brain that made it difficult for me to come back to the book. Even tonight, as I pulled the book out of my backpack—where it had been since my trip to Houston six weeks ago, during which it never was even opened—I recoiled a little. But I resolved to finish it, and I have.

I find it difficult to summarize my feelings on the book. I found it to be terribly fascinating and written such that someone as myself, who has nothing more than a barebones familiarity with biology, could understand it. Admittedly, Kandel approached biological research with an intellectual rigor hardly seen in previous decades; as he notes, biology was considered a “soft science” a century ago, far removed from the rigor of chemistry [which never interested me much] and physics [which certainly did, although I became an engineer anyway]. Admittedly, I come from a technical background, so I’m not the best judge of how your average reader is going to pick up the book—although I find it unlikely that a näif is likely to pick this up at the airport for a little light reading on the red-eye from LAX.

If you’re of a technical bent and are interested in how the mind works—even if you’re not terribly interested in biology as a whole—I think that you’d find it interesting. Since I first began reading it, I’ve known who I’d next hand it to—my friend Jonathan. Jon, perhaps you can steal a page from Stephen’s book and read in the middle of the night when your daughter won’t sleep.

Back tomorrow with some more reading, something that I’ve wanted to do a fair amount of whilst on vacation.

Yeah, so I’m amused even if you aren’t.

I’m only 90 pages in, but I’m really enjoying it so far: Kandel’s initial urge to become what he terms “an intellectual historian” certainly lends his retelling of his own journey into the science of mind [through studies first of psychoanalysis, then medicine, then molecular biology] and the same collective journey. I think Kandel spent a bit too much time fawning over Freud, but … well, Kandel has a Nobel and I’ve got a mortgage and a car note.

I hope to finish this book this month. I’m not as voracious as Kari is [mainly because i don't carve out time to read like she does], but she is making me want to read more. I’d like to average a book a month this year, which is something that I haven’t done since … well, since I started working at TBE. I don’t know that correlation implies causation here—I did also start having challenging classes at the same time, many of which sucked my will to read for pleasure right out the window—but there’s something to it.

Oh, it couldn’t be all the time I spend blogging and reading blogs. I used to do the sportswriting thing, and that sucked just as much of my time.

My thoughts, as I’ve gone along:

• Chapter One: I doubt Ferrazzi’s assertion that “anyone” can become a connector. I really do, and here’s why: truly being a connector requires the ability to make connections. Even if we work at it, some of us are simply better at it than others: we have better memories, we socialize better, etc. When it comes to the old Nature v. Nurture debate, I definitely say “both”, but I also feal that some folks just aren’t capable of becoming good connectors. Of course, that doesn’t sell you as many books, and what Ferrazzi is selling is something that is easily understood.
• Chapter Two: Ahhh yes, the concept of not keeping score. I really believe in this; the only place where I don’t is in who pays for lunch amongst friends. But other than that, Ferrazzi is spot on: doing for others is the way to building a great network. If you want to be important, you have to remember that most everyone is more important than you are.
• Chapter Three: Another head-nodding chapter on goal-setting. Ferrazzi believes, as I do, that you have to have goals. He also believes in the concept that “a goal is a dream with a deadline”. Additionally, he also believes in Personal Boards of Directors. Rochefauld is right: We rarely find that people have good sense unless they agree with us. [To be fair, I probably ran across the conceptualization of a "Personal Board of Directors" in a Weblog discussion of Ferrazzi's text. In any regard, I practice this---and did so just today [7 Aug 2006], in fact.]
• Chapter Four: Building a network before you need it is an important point, but I was quite disappointed that Ferrazzi only hit the point home with a handful of pages and one major anecdote. Given that his earlier chapters have spent a dozen or more pages weaving Ferrazzi’s own experience and a handful of anecdotes into a cogent point, this chapter felt rushed, thrown-in, and unimportant. It’s not, though.
• Chapter Five: Ahhh, audacity. It’s a skill that I’ve let lie fallow of late. Where I used to be highly outgoing, I’ve pulled back in the last few years. I don’t really know why. This is a bit of a kick in the pants to be better about reaching out.
• Chapter Six: Anti-”Networking Jerks”. Another important lesson. Ferrazzi failed to make what I see as an important point: you never know when the peer of today might be working the system as well as you are and becomes the boss of tomorrow. That said, his decision to stress the importance of working with your team is quite good: at this moment, I somehow quasi-manage people decades my senior. The only reason that works—if it does, which I wonder to myself sometimes—is that they all know that I care about who they are as people. My peers and manager are the reasons I chose to continue working for my employer at graduation, and I treat them as such.
• Chapter Seven: Doing Your Homework. I have not done this as much as I should have in life; I have, however, often gone back to a hotel room or my home after meeting someone and taken notes on our conversation: where they went to school, info about their family, etc. This is the reverse of that, and I see the idea behind doing it. It seems creepy, but it’s easily explained: you’re doing your due diligence for people you’d like to meet. Ferrazzi uses this in terms of meeting people at or above his level in business, but this is applicable to us everyday workaday types: who are the managers in your company? What makes them tick? Here in Alabama, I do my dead-level best to determine whether someone is a BAMA fan or an Aubie beforehand so I can mention it to them; me, I just don’t care, as I went to UAH and have familial ties to both schools. [It's easier to get BAMA fans interested, because a distant cousin of mine, Craig Sanderson, was a star wideout for the Crimson Tide back in the 1990s.]
• Chapter Eight: Take Names. This treads into slightly uncomfortable territory for me, but that’s probably a good thing. [Not that I'm uncomfortable with the process because it's bad; more because it pushes the envelope.] Taking names is a good thing, but I would have named this a bit differently. One thing that I have had great success in doing in my short engineering career is this propensity to always add a number to my Treo [and my Palm before that] whenever I call it. If you call someone about business once, you’ll probably call them again! If you start with a single number, you can end up filling it out. For example, I’ve got the cell phone number of the engineering manager on the main contract I work at TBE in my Treo. He gave it to me once when he really needed to get a hold of me, so I used it for that. Conversely, he has my cell number [and I know this because the third time I called his cell that week, he answered me by name]. Now, 95% of the time when I call him—or any of my other business contacts—I go through normal channels of doing it. Just because I have your cell doesn’t mean I’m going to ring you at that unless it’s your main communication point or I really need to talk to you—and when I call folks’ cell phones, they know I need to talk to them. It’s about respect.

