The book explores our cultural discomfort with risk and danger and challenges the assumption that minimizing risk is always the correct path. As compelling as his case for “edge work” is, I have to give further credit to Gurstelle for admitting that not all of us are comfortable with even his very sensible embracing of danger. As such, it’s not a book that’s going to resonate with absolutely everyone. Instead, this book is written for who he identifies as “the Golden Third” — the 34% of the general population who have a higher comfort with risk, yet aren’t off the deep end taking risks far beyond reason and responsible citizenship. Gurstelle propositions, I think accurately, that this group (of which I am an enthusiastic member) often lacks constructive outlets for a sensible embrace of danger that really satisfies their yearning for exhilaration. Between our very litigious culture and the post 9/11 climate, Gurstelle’s assertion that the adventurous among us should embrace their inner MacGyver is both brave and refreshing.

But what purpose does it really serve? To what practical end does “edge work” make our lives better aside from some vague, self-indulgent satisfaction in risk taking? In his chapter entitled “Why Live Dangerously”, Gurstelle states the following:

First, artful yet dangerous living builds your repertoire of life experiences and your store of practical knowledge. Almost every new, varied, and unusual experience you have makes you more valuable on some level because it builds within you something called “deep smarts.”

What are deep smarts? Dorothy Leonard, professor emeritus at the Harvard Business School, and Walter Swap, professor of psychology emeritus at Tufts University, coined the phrase in their well-regarded book by the same name. They define deep smarts as the accumulated know-how and intuition gained through extensive and varied experience. It’s expertise in the form of practical wisdom. Leonard and Swap tell us that it’s just such deep smarts that provide the foundation for an individual’s overall success.

It appears from their research that nurturing your risk-taking skills should result in personal experiences stored deep in our intellect, which have potential for personal value greater than any book learning. According to Dr. Swap, “Someone who may have a lot of book learning but not a lot of real life experience won’t be able to look at a new situation and say, ‘Aha, that reminds me of a time when I did X.’ and that memory suggests a way to act. A person with deep smarts may not actually be able to recognize or to put into so many words where that knowledge came from—but is nonetheless able to react quickly and wisely.”

This “deep smarts” concept dovetails very nicely into what Matthew Crawford talks about in Shop Class as Soulcraft regarding the hands-on nature of real expertise. As valuable as education is, no book can ever teach you better than your own two hands. This applies to specific skills, such as Crawford’s work as a motorcycle mechanic, but also in building our own MacGyver-esque understanding of the world around us. Gurstelle isn’t done there, however. Artfully dangerous living has another benefit to impart.

Taking risks proves your mettle, it displays your inner bravery. And successful outcomes in risky propositions lead to a well-deserved sense of accomplishment. These aren’t just my opinions. There is a considerable body of scientific evidence backing up this assertion. At least two rigorously conducted scientific studies statistically show that, in the long run, people who take reasonable risks are happier and more successful.

He goes on to reference those studies in more depth. The bottom line is that your attitude toward risk has a direct effect on both your satisfaction in living, and your more tangible personal success in your career and other endeavors. “Playing it safe” rarely leads us to the success we really want. Never extending ourselves beyond the “safe” and the known robs us of both the satisfaction of success and the lessons of failure.

I won’t summarize Gurstelle’s entire philosophy, but I do wholeheartedly endorse it. The book is such a quick read that even if you weren’t inclined to purchase it, nearly anyone could get through it in a single sitting at their favorite book shop in probably no more than 3 cups of coffee. So as such, I recommend it to anyone looking for a little extra adventure in their life. His philosophy alone is worth the read, but I also really appreciated his project suggestions, which include:

• Making gun powder, solid rocket motors, slow/quick match (fuses), and smoke bombs
• Throwing knives, cracking whips, and the mysterious martial art of Baritsu (umbrella jujitsu)
• Smoking the occasional cigarette and learning basic zippo lighter tricks
• Drinking the occasional shot of Absinthe
• Driving fast — how to do it safely and legally
• Persiflage and practical joking — or put another way, being a big, fat hairy liar for fun
• Exotic eating (including legitimately dangerous food like Japanese tiger pufferfish)
• Building your own flamethrower

Personally I’ve made this into a checklist of sorts. Not a “bucket list” of things to do someday, but more like a concert set list — things to be conquered in the near term.

