Three years ago I knew the ins and outs of WordPress.  Over the last three years while I was becoming a master of the HubSpot CMS I’d put WordPress to the side.  WordPress Themes and Plugins are the true power of the system and both have come a long way over my absence.  If you are looking for themes I’d highly recommend Elegant Themes and Theme Forest for incredible templates that won’t break the bank.  It’s true that you get what you pay for and you can’t put a price on an excellent site design.

There are lots of great WordPress Plugins and it’s been years since I last recommend some so let me throw out a list with standards.

• Akismet – It comes standard, but nobody wants blog spam.
• All in One SEO Pack – WordPress has come a long way with SEO and many themes have SEO functionality built in but I still find myself relying on this plugin after over four years of use.
• Better WordPress Minify – I’m a big fan of optimizing for speed and minifying your site is an often overlooked way to do this.  It compresses your javascript and css files if you aren’t familiar with the concept.
• Better WP Security – Excellent security plugin written by my friend Chris Wiegman.  I know for a FACT this plugin has prevented my site from getting hacked in the past.
• Google XML Sitemaps – Standard that will help you drive more organic traffic.  A nobrainer.
• Redirection – I’m surprised WordPress has not built in a way to handle 301 redirects but this is a great plugin to make it extremely easy without going into your .htaccess file all the time.
• SEO Friendly Images – Adds alt text and title attributes to your images that you forget or don’t do it to.  It’s the right way to have correct markup and good for search engines.  You might as well install this plugin and make sure that your code is clean as it can be.
• ShareThis – My favorite of the Social Sharing plugins.  I do wish that it wasn’t so heavy on the loading of pages though.
• Ultimate TinyMCE – I’ve used TinyMCE Advanced for years but have just moved over to this plug that unlocks more advanced functionally in the TinyMCE text editor.  You can’t go wrong with either plugin.
• WordPress Database Backup – Install this sucker and schedule it to backup and email your WordPress database on a weekly basis.  Not backing up your site is just stupid.
• WP-Optimize – Not as necessary if you have Database Backup installed because you can optimize your database from that plugin but this plugin does make it extremely easy to blog away all the versions of articles which can load up your database.
• WP Smush.it – Another plugin about optimization.  Reduces image size leveraging Yahoo!’s Smush.it technology.
• WP Super Cache – W3 Total Cache has been getting a lot of love on the cache scene but unless you have special hardware and are truly an advanced user Super Cache should work just fine for you.  Once again it’s a speed thing.
• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – Internal linking is huge and this is my favorite “related links” plugin for a blog.

What plugins do you like?

What do you think of the new template?

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View the Facebook picture page for yourself.

In the James family we start teaching them at a young age to become a Braves Fan.

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Check out The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

The power of the innovator’s dilemma revolves around the problems that sometimes occur when perfectly smart and able businesses making rational decisions in the pursuit of future growth and profits.  Sometimes this same rational and the right sort of innovation comes along which ultimately undercuts them and lets a smaller, agile company come in and eat their lunch.  It is what Wal-Mart did to Sears and is what the Dollar Stores (Family Dollar, Dollar General, Freds, etc) are doing to Wal-Mart today.  Companies continue to chase higher profits and more revenue and to do this they must go upstream into more lucrative markets.  By shifting focus they become vulnerable from this same bottom markets that got them started.

Although much of what he was sharing is very relevant to someone who is looking to create a business, it also is very powerful ideas for any investor to understand too.  From an investors standpoint the fundamental truth that he shared is that “when you purchase a stock you are buying based on the future value of the company based on all available information”.  This absolutely explains why a company like Netflix is priced at the same level of a company much larger than it is because people see it with excellent future growth.  The growth possibilities of Netflix are already built into the price and result in incredibly high stock price to actual earnings evaluations.

The innovator’s dilemma teaches you to look for innovations that completely change the playing field and to look at why the strong companies in the previous generation won’t make the leap.  It is exactly why Blockbuster is in the process of going belly up as Netflix sees great user growth.  The movie rental industry went through a fundamental shift in the way consumers rented movies.  It was a way that Blockbuster couldn’t easily “innovate” into from their traditional model.

Needless to say after Clay’s talk I downloaded his book that night on my Kindle and read through it pretty quickly.  I’m behind on book reviews of some of the excellent books I’ve read over the last six months and this was definitely one of them.  I also noticed after reading this book how many times I noticed references to it pop up in other locations like other books including Steve Jobs biography and Marc Benioff’s Behind the Cloud.

