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. Read the rest of this entry »