Gurstelle wraps up Absinthe with a sort of memoir of great people and the common thread of danger that ran between them. From Churchill, to Edison, to Hunter S. Thomspson, danger (and apparently small quantities of explosives) seems to sew together the lives of great men and women. It’s his call to action — his sermon against apathy and risk aversion. If we would be great people, then we should be a little bit out there, nearer to the edge than is comfortable. He invites us to listen for “the strange music.”

With the throttle screwed on there is only the barest margin, and no room at all for mistakes. It has to be done right…and that’s when the strange music starts, when you stretch your luck so far that fear becomes exhilaration.

Hunter S. Thompson
Hell’s Angels

Absinthe & Flamethrowers on Amazon
The official Absinthe & Flamethrowers website
William Gurstelle’s website

Post photo from Flickr user StuckInCustoms. Original here

My wife rolls her eyes at me when I say this, but it’s a perfect description of my reading habits. I love literature, but I have never really been a reader. I love audiobooks and tear through many over the course of the year, but my rate of actual book reading is usually three books or fewer per year. So imagine my surprise when I tore through Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford in only three days.

Based on this recommendation on Fast Company’s website, I visited my local, soulless, chain bookstore to preview the book. Since how books are categorized in both libraries and soulless chain bookstores is completely lost on me, I collected a Nook brochure and asked for assistance at the desk. The computer told us Shop Class was located in the Philosophy section. That was a surprise, but having now traversed from cover to cover, it’s a completely appropriate classification.

I’m not going to attempt to rewrite Gadi Amit’s Fast Company summary as it pretty much sums up my enthusiasm for this book. In fact, the book goes so deep in so many areas, that any broad summary is going to be grossly insufficient. There’s too much there. Shop Class as Soulcraft is equal parts history lesson, hands-on work ethos, autobiography. deep-reaching philosophy and guidebook for reattaching ourselves to what we do. Crawford explores the deeper knowledge we gain through doing and questions the value we so often put on abstract understanding over practical know-how. Sure, I can understand how an engine works in the abstract, but it isn’t until I’ve held a greasy piston in my hand that I have the kind of useful knowledge only gained by doing.

Amit makes the case that Shop Class should be required reading for anyone pursuing a career in design. I would go further and say that it’s required reading for anyone about to choose any profession — especially one heavy in “knowledge work”. Beyond questioning the established notion that all young whippersnappers should be aspiring to high-paying corporate jobs in knowledge work or as part of the growing “creative class” of designers and design thinkers, this book explores the history of how these aspirations have unfairly degraded rewarding, well-paying trade professions that many people would actually find much more fulfilling. Jobs that are very, very difficult to outsource, he adds. A particularly eye-opening concept is his explanation of compensation. Big salaries are much more sinister when you consider that they’re generally paid only for jobs few people would ever take up out of passion alone. It’s like hazard pay for the soul. Would anyone ever choose to be an investment banker if it didn’t pay very, very well?

What I found most fascinating throughout is Crawford’s exploration of the history of how we used to work, how that changed and its ramifications for everything from what we learn in school to how we work in the professional world. In short, we’ve systematically separated thinking from doing and it’s transformed us into people who know how to use 12 forms of social media at once, but can’t use basic hand tools or even change our own oil. He uses automobile manufacturing as an example. Where it used to take a knowledgeable craftsman to build an automobile by hand (and in so doing he had to understand the entirety of the machine), Henry Ford separated thinking from doing on the assembly line — breaking down the whole sum of the builder’s knowledge into individual, less skilled tasks and transforming the building of a car into a segmented, consistent process. This isn’t evil, and Crawford makes no such inference, but it is the underlying mechanism which run amuck has caused whole skilled trades to go extinct and its conceptual perpetuation into corporate processes and management style for today’s knowledge workers adds insight into how so many people are compelled to work jobs they don’t actually like. They are motivated almost entirely through compensation. According to Crawford, it began in earnest with the craftsmen who built cars before Henry Ford’s assembly line.