  Another quick note: you should use any relational abilities of your contact management software to their fullest effect: note supervisor-employee relationships, who serves as administrative assistant for whom, etc. Speaking of AAs, it never, ever, ever hurts to be personally interested in them. With my company’s program manager for my main work contract, I try to pick up new little bits of info about her every time I call. I’ve never met her [because I've not gone to Houston on this job in the 32 months I've worked it, heh], but we have good small-talk whenever I call. In fact, I always try to treat the situation as if getting to talk to the boss is an afterthought; compared with how many folks seem to run roughshod over people they perceive as unimportant, I get good results. I can’t tell you how many times one of the AAs at work has pulled my ass out of the fire when I’ve deserved to be left to burn to a crisp…

• Chapter 9: Warming the Cold Call: Cold calls just aren’t something that I do, but it’s something that’s realistic in the medium-term of my career. I do like his advice on doing friend-of-a-friend stuff: when I’m chasing something down in the NASA empire, I always maintain a chain of the people who’ve referred me to others. Ferrazzi is right: if I can tell Person B that I’m giving them an interrupt because Person A referred me to them, I get better results. My best example now is in finding rare aerospace metals and fasteners: I now have a small network of folks across contractors and NASA field centers that I can call, all from a two-day event trying to find something that ended up pulling NASA/Kennedy Space Center out of a stop-work. Everyone knows that stop-works down there cripple the space program, so I got some very, very senior people—I mean, stunningly senior; my jaw was dropping as I was making these calls—on the horn to help me out. Like in Taking Names above: I kept a log across the day of as much info as I could get, who they worked for, and who directed me to whom. Anyway…
• Chapter 10, Managing the Gatekeeper: I was clearly ahead of myself here. As I worked through this chapter, I had another realization: my vice-president’s assistant has been a blessing to me over the years. She befriended me when I was just a shavetail of a co-op, for no real good reason. Okay, I know the reason why, but it had little to do with me and all to do with the person who got me my co-op position in the first place. But I’ve had more reason to work with her lately, and man … I owe her a note of thanks. And a lot more, but that, certainly.
• Chapter 11, Never Eat Alone. Given that this is the title chapter, I expected a long, meaty chapter. It’s not there, folks. I do like Ferrazzi’s idea of bringing people together, though: when I do go to Houston next, I now have the idea to go out to dinner with my engineering manager, any colleagues we can drag along, and any of my Caedmon’s Call Houstonian friends that I can scare up while there. I know that some of my Houston colleagues are believers [and that's all I'll say about that: I try to do my best to keep religion out of the office unless approached], and … putting those folks together would be great fun for me.
• Chapter 12, Share Your Passions. Ferrazzi doesn’t directly say this, but it’s important to know that who we are in our business lives is merely one-quarter to one-half of who we are [in terms of time spent doing our jobs] He encourages the reader to share his or her passions with the people they meet, seeking to find common ground. I have found this to be effective myself: at the end of the day, you’d rather be talking with a customer about your shared passion for canoeing—or actually doing it!—rather than re-hashing the issues you’ve already hashed out that day.
• Chapter 13, Follow Up or Fail. He makes good points all around about following up, including timing for doing it in various situations. There is first-mover advantage in following up…
• Chapter 14, Be a Conference Commando. Ferrazzi clearly gets the key thing with conferences: an opportunity to make acquaintances that can become relationships. Conferences are singles bars for business. [Note: I don't go to conferences.] I felt like this chapter should have been broken up a bit—it’s far longer than any other to this point—but you can winnow it down to three things: 1. Do your homework beforehand. 2. GET OUT THERE. 3. Follow up, follow up, follow up.

