by Rupe | Oct 31, 2016 | Mentoring, Not So Recent Reads
Speaker and author Nicholas Boothman offers tips for making a solid first impression — before it’s too late.
Within seconds of meeting you, people are already making judgments about your personality. Are you hireable? Or dateable? How about friendable? And while it’s technically possible to reverse a bad first impression, it’s not easy. So you’ll want to put your best face forward.
Source: How to make people like you in 4 seconds…
My Comments: Pretty good advice.
by | Oct 8, 2013 | Mad Musings, Not So Recent Reads
Title: Scarcity
Summary:
In the blockbuster tradition of Freakonomics, a Harvard economist and a Princeton psychology professor team up to offer a surprising and empowering new way to look at everyday life, presenting a paradigm-challenging examination of how scarcity – and our flawed responses to it – shapes our lives, our society, and our culture.
Why do successful people get things done at the last minute? Why does poverty persist? Why do organizations get stuck firefighting? Why do the lonely find it hard to make friends? These questions seem unconnected, yet Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir show that they are all are examples of a mindset produced by scarcity.
Drawing on cutting-edge research from behavioral science and economics, Mullainathan and Shafir show that scarcity creates a similar psychology for everyone struggling to manage with less than they need. Busy people fail to manage their time efficiently for the same reasons the poor and those maxed out on credit cards fail to manage their money. The dynamics of scarcity reveal why dieters find it hard to resist temptation, why students and busy executives mismanage their time, and why sugarcane farmers are smarter after harvest than before.
Once we start thinking in terms of scarcity and the strategies it imposes, the problems of modern life come into sharper focus.
My Comments:
Still reading this…thus far really enjoying it with a more thorough update…
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by Rupe | Nov 23, 2012 | Mad Musings, Not So Recent Reads
Title: 23 Things They Don’t Tell You about Capitalism
Summary:
Thing 1: There is no such thing as the free market.
Thing 4: The washing machine has changed the world more than the Internet.
Thing 5: Assume the worst about people, and you get the worst.
Thing 13: Making rich people richer doesn’t make the rest of us richer.
If you’ve wondered how we did not see the economic collapse coming, Ha-Joon Chang knows the answer: We didn’t ask what they didn’t tell us about capitalism. This is a lighthearted book with a serious purpose: to question the assumptions behind the dogma and sheer hype that the dominant school of neoliberal economists – the apostles of the freemarket – have spun since the Age of Reagan.
Chang, the author of the international best seller Bad Samaritans, is one of the world’s most respected economists, a voice of sanity – and wit – in the tradition of John Kenneth Galbraith and Joseph Stiglitz. 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism equips listeners with an understanding of how global capitalism works – and doesn’t. In his final chapter, “How to Rebuild the World”, Chang offers a vision of how we can shape capitalism to humane ends, instead of becoming slaves of the market.
Ha-Joon Chang teaches in the Faculty of Economics at the University of Cambridge. His books include the best-selling Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. His Kicking Away the Ladder received the 2003 Myrdal Prize, and, in 2005, Chang was awarded the Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought.
My Comments:
Really great read. I did not have a decent understanding of what the Free Market means, this breaks it into pieces and provide a pretty concise and interesting treatment of how it affect impacts modern (primarily U.S focused) society. Â Thoroughly enjoyed and very much recommend.
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by Rupe | Feb 17, 2012 | Not So Recent Reads
Title:Â How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free – Retirement Wisdom That You Won’t Get from Your Financial 
Advisor by Ernie J. Zelinski
Summary:
How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free offers inspirational advice on how to enjoy life to its fullest. The key to achieving an active and satisfying retirement involves a great deal more than having adequate financial resources; it also encompasses all other aspects of life – interesting leisure activities, creative pursuits, physical well-being, mental well-being, and solid social support.
In How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free, bestselling author Ernie J. Zelinski guides you to:
- Gain courage to take early retirement; in fact, the earlier the better.
- Put money in proper perspective so that you don’t need a million dollars to retire.
- Generate purpose in your retirement life with meaningful creative pursuits.
- Follow your dreams instead of someone else’s.
- Take charge of your mental, physical, and spiritual health.
- Create and maintain great friends – a key ingredient for a great retirement.
- Above all, make your retirement years the best time of your life.
With its friendly format and positive tone, How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free offers retirement wisdom that you won’t get from your financial advisor. This wisdom will prove to be much more important for creating an active, satisfying, and happy retirement than how much money you have saved.
My Comments:
Really loved the trip that this read took me on. Â As an almost full retiree myself, these are sage words for me. Â Ernie Zelinski captured the essence of what I think retirement should be. Â Â Hopefully, when I fully retire for good in 5 years or less, I will get a chance to do all the thinks I dream of. Â
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by Rupe | Feb 16, 2012 | Mad Musings, Not So Recent Reads
Title: One Second After by William R. Forstchen
Summary:
In a small North Carolina town, one man struggles to save his family after America loses a war that will send it back to the Dark Ages.
Already cited on the floor of Congress and discussed in the corridors of the Pentagon as a book all Americans should read, One Second After is the story of a war scenario that could become all too terrifyingly real. Based upon a real weapon – the Electro Magnetic Pulse (EMP) – which may already be in the hands of our enemies, it is a truly realistic look at the awesome power of a weapon that can destroy the entire United States, literally within one second.
This book, set in a typical American town, is a dire warning of what might be our future and our end.
My Comments:
At first I thought that this was going to be a long read, but it turned out quite good. Â I am not a big fiction reader per se, but this really give you something to think about. Â The fact that it is also possibly, although not likely, add to the mystique of it. Â Really enjoyed it. I recommend it.
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by Rupe | Jan 18, 2012 | Not So Recent Reads
Title: The Second World War – Milestones to Disaster by Winton Churchhill
Summary:
Churchill’s history of the Second World War is, and will remain, the definitive work. Lucid, dramatic, remarkable for its breadth and sweep and for its sense of personal involvement, it is universally acknowledged as a magnificent reconstruction.
My Comments:
Absolutely brilliantly written. If you care about history, especially history of the one of the most seminal events in all of history, this is a must read. This is the first part of several volumes. I will move on to the next soon. I very must recommend it.
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