Loserthink by Scott Adams

 America is awash in debate, but it seems there is very little actual discussion or argument happening. Many talk by each other and simply become more entrenched in their positions, or they adopt more extreme, outrageous or nonsensical views. It does not help that politicians and pundits engage in the same kind of thing and seem to encourage it in others. In addition, television and radio broadcasts are full of it, propagating the noise, perhaps emphasizing one side or the other, but rarely providing useful new facts or analysis.

I see this on social media a lot. I see a lot more people parroting or sharing a juicy tidbit that they seem to think carries a point (the point is not always clear and the facts are sometimes just wrong), but I rarely see someone address and issue with humility, reason or an admission of uncertainty.

Cartoonist Scott Adams noticed it in his social media interactions, too. He attributes some of this to the complexity of the world we live in and the issues we deal with; human beings are not very good and understating complexity. In addition, most people aren’t trained to think productively to produce reasonable solutions. As he put it in his book Loserthink, “Despite evidence to the contrary, we all use our brains. But most of us have never learned to think effectively.”

Loserthink is Adams’ term for unproductive, ineffective ways of thinking. He generously thinks that people are not stupid, they are just using unhelpful, unfruitful patterns of thinking.  You will get nowhere trying to shame people for stupidity, but you might get somewhere if you engage people in seeing how ridiculous is loserthink, and how it produces divisions that generally don’t benefit us (though it might benefit some).

Most of the book is devoted to identifying common types of loserthink an how to think more productively. He draws on ways of thinking from various professions and disciplines in which people are trained in thinking and problem solving: psychologists, artists, historians, engineers, leaders, entrepreneurs and economists.

Adams expresses some opinions about political and social issues that are likely to be controversial to some. Rather than take as evidence that you are right or that Adams is a dunce, take it as challenge to think things through for yourself. Test yourself to see if you might be engaging in loserthink. It might not change your mind, but it is likely to make you more modest about your certainty in some area, more confident in the workability of your solutions in others and generally more persuasive because you have check yourself for loserthink and you can gently help other address theirs.

Scott Adams also wrote

How to Fail at Almost Anything and Still Win Big

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

Bored and Brilliant by Manoush Zomorodi

The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande

Choosing Civility by P. M. Forni

Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner

Histories and Fallacies by Carl R. Trueman

How Not to Be Wrong by Jordan Ellenberg

Range by David Epstein

Six Easy Pieces by Richard Feynman

The Thinking Life by P. M. Forni

Adams, Scott. Loserthink: How Untrained Brains are Ruining America. New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2019.

Late Bloomers by Rich Karlgaard

The heroes of our age are young. Mark Zuckerberg, the man who made millions on Facebook while still in his 20s, is a notable example. Though Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak and Tiger Woods are no longer youngsters, they achieved fame and wealth early in life and that is at least one reason why they remain famous. Forbes publisher Rich Karlgaard is concerned that our focus on early achievement is depriving our society of the untapped potential of many—probably most of us—who develop at a slower rate. He discusses his concerns, and what we can do about it, in Late Bloomers.

 An industry has developed around seeking early achievement. You have to do well in school and get great SAT scores to get into elite colleges. You have to go to elite colleges to get jobs with the best companies. You have to work for the best companies to get ahead in life. If you have the right stuff, you can skip some of these steps and create your own successful business in your 20s.

 Except it’s not really so. Becoming equipped to succeed on this narrow path, which depends on early achievement, does not necessarily prepare one to have sustained success or achievement in any other area of life.

 In addition, most of us don’t have the mental equipment to make wise choices and stick to them while where young. The brain doesn’t fully mature until we’re in our mid-20s. Though the brain starts to slow down after that, certain types of intelligence—based on knowledge—continue to increase into our 40s and can be sustained well into old age. This late-developing intelligence can more than make up for the slower processing speeds of older brains.

 Kalgaard shares the stories of some late bloomers. Martha Stewart started her catering business at age 35, and published her first book at age 41. Toni Morrison published her first book, The Bluest Eye, when she was 39. More up my ally, Raymond Chandler was 51 when The Big Sleep, his first book, was published. Karlgaard pulls examples from the arts, business, sports and other fields.

 Karlgaard describes himself as a late bloomer. He didn’t do well and struggled in dead-end jobs until he was 25, when his brain finally matured enough for things to start clicking. This was when he was able to get a job that most of us would consider  ordinary, and he still had a ways to go before his career took off.

