I’ve been pondering on this for over a week now as it ties in with much of what I’ve been writing and thinking about for many years.

The low information diet is a neat phrase — and concept — used in Timothy Ferriss’s new book, The 4-Hour Workweek, which I reviewed here a couple of weeks ago. It also sings from the same hymn sheet as another book, Mediated — How the Media Shape Your World, which I also reviewed here some months since.

Information is the bane of our lives. It pursues us everywhere, via billboards and Blackberrys, cell phones and laptops. Information never stops, it seeps into our brains, jams out all useful activity and crashes any tendency to creativity. Most of it is useless, irrelevant, biassed, deceitful, deceptive and damaging to our health.

Do I like information? I love it. We all do. But, like alcohol and drugs, it’s monumentally counter-productive unless consumed in tiny doses at precisely the right time.

The problem is, information makes us feel important, connected, in league with “where it’s at”. If we don’t get any, we’re sure to look inadequate at the XYZ Conference. We never stop to think that the XYZ Conference is just another vehicle for more useless information, as is that so-vital podcast, video hookup or blog post (present post excepted because of its essential nature).

Ferriss’s chapter with the same title as this post is the best eight-page sequence in his book. Alone it will change your life. If you’re a Techmeme groupie or a news junkie — as I used to be — read it and learn about “selective ignorance” and the trial one-week media fast.

Refuse to be mediated, concentrate on that personal task in hand. Only your work and activity is worthy of your attention. Everything else may be relevant to others, but will kill your effectiveness and utility if you indulge in it.

There are many traps to watch out for too. I watched Ferriss being interviewed on the Scoble Show the other day hoping to discover whether the author’s wildly romantic CV had any truth in it and whether he did indeed work only four hours a week. Most of it was driven by Scoble’s interventions pushing some aspect of his own work methods. Unfortunately, it diverted the author onto narrow detail-driven paths that made his ideas seem trite. Like hiring someone in India to triage his email. Now I do know about hiring people to do simple tasks, like writing content, and believe me the time-overhead involved is usually much greater than doing the job yourself — especially if it’s triaging your email.

Outsourcing is rarely the answer because of the admin and the need to train the outsourcee. They will also require supervision to keep them up to standard, billing and paying, accounting and complimenting. It really is not as simple as Ferriss says.

So let’s stick with the low information diet. This is the nub of the matter. Get it right — depending on the source of your income stream — and all else follows.

Draw up a few relevancy charts. Redraw them onto one page and into one box. Eliminate anything even slightly superfluous. Concentrate ferociously on what’s left, but only to the extent that it serves your purpose, and you are beginning to see the light.

It is vain to do with more what can be done with less. William of Occam.

Take Occam’s Razor to everything you do and you won’t go far wrong. Not to do so is to cut your own throat.

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking. Albert Einstein.

Abraham Lincoln’s famous maxim, “You can please all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can never please all of the people all of the time”, is so obviously true you wouldn’t expect anyone to fall foul of its remorseless logic. Yet that is precisely what Britain and some other Western countries have done over the past decade.

It began with Bill Clinton and his obsessive pursuit of minority interests to bolster his poll results and show how caring he is to the wider electorate. In Britain, Tony Blair followed suit under the banner of The Third Way, a neo-Marxist equality agenda of endless social tinkering and mindless bossiness. It was how they would make the entire population love them to bits — they thought.

The Third Way signalled the death of Bentham’s Utilitarianism in British politics and the beginnings of an eerie hero worship of carefully selected in-groups and minorities.

Jeremy Bentham’s Embalmed Body

Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), philosopher and social reformer, paved the way for modern fully-franchised democracy with his great maxim, “The object of all legislation should be the greatest happiness for the greatest number”. It has been the basis of modern society ever since and has clearly worked well. He even provided a mathematical formula for calculating the best possible outcome in every situation.

Then came the Clinton/Blair obsession with “dog whistling” — the pursuit of prescriptive minority rights which are often rolled out at the expense of other minorities and almost always the majority itself.

Let’s look at an analogy of Bentham’s dictum in action. Somewhere in Holland a hole appears in a dyke. A small boy senses the danger and stops the flow by putting his finger in the hole.

His cries alert farm workers nearby who rush to his aid only to find other holes appearing. They stop the trickle with their own fingers. Soon, at the urging of the Mayor, others are rushing onto the scene until the whole village is there with their fingers in hundreds of holes.

