Category Archives: Literature

9 Tips to improve writing skills

Books, Literature

” 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.“

IDEAVIRUS

Books, Literature, ,

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”.

I have started reading it. Have you?

Steve Jobs and “Focus”

Business, Leadership, Literature, ,

Who was the most iconic CEO of the last decade? Very few people will disagree with the choice of Steve Jobs. No wonder there are so many books about Steve Jobs and the Apple story. While many of the books are interesting, the most read book is likely to be “Steve Jobs”by Walter Isaacson. The book is about 600 pages thick and naturally, it would be quite comprehensive and would cover most important aspects of his life(I haven’t read it yet).I am sure the book is also the favorite of many of his admirers, fans and probably even critics.

While there are so many things that can be learned from Jobs, one of the most legendary aspects of his life has been his razor like focus. In his popular daily blog, Fred Wilson(a Venture Capitalist and principal of Union Square Ventures), writes about this aspect “Focus”. He says that “Focus is critical when you are three people, when you are twenty-five people, five hundred people, and ten thousand people. You can always get farther faster by saying no to too many projects and too many priorities. Pick your shots carefully and hit them. That’s what Jobs did to turn around Apple and that’s what you can do with your company too.” The full blog can be read here.

As an entrepreneur myself, I have been trying to apply this principle of “focus”. At our company, we have been focusing on only one vertical and that has served us quite well so far, especially we are so much resource constrained. And “focus”is required not only in new firms, but also in every aspect of life. Do you agree?

How many books can you read in a year?

Literature

How many books can you read in a year? 5? 10? 15? How about 200? That is the target that Claire Diaz-Ortiz has set for herself in 2013. Claire is the Manager, Social Innovation at Twitter. She is a regular contributor to the LinkedIn Influencers section and in the series “What Inspires Me?”, she had mentioned that she is inspired by books. And that where she also mentions about her goal of reading 200 books this year. She claims that she has been reading more than 100 books every year for the past few years and had gone past 150 books in 2012.

How easy is it to read 200 books in a year? This number translates to approximately 16 books a month or 4 books a week. Even if one reads so many books every week, is it possible to retain the gist of each book? I do not know. Only Claire can answer that.

Claire’s obsession with reading books reminds me of Seth Godin’s obsession with writing. He has been blogging almost daily for the past 12 years and recently completed  his 5000th blog post. His landmark 5000th blog inspired me to resume my writing and I had set a target of writing every day. I have not come anywhere close to that, but the journey has begun.

Coming back to writing, when I try to recollect how many books I have read this year, I can count about 12-15 books in 7 months. I could read a maximum of 10 books in the next 5 months. That will still be only about 25 books in 2013, which is a far cry from what Claire has been achieving consistently over the past few years. Should I even try to read so many books? Perhaps not.