A Spotless Future

So I had a great day today, one of those days where I get a chance to catch up with myself, and get down to some reading. Getting a better understanding of life (mainly other people’s)…

So I managed to finish off both Delivering Happiness (Hsieh), the book on Zappos, and Let My People Go Surfing (Chouniard), that on Patagonia. Don’t I just love corporate autobiographies? I also made a sizeable dent in The Checklist Manifesto (Gawande) and Walden (Thoreau) (just to read something different).

Anyway, they’re both great books, and I feel like I should put forth some take home points that I enjoyed from them. Firstly, from Delivering Happiness:

• There’s a point in the book where Hsieh is talking about how he goes about giving talks and presentations and that after giving up the strategy of writing a script and reciting it, he essentially freestyles, and reaches what he envisions as a state of Flow as Csikszentmihalyi describes in the book of the same name. I’ve read a little of Csikszentmihalyi’s work, I’m halfway through Creativity, after seeing it recommended somewhere (the New Yorker?) and it’s fantastic. So this is a new book for my list.
• There’s a great list of ‘Top 10 Questions to Ask When Looking for Investors and Board Members’ that Hsieh goes into when looking for new people or new companies to get involved it. I’d check that out.
• Finally, after toasting ‘Infinity and Beyond!’ to the takeover/marriage of Zappos and Amazon, there’s a lovely little quote, not attributed to anyone which reads:

No matter what your past has been, you have a spotless future.

What a great way to end.

And then from Let My People Go Surfing I noted this particular points:

• Look into a book called The One Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka, about the careful ecological use of land.
• I also really like the definition of wilderness as “a place that is more than a day’s walk from civilisation”. This however leads on to the fact that there are few such places left. It almost explains going into the wild.
• I also made a note to look into the book Confessions of an Eco-Warrior. And that reminded me also to check out Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang. Two more books I guess…
• I really rather enjoyed reading about the section where they looked into where the chemicals that were used in their dyes came from. Entirely reminded me of Cradle to Cradle (a book that I wholeheartedly adore). I was later then unsurprised in the book to come across mention of William McDonough. Fantastic work on the behalf of Patagonia though, looking into the origin of chemicals in their products.

I guess I now just have to read some more. I might even re-read C2C.