15 posts tagged “book”

Needless to say, having a wee bit of imagination is a good thing. Unlearning to learn some visual tools and skills seemed appropriate so here is what I have just picked up and reading currently.

More on it when I get through it but I can tell you that after about 40 pages, I am buying a big whiteboard for the home.

Swimmy, Stripes and Orbitting the Giant Hairball are all excellent hand drawn visual presentations of very powerful messages. Furthermore, with coffee shops being a part-time habitat for me, napkins are always plentiful.

Matt Richtel has a very neat article in the New York Times here called "In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop"

Some quotes from his article:

"Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

It is unclear how many people blog for pay, but there are surely several thousand and maybe even tens of thousands.

I am definitely not paid to blog but if you want to read what they have to say, there are some posts here and here

Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch had a post independent of this article that says a lot about the world of professional bloggers here called "Six Months In, And 600 Posts Later...The Worlds Of Blogging and Journalism Collide (In My Brain)". Some related quotes from this post are:

"It is mostly breaking news, reporting facts and providing analysis. At TechCrunch, I am completely focused on blogging, 24/7"

That is because the blogging never stops. Just ask my wife and kids, who now mock me by repeating back my new mantra: “I’m almost done, just one more post.”

But we live or die by how fast we can post after a story breaks, if we can’t break it ourselves.

I won't be surprised if Matt Richtel's story was inspired by Erick's post.
 
It tied in really well with my earlier post "Who Is Your Chauffeur" here. It was in response to a post on entrepreneurs but applicable to everyone and then of course, there was this post way back, which probably fits the best. The pictures of Stripe climbing (from the book Hope for the Flowers by Trina Paulus) away says it all.

It is really amazing how really simple things communicate the best. I have three books that use that extremely effectively and they all have one thing in common - they use presentation formats that appeal to children, not boring adults.

They all are:

• Simple
• Tell One Story and
• VERY importantly, Fuuuuuun!

Two books that I referred to in the past on this blog are:

1. Hope for the Flowers by Trina Paulus recommended to me by my colleague, Tom Rolander here at CrossLoop.
Two caterpillars, Stripes and Yellow are the main characters, who go on to explore the 'more' in life

2. Orbitting the Giant Hairball by Gordon McKenzie recommended to me by a mentor of mine.
The Hairball is a reference to all the policies and rules that grow and thrive at corporations. You can see many of those in personal lives through patterns and a daily rut

3. Swimmy by Leo Lionni . My most recent favorite that I picked up is from Robert Kalin, The Founder and CEO of Etsy. It is extremely applicable to startups but can be applied to the power of relationships - professional and/or family.

Watch Robert reading it below and you get the distinction of being one of those few who have read at least one book this year:

Imagine: Being FUNomenal

I had a fantastic opportunity yesterday to attend a Churchill Club (They organize some of the best events in the Valley, btw) event called "Who Do You Trust? Trends in Trust and Influence for the Next Generation of Business Leaders". A post on that definitely coming up later.(I tweeted this event)

The one reason why I attended was to get a chance to see and listen to Robert Cialdini, Author of one of my all time favorite that I had referred to in this blog some time ago - “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion”

One big take away I had from the event was an observation from his studies about "credible communicators" with reference to reporters, bloggers, social media folks, msm, friends etc - anyone can be a source of information that you might trust. These communicators had two characteristics:

• They are percieved as experts/ authorities in their domain
• Very importantly and critical, they were perceived as being objective and unbiased

For the latter, those who were perceived as trustworthy were straightshooters having built that reputation over some years. If you do not have the 'many years' luxury, here is what many people do:

State a weakness first and then right after that they follow it up with their argument or statement.

The example Dr. Cialdini gave was for Avis: We Are #2 But We Try Harder

Being personally always fascinated and studying social behavior (online and offline) - this blog being only one form of expression with the subtitle "Everything social offline, Online", I was very keen on making an attempt to sign up for his social experiments/thesis. After a quick introduction and chat, I signed up to be a part of this expertiments and thesis. He gracefull accepted my offer and now the hard part - waiting for the next steps assuming the right people in his team actually need more volunteers.

