Messy:The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives - Tim Harford Audiobook

Written by Tim Harford
Read by Nicholas Guy Smith
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps

Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
Release date: October 4, 2016
Duration: 09:44:33

From the award-winning columnist and author of the national bestseller The Undercover Economist comes a provocative big idea book about the genuine benefits of being messy: at home, at work, in the classroom, and beyond.

Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives celebrates the benefits that messiness has in our lives: why it’s important, why we resist it, and why we should embrace it instead. Using research from neuroscience, psychology, social science, as well as captivating examples of real people doing extraordinary things, Tim Harford explains that the human qualities we value – creativity, responsiveness, resilience – are integral to the disorder, confusion, and disarray that produce them.

From the music studio of Brian Eno to the Lincoln Memorial with Martin Luther King, Jr., from the boardroom to the classroom, messiness lies at the core of how we innovate, how we achieve, how we reach each other – in short, how we succeed.

In Messy, you’ll learn about the unexpected connections between creativity and mess; understand why unexpected changes of plans, unfamiliar people, and unforeseen events can help generate new ideas and opportunities as they make you anxious and angry; and come to appreciate that the human inclination for tidiness – in our personal and professional lives, online, even in children’s play – can mask deep and debilitating fragility that keep us from innovation.

A review - MESSY overflows with scenarios involving nature, elections, homophily, office space, and more to make its case that orderliness does not engender success and may, in fact, impede it. Given that Americans tend to equate a British accent with sophisticated orderliness, Nicholas Guy Smith might seem an odd choice to narrate an audiobook about the value of being disorderly. The obvious rationale is that author Tim Harford is British. Smith gives no other reason for listeners to question his selection. His reading is clear and engaging, with an understated suspense well suited to Harford’s tendency to leave a story hanging, relate other anecdotes and facts, and then pick the story back up again. Smith and Harford prove to be a good pairing. Together, they neatly disrupt our preconceptions of what really drives success. K.W. � AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine