Smart Thinking

From the NY Times.

In an attempt to increase book sales, HarperCollins Publishers will begin offering free electronic editions of some of its books on its Web site, including a novel by Paulo Coelho and a cookbook by the Food Network star Robert Irvine.

The idea is to give readers the opportunity to sample the books online in the same way that prospective buyers can flip through books in a bookstore.

“It’s like taking the shrink wrap off a book,” said Jane Friedman, chief executive of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide. “The best way to sell books is to have the consumer be able to read some of that content.”
Starting Monday, readers who log on to www.harpercollins.com will be able to see the entire contents of “The Witch of Portobello” by Mr. Coelho; “Mission: Cook! My Life, My Recipes and Making the Impossible Easy” by Mr. Irvine; “I Dream in Blue: Life, Death and the New York Giants” by Roger Director; “The Undecided Voter’s Guide to the Next President: Who the Candidates Are, Where They Come from and How You Can Choose” by Mark Halperin; and “Warriors: Into the Wild” the first volume in a children’s series by Erin Hunter...

Another interesting think piece (a real Morty term to use) - Moishe subscribes to this theory

Research shows that your brain function is both broadened and improved by “interdisciplinary exercise.” What does this mean? Be eccentric. Use your brain to think about lots of different things, even things that have nothing to do with one another. This builds new synapses, exercises existing ones, and simply makes you smarter.

OK, you’re thinking, but I’m founding a company. I don’t have time to think about anything other than cash flow and customer acquisition, much less take up new hobbies. But here’s one quick way to do become interdisciplinary: When you read, read stuff that has nothing to do with what your company does. (You can make time to read.)

Life Optimizer had a great post last week that explained three reasons why diversifying your reading is a shortcut to brains-building.

1. Avoid boredom
I don’t know about you, but reading the same topics again and again makes me bored. Even for topics I’m passionate about, I will be more refreshed if I also read other topics once in a while.

2. Arbitrage knowledge
The art of arbitrage is important for living smart, and diversifying your reading allows you to do knowledge arbitrage. Knowledge arbitrage means taking ideas from one field to be applied to another field. If you read only one or two topics, it’s difficult to do that.
3. Cross-pollinate ideas
Continuing the idea of arbitrage, not only can you borrow ideas from other fields, you can also combine ideas from different fields. Often it will give you “original” ideas since nobody has seen such combination before. Of course, you can only cross-pollinate idea if you have different kinds of idea to begin with, and that’s why you should diversify your reading.

It turns out this is a tried and true method, used by some of your business icons — like VC Michael Moritz and Apple founder Steve Jobs.

Last July,
the New York Times revealed what several hyper-successful business leaders read — and it ain’t business books.

For example, Moritz, the Sequoia VC who funded Google, Yahoo!, PayPal, Kayak.com and others, said:

“I try to vary my reading diet and ensure that I read more fiction than nonfiction,” Mr. Moritz said. “I rarely read business books, except for Andy Grove’s ‘Swimming Across,’ which has nothing to do with business but describes the emotional foundation of a remarkable man. I re-read from time to time T. E. Lawrence’s ‘Seven Pillars of Wisdom,’ an exquisite lyric of derring-do, the navigation of strange places and the imaginative ruses of a peculiar character. It has to be the best book ever written about leading people from atop a camel.”

The Times also reports that Apple founder Steve Jobs once had “an ‘inexhaustible interest’ in the books of William Blake — the mad visionary 18th-century mystic poet and artist.”