The Dawn of Innovation by Charles R. Morris

Over the course of the 19^th Century, the United States transformed from a frontier nation dependent on trade with former colonizing nations to a leading manufacturer and exporter of goods. Charles R. Morris describes how America accomplished this change in The Dawn of Innovation.

The forces that led to the development of an American system of manufacturing were practical and cultural. There were labor shortages, especially for skilled labor. Americans in every field were interested in mechanizing work to get it done with the people and skills available. Americans were also largely middle class, at least in their way of thinking. They had to have the means to cross the Atlantic, and once here wage pressure and the availability of resources quickly made many people middle class. The middle class valued improvement and economic independence. In the U.S. they were free from the limiting class structures of Europe.

The middle class were also consumers. They were interested in the goods and lifestyle associated with wealth, but at prices they could afford. And there were a lot more of them that the handful of rich people who were the consumers of traditional luxury goods. Americans wanted to produce, market and distribute goods on a mass scale that was hard for Europeans of the time to even imagine.

The cloth-making industry was one of the first to bring together the aspects of modern manufacturing: specialization, organization of work flow, mechanization and automation. American cloth makers took—sometimes stole—these things from the British. A leap that the Americans made, but not the British, was to apply these same concepts to all kinds of production.

The organization of work was especially helpful in the U.S., where the skilled workers needed for precision machine making were few. Morris uses the arms industry as an example of American leadership in the transformation from craft piecework to an organized workflow with uniform standards.

Morris also undertakes some myth busting. Eli Whitney is associated with first rifles—really the first manufactured goods—to have interchangeable parts, which is a hallmark of modern manufacturing. Whitney and others promised interchangeability to win contracts with the Army, but he never achieved it; it took him a while to even become a good gun maker. It took decades of work by others to achieve interchangeable parts. This was both a matter of organizing work and developing more precise machining equipment.

Morris shows how innovations accumulated over time to create American manufacturing leadership. He shows how the culture and natural environment were incubators for such development.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Gentleman Scientists by Tom Schachtman

Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick

The Power Makers by Maury Klein

The Society for Useful Knowledge by Jonathan Lyons

Waste and Want by Susan Strasser

Morris, Charles R. The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution. New York: Public Affairs, 2012.

Atomic Habits by James Clear

Though we might like to imagine ourselves exercising a lot of conscious control over our lives, a lot—perhaps half—of what we do in a day is habitual. Our habits can make us or break us. Fortunately, we can change our habits.

 Of course learning new habits is not always easy, especially when it comes to breaking old habits. We’ve learned a lot about how we how our brains work in forming habits that can help. James Clear organizes this into a system in Atomic Habits.

 Before he gets started, though, Clear makes an interesting point. Our identities can be wrapped up in our habits. It can be hard to stop a behavior we identify with. It can be hard to start something new and stick with it if we think of it as out of character for ourselves. If we want to be different, we have to believe we can be different and picture ourselves that way.

 Clear lays out four laws for creating habits that are easy to adopt. The inverse of these laws can make a behavior more difficult and help us break bad habits.

 Effective habits are obvious (in your face cues about what to do), attractive, easy and they provide immediate rewards. The more of these characteristics you can bring to your new habit the better. Set up your environment and daily routines to bring the behavior you want into your awareness. Find ways to link it to other things you want. Remove obstacles and concentrate on small, doable changes.  Find a way to get something  out of performing now (consistent with you goal) to carry you until the more long-term payoffs of the behavior kick in.

 The inverse of these work to weaken bad habits. Put reminder and triggers of old behaviors out of sight. Find ways to make it distasteful and unappealing. Put barriers in the way of performing the old habit---make it harder. Creates disincentive and make it costly.

 Clear provides several examples from his own life and from others. The book is peppered with references to his web site where he provides additional examples, forms and worksheets.

 I previously wrote about this book here.

 If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Big Thing by Phyllis Korkki

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

Changing for Good by James O. Prochaska, John C. Norcross & Carlo C. DiClemente

The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande

Get Smart! by Brian Tracy

How to Fail at Almost Anything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams

Level Up Your Life by Steve Kamb

One Small Step Can Change Your Life by Robert Maurer

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

Secrets You Keep from Yourself by Dan Neuharth

Small Move, Big Change by Caroline L. Arnold

Succeed by Heidi Grant Halvorson

This Year I Will... by M. J. Ryan

 Clear, James. Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Habits. New York: Avery, 2018.

