Tag Archives: books

Read 50 pages a day

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(Thanks to sumit, The Hiring Tool, for the tip)

Reading books is one of the most important (I would classify it as mandatory) activity an entrepreneur should invest his/her time into. And I am not talking audio books, I am talking actual real paper books (e books are also fine, but not as effective unless you have a Kindle).

Issac newton said “If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of Giants”. That is true for all entrepreneurs because essentially that’s what they are trying to do, look farther into the future, solve problems and be really fast at it. As the history tells us, the most successful ones are those who are able to look the most farther.

Reading allows you to “stand on the shoulders of giants”. It allows you to learn from what other folks have experienced, achieved, failed at, loved , suffered, everything A-Z. There is just a lot of concentrated, distilled knowledge in the books, that its almost a sin for an entrepreneur not to be reading, since upgrading of skills is a constant need for a startup founder.

To some of you, it may seem counter intuitive. Wouldn’t it be better for me to spend my time on real-time , real world problems at hand, instead going into the dreamy world of books? Isn’t my first and most important job to solve real problems?

Yes, that’s true. At a fundamental level the job of an entrepreneur is to solve problems.  But as we know the most effective way to approach / solve a problem is by looking at parallel scenarios and applying the learning to the problem at hand.  Isn’t it easy to solve a problem if you have already experienced a similar one before?

Books are one of best way to collect /come across /find / learn these problems which others have come across.  When you read “The Google story” and go thru the birth of google as an idea, as a young company and so forth, you are sure to learn a bunch of stuff that you can use while building your own company.

The book stores are full of these inspiring, real life stories of companies, people, which are biographies and autobiographies. Then there are authors like Seth Godin, Malcom Galdwell , Tom Peters and so many more. You just need to get started and you will discover a whole new world.

Its not tough at all, I carry a book almost everywhere. And a lot of my reading happens while traveling, waiting, just filling the small little time gaps and I finish almost a book a week.

Trying to read a whole fat book may seem difficult, but reading 50 pages is quite easy. So go ahead my friend and commit yourself to “Reading 50 pages a day”. It will not take more than 1-1.5 hrs, depending on your reading speed. Just keep at it and i promise it will be one of the most fruitful and enjoyable investments of your time.

Tell us in comments if you are planning to start 50 page a day reading journey and keep us updated on the progress…

Strand book festival, very disappointing

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Earlier this week 4 of us visit visited the strand book fest at the

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“chinnaswamy stadium, Bangalore”. All of us are very active readers, we regularly purchase books and were prepared to spend good money, expecting to grab good books along with very good discounts. At the entrance we picked up one Plastic baskets each (yes the same one you pickup in the grocery store). Now I have weakness for buying books and often pickup 5-10 books on my each visit to a good bookstore. I was thinking since i will get more variety and cheaper prices, I may actually end up filling more than one Basket.

Alas, the organizers of the book fest had something else in mind, to cut the long story short I came out of the fest totally dis-appointed, with only 3 books. Almost same was the case with other 3 friends. All of us decided not come back to the fest again and also to warn our friends against it.

Here are the reasons:

  • After looking at some of the books and the prices, I realized that most books are NOT DISCOUNTED, they were being sold at prices higher than what is available in the market already
  • Most of the stock on display was HARD COVER BOOKS and soft covers/paper backs were either not to be seen or hard to locate, hard covers naturally sell at much higher price as compared to other editions
  • The variety of books was totally disappointing
  • Staff was not at all helpful to customers. I asked one staff member to find a book for me two times, he heard my request and went away with a promise to come back but (as you can guess) he never did bothered to come back. I am sure he never even looked for the book
  • During checking out when I confronted him he made some very lame excuses and gave me this attitude like “we are doing a favor to people of Bangalore by putting up this book fest, why are you asking so many questions”
  • This festival has reputation of selling books on discount, where as they clearly don’t sell it cheaper than what is already available in the market
  • They are just taking advantage of the reputation and fooling the customers.

In our case since we had come out in a mood to buy the books, we drove to our favorite book store BLOSSOMS, these guys are too good, they give 20% flat discount and have 3 floors packed of books. The variety of books here is 2-3 time more as compared that Strand fest had. We also compared prices for some of the books and that confirmed the higher prices at Strand fest.

Yes all of us ended up buying a good 20+ books of our choice at a good price, from Blossoms! I am currently reading the autobiography of Marlon Brando …