Walmart, (Sam) Wal(ton’s) mart. The Walton fortune has long been split among 4 main heirs and still each shard is listed in the top 4, 5, 6, and 7 of America’s richest, each with over $20 billion.
The story Sam Walton tells of how he started Walmart is one of my favorite autobiographies and business books. My old, scribbled paperback is long lost but I can now safely share the book with you digitally through the 3rd-party magic of Scribd:
read it online.
It’s time to (re)read Sam Walton and be inspired by history’s most successful practitioner of commerce, there are too many opportunities out there waiting for us!
It is a story about entrepreneurship, and risk, and hard work, and knowing where you want to go and being willing to do what it takes to get there. It’s a story about believing in your idea even when maybe some other folks don’t, and about sticking to your guns.
But I think more than anything it proves there’s absolutely no limit to what plain, ordinary working people can accomplish if they’re given the opportunity and the encouragement and the incentive to do their best. Because that’s how Wal-Mart became Wal-Mart: ordinary people joined together to accomplish extraordinary things. At first, we amazed ourselves. And before too long, we amazed everybody else, especially folks who thought America was just too complicated and sophisticated a place for this sort of thing to work anymore.
A traves del traductor al español de Diaporah fue que me tope con este desaforado elogio al ensayista Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio. Se me enchina la piel. Entusiasma el entusiasmo, cuando tan honesta y esplendidamente escrito, no? Es la primera vez que oigo de el. Habra que leerlo, alguien ya lo ha hecho?
Ferlosio se retiró a estudiar y a escribir incansablemente.. una clase de escritura… el ensayo de alto contenido intelectual—que en España habÃa quedado anclado en formas dieciochescas y encorsetado en ampulosos moldes de cursilerÃa retórica y vulgaridad estilÃstica que aún hoy hacen estragos.
La no-ficción escrita por Sánchez Ferlosio, con su fama de cascarrabias encerrado en la España del
XVII,
es lo más moderno, aventurado y experimental que en nuestro paÃs se ha hecho en este terreno. Cuando alguien quiera saber quién ha construido en nuestro tiempo una forma nueva de pensar escribiendo, háblenle del joven Ferlosio, no de los viejos prematuros que siguen explotando hasta la saciedad fórmulas de almidón. Es la escasez de ejemplos cualitativamente comparables (y no la supuesta excentricidad del autor) lo que constituye la singularidad de los ensayos de Ferlosio…
entre esas páginas están las mejores que, en el campo del pensamiento, se han escrito en castellano desde que comenzó el siglo XX. O sea, no sólo es nuestro ensayista más moderno, también es el mejor.
Yo quiero saber!
Meritocracy used to be simply a more positive word for elitism to my mind. The word comes up frequently in discussions of elite universities and what they should aspire to. I considered it something good, a value, but the “meritless” masses left out were always a big cloud. Why exactly it was worthwhile I had never given much thought for.
Perhaps the most interesting thing I learned from Singaporean
Kishore Mahbubani’s
The New Asian Hemisphere was his completely different take on the meaning of meritocracy: it’s not about exclusion but about
inclusion, about casting your net as wide as you can. It’s the very base of
human resource management: to be honest about people.
The principle of meritocracy is astonishingly simple. It states that
since every individual is a potential resource, all should be given an equal opportunity (as much as possible) to develop and to make a contribution to society.
No talent should be neglected. Virtually all successful human organizations succeed because they apply the principle of meritocracy rigorously.
[It’s the story] of how a society views its own population. Are the poor a burden or a potentially rich resource waiting to be tapped? The shift to the latter perception explains why India is now on a steadily upward trajectory. Each year India is introducing more gifted people into the global economy than any other society, with the possible exception of China.
The simplest way of understanding the virtues of meritocracy is to ask this question:
why is Brazil a soccer superpower and an economic middle power? The answer is that when it looks for soccer talent, it searches for it in all sectors of the population, from the upper classes to the slums. A boy from the slums is not discriminated against if he has soccer talent. But in the economic field, Brazil looks for talent in far smaller base of the population, primarily the upper and middle classes.