The Revenge of Analog by David Sax

The joke about visions of the future that never panned out is usually, “Where is my flying car?” The proliferation and promises of digital technology over the last two or three decade might prompt us to pose some other questions such as, “Where is my paperless office?”

In The Revenge of Analog, journalist David Sax discusses how analog technologies are sometimes thriving in the digital ages. Some are making comebacks. Some never went away. Some are growing more popular because of digital technology, not in spite of it.

Sax looks at a lot of analog technologies. This includes vinyl records, paper and pen, tabletop games, books and brick-and-mortar stores.

Some of these have very interesting histories in how they have fallen, risen and interacted with digital technology. What I found most interesting in the book is the reasons analog persists. It is usually because it brings something that digital technology leaves out.

For instance, analog technology appeals to the senses. I know a lot of bibliophiles who love the smell of books, though it would not seem to be a pertinent feature. The IRL space is simply much richer that even the most detailed virtual space.

 “There’s never going to be a virtual environment as completely engaging as the physical environment is,” computer game designer Bernie De Koven quoted in The Revenge of Analog

Analog is usually slow. Generally, a strength of digital is that it is almost always faster. We don’t always want fast. Sometime the slower pace, the pauses, helps us to take things in and savor them. For instance, when you listen to a vinyl record, you can’t skip songs at the touch of a button, you have to lift the needle and move it or even change records. You can’t listen to any songs you have in random order, but you have to listen to song on a single album in the order the artist or producer arranged them unless you introduce a lot of pauses as you interact with the discs and player.

Analog is limited. The digital world can be so rich with information and choices that it can be overwhelming. Paper and pen limits the size, colors and effects you can produce. These limitations help us hone in on the main issues quickly and get moving.

“People think limitations are bad things. But it moves the process forward, in a good way. You can easily get lost in the process. It’s easier to stick to a plan when you have limitations,” analog recording studio owner Chris Mara quoted in The Revenge of Analog

In the real realm of communication, analog is more intimate that digital. The ultimate analog communication is a face-to-face conversation, mediated by nothing but the air in between two people. We send off a lot of nonverbal signals when we speak, and we sense these signals from others, which gives us a more rich and nuanced understanding of what is said (and unsaid) than we can get from a text message or even over Skype or Facetime.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Learn Better by Ulrich Boser

The Organized Mind by Daniel J. Levitin

Sax, David. The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter. New York: PublicAffairs, 2016.

How We Got to Now by Steven Johnson

The prevailing myth of invention is that it is the product of a solitary genius. Steven Johnson takes on this myth in How We Got to Now.

Johnson’s book is a history of invention with a focus on six particular innovations. He demonstrates that simultaneous invention is common, suggesting that societal knowledge, norms and expectations play a part in invention—at least in providing an environment in which certain types of inventions can be created and flourish.

Thomas Edison and the light bulb is the classic myth challenged by simultaneous invention. Humphrey Davy demonstrated an incandescent electric light in 1802 and Frederick de Moleyns received the first patent for a light bulb in 1841. By the time Edison got involve, people had been working on light bulbs for 30 years, and the potential for electric light had been now for 70 years. Edison and his team of collaborators deserve a lot of credit for creating a commercially successful electric lighting system, inventing solutions to many problems along the way, but is a story of systematic hard work.

Edison’s electric lighting system depended on a lot of prior technology, which relates to another of Johnson’s points: clusters of inventions. An invention can illuminate a previously unnoticed problem (or create a new one). For instance, the availability of affordable books that follow Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press revealed that many people were farsighted. This sparked a demand for reading glasses. The tinkering with lenses led to the invention of telescopes and microscopes. Galileo took up the telescope and made discoveries in astronomy that reshaped how people saw the world. Robert Hooke used the microscope to explore a seemingly alien world of the very tiny thing all around us, though the revolution he inspired took longer to bloom.

Johnson explores other aspects of invention and society. I think it is fair to say that his view of how invention works is a lot messier than the myth. Inventors are at the right place at the right time, with open minds that are prepared (likely by accident) to make a connection and a willingness to do the work of thinking, testing and making something new. They probe the boundaries of their fields, tinker and throw themselves into hobbies that bring them, often with companions, to crossroads that challenge their notions of where they can go and how they can get there.

