Book review: The Misfit Economy

I just finished reading The Misfit Economy, by Alexa Clay and Kyra Maya Phillips. The subtitle is "lessons in creativity from pirates, hackers, gangsters, and other informal entrepreneurs". Clay and Phillips define a misfit as "a person whose behavior or attitude sets them apart from others in an uncomfortably conspicuous way", and the book is essentially a collection of 30 or so case studies, ranging from camel milking in the US, to Somali pirates.

Unsurprisingly, the motivations for being a misfit include reputation and esteem, and/or financial gain. Clay and Phillips use their case studies to illustrate five principles they argue are ways of "unleashing your inner misfit":

1. Hustle (a determination to take your destiny in your own hands, and an ingenuity that allows you to make something out of nothing);
2. Copy (bring about incremental improvements and allow products and functions to evolve);
3. Hack (follow the hacker imperative: the driving need to understand how systems work and then put them back together in enhanced forms);
4. Provoke (step out of reality, imagine something different, and get others to wake up to different possibilities); and
5. Pivot (enact a dramatic change in the course of your life to pursue greater fulfillment and inspiration).

Overall, I found the book to be well written and a good read. However, I didn't really feel like the narrative cohered too well. Some of the case studies were better than others at fitting the principles that Clay and Phillips were trying to illustrate, and the distinction between the different principles is not always clear (copying and hacking are closely related, as are hustling and pivoting). The case study approach makes the book easy to read, but it results in a fairly shallow treatment. It definitely falls short of offering "lessons in creativity", other than the authors' assertion that these five key principles exist.

Some readers might find the stories inspiring, and may indeed unleash their 'inner misfit' after reading. For me, I just found it a collection of interesting stories.