Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Effectivity

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Have you read this book? I'm going through it again now for the third time. It's quite a powerful book. I'm stuck on Habit 2 "start with the end in mind", it's difficult to plan your entire life out, but I'm giving it a go.

This is turning into Rich's book review site isn't it. I also forgot to mention Victor Frankl's 'Man's Search for Meaning' as one of the books I recently read. It was mentioned by just about every other author I read so I thought I'd give it a read too.

I need to keep a better book diary. I enjoy making mind maps of the good books I read, but it takes at least an hour, and I can't really be doing that at work during term time when I'm supposed to be making 'edutaining' Halloween or Harry Potter lesson plans. I don't even like Harry Potter, but I can see why it's popular. I just watched the Prisoner of Azkaban as I heard it was a good one, and…

Wow this post is all over the place. I could talk about so much but I shall study Kanji instead. After all that's what an effective person would do.


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Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Lately

It's been a short while since I lasted posted to this blog and you could be forgiven for thinking I'd given up on it altogether. I some respects, you'd be right. It was a lot easier to write about the new and exciting things being experienced every couple of weeks when I was doing things I thought were new and exciting every couple of weeks.

Two things have happened, I've lost some perspective of what would be interesting for the reader (whoever you are) and my interests developed away from this blog.

For example, I recently had a lovely weekend with Shino in a traditional old fashioned expensive Japanese guest house with perhaps the most extravagant meals I have ever eaten. It was lovely, but not that exciting, at least for someone living in Japan.

I've been to a couple of mountain "raves", with some good dance music and inexplicably low turn outs (think 25 people dancing in a field), and some nice dinners and parties around the place. I've finished a few more books (see below) and I've also set up a Charity Donation page with some friends which I'll talk about some other time.

And as for interests developing away from blogging, I think what I mean is that I started to feel like if I was going to be spending time blogging, I wanted it to be earning me money, which lead to a lot of blog and general internet money making research instead of actual blog updates.

So that's kind of what I've been doing really, and internet business is still a top priority, only coming behind studying for my Japanese Proficiency test this December. To be honest, I believe that a successful internet start up is going to play a much more valuable role in my future than the proficiency of my Japanese, but the actual studying is building self discipline, activating the brain and allowing me to communicate more effectively in the community I'm currently in. Or maybe that's just my way of justifying my procrastination. What do you think?

The books:

Supernatural Isle Of Man:
A nice present from Mum which allowed me to give Shino the occasional ghost story while she was visiting the Isle of Man.

Derren Brown's Tricks of the Mind
Good book with a few simple tricks. Doesn't give away Derren's best mind reading tricks (which I'm currently loving) but does have some great beginner advice on memory, hypnosis, NLP, psuedo science and memory :) Also, quite a lot of anti-religious ranting. About half the book in fact. His favourite book is Dawkins 'The God Delusion"... Not that that's a bad thing, but I would have preferred more stuff about his skills instead.

Good book on globalization. Loads of interesting things, especially near the end. A real eye opener. A best seller and award winning book.

The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About Itby Michael Gerber
An entrepreneurial guide from a guru of small business management. A bit boring for me since I don't have an actual small business yet.

Amazing book. The current manifesto of my life. A complete how-to guide in internet entrepreneurship and much more. I'm going through it again now highlighting and making notes, in preparation for my own start up.

Bill Clinton's My Life
Good interesting story of the man's life. Certainly makes him out to be more of a complete real person, not just the 'I did not have sexual relations with that woman' man we all remember. Also made me feel that Republicans are power hungry, win at any cost, progress haters. I guess if Bush ever writes a book (can he write?) I should read that too, you know, just to be fair.

Ha ha :) Can you tell which books I set up affilate links to Amazon.com with? It's my first time playing round with affiliate links but I think I get about 4% of the cost of the book if you buy it through my link. That's assuming any Americans are reading this. I have yet to see if there is a British version (I'm sure there is). I've also set something up that's supposed to automatically make links, but that one doesn't seem to be working yet. Ah well, it's all new. Welcome internet money skillz.



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