If you are an entrepreneur, investor or otherwise deeply interested in understanding why some great businesses fail then this is a MUST read.  The concepts aren’t really completely surprising once you learn the fundamentals why but it’s one of those moments where the light bulb will go off and it changes the way that you look at everything else.

Book Highlights

Below are my Kindle highlights if you want to get my main nuggets without reading the whole book:

One theme common to all of these failures, however, is that the decisions that led to failure were made when the leaders in question were widely regarded as among the best companies in the world.

The research reported in this book supports this latter view: It shows that in the cases of well-managed firms such as those cited above, good management was the most powerful reason they failed to stay atop their industries. Precisely because these firms listened to their customers, invested aggressively in new technologies that would provide their customers more and better products of the sort they wanted, and because they carefully studied market trends and systematically allocated investment capital to innovations that promised the best returns, they lost their positions of leadership.

There are times at which it is right not to listen to customers, right to invest in developing lower-performance products that promise lower margins, and right to aggressively pursue small, rather than substantial, markets.

Occasionally, however, disruptive technologies emerge: innovations that result in worse product performance, at least in the near-term. Ironically, in each of the instances studied in this book, it was disruptive technology that precipitated the leading firms’ failure.

Generally, disruptive technologies underperform established products in mainstream markets. But they have other features that a few fringe (and generally new) customers value. Products based on disruptive technologies are typically cheaper, simpler, smaller, and, frequently, more convenient to use.

the observation that technologies can progress faster than market demand, illustrated in Figure I.1, means that in their efforts to provide better products than their competitors and earn higher prices and margins, suppliers often “overshoot” their market: They give customers more than they need or ultimately are willing to pay for. And more importantly, it means that disruptive technologies that may underperform today, relative to what users in the market demand, may be fully performance-competitive in that same market tomorrow.

the conclusion by established companies that investing aggressively in disruptive technologies is not a rational financial decision for them to make, has three bases. First, disruptive products are simpler and cheaper; they generally promise lower margins, not greater profits. Second, disruptive technologies typically are first commercialized in emerging or insignificant markets. And third, leading firms’ most profitable customers generally don’t want, and indeed initially can’t use, products based on disruptive technologies. By and large, a disruptive technology is initially embraced by the least profitable customers in a market. Hence, most companies with a practiced discipline of listening to their best customers and identifying new products that promise greater profitability and growth are rarely able to build a case for investing in disruptive technologies until it is too late.

the only instances in which mainstream firms have successfully established a timely position in a disruptive technology were those in which the firms’ managers set up an autonomous organization charged with building a new and independent business around the disruptive technology.

Creating an independent organization, with a cost structure honed to achieve profitability at the low margins characteristic of most disruptive technologies, is the only viable way for established firms to harness this principle.

It is in disruptive innovations, where we know least about the market, that there are such strong first-mover advantages. This is the innovator’s dilemma.

When the performance of two or more competing products has improved beyond what the market demands, customers can no longer base their choice upon which is the higher performing product. The basis of product choice often evolves from functionality to reliability, then to convenience, and, ultimately, to price.

This is one of the innovator’s dilemmas: Blindly following the maxim that good managers should keep close to their customers can sometimes be a fatal mistake.

The fear of cannibalizing sales of existing products is often cited as a reason why established firms delay the introduction of new technologies. As the Seagate-Conner experience illustrates, however, if new technologies enable new market applications to emerge, the introduction of new technology may not be inherently cannibalistic. But when established firms wait until a new technology has become commercially mature in its new applications and launch their own version of the technology only in response to an attack on their home markets, the fear of cannibalization can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The popular slogan “stay close to your customers” appears not always to be robust advice. One instead might expect customers to lead their suppliers toward sustaining innovations and to provide no leadership—or even to explicitly mislead—in instances of disruptive technology change.

In the tug-of-war for development resources, projects targeted at the explicit needs of current customers or at the needs of existing users that a supplier has not yet been able to reach will always win over proposals to develop products for markets that do not exist. This is because, in fact, the best resource allocation systems are designed precisely to weed out ideas that are unlikely to find large, profitable, receptive markets. Any company that doesn’t have a systematic way of targeting its development resources toward customers’ needs, in fact, will fail.

