Your post has helped me make some of these decisions.

On the related topic you brought up about Serial Enthusiast, this is an interesting one I’d like to explore more. The last two years of my life have been spent studying/analyzing the things people are passionate about, and in my talks I always ask the audience to tell the people sitting near them one thing they’re passionate about. Aftwards, I always get a lot of people telling me how their passions have changed, and for many–how *frequently* they’ve changed.

You defined some good reasons for this… I could not agree more about the moving thing. By design, I have refused to live anywhere longer than 5 or 6 years. After that, I find myself becoming too comfortable, and I’m somewhat addicted to the thrill of starting from scratch in a completely new place, where everything from finding the best latte to picking a car mechanic is an adventure.

One reason why people lose/change passions is because they simply ran out of new challenges for that [whatever it is] OR because the amount of effort required to meet the next challenge would be too great, or not worth it. For so many things, the passion and expertise curve is almost exponential… take chess or rock climbing, for example–where each new “level” requires a near-doubling of the effort it took to reach the previous level. For a lot of things people are passionate about, there is novelty in attaining the next “level”, but once you hit the real (or motivational) wall to progress further, and you’re not really going anywhere else with it, then it’s time for a change.

I guess it mostly comes down to how much we value having the next level of expertise in this thing (if there even IS one), and whether it’s worth it (and a lot depends on our own ability to be patient). If not, then the novelty (dopamine) ceases for that thing.

Oops sorry to have left this long-ass comment–especially when part of your post was about honing things down… : )

Congratulations on your wedding and have a great honeymoon!

And it’s true we’re not all the same kind of learners. I like to grasp things quickly and move on; other people might like to linger longer. We need more flexible information sources to meet different people’s needs.

At least, I’d like to think so, and would like to do so.

Maybe readers are like that. One, just a pragmatic interest in the basics of a subject. Others readers want to dig deep and understand the details.

Neither one of them wants needless verbiage, self-indulgent or otherwise. But both have a kind of interest that causes them to respond to one kind of book/booklet over another. We’re not all the same kind of learners.

And I doubt this is consistent or uniform in any one person from subject to subject.

Good posting and thanks for enlarging my thoughts and extending the conversation!

I hadn’t seen NXTbook Media before… interesting. I wonder, however, whether such products are even needed. With PDFs, everyone can publish themselves in a portable format. However, PDFs aren’t optimized for work with digital book readers and there are other things you could do with something richer, like the Flash technology that NXTbooks are apparently based on.

And thanks for your comment! Perhaps you’ll be tracking this somehow, based on your recent blog post covering various ways of monitoring responses to comments you’ve made. I personally haven’t done a very good job of keeping track of comments I make on other sites.

Have you see NXTbook Media? That could be another solution.

Thanks for your insight.