It's a bit late.

So sue me.

I bloody love books. Last week, while I was bedridden with the flu, the biggest irritant wasn’t the dog barking to be entertained. It was the fact I couldn’t even get any reading done.

So a day late, and in honour of World Book Day (I know it was yesterday - refer to the title and subheading), I’ve gone through five years of Kindle notes to find the sort of amazing life and business lessons you only get from books.

Strap in.

Who are you trying to impress?

‘And soon the only people who can understand the intricacies of the harmony,’ Guinevere argued, ‘are other skilled craftsmen, and so you become ever more clever in an effort to impress your fellow poets, but you forget that no one outside the craft has the first notion of what you’re doing. Bard chants to bard while the rest of us wonder what all the noise is about. Your task, Pyrlig, is to keep the people’s stories alive, and to do that you cannot be rarefied.’

Bernard Cornwell - Excalibur

Sure, it’s Guinevere of King Arthur’s Mrs fame talking about pagan bards, but it could also have been a reaction to someone writing for other writers. Ooh, show them how smart you are. Show off your skills. Never mind that it’ll go over the heads of everyone else - you know, the people you might be selling to.

Are you sure of the numbers?

You run into a pretty big problem if you run a data-led campaign and all your data is fucking wrong.

Tim Shipman - All Out War, The Full Story of How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class

Ever been in a meeting where someone’s got a fucking chart out? Never trust charts. You don’t know where those numbers came from, if they’re any good, what they actually mean. You just know they make a convincing chart in this meeting right here and right now. Don’t just accept the data.

Speaking of meetings.

Yes, this meeting could’ve been a bloody email

While the spoken word is great, it still suffers from significant limitations. It frees ideas from their original host, but it allows ideas to be transmitted only as far as the speaker can travel, or can shout, or can travel while shouting.

Ryan North - How to Invent Everything

Don’t make me travel while you shout. Just email me. Please.

Good copy stops spaceships being covered in piss

Then it’s time to don a triangular yellow plastic urine bag by inserting the penis into a rubber receiver built into one corner of it. There are three sizes of receivers (small, medium, large), which are always referred to in more heroic terms: extra large, immense, and unbelievable.

Michael Collins - Carrying the Fire

I’m sure I’ve mentioned this one before. Basically, astronauts used to get quite soggy, because nobody wants to go to the flight surgeon and say “excuse me boss, can I have the small nozzle for my small phallus?”

Sure, you feel like a big man at the Cape, but the next thing you know you’re circling the Earth and there’s a big glob of wee at face height. Words fix that by letting even the modestly endowed ask for the EXTRA LARGE WILLY HOLDER.

Probably have been simpler to just send women into space, I reckon.

No, Martin, no fucker’s in the market for a 3 inch hole

It’s one of Martin’s favourite quotes. You don’t sell the drill, darling. People aren’t buying a drill. They’re buying the hole.

Are they though?

‘I don’t think it works like that at all. You see an electric drill in a shop and decide you want it. Then you take it home and wander around your house looking for excuses to drill holes in things.’

Rory Sutherland - Alchemy

I’m with Rory. Sometimes, you just want something because you want it. In those wonderful circumstances, you don’t want to be sold to. You just want to be able to buy the damn thing with a minimum of fuss.

Nobody below the height of 5’8” is to be trusted

Incidentally, it’s funny how often the miseries of this world are caused by short people – they are so much more quick-tempered and difficult to get on with than tall ones.

Erich Maria Remarque - All Quiet on the Western Front

It’s just sensible advise isn’t it. History’s greatest monsters were all short. Vlad the Impaler, Stalin, Ben Hampson…

I however, at 6’7, am famously happy-go-lucky and easy to get along with. Just like fellow tall men Donald Trump and Henry VIII (both 6’3) who nobody ever had a bad word about ever.

Incidentally, Damon Albarn is 5’11. The most evil of heights.

Damon Albarn is a whopper

Blur represented the acceleration of negative long-term social trends, not least the destructive fetishization of working-class culture.

Richard Sayeed - 1997: The Future That Never Happened

There’s no lesson here. I just don’t like Damon Albarn and want to put everything that’s gone wrong since 1997 squarely on his plate. The div.

There you go. Some wisdom from books and that. Share yours in the comments.

Something Mint - BOOKS

If you like books, you’ll like Glenn Fisher’s Library of Lazy Thinking.

You may not like Glenn though, for reasons so ably elucidated above by Remarque.