I'm a big Seth Godin fan. I tore through his latest offering We Are All Weird and want to share it with the world. It is a manifesto, a concise document meant to change something in the world. The basic idea of We Are All Weird is that normal is not so normal anymore. The world is weird and getting weirder. It would behoove everyone, from marketers to academics, to recognize it and move forward.
It is a fun and challenging read, a rare and welcome combination. There are amazing examples of the world getting weirder that range through time and location. Since I read it on the Kindle, I was able to quickly dig deeper into the wide reaching references.
It was eye opening to hear Seth's take on one of my personal passions, the education system. He points out the current limitations of encouraging everyone to be normal. You lose both ends, the highest and lowest achieving students. We now have the tools and techniques to restructure the education system to reach every student more effectively. We can address the lower achieving students, who are frequently studying the wrong material for the wrong reason. We can also encourage the higher achieving student to the greater levels by becoming leaders and teachers.
I do take issue with his, often improper, use of the normal or bell curve. One of the primary prerequisites for assuming a normal distribution is a single variable that is at least interval scaled. For example, weight can be be understood by using a normal curve. However, Seth plots cultural behaviors from various decades on a normal distribution. Cultural behaviors are not a single variable and are nominally scaled. Additionally, normal distributions are only theoretical. Actual data (if appropriate) should be displayed in a histogram. This might appear to be a minor point, but when he misuses statistics he loses scientific face. He can make his argument without misusing statistics.
I recommend We Are All Weird, but get Linchpin first.
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