 Late bloomers have several skill, some hard-won, that help them succeed in their own time. They retain curiosity; they do not specialize to early and they do no avoid failure they way early achievers often do. The have compassion for other and themselves; they’ve had to overcome failure. They are resilient; they have developed perspective and support networks. The have learned to stay calm. The have insight gained from varied experience. The have wisdom, the elusive quality that arises from a maturing brain and a wealth of experience. The have learned when to doubt themselves and when to trust themselves. They know when to stick and when to quit. They are patient.

 As a society, we need to recognize that early achievement is not the norm. People develop at different rates and may peak in different ways at different ages. If we want to enjoy the full potential of people, we have to value the contributions of late bloomers.  We also have to open pathways for them through life-long learning and late-career pathways that force people out just because there is no more ways for them to move up the corporate ladder.

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

The First 20 Hours by Josh Kaufman

Future Bright by Martin E. Martinez

The Genius in All of Us by David Shenk

Learn Better by Ulrich Boser

Mindset by Carol S. Dweck

Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer

The Organized Mind by Daniel J. Levitin

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

Quiet by Susan Cain

Self-Love by Robert H. Schuller

Your Intelligence Makeover by Edward F. Droge, Jr.

 Karlgaard, Rich. Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed with Early Achievement. New York: Currency, 2019.

Range by David Epstein

Specialization is king. It has become seen as the road to success. Since Malcolm Gladwell popularized the 10,000-hour Rule a few years ago (perhaps unintentionally), I’ve seen a lot of people using it to justify and spell out the road to specialization: focus and start early. However, specialization can hurt when we face problems that cross boundaries and pull us out of our niche; we can be lost and ill equipped outside of our specialization. Journalist David Epstein explored the issue in his book, Range.

 Epstein starts out by showing the limitations of specialization. It works well in an arena where repeating patterns prevail, and we can learn to recognize those patterns from exposure. When there are no repeating patterns, or they are complex and obscure, a high degree of specialized knowledge can lead to wrong conclusions and false confidence. We can have a few good tools that we trust, but if they are the wrong tools for the job we may be doing the wrong thing without realizing it. Complex environments and problems require us to reason conceptually, connect ideas from different contexts and solve problems without direct prior knowledge of what we are facing. We need breadth.

 Though it is not as popular a narrative, Epstein provides several examples of how people with broad and diverse knowledge have become high achievers. Creativity is, to a great extent, finding relationships between seemingly unrelated things. One must be equipped with a variety of experience to be able to make these leaps.

 I can see how the generalist’s path can seem unappealing. It may not seem like a path at all. Deep learning is slow and effortful. It is a way of errors, false starts and diversions that can seem like a waste of time. Developing range is messy and uncertain; by comparison, specialization seems like a sure thing.

 Epstein’s book contains ways to develop range. Analogies allow us to apply knowledge from one area to another, and seeing where analogies fall apart can lead to new ideas. Take an outsider’s cooler, distant and critical view and save yourself from the pitfall of taking a rosy view of familiar things. Pay attention to things that don’t fit the model. Don’t plan too far ahead, but be open to exploration an experimentation. There is a time for mastering particular knowledge and procedure, but the overall approach to learning should be to make connections and gain perspective.

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

The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande

The First 20 Hours by Josh Kaufman

Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner

The Genius in All of Us by David Shenk

Learn Better by Ulrich Boser

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

 Epstein, David. Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. New York: Riverhead Books, 2019.

New Stuff May 27, 2020

Atomic Habits by James Clear

Bigger than Life by Marilyn Cannaday

The Boom by Russell Gold

Feeding the Fire by Mark E. Eberhart

God’s Equation by Amir Aczel

The Introvert’s Way by Sophia Dembling

Lift by Daniel Kunitz

Mr. America by Mark Adams

New Stuff April 6, 2019

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out by Richard P. Feynman

Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction by Patricia Highsmith

Scan Artist by Marcia Biederman

Stat-Spotting by Joel Best

Scan Artist by Marcia Biederman

When I want to find some information, I can pull my cell phone out of my pocket and search for it using Google (or some other search engine, but probably Google). I can remember a time when that was not an option. If the information I needed wasn’t in the dictionary or encyclopedia I had at home (which was already of date in some areas), I’d have to go to the library for additional references or—heaven forbid—the morgue of a newspaper office. Getting useful information was not a trivial affair. The generation before mine that saw a pre-Internet explosion of printed information after World War II especially felt the difficulty of keeping up. Evelyn Wood was there with an answer; Marcia Biederman tells her story in Scan Artist.

