” The truth is you’ll never get anywhere in life unless you can write. It’s more important today than ever before, courtesy of personal computers, the internet, social media and email.” – Steve Tobak.
Steve is one writer whom I have started to admire, even though I don’t agree with his political views always. In his latest blog, he shares 9 things that can help one become a great writer. Two points which I think are fundamental, but are very critical are
a. Read … a lot
b. Be genuine, direct, clear and concise
The 9 steps can be found here. As Steve says, ” ..make no mistake: no matter what you do for a living these days, if you want your career to flourish, you need to learn how to write. Period.“
This is a great book that I completed reading recently.
Recognition for the book : 2011 Pulitzer Prize Finalist
What is is about : The impact of internet on our brains. The way the brains are getting rewired and how much distracted we are becoming everyday due to information overload.
The Wow moment : A clear explanation of how we are becoming “Shallow” thinkers and how we are losing our ability to contemplate and engage in “deep thinking”.
Other insights: Human beings started to speak first and then started to write much later. Now, we are in danger of slowly moving away from the “written”world.
This 5 letter word is gaining more and more prominence. It was only a week back that Fred Wilson, the famous VC, blogged about “Focus”and how it led to the success of Steve Jobs.(Read my blog here). Today in LinkedIn, Daniel Goleman, the author of the path-breaking book “Emotional Intelligence” announced the title of his new book(surprise, surprise) – “Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence“.
He asks “What do a world-class athlete, a star rapper, and a high-performing executive all have in common? Focus – how well they pay attention to what matters most for their performance. Focus is the hidden ingredient in excellence – but a different kind of focus matters for each of these achievers.”He then makes a very relevant point, “In the new normal we are inundated by a sea of distractions. Attention has become a mental ability under siege. We need to get smarter about how to maintain our focus.” I can relate to this big time. The constant need to refresh the inbox to see if there are new mails, frequent checking of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn prompted by the fear of losing vital insights has an impact on productivity. That is where Daniel Goleman’s book comes into picture. More details about the book are available here or click on the image below.
(Image Credit – Harper Collins Publishers)
Before I finish, I would like to add that his book “Emotional Intelligence” had an extraordinarily positive effect on my thinking. I would highly recommend that you get a copy of it.
Click on the image to read a good review/overview of the book.
If you have read my previous posts, you would have noticed that I am a Seth Godin fan. I eagerly wait for his blogs every day, and he never fails to post a blog a day. As I wrote 2 months back, he crossed the landmark of having written 5000 blog posts. In my blog about his blogs, I had mentioned that I had read just one book of his – Purple Cow. Now, I have added two more to my list – “Tribes” and “All Marketers Are Liars“.
Just in case you are wondering how this is all relevant to you, this blog post is about another book he wrote and which is available for free download. The book is called “Ideavirus”and it is about “Viral Marketing”. If you are fascinated by how ideas spread, and how you can benefit from those ideas, click on the image below to download the book.
If you want further motivation to read this book, read this “Unleashing the Ideavirus is claimed to be the most downloaded eBook of all time.- Wikipedia”.
Acronyms, acronyms, acronyms. They are all around us. LOL, ROFLOL, TGIF, WTF(Winning the Future – coined by Obama, but also has a different expansion!!). Some of them are fun, some horrible and some really good. I would add P.R.E.S.E.N.T to the “good” category. So what is this P.R.E.S.E.N.T ?
I am an avid reader of the ” Influencer Posts” in LinkedIn and today LinkedIn sent me a post titled ” How to Hack Your Daily Routine” . Being an early bird myself, the title of the post aroused my curiosity and I open it to find Claire Diaz-Ortiz, Manager of Social Innovation at Twitter. Well, it turned out that it was not about getting up early, but more about how to start a day irrespective of when one gets up. Without taking away too much of what she has to say, here is what she has to say. Once you are up in the morning, you can do the following.
P — PRAY (or PAUSE) R — READ E — EXPRESS S — SCHEDULE E — EXERCISE N — NOURISH T — TRACK
Curious to know how it works? Here is her LinkedIn post and download her ebook for free here or click on the image below.