Flying a plane is easy; it’s the stalls, weather emergencies, getting lost, instrument failures, and those two essential but special circumstances—takeoffs and landings—that take all the training time.
Beyond fear, by the way, is a great, straightforward book on security, full of examples and insights. It was interesting to get to read it only until now, when terrorism has been far eclipsed as the crisis of the day by the financial collapse.
This rings so true it hurts.
The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot -albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity.
It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
I hunger for nonfiction because I love learning and because I long to expand my life, my experiences, my thought—all of them so sadly limited. One particular obsession of mine lately is to find truly great nonfiction in languages other than English. It’s not that there’s a lack of it in English (quite the opposite) but rather a nagging suspicion of Western (American-European) parochialism, of missing out on great works and different perspectives I can’t even imagine.
The surprising thing, though, is how hard it is to found it. I have no trouble finding truly great, truly unique fiction in many languages but my trawlings for worthwhile nonfiction turn out almost always empty.
Perhaps it’s a matter of nonfiction not being as readily exportable and thus translated to other languages. Perhaps there’s just not a English market for translated nonfiction. Perhaps English just sucks into it most modern nonfiction writers, whatever their native language. Perhaps whoever wants to be widely read these days chooses to write only in English. Perhaps nonfiction in other languages is ”remade” rather than “subtitled” into English. Perhaps I need to be introduced to it by a native speaker. Perhaps nonfiction as we now conceive it is a very modern meta-genre. Perhaps nonfiction is a Western thing. Perhaps nonfiction needs a massive community of hundreds of millions of wealthy, educated speakers to foster the few who will read it, let alone write it. Perhaps I’m so drenched in the Anglosphere that I only get it’s version of who’s relevant. Perhaps just as Greek, Latin, Chinese, Arab, or French had their golden nonfiction age, this is English’s. Perhaps.
Lacking an answer,
my guess these days is that English nonfiction is, personally, by far the only worthwhile modern nonfiction in the world.
But I’m still looking. And so, dear Interwebs, please help me out, what examples do you know of truly great nonfiction in languages other than English?
Anything goes, as long as it’s general, nonlocal, non-culturally-specific
(say, no books on Kohdo, the Japanese art of smelling incense, or on the cuisine in the Mexican state of Oaxaca) but to give you a more specific idea of what I’m looking for,
here are some subjects dear to my heart and some outstanding representatives within them (with the few items in languages other than English bolded):
- Economics —think Daniel Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom, Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, PJ O’Rourke’s Eat the Rich;
- History —think Peter Watson’s Modern Mind and Ideas, Mitchel Waldrop’s The Dream Machine;
- Philosophy —think Daniel Dennett’s Freedom Evolves;
- Reference —think Encyclopaedia Britannica, Oxford Dictionary, American Heritage Dictionary, Diccionario Maria Moliner;
- Biology —think Richard Dawkin’s The Selfish Gene, cognitive science (think Andy Clark’s Natural Born Cyborgs);
- Neuroscience —think Jeff Hawkins’s On Intelligence;
- The Singularity —think Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near, Hans Moravec’s Mind Children;
- Computer science —think David Hillis’s Pattern in the Stone, Charles Petzold’s Code, Peter Norville’s Ambient Findability, Doug Engelbart’s Augmenting Human Intellect;
- Philosophy/language/cognitive & computer science —think Douglas Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher and Bach;
- Aphorisms —think Jorge Wagensberg’s Si la naturaleza es la respuesta…;
- Essays —think Alfred N. Whitehead’s Aims of Education, Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters, Fernando Savater’s A Decir Verdad;
- Information Design —think, of course, of Edward Tufte’s masterful works;
- Comics —think Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, The 9/11 Report: a graphic adaptation, Rius’s works;
- Artificial Intelligence —think Marvin Minsky’s Society of Mind;
- Interface design —think Jef Raskin’s The Humane Interface, Donald Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things;
- Design —think Cristopher Alexander’s Notes on the synthesis of form;
- Journalism —think John Battelle’s The Search;
