➻ Peter Buffet—musician, son of Warren and author of Life Is What You Make It: Find Your Own Path to Fulfillment*—will not be attempting to succeed his father as the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. The reason why can probably be deduced from the title of his book, but he went into more detail, talking about Growing Up Buffett in today’s Freakonomics podcast with Stephen Dubner. Discussing his degree of interest in the company growing up, he says:

Well, you know, growing up we really didn’t know what my dad did. It was quite mysterious. He read a lot, which he still does. And I will say if you walk in the house today you will see the same thing that I saw in 1965. He’s just this consistent human being in spades. It was incredible. But we didn’t know what he did. In fact, when my sister filled out a form, I think in fourth or fifth grade, about what our parents did, she put “security analysis,” and it was assumed that what he did was check alarm systems.

He also explains why he is living proof that investing in yourself and growing your own life is much more important and satisfying than having a pile of money that belongs to someone else’s success. And, though he didn’t follow in his father’s career path, Peter Buffett is a philanthropist like his father, which brings us to our next link.

*If you’re interested in learning more about the book, Jon wrote a short review and discussed what it was like having Peter as a client when he worked for a digital media company on this blog last April.

➻ The Economist reviewed three books this week about Giving For Results. One of them is Do More Than Give, which is the follow up to a book we greatly admired when it was released in 2007—Forces For Good. The review begins by taking a look at the state of philanthropy in America.

Whether America’s famed philanthropic tradition is all it is cracked up to be will become much clearer during the next few years. Superficially, that tradition has emerged from the global financial crisis in remarkably good shape. In the past year some 69 of America’s billionaires and billionaire families have promised to give away at least half of their fortunes by signing the Giving Pledge championed by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, two of the world’s richest men. Among them is 27-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, a founder of Facebook, proof that America’s giving gene has passed to the next generation.

The question is, will all that giving, by the billionaires and the thousands more Americans with far smaller amounts of money, actually do any good? There is rather a depressing history of well-intentioned donations often doing nothing to alleviate society’s problems, and sometimes even making matters worse. As Mr. Buffett has said many times, “making money is far easier than giving it away effectively.”

Looking at how Do More Than Give addresses this issue, the review states:

Of the six practices of effective philanthropists described in “>Do More Than Give, two stand out as being unusual. To achieve real change—what the authors, Leslie Crutchfield, John Kania and Mark Kramer, call “catalytic philanthropy”—the best course may be to engage in political advocacy to change government policy, they argue. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is doing this a lot more than most, on issues ranging from education reform to international aid. But the advice also works at a local level, as the book illustrates through the story of how the Tow Foundation improved juvenile justice policy in Connecticut. Their second sound piece of advice is that philanthropists should work together more often. This seems obvious, but as the authors rightly ask, “Why don’t more foundations actively collaborate with their peers?”

We brought Leslie Crutchfield to Milwaukee a few years ago to speak to local non-profits. You can find video of that event on our YouTube page, or read the Jack Covert Selects review of her first book if you’re interested in learning more.

➻ Named after Edison’s idea that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, the third annual 99% Conference was held last week in New York. Their list of speakers was really impressive this year, so I’ve been keeping my eye out for video and roundups. And while I can’t find a whole lot, there are a few things trickling out such as Cool Hunting’s recaps of Day One and Day Two and Nora Herting’s Illustrated Takeaways of a few of the presentations. I’ll share more as I find it, but the links on the speaker pages themselves have some interesting material to dig through in the meantime, including an interview with Chris Guillebeau about how Balanced People Don’t Change the World.

➻ You might call Andrew Kessler’s Novel Approach to Bookselling a bit unbalanced. He opened a bookstore in Manhattan whose shelves contain about 3,000 books, but they’re all copies of the same book—his own history of Martian Summer: Robot Arms, Cowboy Spacemen, and My 90 Days with the Phoenix Mars Mission. Inc.‘s Eric Markowitz tells us more:

The store opened on April 12, its shelves loaded with about 3,000 copies of Martian Summer: Robot Arms, Cowboy Spacemen, and My 90 Days With the Phoenix Mars Mission. There is no café, there are no readings. The chalkboard outside reads: “We have one book, but we are not Scientologists.” A passerby wondered aloud on a recent Saturday morning, “What the hell is this place?” [...] At around 3 p.m., a young women wanders into the store.

“Can I help you find anything?” Kessler asks.

“I’m looking for a book,” she says.

“Is it this one?” Kessler responds.

I have no idea why we didn’t do this with The Hundred Best Business Books of All Time.

➻ If you liked Nora Herting’s Illustrated Takeaways from the 99% Conference above, you’ll love Mike Rohde’s Chick-fil-A Leadercast Sketchnotes. And if you love Mike Rohde’s Chick-fil-A Leadercast Sketchnotes, you’ll absolutely fall apart when you see Wendy MacNaughton’s Meanwhile, The San Francisco Public Library at The Rumpus.

➻ So, NASA Announced the Results of Epic Space-Time Experiment last week. And, well…

“The space-time around Earth appears to be distorted just as general relativity predicts,” says Stanford University physicist Francis Everitt, principal investigator of the Gravity Probe B mission.

I think this should have been the soundtrack of that epic announcement: