Book Review: We Are All Weird

 

Disclaimer: I recently bought this book on sale from Big Bad Wolf event, and to make my 2020 reading challenge not that pathetic). 

I have read several books by Seth Godin before, and this one is the shortest. That's why he called it as a manifesto. As a manifesto published in 2015, it still relevant, or I can say 99% relevant to read in 2020. 

the content of this book stay true to its title. In several part of the books he mentioned some "local" (US) culture cases as example, so it was hard to understand for me as a person who was not in US (or aware of their cultural and news update) around 2015-ish or before that. It was not a big chunk of this book so I could understand the overall ideas anyway. 

This book laid some proofs to support the author's manifesto that the weird are exist as tribes, groups, and (especially) market. He didn't want to say it as "niche" market, yet it still have the same vibe as niche for me. Which reminds me of Chris Anderson's book: The Long Tail. It has more explanation, as far as I could remember. Sorry, I read it a long time ago, 2015, and I don't have the copy to reread it. Personally speaking I prefer The Long Tail particularly if we want to focus more on the economic side. 

I guess if the author revisited this book now, he may want to update it. The TikTok phenomenon, more tech advancement to support personalised items, and many more. In some parts of the book, the author sounded "English-centric", like aiming the book for English speaking people only. When he pointed out "English speakers" are the mainstream, did he forget that Chinese is spoken by the most number of people on earth? I guess it's fair because the book was written in English, but culture-wise, it could be hard to understand for people who are "minorities" since beginning and do not find they are "weird". 

Alas, the term "weird", "normal", and "mainstream" are subjective (even though the statistics say the other way). Society has its own way to define those terms, and again, it bounds to place, time, and groups.