Draft Complete!
My new book is done! Sort of.
I finally have a complete draft of How I Learn Stuff: Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar.
All I need now is a publisher.
- I had the idea for a book like this 26 years ago (original title: “School Kills”).
- I had the idea for this specific book 18 years ago.
- The oldest text in the book was written 10 years ago.
- The basic architecture and style came together 3 years ago.
- Three quarters of the book was written over the last 6 months.
- The very last section, written 3 days ago, was on the topic of….
…how procrastination is a virtue.
April 4th, 2008 at 6:53 pm
Fantastic, can’t wait to read it!
April 4th, 2008 at 8:28 pm
“…how procrastination is a virtue.” This indeed peaks my interest considering I have been labeled as a procrastinator.
If there were no other content in the book, the last section alone would peak my interest since I have read your “How I learn Stuff” white-paper.
[James' Reply: I am a champion procrastinator! I lost 38 pounds procrastinating, over the last six months (walking is a virtuous way to avoid writing). I defaulted on a book contract once because I felt it was better to publish nothing than to publish something that felt rushed. That's why I was careful not to get a book contract before I finished this thing.
Think of procrastination as a message from your unconscious that THE SOUP IS NOT READY.]
April 5th, 2008 at 1:23 am
Great news! The draft chapter I read last year has left me wanting more. And I completely agree that it is sometimes better to wait.
April 5th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
Can’t wait to read it.
I have learned so much from you that read How you learn will be amazing to undercover a lot of your thinking.
Good news, hope you find a publisher soon
[James' Reply: Thank you, Jose. We'll see. If necessary, I'll publish at lulu.com.]
April 5th, 2008 at 4:36 pm
I’ve been labeled a procrastinator as well, so I can’t wait to read your thoughts on the subject. BTW, where can I read your whitepaper on learning?
[James' Reply: I don't think I've written a paper on learning. Not that I recall, anyway. But I did post an early partial draft of the book, months ago. I've taken that offline, though.]
April 5th, 2008 at 8:07 pm
Very cool, James!
Congratulations,
-Steve
April 6th, 2008 at 6:37 am
Looking forward to reading it.
You could publish it yourself - http://www.lulu.com - That’s what I would do
[James' Reply: Just for curiosity, I did. I put the draft through their process and ordered five copies. I haven't received them, yet. I fear that publishing through Lulu would make the book too expensive, but that's my fallback plan if the big publishers don't care for it. After all, the book implicitly criticizes public education and university education, too. They may not think there's much of a market for it.]
April 6th, 2008 at 11:07 am
Procrastination is a virtue - I believe that is first used by Larry Wall - the creator of PERL. I think you’ll like PERL.
yan
[James' Reply: I do like Perl.]
April 6th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
Procrastination is virtue…. I always used to think procrastination is bad and a sign of either incompetency or laziness. I am not sure if that is true. I procrastinate things that are tough, where I have no clue about, things that I don’t like, things that make me to venture into new things, especially all those items where I am STUCK.
Your story with this book made me to realize that “being in a state of confusion” is at times “good thing” — you are thinking. Given the life we have around us, things are not simple around us, hence there are no simple solutions to the problems that we face. I would say if you are confused, thinking and procrastinating - that is a sign of active mind.
Being someone privileged to have read the draft … I would say this book has the potential to change the way parents and kids look at school and learning at school. In the Indian context, it will have interesting disrupting effects ….
A milestone in the history of learning and education … With very little reading history to myself, I have not read or heard of the kind of thinking that you are promoting via this book …
When I shared the ideas of the book with my wife, she said .. “Not every one can be as intelligent and daring as James …â€? I replied, best part of the book is that James really shares those moments and tips that helped him to achieve where he is today …in that context, every educationist, government policy maker, Teacher, reformer in education needs to read this book with OPEN mind and see what is in for them. Given the social, cultural background of Indian education system, it would take ages to say “go to school, learn the stuff you like to learn, there is no homework, no exams in the current form, learning is fun, experiment with things, take teacher not a moral policy keeper but as a mentor in learning …”.
One has to start somewhere towards this new system of learning … James, your book and thoughts, ideas, experiences presented, are best starting points …
Thanks for bringing so daring, unique and revolutionary approach to learning…
I wish all the best to future of this book … may this book reach to millions of kids/parents and thinkers and change the way world approaches learning.
Shrini
[James' Reply: Wow, thank you Shrini.]
April 6th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
Congratulations!
