“The Flake Filter”
By Toby Unwin
2003, Element Limited Corp.
156 pp.
$19.95
Time is money. To succeed in life, we need to use every second we have to maximize profit.
Unfortunately, the world is swarming with unreliable people — flakes — who obstruct our moneymaking potential. They take up a lot of our time, but they don’t make us any money. The solution, author Toby Unwin asserts, is clear: we must filter all of these flakes out of our lives and deal only with “solid guys.” In “The Flake Filter,” Unwin has devised a system for classifying the majority of the world’s people as flakes — as he reiterates several times in the book, “solid guys” are so rare that they are worth their weight in gold.
Unwin’s credentials, as he cites them, are his retirement at age 26 with a net worth of $160 million (“on paper”), his pilot’s license (certified for “every fixed wing rating”) and his continuing business success in Florida. Unwin is originally from the United Kingdom, and made his fortune from an Internet business there.
So what exactly is a flake? According to Unwin, flakes are lazy, unreliable, untalented people who wish they didn’t have to work. They like to waste time, and they prefer taking the easy roads in life. Flakes can be found everywhere, but seem to be especially concentrated in the fields of education (“corrupting another generation”) and government. They also frequent committees, action groups, and nonprofit organizations.
Unwin’s definition of a “solid guy” is a profit-oriented, straight-dealing self-starter. Solid guys are usually entrepreneurs or business owners.
While much of “The Flake Filter” consists of informal advice and personal asides, the book also offers a numerical scoring system to determine the flakiness level of any individual. Unwin outlines three major categories for judging people: their background, their motivation and character, and their actions. Within each of these categories are several specific questions, each worth a certain amount of points.
For example, have you ever left someone a phone message or an e-mail but didn’t get a response? Add two points to their flakiness score. As Unwin writes, no one — not even the CEO of a major corporation — is too busy to take one minute out of their day to make a quick call back. And people who are unreliable with small tasks also tend to be unreliable with major ones.
“The biggest flakes you will ever meet,” Unwin declares, are people who get involved with causes or projects for personal, emotional or idealistic reasons rather than for money. This is because the outcome of the project doesn’t really affect them, and as a result these flakes focus more on their personal needs than on the work that needs to get done. “Do yourself a favor and steer clear of these idiots,” Unwin writes. “If someone is not motivated for financial reasons, be very, very suspicious.”
“The Flake Filter” is most interesting as a case study of its author, who is so transparently money-obsessed that he can’t resist making several sales pitches within the text to persuade the reader to buy extra copies of the book.
Personal anecdotes and asides are all over this book. In one of the most memorable, Unwin writes, “My ex-girlfriend years ago, lost faith in me, and when she later discovered her mistake, my ship had already sailed. No doubt, my wife is grateful for this as she steps into her Mercedes in the morning and checks to see if she is running late on the new Cartier watch I bought her.” By the way, his wife is a former model and Ivy League graduate, as he points out more than once.
Elsewhere in the volume, he recounts meeting a new male co-worker who was wearing a purple shirt “and was kind of effeminate. I thought this guy might be a flake just based on these couple of things alone.” His initial suspicions turned out to be correct, Unwin claims, as the man (hired as a web consultant) was more concerned with the color of drop-down buttons on a web page than with profitability projections.
Writing again of former business associates who refused to concentrate on the bottom line, Unwin concludes, “These people were total monkeys (no offense to those creatures), and they were flakes too.”
But despite these amusing examples, Unwin’s writing is mediocre. The brashness does not compensate for a dull writing style and a somewhat disorganized approach. It’s obvious that Unwin is a businessman first and a writer second (or fifth, more likely), and a livelier writer could have done a much more entertaining job. Though “The Flake Filter” is somewhat interesting to read, you’d have to be a “total monkey” to pay $19.95 for it.
Brian O’Keefe can be contacted at [email protected]