Poke the Box
Tonight, I read Poke the Box by Seth Godin. Its too short to be called a book, so he refers to it as a manifesto. I like manifestos. I read two books last year, which far exceeded the number of books I’d read in the previous twenty years combined. Poke the Box might be my new favorite. Here’s why…
I found the book on Amazon (http://amzn.to/hQA1BH ) for $9.50. I noticed that it was in stock, but might require a two day delay in shipping, so I decided to buy it on my wife’s Kindle for $4.99. Duh. About ninety seconds later, I started reading.
The Kindle screen isn’t backlit and our living room isn’t particularly well lit, so after about 20 minutes of squinting, I decided to try reading on the iPad. When I picked up the iPad, it magically knew what “page” I was on…so I kept reading. If I was outside, or in a brighter room, I think I might have preferred reading on the Kindle. We’ll see next time.
About the Book:
I am an avid reader and re-tweeter of Seth Godin (@ThisIsSethsBlog) on Twitter. He is smart and writes in focused, daily, well-proportioned amounts that usually resonate with me. His posts are among the first I read in the morning…before I get out of bed.
Poke the Box reads like his blog. Easy reading, short paragraphs, punctuated with powerful, quotable truths. By the time I soaked in one page and had a chance to let it resonate, he’d hit on something else, even better, on the next.
So what’s “poking the box?” He talks about pushing (poking) buttons to see what happens, versus sitting there, maintaining the status quo.
When you do this, what happens? When you do that, what happens? The box reveals itself through your poking, and as you get better at it, you not only get smarter but gain ownership. Ownership doesnt have to be equity or even control. Ownership comes from understanding and from having the power to make things happen.
He talks a lot about taking the initiative, something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. I’ve called it building capacity. He just calls it initiative.
That’s your opportunity-to approach your work in a way that generates unique learning and interactions that are worth sharing.
and
…I wonder if there is a moral obligation to start.
I believe there is. I believe that if you’ve got a platform and the ability to make a difference, then this goes beyond “should” and reaches the level of “must.” You must make a difference or you squander the opportunity. Wasting the opportunity both degrades your own ability to contribute and, more urgently, takes something away from the rest of us.
Wow, that was pretty much sums up my whole call to action at our last Tech Camp Day. Here’s the way I phrased it:
If all you do is your job, then that’s all you’re going to be good at. If you do you job AND learn about other things at the same time, you double up your efforts and create options and opportunities for your future. If all you do is the work you are assigned, then that is ALL you will learn. You have more options than that. You have the internet in your pocket, access to the sum of all human knowledge in your backpack and the opportunity to take ANY class you are interested in for free on the internet. Your opportunities are limitless.
Yes, you should do your classwork, but you should be building capacity for the next big thing in your life at the same time. This requires a new set of habits. Students are conditioned to be compliant, wait for instructions and complete their work. That’s not enough anymore. We should be learning how to be self-directed, self-motivated and thoroughly-connected learners.
This book came to me at just the right time. It really reinforced and expanded some of the ideas about learning and doing I’ve been wrestling with recently.
I highly recommend the book. Five stars. If you read it, let me know so we can talk about what we are doing/shipping.
