Geometry of Thinking

 Geometry of Thinking: How to Find Yourself and Succeed in Business, Kane Edwards, HighRock, 2022

At work, are you stuck in an emotional rut? Do you think that there has got to be something better than this? New opportunities are always available. This book may be able to help.

Compare your talent to a guitar. Everyone has a talent for something, some people just take longer to find it than others. The guitar has sat in your closet for your entire life. One day, you take it out, and start playing. The sound is awful. Do you toss it back in your closet, and vow never to touch it again? Instead, learn to play just one string the right way. Then you can master two strings. After that, learn how to play chords, and, before you know it, you are actually playing the guitar.

It is the same when starting a small business. It is normal to want to make a million dollars in your first year. That is not going to happen. There will be setbacks and false starts. There will be days when quitting looks very tempting. Concentrate on doing one thing very well, until you can do it without thinking about it. Then add another thing to do, and another, and another. Before you know it, you are successful at getting a promotion at work or running your own small business. Perhaps you are a creative person, with plenty of ideas for small business to start. But you stink at the "business" part of running a small business. Concentrate on learning how to run a business, or hire someone to do it for you.

This book is less than 100 pages, and is very thought-provoking. It will get someone out of their emotional rut, and help them get a promotion, or a better job. It gets 4 stars.

Digital is Destroying Everything

Digital is Destroying Everything, Andrew V. Edwards, Rowman and Littlefield, 2015

Digital (which includes robots, the internet, algorithms and smartphones) is supposed to usher in a new era of convenience and lower prices for the consumer. There is no downside to all this inter-connectedness, right?

Very wrong, according to the author of this book. He explores how streaming and file sharing have basically destroyed the music industry. The newspaper business is also on "life support." Those who are unemployed are told to learn how to code or re-train for some 21st century job. That may be possible for some people. What is your average middle-age factory worker whose job has just gone overseas supposed to do? Besides, is there much of a demand by companies to hire these semi-trained, but inexperienced, coders?

Digital (especially Amazon) is one of the forces that has emptied Main Street of mom and pop retail shops, and emptied hundreds of strip malls all over America. Retail itself deserves some of the blame (JC Penney, for instance). The newest trend in retail is to build "lifestyle centers" or "Town centers" which are little more than strip malls with a village facade. Have you ever hesitated to go into a store out of fear that the owner might actually. . . talk to you? The object of American entrepreneurship seems to be to create a smartphone app to be sold to some major corporation for an insane amount of money. Creating actual revenue through sales of the app was never a consideration.

Human interaction seems to be deader than dead. How many dinner times are silent because everyone in the family considers the happenings on their tiny screen to be more important than the person sitting across from them? Is personal privacy an obsolete concept? Political discourse has become balkanized, in that believers in nearly anything can put up their own website (or websites) and tell themselves that they are right, and everyone else is wrong.

What can a person do about it? Reduce Your Digital Exposure. Leave your smartphone off until you actually need it. This is an excellent and eye-opening book. It should be read by everyone, especially by those who have to check Facebook (for instance) every few minutes.