

The Startup Daily — Great Ideas from Great Books - gandalfar
http://thestartupdaily.com/
Inspirational stuff for your daily RSS Feed.
======
orangewarp
I'll have to check out some of these books personally but I'm curious if
anyone has read the "The Dip: A little book that teaches you when to quit."
I'm interested if someone can give a little more detail as to how the author
explains and turns into a procedure, the process of understanding and the
actions of when to quit.

Two quotes the site claims are, "If you can't be the best in your class, you
should quit" and "Quitting does not make you a failure, you quit to avoid
failure." It struck me as a little dangerous and possible that if this is the
kind of understanding that results from the book, people might skip out too
quickly - something that I see in education too often when persistence and
effort could have done wonders. In my opinion, it is very important to know
when to ADMIT failure (as opposed to avoid failure) and learn from it. Surely
it's also good advice that at some points in our lives we should know when to
cut our losses and move on to the next thing. Does this book do this in a deep
and objective way?

There is a lot of evidence that people are pretty poor at assessing
themselves. Second, the idea of failure avoidance is a common trait of people
with fixed implicit theories of self and low effort-belief (traits correlated
with lower performances, at least on tasks in the domain of education.) Third,
people are really good at justifying their actions to preserve their self
concepts. Ingredients that unless accounted for, seem like they could be dream
killers with a slight push called "go ahead, quit."

Now, I'm going to give the benefit of the doubt that the actual book probably
goes much more in depth as to when and how to make this sort of assessment but
I thought I'd bring it up. Your thoughts?

~~~
karlkrantz
You're right that it is dangerous advice if used as an excuse. One of the
points that Seth Godin makes—that I didn't have space to go into in that short
writeup—is that it's a good habit to determine what would make you quit
something before you even start, this way you never quit because the short
term pain is too great. This also helps prevent you from getting blinded by
pride and sticking with something too long (He uses the example of Nixon and
the Vietnam war in the book).

I think the book does look at it in a objectified way, and in the signature
Seth Godin way that is both simple and deep for his fans, and too obvious to
his critics.

Note that The Dip is actually a super short book, maybe 75-80 pages. To veer
off topic a bit I think this in itself is interesting, and a trend I'd like to
see more of. Not just because people are busier than ever, but because
publishers push writers to "fill out" so many business books when the core
point could be made in less than 100 pages. Some ideas are complex and require
1000 pages, many could be done justice in a few chapters.

------
karlkrantz
Get home, check Hacker News, see your own site listed = sweet! I launched this
just over 3 weeks ago so it's still a little sloppy, but improving as fast as
I can. I would love any feedback from HN people.

------
wmwong
One phrase summary of startup books. Awesome.

~~~
karlkrantz
I'm glad you like it. Just to clarify, they are sometimes summaries, and
sometimes just something from the book that seemed useful, and may have little
to do with the theme of the book. (I need to improve my messaging or I'm going
to get people emailing me "you completed missed the point of that book!")

Short and useful to startup folks is the goal.

------
sabat
I love this site, thanks for posting this. Added to daily reading.

~~~
0xEA
Subscribed.

