First, I should get this out of the way. I’m starting to get bored with myself. So, I can only assume that the people that read this blog from time to time are similarly getting bored. I mean, I understand it’s tough to slog through 800 + words to get to a point, when I make one. I’m working on it, believe me.
Frankly, I think the challenge with my current state of boredom is the difference between knowledge and wisdom. I have too much of the former and not enough of the latter.
I read a ton—too much, in fact. I am a voracious consumer of information—30 + magazines a month (most if not all by subscription). I mean, seriously, I don’t know a single other person in my entire universe that reads that many magazines, and especially not a neurotic nutball that feels guilt if the months pile up on Food & Wine magazine, for example. And, I spend a lot of my life online reading blogs, etc. When I’m reading a book I’m reading non-fiction and I usually get through a book a month—most are wine and/or marketing/business related. Sometimes they’re wine business books, just to make it easy for myself.
Simply put, I take in too much information that is intended to make me knowledgeable. Ideas are great, but there’s a point of diminishing return when you can’t practically do all or them, or any of them, really.
Sadly, in the last three years I’ve read just two fiction books that I can recall—Life of Pi and the Da Vinci Code. Life of Pi made me cry and feel joyful and The Da Vinci Code gave me serious pause to reflect on the dogmatism that 12 years of Catholic schooling can give you. My wife starts to steam because I still haven’t read Harry Potter despite the obvious emotional investment she has in the series—for Pete’s sake she took a day off from work to go to a recent Harry Potter book release party wearing a homemade t-shirt that says, ‘Ron is a Keeper.’ She was a mess when Dumbledore died, but I don’t know what any of this means in practical terms.
Net-net, I’m on max information overload. I’m about as plugged into the things I’m interested in as humanly possible. I’m knowledgeable. I’m mostly decent dinner conversation. There’s not a whole hell of a lot in wine, pop culture, business or Notre Dame Football that eludes my grasp.
But, this is where the double-edged sword comes into play.
While I feel like I’m pretty knowledgeable, what I’m missing is wisdom—the wisdom that can be gained from reading fiction—the empathy you feel for well-drawn characters in a story that has a beginning, a middle and an end with a moral.
So, this post would normally be about wine customization labels and the obvious market that is being missed. I got inspiration for the post from an ad in Rolling Stone magazine (yes, by subscription) for Converse shoes whereby Generation Y can customize their sneakers. There’s lot of this customization stuff going on—in fact there’s probably some marketing case studies, too, if I searched for them (I’m not). Heck, http://www.threadless.com and http://www.spreadshirt.com have businesses built on customized t-shirts. Common sense tells me that if one of these custom-label wine companies created an easy to use, highly flexible and customizable online label-maker and offered and marketed the ability for younger consumers to create their own cool labels then you’d really have a pretty cool business going.
But, like I said, I’m getting bored with myself and ideas are great to a point, but sometimes action is more interesting. Or, absent action at least having the wisdom to know the good ideas from the bad is pretty cool, too.
I think I’m off to read a good book, but before I get to the fiction I’m reading Henry Miller’s Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch—it’s a non-fiction, supposed to be kind of like a first person blog before there were blogs. It’s supposed to be packed with wisdom, too. Maybe it will give me some ideas.