by Jonathan Gottschall
ISBN: 9780547391403

If you are going to write about stories, you should probably be able to tell one. Otherwise, you’ve got a credibility problem. Thankfully, Gottschall can tell stories and doesn’t hesitate to give color to his theories using examples from his own life.

Not that the book is all about him. It’s all about us, and how we are creatures of story. Human minds are wired for story, and this makes it possible for us to be in turn wired by story. Exploring this idea doesn’t destroy the magic — how our brains operate and what we believe is more layered than a trick that loses it’s power when it’s explained, after all. Science isn’t the enemy of story.

Story is a broader concept than at first you might realize. From the thoughts spinning through your head the moment your alarm goes off, to nearly every second of television you watch, to many of the conversations you have, to the shows in your head when you are sleeping — these are all stories. Fiction is “Character + Predicament + Attempted Extrication” — there’s even and equation of sorts for stories. (Science is a story, too.)

Knowing something is “just” a story doesn’t change how the brain reacts to it, either: “the emotional brains processes it as real”. If you are thinking emotional brain doesn’t sound scientific, Gottschall is talking to neuroscientists about regions of the brain that show activity during a functional MRI.

Our mind working this way is “a crucial evolutionary adaption” — storytelling provides meaning and creates a coherence in our lives that we otherwise wouldn’t have. Think things are confusing now? Imagine for a moment that there’s no internal narrator in your head, no ability to sequence and relate events to others… doesn’t sound human, does it?

Not that the storytelling mind is perfect, it isn’t. Both in the ways that our minds in general aren’t perfect (we forget things) but in ways that make us susceptible to conspiracy theories. The drive to find meaning is so strong, we have a tendency to create it when it isn’t obvious, or isn’t there. It is in this way that conspiracy theories make sense: they are a “solution” to the problem of evil. Why do bad things happen? It is hard for our brain not to know the answer, and when it doesn’t know, it is prone to make one up or believe a “logical” story that gives us a meaningful answer, so strong is our desire for meaning. It also means that we can lose ourselves in and learn from novels: “Good fiction tells intensely truthful lies.”

Storytelling is then, evolutionarily speaking, a tradeoff worth making. We might believe things that aren’t really true, but on the other hand, stories let us relate our communal experiences over space and time. Our memories are flawed, and our sense of ourselves as protagonist in the drama of our lives further erodes our adherence to literal truth, but these tendencies can still serve a greater good. Memory (which is a story we tell ourselves about the past) has a purpose: “to allow us to live better lives.” That we have the ability to forget or to reframe events isn’t a flaw, it is by design — one that lets us keep telling the story of our lives in ways that lets us grow and change.

We do seem to have some kind of need for redemption stories, don’t we?

I highly recommend this book. If you ever wondered why stories have such power, reading this book is a good place to begin your exploration of the answer.

In this book Sims tries to get people comfortable with uncertainty, particularly the uncertainty around business decisions involving new product development. He quotes a major player in the space (Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com founder) early on to help establish credibility for his arguments: “You can’t put into a spreadsheet how people are going to behave around a new product”.

Experimental innovators — like Bezos — “do things to discover what they should do” instead of developing painstakingly detailed master plans. It isn’t that detailed master plans never work. When “much is known, procedural planning approaches work perfectly well” Sims tells us, it’s when they are unknown that they don’t work. (One problem I see is that companies like to think they know more than they do — so people rely on master plans that are but illusions of certainty.)

So what are little bets? They are “concrete actions taken to discover, test, and develop ideas that are achievable and affordable”. If this sounds familiar, perhaps you’ve been reading Eric Ries’s Lean Startup stuff. Little bets are experiments that can fuel progress through the learn, build, measure loop: placing little bets is the minimum viable mindset in action.

It’s that simple, but placing little bets isn’t necessarily easy. We’ve got human nature to contend with, and we aren’t always as mentally flexible as it would be good for us to be:

By expecting to get things right at the start, we block ourselves psychologically and choke off a host opportunities to learn. In placing so much emphasis on minimizing errors or the risk of any kind of failure, we shut off chances to identify the insights that drive creative progress. Becoming more comfortable with failure, and coming to view false starts and mistakes as opportunities opens us up creatively.

Levels of resilience vary widely, but the good news is we have the ability to change our mindset and develop greater tolerance for failure. It might not sound possible to change a fixed mindset to a become more of a growth mindset, but it is. (Sims cites Carol Dweck’s work on mindset for this.)

Experiments flex growth mindset muscles. They encourage us to focus on what we can learn, rather than what we might lose. Pixar’s creative process (“going from suck to nonsuck”) is a growth mindset in action, as they iterate from sketchy storyboards to brilliance. The important point being, they don’t start at brilliance, it takes a lot of work to get there.