On the whole, Johnson presents a vision of hope in our history. We are not dependent on genius or serendipity; human creativity is both a social and an individual process in which the collision of ideas leads to new ideas. We live in an era where the collision of ideas may be more possible than ever.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Ada's Algorithm by James Essinger

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

The Big Necessity by Rose George

The Big Roads by Earl Swift

The Big Thirst by Charles Fishman

Bottled Lightning by Seth Fletcher

Circles by James Burke

Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury

Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes

The Great Stink by Clare Clark

Hedy's Folly by Richard Rhodes

Make a Joyful Sound by Helen Elmira Waite

The Pinball Effect by James Burke

The Powerhouse by Steve Levine

Rust by Jonathan Waldman

Steven Johnson also wrote

The Ghost Map

The Invention of Air

Johnson, Steven. How We Got To Now: Six Innovations that Make the Modern World. New York: Riverhead, 2014.

How to Improve Your Memory by James D. Weinland

James D. Weinland’s How to Improve Your Memory is, in my mind, primarily a book on study skills. Weinland’s interest is learning, and memory is an important part of that.

As I read the book, it seemed to me that learning successfully is built on four areas: intention, attention, repetition and organization. Weinland has tips related to all of these.

Intention to learn is easy to come by when you have an interest in a subject. If you’re not interested, you’ll need to find some other motivation. Think about why you’re studying a subject and the benefits you hope to achieve. Even if you’re a student and you “have to” take a class, think of the opportunities that might open up to you if you get a good grade.

Attention is very important to memory and learning. If you forget something, it is very likely you weren’t paying attention to begin with. Remove distractions from your environment and mind (this wasn’t an issue when this book was published in 1957, but put away your cell phone and put it out of your mind). Engage as many senses as you can.

Remember that attention isn’t an infinitely available commodity. Get the rest you need. Don’t burn yourself out by focusing too long on one subject or closely related subjects. Give your mind, especially the executive functions a break, by alternating unrelated subjects, switching back and forth from mental to physical activities and making a little time for rest and recreation.

Repetition is important to memory, but it doesn’t need to be boring. Allowing time between practice sessions can actually improve performance.

Organization can go a long way to making learning easier. Some of the most successful mnemonic techniques involve arranging and associating things we want to remember with things we already remember well, especially locations. For instance, pigeonholing involves creating a spacial arrangement, such as a grid, with things to be remembered in each space. Mind maps do something similar with a more free-form arrangement that also takes advantage of our ability to remember images and colors. Memory castles are sophisticated applications of this strategy. Understanding how things are divided into wholes and parts or groups can help you break down subjects into smaller, easier to remember, parts that are connected so that remembering on item helps you remember the others.

I tend to connect the use of meaningful association to the idea of organization. Meaningful association builds on what you already know. This could be building on or filling in your background on a subject, finding analogies to familiar or using acronyms and rhymes. A related practice is it to come up with an outrageous image that represents what you want to remember. We find it easy to remember images—the more unusual the image the easier it is to recall—so we can take advantage of that by associating what we want remember with a crazy image that reminds of it.

The book is dated, but I think the advice is applicable even if the science of memory has advance. In addition, the book has the advantage of being short.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Double Your Brain Power by Jean Marie Stine

Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer

The Organized Mind by Daniel J. Levitin

Rapt by Winifred Gallagher

Your Intelligence Makeover by Edward F. Droge, Jr.

Weinland, James D. How to Improve Your Memory. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1957.

The Grid by Gretchen Bakke

Anthropologist Gretchen Bakke has written about a system integral to the American lifestyle that we associate more with engineers: the electrical grid. The Grid describes how we arrived at the system we have, the forces that are operating on it and how they might shape its future.

The grid is more than a set of wires on poles. It is also a system of companies, markets, laws, regulations, government agencies, cultures and individual people. As an engineer, I feel it is important for me to be aware of the business, policy and cultural aspects of my work. Technology cannot be easily isolated from these things. An engineer who focuses completely on technology risks putting a lot of effort into a solution that fails for important non-technical reasons.

Having commented on engineering, I should mention that Bakke’s book is written for laymen.

She explains the science and technology of electricity in terms that I think most people can understand.

