Rarely am I entertained and engrossed by a self-help book, but this one was so good I read it in one sitting. I then gave it to my husband, who quickly gobbled it down. Why is it so different from others? Well, the authors are honest and funny — and they don’t repeat silly truisms ad nauseam.
The Rules Book is 44 pithy chapters on how we can view life through unwritten rules. They clearly state that these rules have been around for ages, and that they merely collected, explained, categorised, and visualised (there are some clever drawings) them.
Examples include the Ketchup Effect: nothing happens, and then everything happens all at once. Yup, been through that just this week. Then there’s Goodhart’s Law: metrics are not the same as goals. The idea became known as Goodhart’s Law, named after the British economist Charles Goodhart who originally used it to critique a British prime minister’s economic policies.
The authors also reference a time during the British Raj when there was a cobra plague in Delhi and the government announced it would pay a bounty for every dead cobra. They write: “At first, it looked like the scheme would succeed, because there was a sharp spike in the number of dead cobras dropped off at the bounty office. As it turns out, though, enterprising members of the population had begun breeding cobras only to kill them and collect the bounty.” They end off the chapter with: “When the metric becomes the goal, we often strive to achieve it at any cost, without realising that we might end up missing — or worse, endangering — the real goal.”
