Book Review: The Icarus Deception by Seth Godin & Make Good Art by Neil Gaiman

This type of book thrives by stating the obvious emphatically.  Advice tomes, self-help manuals, life & business inspiration.  Have a taste, and see if you can guess which quotes are from Seth Godin ("one of the most popular business bloggers in the world") and which are from Neil Gaiman ("one of the creators of modern comics").

1. "If you don't know it's impossible, it's easier to do."
2. "An artist is someone who uses bravery, insight, creativity, and boldness to challenge the status quo."
3. "Something that worked for me was imagining that where I wanted to be ... was a mountain.  A distant mountain.  My goal."
4. "When you speak your truth, you have opened a door, allowing others to speak to you, directly to you, to your true self."
5. "Life is sometimes hard.  Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong."
6. "Art has no right answer.  The best we can hope for is an interesting answer."
7. "So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can."
8. "Artists fail, and failing means that sometimes you need to change your mind about what you thought the best path might be."

The odd numbered ones are from Gaiman; the even from Godin.  But they all sound like they came from the same barrel of platitudes, from the shelves of AphorismMart.  They're all true and yet like keys you find on the street - they don't open any doors you have to open.  I like that metaphor: these self-evident truths are someone else's keys that don't work on your locks.

And yet I just read - eagerly - both of these works, and paid close attention, searching for ways to move closer to my distant mountains.  I suppose there is something of a useful thrill, then, in finding someone's keys on the street, knowing that they open some door somewhere, taking hope that your keys must also be somewhere around here.