Given their likely acquaintence with such a cognitively rich world of work, it is hardly surprising that when Henry Ford introduced the assembly line in 1913, workers simply walked out. One of Ford’s biographers wrote, “So great was labor’s distaste for the new machine system that toward the close of 1913 every time the company wanted to add 100 men to its factory personel, it was necassary to hire 963.”

This would seem to be a crucial moment in the history of political economy. Evidently, the new system provoked natural revulsion. Yet, at some point, workers became habituated to it. How did this happen? One might be tempted to inquire in a typological mode: What sort of men were these first, the 100 out of 963 who stuck it out on the new assembly line? Perhaps it was men who felt less revulsion because they had less pride in their own powers, and were therefore more tractable. Less republican, we might say. But if there was initially such a self-selection process, it quickly gave way to something more systemic.

In a temporary suspension of the Taylorist logic, Ford was forced to double the daily wage of his workers to keep the line staffed. As Braverman writes, this “opened up new possibilities for the intensification of labor within the plants, where workers were now anxious to keep their jobs.” These anxious workers were more productive. Indeed, Ford himself later recognized his wage increase as “one of the finest cost-cutting moves we ever made,” as he was able to double, and then triple, the rate at which cars were assembled by simply speeding up the conveyors. By doing so he destroyed his competitors, and thereby destroyed the possibility of an alternative way of working. (This also removed the wage pressure that comes from the existence of more enjoyable jobs.) In 1900 there were 7,632 wagon and carriage manufacturers in the United States. Adopting Ford’s methods, the industry would soon be reduced to the Big Three. So workers eventually became habituated to the abstraction of the assembly line. Evidently, it inspires revulsion only if one is acquainted with more satisfying modes of work.

Crawford further expands on how the separation of thinking from doing — that is, the bulk of the thinking being done by a select group of upper-level engineers or managers and the bulk of the “doing” undertaken by people with only a basic understanding of their exact task — has crept up from manufacturing into “knowledge work” as well. I won’t attempt to summarize it, but I will say that it’s a fascinating history lesson with a series of keen insights.

As I tore through Shop Class as Soulcraft, I was particularly stirred to recognize that what I do as a designer seems to oscillate back and forth between having many trade-like, fulfilling qualities and sometimes a few of the soul-sucking “knowledge work” pitfalls described in the book. On the positive, the dynamic with my team is very much along the lines of what Crawford describes as a “crew” in reference to tradesmen of various expertise who come together for a common project. I’ve found this to be the case in pretty much every creative team I’ve ever worked on and it’s easily what makes creative collaboration so fulfilling — even if it isn’t always particularly hands-on. Now I can’t help but think of design work as almost one part electrician, one part sculptor. I particularly appreciated Crawford’s explanation of expertise as pattern recognition. Through the ongoing experience of doing the work, we start to pick up on patterns — patterns we then draw on intuitively on a daily basis. For me it lets me see what’s wrong or right with a design in ways that are sometimes difficult to articulate to other people. That is, it’s difficult to explain how I “know” that this doesn’t look right. Their eyes aren’t used to looking for what I see. For example, I was showing Photoshop Disasters to a colleague this morning and on most of the images, she couldn’t see many of the errors unless I pointed them out. How come they’re invisible to her and painfully obvious to me? Experience. More specifically, experience in doing that kind of photo manipulation for so many years. This disconnect shows up a lot in evaluating design work with clients. To them, my evaluations may seem arbitrary and subjective, and I have to remember that they probably can’t see everything I see. That puts the burden on me to build that trust so that they’ll come to rely on my eyes.

I really could just go on and on about Shop Class as Soulcraft, but I’ll end with this. I recommend its 238 pages to anyone open to deeper meaning in the things they do, be it professional or weekend DIY. Taken early enough, I think it can be both an inoculation against the cliche of the mid-life crisis and a renewal of the value of actually doing things with our own two hands.

Music recommendations are always really tricky because tastes vary so widely. Which recordings? The studio sessions? That one live show? That’s why I’m not recommending the music of Jonathan Coulton, per say. What I really recommend is the writing that goes into his music. I recommend his exuberance, his unapologetic nerd-i-tude, how his songs can be simultaneously so funny and so sad.

