Walden - Henry David Thoreau

A classic piece of American literature about the experiences of the author living simply for a year. It was published in 1854. Here are 5 quotes. You may notice I have already quoted it in the Vagabonding entry.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

To be awake is to be alive.

In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.


...if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings.

The Photoreading Whole Mind System - Paul Scheele

The 5 steps to photoreading significantly summarized.

1. Prepare - Your purpose and mental state
2. Preview - Survey, trigger words, reading goals
3. Photoread - Photofocus, enter state, say affirmations, breathe.
4. Activate - Incubate, probe, super read, dip and mind map
5. Rapid Read - move rapidly through text without stopping.

First Things First - Steven Covey

5 steps to take now for a better life from the author of this book and of 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

1. Educate your conscience. Think deeper, and spend more time reading and studying.
2. Personal leadership. Write your personal mission statement.
3. Double the time you spend on important, none urgent tasks. Study, improving communication, getting feedback, preparation, planning, education, seizing opportunities, personal development and developing others.
4. Rebuild one relationship you care about. Boss, spouse, child, parent or friend.
5. Spend time on the physical, mental, spiritual and social aspects of your life every day.
   

“The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”

Can a Robot be Human? - Peter Cave

5 of my favourite questions from this thought provoking philosophy book that I received from my big sister.

1. Why are all the things the way they are? Metaphysics/God
2. Can you sincerely want a more equal society while knowingly being wealthy? Politics/Ethics
3. What makes me me, and continue to be me? Metaphysics/Selves
4. Morally, ought you not kill one person to save the lives of others? Ethics/Politics
5. Why vote? Politics/Rationality

Vagabonding - Rolf Potts

5 quotes for long term traveling from this book, which its self includes many quotes.

1. This book views long-term travel not as an escape but as an adventure and a passion - a way of overcoming your fears and living life to the fullest - Rolf Potts, Vagabonding
2. My greatest skill has been to want little - Hendry David Thoreau, Walden
3. A good traveler has no plan, and is not intent on arriving - Lao-Tzu, The Way of Life
4. What I find is that you can do almost anything or go almost anywhere, if you’re not in a hurry. Paul Theroux, The Happiness Isles of Oceania
5. And in the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know it for the first time. T.S. Elliot, Little Gidding

Books

Hello and welcome to another episode of Richard’s book blog! This month we will be covering the books from February and March, along with the benefits and drawbacks of audio books.

Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman
Great book about the Patagonia outdoor clothing company and the work it does for the environment. Talks about the founder finding his passion in his work. Shows that business doesn’t have to be shareholder profit lead, but can still make a profit, while helping the environment as well. Company (and the owner) worth over $500million today. An inspirational blueprint for sustainable international business and entrepreneurial hopefuls.

Maximum Achievement: Strategies and Skills That Will Unlock Your Hidden Powers to Succeed
Start to finish complete book on the application of living a successful life. From positive mental attitude to goal setting to parenting and love. This guy loves making lists. List your strengths, list things that are important to you, list your goals. Worth reading (and making lists) again.

How to Make Millions with Your Ideas: An Entrepreneur's Guide
Great book with lots of strategy tips, examples and anecdotes from people who’ve made millions of dollars in the direct marketing industry. People like the inventor of Barney the purple dinosaur to informational direct marketers like Tony Robbins (who is also worth about $500million today).

The Monk and the Riddle: The Art of Creating a Life While Making a Living
A book about finding fulfillment and passion in your work every day, not just in the phantom “pot of gold” at the end of the rainbow that may or may not come. The writer is a venture capitalist based in Silicon Valley, and the story follows his experiences with the typical twenty something year old entrepreneurs who every day come to Silicon Valley seeking their fortunes, but don't think about why.

"This business has legs": How I Used Infomercial Marketing to Create the$100,000,000 ThighMaster Craze
Half way through this interesting story of the man behind the Thighmaster craze. Once the product was launched it took him only two years to make $100,000,000. He didn’t invent it. He just knew he wanted to sell something and spend six months looking for things.

I Am America (And So Can You!)
Comedy book from American satirist Stephen Colbert.

Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded]: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Popular and recommended economics book. Just started. Very interesting.

Atlas Shrugged
Here we have the big one. It’s over a thousand pages (about equal to 5 of the books here put together), and in audio format 2.2days – over 50 hours! I’m less than a quarter way through, about 10 hours, but it’s fascinating and comes highly recommended.


In April I’ll be continuing with that mammoth, as well as possibly going back over my favourites from the last year. 7 Habits, The 4Hour Work Week and Think and Grow Rich all need another going over, but I might start Blink, Winning or The Game instead.

Audio Books.

The drawbacks
Currently no way to speed read. You can read comfortably about 500 or 600 words per minute(wpm) on paper by pacing, developing your peripheral vision and eliminating sub-vocalisation (when you say the words in your head as you read them), but you can’t do any of that with an audio book. In fact you are forced to listen at the speaking speed of about 150wpm, and that’s the rate at which you must go through the book.
I think it's almost impossible to sit on a chair doing nothing but listening. Not so with actual reading.

