Working on down my reading list from my honeymoon (what else are you going to do while you're sitting on a beach in the South Pacific...), here's one I really liked.  Made to Stick:  Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip and Dan Heath, is more of a mental tool than a book in my opinion.  If you're like me, your brain is swarming with tons of ideas about things that would be really cool and end up on the "someday" list.  This book is all about how to convey those ideas to other people in a clear, understandable, sticky way.

The problem with new and truly revolutionary ideas has always been that no one knows how to relate to them (which is where the phrase "before its time" comes from I suppose).  Trying to describe something that a person hasn't seen before breaks their model of reality and they zone out rather than continue futily trying to figure out what you're talking about (for example, how do you explain color to a blind person?).  This book is a tool that helps you hone your ideas and relay them to people in a format that they can wrap their brains around easily and latch onto.  For someone like me--and I would assume other techy geeks everywhere--that's a pretty critical skill to have.  It can make the difference between your idea making an impact on a project or being rejected, or even getting funding for your company or going bankrupt.

I read through this book with a couple of ideas I've been cooking up for a while in my head, and it really helped me tune them and construct tangible messages around them.  I'll probably at least skim thru this book on a regular basis to make sure that I have the elevator pitches for my ideas well thought out and ready to go when it's showtime.  It also has a cool-looking cover, the duct-tape effect is nifty :)

Readability:  9/10 -  Fun book to read.

Originality:  6/10  -  Not new stuff (a lot of it has been covered before in The Tipping Point), but packaged and presented well.

Overall:  8/10 -  Definitely recommended.

I had a chance to read a few books on my honeymoon (French Polynesia--I had no idea places that picturesque actually existed, it was incredible), so I thought I'd review them since a couple were pretty good and definitely worth a read.  One that I'd recommend is The Dip by Seth Godin (he usually writes great bite-sized content), which is a nice short read but also very thought-provoking and it was giving me deja vu the entire time I was reading it.

The Dip is about difficulties in achieving goals, and what to do when you hit them, as you inevitably will.  When to quit when you hit a road bump, and when to keep on plugging along.  As I read it I repeatedly experienced deja vu as I remembered various difficulties I ran into while starting up Latigent.  There are definitely smart times to quit, and not-so-smart times to quit, and it's pretty important to know which is which.

The Dip provides some nice mental tools to help sort out which projects deserve your energy, which you need to abandon, and which need to be refocused.  For people like me who seem to juggle hundreds of balls at any one time, that's a pretty critical thing to get right, because inevitably SOMEthing falls through the cracks.  At only 96 pages it's a quick read, and I'll probably pull it out to re-read it from time to time just to make sure I'm looking at the big picture and spending my time and energy wisely.