“What do we do now?” somebody shouts.

A distant voice cries, “There’s another hole.”

So now the dyke will give way taking the entire population of the village with it. The Benthamite view would be to send a small repair party to the dyke to assess the likelihood of saving it, while evacuating the rest of the village to safety. In other words, it may mean sacrificing the few in order to save the majority.

Stable Families
We know that children are happiest and more stable if brought up in married two-parent families. All the statistics prove this self-evident fact. Why then would a couple with children be financially better off in Blair’s Britain if they were not married? And why are the same “rights” given to same-sex couples in loose relationships as to married families?

Bentham’s relentless logic means that public policy should never be confused with private kindness, which is exactly what we’ve got in Brokeback Britain.

The greater public good has been destroyed in favour of a patchwork quilt of minor prescriptive measures, all jangling against each, causing huge resentment in the so-far silent majority, and destroying all social cohesion in the cities and in the country.

Children run wild at night, tormenting adults who can’t take action because of the Children’s Rights Act. This situation is an example of extensive child neglect in a society that increasingly looks to the state for everything. And that’s not to mention the destructive Human Rights Act which grants British civil rights universally to the whole world in an act of unparalleled betrayal of a nation’s right to protect itself from harm.

If New Labour had foresworn the advice of its militant Marxists, oddball, second-rate academics, and heeded the wise words of Jeremy Bentham, little of this would have happened.

That politics today is broken is clear. Only the resurrection of Bentham’s Utility agenda can save it. It’s not as if he’s that far away. His perfectly embalmed body, still in his familiar clothes and sitting in his favourite chair, can be seen in a glass cabinet in a London University college.

It would mean the end of prescriptive legislation, social engineering of the many by the few, the massive centralization of power, and the loss of the balm of Superdemocracy.

As General George Patton once said : “Don’t tell people how to do things, [suggest] what to do and let them surprise you with the result.”

Thanks to Aaron Brazell at Technosailor for the Patton quotation.

Update : Catch Timothy Ferriss on The Scoble Show.

Timothy Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek is one of those business books that use counter-intuition as a badge of merit. Much of it is so batty and over-egged you wonder if you’re not wasting your time reading it.

And yet the core message is a powerful one, and it contains much food for thought for anyone stuck in a boring career, or running an ailing business.

The subtitle is, “Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich”.

New rich, or NR, is an important refrain throughout the book. And yes, acronyms abound. DEAL — D for Definition, E for Elimination, A for Automation, L for Liberation, makes for tiresome reading sometimes, as does the author’s CV.

Did author Timothy Ferriss really become national kickboxing champion of China by using a loophole in the rules allowing him to push his opponents out of the ring a few times to eliminate them from the competition? And if so, is that the way you want to run your life? Your call.

He also claims to have been a motorcycle racer in Europe, Argentine Tango champ in Buenos Aires, a scuba diver in Panama and a skier in the Andes. Oh, and a language teacher in Thailand and Japan and … much more. Bear in mind he’s only 29, or was when he wrote the book.

Well, maybe so, but these boasts don’t add much to his basic thesis. And thesis it is, for Ferriss is a very smart cookie. His main ideas, like the low-information diet (down with RSS), outsourcing the boring stuff, reducing work to what you do best, have much in common with the 80/20 principle, but go that extra mile to the very limits of absurdity. The brakes screech on at the last moment, though, and he avoids complete overturn — just. Maybe that’s his motor-racing experience coming through.

The book is also interestingly interactive. We’re referred to his website for the latest, or most detailed information. It’s a good way to drive traffic as those of us who advocate print/online synergy have been saying for a while. Be aware, he also embeds passwords in the text for the most intriguing documents online. This is a total tease, but one way of making sure you read the whole book.

By now you will have realized that Timothy Ferriss is a bit of a flamboyant sort of chap. While that may be the new blue in business book style, the main question for this reviewer is : does it contain enough meaty nuggets of new ideas and information to justify trawling through the whole book with umpteen visits to the website?

I would say, yes. It certainly made me rethink many of my lazy, received-wisdom notions about business … and even life. Wow, I didn’t think I was going to write the L word there. That’s what Ferriss does, he gets you branching out laterally in ways you never intended.

