I’ve come to understand I’m a life-long learner, even though I don’t have a piece of paper with my name on it. One of the ways I enjoy learning is books. I’m particularly drawn to books that are not on the best sellers lists.
Here are some of the books I’ve read recently and what some of my takeaways were.
Ask Iwata : Words of Wisdom from Satoru Iwata, Nintendo’s Legendary CEO
Iwata was CEO of Nintendo during some of their biggest years. He started as a small game programmer and worked his way up the ranks. He was beloved by the community because of his gamer roots and point of view. Unfortunately he died tragically about 10 years ago from a sudden onset of throat cancer. He never got to write his book, but he was a frequent writer of “Iwata Speaks” for the Japanese version of the Nintendo website. In this book his thoughts and wisdom are translated from the original Japanese. Nintendo is where I first learned of the concept of “Blue Ocean Strategy” and Nintendo to this day is a Blue Ocean company. I enjoyed this book by challenging myself where I can apply Nintendo philosophy in the things I do, and how can I translate something like how can game design benefit me.
Your Music, Your People – Derek Sivers.
Derek had written an earlier book that really spoke to me, called “Anyway You Want” which documented how he created a multi-million dollar company called CDBaby.com without any traditional education or experience. He simply solved a problem that he had, that other people had. His earlier book was the first time I read anything that resembled my own story.
In this newer book of his, he shares his wisdom of marketing music. I had a thought early while reading it, “What if I read this book interpreting music as a metaphor?” What if marketing music could be applied to anything that involves the intangible and magical? Once I made that shift in my thinking, the book really blew my mind open with possibilities.
Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings: The rise and fall of Sierra On-Line, Ken Williams
As someone who was part of the 1980s computer revolution, Sierra On-Line was an important company to me. They created some of the most ground-breaking games of the 1980s. I loved traveling back in time with this book and learning more about their modest beginnings. I’m always drawn to stories of people making it up as they go, and this book is filled with that. Ken and his wife Roberta started by making games from scratch and copying them disk by disk themselves and selling them in Ziploc bags with photocopies of the instructions. From those modest beginnings they took Sierra to one of the biggest game companies of its time and Ken realized his dream of being CEO of a public company. All of the magic and fairy dust of their meteoric rise is ruined when they are eventually bought by a larger company. I appreciated Ken taking the time to write this book for the public record 25 years after he left the company.
Loserthink : How Untrained Brains are Ruining America, Scott Adams
Scott Adams is best known for being the creator of the “Dilbert” comics. Lately he’s found a voice as a provocative thinker and I appreciated him challenging my own way of seeing the world.
This book helped me understand better why people do the things they do, or vote the ways they vote, when it makes no sense to me. I also appreciated some proposed “new rules” he suggested in the book:
The 20-year rule – that we don’t judge people for things in their past from over 20 years ago. This comes up a lot these days when skeletons are found in people’s (public figures and politicians) closets and nothing can remain in the past any longer. Do we want to live in a world where we don’t acknowledge that people can change and evolve or do we want to tar and feather them forever for things they did much earlier in life? Would you want the same done to you?
The 48 hour rule – That I allow someone to apologize and take back something they said, no questions asked, if it’s done within 48 hours. This comes up most frequently when an inelegant statement is made on somewhere like on Twitter. If they show enough judgment to walk back their quote, it’s not for me to mind read them or judge what’s truly in their heart. In our current “outrage” climate, these things are never dropped.