Research has shown, in fact, that the vast majority of successful new business ventures abandoned their original business strategies when they began implementing their initial plans and learned what would and would not work in the market. The dominant difference between successful ventures and failed ones, generally, is not the astuteness of their original strategy. Guessing the right strategy at the outset isn’t nearly as important to success as conserving enough resources (or having the relationships with trusting backers or investors) so that new business initiatives get a second or third stab at getting it right.

Because a company’s stock price represents the discounted present value of its projected earnings stream, most managers typically feel compelled not just to maintain growth, but to maintain a constant rate of growth.

One of the bittersweet rewards of success is, in fact, that as companies become large, they literally lose the capability to enter small emerging markets. This disability is not because of a change in the resources within the companies—their resources typically are vast. Rather, it is because their values change.

When are spin-outs a crucial step in building new capabilities to exploit change, and what are the guidelines by which they should be managed? A separate organization is required when the mainstream organization’s values would render it incapable of focusing resources on the innovation project. Large organizations cannot be expected to allocate freely the critical financial and human resources needed to build a strong position in small, emerging markets. And it is very difficult for a company whose cost structure is tailored to compete in high-end markets to be profitable in low-end markets as well. When a threatening disruptive technology requires a different cost structure in order to be profitable and competitive, or when the current size of the opportunity is insignificant relative to the growth needs of the mainstream organization, then—and only then—is a spin-out organization a required part of the solution.

When performance oversupply has occurred and a disruptive technology attacks the underbelly of a mainstream market, the disruptive technology often succeeds both because it satisfies the market’s need for functionality, in terms of the buying hierarchy, and because it is simpler, cheaper, and more reliable and convenient than mainstream products.

Each of the disruptive technologies studied in this book has been smaller, simpler, and more convenient than preceding products. Each was initially used in a new value network in which simplicity and convenience were valued. This was true for smaller, simpler disk drives; desktop and portable computers; hydraulic backhoes; steel minimills as opposed to integrated mills; insulin-injecting pens as opposed to syringes.

We have learned in this book that in their straightforward search for profit and growth, some very capable executives in some extraordinarily successful companies, using the best managerial techniques, have led their firms toward failure. Yet companies must not throw out the capabilities, organizational structures, and decision-making processes that have made them successful in their mainstream markets just because they don’t work in the face of disruptive technological change. The vast majority of the innovation challenges they will face are sustaining in character, and these are just the sorts of innovations that these capabilities are designed to tackle. Managers of these companies simply need to recognize that these capabilities, cultures, and practices are valuable only in certain conditions.

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If you are interested in listening to the episode here is the embed.

I can’t help but get fired up and passionate about this stuff still!  Although my focus is on making the best interactive campus mapping platform I still want to spread the news of inbound marketing.  Also any extra exposure I can do for nuCloud and .eduGuru has to be a good thing right?

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Anyway with some extra money in savings and some bonus money that I acquired last year I wanted to do something besides letting it sit in a savings account making minimal interest.  Well I haven’t had a lot of luck with the market in my various plays over the years but then again I never really had a truly solid investing strategy.  All that has changed over the past year.  There was a time when I was a rookie inbound marketer.  Through a voracious appetite for knowledge and lots of evenings of reading I was able to get to the top of the game.  Why couldn’t I do the same with stock investing?  An a new obsession for knowledge began.

By no means have I become an investment guru, yet, but I definitely have created some very clear thoughts about investing.  I have been reading some incredible books recently that I’ll have to start sharing some of the book reviews in the near future.  I’ve also renewed my deep devotion to sites like The Motley Fool and Seeking Alpha.  I’ll toss out one additional site that I love to read daily, Stock Gumshoe.  I never invest in Travis’ daily teased stocks, ok I did once and I’m still in the green on it, but I find his dissection and explanation of companies and industries fascination and insightful.

Kyle’s Stock Investment Ten Pillars

So let me toss out the Ten Pillars of my stock philosophy:

