Sprezzatura – “a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it.”

A term coined in 1528 termed by the Italian count Baldassare Castiglione in The Book of the Courtier. Fascinating concept, innit? Nowadays people seem to love shouting about how much they work and all the good shit they’ve done but really, it’s the ones who appear to move forward effortlessly that are fascinating. Less talk, more action is the key.

Read more:

Seth Godin on Sprezzatura

Nick Southgate on Being Effortless

I’ve just started reading Seth Godin’s book ‘Purple Cow: Transform Your Business By Being Remarkable’. I currently have about eight books on my bedside table but I just keep ordering more and more from Amazon, starting them, then getting distracted by another. It’s a bad habit that hopefully I’ll rectify when I have more time to read non-academic texts.

I digress.

If you’re not familiar with Seth Godin – his self-described one line bio reads as follows:

Seth is a writer, a speaker and an agent of change.

I’m not far enough into ‘Purple Cow’ to make any kind of assessment of its content, but I wanted to pick it up a) because it was a New York Times and Wall Street bestseller that got an unfathomable amount of press and b) because Jay Z name-checked it as a book that had a big impact on him. To what extent these two facts are related, we can only speculate. And even though it’s about ‘changing your business by being remarkable’ and I am patently not a businessowner, I find that, on a personal level, there’s usually something to be taken from these funny little branding and marketing bibles.

I stumbled across Godin’s blog the other day, by way of my friend T.Magic’s site and I particularly liked this post, regarding the state of the publishing and media industries:

Who will save us?

Who will save book publishing?

What will save the newspapers?

What means ’save’?

If by save you mean, “what will keep things just as they are?” then the answer is nothing will. It’s over.

If by save you mean, “who will keep the jobs of the pressmen and the delivery guys and the squadrons of accountants and box makers and transshippers and bookstore buyers and assistant editors and coffee boys,” then the answer is still nothing will. Not the Kindle, not the iPad, not an act of Congress.

We need to get past this idea of saving, because the status quo is leaving the building, and quickly. Not just in print of course, but in your industry too.

If you want to know who will save the joy of reading something funny, or the leverage of acting on fresh news or the importance of allowing yourself to be changed by something in a book, then don’t worry. It doesn’t need saving. In fact, this is the moment when we can figure out how to increase those benefits by a factor of ten, precisely because we don’t have to spend a lot of resources on the saving part.

Every revolution destroys the average middle first and most savagely.

As an aspiring journalist, I spend a lot of time contemplating the future of print media and how I can possibly make a living in a dying industry. This short post made me look at things from a slightly different angle – which I suppose is what Godin is all about.

Check the rest of his stuff here.

I know it’s a complete cliché to be a young, urban, university-educated female with a penchant for Hip Hop and a love for Zadie Smith, but fuck it. I’m a young, urban, university-educated female with a penchant for Hip Hop and I love Zadie Smith. Ever since I first got my hands on her much-praised debut novel ‘White Teeth’ (written, in part, when she was 22 – the same age I am now. Sigh.), I’ve made it my business to seek and soak up pretty much everything this woman has written.

I stuck with the Kabbalah-related confusion of ‘The Autograph Man’. I spent a while wishing I was part of the dysfunctional Belsey family depicted in ‘On Beauty’.  I’ve devoured numerous short stories she’s published in The Guardian and elsewhere. And, of course, I’ve re-read ‘White Teeth’ about six(teen hundred) times.

Right now, I’m working my way through ‘Changing My Mind’ which, as you’ve probably worked out from the image above, is a collection of Smith’s essays. What I like about it is that, like all Smith’s writing, the essays in the book manage to blend intellectual theory with instantly-relatable pop culture references in a way that is easily digested, but still makes you feel a little bit clever for understanding it. Topics range from Kafka to Katharine Hepburn and touch on the personal and impersonal, but regardless of subject matter, Smith handles it all with her characteristic stylistic ease and good humour. A recommended purchase for sure – but then I would say that, wouldn’t I?

Andrea Levy’s ‘Small Island’ is one of those books which causes you to form some deep emotional attachment to the characters, so that you go into a period of quasi-mourning when you reach the last page and realise you’ll never hear from them again. Or maybe that was just me. Either way it’s a proper warm-the-cockles-of-your-heart-but-not-in-a-cheesy-way type of novel which deals with the Windrush era of Caribbean immigration into the UK. Really interesting if you’re a history geek like myself, and actually really interesting even if you’re not. Swear down.

Anyway, that’s a very convoluted way of getting to my point (there is one, promise!): Today I found out the BBC have made a soon-to-be-aired adaptation of Small Island, and I am really fucking excited and I think you should be, too.

What’s that you say? BBC adaptations are for middle-aged couples who live in sleepy villages in Sussex and do their shopping at Ocado.com? Oh, piss off.

Allow me to commit a cardinal sin of writing and draw for a dictionary definition to open this post:

1 obsolete : outcome, result
2 a : degree or measure of succeeding b : favorable or desired outcome; also : the attainment of wealth, favour, or eminence
3 : one that succeeds

As a society, we are obsessed with success. I think it correlates with an increasing preoccupation with fame – we want to achieve recognition for the work that we choose to do, regardless of what type of work it is. But ask someone how they’d define success, and how they would know if and when they achieved it, and he or she will probably struggle to give you an answer.

The title of Malcom Gladwell’s ‘Outliers’ refers to those individuals who have achieved what we might consider to be an extraordinary amount of success – the ‘wealth, favour, or eminence’ that the dictionary definition refers to, and usually a combination of all three. What’s interesting about Outliers is that it turns so many of our existing preconceptions about makes someone successful on their head.

The stories of remarkably successful people are usually put forward in a ‘rags to riches’ narrative – “a hero is born into modest circumstances and by virtue of his own grit and talent fights his way to greatness.” Gladwell says that this is fundamentally bullshit. People who achieve are very rarely people who rise from nothing. Not only that, but their personal characteristics and abilities as a human being have little bearing on what they are able to achieve. Instead, people who achieve are general blessed with a sequence (not just one) of significant and rare opportunities. They work incredibly, incredibly hard. And they are advantaged in some way by their cultural legacy, even if it may seem ‘on paper’ to be typically disadvantageous.

What makes this book fascinating are the case studies Gladwell uses to illustrate his points. The backgrounds of everyone from Bill Gates to The Beatles to Gladwell’s own mother are analysed to see if they match with his theories. Of course, they always do.

There are parts of ‘Outliers’ that remain questionable, and the writing style won’t be to everyone’s taste. But the fundamental message is interesting, and certainly inspiring. Whilst our cultural legacies – where we’re from, where we grew up, what our parents taught us about work – are inescapable, we are still statistically likely to achieve a great deal if we are willing to put in the work. ‘Work’ not being an abstract term like success, but instead the 10,000 hours that studies have proven is required to become really fucking good at what it is you do.

Better get cracking now, then.