Primordial Ooze

Over the past 6 or so months, I’ve made it a personal goal to start reading more. I’m not just talking about technical books such as Foundations of Ajax,  The Zen of CSS Design, and Working with Visual Studio Team System (no more than a big marketing piece). I’m talking about self-help and nonfiction books like Winning, de Bono’s Thinking Course, and the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

I have a few books on my to-do list which I hope to read as I keep the momentum. That reading list roughly includes First Things First, The Tipping Point, The Inmates Are Running The Asylum (which I should have read a long time ago), Crossing the Chasm, Getting Things Done, Rules for Revolutionaries, and Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond.

That last book, Guns, Germs, and Steel has been talked about by my friends a lot. As such the name Jared Diamond has been floating around in my head. As I browsed the links tagged by some of my friends via del.icio.us (what? you’re still not using del.icio.us?!), I came across a recent talk by Jared Diamond entitled How to Get Rich over at Edge.

Whoa, three paragraphs and I’m just now getting to the title of this post.

In this talk, Mr. Diamond uses the lessons of history to describe why some groups of humans succeed and why some fail. The primary point was rather simple and I think everyone can agree is more or less common sense. That groups of humans succeed when they face competitive forces and that they are not isolated from their competitors. At least, that’s what I got out of it. The best part of the talk, though, is not so much the lesson but the journey in getting there. As you read  the talk, you learn about the German beer industry, Japanese food processing, how Japan had acquired gun technology and how the samurai, fearing the great equalizer of the thunder stick, restricted the use of guns over time until firearms became extinct by the time Commodore Perry came to Japan in the 1840’s. This is a great quote

What happened was that the Samurai, the warrior class in Japan, had been used to fighting by standing up in front of their armies and making a graceful speech, the other opposing Samurai made an answering graceful speech, and then they had one-on-one combat. The Samurai discovered that the peasants with their guns would shoot the Samurai while the Samurai were making their graceful speeches (Link).

How funny is that?