Grab Your Book and Go Algorithm Surfing With Me

For some reason this song came to me this morning



Mark Coker talked about algorithms in that book of his.  You know I glazed right over, that's all numbers and stuff.

You need to 1)have a great book (that's over 70,000 words long) 2)have all your social media in place 3)advertising in place 4)tribe (Seth Godin) 5) Great cover (me) 6)a bunch of other stuff I can't remember because I can't do it.

Anyway.  Jan and Dean.  Very interesting story.  Jan was the dynamic one of the duo, everything was his idea, he was the engine.  Then one day, 2 years into med school,  he was speeding in a Corvette and had a car crash he barely survived.  Left with traumatic brain injury, it took years to recover to a functional level and he never made it all the way back.

So was the connection between the algorithms and the words of the song or was it the lesson of Jan Berry and the frantic push to catch the algorithm wave that rose from my subconscious this morning?

There are two ways you can look at life.  In one way everything that's to be revealed is on the surface, and in the other way, nothing is on the surface and you have to dig for meaning.

In Mark Coker's view the longer the book, the happier the customer will be.
In a rabbinic view, and I know most of you are not Jewish, maybe not even Christian, the more concise your thinking the better.

What's more valuable?  A long book that wanders all over and is forgotten as soon as the reader is turned off, or a work that focuses like a laser on what the creator is trying to say and 20 years later still carries emotional impact?  (Go ahead, accuse me of phrasing the question in a way that we know what I think the answer is.)

But.

Should a creator be trying to say anything?

Is there room for both?

I'm not a greengrocer.  I don't sell my ware's by the pound.  (Did you see what I did there?  That's called a greengrocer's apostrophe.)