Okay, okay, I ran out of energy after that point, mainly because this chapter-by-chapter bit was making it take forever to read the bloody book. My generalized thoughts after finishing last night:

1. I’m not really sure that I’m in Ferrazzi’s complete target audience. He seems to be after the people that want to be C$Os in corporations. Me, I’m fine with the concept of being a middle-to-upper manager, perhaps a VP in my 50s or something. Really and truly, I don’t have the top-of-the-world aspirations that Ferrazzi has. Unfortunately for the reader, that’s the case with most of us, and Ferrazzi loses site of that, I feel. His principles—which are, on the whole, very good ones—get diminished more than a bit by this. The biggest example is his bit about being the CEO of Me, Inc., and about building your own personal brand. I might have bought that crap five years ago, but I just don’t buy it now, largely for theological reasons. [That's a whole other post there.] I hate that an otherwise good book was diminised by that.
2. That said, the best premise that Ferrazzi provides—never in so few words as I would like—is a quite simple one: you get the most value out of any network to which you add the most value. I would like to think that this is something that I intrinsically understand and execute at this point. [Is it any wonder that I love BitTorrent, really?]
3. The book could stand a re-write. I cherished Ferrazzi’s anecdotal story-telling, which fuels much of the book, but I would argue that the book is not formulaic enough. Look, every good book about business needs to have a good idea—usually common sense packaged in uncommon ways—told in an engaging manner. That said, I’ve found that the books that I like the best are either told by excellent writers—guys at the level of a Malcolm Gladwell or a Michael Lewis—or by competent writers who know that they should stick to a formula [notably, David Allen]. Yes, reading formulaic prose gets tiresome, but it divides and conquers the subject matter into manageable chunks, which allows you to read really good books at the same time you’re chunking your way through the other book. Ferrazzi and Raz seem to veer towards and away from a formula, and I wish that they’d stuck to it.
4. Stephen, you might read this and see what you’d have to say, given how often you, Jonathan, and I have discussed it.

Okay, two months to read that? Oi.

Here’s what showed up on my doorstep from the family:

Must finish up the Ferrazzi tonight…

The level of a man’s intelligence is the degree to which he agrees with me.

That’s pretty close to how Tom Clancy stated it in one of his novels. I think the source, though, falls from François, Duc de La Rochefoucald:

We rarely find that people have good sense unless they agree with us.

– Reflections, maxim 347

Excellent!

Me: I’ll be out of the office on the 8th and 9th.
Boss: Oh? Going somewhere?
Me: Yep. Portland.
Boss: Oregon?
Me: Yep. Remember a couple weeks ago when I was trying to figure out when I could go see Over the Rhine during the [program] monthly?
Boss: Yeah. You were frustrated about the shows in Ohio being on Easter weekend.
Me: You got it. Never been to Portland, always wanted to go, and now I have a great excuse.

Two things:

1. Yes, Sean, we need to talk before I go.
2. Yes, Mom, I will come to Tennessee before I go off on this crazy trip. I’m coming either next weekend or the next, whichever doesn’t have choir singing at church. I know that we’re off one of the two, but I just don’t know which one is clear.

And yes, if you’re curious, this is replacing my longer planned trip in July. I had that trip half-planned, but I’m doing this instead. I’ll just shelve those plans until next year. Actually, I’ll probably shelve them until next April. As this year’s gone by, it’s made sense to me that the best time for me to take vacation is just after Easter: any earlier and I mess up Lent stuff at church and run into co-workers’ Spring Break trips with kids, and any later I run into summer vacations with kids. [And if you're saying, "Well, what about the fall and winter?"---you maroon, that's HOCKEY SEASON!]

Lastly, the greatest thing about all this is that, assuming I don’t take any time the rest of the year, I’ll have a good three weeks banked up by the time I’m ready to take vacation next year. I hit my five-year point at work for accruing vacation time in early September, so by the time I’m ready to do the trip I’d like to do, I’ll be able to make it a driving trip and not a flying one. Driving is what I want to do most of all…