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  • Messy

  • By: Tim Harford
  • Narrated by: Roger Davis
  • Length: 10 hrs and 7 mins
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars (43 ratings)

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Messy cover art

Messy

By: Tim Harford
Narrated by: Roger Davis
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Publisher's Summary

The urge to be tidy seems to be rooted deep in the human psyche. Many of us feel threatened by anything that is vague, unplanned, scattered around or hard to describe. We find comfort in having a script to rely on, a system to follow, in being able to categorise and file away. We all benefit from tidy organisation - up to a point.

A large library needs a reference system. Global trade needs the shipping container. Scientific collaboration needs measurement units. But the forces of tidiness have marched too far.

Corporate middle managers and government bureaucrats have long tended to insist that everything must have a label, a number and a logical place in a logical system. Now that they are armed with computers and serial numbers, there is little to hold this tidy-mindedness in check. It's even spilling into our personal lives, as we corral our children into sanitised play areas or entrust our quest for love to the soulless algorithms of dating websites.

Order is imposed when chaos would be more productive. Or if not chaos, then...messiness. The trouble with tidiness is that in excess, it becomes rigid, fragile and sterile.

In Messy, Tim Harford reveals how qualities we value more than ever - responsiveness, resilience and creativity - simply cannot be disentangled from the messy soil that produces them. This, then, is an audiobook about the benefits of being messy: messy in our private lives; messy in the office, with piles of paper on the desk and unread spreadsheets; messy in the recording studio, in the laboratory or in preparing for an important presentation; and messy in our approaches to business, politics and economics, leaving things vague, diverse and uncomfortably made up on the spot.

It's time to rediscover the benefits of a little mess.

©2016 Tim Harford (P)2016 Little Brown

What listeners say about Messy

Average Customer Ratings
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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Clever and engaging

Tim Harford makes a convincing case for embracing the chaos of a complicated world and avoiding the urge to excessively contain, categorise and control.

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Interesting at times but long winded

I loved the start of it but as the book progresses the needle gets stuck on the same topic and stays there for too long. It would have been a marvelous book it it was half the length

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Fair

The book starts off good but the middle to end sections become too monotonous and lose the readers interest

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

A tidy messy book of great lessons

A beautiful depiction of a collated mass of real well researched stories I found so helpful to understand some personal messy strengths previously viewed as weakness. I emerge from the content affirmed by this and emboldened to not suppress but strengthen that talent even further.

I found the reader's rise and fall and related connection to the text brought it to life and magnified its lessons.

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  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

The Voices

the voices were excruciating. content is
good but every voice made it less and less easy to return to

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