Skip to main content

Join a library

The last year, as I embarked on my entrepreneurship journey, I ended up buying a ton of books. Being a book lover, it was easy to justify all the purchases. All of them were important to my learning, my development and the development of a practice. 
But what happened - as I observed - was that the range of books I purchased was narrow cast towards my work. 
And my son asked me "You work and you read about work, why dont you read something else?" And that question prompted me to raid a few of his books - From Eragon to Wonder to Divergent (and this is a must read for anyone). 
And I must admit, it made a difference. A different perspective for one and an insight into different stories. One thing led to another and I read a travel book (Seven Sacred Rivers), a classic (Call of the wild) and then a few fiction books as well. 
And since I could not purchase every book that came along - I joined a library. Having been a member of two libraries in the recent past, it was deja-vu. Once you join a library, your book reading behaviour changes...Serendipity kicks in. You pick up books you would normally not buy. Since you are not buying, it is easy to pick up and read books you normally would not. And that enables you to read more, diverse subjects - and if you dont like the book, it is just a quick return away...
So, join a library...if you have one around you so your reading and your perspective goes up...Thats my lesson for January PS: I am tempted to say, adopt a library behaviour - but thats for later ;)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The man who saved Pumpelsdrop

This was a story we had in college if I am not mistaken. Perhaps it was in school, but a delightful story it was. The story goes somewhat like this ( reproduced from here ), but the college version we had was slightly different from this.  I t was a dull, gloomy and a depressing morning in a town named Pumpelsdrop in northern England. The Great Depression had brought all the businesses to a standstill. The bored automobile dealer was spending time alone, as usual. But, this seems to be an unusual morning as an odd entity (customer) appeared on the horizon. A man in a bright suit walks up to the dealer and says, "I need to buy a Rolls Royce Phantom II. We have a business conference coming up and I need to impress my customers". Then proceeds to pay 10% of the deal with a single check for 2000 pounds. The rest he says will pay when he takes the delivery.   The auto dealer was stunned. He was delighted to hear that someone is holding a business conference of some kind and ...

Zero to One

Zero to One by Peter Thiel is a nice read. (Yes - if I sit down to write a book review - the book has to be worth it - and usually good - so most of my book reviews are about good books.You can stop here if that's the information you seek.) Where this book scores is in contrarian thoughts and contrarian questions that make you think. It starts with a four big lessons learned from the 90s dot-com crash that is, Make incremental advances, Stay lean and flexible, Improve on the competition and Focus on product, not sales. Just as you warm up to it, he says, the opposite rules are more correct - which are: It is better to risk boldness than triviality. A bad plan is better than no plan. Competitive markets destroy profits. Sales matters just as much as products. And finally leaves with a simple definition of contrarianism - it is not to oppose the crowd (or follow a smaller or newer or older crowd) but to think for yourself. "All happy companies are different"...

Anti networking year

I dont usually go out of my way to network. But over the last few years, I ensured that I spend some time creating new connections. It is a small fragment of my time that goes into it, but what I realised was that some of those networking events were not really working out. I also took time to post about the things I do (mostly on Linkedin) and here (nobody reads this - this is more of a note to myself).  It seemed to be the same set of people saying the same set of things. So, this year I have decided to step back.  Unless it is a truly unique event, I wont be going to any event - and thats how the unconference happened.  Unless it is a really significant update, I wont be posting about it.  And spend time creating and doing the things I like to do. Perhaps read more. Or write more. It is April now and I have done well so far.  Managed to read a few books. Actively working on a few creations. And then some. Lets see.  So for all I know, I might write less ...