Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Support the Mistake Bank book! Right now!

Hey everybody, John Caddell's Mistake Bank project, about which I've written here before, has swung into high gear in the final days of getting it out as an awesome book, with a Kickstarter campaign. Drop everything and go get your advance copy!

The book is called The Mistake Bank: How to Succeed by Forgiving Your Mistakes and Embracing Your Failures. Here's what I like best about it.
  • The book contains more than fifty real stories John has gathered about mistakes and learning from them. Actually I think John has collected far, far more stories than that over the several years he has been working on this project. But he has selected fifty of the best, and organized them to illustrate lessons we all need to learn about benefiting from our mistakes. If the stories in the book are anything like some of the ones I've seen on his Mistake Bank blog over the years the book will be excellent.
  • This whole project is an excellent example of narrative work: real stories about real people collected and arranged in order to help real people meet real needs! It's not lectures, it's hard-won experience! This is bringing stories to where they need to go. And it's participatory too, because John has carried on correspondence with many people about the project over the years (I'm happy to count myself in that group). So this isn't just what John thinks you should know about mistakes, though that is certainly a lot; it's the product of broader experience than that.
  • I expect to learn a lot from reading the book, even though I've read a lot of the Mistake Bank blog posts. Seeing the stories selected, organized and illustrated, making up a coherent presentation makes a big difference. I can't wait to see what sorts of lessons he has in store for me in my own work and life. (At this point I've got the making of mistakes down pat, but it's that follow-up part about using them fruitfully that I'm keen to get some insight into.)
John was the first person who ever wrote to thank me for writing my book, years ago, so let me be the first to ... ooops, lots of people have already thanked John for his great work. So please, get on over there and help John's Kickstarter campaign push over that final line. It'll be a mistake if you don't!

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