- Business —think anything by Peter Drucker;
- Medicine —think Atul Gawande;
- Language —think Claude Piron’s La Bona Lingvo, George Lakoff’s Metaphors we live by, Giles Fauconnier’s The Way We Think;
- Selfhelp —think Efrain Bartolome’s Educacion Emocional, Dale Carnegie’s How to win friends and influence people, Harry Browne’s _How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World;
- Finance —think The Essays of Warren Buffet;
- Sociology —think Virginia Postrel’s The Future and its Enemies, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, Guillermo Oliveto’s El Futuro Ya Llegó;
- Psychology —think Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow, Ellen Langer’s Mindfulness, Karen Pryor’s Don’t Shoot the Dog, Sherry Turkle’s The Second Self;
- Biography —think Feynman’s Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman, Sam Walton’s Made in America;
- Mathematics —think Michael Spivak’s Calculus, Tobias Dantzig’s Number;
- Education —John Holt’s How Children Fail, Guillermo Jaim Etcheverry’s La Tragedia Educativa, Seymour Papert’s The Children’s Machine;
- Programming —think The Pragmatic Programmer, The Little Schemer;
- Technology —think Kevin Kelly’s Out of Control;
- Periodicals —think The Economist, The New York Times;
- Video —think TedTalks, Helvetica, David Attenborough’s Life in the Undergrowth;
- Animation —think The Crisis of Credit Visualized, Trusted Computing, The Machine;
- And other wonderful, unclassifiable stuff —think James P. Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games, El Retorno del Cangrejo Parte IV, Mihaly Csikszentmihaly’s Evolving Self.
Extra points (not-at-all-necessary but cool parameters):
- the book is less than 200 years old. One extra point if also less than a 100 years old. A further extra point if also less than 50 :).
- from a non-Western language (like Japanese!),
- third culture-ish,
- NOT yet translated into English.
My public and personal library nibbling, my bookstore standing-reading, used to make me feel uneasy, undisciplined and unfulfilled. Not so lately. Split is the new short. and reading book chapters feels like a good balance between substance and stub. Here 5 interesting ones read recently:
Prologue of Ian Burma’s
Inventing Japan, for that great Tokyo Olympics anecdote.
Chapter 11 of Barry Schwartz’s Paradox of Choice, for honest, useful advice for living at “the pinnacle of human possibility”.
Chapter 3 of Po Bronson’s
Nudist on the Late Shift, for the gripping,
amazing tale of how Sabeer Bathia started and sold Hotmail.
Also from Nudist (and partially available on Wired), chapter 7, for an inspiring, charming portrait of Danny Hillis at crossroads.
Chapter 1 of John Nathan’s
Sony: The Private Life, for its depiction of the fascinating soulmate relationship between Sony’s founders, Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka.
Each person creates the world he or she lives in by investing attention in certain things, and by doing so according to certain patterns. The world constructed on the blueprints provided by the genes is one in which all of a person’s attention is invested in furthering the agenda of “reproductive fitness.” This is a simple goal: How can I get enough out of the environment to make sure that I reproduce and that my children will also have children? In less complex organisms, like many species of insects, practically the entire life span is dedicated to the project of laying a clutch of eggs; promptly afterward, the parents expire. Like every other organism, the butterfly has evolved to see only those things that will either help or hinder the survival of its offspring. Its world is made up of flowery shapes that provide nectar, and shapes that resemble predators that are best avoided.
Poets make much of the majestic eagle soaring freely among the snowy peaks. But the eyes of the eagle are generally focused on the ground, searching for rodents lurking in the shadows. The lives of much of humanity could be summed up in similar terms.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,
The Evolving SelfAM
Flow was one of the best books I’ve ever read. I’m halfway through its sequel, The Evolving self, and I can already say the same for it. I’m already having trouble remembering meself before I started reading it—it’s one of those books that stretches and rewrites you as you read it. It’s also deeper than Flow, more speculative, darker—the whole first half has been about the (inevitable) obstacles to human freedom.
After reading
Flow I felt confident happiness, joy, flow, would always be at hand, always within me. Yet I also realized that happiness, joy, and flow were not enough.
The Evolving Self is about what’s missing.
