About the blog and my book reviews

I have received a lot of questions on my blog, and the purpose of the book reviews, so I thought I would answer them in a post.

I like to read – a lot.  For me it’s like snowboarding; you get so intensely focused on what you are doing (in the case of snowboarding it’s so you don’t break your neck) that it puts the rest of the world on hold for a while.  Reading has the added benefit that you are also learning while you read so you have the benefit of distracting yourself form one productive task while doing another.    You also have that fun “aha!” feeling when you learn something and somehow your mental map of this incredibly complex world sharpens.  With a better map, your pattern recognition improves as does your ability to reduce stress.

 I think it is amazing the learning you get from a book for such a modest investment.  Think about it for a minute:  a professional spends his or her entire career mastering a subject and then spends 6 to 12 months or more distilling those ideas into a few hundred pages.  Three thousand books are published a day, and of these only the very few/best get recommended.  So when I read a book I am often getting the very best of the available knowledge on a subject.  I get the benefit of an expert’s life work for a trivial amount of money and an investment of a handful of hours, during which I am being entertained by the author. 

I love to read.

My biggest two problems with books are:  A) which to read and B) how to apply them.  I solve the ‘what’ by asking keen fellow readers what they have liked.  I cruise Books Ink, my favorite bookstore, whose staff reads and recommends great books. I also refer to NYT Book Review, Kindle’s book list etc. and Amazon when their predictions and recommendations are right.  I have yet to find a source that applies judgment and makes recommendations specifically for entrepreneurs, like me, who like change – tech, science, learning etc.  My goal is to share my recommendations specifically for this community.

The bigger issue for me is figuring out how to apply what I have learned.  I can’t tell you how many times I have read a book, have been blown away by some amazing insights and then said to myself “This is great – what do I do with this, how do I apply it to what I am doing?”   That is beyond the scope of most books.    That is the second problem I want to address with this blog.

I will share reviews of only the very best books I have read. I’ll give you the perspective of a curious entrepreneur that loves new ideas and is fascinated by how we got here, what’s going on, how things work,  how we make tomorrow (literally) better and where are we going.  My second goal, which I have never seen in a book review, is to discuss specifically how I have seen the principals in the book applied to my entrepreneurial experiences. I hope that will spark a similar creative approach by you, my reader.  Though books are great for sharing ideas, those ideas only make a change when they are applied with positive benefit.  My goal is to help you get that positive benefit. It would be great to hear from you when that happens.

To quote one of my favorite entrepreneurs, Thomas A. Edison “The value of an idea lies in the using of it".

Comments

[Heidi]

Quite insightful and well written. I look forward to reading more of your thoughtful perspectives.

[Personal Evolution]

Thank you for posting this article. I think everyone should be pursuing knowledge in all areas of their lives. I feel you are doing a great service by providing your reviews because it is hard to weed out all of the books that are not informative.

[cv writing service]

Sounds good and what is more important - informative. It's hard to find something that really interests you among all that trash that overwhelms the Net