One of the reasons she doesn’t need to resort to deep technological or scientific explanations it that technology is not the biggest barrier to the grid of the future. Of course, technology is very important, but much of what we need to make our grid more resilient and wireless is already in our hands, or will be within our grasp in the near future.

The harder things to wrangle are the business and regulatory aspects of the grid. Renewable energy sources (especially variable sources like wind and solar), distributed generation (which is becoming increasingly affordable), increased efficiency, flat or declining demand, and regulatory reforms over the last three decades have put the squeeze on electric utilities. Our electric utilities, and the system of large, central generation plants they operate, were built for the business and regulatory setting of the early 20^th Century, when rapidly increasing demand meant that the consolidation of generation into large plants controlled by highly-regulated monopolies made sense as a way to provide ever cheaper power for an ever growing population of customers.

By the 1960s, this model of growth was failing putting upward pressure on electric prices. Regulatory reforms starting in the 1980s introduced competition to electric markets that put another squeeze on utility profits.

These historic changes are still in action and accelerating. Environmental regulation and customer expectations about the use of renewable energy are also a growing pressure on the system, especially because the variability of solar and wind energy make it difficult to balance demand and generation on the grid, which must be done constantly and almost instantaneously.

In addition to describing how our grid came to be and the troubling weaknesses it has in light of our changing environment and expectations, Bakke looks to the future. Of course, no one knows what the grid make look like, but current developments have the potential to scale up to shape the grid.

A future grid is likely to be a highly computerized system of integrated microgrids that can operate independently when the larger grid is out. It will include many generators distributed across the grid (large, central power plants are on the way out) that take advantage of alternative and renewable energy sources. New developments in energy storage, such as the batteries that will be in fleets of electric cars, and a host of smart meters, homes and appliances will help us balance the grid. We’ll need to develop standards that allow all this new technology to communicate and work together as it also controls the existing parts of the grid that continue to be useful. Continued regulatory reform will be needed to adapt to these changes and possibly to force openness into a market that existing power monopolies may be tempted to guard. Utilities will need to find new business models, and we all might need to be open to what they could be, because it is unlikely that they’ll be able to keep going by selling kilowatt-hours in the old fashioned way.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

The Big Roads by Earl Swift

Make a Joyful Sound by Helen Elmira Waite

Bakke, Gretchen. The Grid: The Fraying Wires between Americans and Our Energy Future. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016.

You Can, You Will by Joel Osteen

In You Can, You Will, megachurch pastor Joel Osteen discusses qualities of a winner. Actually, Osteen might say that you’re already a winner, you just need to start believing and acting one to see in come to fruition.

First, winners have a vision and they stay focused on in. A practical way that Osteen suggests to keep your vision before your eyes is to put things in your environment, like sayings or objects, that remind you of your vision.

Winners stay focused on their goals. In particular, they don’t get derailed by trying to please everyone or to please people who are never happy. They know the difference between being kind and generous and taking improper responsibility for the happiness of others.

Osteen encourages people to expect good things to happen. Reinforce this belief by actively remembering good things that have happened to you in the past.

Be positive intentionally. Do your best to enjoy whatever you can in your current situation, even while you hope and work for something better.

Winners strive for excellence. Do the best you can and look for ways to improve. Show your desire for excellence by taking care of yourself and your things.

Always be growing. If you’re not working to improve your abilities, you’ll get left behind. Besides, if you have big dreams, there are probably many things you need to learn and improve on your way to achieving them.

Make service a lifestyles. Try to make life actually better for actual people. As a bonus, you’ll have more satisfaction with life.

Finally, be enthusiastic. Stir up your passion. It’s easy to get bogged down and discouraged, so you have to intentionally maintain a good attitude that will carry you through rough times.

Mostly, this is standard self-help material. Osteen touches on a more deeply and fundamentally Christian topic in the chapter on serving others. The Bible repeatedly describes God as a helper of the poor, widowed, orphan and oppressed. He repeatedly expresses the pleasure he takes in His people when they help needy people.

Though he doesn’t devote a chapter too it, Osteen emphasizes the need to surround yourself with good people. You need to spend time with people who will challenge and encourage you. Spend as much time as you can with people you want to be like.