It would be easy to dismiss Coulton as a comedy singer in the vein of Flight of the Conchords or Tenacious D, but that’s missing the depth of his art, in my opinion. He’s not a comedy act. He’s a singer/songwriter who happens to be really, really funny sometimes. If you imagine David Sedaris as a buoyantly cheery sort of folk singer, then you’re getting closer to the bizarre genius of Coulton. He’s some sort of fantastic, humorist minstrel that’s really difficult to describe and really easy to enjoy.

I describe actor/comedian Eddie Izzard as someone “so funny that he can do european history humor” and it’s true — he can and does. Coulton is kind of like that. I haven’t come across any other songwriters who can write a catchy lyric about fractal geometry like Mandelbrot Set, a downright cheery sing-along about zombies like Re: Your Brains, a love song from the perspective of an evil mad scientist such as Skullcrusher Mountain, or so perfectly capture the plight of what it’s like to write software for a living as in Code Monkey. As I re-read that description, it almost sounds like kids’ music. Trust me, it’s not. Because of Coulton’s joyful First of May, I had to look up the meaning of “in flagrante delicto.” His lyrics are downright chewy sometimes and the complexity of songs like I Feel Fantastic and Creepy Doll reveal new jewels on each subsequent listening. This is not music dumbed down for the masses. These are anthems for your inner nerd. This is music so fun, yet so non-condescending, that you can’t help but have a better day.

I don’t think any further attempt at description would really do JoCo justice, so I’ll leave it at this. If you can scrounge up $12, head over to the iTunes music store and pick up Best. Concert. Ever. pronto. This live performance released in 2009 so perfectly captures his exuberance that I really can’t recommend it enough as the place to start. I can listen to its 20 tracks on nearly endless repeat. I love this album and I’m absolutely thrilled that The Mrs and I are going to see him live in October!

The cake is a lie!
The cake is a lie!
(I didn’t actually play Portal until this month. I know, I’m way behind.)

Jonathan Coulton’s Best. Concert. Ever. on iTunes.

For the unfamiliar, the premise of Dexter is easily the best concept fusion I think I’ve ever seen. We’re not talking The Mummy meats The Incredible Hulk. This actually works. There are stand out cop shows like FX’s The Shield. There are three iterations of CBS’s CSI forensic science franchise. CBS also has Criminal Minds, its very own FBI profiling show where each week they stalk and catch a new serial killer. Dexter is essentially the best parts of each of these kinds of shows all rolled into one. Dexter Morgan is a forensic blood spatter specialist working for the Miami Metro PD. He’s also [spoiler alert!] a serial killer. That’s actually not all that interesting until you add the third and best component. His fetish is killing killers. Using not only his professional acumen as a forensic scientist but his own natural ability to sniff out others “like him,” Dexter exacts his own twisted sort of vigilante justice on those who take lives. Meanwhile, he lives a carefully choreographed life to hide his sociopathy — his complete lack of real human emotions. This dichotomy — this double Dexter that only the audience gets to see — gives the show a dynamic unlike anything else I’ve ever seen. It’s the super hero’s alter ego re-imagined in a deliciously twisted way.

Dexter narrates his exploits in his own voice, bringing us along with him on the frightening yet strangely comfortable paths of his psychosis. We can’t help but pull for Dexter, but all the same, he’s a mur-der-er. Murder is bad, right? This central contradiction makes Dexter decadently delicious to watch. However, where the show really shines is in the depth, the complexity, and the authenticity of each of its key characters. The killer of killers bit is just the sizzle, the steak is in the characters and the fantastic way in which Dexter executes such an outlandish premise in such a completely believable way.

During the writer’s strike, NBC aired a neutered version of Dexter in prime time. Watching the original Showtime version on DVD, I just can’t imagine how it would have worked on network television. Not because it’s particularly graphic. I’d say CSI or even Heroes at times is just as graphic or more than Dexter. Gore doesn’t really relegate it to Showtime. The reason Dexter needs to be seen in its original Showtime glory is for the language. Frankly, it was so refreshing to have the police walk up to the aftermath of a truly horrifying death and someone actually ask “what the fuck?” Finally, adult television for adults.

So unless you just can’t stand the sight of blood or “motherfucker” shatters your delicate sensibilities, Dexter is easily one of the best TV series I’ve ever seen.