This year’s crop shows a continued emphasis on non-fiction (only 3 novels), and on various aspects of business life. Spending the better part of the year working for startups and in that landscape has fired up a desire to better understand how businesses and products are built, beyond the UX portion that I’m most familiar with.

Some trends that arose or grew were grief work, neuropsychology, productivity, creativity, and sustainable living. Some that dropped off from previous years include Buddhism (doing more online reading and podcasts in this area, along with actual practice finally), storytelling, and plays and poetry. One goal for this year is to add those back in, along with more fiction—I used to read much more of those, and miss the spark that gets lit in my brain by translating words into mental images. More graphic novels would be great too—there is so much great work in the field these days—and thankfully my holidays left me with a great pile to start from.

This year’s list:

• The Zen of Steve Jobs – Caleb Melby
• The Tao of Psychology: Synchronicity and Self – Jean Shinoda Bolen
• The Fault in Our Stars – John Green
• The Accidental Creative – Todd Henry
• The Visionary State – Erik Davis
• Life Itself – Roger Ebert
• How to Win at the Sport of Business – Mark Cuban
• American Veda – Phillip Goldberg
• The Influencing Machine – Brooke Gladstone
• Mastery – George Leonard
• It’s All About the Bike – Robert Penn
• Stop Stealing Dreams – Seth Godin
• 250 Things You Should Know About Writing – Chuck Wendig
• Helping Me Help Myself: One Skeptic, Ten Self-Help Gurus, and a Year on the Brink of the Comfort Zone – Beth Lisick
• Paper Towns – John Green
• 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done – Peter Bregman
• Seeking Peace: Chronicles of the Worst Buddhist in the World – Mary Pipher
• Love Goes to Buildings on Fire – Will Hermes
• Mindset – Carol Dweck
• Design Is a Job – Mike Monteiro
• Buddha or Bust – Perry Garfinkel
• Sacred Dying – Megory Anderson
• The $100 Startup – Chris Guillebeau
• The Dip – Seth Godin
• Finding Your Way in a Wild New World – Martha Beck
• 168 Hours – Laura Vanderkam
• Incognito – David Eagleman
• Love Yourself Like Your Life Depended on It – Kamal Navikant
• Minimalism: Essential Essays – Joshua Millburn & Ryan Nicodemus
• Turning Pro – Steven Pressfield
• Steal Like an Artist – Austin Kleon
• The Paris Review Interviews, Volume 1
• Radical Simplicity – Dan Price
• The Alchemist – Paolo Coelho
• California Rock & Roll Smartass – Joel Selvin
• Guitar Zero – Gary Marcus
• Maps and Legends – Michael Chabon
• The Cosmic Serpent – Jeremy Narby
• One Way – Lawrence Lessig
• The Nerdist Way – Chris Hardwick
• Fire Monks – Colleen Morton Busch
• Diamond in the Rough – Shawn Colvin
• Are You My Mother? – Alison Bechdel
• The Now Habit – Neil Fiore
• Tiny Beautiful Things – Cheryl Strayed
• Daring Greatly – Brene Brown
• From Campus to Combat – James Alter
• Wrecked – Jeff Goins
• The Myth of the Garage – Chip & Dan Heath
• The Little Book of Talent – Daniel Coyle
• Get Your Pitchfork On! – Kristy Athens
• You Can Buy Happiness (and It’s Cheap) – Tammy Strobel
• Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back – Andrew Zolli/Ann Marie Healy
• Start with Why – Simon Sinek
• Don’t You Have Time to Think? – Richard P. Feynman
• The Checklist Manifesto – Atul Gawande
• Brains on Fire – Robbin Phillips, Greg Cordell, Geno Church, Spike Jones
• The 4-Hour Chef – Tim Ferriss
• Emotional Equations – Chip Conley
• The Geographer’s Library – Jon Fasman

Credibility & Calories: A Perspective on Information

(Final draft pending any revelations) (The FWD)
by Woody Evans

Information doesn’t want anything, but people do. People want things like sex and freedom and control and food and community and property.

Information isn’t a kind of perfect thing, it’s not an ideal, it’s not even a value. It’s a tool. And being a tool doesn’t make information good.

Tools are generally considered good if they’re useful. Hammers are used to build houses. And we all know that good tools can be used for bad things.

Information is not essentially good, though it is an essential good. That is to say, it’s a commodity that has value, can be traded, and that can also lose value and degrade over time.