Joel Osteen also wrote I Declare.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Be All You Can Be! by John C. Maxwell

Creative Living for Today by Maxwell Maltz

Life's Not Fair, but God is Good by Robert H. Schuller

Positive Imaging by Norman Vincent Peale

Power in Praise by Merlin R. Carothers

The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale

You Can if You Think You Can by Norman Vincent Peale

Osteen, Joel. You Can, You Will: 8 Undeniable Qualities of a Winner. New York: Faith Words, 2014.

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The Organized Mind by Daniel J. Levitin

Modern life presents us with too much stuff and too much information to deal with. In The Organized Mind, psychologist Daniel J. Levitin explains how we can work with our mind, instead of against it, to handle information and make better decisions.

Attention is the critical resources for taking in information, making good decisions, and forming memories. The difficulty is that we only have so much attention to go around. Our attentional systems work to make us unconsciously ignore many of the signals that come our way; we would be overwhelmed if they did not. Our built in systems pay attention to change or to things that seem important. Our natural state is to have a wandering mind, broadly attentive to the environment, screening out the stable and safe, occasionally zooming in on something novel or critical.

We can also use the executive functions of our mind to focus attention where we want it. This can consume a lot of energy, but we can do it very effectively, sometimes focusing to the point where we lose track over everything else.

Both forms of attention have their strengths and limitations. In addition, it is costly to our attention bank to switch between modes or to switch focus from one subject to another. The load of information that we have to deal with can exhaust our attentional system, leading to inattention, poor memory, and bad decisions.

Levitin offers solutions to alleviate these problems and work with the strengths of our brains. The primary suggestion is to offload as much information as possible to the environment. The less we have to remember, and the fewer minor decisions we have to make, the better off we’ll be. Highly successful people use systems of habits, calendars, filing, labels, and standards to minimize the amount of information they have to carry in their memories. It is often not so important to know something as it is to be able to find it when you need it.

A related concept is to use categories and chunk up information. Our minds do this naturally. For instance, we typically don’t remember a telephone number as seven digits, but as two chunks of digits. We can apply a chunking strategy by breaking large jobs into doable tasks, or be grouping related tasks together. We can create scenes or stories in our mind (we do it anyway) to connect a string of events. Sleep seems to be important our natural chunking process, consolidating memories, connecting new information to old, and formulating new concepts.

Levitin presents many tools to organize information and things to make it easier on our brains. In my opinion, one of the most helpful tools is the fourfold table. This is a simple method to organize statistical information and assess the probabilities of certain outcomes. We have horrible intuition for understanding probabilities and assessing risks. Even people trained in statistics typically get probabilities wrong when they guess. The fourfold table, which Levitin describes in some detail with examples, allows one to break down the numbers and evaluate the most relevant probabilities.

The Organized Mind is not a how-to manual, though it has many strategies for organizing based on how the brain works. Levitin discusses the structure and function of parts of the brain, but is not excessively technical. A reader could skim these sections without too much loss. A reader could also focus on a particular aspect of organizing (business, time, and even social life) based on the way the book is organized, though the first few chapters have a lot of information that is background for the other sections.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life by Alan Lakein

Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer

The Procrastination Equation by Piers Steel

Rapt by Winifred Gallagher

The Thinking Life by P. M. Forni

Levitin, Daniel J. The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in an Age of Information Overload. New York: Dutton, 2014.

Public Utility Depreciation by NARUC

I don’t usually read reference books, or textbooks, all the way through like I did with Public Utility Depreciation Practices. Because of my new job as a “depreciation engineer,” I undertook reading this guide from the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC).

The title describes the content of the book. It includes some historical and legal background, but the bulk of the book is aimed at the practicalities of determining depreciation expenses.

The main elements going into depreciation rate determination are depreciation base, service life, net salvage, and depreciation computation methods. Depreciation base is the starting point; it represents the initial investment of capital that is to be recovered as a cost through depreciation. Generally it is the book cost (original cost of the infrastructure including materials, equipment, labor and related costs).

Most methods of computing depreciation are referred to as age-life methods. These methods spread the cost of the expected life of a piece of infrastructure. The preferred method is straight line depreciation. To apply these methods, one will need to know or estimate the life of the infrastructure under consideration and the net salvage value. The depreciation rate is the difference between the base and the net salvage, divided by the life of the infrastructure. With the exception of unique pieces, like types of infrastructure are lumped together because they are expected to have a similar life (wooden poles, steel poles, copper wire, conduit, etc.).