I look forward to pressing “add to cart” at Amazon
April 6th, 2008 at 8:52 pm
…how procrastination is a virtue.
Really, makes me wonder if I want to read the book! procrastination is not a message that the soup is not ready, but rather not interested in this!
[James' Reply: I suppose that is another reason for procrastination. But not one I care about. I'm far more concerned with why I don't do things that I am interested in, like writing an article I'm supposed to write, or creating a test plan I'm supposed to create, or learn a new skill that I would like to have. That's the issue I'm trying to address in the book.
What I explain in the book is that I am-- and I believe we all are-- polypsychic creatures. Our minds consist of many independent agents that normally are integrated into an illusion of one being. This means that my mind and my will are often at odds with each other. I sit down to write and my mind says "I'm not ready to write, I want to play online chess." Suddenly my will finds itself playing online chess...
So, one of the premises in the book is how do I live with a mind that runs away at times? One of the challenges of doing this is that sometimes my mind goes wandering for good reasons that become apparent only much later. What seems to be empty procrastination may in fact be critical work that my mind needs to do. I think that's important.
But you know what, I'll add a few sentences about the interest issue, just to clarify that section.]
April 7th, 2008 at 3:54 am
Nice work Jamie, think this is something I think I’ll enjoy reading
April 7th, 2008 at 3:55 am
Oh man! Call me a bookworm (especially for your books). I simply can’t wait to grab one. It is my Harry Potter. Please tell WHEN can I read one in India.
April 7th, 2008 at 7:31 pm
‘That’s the issue I’m trying to address in the book.’ — James
Well then I will change my mind
It would be interesting to see what you have discovered and compare it with works of perhaps Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Further, it would be more interesting to see how your subjective learning experiences apply to others. Looking forward 
[James' Reply: My book is much lighter than his. But the longer it takes to get a publisher, the more I will add to it.]
April 8th, 2008 at 1:36 am
Procastination is really something which we all use in various forms and situations but somehow the word triggers a negative vibe when used. I am sure your book is going to disspel this myth and encourage readers to use this trait knowingly.
Being an avid follower of ET and drinking the ET kool-aid regularly (specially via your Lessons learnt in software testing book), can’t wait to get my hands on your new book.
All the very best and hope to see this book all over India stores.
April 8th, 2008 at 7:00 am
I wouldn’t worry about implicitly criticizing public education and policy. You’re travelling the same road as John Holt, author of “Why Children Learn”, “Why Children Fail”, “Teach Your Own”, and “Learning All the time.” If I recall correctly, Holt’s first books were published in the 1960’s, and they are still in print today.
In fact, Holt is the father of the unschooling movement, where we literally take our children out of pre-defined cirricula and let them study what they want, when they want. We homeschool our own - with a slightly more rigid cirricula - and the local homeschool group has roughly one holt book per two families. I suspect the market is much larger than the testing book market.
Even within the system there are people fighting for education reform in this direction - people like John Taylor Gato (”A different Kind of Teacher”) and Rafe Esquith (”Teach Like Your Hair Is On Fire.”) Gato was a public-school teacher who basically asked his students to come up with their own education plan, and the just supervised them. IIRC, he had middle teen-agers and would actively support them in “cutting class” if they had something meaningful - like an apprenticeship, internship, or, say, summer semester trig class - to attend.
The difference with James’s stuff is he can reach an audience that isn’t parents frustrated with the public school system. He can reach parents who are happy with it - or, for that matter, people with no kids looking to improve themselves. In my book, that’s huge. This book has a chance to impact corporate America, with all of it’s flaws - such are hiring for specific skill and focusing on immediate results at the expense of long term health.
bravo, man. bravo.
[James' Reply: Are you saying that based on the idea of it, or have you read the draft?]
April 8th, 2008 at 7:03 am
Or, lest I forget, Mara Montessori, someone totally counter-cultural in her day that has become a completely accepted “school” of education in our time. If mindless best practices both you, check out Montessori’s “The Discovery of the Child” - at the time, to assess potential, her contemporaries were measuring the size of the children’s skulls and the number of bumps on them! And that was the late 19th century!
[James' Reply: My son went to Montessori school until 7th grade. Since then we've been unschooling him.]
April 14th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
Well done James, I will definetely order a copy. Welcome back teaching, we like Michael B too
but have missed you over here.
