Rework [Hardcover]

It would be easy to be dismissive of this book:

Its 270 pages are mostly white space and tangential illustrations;you get about 100 pages here. It doesn't go into any depth, simply skimming the surface of very many different notions. Nothing here is new, it is 80% common sense and you can read most of it for free on the Signal vs Noise blog.

And yet I highly recommend buying and reading it. It will only take you a few hours and will enrich your business life. Why? Because you are stupid.

Its okay though, I'm stupid too; we are all stupid. We constantly forget what we know; we backslide; we lose courage. We listen to overpaid overfed corporate execs and their ghost-writers and don't listen to what our sensible grandmothers tell us, and heck those grandmothers would never have let the economy go crunch.

So we need books that remind us what we already know to be true, and reiterate it a distinctive and friendly way so that remember it for a little while longer than normal.

This book does this so well that it sets the benchmark for slapping yourself in the face. Along the way it reminds you that you wasted several hundred dollars on wordy business books that told you what to do and how to do it, by authors who did a 180 a couple of years later.

Put simply this book reminds you to be free. Think freely, march to your own drummer, don't do stuff because it worked for someone else, and ignore any doomsayer who says 'that will never work'. Perceived wisdom is dangerous; real wisdom involves having an open mind with plenty of room for new thinking.

It is motivational more than informative, but that is what you need. Your business will be unique, every business is, so why copy someone else?

For the cost of lunch for two at Timmy's, this book will shake off all the nonsense you read in the newspapers and in business books, and set you free to build something really wonderful.

This book won't tell you anything new. This book is the best purchase you will make this year. Go figure.

Five stars.

If Joseph Schumpeter were to design a "creative destroyer," he would probably come up with a business thinker who bears a striking resemblance to Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. To me, they seem to be iconoclasts who are impatient to build rather than anarchists whose objective is chaos. They quickly indicate a healthy respect for the nature and extent of difficulty when challenging the status quo. But they are not deterred by that difficult, as their success with 37signals clearly indicates, and they probably have more confidence in their readers' (as yet) unfulfilled potentialities than most of those readers do.

Consider this passage in Chapter FIRST: "There's a new reality. Today anyone can be in business. Tools that used to be out of reach are now easily accessible. Technology that cost thousands is now just a few bucks or free. One person can do the job of two or three or, in some cases, an entire department. Stuff that was impossible just a few years ago is simple today." That said, Fried and Hansson realize that many people who read that passage will heartily endorse its spirit but decline to embrace and leverage the opportunities that the new reality offers. For them, the "real world" is defined by what James O'Toole so aptly characterizes in his book, Leading Change, as "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom."

This so-called "real world" has advocates who, Fried and Hansson observe, "are filled with pessimism and despair. They expect fresh concepts to fail. They assume society isn't ready for or capable of change. Even worse, they want to drag others down into their tomb. If you're hopeful and ambitious, they'll try to convince you your ideas are impossible. They'll say you're wasting your time. Don't believe them. That world may be real for them, but it doesn't mean you have to live in it." By now you have at least a sense of the thrust and flavor of Fried and Hansson's perspectives on how (literally) anyone can rework what she or he does...and rework how she or he does it...to achieve and then sustain success in all dimensions and domains of one's life. Indeed, one of the most important insights shared in the book is that the most valuable business lessons are also the most valuable life lessons. For example, here are ten of several dozen that Fried and Hansson discuss:

Learning from mistakes is overrated.
Planning is guessing.
Scratch your own itch.
Not enough of [fill in the blank] is a cop-out.
Embrace constraints.
Be a curator, not a custodian.
Reasons to quit.

Note: The material in this chapter is wholly consistent with the gambler's adage, "Know when to hold `em, know when to fold `em" as well as with Seth Godin's observations in The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick).

Long lists don't get done.
Emulate great chefs.
ASAP is poison.

Granted, the tone of Fried and Hansson's narrative is sometimes confrontation, in-your-face, but I think that is necessary because their separate but related purposes are to challenge their reader to "rework" or, in some instances, "blow up" assumptions and premises about business success that are no longer true (or never were), and, to encourage their reader adopt a new mindset, then formulate and execute new strategies and tactics that will achieve sustainable business success.

If you need some fresh perspectives on how to get more done with less, including less stress, and with more joy, look no further. And if you share my high regard for this book, I highly recommend Godin's Linchpin, Guy Kawasaki's Reality Check, Scott McLeod's Ignore Everybody, and Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense co-authored by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton.

This book gave me some good advice that wasn't overly wordy. It got me into actually making things and making a profit. It gave me comfort knowing I don't have to be big overnight. I don't need to be a great artist right now. I just have to work with what I've got right now. I like how the authors say, "Everything is marketing."