How To Cook A Purple Cow

Seth Godin has written a horrifying post in which he delights in the fact that most business books are only about 5% substance and 95% “motivation.” He also knocks other types of how-to literature for their frivolity:

The gap is motivation. Gardening books don’t push you to actually do something. Cookbooks don’t spend a lot of time trying to sell you on why making a roast chicken isn’t as risky as you might think. The stakes are a lot higher when it comes to business. Wreck a roast chicken and it’s $12 down the drain. Wreck a product launch and there goes your career…Computer books, of course, are nothing but bullet points. Programmers get amazing value because for $30 they are presented with everything they need to program a certain tool. Yet most programmers are not world class, precisely because the bullet points aren’t enough to get them to see things the way the author does, and not enough to get them motivated enough to actually program great code.

The difference, Seth, is that sometimes people are motivated to do something without being pushed to it by pap. Sometimes the reader is an intelligent person who gets motivated because they are inspired by the writer’s deep understanding of the subject, as opposed to the writer’s deep understanding of how to write an advice book.

And you are wrong, so very, totally wrong, about cookbooks and computer books. Good ones, that is.

As far as cookbooks go, I am sorry that you have never read anything by Mollie Katzen or M.F.K. Fisher, both of whom inspire readers to be better cooks, and better eaters, just by their own love of food and their vast knowledge of it. You don’t read them for the lists of ingredients, you read them for the style, the warmth, the personality. In short, they inspire with art, not artifice.

And as far as computer books go, I am sorry that you have no experience with O’Reilly’s Head First series, which motivates readers to achieve great things in software development with their quirky, personable style, and their format designed around the way people absorb information. And yet, it’s impossible that you aren’t familiar with Kathy Sierra and her blog about creating passionate users. Seems like, on some other day, her whole philosophy might be right up your street.

Beyond that, though, the truth is that this world actually contains a great many people who get motivated without being cajoled into motivation. Some people like books dense with information and little else, because their motivation to learn and grow is coming from somewhere outside the book. And when motivation comes from inside a book, it isn’t always because the book was written with motivation as the main purpose. In fact, history shows that there is substantial precedent for things happening differently.

Art, not artifice. It can happen in advertising too. Can’t it?

photo by Elsie esq.