Since becoming an author I read even more books – mostly nonfiction. I’m also a part of a book club so I read fiction once a month too.

Lately with business books I seem to read them in pairs. I find myself reading books at the same time with what seem like polar opposite messages. Before it was “The 4 Hour Work Week” by Tim Ferris and “Crush It” by Gary Vaynerchuk. One says to work far less hours and one advocates working a lot more than the average work week of 40 hours.

Now the paradox comes from “Linchpin” by Seth Godin and “The Referral Engine” by John Jantsch. They both have the same color orange covers and I carry them around together. The Referral Engine talks about a system that is predictably delivers well. Linchpin is about making your own way and being remarkable.

Another example: I alternatively read Godin praise Bob Dylan  and listened to a CD on my way to work about how inconsistent Bob Dylan is (as in fail).

From an interview with Seth Godin:

Seth Godin: Well, you know, a lot of people want competence, and certainly people on Wall Street seem to, and competence being someone who they think is good at things. Unfortunately, competence is the enemy of greatness because people who are competent like being competent. They like doing a good enough job all the time.

Bob Dylan is serially incompetent. He got booed off the stage in the ’60s. He got booed off the stage when he became a born-again Christian. He was ignored for years because he keeps taking risks, because he keeps doing things he is not good at and then getting good at them. When we look at corporations, which a Motley Fool person spends a lot of time doing, Wall Street keeps putting pressure on corporations to be average and then they’re surprised when they hit the wall when, in fact, it’s the corporations that have strong leaders who ignore Wall Street, the Apple Computers (Nasdaq: AAPL) of the world, the Googles (Nasdaq: GOOG) of the world — those are the people who keep confounding expectations by overdelivering because they’re willing to be incompetent.

Mac Greer: And along those lines, Seth, I have a friend who’s seen Bob Dylan multiple times and said that sometimes he’s been great and sometimes it’s just been awful. I’ve only seen him once and he was great, but it sounds like there’s a hit-and-miss quality to his performing.

Seth Godin: Oh, yeah, I took my son to see him and we left halfway through because it was horrible. (Laughter.) But the point is that human beings would rather have glimpses of genius than day-to-day mediocrity.

Seth Godin is the guy who doesn’t match his socks!

Anyway, I suppose I’ve been going through a bit of an identity crisis. I’m more of a Seth Godin type who wishes she were more of a John Jantsch type. I married a John Jantsch type to compensate. His business does really well and its fueled by referrals. Mine…I’m still (as a new author & with new products) trying to figure it out.

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