Passing Along the Books
There's a Goodwill a few blocks from me that I go to a few times a week, mostly because they tend to have a respectable book selection. (It's also interesting to browse the old CDs they have there, which now seems akin to thumbing through my parent's collection of old LPs.) Since the books are cheap, I find that it's a pretty cost effective way for me to sample lots of more popular titles just to see what will stick to my brain. I've learned from this, for example, that as a business writer, Jack Welch is not that interesting.
Every other Wednesday, they have a "Half off everything in the store" kind of sale, so the price of each book falls to well under a dollar. All paperbacks are 40 cents. At that price, I'll buy almost anything that I've heard of and felt I might be interested in. If I buy 10 books and one of them is good, the $4 I spent is still a quarter of what I would have spent on one new book from Borders.
What I decided to do more recently was buy books for other people. There's a small handful of books that I've perused and felt were insightful, prudent, and interesting, and I would like nothing more than to share them with someone else, in the hopes that it would turn on lights for them, too.
I found a copy of one of my favorite books about selling and salesmanship a few weeks ago, bought the copy of it, and left it out on a public bench where I often see stacks of abandoned books that are picked up by my city's myriad homeless. Is it going to teach any of them how to get a job in sales? Probably not. But I'm a big fan of passing the ideas forward.
Of course, you could argue that, at 40 cents a book, the homeless could buy the books themselves. They could certainly go to Goodwill and find the stuff they want to read. But there's a difference between going out and finding a book to read among the thousands of titles in a bookstore, versus someone handing you a book directly with a hearty recommendation. I'm not always handing them out directly to people, but I make sure it will end up in someone's hands, with a good chance they'll read it.
When someone hands me a book, and it ends up being a good one, it's a pleasant surprise. It's like an answer to a question you didn't even think to ask, which is something we all need to seek out.
Every other Wednesday, they have a "Half off everything in the store" kind of sale, so the price of each book falls to well under a dollar. All paperbacks are 40 cents. At that price, I'll buy almost anything that I've heard of and felt I might be interested in. If I buy 10 books and one of them is good, the $4 I spent is still a quarter of what I would have spent on one new book from Borders.
What I decided to do more recently was buy books for other people. There's a small handful of books that I've perused and felt were insightful, prudent, and interesting, and I would like nothing more than to share them with someone else, in the hopes that it would turn on lights for them, too.
I found a copy of one of my favorite books about selling and salesmanship a few weeks ago, bought the copy of it, and left it out on a public bench where I often see stacks of abandoned books that are picked up by my city's myriad homeless. Is it going to teach any of them how to get a job in sales? Probably not. But I'm a big fan of passing the ideas forward.
Of course, you could argue that, at 40 cents a book, the homeless could buy the books themselves. They could certainly go to Goodwill and find the stuff they want to read. But there's a difference between going out and finding a book to read among the thousands of titles in a bookstore, versus someone handing you a book directly with a hearty recommendation. I'm not always handing them out directly to people, but I make sure it will end up in someone's hands, with a good chance they'll read it.
When someone hands me a book, and it ends up being a good one, it's a pleasant surprise. It's like an answer to a question you didn't even think to ask, which is something we all need to seek out.