1. Never invest in a stock that you wouldn’t want to hold forever.  You own a part of the company so you should act like it.  So maybe forever is too long but you have to be thinking long term.  5+ years minimum.  Remember you NEVER want to pay short term capital gains.
2. Look for companies that are creating disruptive innovation.  More on this this in a later post.
3. Don’t hold more stocks than you can keep up with.  Seriously a dozen is about all anyone could hope to watch closely.  The rest is what retirement mutual funds are for.
4. Watch and find the right time to buy.  I easily have three times as many stocks that I watch as I own.
5. Don’t buy what you don’t know.  If you don’t deeply know biotech then stay away.
6. Learn from your mistakes.  You know the rule… Fool me once, shame on you!  Fool me twice, shame on me!  As a true fool investor I’ve been taking this one to heart.
7. Dividends are good.  Especially in a market like the flat one we have been in for the last decade.  If a stock has a dividend then it has much less risk and not going to belly up on you.  Of course it also means that you aren’t in a super-fast growing company that will probably double in a year.  It’s ok to take some risk but you will sleep much better knowing that your money won’t disappear overnight.
8. It takes money to make money.  A 10% gain is still a 10% gain but if you are talking about a $1,000 investment vs a $10,000 investment well it is significantly more money that you gained.
9. If it sounds too good to be true then it probably is.  Seriously don’t make that stupid mistake.  Stay away from OTC and Pink Sheets.
10. Investing is a marathon not a sprint.  This isn’t a get rich quick game.  If you try to play it that way then you will most likely lose it all.  Remember rule #1.  We want to hold this company basically forever.

Closing

So what do you think of my philosophy?  The beauty of investing is everyone can do it differently.  I’ve tried lots of different approaches and these rules feel right for me.  It’s also been working pretty well over the last night months.  As of this writing my portfolio is in the green.

I’ve also discovered that checking out the financial section of the web on a regular basis has helped me build a better understanding of the macro level of the world.  This is especially true for the companies that I’m investing in and their industries.  It’s probably pretty good knowledge for a CEO to have I think.

Are you guys interested in me writing more about investing and stocks?  Would people find it interesting for me to talk about what I’m investing in and why?  I guess it’s my blog so I can write about whatever I want but because this is a little bit different topic than I usually talk about I’m curious if you are as fascinated with it as I have become?

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One of the reasons for my lack of blogging was I spent the last five months at HubSpot learning sales.  I say learning sales instead of “doing” sales because it was absolutely a learning experience for me.  The psychology of sales is something that everyone should learn.  Sales is one of those skills, like customer service and people management, that are invaluable no matter what profession you are in.  Sales is also an all-consuming beast that has kept me so focused on it that I haven’t been a good blogger, fiance, son, or friend.

Most of you might not even know that I quit HubSpot about a month ago or that I moved back to South Carolina.  That’s right, I’m no longer a HubSpotter, just a shareholder, but I’m now the full time CEO at nuCloud.  I haven’t been the typical extremely open and transparent Kyle because I wanted to enjoy the holiday break and it is simply taking me a little time to ramp back up again.

So let me tell you the story.

The Lessons Learned and Advice to Other Entrepreneurs

As far back as high school, I knew that one day I wanted to be my own boss and run my own business.  Where some people say they want to be a doctor, a lawyer or whatever else I wanted to be a business owner.  The challenge is getting to the point where you are comfortable enough to take the risk of doing your own thing.

I believe it is something like 75% of restaurants fail in their first year.  That is only one type of business and one you would think the model is fairly straightforward to get right.  It still fails at an incredibly high rate though.  What I’ve learned about business owners and entrepreneurs in general is that they aren’t necessarily smarter or wiser than other people.  They simply have more balls and are not afraid to take a risk.  No matter how you cut it, attempting to forge a new business is a leap of faith.  The reason that certain people attempt it in the first place is because the reward for getting it right can be pretty huge!

Way back in 2008 when I first started nuCloud I remember asking myself if I was ready to try and start a software company.  nuCloud has been a “nights and weekends” passion for over three years now as we have slowly and safely been building the business.  The big debate when I took the job in Boston to go work for HubSpot was “Do I know enough to run my own business, or is there a lot that I need to learn by working at and growing another company first?”

Looking back, moving to Boston and spending the last three years at HubSpot was definitely the right decision.  You don’t know what you don’t know until you have lived through learning it.  When I first started working at HubSpot remotely there were maybe 30 employees and when I moved up in January 2009 there were about 50 people.  By the time I left last month there were over 300 employees.  It was crazy growth and a real experience watching from the inside as the company scaled and tried to keep everything moving forward.  I was given amazing opportunities to learn in my time there.  My jobs included consulting, management, product and sales.  I was definitely better at some than others but to be a CEO/business owner you are one of the few people who needs to be a jack of all trades.  The more you fundamentally understand the various roles people at your company will do the better you will be able to support them and manage them properly.  For this reason I really believe the idea behind the show Undercover Boss is brilliant!

My words of wisdom to anyone else thinking about starting their own business.

