There ought to be a support group for people who buy too many books. I buy too many self-help books. I buy more books than I could ever have time to read.
Every lunchtime, while my colleagues eat in the company restaurant, I walk around the book stores of London. I love the discount rack. You can find so many cool things there. When I don’t go to the book store, I go to the library which, if nothing else, is not as expensive as the book stores.
I’ve read books on speed reading and try my best to keep up with it all. I read much more quickly than I did a few years ago. But still, that just means I buy more books. I read load of them, but some sit in a corner of the house never to be found again.
Skills Quantification
Where I’m working at the moment, people are hiring like crazy. I overhear the managers pouring over CVs and saying things like “this guy has six years experience, but this other guy has eight.” I wonder if one day we will hear in the IT market, “This guy has 22 years development experience, but this other guy over here has 25.”
There is definitely a law of diminishing returns when it comes to IT skills. The need to quantify the skills is really funny. IT development is, or should be, creative work. Talent is far more important than skill. I’m sure you’ve seen highly skilled developers produce some very crap products because they never focused on design or gui or talking with clients etc.
Swimming With Sharks
For the past few years now, I’ve been reading about one self-improvement book a week. I started with the 7 Habits and have read so many I’ve lost count. I’ve read Brian Tracy, Tony Robbins, Tom Peters, Herb Cohen and loads of other not-as-famous authors. I’ve read about NLP, Negotiating skills, Networking, Sales, Customer Service–you name it.
After a while, the books start to get a bit dull. I still like to read them and re-enforce anything that is worth learning.
But I just finished reading Harvey Mackays Swim With the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive. It was great. I enjoyed reading it a lot. I was so taken by it that I tried to do some negotiation and haggling at Tottenham Court Road. It was a lot of fun.
So, to put it briefly, I highly recommend it.