I bought 5 books over the weekend and thought I would share a few “life lessons” I am learning from the three that I am slowly slowly reading:
- T D Jakes’ Reposition Yourself: Living Life Without Limits
- Call to Action: Secret Formulas to Improve Online Results
- Robert Ludlam’s The Bourne Ultimatum
Several aspects of Jakes’ book caught my attention, and I found myself taking several notes. For example, I made notes on his talk of how the success formula has changed from what our parents taught us:
This begs a couple of questions:
- Are you teaching the right success formula to your children?
- Perhaps even more importantly, are you teaching them to be willing to reposition themselves to a new formula when it arises? There will be a new formula someday. Change is constant.
My lesson: I am ashamed to say that I did not teach the right formula to my children and that I did not teach them to anticipate trends and be able to adjust accordingly. I did not learn it early enough in life myself. I am going to share it with them now, though, and you may want to do so with your children (even if they are adults, as mine are).
Another lesson: Something else he said that really grabbed hold of me was that we become habituated to apathetic indifference. I felt like he was talking right to me. How to work ourselves out of this is not something he has said much about (yet, at least). But, I may have some thoughts on it to share in a later article.
I am taking my time with Jakes’ book, so I can’t give you a final report on it, but I thought the above points were definitely worth sharing.
The book Call To Action really has some good information in it, too. While its target audience is internet marketing organizations (like the eBay’s and Amazon’s and so on), it has really insightful advice for all people who write on the web. For example, I have learned from it so far that I do not do a good enough job of telling you what the benefits of something are. Let’s take the example of my recent article where I mentioned that one of my key learnings in life is that Life Is Short. I just let that thought “lay there” for you to draw your own conclusions from it, and you are certainly capable of doing that. But, it would have been better for me to have added my own thoughts on the benefits of realizing that life is short. An example would be: you learn that you need to focus on what is important, and not waste time on things that are of no real value to you and those you love.
The book is chocked full of other neat little things, such as telling me to not use blue text when the text is small, because the eye has the fewest blue receptors (compared to its red and green receptors). I’m glad I read that because I like blue, and my preference for it could have made reading the site harder.
Finally, as for the Bourne Ultimatum, what can I say? I love Ludlam’s stuff and have for years. And I will see the movie. I have watched the first two movies in the series a few times each, those being among the very few movies that I can watch more than once and still retain interest. Matt Damon is the right guy for those movies … one of my favorite actors. Right now I am moving slowly through the book, but, if I know me, there will come a point when I become totally absorbed in it. So, if I don’t write an article for a day or two, you will know what happened.
Oh, my lesson from the Bourne Ultimatum? Just that it has been far too long since I have read a fiction book. I need to read them more often.