344 Questions: The Creative Person’s Do-It-Yourself Guide to Insight, Survival, and Artistic Fulfillment by Stefan G. Bucher
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
“The more honest you are with yourself as you go through the book, and the more notes you make in it, the more valuable it will become to you. That’s why this book is small, fexible, and doesn’t cost a lot of money. I want you to take it with you when you go to woek, keep it in your bag, and scribble into it as answers occur to you. Don’t keep this book clean! Mess it up! Write in it freely! Doodle! Put a rubber band around it, so that you can keep interesting articles and extra pages of notes in it. If you keep this book in mint condition, I’ve failed. Because a tattered, bust-up book-filled out and scribbled upon — means you’ve found out new things about yourself and you’re inspired to take action”.
I would heartily agree, Mr. Bucher. A tattered, note-filled book is an addition to every person’s fossil registry of personal story and evolution. It really is a crying shame this book does not inspire any of this. Unavoidably I must come to the heart-wrenching conclusion that you have failed.
First of all, how do you expect, no, demand from people to write on a book made entirely of glossy paper? Have you ever tried writing with a pencil on this material? I always hated my English textbooks for this very reason. Unless this is some indication that you want our answers to be set in Bic ink — hardly the point of the book as you must have planned it Mr. Bucher, I would entertain the thought — the selection of materials is the first poor design choice to come out of this book. I might have actually tried writing with a pen but the subconscious connections with English teachers with terrible Greek accents I so naively thought I had left far behind, ultimately overpowered me.
Then, what sort of questions are these? They gave me the feeling they were either too sterilised or trying too hard to be witty and/or innovative. Most of the book consists of questions that require you to either be extremely honest with yourself or have remarkable skills of self-knowledge to properly answer, mostly both: “What are you doing to sabotage yourself?”, “What are you going to be doing in the next 60 years?”, “Do you prefer your inner or your outer life?”, “How do you handle too much success?”, “How much can you whore yourself out?” etc. They’re insightful questions, but if I were in any position to actually be able to return equally insightful answers, I wouldn’t be interested in buying this book in the first place. If I could answer all these questions as easily as the book has this passive-aggressive aura about it that it’s really possible, I would already be everything I want, can, have or haven’t ever dreamed to be.
OK, let’s say that answering the questions would actually evolve me into such an Übermensch. The auxilliary questions meant to help you on every page, along with the whole flowchart thing going on that makes no sense and if I really followed it I would never even reach half of the questions (how can you have several arrows pointing towards a box in a flowchart, but no arrows pointing outwards and still have it be workable?), are not much better than the main questions themselves. I don’t know if designers use flowcharts –they probably do– but this book would definitely be enough to drive any programmer to insanity!
Some of the less ambitious questions pack some punch and made me think as well as laugh. This is the reason this is getting 2 stars instead of only 1.
This sterilised, efficient, perfectly creative –where creative is implied here to exclude anything that cannot be represented with flowcharts–, ideal model for Westerners, best displayed in cases such as this… It scares the hell out of me, man.