• Always be learning
• Be fearless and not afraid of failure or you will never make the jump and always wonder what if
• Be willing to put yourself in an awkward position if you think there is something to learn from it
• Build an incredible network of friends and family for support

When To Move, Not If To Move Back

By the beginning of December I was to the point where I felt like I had learned a good bit about sales but will be the first to admit that I wasn’t a great salesperson yet.  The truth is I also learned that my integrity would never have allowed me to be an A+ sales person because there were certain steps my code of ethics will never allow me to take.  No matter how you look at it sales is a dirty business, and you have to be willing to do certain things and sleep with those actions to truly be an overachiever.  The crazy, for better or worse, thing about it is that the world doesn’t move without sales.

I had learned everything that I felt I needed to learn from HubSpot.  Heather and I are getting married at the end of April so that is just around the corner and we will want to be closer to family.  My nephew is two years old and beginning to speak and I want to be a part of his life.   My father’s brain cancer won’t get any better and every day I’m away is another day that I’ll regret one day if I’m not there.  My best friend Skip is 14, which is old for a dog, and I don’t want him to have to endure another Boston winter.  nuCloud actually had quite a good 2011 and my brother had been working full time on it for five months already.  Deep down inside I’m a country boy who would much rather run around in the woods than tour a big city.  There were so many compelling reasons to go home that it was always a question of when not if.

I asked Heather in early December, “What are we waiting for”?  The decision came pretty quickly for the two of us at that point.

The Big Move

December 16^th was my last day at HubSpot and on January 4^th we got into the car and moved.  It was the end of an adventure.  Everyone should move far away from home at some point in their life for the experience.  For us three years was enough.

I can’t even tell you how exciting it is to finally be doing my dream job.  It has taken a lot of work and more learning than you can imaginge to get to this point.  Although I’ve been on this path for over a decade I’ve really just begun the journey.  In the beginning I had no idea what the business would do and the amazing idea for nuCloud kind of fell into our laps.  You have to be ready to go on the journey if you want to see where it leads though.

nuCloud has the typical startup/small business problems, but they are all problems that I’m ready to handle.  They are also all MY problems and for a problem solver like myself I wouldn’t want it any other way.  The nuCloud corporate office is setup in my brother’s basement on a couple of folding tables and I love every minute of it!

Who needs an interactive campus map for their website!?  I know this great company that will get you setup with one and really take care of you for a great deal!

Image Credit: Sunrise by CoreBurn

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Here is a story of a young man who’s life couldn’t look much brighter and then he is thrown into war.  As a POW to the Japanese everything is stripped from him but he survives years of this to come back and live a life of meaning and happiness again.  I think there are lessons in this book that we could all learn.  When times get hard, and it’s hard to think of anything more difficult to survive than what Louie did, there is hope on the other end.

Of the 1,487 customer reviews on Amazon 87% are five stars!  I don’t think I’ve seen a book with that many reviews?  I can’t recommend this amazing story enough.

If you are curious about a little more information check out this short video trailer for the book.  You just have to feel that it is only a matter of time before this story is turned into a movie.

As I’ve done in recent reviews here are my Kindle highlights for a couple of really catching passes.

In the 1930s, America was infatuated with the pseudoscience of eugenics and its promise of strengthening the human race by culling the “unfit” from the genetic pool.

He didn’t run from something or to something, not for anyone or in spite of anyone; he ran because it was what his body wished to do. The restiveness, the self-consciousness, and the need to oppose disappeared. All he felt was peace.

Louie wins the 1933 UCLA Cross Country two-mile race by more than a quarter of a mile.

Louie’s supreme high school moment came in the 1934 Southern California Track and Field Championship. Running in what was celebrated as the best field of high school milers in history, Louie routed them all and smoked the mile in 4:21.3, shattering the national high school record, set during World War I, by more than two seconds.

A lifetime of glory is worth a moment of pain. Louie thought: Let go.

In 1935, when Cunningham’s record of 4:06.7 reigned, science weighed in. Studying data on human structural limits compiled by Finnish mathematicians, famed track coach Brutus Hamilton penned an article for Amateur Athlete magazine stating that a four-minute mile was impossible. The fastest a human could run a mile, he wrote, was 4:01.6.

In World War II, 35,933 AAF planes were lost in combat and accidents. The surprise of the attrition rate is that only a fraction of the ill-fated planes were lost in combat. In 1943 in the Pacific Ocean Areas theater in which Phil’s crew served, for every plane lost in combat, some six planes were lost in accidents. Over time, combat took a greater toll, but combat losses never overtook noncombat losses.

