Phyl Terry: recommendation

Transcript context

…Do you have a favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love, whether it's like a digital app? I'm going to give you a very different kind of answer than I would normally give, but I'm hoping you and your community will appreciate this. So I did recently discover it, but I'm going to talk about a book, Lenny. So 25 years ago, a guy named Robert Strassler, who was a business guy, he started teaching at a special high school for kids who were dropping out. And he was teaching them some of the classics like Herodotus and Thucydides, expert, and they couldn't get it. And the books were terrible because there was no context, so he spent 10 years and he reinvented the format of a history book. There are 120 maps. Each of them he drew specifically, and they're only relevant to the previous one or two pages. Okay? There's a margin summary in plain English for each paragraph describing what that paragraph just said. He got the top scholars in the world to write two-page appendices on their expert topic, things they've written hundreds of books about, hundreds of pages about, you have to do it in two pages. And by the way, the publishing world wouldn't back it. He funded it himself. He hand drew the maps. He spent two years creating a concept index, not just a keyword index. And it's just blown apart the whole industry. Completely disrupted. He sold hundreds of thousands of copies of these books. They are a masterpiece, Lenny. They have Landmark Series. Landmark. They have new ones coming out. Every product person, in my opinion, should go look at this and look at the product design of this book. It is masterful and it teaches you a lot about usability and the reader experience. I want product people, Lenny, to get out, who are doing digital work to get out of the digital world and look at products outside the digital world for inspiration and thinking, because I don't want you all looking at the same stuff. You're going to just create the same stuff. I love tools like Calendly, which I just didn't... I've been using for years, but no one could get it right until they got it right. Those are great. How's that for an answer? That's incredible. So what is it called again and where do you find it?…

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