My last few posts were about political books, so I figured, what better time than the present to bring up some books that tackle the topic of religion? Seems many of our politicians can’t separate themselves from their religious backgrounds/beliefs, so it kind of goes hand in hand these days.
What do books about politics and religion have to do with entrepreneurship? Technically, nothing. But one thing I’ve found is that most of my best inspirations and ideas have not come out of books that teach “entrepreneurship.� Why is that? Because, being an entrepreneur is about thinking differently.
If all you do is follow the checklists set forth by others in entrepreneurial books, then are you really being entrepreneurial? Or are you going along with the crowd? Not to knock those books, as they are helpful for many reasons. But, often you need to come at your ideas from a different angle. And this month, for some reason, I’ve been reading two books that have a bit to do with religion–one angle I rarely consider but, needless to say, it got me thinking … Here’s the first book.
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
The other morning my son came into the kitchen and announced, “Mom, you have a really bad book.â€? Oh, dear, I thought. Did I leave Anais Nin or Colette lying around again? But then I quickly realized that his reading skills weren’t quite at that level, so I knew that he had to be referring to Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great. Now, I had this book on my reading wish list since the day it was published, as I like any book that questions the status quo (especially the religious one). Unfortunately, I find Christopher Hitchens at times incomprehensible (as in this case) and not very amusing. (Hence an earlier post about “Why Christopher Hitchens isn’t funny.â€?)
So, I love the concept of the book, but found it torturous to read and admittedly gave up after a few chapters. (Life is too short to read books that don’t grab me and suck me in!) However, I enjoyed the conversation with my son about how it’s OK to question the idea of God. And this book in particular focused on how people use the concept of God for their own purposes or to be exclusive of others and, in those situations, God is not great.
Then somehow we got onto the topic of the Pilgrims fleeing England in search of religious freedom, and I noted to myself (not to him) the contrast with today, where certain groups want to impose their religious beliefs on the rest of us. Add to this the fact that we were founded as the United States of America, under a very different governmental structure than ever before (how entrepreneurial of them!), yet now we’ve gotten back to the government proposing the equivalent of a “thought-crime� bill that would enable it to prosecute anyone criticizing it. (Thanks to my friend George over at “I’ve BeenMugged� for bringing that to my attention.)
Which brings me right back to my theory: Once the rebels become the ruling class, then they’re no longer rebels. Hence, the best entrepreneurs cannot simply follow an entrepreneurial handbook, because once they do that, then they are no longer innovating. And this is why I tend to look elsewhere for inspiration and ideas.
The Top Shelf Bottom Line: Great concept (challenging the status quo); poor delivery (Hitchens is not my messenger of choice here).
Book Two coming later this week: Eat, Pray, Love.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 at 3:20 pm and is filed under Nonfiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.Leave a Reply
