“The Myths of Innovation” by Scott Berkun
Acquiring the Book
“The Myths of Innovation” by Scott Berkun
was a book that I happened to stumble across while trying to return another
book to a mentor. We will call my mentor
Mr. C for referencing purposes. He had
this book and another sitting on his desk.
He had admitted that he hadn’t read it yet and was interested in its
contents but offered me the first go. I
took the opportunity of being the first human to read this copy of the book and
quickly grabbed it up and made my way back to my office with it.
You can easily purchase this book from outlets
such as Ebay.com, Amazon.com, and Walmart.com for prices ranging between ten and
twenty dollars. I have a few relationships
in my workplace where we actively trade books for a prolonged period of time
because we spend so much of our time at work that it makes reading and
digesting books a costly pastime.
Overview
Like the book’s title infers, it is written
around the subject of innovation. This
writing delivers a lot of facts about historical innovators and the challenges
that they faced long before they were known as innovators, inventors, or even
successful persons. The flow of this
book started out pretty exciting for me.
I felt its invitational pull that drew me back strongly in the
beginning. This leveled off through the
middle portion of the book but then returned as strong as ever towards the end.
I often found that the book would influence
me to want to pursue my dreams as an entrepreneur and inventor. It had me comparing some of my travels and
journeys with those of historically famous innovators that were the subject of
the read. I spent quite a few hours lying
on my back on my living room floor looking up at the pages and thinking of how
I would apply the knowledge contained in the book to my own life.
In tandem to reading this, I was also studying
business law. My studies and the
contents of the book fit together perfectly.
I have this knack for tying various things going on in my life
simultaneously together to provide a good jolt of purpose and drive to whatever
it is that I am trying to accomplish. I
will forever remember this book for this chunk of time of my life.
Annotated Bibliography
The first thing that really surprised me
and sold me about this book was that it contained a complete annotated
bibliography that covered the entire span of the book. Literally every page donned reference material
to whatever it was that author Scott Berkun was writing about. This was impressive as I am weak for
scholarly articles and citations. Seeing them at the bottom of every page just made
me happy inside.
Being surrounded by all the reference
material gave way to the feeling that what I was reading was true. I knew with a little bit of further research
that I could confirm what it was that the author was saying and follow up on
what I was reading. I embarrassingly admit
that I did not do this much, rather, I took the book for face value and absorbed
the content within it without using the referencing material more than two or
three times. Upon finishing the book, it
had a larger complication of the bibliography’s references. I didn’t take too much time to look through
these as I had already had the book an unwelcome length of time, however, it
still made me feel good that the author had taken so much time to provide
sources for what he was writing about.
This was especially helpful in the subject
matter. The author used references to
point to the validity of his claims as they pertained to historical innovators,
their innovations, and their life stories.
I do wish that it contained more faction research on the process of
innovation and invention and followed up by pointing to journals and articles
that he based his information on, but nonetheless, any reference is better than
no reference at all. The biggest benefit
of the annotated bibliography is the feel of what you were reading. It did not feel like you were reading some
quickly scribbled and pushed self help book, however, it really felt like you
were holding a tome of knowledge.
Towards the End
Things really turned up towards the end of
the book. The author skillfully twists historical
inventors, inventions, their strategies, and their stories together for you and
allows you to look through their eyes and think how they think for a good bit
before giving you some real gems.
Towards the end of the book Scott Berkun delves into very applicable
tactics and methods that the modern person can use towards improving their
skills as an innovator and as a person.
The author wrote two excellent chapters on motivation
and pitching ideas. I previously hadn’t
realized how important pitching an idea was for an innovator. I hadn’t tied innovation to salesmanship. I also hadn’t realized all the little things
to keep in mind when bringing an idea to someone else. I am truly enlightened for having read these
two chapters alone. I admit that I wish
that the book was packed full of these gyms, and I imagine how exciting it
would be to read had I felt the excitement of reading the entire book as I had
felt during reading and digesting these two chapters.
The author breaks down the sales pitch of
an idea in one of the later chapters into various components. He then explains that anyone delivering a
sales pitch needs to have the same pitch in various time-length formats. What I took from this is that anyone pitching
an idea needs to have a ten second pitch, a one-minute pitch, and a ten-minute
pitch for the same idea. He then gives
strategies for applying each and going from the first to the last in a
progressive fashion.
Humor
I think that it is worth it to mention that
a lot of the fluidity and ease of reading this book comes from the passive
humor that the author possesses. He’s
able to weave a very natural feeling humor in his writing that leaves you
smiling when you come across it. This is
not a forced humor or a book so injected with humor that you have to look for
the content, rather, it is genuine and imaginable that this is how you would experience
communicating with the author in real life.
A lot of whether I mesh with these types of
non-fiction writings depends on if I find that through reading the book that
the author’s personality is compatible with mine. In this case, it very much was.
Overall Rating
I feel like a pretty hard critic in giving
book a 3.5 out of 5. This writing really
explored historical innovators and their challenges. I feel like it spent a lot of time pounding
on history and not enough time delivering unique technique to overcome. I do like the level of encouragement to be an
inventor, but a lot of it came from pointing to the persistence of other
inventors who struggled a lot instead of pointing to ways to overcome these
struggles. Overall, I really enjoyed the
book and would recommend others read it if they are interested in business,
inventing, innovation, and changing the world.
My Headspace at the Time
During this time, I had been doing a lot of
dreaming in my spare and not-so-spare time.
I had crafted an idea of a licensing business based on research and
innovation. This is a hard sell in real
life, because of the inherent risk in hoping that research transforms into
profitable substance. Nevertheless, the
book had me thinking and dreaming in ways that I hadn’t thought or dreamt of
before. I think it is these influences in
our emotions and thoughts that really make books hang with us over the course
of our lifetimes. I only hope that my
next series of reads provides me with the same type of interface to my life as
I am currently experiencing it.
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