Thought experiment: think of the most valuable discrete item of information you know. How do you assign its particular value relative to other things you know? Is it the most valuable to you personally, to your community, or to the world system as a whole? Maybe you have to use a utilitarian frame to give it value (it’s valuable because it can serve the most number of people the best); maybe you have a particular religious frame (it’s valuable because when someone knows it, that person is enlightened or saved); maybe it’s valuable to you because it can make you a lot of money (or make a poor country rich).

Would it be valuable to the watermelon farmers and field hands near Mize, Mississippi? The land there is woods and small farms, piney, built on loam and clay, and full of fierce folks who spend a lot of time in church. They drink, fuss and fight, try to get degrees at the community college.

If the most valuable information in the world is a simple solar hack (filling plastic bottles with whatever water you’ve got, leaving them in the sun for a full day to make them safe to drink, say), how valuable is it to my rural Mississippi cousins? They have plentiful well water, the Okatoma river easily at hand, and over 50 inches of rainfall per year.

If the most valuable information in the world is a prayer, you’d get them more interested—but it better be a Baptist prayer. You see what I mean. Information is not objectively valuable.

To talk about the information needs of the developing world, we need to talk about what information is and what it is not.

Information is not:

• Salvific.
• More valuable than gauze, iodine, or syringes.
• The key to a floating world of equality or purity or dignity.

So what is information, at its best, for the world’s poor?

Here’s the answer: information is food and health. Anything beyond that, until the basics get ironed out, is lagniappe. We get the information to the people so that they can sustainably clothe, feed, and heal themselves. Your IT initiatives for the burgeoning sub-Saharan mobile “market”? Let it focus on these basics. Dignity, open government, capital ventures—these things may follow only if there’s a well-laid cornerstone to build from.

People need to eat, and when your kid lacks something basic you’ll do a hell of a lot that you never thought you would to get her what she needs. Nothing is more valuable than the bit of information that leads me to food to fill her belly with.

Calories build the credibility of the information technologist.

We build beyond the basics when the luxury presents itself.

Information is only as valuable as the context and the people who use it. Evans’ essay caught my eye among the submissions because of some other reading I’ve been doing about aid work in both developing countries and disaster zones at Tales from the Hood. The aid worker who writes it has strong opinions about the right and wrong way to really help people in desperate situations, and takes particular offense at aid (though well-meaning) that starts from an end of its own and works backward to justify itself. What is missing in such a case is the question, “What do you need?” to those one is trying to help. His imaginative vision of AidMart offers one potential ideal for the future.

I’m not a strict believer in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but it makes intuitive sense to me that the kind of self-actualization required for “dignity, open government, capital ventures,” the cornerstones of functional society, can’t be established or maintained well without the physical and basic emotional needs of people being met. And though Evans and the unnamed author of Tales from the Hood are both talking more specifically about the developing world, it’s just as sound a principle here in the “First World” as our own sense of security continues to erode. The realities of Katrina, financial collapse, the Gulf spill and nearly 10% unemployment mean that the choices of which level gets satisfied first are plenty real to millions of people in one of the richest countries on Earth.

So the questions I ask myself, are “What now? What information do I have that could be useful, and how can I get it to those who can use it?” I hope this post is worthy as a first answer to that question. If you’re interested in contributing or getting more information about the book, just click the handy widget.

And read Vinay’s summary of the project and what we’re trying to accomplish. How can your voice be part of the conversation?

Happy birthday Mom, I still miss you (and I know you would have cried too).

Last Minutes with ODEN from phos pictures on Vimeo.

Next, read this from La Vida Locavore.

I’m currently reading Palmer’s A Hidden Wholeness right now, which could be described as a manual for dealing with this type of soul emptiness. Very interesting so far, especially for the essential Quaker-ness of his approach, which lures the soul out of hiding by creating a safe place for it to emerge both within the individual and within a trusted community. Thought-provoking stuff in a world where so many people are already undergoing wrenching transitions due to political upheavals, environmental issues, health problems, loss or change of jobs, etc.

We’re in the process of building a coop (they will be inside for a few months until they’re big enough), and in the meantime it’s Chicken TV all the time. Weekly updates at the YouTube channel as time warrants.

The chickens we just got are a new phase of this, following the gardening/canning that’s already happening. I’m also almost finished with a Permaculture Design course and am looking to combine that with the more philosophical/psychological stuff I’m learning in school. I guess if I could aspire to such heights, I’d like to follow in the footsteps of someone like Wendell Berry, who has such a strong connection to the land and an equally beautiful way of talking about that connection.