Don’t forget the books!

Over the holidays my nephew, who is six going on seven, had a homework question regarding plant and animal parts that frustrated him to no end. As I watched him struggle with it, he went from scrunching his nose and tapping his pencil on his head to outright whining at me for the answer.

“Look it up.” I told him.

In response, he huffed the sort of sigh that only a six year old can muster. “I can’t.” He told me.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Cause.”

“Because what?”

” ’cause the Internet’s broken.”  At which point, I must admit, I stared at him in astonishment.

His response was surprising to me because we were sitting in my parent’s den where one entire wall is covered by bookshelves – some of them children’s encyclopedias. (Although, to be fair, I also wanted to know what he’d done to our modem/router set up to “break” the Internet.) I introduced him to the encyclopedias and the moment passed.

When I thought about it further however, I realized how similar his approach was to my own in some respects. In this day and age, when we want information, many of us in the venture and entrepreneur communities turn to white papers, research reports, the Internet, and each other.  While these are valuable resources, what we ignore much of the time are books.

So, one of my resolutions for 2011 is to go through some of the books here in our Openview Library and share them with you.  Stay tuned!