No Excuses by Brian Tracy

In his book No Excuses!, self-help, business and sales author Brian Tracy says that there are several strategies that can lead to success. Self-discipline makes them all work.

For Tracy, self-discipline is the same as self-control, self-denial, delayed gratification and self-mastery. As you might guess from this description, he relates discipline to character. One of the important aspects of exercising discipline, even more than what you achieve by it, is who you become by it. Self-discipline leads to greater character, courage and persistence.

Self-discipline is also important to having a great personal life. Our relationships with spouses, children and friends, our physical fitness, and even our happiness and internal peace can be improved by discipline.

Of course, as you would expect from Tracy, he addresses the importance of discipline in business and work. Discipline is important to success in every aspect of business.

If you’ve read many self-help or business books, you may have seen many of the ideas presented by Tracy in No Excuses! Even so, some are so simple, powerful, possibly obvious and often overlooked that they bear repeating.

-Always be improving your skills.

-Writing down your goals greatly increases the likelihood you will complete them.

-When you are at work, work.

-If you want to be wealthy, save money.

-Spend most of your time on your most valuable activities.

Tracy presents an interesting idea that you may not have seen elsewhere. Happiness is not an end to itself; it is not something you achieve. Instead, happiness arises out of the process of doing what you love, having great relationships and meeting needs. To paraphrase the cliché, happiness doesn’t come from reaching a destination, it comes from enjoying the journey.

Tracy brings up another worthy concept about discipline. Disciplining yourself in one area helps you to discipline yourself in another. Every chapter in the book is about using self-discipline in a different aspect of life. Don’t burn out trying to do it all at once. Pick an area or two that you find most important or needful and begin disciplining yourself in those areas. When you make a habit of being disciplined in those areas, it will be easier to be more self-disciplined in other areas as well.

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

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

The Procrastination Equation by Piers Steel

The Richest Man Who Ever Lived by Steven K. Scott

The Thinking Life by P. M. Forni

Tracy, Brian. No Excuses! The Power of Self-Discipline. New York: MJF, 2010.

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Waste and Want by Susan Strasser

An old proverb relates trash and treasure as a matter of perspective. In Waste and Want, Susan Strasser describes American’s changing perspectives on waste from the colonial era to our own day.

In the colonial and revolutionary period of American history, manufactured objects were rare and expensive. Repair and mending were common even among the wealthy because it was difficult and costly to replace objects. In addition, the various types of home industry practiced by both men and women equipped them with skills in handling materials that made them adept at repair. Even when and object was beyond repair, it parts, or the material it was made of, might be usefully repurposed themselves or as part of an assembly. This lack of goods and facility with handling materials made bricolage common. Because things had durable value, people had a sense of stewardship relating to them.

Strasser establishes this as a beginning state. The development of industry and consumerism led to a current state in which all of these have been reversed. We have an abundance of goods, and many of them are inexpensive. We work in factories and offices where we do not develop skills for repair, and particularly have lost familiarity with materials needed for practical bricolage. These and other forces, particularly those related to health and cleanliness, have resulted in waste being something of the home where additional value may be extracted to something that is the realm of specialists that is taken away and handled by government agencies or specialized companies.

There are many stages in this development. It is interesting to me that the value of household waste as raw materials American industry provided a mechanism for poor and rural people to purchase manufactured goods. Even so, as industrialization made more goods available, along with larger quantities of more manageable waste, household waste became less valuable, and reuse and recycling became associated with poverty.

By the end of the 1920s, consumer culture was established in America, and it reinforced the trends identified by Strasser.  Planned obsolescence was developed in the automotive industry, and along with the craze for fashion, it took hold for almost all consumer goods. Even during the Great Depression, when lack of credit and unemployment made doing it yourself attractive, there was an assumption that people had access to new and old consumer goods and their packaging. Even during this period of economic distress, demand for certain types of consumer goods grew. Thrift was reimaged for a consumer age. For instance, refrigerators became commonplace, and instead of being presented as luxury items they were sold on the notion of thrift, allowing housewives to save on food by keeping leftovers and buying in bulk.

People were encouraged to conserve and recycle to support the war effort during World War II. However, this did little to reverse changing attitudes that valued the new over the old and saw little value in trash. People had jobs and money, and wartime rationing created a pent up demand for goods that was unleased after the war. Disposable goods and packaging represented cleanliness and convenience; it was freedom from dirt and drudgery. There was no value in trash, which was taken away by collectors.

There were reactions against this even in the 1950s. They grew into the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, which were skeptical of corporations and consumerism. The environmental movement also grew out of this counterculture. Reuse of second-hand goods became more acceptable for even middle-class families, though few had the skills needed to rework these items to make them seem new or adapt them to current fashion. Little used goods were seen to have some value that could be recovered through yard sales. (I grew up on a stretch of highway that now boasts and annual 100 mile yard sale.)

This counterculture has not resulted in a broad return to a stewardship of things. Strasser suggests that a rising ethic of environmental or resource stewardship may lead to the mitigation of problems related to the abundant trash created by disposable and rapidly obsolete goods. There is no turning back, but we might find new reasons and ways to reduce use, reuse, and recycle.

Stasser, Susan. Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999.

Interesting Stuff August 23, 2010

Amazon Says E-Books Now Top Hardcover Sales
Ancient buried ship hull found at Ground Zero site
August 28 is Read Comics in Public Day
Cameras capture bizarre deep-sea creatures on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef
EPA unveils strategy to modernize clean water programs
EPA’s Coming Together for Clean Water Strategy
In Praise of Private Infrastructure
Interesting Stuff July 13, 2010
More about Harvey Pekar:
-Harvey Pekar: A Life of Splendor
-Harvey Pekar: A timeline of a comic book icon
-Harvey Pekar Dies
-Harvey Pekar tribute at Comic Twart
Projects to prepare tracks for taller trains
Running Out of Water – The Book Review

Ten thoughts on Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

Interesting Stuff Dec. 30, 2010

A 25-Year-Old Prediction of Water Scarcity in the Southwest Holds True, Study Finds
Andy Rash’s Iotacons: Pixel Portraits
Brenda Starr to retire January 2011
ComicTwart takes on Futurama-hard to decide which drawing is most awesome
Crucial Trade Waterway Under Threat

Do you know what it means, to protect New Orleans?
-Corps of Engineers Awards New Orleans Levee Contract
-Pipes, Pumps Trouble Big Easy

E-book anonymity boosts romance novel sales
Interesting Stuff Dec. 2, 2010
Kansas City Corridor Rehab Nears an Early Completion (I’ve driven by this bridge several time in the last few weeks and I’m looking forward to crossing it)
Minimal Fantastic Four by Tom Fowler
Water-Driven Power Plant Producing Clean Energy for More Than a Century

Awakening the Entrepreneur Within by Michael Gerber

Gerber, Michael E. Awakening the Entrepreneur Within: How Ordinary People Create Extraordinary Companies. New York: HarperCollins, 2008.

Sometimes Michael Gerber writes like a New Age guru. Sometimes he writes like a bad poet. Sometimes you may wonder if you’ve paid $25 to read a sales presentation on his latest ventures. Sometimes he writes paragraphs as bad as this one.



To be fair, Awakening the Entrepreneur Within is not strictly a business book. Gerber says of the book, “This is not a do-it-yourself manual. It is an entrepreneurial spiritual guidebook.”

The book is a series of stories. Mostly they are the stories of how he started his businesses. One is the story of how he imagines he’ll start a business.

The stories illustrate the stages of entrepreneurial development. An entrepreneur progresses through being a dreamer, a thinker, a storyteller and a leader. More properly, he accumulates these roles as he develops himself and his business, though at each stage one role predominates. An individual need not necessarily fulfill all these roles himself. In founding what is now E-Myth Worldwide, he teamed with a thinker. In his imagined story of a company to come, he hires someone to serve as the leader.

A dreamer contribute what you might expect, a dream. To be an entrepreneurial dream, it must be impersonal. It must be about others instead of the entrepreneur. The thinker develops the dream by picking it apart, asking questions, finding solutions and working out the details (Gerber calls this going from the dream to the vision). The storyteller takes the vision and creates an impassioned story, which he’ll tell repeatedly, refining it until it moves people (Gerber’s term here is purpose). Finally, the leader turns the dream, vision and purpose into reality through action (he takes on the mission).

Near the end of the book lays out, step-by-step, what he calls the golden pyramid. This process implicitly incorporates the stages of entrepreneurial development, but also incorporates the business development ideas from E-Myth. Though this is in some ways the most detailed how-to chapter, Gerber still falls into fanciful language.

If you’re looking for how-to, you may want to look elsewhere. If you’re looking for inspiration, this might be your book.

Be All You Can Be! by John C. Maxwell

Maxell, John C.  Be All You Can Be!  Colorado Springs, CO: Victor, 1987.

I’ve read several of John C. Maxwell’s books.  He has become almost an industry in himself for the production of leadership books.  It started while he was still a pastor.  Be All You Can Be! draws from leadership lessons he gave his staff at a church where he was pastor.

Maxwell sounds more like a pastor in this book than he does in some of his later works.  It is full of homiletical mnemonics.  As a kid, I thought these methods were mainly intended to help the hearers remember the message.  Nowadays, I think it is equally intended to help pastor remember their sermons.

It is probably best to take the book as a set of lessons.  Each chapter has a focused theme on some aspect of leadership.  These themes recur in Maxwell’s other books, and entire leadership books are built around any one of them.

The downside of the focused chapters is that it is difficult to find the thread that ties them together, other than leadership.  It might be that leadership is a costly endeavor.  The potential leader will face obstacles, resistance and distractions in abundance.  Much is demanded of a successful leader, and he will need a vision, character, and commitment to carry him through.

The upside of the book is that it covers a lot of ground in relatively few pages.  Each chapter can be read at convenient intervals without much concern over the order in which you read them.  If you looking for a basic leadership book, especially one that draws on a Christian or ministry context, this may be the one.

Having said that, I think it is worth a paragraph to discuss Maxwell in a wider context.  I’ve heard evangelicals lament that recently the books most read by pastors relate to leadership rather than their faith.  Many of those leadership books are probably Maxwell products.  Be All You Can Be! is more explicitly related to a church setting than his other books, but that isn’t an especially important matter.  Maxwell draw examples from the Bible, but he might have found adequate examples from other sources.  Even the selection of an author for the forward is telling.  Zig Ziglar is a prominent Christian, but millions have read his self-help and sales books without any concern, or possibly even knowledge, of his religion.  This book might be found in the Christian section of some bookstores, but it there is little that would keep it out of the business or self-help aisles.

John C. Maxwell also wrote

Developing the Leader Within
The Difference Maker
Winning with People

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

The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership Tested by Time by James L. Garlow

On Becoming a Leader by Warren Bennis

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The Caped Crusade by Glen Weldon

Based on his self-description in The Caped Crusade, Glen Weldon and I are close in age. Unlike Weldon, the limited selection of broadcast television channels in my rural community did not present 1960s Batman series. My childhood impressions of the Dark Knight came almost exclusively from the comics. My favorite version of Batman is the “World’s Greatest Detective” (when I came across his team-up with a very old Sherlock Holmes in Detective Comics 500, I had to have it). I’m also fond of the adventure hero who hues close to his pulp roots—basically the Shadow or Doc Savage in a bat suit (I also had to buy Batman 253, in which the awestruck superhero acknowledges the Shadow as an inspiration).

I suppose that I staked out my position on Batman because that is partly what Weldon’s book is about, the contradictions between Batman the character and Batman the idea, and the tension between stories loved by hardcore fans and stories appreciated by a wider audience who engage with Batman in diverse ways.

Weldon illustrates this tension, and the character’s shift as the pull is sometimes stronger in one direction or another, through the history of the character. He sees a cycle in Batman’s depiction. He starts as a dark loner. He becomes a father figure (most directly to Robin). He grows into the patriarch of a family (Robin, Alfred, Batgirl, and Huntress just to start a list). Then a desire to revitalize the character, get back to roots, or satisfy the core fandom returns him to the loner stage.

The hardcore fans Weldon writes of generally conceive Batman as serious. They want a Batman who is realistic and gritty. In my experience as a reader of comics, “serious,” “realistic” and “gritty” are often code words for prurience, grotesquery and gore. I’m not interested in that in comics or any other media.

These fans have a love-hate relationship with the Batman of other media (they just hate the Adam West version). The Tim Burton films revitalized public interest in Batman when the comics were in a serious sales slump. (The hardcore fans hate the Joel Schumacher movies. I’m with them on that.) In the Chris Nolan trilogy they finally got a Batman who is serious and has acceptance in the wider culture.

That culture is much wider now than ever, especially due to the Internet. Comics fandom was once very insular, and in some ways it still is. In the Internet age, many people are engaging the character and idea of Batman. Comic book fans, cosplayers, fan fiction writers, movie buffs, fashionistas, retro TV watchers, hipsters and a host of others are interacting with Batman’s stories, history, image and iconography. It is a world that some of the old hardcore fans may find discomfiting, but it may be a place where Batman can have lasting relevance.

Weldon plainly likes that prospect. In his view, the super-straight Adam West Batman and the grounded, brooding Chris Nolan Batman can coexist. They are both really Batman. People have always focused on the aspects of the character that resonated with them. They have also imposed on him interpretations that the writers and artists that created his stories never imagined. We do this with every text, but few texts have the longevity of Batman. That may be the Weldon’s other point. We can take any version of Batman as seriously as we want, or we can simply enjoy the stories. He is a fictional character after all.

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

Amazing Fantastic Incredible by Stan Lee, Peter David & Colleen Doran

Comic Book Nation by Bradford W. Wright

The DC Comics Guide to Writing Comics by Dennis O’Neil

Fic by Anne Jamison

Kirby by Mark Evanier

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

Reading Comics by Douglas Wolk

The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore

Stan Lee by Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Will Eisner by Michael Schumacher

Wisdom from the Batcave by Cary A. Friedman

Weldon, Glen. The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016.