Life expectancy can be estimated by several methods. Survivor curves are developed from statistical studies of the life of particular types of infrastructure, though other methods may be used depending on the type and quality of data available.

Net salvage is estimated based on experience. The gross salvage is the price received for the equipment or materials retired. The cost of removal is subtracted from this to calculate the net salvage. Sometimes it can cost more to remove infrastructure than the value of the retired equipment and materials, so net salvage can be negative.

Calculating depreciation is more art than science. Projections of future values are inherently tricky. Growth can cause infrastructure to become inadequate before it is expected, or slower than expected growth can extend the life infrastructure. New regulations can make infrastructure obsolete in an instant, as can new technologies. In addition, utilities are constantly adding and retiring infrastructure. Amidst this uncertainty, regulators must balance the level of service needed by utility customers with the returns needed by utility investors in a complex environment.

Admittedly, a book from 1968 may seem dated. However, many of the practices described are still in use. Government regulation of monopoly utility rates in the United States has been occurring for more than a century, and the practices to not change rapidly. Even so, some of the practices described were considered obsolete, or near obsolescence, at the time of publication, and are not likely to be encountered now unless you’re a financial historian combing through moldy account books.

National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners. Public Utility Depreciation Practices. 1968. Washington, DC: Author, 1974.

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Esther

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Future Bright by Martin E. Martinez

Higher intelligence is linked to higher achievement. The demands of our world and culture are calling for higher achievement to address increasingly complex problems. As individuals and societies, we should strive to increase intelligence, which is possible, to arm ourselves to overcome these challenges. This is the opinion advanced by education professor Martin E. Martinez in his book Future Bright.

Martinez builds his case by starting with the link between intelligence and achievement. He cites studies that indicate that in school, work, and personal life, achievement is positively correlated to intelligence.

He moves on to describe what intelligence is, drawing on historic and current theories and research. A significant portion of the book is devoted to defining and understanding intelligence. The prevailing model is hierarchical. A single general intelligence is linked to achievement in all areas. There are also different types of intelligence that are linked to success in clusters of specific skills. Intelligence is affected by both genetics and the environment, and by both individual and cultural factors. If you are looking for a primer on intelligence that covers a lot of ground relatively briefly, you can find it in these chapters.

The hope that Martinez offers is that intelligence is, in part, learned, and it can be increased. Two major types of intelligence, most strongly related to general intelligence, are fluid and crystalline intelligence. Fluid intelligence is related to successfully dealing with novel situations. The heart of fluid intelligence is problem solving.  Crystalline intelligence is structured knowledge, such as is attained from formal education. It is not merely an accumulation of facts; it is an organized mental repository of useful information. The primary skill for crystalline intelligence is critical thinking, the ability distinguish credible, worthy, and useful ideas.

Problems solving and critical thinking are skills that can be learned and improved. Similarly, we can learn new information. By these means fluid and crystalline intelligence, and with them general intelligence, can be increased.

Intelligence is not the only determinant of success, for many intelligent people are not successful. Another important factor is what Martinez call “effective character.” These are personality traits that Martinez suggests can be learned or improved in most people. The critical trait is conscientiousness. Conscientiousness is associated with setting and pursuing goals, working with diligence, and seeking excellence.

Martinez offers several strategies for increasing intelligence. One that is in keeping with the motivation behind this blog is to increase crystalline intelligence (structured knowledge) by reading books. A work as long a book must be structured well to be coherent from beginning to end. In addition, effective written communication presents ideas in a manner that lends itself to analysis by critical thinking. Nonfiction books are especially useful for cultivating crystalline intelligence.

Though the strategies are aimed at the individual, he discusses how some of them are adaptable to parenting and schools. Because Martinez in the early chapters suggests societal benefits to higher intelligence, it makes sense that his book would also include suggestions for policy and cultural adaptions.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Change Your Brain Change Your Body by Daniel G. Amen

Double Your Brain Power by Jean Marie Stine

The Genius in All of Us by David Shenk

How to Build an Android by David F. Dufty

Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer

No Excuses by Brian Tracy

One Small Step Can Change Your Life by Robert Maurer

Your Intelligence Makeover by Edward F. Droge, Jr.

Martinez, Martin E. Future Bright: A Transforming Vision of Human Intelligence. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.