Evil Plans : Having Fun on the Road to World Domination
This article was originally written in French. The AI may have screwed up some bits. If you understand French, please change the website language for a better experience.
| Enjoyment (between 💀 and ❤❤❤❤❤) | ❤❤❤ |
| Writing (between 💀 and ✒✒✒✒✒) | ✒✒ |
| Reading Language | 🇬🇧 |
| Reader's Age | 27 |
| Pages (Kobo Clara HD) | 148 |
What’s it about?
Hugh MacLeod is a creative. If reality doesn’t suit him, he’ll draw over it. He broke through with his drawings, and his consulting company gapingvoid.
He seeks to rediscover the joy of trying, experimenting, and undertaking. It seems like he’s succeeding! Why call his new adventure a business when it can just as easily be described as a Machiavellian plan?
Through this lens, he goes chapter by chapter, providing numerous examples and offering plenty of advice. These tips have strategic, economic, and even spiritual dimensions. Why are we doing this?
I didn’t know Gapingvoid, but I had seen some of his drawings before. Not all of his words are perfect, but they are comforting and make you want to give your dreams a chance, to find them a place in the real world, no matter how you have to bend one or the other.
What I liked
- Very real case studies (with first names, simply), and not all of them successful. It felt more like having a conversation with a local elder than with a Silicon Valley guru.
- Scenarios that start with almost no money yet find a way to succeed.
Spoiler
Unlike in *Zero to One*, the final mission doesn’t come from a pursuit of monopoly and money, but from Love ❤. That’s a limited resource too, but a bit more evenly distributed 😊 From a more rational perspective, I’d say it’s more motivating to play a positive-sum game than a zero-sum game.What turned me off
- Assumes you already have something to develop. If that’s not the case, it can be a bit off-putting.
- Some examples felt unnecessarily long, as if to reach a certain page count.
A few gems
Good news! You don’t die.
Once this message is understood emotionally, it’s incredibly liberating.
Take the cream of the crop, ditch the rest.
Whether for pleasure or profit, Hugh MacLeod is violently essentialist: the majority of the outcome depends on a minority of the effort. So, toss out everything that isn’t interesting enough.