More Reading
So many books, so little time. But I keep on reading. I am truly hooked on books. I always have been. There's so many wonderful worlds there to explore in both fiction and non-fiction. Here's some of what I've been working on.

Make It Stick is a book about why some messages and bits of information stick- continue to catch our attention. Chip and Dan Heath start with an example of some of those famous spam urban legends that never go away and move on to many excellent examples of the message sticking. They say there are the following six elements that make a message sticky:

Simple
Unexpected
Concrete
Credible
Emotional
Stories
s

As a result I am looking differently at each week of the treatment curriculum we use to see how I can help make it "stickier". But it is hard, thanks to one thing the brothers highlight- the Curse of Knowledge. That simply is the fact that once we have learned something, it is hard to remember what it was like NOT to know it. We thus assume that whoever we are teaching, training, etc. already knows as much as we do. This is one of the biggest obstacles of developing messages that stick.

For anyone in advertising, teaching, training, blogging, or any other kind of attempts at communication, this is a must read. It is also interesting.

The Men Who Loved Trains is a eulogy to the great railroads of the east coast and how they were wrecked by greed and grandiosity. There are good guys and bad guys in Rush Loving's storytelling. The bad guys had no concept of railroads as anything other than a business. And they had no good concept of what that business could be or do. They were in it for themselves. Some of them were no better than the classic railroad robber barons of the late 19th Century.

The good guys in the story are the ones who loved trains as trains and worked hard to make them work for the good of all. It is a sad story from the Pennsylvania and New York Central Railroads through Conrail into the Norfolk and Western days of now. It is basically a business book, but it is a story of love of the companies that have been lost. (Note: I am a grandson of a New York Central railroader and the nephew of an Erie Lackawanna railroad man. Check your history books for these storied roads.)

Something In the Air kicked in the nostalgia. Big Time! Alan Freed. Johnny Lujak, Dick Biondi, Cousin Brucie, Murray the K, Dan Ingram, Jean Shepherd. Names and voices of radio in the 50s and 60s. THE names and voices of radio for millions- a generation. Marc Fisher's book is the story of a revolution spinning through air across the invisible waves of radio. I was going to write more about it here, but it has struck so many chords in this former DJ, college radio nerd, and lover of all things radio that I am working on a few other posts about it. Watch for them in the coming weeks.