The benefits
The voice actor can add to the experience of the book – This is the case for I Am America, read by the author, and Atlas Shrugged.
You can simultaneously share the listening experience.
You can listen to it driving, cooking, cleaning etc adding about 5 hours of reading each week that you wouldn’t have other wise done.
You can “share” them for free online. I like to think of it like an online library card.

Conclusion
With software developments in the pipeline for speeding up audio without raising the pitch or losing any understanding to 300-500wpm, audio books are a great addition to normal reading. Audio books are available from iTunes, audible.com and for free from your choice of bit torrent file sharing networks!

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.

The World Is Flat [Updated and Expanded]: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Centuryby Thomas Friedman

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.

The 4-Hour work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New RichTim Ferriss

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.

The 2nd year in Japan Summary

You may remember about this time last year, I gave a summary of my first year in Japan just before I returned home, so people knew what I had been up to. It had nice little month by month pictures and a little description of what had happened, and the interesting things that I did, saw, or had held in my hand.

Well since I'll be back in the Isle of Man and London, I thought it was time for another update. But this year, I haven't really been to big cities, or world heritage sites or other asian countries.

So what have I been doing? People out here have been asking me this too, since I stopped drinking, and I’ve had a hard time answering. Then when I thought about it, well, I guess I’ve spent quite a lot of time…

Reading.

Richard? Reading? It's kind of become a hobby.

Here’s a list of the books I’ve read this year, most of them in the last 6 months. Some have been ebooks, some audio books and some are just plain old pieces of paper bound together.

I’d love to talk about any of them and be interested to know which ones you’ve read too. Oh I don’t know why I’ve ordered them in alphabetical order of the first name of the Author. I must be the only person in the world to order books like that. There’s probably a few mistakes too.

Non - Fiction

• Anthony Grant
• Coach Yourself: It's Your Life, What Are You Going to Do with It?
• Andy Riley
• Book of Bunny Suicides
• Antony Robbins
  
• Personal power II
• Awaken the Giant within
• Get the Edge
• Lessons in Mastery
• Brian Tracy
  
• 21 absolutely unbreakable laws of money
• 21 ways to double your productivity
• 21 ways to build a high profit business
• Accelerated learning techniques
• Dalai Lama
  
• The way to a meaningful life
• Dale Carnegie
  
• How to win friends and influence people
• David Allen
  
• Getting Things Done
• David J. Schwartz
• The Magic of Thinking Big
• Deepak Shopra
• The 7 spiritual laws
• Donald Trump andRobert Kyosaki
• Why we want you to be rich

• Joseph Bennette
  
• A course in light speed reading

• John Gray
• Men are from mars, women are from Venus
• Kenneth Weiss
• Building an Import/Export Business
• Larry King
  
• How to talk to anyone, anytime, anywhere
• Napolean Hill
• Think and Grow Rich
• Rhonda Byrne
• The Secret
• Robert Kyosaki
• Rich Dad Poor Dad
• Rich Dad Poor Dad 2: The Cash flow Quadrant
• Retire Young Retire Rich
• Choose to be Rich
• How to find great investments

• Richard Templar
• The Rules of Wealth
• The Rules of Work
• The Rules of Life

• Stephen R Covey
• 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
• Living the 7 habits
• Tina Konstant.
  
• Teach yourself speed reading
• Wayne Dyer
  
• Manifesting your destiny

Fiction

• Aldous Huxley
• Brave New World
• Benjamin Kunkel
• Indecision
• George Orwell
• 1984
• JD Salinger
  
• Catcher in the Rye
• Paulo Coelho
  
• The Alchemist

Started but not finish

• Karl Jung
• Memories Dreams and Reflections
• Michael E Gerber
  
• The E-myth Mastery Revisted
• Thomas L Friedman
• The World is Flat
• Timothy Ferriss
  
• The 4 hour work week
• Joseph Heller
• Catch 22
• John Fowles
• The Magus
• David Shuttleworth
• Mind control, NLP and Hypnosis
• James Heisig
  
• Remembering the Kanji: Complete Course on How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Japanese Characters

Not started but have

• Anthony Robbins
• Live with Passion
• Ultimate Relationships
• Brian Tracy
  
• The science of self confidence
• Robert Kyosaki
• Rich Dad’s prophecy
• Steven Levitt
  
• Freakonomics
• Jenny Randles
  
• Supernatural Isle of Man
• Neil Strauss
  
• The Game

• 40 downloaded ebooks of various quality on psychology, social interactions, hypnosis and mind power.
• 5 Gigabytes of probably pretty good audio books on wealth, health, life etc.

Not have but want/recommended/on my wishlist

• Richard Branson
  
• Losing my Virginity: the Autobiography (the new one is out August 6th!)
  

And a load of other ones. Go to amazon.co.uk and search for my wishlist if you would like to see all of them. I think you can do this by just typing my name in to amazon, but who knows!

Since that's about 4 times as many books as I've read in the whole previous 24 years of my life, it's fair to say a small about of personal growth has occurred, hopefully for the best.

I’d say I'm on information input mode at the moment. Maybe I'll stay like this for a bit, or maybe I'll switch to output mode and write my own book in my third year in Japan, who knows?

Anyway, let me know if you want to talk about any of these books, or have a few recommendations you could see me enjoying. I'd like to write about which were my favourite and why some time, but don't hold your breath.

Hasta la vista, baby. Hopefully see you soon.