Everyone had heard stories like Reading’s, and everyone had looked from their planes to see sharks roaming below. The fear of sharks was so powerful that most men, faced with the choice of riding a crippled plane to a ditching or bailing out, chose to take their chances in a ditching, even in the B-24. At least that would leave them near the rafts.

Historians estimate that the Japanese military murdered between 200,000 and 430,000 Chinese, including the 90,000 POWs, in what became known as the Rape of Nanking.

Without dignity, identity is erased. In its absence, men are defined not by themselves, but by their captors and the circumstances in which they are forced to live. One American airman, shot down and relentlessly debased by his Japanese captors, described the state of mind that his captivity created: “I was literally becoming a lesser human being.”

Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man’s soul in his body long past the point at which the body should have surrendered it. The loss of it can carry a man off as surely as thirst, hunger, exposure, and asphyxiation, and with greater cruelty.

In Japan’s militaristic society, all citizens, from earliest childhood, were relentlessly indoctrinated with the lesson that to be captured in war was intolerably shameful. The 1941 Japanese Military Field Code made clear what was expected of those facing capture: “Have regard for your family first. Rather than live and bear the shame of imprisonment, the soldier must die and avoid leaving a dishonorable name.” As a result, in many hopeless battles, virtually every Japanese soldier fought to the death. For every Allied soldier killed, four were captured; for every 120 Japanese soldiers killed, one was captured. In some losing battles, Japanese soldiers committed suicide en masse to avoid capture.

in many hopeless battles, virtually every Japanese soldier fought to the death. For every Allied soldier killed, four were captured; for every 120 Japanese soldiers killed, one was captured.

“If I knew I had to go through those experiences again,” he finally said, “I’d kill myself.”

Two hundred and twenty-five men from the 11th had gone missing and were presumed dead, including twenty-six from Louie’s 42nd squadron. Many more had been killed in action. Of the sixteen rowdy young officers who had shared the pornographic palace on Oahu, only four—Louie, Phil, Jesse Stay, and Joe Deasy—were still alive.

“From now on,” she said, “September 9 is going to be Mother’s Day to me, because that’s the day I learned for sure my boy was coming home to stay.”

The paradox of vengefulness is that it makes men dependent upon those who have harmed them, believing that their release from pain will come only when they make their tormentors suffer.

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One of Dave’s sayings is, “If you can catch three fish in a day then it was a GREAT day!”.  Combined that is exactly how many fish we caught although we did hook more than twice that many other fish that got away.

I really do miss just getting away and going camping and spending time out in nature.  It’s something that has been hard to give up by living in the middle of a city.  It’s also something that I look forward to getting to do a lot more of one day.

I decided that I was going to bring two of the trout back and give it a shot to cook them up.  If you plan on filleting a fish like a trout you better have a great filleting knife as I learned.  Even the high quality Cutco kitchen knifes that I own suck at this task.

It took at least an hour filleting the two fish, yeah I know way to long but I blame it on not having the right knife for the job.  Afterwards I sprayed a pyrex cooking pan with vegetable oil, covered the fish with thyme, oregano and some olive oil.  Then cooked the fish at 350 degrees for 25 minutes.  That was it and everything actually came out really tasty.  Even Skip enjoyed a couple of bites.

All in all I think I would definitely go fly fishing again.  Just getting out in nature and enjoying a day on the river makes it all worthwhile.  Actually catching a couple fish to bring home and bake makes all the better!

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Instead of reading the whole book here are 18 quotes from the book that really stood out in my mind.

The story of this increase—just a few centuries old—is one of technology and power, of politics, grievances, and class: the wealthy and powerful have always been the first to acquire new kinds of light and have always had more of it than others. But the story of light is also one of constancy and mystery, of beauty, brilliance, and shadows, and it includes those who continue to use the same types of light now as in centuries past.

LIGHT—SO PRECIOUS WITHIN—was even rarer on the streets of the cities, towns, and villages of the past, for before the seventeenth century, street lighting was almost nonexistent everywhere in the world.

The eye functions differently at night than during the day. In the dark, people see with their retinal rods rather than their retinal cones, and complete adaptation to night vision takes a full hour. Even then, human sight is much less acute at night, and the eye can’t distinguish color.

