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A couple of years ago I read a story about an eight-year old who "borrowed" his parent's car one evening and drove (safely!) to McDonald's to get a burger. It turns out he had the munchies that evening and taught himself how to drive in ten minutes on YouTube.
As a parent, this was terrifying to read, but I also wrote at the time about how it was a perfect example of a trend that I was calling Light-Speed Learning - the idea that our expectation today, reinforced by easy access to how-to content online, is that we can all teach ourselves to do anything faster. Fundamental to this belief is that people today largely have faith in their own ability and intelligence to be able to learn in this way.
Two decades ago we were in the midst of "loserdom." Slacker culture was strong and songs like Beck's "Loser" defined a generation. This was the time that the ubiquitous For Dummies and For Idiots series of guide books were first launched. This underachiever mentality dominated the minds of Generation X, until this cohort of "teenage dirtbags" grew up and had kids. They went through their own mid-life crisis of sorts and came out the other end to define the world that Millennials and Generation Z are inhabiting now.
As we are just a few months away from the next decade, this has changed dramatically. People no longer embrace their own limitations the way we once did. Two decades ago we might have willingly called ourselves Dummies and Idiots, but that's not who we are today. The problem is, most guidebooks on topics we want to learn are still written for that mentality. Dummies and Idiots guides are filled with quantified bullshit and useless definitions.
So-called "bible-style" guidebooks are even worse, promising 700+ pages on a business topic but lacking any real actionable advice. For example, one such guide includes the following definition (taken verbatim):
But some of you are thinking ... don't we want a guide to be basic? Isn't it a good thing, as some fans of the Dummies guides point out, that a guide doesn't assume we know anything about a topic? There is a difference between keeping things simple and dumbing them down. Just because you don't know the intricacies of email marketing or social media doesn't make you an idiot who needs to have the word "friend" defined for them.
If the dummies, idiots and bible guides are too bloated, then maybe we should just follow the lead of that eight-year old burger-lover and seek out our advice through YouTube and blog posts. Both are great, but unfortunately they are time-consuming to find and quickly become dated. They lack curation and there isn't a single cohesive point of view. The end result is akin to building your own house by finding your own architect, plumber, contractor, electrician, landscaper and roofer. You can do it, but it ends up being a lot more effort.
As an author, I have wondered what would it take to create a useful, actionable, opinionated, relevant, not-quickly-outdated guide to a business topic? And not just one topic but dozens. Hundreds. Maybe thousands. That's a question I've been leading a team to answer for the past 16 months.
In that time we have been laying the foundation for a new type of guide book. We have assembled an amazing team of editors, designers and publishing professionals. We've tested template designs and spoken to educators and learning consultants. We have worked with multiple design studios to create an engaging and friendly template. And lastly (but most importantly) we have recruited some unbelievable experts to write the first several books in a new series we called the Non-Obvious Guides.
The series has a simple mission: to bring you real advice from real experts. They are written for smart people - not dummies or idiots. And the tone of each one is intentionally meant to be "like having coffee with an expert." When thinking about who we were writing for, we described our ideal readers as "Time-Starved Doers":
Our goal with these books is to offer the next best thing to that experience. I'm beyond thrilled to share that we have now launched the first five of these books. They are available online and in fine bookstores across the US, as well as distributed internationally with several translated versions in multiple languages already in progress too!
One of the things we have spent a lot of time working on is the interior for these guides to make them visual, easy to read and filled with templates and guides to help you get stuff done. Here's a couple of examples of the interior spreads from my contribution to the series - the Non-Obvious Guide To Small Business Marketing:
In the coming months, we have many more guides coming on topics including Blockchain, Effective Presentations, Customer Service, Leading Technical People, Doodling, Statistical Literacy, Sales and many other important themes. I'm so excited by the series but even more by the authors that have come on board and their consistent willingness to share their deep expertise in such a generous and accessible way.
