Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt (Fall 2010)
This might be, for all I know, the first book I read after I started working. I distinctly recall reading a passage from this book about how traffic jams started, looking out the window of my bus, and realizing we were in a traffic jam. (1)
I think I drew one life-changing idea from this book. It grew out of the examples about how surroundings influence decision making. In the context of driving, these included how the spacing of stripes on a road, the distance between the curb and the median, and the decision to include a dividing line in a suburban side street all impacted driver speed.
Understanding how context mattered in the driving environment helped me see things a little differently in terms of problem solving. I became more willing at work, for example, to change the medium of my delivery instead of focusing on word choice.
This was a big transition for me because our education system very rarely asked for the same assignment to be completed more than one time. In the rare event that such an opportunity presented itself, it usually came in the form of a revision- writing a paper again, for example, or taking a new version of an exam.
In these cases, the 'do-over' always involved the same assignment using the same medium as the original. I was never asked as a student to redo a paper by making a video about the same topic or retake an exam verbally that I originally flunked on paper.
Therefore, one real-world skill that my education failed to cultivate was the ability to influence others by adjusting the environment in which they considered my ideas. The manner in which this book presented how environment influenced behavior made me start considering the possibility that, for example, following up a phone call with an email might be more effective than a second phone call.
It also laid the groundwork for a really valuable idea I encountered a few years later- people generally recall the way you make them feel but rarely remember the exact words you used. This, again, ran counter to how I was educated (where the emphasis is on word choice more than on inciting emotion) but reading this book and understanding the idea that context influences behavior prepared me to accept the idea and adjust my approach accordingly. (2)
I don't seek out books like this all that much anymore. And I think the introductory nature of what I got from that one concept it is reflected in how disappointed I was when I recently re-read this book. (3)
In other words, since the idea I drew from this book got me started down a particular path, going back to it in at a later date did not have much value- it would be like an NBA player going back to elementary school and shooting two-handed free throws. However, that does not detract from the initial impact reading this book had on me and on my thought process back in late 2010.
Footnotes / imagined complaints
1. What next?
I returned to the book- what else could I do? It was a traffic jam, after all. I read an awful lot during traffic jams that year when, if memory serves me correctly, construction was pretty regular on I-93.
In those first three and a half years at that job, I read about sixty to seventy books per year. The commute, each way, was about one hour. I walked for about twenty minutes each way. So, during that time, I read about one hour and twenty minutes per day, five days a week.
I think the math adds up. Seventy books per year is just over one book per week. And one book should take a little less than six to seven hours.
2. More complaints about education.
To extend the 'real world deficiency' idea from the prior example, it could be that, because my education involved having work graded by one person, my ability to craft a message to a known target improved at the cost of not developing my ability to craft one message that appealed to multiple targets simultaneously.
3. Books like what?
Meaning books that tend to use study results, intensive research, and real-world models to make observations and predictions about specific topics. A lot of books like this are better fits between magazine rather than hard-bound covers.
