Godin listed the skills he felt couldn’t be outsourced.

analysis

insight

surprise

responsibility

humor

creativity

guts

respect

charisma

vision

calm

love

Did you learn any of those in a classroom? The only way I’ve found them is to surround yourself with people that already have them. To absorb them through iteration and imitation until they become dispositional. Books are only a mediocre substitute. The key though is to avoid the academic pressures that push you away from those skills and towards sycophantry, cautiousness, repetition, tradition, jealousy and shortsightedness. Because once you tattoo yourself with those any of these viewpoints, the scars never go away.

The Effect of Word of Mouth on Sales: Online Book Reviews—Judith A. Chevalier

DO NOT read this paper. It’s awful. It actually uses this sentence as its conclusion “The evidence suggests that customer word of mouth has a casual impact on consumer purchasing behavior at two internet retail sites. We believe this has not been shown before.” Groundbreaking.

Street Gangs: The New Urban Insurgency—Max G Manwaring

I wrote about this here.

Brave New War—John Robb

A MUST read. Wrote about it here.

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

It’s the third time I’ve read it this year. Every time I do I become more convinced that it ought to be included in high school canon. It ought to go Scarlet Letter, Huckleberry Finn, The Jungle, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mocking Bird, Catcher in the Rye, Fahrenheit 451, Fight Club. Is there a better book that sums our age? Anything that better encapsulates the existential vacuum and how a society struggles to overcome it? Everyone of those other books were banned or disparaged or slighted by critics but in time we came to see how valuable they were. FC is the same.