Pixar wouldn’t even be here if Steve Jobs didn’t have a growth mindset. Instead of focussing on what he expected to gain from Pixar’s animation division, he continually made investments in the company that were about what he could afford to lose. (If this sounds like a no-brainer, remember the Pixar you know isn’t primarily the hardware company Jobs originally bought.) It wasn’t one giant bet that created the Pixar we know today, but several small wins that resulted from little bets.

Invention and discovery emanate from being able to try seemingly wild possibilities and work in the unknown; to be comfortable being wrong before being right; to live in the world as a keen observer, with an openness to experiences and ideas; to play with ideas without censoring oneself or others; to persist through dark valleys with a growth mind-set; to improvise ideas in collaboration and conversation with others; and, to have a willingness to be misunderstood, sometimes for long periods of time, despite conventional wisdom.

Perhaps best part, if you aren’t there in your thinking right now, is that you don’t have to change everything at once. Start small, pick one thing — one experiment that might create some fear or uncertainty, and do it anyway, just to see. Something small enough you can focus on the afford to lose part… there’s so much to gain if you do.

This book is a quirky and pleasant object: it features sort of cardboardy covers, an interestingly flat/matte feel to the illustrations, and inviting, expansive margins with the text. Handling it, I saw that Seth Godin, Tom Peters, and the Nelson Mandela Foundation blurbed it. Okay, that got my attention. Not that I give tremendous weight to blurbs, but I do pay attention when they are by people I like, or they are an unexpected mix.

In this book, John Hunt (Worldwide Creative Director at the advertising agency TBWA) offers seventeen observations, and artist Sam Nhlengethwa illustrates them. The feel is provisional, collaged, open instead of fixed, and the intention is to provoke thought to lead to forward motion.

You may not expect to hear things like this from an advertising guy, but:

If something is fundamentally bad or wrong, it’s pointless trying to embroider it with good ideas. If the premise is false, no amount of great thinking is going to change that. Yet time and time again, ideas are asked to fight lost causes.

It would be pretty easy to soundbite this book (“no one orders a bouquet of beige flowers”, “logic is kryptonite”) and make is sound like something fluffy and easy to snarkily pick apart, but that isn’t the point. The point is to provoke yourself, and hopefully those around you, to more open thinking, to engage with ideas and change things as a result.

Original thinking needs a longer leash. Continuously taking your mind for a walk to exactly the same place doesn’t really exercise it. You can’t connect different things together if what you’re seeing is always the same. It’s because you know the narrow confines of your particular space that you have to venture further afield. The gap between what you already know and what you’re exploring is often where the best ideas pop up.

Recommended if: the bozos are getting you down, if you want a source of inspiration close at hand, if physical books about creativity make you happy.

This book is far more interesting than one might think, given the title. (Unless productivity porn is your thing, in which case it is that interesting but not what you’d expect.) I believe it started off life as an article in The New Yorker (“The Checklist”), and in an all too rare turn of events deserved to grow to full book length.

Gawande’s insight is as simple as it is radical: checklists, when well-designed, can make experts dramatically better at what they do. In operating rooms, using checklists can save lives. In building enormously complex structures, they can prevent serious problems and correct issues before they are more expensive to fix. Checklists made is possible to fly the B-17 bomber, and help make commercial air travel safe. The power of checklists isn’t limited to risk reduction, either: checklists can be used to successfully promote communication and working as a team. If this sounds in the least bit dry, it’s because I’m not doing Gawande’s writing justice — he has a knack for telling stories.

The real mystery is: why aren’t aren’t checklists more widely deployed? Experts resist them, because they fall into the trap of thinking they know better — rather then seeing the checklist as a tool to let them act more effectively to leverage their skills and insight. And checklists aren’t revenue-generating the way a blockbuster medication or medical device can be — though they can be responsible for enormous cost savings. Creating checklists and refining them can be a thought- and labor-intensive process, and it requires behavior change, something most of us are not as good at or willing to do as we might believe ourselves to be.

After reading this book, 1) I was grateful for aviation checklists, as I am a nervous flyer, 2) determined to ask about the use of checklists in the operating room if anyone in my family needs surgery, and 3) curious to see if I can implement checklists in my work environment.

I really like Lamott’s nonfiction. (This isn’t a dig at her fiction; I haven’t read any of her novels.) I’ve read Operation Instructions, Traveling Mercies, Plan B, and possibly the most well-known, Bird by Bird. This book is the same vein as Traveling and Plan B, so if you liked those, you will probably also like this.

Lamott is still pissed off over politics, still striving to do the right thing when what she is tempted to do is get even, still sharing the struggle of raising her son who is now a teenager. The kind of laughter generated by her writing is the kind of laughing you often hear in twelve step meetings: a recognition of the crazy and how, really, once you calm down, so much of that shit is optional.

Recommended if you have a sense of humor even about important topics, a broad-minded spirituality, and an outright affection for mouthy women who say what they think. If you don’t have all these things, this book will probably make you angry, so why bother?