As the eyesight is getting worse and worse, the speed of reading is getting slower and slower. Tonight, try to finish the book that I read for a long time last semester, and then put it in a quiet corner. Maybe I won't read it again in my life. Through finishing reading, I found that this is an interesting book. I can understand a lot of things the author said, and I have deep experience. It also confirms my idea: only when you accumulate experience to a certain extent, can you understand those lives. Many educational failures stem from the large experience gradient gap between the teacher and the audience. Communication is effective only when there is more consensus on the cognitive basis between the two. It's not that the other party doesn't want to listen, but that he doesn't have relevant experience reserves and can't form activation related to it. The problem is that when the listener understands, the former narrators are basically gone. Why can't we understand earlier? The tangles of life also come from this.

Today's book was written by Charles Handy, a British management philosopher, with a strange name: "elephants and fleas - foreseeing the future of organizations and individuals". The title of the book is very strange, which is one of the reasons why I bought it (I have read some strange books in recent years). Briefly introduce: the so-called elephant is a large organization, Fleas are independent workers or self-employed. As the name suggests, do you want to work in an elephant organization or be an autonomous workplace flea. This is really a good question. I believe many of us have been confused about it in our lives: large organizations are stable but not free; Fleas are free but full of uncertainty. How to choose? Of course, when the author was close to the age of 50 (1981), he resolutely chose to be a flea, and then witnessed a miracle: he not only didn't starve to death, but also spent a magical life. Many ideas put forward by the author are very cutting-edge: such as combined life, clover organization and so on. For the author, the information is as follows:

Charles Handy（1932-） CBE is an Irish author/philosopher specialising in organisational behaviour and management. Among the ideas he has advanced are the "portfolio career" and the "Shamrock Organization".

Handy was born in the countryside of Ireland. His father is a priest. He graduated from Oxford University and majored in classical literature. He once worked in the multinational oil company shell and later became a freelancer (flea). Now he is a master of European management philosophy, as famous as Drucker and famous all over the world. This book is the first one I have read. I feel really good. I hope I can write such a book in the future.

The book was first published in 2001 and began to be released on a large scale in 2003 (it is not clear how the foreign publishing system works). The whole book is a 70 year old man talking to you about his life, people, things and thinking (his analysis of capitalism is very grounded), which can be read as a micro biography. Many of his statements seem ordinary, but they are full of life experience. His language is simple and eloquent, without those flashy affectations. He is of the same generation as my father, and most of that generation has the characteristics of this kind of expression: concise and comprehensive, no nonsense.

In fact, I quite like the concept of "combined life" proposed by him. Of course, according to his own situation, his combined module includes four parts: family work, voluntary work, study work and paid work. Everyone can design their own combination module. To borrow his famous saying: shape myself into a brand. For independent workers, being different is reputation.