Tejas Software Consulting Newsletter

I’ve just read James Bach’s new book, Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar: How Self-Education and the Pursuit of Passion Can Lead to a Lifetime of Success. It’s available now as an e-book, and will be released in September 2009 in hardcover. It’s easy to digest at 141 pages long, but it still gives us a lot of insight into the author’s history and the way he thinks. There are a number of sound bites in the book that I like to repeat, like this one - “Procrastination is… like being in the dining room of my mind, chomping on breadsticks and waiting for the food.”

Full disclosure: The author is a friend of mine, so I’m biased toward wanting him to be successful. Yet I’m also more motivated to be critical of his work than I would be with a stranger, which is exactly what the buccaneer-scholar approach calls for.

Hopefully the paper edition is easier to install

My experience with the e-book format was disappointing. It uses Adobe Digital Editions software and has tight DRM restrictions - you have to register with Adobe to even be able to restore the book from a backup. The standard installation process failed for me on Windows. I had to search for a manual installation option, which did work. When I registered with Adobe after installing the software, instead of before installing, I was no longer able to read the book, and I had to download it again, which I could only do by uninstalling Adobe Digital Editions and reinstalling it. I was unable to get it to install at all on Mac OS.

When the reader showed the text in one column, it was pleasant to read on the screen. I tended to maximize the reader window so I wouldn’t be distracted by other open applications, which caused the reader to switch to using two columns. There was a wide gutter between the columns but little whitespace on the outer margins. Some illustrations were chopped off on the outer edges in the two-column format, and the page numbers often overlapped the text. When I put the system on standby with the reader running and then woke it up, the reader window always become garbled until it redrew the window.

I was able to read the book on Linux with the Windows version of the reader running under “wine,” though it took some hacking to get it to install. So it actually works better on an unsupported platform than it does on Mac OS, which is supported.

Scholarly Buccaneers

It’s a shame that there are difficulties in the logistics of reading the book, because it’s well worth reading once you get the reader software working or a real book in your hands. In a nutshell, the book extends the concept of “Do what you love and the money will follow” to education - “Study what you love and an education will follow” (my words, not his). Will money come out of the buccaneer approach to learning? Not necessarily, and he doesn’t promise financial success as you might assume from the subtitle. The success James writes about is more about lifelong personal happiness than earning a living.

The “buccaneer” part of the title isn’t just a hollow reference to help sell the book - buccaneering is really compared to the learning process throughout the book. As someone who sings sea shanties and hangs out with people dressed as pirates at Renaissance festivals, the well-researched buccaneer references certainly kept my interest. While James does endorse civil disobedience, he does not of course entreat his readers to follow the buccaneers’ habits of theft and murder, much like the folks at the Renaissance festivals like to sing about adventure but never intend to actually draw blood with the swords they’re carrying. It’s the freedom that the buccaneers exercised that James is after - intellectual freedom - much like Captain Sparrow seeks freedom, and for both James and Captain Sparrow, this freedom comes within a well-established social structure, not the anarchy that you might expect.

James likes to use acronyms to remember lists of words that describe various methods that he uses. This time around, the acronym is “SACKED SCOWS.” I’ve never gotten much use out of his acronyms, but I did really like the learning approach that he describes in detail here. James describes the progression of his career, and how he now builds his credentials in lieu of academic diplomas. I like his strategy of staying in between our expectations and our aspirations for ourselves in order to stay engaged. He admitted that he has had self-doubt, however, and even flaws, which reminds us that it’s okay to be human. There is a good balance of autobiography that his fans will enjoy and general advice that anyone in any field can benefit from.

A few elements of the book still seem unpolished, like the table of clam facts in chapter six that didn’t make sense to me until I read the explanation that came after the table. And the epilogue seems to have the potential to give a touching end to the story, but it mostly left me confused.

I find myself wondering, would I recommend this book to my daughters? I have to admit, my gut reaction to that question is to hesitate to give them a book that says it’s okay to rebel against their teachers and drop out of school if that’s the direction the wind blows them. But my kids were homeschooled for several years, so they have already had a taste of buccaneer scholarship. Alas, when I mentioned to them that I had read James’ book about how to learn like a buccaneer, the response was “Dad, your friends are so weird.”

For more on buccaneer scholarship, see the Buccaneer Scholar web site.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009 at 11:36 pm and is filed under Career, Life, the Universe, and Everything, Software Testing, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.