Whether any of his schemes will stick enough to actually change anything remains to be seen. I also have to say, that some of them appear to be marginally illegal, at least where I am. So, if you can’t afford a lawyer … well, I’m not one either, so I’m not going to advise you.

Judgement : I would emphatically recommend this book if you have a taste for the extraordinary and don’t mind flouting conventions and doing things “your way”. Of course, if you do ‘em his way, you may find yourself perched on a giant Ferris wheel unable to get off. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

News hot off the presses of three new series starting on Syntagma inventory :

1. If you’re an aficionado of the BBC’s top-notch, mega-hit TV series, Life on Mars, you’ll be interested to know that Syntagma author, Guy Adams wrote the BBC book of the show, and is just beginning on the second volume, which covers the second series.

Read Guy’s story over on The Hack’s Progress.

2. As it’s Edward Elgar’s 150th anniversary in June, Steve Newman is publishing his play : A Summer Garden, over on Classy Classical in eight parts.

Start reading here.

3. The fourth in our Zen Masters series has begun over at Spiritual Nirvana. Catch the biography of Hui Neng, the sixth Chinese Patriarch of Zen, here.

My print publishing business, Dial Publishing, is currently in exploratory talks to buy a small, but established print publisher of nonfiction books. This is still at the confidential, due diligence stage, so no names or pack drill.

If the buy comes off it will bring a solid backlist of steady sellers to Dial’s inventory, plus a fund of experience and connections impossible to create overnight. Dial Publishing is a totally separate business from Syntagma Digital Limited, which is our digital publishing company.

These events have ballooned out over the Easter period and have led me to reflect on the essential differences between print and digital publishing. With 20 years of print experience and two years of digital publishing behind me, I’m only now beginning to see the wood from the trees.

Let’s state from the outset that we’re talking profitable projects here, not worthwhile artistic efforts which gain critical acclaim but lose money — they are more in the province of personal blogs. In the commercial sphere, it’s the money that determines the outcome in both cases, as always.

Digital and print publishing are surprisingly complementary over a range of possible output. Speaking very generally, the money in digital publishing is in :

Bite-sized reports on events and products that command large-scale interest.

Most essay-type sites don’t make any money at all. The way still to earn income publishing online (not social networking) remains in a few mega-niches : finance, automotive, gadgets, gossip and miscellaneous products and services. Looking across Syntagma’s 50-60 sites the ones with large numbers of text link ads stand out a mile. That’s a very good test of financial viability. All our projects going forward focus on these areas.

The gold in nonfiction print publishing comes from :

Lengthy exposition and detailed information on essential topics and useful techniques.

Most writers find one of these branches easier to accomplish than the other. Just a few may be good at both.

So, in terms of cash and results, there are two discrete environments — print and digital publishing — to work with. Both are capable of bringing results, but the need to consolidate and move on is ever present, especially online.

Other Considerations
To succeed in digital publishing you need to play the market and its highly volatile readership with a certain degree of cunning. Traffic is driven by keywords and buzz — what we used to call “word of mouth”, but now in a different context. To win online you have to get down and dirty with search engine optimization and a measure of gaming of the system. Google benefits too, so there’s real scope for the dark arts here.

Some people don’t really like that aspect of digital publishing — I confess to being a bit chary of it myself. However, to win a war you have to kill people. There’s no other way.

Print publishing is much more congenial to anyone with scruples, although the scope for shenanigans is increasing by the day, especially as the number of titles being published grows beyond the public’s capacity — and wish — to purchase. Content and reputation count above all in today’s busy marketplace.

Complementarity
If you indulge in both arms of publishing, what are the cross-fertilizations you can call up to improve both businesses?

There are many, but in brief :

* You can sell books online and use websites for publicity.
* Books can contain a list of web addresses to get a new audience logging on.
* Multiple cross-references can drive traffic both ways.
* Websites can provide an introduction, while a book develops the whole picture.
* Books can refer readers to websites for more up-to-date information.

These are real benefits and, used smartly, can make a great deal of difference to success on- and offline.

The convergence of digital and print publishing is therefore more of a complementarity than a merging. That the same people are now often doing both is a sign that a mature marketplace is developing which successfully crosses the seemingly large ravine between the two outlets for publishing.

Which, though, potentially yields the bigger return on investment?

That will have to be left to another post, so stay close.