Ting-a-Ling Timequakes, No Assholes and the 8th Habit

Interesting inspirations in the form of three different books I picked up while walking around town today. First, still embittered after a recent break-up with my Japanese girlfriend and walking up Charing Cross Road to my bus-stop on New Oxford Street I stumbled into one of these half-indie bookstore / half adultstore places - and came across Kurt Vonnegut. I had not heard about this author, which given the other authors surrounding his books (Paul Auster, Graham Greene, Albert Camus etc.) surely exposes me as blatantly ignorant. But after scanning through one of his books titled "Timequake" and reading a few deliciously pessimistic and misanthropic (see my state of mind above) paragraphs I decided to spend some quality time with this book and a grande Cappuccino at the Starbucks up the road. I really enjoyed the read, and continuously felt reminded of Charles Bukowski - perhaps the same outlook on life, albeit in a more sophisticated, intellectually charged language.

Here is one of the paragraphs that resonated well with me today:

The African-American jazz pianist Fats Waller had a sentence he used to shout when his playing was absolutely brilliant and hilarious. This was it: "Somebody shoot me while I'm happy!"
That there are such devices as firearms, as easy to operate as cigarette lighters and as cheap as toasters, capable at anybody's whim of killing Father or Fats or Abraham Lincoln or John Lennon or Martin Luther King Jr., or a woman pushing a baby carriage, should be proof enough for anybody that, to quote the old science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, "being alive is a crock of shit."

Then, after getting off the bus at Liverpool station and planning to buy some DVD, I found myself browsing through the business section at the local W.H. Smith store. I ended up buying "The No Asshole Rule" by the Stanford Management professor Robert Sutton, and Stephen R. Covey's "The 8th Habit".

The former resonated with my past and current job experiences, where from the top down I have found and continue to find myself confronted with some characters that I would label as "certified assholes" per the definition of the book and common sense. Getting some tips on how to deal with such jerks, and also just reading about how frequent a work-experience this is to millions of others, is very welcome.

The latter book made sense as I generally don't like to wallow in mire such as the one described above, and I remember being uplifted / motivated / inspired by "The 7 habits" before. Just started the first chapter, which relates the story of Muhammed Yunus's micro-finance banking concept (Grameen Bank) for the poorest of the poor in Bangladesh (for which he of course won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006). And - lo and behold - I feel more uplifted / motivated / inspired already :-)

Nothing like a healthy dose of misanthropic cynicism followed by a shot of philanthropic can-do-ism to keep heart and mind balanced.

Back to those books.