The privileged and wealthy, who had always been profligate with light—the more their parties and dances were brilliantly illuminated, the greater seemed their position and power—now habitually rose late in the day, so that rising late, too, became a mark of prestige.

Any mariner of the eighteenth century would have found it impossible to comprehend that one day a marker on the Eddystone reef would emit a light equivalent to 570,000 candles, or that such a light would not be essential to seeing a ship safely past the rocks; that there would come a time when navigators hardly needed to scan the horizon, for they would get their bearings from a prism of information—radar, GPS, and electronic charts. Data would become the new

Indeed, the ritual of spring-cleaning was largely a response to a winter’s worth of soot from hearths and lamps.

Machines are most economical when they run all the time, and electric lights proved so efficient that their use extended the workday, which had been gradually losing its dependence on natural daylight since the introduction of the mechanical clock in the sixteenth century. Edison’s success helped to fully establish the three-shift day and the final erasure of natural time in the factory.

The attempt to subdivide electric light may have continued for almost a century and have involved dozens of experimenters and electricians, but Americans would always think of Edison as the sole inventor of the electric light, and he would always hold a particular and sentimental place in the popular imagination, as was clear during the opening ceremonies of the Electricity Building.

One moment our world was dark, and the next brilliant. That almost no one understood how this was accomplished, and that this light, unrelated to the eons of tallow and coal; this light, requiring nothing of us—no fussing over a flame or wick, no worry over the quality of the oil; this light, with its own particular trajectory tied to the precision of the industrial age—timed and tuned, and pitched and keyed, all rhythm and exactitude; this light, conjured by wizards—as both Edison and Tesla with their varying temperaments were called; this light, with its constancy and brilliance, was nothing if not the evidence of things unseen. What it did require, of course, was that we go forward on trust. What culminated at Niagara was only the beginning: the electric grid would come to be considered the greatest technical accomplishment of the twentieth century. New wizards would detach us even more from the things of this earth, and we would need to trust also that our data, words, and life’s work would not in an instant disappear from before our eyes. H. G. Wells understood that something fundamental had shifted as he stood looking at the falls in 1906. Not only had the spiritual been fused to the industrial, but it also seemed that some glory had been taken away from Nature herself.

Elsewhere he wrote, “The Eskimo have no phrase expressing a greater degree of misery than ‘a woman without a lamp.’ After the death of a woman her lamp is placed upon her grave.”

THIS MUCH HAS ALWAYS been true: electricity can’t be stored. It must be generated as needed and consumed within moments of its generation. The supply must continually adjust itself to fluctuating demand, and a power plant must have sufficient capacity to meet all its customers’ needs at any given moment of the day. Maintaining this balance was especially fraught during the first tenuous decades of electrical expansion.

Electric light was now but one of many things that made life easier and also seemed to define what it meant to be modern.

When gaslight and kerosene lamps disappeared, so did the last vestige of a central fire in the home. Electric light was everywhere, yet concentrated nowhere; everyone sat in the halo of his or her own lamp.

At the same time, rural men and women stood bewildered before the one bare bulb hanging from their kitchen ceilings. Some screwed corncobs into light sockets to keep “the juice” from leaking out, or they would not let go of the chain pull, believing that once they released it, the light would go out.

Electricity meant that the children of farmers would be different people. Not only would they do better in school once they began studying by electric light, but it would carry them into a different world: “To a farm girl who has been brought up with many electrical conveniences it is like listening to a fairy tale to be told that once rural homes did not have electricity.”

Additionally, in modern industrial societies, humans tend to give themselves little time to wind down in darkness and quiet before attempting to go to sleep. And they no l onger vary their sleep according to seasonal changes in the length of days and nights, although even now the human biological clock still shifts according to the season and the amount of sunlight in a day.

Also, all the stars in light-polluted skies are less apparent than they were to our ancestors because the lights we live by are often so bright they suppress the rod system of the human eye: “About one-tenth of the World population, more than 40 percent of the United States population and one sixth of the European Union population no longer view the heavens with the eye adapted to night vision, because of the sky brightness.”

One of the first things we ask of light is that it grant us some assurance in the dark. Except during the threat of aerial bombardment or under the glare of interrogation, it has almost always made us feel safer. But whether or not it truly ensures our safety is an open question, one that has been argued since the seventeenth century, when a few European cities expressly forbade streetlights for fear that they encouraged footpads and drunks, even as other cities were installing them in hopes of bringing order to the night.

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