Evelyn Wood did not invent speed reading. She did not even like the term. However, for decades her name and face was more strongly associated with it than any other person. Though she built her reputation on being a school teacher, she never was not a regular classroom teacher (she was a school counselor) and she was not a reading specialist. She had a master’s degree in speech, earned under the direction of a professor who a studied theater.

Theater may be the lens for looking at Wood’s career. She started writing and staging plays when she was in high school and a college undergraduate. Many of these had religious themes related to her Mormon faith. When she was in Germany, where her husband served as president of the Mormon mission in Frankfurt as the Nazis began their aggressions, she fell in love with the opera and cajoled her way into back stage of the opera house. She began bringing what she learned of stagecraft into her own productions.

Back in the U.S. the Woods put Evelyn’s theatrical skills to work as lecturers on their European experience. They changed their focus as American sentiments shifted from Germany to Britain. They also put a pretty heavy spin on the Mormon relationship with the Nazis and greatly embellished the dangers they face leaving Germany.

Evelyn Wood’s success as a seller of her speed-reading system was largely built on such theatrics and embellishments. She claimed student could read thousands of words per minute; the faster one read the better their comprehension. (The fastest people can actually read is about 900 words per minute. Anything faster is skimming, and comprehension suffers when one skims). She managed to get endorsements from senators and she encouraged, or at least never corrected, the misconception that she was tied to John F. Kennedy and his reportedly fast reading speed. (Ted Kennedy took her course as a senator, and staffers in the Kennedy, Nixon and Carter administrations took the course, including Jimmy Carter himself, though Wood was not the teacher.)

The company she started changed hands and business models several times. A lot of money was made with her name and methods, and in the sale and resale of the company, but the Woods received only a small portion of it. Even so, she was ready to promote herself, her methods and the company that still paid her a consulting fee. She slowed down, but continued to make appearances and accept interview requests even after suffering cancer and a stroke.

While one may sympathize with her, especially in her illness later in life, the Evelyn Wood presented by Biederman is not easy to like. The Wood adopted a teenage girl largely to have a live-in nanny for their natural daughter when they moved to Germany; they never really acknowledge their adopted daughter or even saw her much once she was an adult. Wood was in some ways a con artist who played on the insecurities of her marks, some who were never knocked in spite of the mounting evidence that her program was at best an overprice lesson in skimming.

Wood found a way to take advantage of the insecurity of her day. She built a brand on it. While primarily a biography of Wood, Scan Artist reveals interesting things about America of the time and the obsession with self-improvement. It has not disappeared. Speed-reading apps still claim to greatly increase both speed and comprehension. TED-talkers claim to read a book or more a day. The Internet makes it easy to acquire a shallow knowledge of almost anything quickly, so perhaps people have become satisfied with what they can learn from skimming hundreds of books a year. Deep learning and understanding remains slow and effortful.

Biederman, Marcia. Scan Artist: How Evelyn Wood Convinced the World that Speed-Reading Worked. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2019.

Super Attractor by Gabrielle Bernstein

I won’t say much about Gabrielle Bernstein’s Super Attractor. There is something about it that turns me off. I suspect my biases are usually clear, though I don’t often state them as explicitly as I do here.

Much of what you’ll find in term of advice is in Super Attractor is similar to what you might find in other self-help books. It has the New Age perspective that is common among many books of this genre, especially in the wake of Oprah’s popularizing of books such as The Secret.

Bernstein goes a step farther in reviving Spiritualism. She essentially claims to be a medium (though she doesn’t use the word) who is in touch with a spirit guide—and you can be, too. I do not know if she is a sham or if she is playing with fire, but it is a path I cannot take or recommend on either scientific of religious grounds.

“Fear is a gentle reminder of what you don’t want, and therefore it helps you clarify what you do want,” Gabriell Bernstein, Super Attractor

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

Acres of Diamonds by Russel H. Conwell

As a Man Thinketh by James Allen

Make Miracles in Forty Days by Melody Beattie

Night of the Ghouls (film)

The Real World of Sherlock Holmes by Peter Costello

The Secret by Rhonda Byrne

The Secret of the Ages by Robert Collier

Bernstein, Gabrielle. Super Attractor: Methods for Manifesting a Life Beyond Your Wildest Dreams. Carlsbad, CA: Hay House, 2019.

New Stuff April 6, 2019

Anxious for Nothing by Max Lucado

Good Naked by Joni B. Cole

Happiness is a Choice by Barry Neil Kaufman

Haunted Jefferson City by Janice Tremeear

Move Ahead with Possibility Thinking by Robert H. Schuller

New & Interesting Stuff January 26,2018