Imagine: I am not as good as David Pogue but I believe that CrossLoop is the best free software to help someone. To establish further trustworthiness, here is a Disclaimer: I am one of the Co-Founders of CrossLoop.

I am a little into creativity - actually maybe more than a little ... borderline obsessed with it. Why?

• It allows one to break conventional wisdom - some also call that wisdom of the crowds or herd mentality
• It enables one to easily differentiate
• It can have a revolutionary (creation) or evolutionary (improvement) outcome
  
• It enables one to explore the unknown and embrace failure, not fear it. If you fail fast, you get faster to your goal and eliminate more steps to your goal
• It magnifies discovery
  

With the above in mind and the following observation by Cathie Black (that I picked up - Yes - in The Wall Street Journal), I just ordered The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp, a choreographer.

"My favorite lines are about the importance of naïveté, which she sees as a great advantage. Tharp renames it "forever the child" or "the ability to not know." She writes: "You do not know that failure can hurt, or even that you can fail." Not a bad state of mind, in work and in life."

Being a relatively new father and watching my daughter grow closely, I could not agree more.

Furthermore, one of my all time favorite books is Orbiting The Giant Hairball - A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving with Grace by Gordon MacKenzie - another artist. He brings out the significance of naivete and all the advantages of being a child. At what age, did you stop raising your hand?

  Imagine: A blog about all things you DO NOT know

I have a few posts up on happyness and I would like to especially refer to this one with reference to this article in The New York Times - In Silicon Valley, Millionaires Who Don’t Feel Rich, by Gary Rivlin.

Obviously the observations by The Journal and The Economist ring true when you read the entire article that:

1. Wealth is not making Americans happier and
   
2. Rivalry is a big cause for it. The World is just not Enough.

It would have been awesome to see them work that hard because what they were doing was their passion, a hobby or a cause they believed in!

I firmly believe that America is all about choices and it is our job to choose. Many obviously want that 'more' in life - it is really amazing how many here in the Valley (and probably at many other places as well) are climbing "this" pillar hard. Not one seems to know what is at the top but climb they do ... faster and faster.....others are, aren't they....  nudging others out, walking all over others and sacrificing time with their friends, family and children.

It only gets harder since they do not seem to have a strong Why. Friedrich Nietzsche is known to have said "He who has a strong enough why can bear almost any how"

Imagine: The 'y' in happyness

It took me a while to finally finish Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl but I did! It was very profound for this pea brain since I had to read many sentences over and over again. Actually - I was very very busy too - no, seriously!

Frankl developed the concept of Logotherapy - the will to meaning - from his time and experiences at  concentration camps. I found it especially relevant since it is in stark contrast to today's frequently sighted .. or should I say "celebrity wanna-be" sitings of will to pleasure (Freud) and will to power (Alder).

I hope to bring a lot of various simple applications of it in our lives today so let  me begin with one that is probably the core of the book. According to the book, one can discover this meaning in life (which, btw, continues to change all the time but never ceases to be) in 3 different ways:

1. by creating work or doing a deed
2. by experiencing something or encountering someone
3. by the attitude we choose towards unavoidable suffering (more on this certainly later from some personal examples)
   

You can very well imagine people involved in all of the above three but (2) states directly that encountering a person like you, I or anyone can make the significant difference. Apart from the fact that you might meet that someone to change your life, the really cool part is that YOU might be that person in someone else's life. So next time look closely since as my father in-law likes to say, "if you believe in coincidence, you may not be paying attention".

Imagine: You are it!

My Next Book .........have you read it? It is supposed to be a classic!

Imagine: Hide and Seek

Book: Show us a book that made you laugh out loud.
Submitted by Red Pen.

English IS my second language - Communication, Communication, Communication right?