I am not sure how publishing houses work in the US but over here, basically you get a sum of money for writing a book and then you may get some additional money per book if you sell lots of it. When I decided to publish my book in Swedish I chose a small publisher, also a friend of mine, that took care of the setting, design and printing for a certain amount of money - something like 14 000 USD. Then I have the right to get as many books as I want to sell on my own at conferences, the part that is sold via the bookstores or on the Internet I get 8 USD a piece.
For the English version, that you were kind enough to write a foreword to, I used a no-label company that charged me a lot more: around 40 000 USD but then left me with all the rights and all future income. In this later case I get whatever the publisher normally gets from Amazon or the likes which is a lot more. However I will not have a large publisher advertising my book. So it really depends on your ability to sell the book , or really the books ability to sell itself. Almost all books I have bought were tips from you and other colleagues or friends. Then another thing is the distribution. I have a central storage for my books in Sweden and the Internet shops order from that storage. However for the rest of the world I am trying out a print on demand solution through http://www.lightningsource.com . This is not yet ready but will be, hopefully, in a few weeks time. So as of now you will have to mail me to get a copy. They promise that the POD version is almost as good as the real thing, we’ll see.
So there are plenty of ways getting published.
[James' Reply: I want to try a traditional publisher, first. If that doesn't work I'll probably use Lulu.com.]
April 29th, 2008 at 2:27 pm
Regarding my comments above - I wrote the comments around page 30. Having read the whole thing now, they still stand.
April 30th, 2008 at 1:46 am
I have a software testing parallel…
Some people in our biz say that the later you wait to fix a bug, the more expensive it is to fix. I have a story that refutes that.
I was on a project where a programmer let a sev 1 bug languish for 186 days. Every week in triage, he’d shrug when asked about a fix. He had good standing and reputation on the team as being a thoughtful, talented programmer, so everyone seemed to let it go (else, I think he would have been fired).
But one day, when it came time for him to shrug in Triage, he announced it was fixed! Turns out, it had become untenable for him to put off the problem because other emerging bugs seemed linked to it. When he finally sat down to face it, his first strategy was to search the company intranet to see if there were any solutions. Smart move. Turns out, just a few days earlier, an API was released internally that had promising code. The programmer tried it and it worked!
He was not ashamed about this. Instead, when given playful ribbing about it by the PM, he responded that his procrastination likely saved the project hundreds of hours of his time because jumping right on the problem from Day One would have meant building a complex fix from scratch, taking weeks.
I wish more programmers were this honest. It helped me see that procrastination does not have to connote an irresponsible or apathetic work ethic — but that there may be a good reason *not* to immediately devote time and effort toward a solution.
April 30th, 2008 at 3:31 pm
Fantastic, can’t wait to read it! And i mean it!!!
May 19th, 2008 at 6:27 am
Hi James,
You wrote a book! Well done! I have also been writing for the last seven months. I like writing very much but am not sure what will happen to my draft now! I am sending it to the literary agents in London tomorrow. Scary.
Good luck and if you need a reviewer, you can send me a copy.
Jamie
September 5th, 2008 at 4:21 am
Permit me to go slightly off-topic.
I can’t quite make my mind up about procrastination. We’re rarely told it’s a virtue and in fact the workplace invariably rewards those who do the opposite, ie they are decisive and execute. However I definitely agree when a person is procrastinating they are usually actively thinking about the matter in hand, it’s just that doing this is rarely /visible/ to anyone else and it’s often confused with inaction, dithering, doing nothing, and other negative terms.
I procrastinate but I justify this to myself as wanting to do the right thing on the first attempt. I see it as going hand-in-hand with perfectionism. Nothing wrong with that but you can get into the habit of overplanning. What would be just as good would be to spend a little time thinking about something, attempt it anyway and then iterate until the goal is reached. A great side-effect of is that you may be right on the first go and thus you would save a lot of time.
Both approaches have their pros and cons. I guess it’s easy to get entrenched into one line of thinking and naturally be sceptical about those who look at things from the other side.
Jury’s out!
[James' Reply: I feel rewarded for my procrastination on the job. Haven't you ever been assigned a task, put it off, only to discover that the task became moot?]
November 3rd, 2008 at 12:07 pm
How much for a signed copy of one of the lulu prints? I accept that there are real-world friends and family and whatnot that have implicit queuing rights, but I’m putting myself down as first dibs caller on the blog
[James' Reply: The Lulu copies were just drafts for review, unfortunately. I'm alllllmost done with the final draft, which will be published by Scribner, next year.]