When I sat down and wrote the first draft of Principles of Applied Stupidity, I ran into an unexpected problem. Because I was writing a book that was essentially nonstop heretic blasphemy, at least in the context of the standard American educational experience, I had this constant gnawing fear that someone was going to come along at any moment and rap me on the knuckles with a ruler… or worse.
I actually had to go see a chiropractor at one point to get my muscles untangled, as I kept inadvertently locking myself into a self protective posture while typing.
Again, while writing this book, I felt very much like Galileo at a pope convention, but I have since discovered that there are other people who are thinking very much along the same lines. Now you might think that I would be upset to discover that ("oh no! they stole my idea!" etc.) , but amazingly, it’s exactly the opposite. If absolutely no one agreed with the ideas in the book, that might make a good argument for it being all wrong. But amazingly, the book has resonated with quite a few people, and I’m starting to find, in bits and pieces anyway, people all over the place who actually concur with the ideas in the book, and that is a truly wonderful thing. And if were going to have any chance of overcoming the collective emotional/psychological trauma that leads so many people to be scared to death of “looking stupid,” I’m going to need all the help I can get.
Just to recap, one of the biggest hits was meeting up with the folks at Chronicle who did an entire episode based on the book. Then a guy who publishes an online magazine for financial planners did a feature review of it. Then David Meerman Scott discovered it, and gave me a great blurb for my dust cover. Then just the other day I stumbled into a management consulting blog web site that mirrored one principle applied stupidity, which is “be willing to ask a stupid question.” The reviews on Amazon have been amazing. Just last week, Megan Mcardle in Time Magazine did an article on the benefits of failure. And then just today, I rather randomly bumped into a guy named Adrian Segar on a twitter conversation, and he has written at least two recent blog posts which are very much in line with my own philosophy of getting away from the educational industrial complex’s left-over-from-the-Industrial-Revolution way of doing business.
Can it be there is a movement afoot?
–jl
