How many times have you read a good book and thought to yourself “That’s a good idea, I should apply that to my own life“….but invariably you did NOT apply it to your life because you had no specific way to do so, or you forgot, or you were just too lazy to do so?
Big Ideas in Short Bites
Brian Johnson probably had these thoughts too, but he decided to do something about it…so he’s spent the past 18 months (much of it in Bali – SWEET!) reading his selection of the Top 101 books of all time in philosophy, self-help, business/leadership, and spirituality…and created short compendium notes (think: “cliff notes with actionable items”) of the best-loved books of all time.
Want to apply principles of Dale Carnegie, Tony Robbins, Mihaly Csikszentmihayi or Don Miguel Ruiz to your life? Then go get the overviews at PhilosophersNotes , sign up — and gobble up great learnings in short bites. Brian’s made if available in written, audio and (sometimes) video versions. He’s entertaining and genuinely a nice guy 
How Creative is this really?
For those of us who suffer from CNG (a.k.a. “Cliff Notes Guilt” as in: “I really should have read the whole book for class but I used cliff notes to get me over hump”), the question you are probably asking is “So… where is the creativity or innovation here”?
I think Brian is onto something very creative – see this video on his latest project called “LIFE 101″
He has begun to map out the storyboard for a future book/series that will mesh together the great ideas contained in the first 101 books he’s read and reviewed. This seems to be a creative idea that perhaps others have thought of, but has any one single (other than a book reviewer) actually chosen, read, digested, analyzed, and re-formulated the top 101 philosophy books? That seems useful to me.
See Brian’s blog for more on this…
From “Creativity to Innovation”
If Brian is able to create a Mash-up of the top 101 books, what is the result? Is it possible he will create new connections and intersections (see my past post on Intersectional Creativity and Mashups) that others have not seen before. Yes, probable. The exciting thing is that by having created a forum in Philosophers Notes where others can view and take action on these books, I think he’s actually using today’s technology in a very innovative way – to turn Ideas and Creativity into actionable results.
Looking forward to Master Brian’s results in the coming year!
large advertisers to “test out” banner advertising and key-word searches as legitimate ways to market their message. Fortunately, a few pioneers like Citbank, Worlds Inc. and Softbank believed us – and within a year hundreds of advertisers joined the fray. .. But the market researchers at the time thought that ad revenues might shift to Internet to $1B within 5 years – eureka! (?yahoo!?) – we were off to the gold mines, but only a fraction of the world’s marketing was anticipated to shift to online.
begun…but the idea of a SEARCH as a driving force had caught our attention, and the idea of “pay for position”/auction advertising seemed increase our potential revenues, so we tested our ideas…within 15 months Overture went public. ….But the market researchers at the time thought that ad revenues might shift to Internet to $3B within 5 years – wow! (it was only anticipated to be a partial shift).