None of us want to live in a world (or work at a company) that is led by dummies and idiots. Most of us don't want to be treated that way either. We already have access to the information of the world online and the opportunity to get smarter faster on just about any topic is readily available. You don't have to be a dummy or an idiot any more.
There are two Black idiots and there is one Southeast Asian idiot and they focus mainly on moisture and sheen, going so far as to apply sunblock to avoid a deeper shade. I am thinking jealously how they will not stain the fabric of the outdoor couches with the self-tanner needed to encourage the expected hue. Often I find myself thinking of the outdoor couches because it is one of the few things production will hassle about.
I do not wash my plate, but I put it in the sink. It is the foundation of the daily pile. We all contribute but only the person most bothered does the work of its soapy disassembly. No one here, including me, understands the power of the collective. At the salon I made schedules as equitably as possible. The stylists appreciated this. After I posted the schedule to the system, they would switch shifts like trading cards and that was fine. I let it happen, winding the ends of my hair around my index finger while watching the monitor display at the Lasik center across the mall hall, which televised looped, recorded laser surgery on the naked eye, all day long. Here it drives me mad that everyone forgets to be a team. We could be a team against production. We could get what we want, make them see it our way. We could have a true stake, make the show a different thing, something more interesting and more sexy and more true; we could unite!
There he is now, awake with a dour scowl in our direction and in the outdoor gym area throwing a medicine ball back and forth with the other boys as part of an elaborate daily circuit routine that even sad Brad knows by heart. This is how it is, one person up and then another and then everyone comes to life in the sunlight as if waking is a virus communicable by air.
Once I am fully submerged I flip and open my eyes, surface, buoy with a closed-mouth smile. My heart is abacus beads tabulating likes and faves, fast and automatic and tick tick tick. Brad, idiot, be calmed. There is nothing but this moment. Legs coming toward me. There is not even, I worry, any death in this death.
The water is stirring more now; there are several people in the pool, now, and I can see their bodily noise in my periphery. I can feel them upsetting the water. I am just floating. I am no longer dying. They recede, get out of the frame.
Guernica is a non-profit magazine dedicated to global art and politics, published online since 2004. With contributors from every continent and at every stage of their careers, we are a home for singular voices, incisive ideas, and critical questions.
I was watching an episode of Shark Tank recently when Mark Cuban said, after one of the entrepreneurs failed miserably in attempting to lure a Shark to invest in part because of a gross over-valuation: First come the innovators, then come the imitators, then come the idiots.
Building on the unexpected success and popularity of their sound, Bobby Bones & The Raging Idiots signed to Black River Entertainment in May 2015. In November of that year, they proudly released a six track digital EP for their youngest fans entitled The Raging Idiots Presents: The Raging Kidiots,
2016 has already kicked off in a major way. Bobby Bones and The Raging Idiots released their debut single "If I Was Your Boyfriend" from their forthcoming full length musical comedy album. Additionally the video was exclusively premiered on CMT and CMT.com.
3 Idiots is a 2009 Indian Hindi-language coming-of-age comedy-drama film written, edited and directed by Rajkumar Hirani, co-written by Abhijat Joshi and produced by Vidhu Vinod Chopra. Adapted loosely from Chetan Bhagat's novel Five Point Someone,[5] the film stars Aamir Khan, R. Madhavan and Sharman Joshi in the titular roles, marking their reunion three years after Rang De Basanti (2006), while Kareena Kapoor, Boman Irani and Omi Vaidya appear in pivotal roles. Narrated through two parallel dramas, one in the present and the other set ten years in the past, the story follows the friendship of three students at an Indian engineering college and is a satire about the social pressures under the Indian education system.[6][7][8]
Produced by Chopra under the banner Vinod Chopra Films,[9][10] 3 Idiots incorporated real Indian inventions created by Remya Jose,[11] Mohammad Idris,[12] Jahangir Painter[13] and Sonam Wangchuk, the latter of whom also inspired Khan's character.[14]
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