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An End Of My Own Era – Discover Magazine

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Nov 15, 2011

I used to subscribe to Omni Magazine, and loved it a lot. I was into alien stories and space stories and some of those scientific conspiracy theories one always heard about back then. It was the days of X-Files and I loved it all, even if I didn’t quite believe it all.

Then one month I got a notice saying they were discontinuing publication of the magazine and I was sad. I had just re-upped my subscription a couple of months earlier and thought that maybe I’d be getting some money back. But these folks never give you back your money. Instead, the letter said they were going to start sending me a replacement magazine, Discover. This was December 1995.

I love Discover magazine. I think some of the smartest people in the world must read it because the comments I see every month cover some topics that just leave my mouth wide open. And the commenters aren’t all PH.D’s either, just “regular” people that happen to know a lot about certain things.

I always felt smarter for reading Discover. It’s amazing the things you can learn. I was always drawn to the astronomy stuff, galaxies, string theory, warp speed, that sort of thing. I always read all the medical stuff and have been fascinated with the progress that’s been made over the years in the study of the brain.

Yes, I’m talking about the magazine in the past tense because after almost 16 years I’m letting my subscription lapse. This is a hard decision for me because I still love the magazine a lot. But you see that picture above? Those are magazines that I’ve yet to get to and I have a few more than I discovered after taking that photo. And the funny thing is that I’ve just finished reading two other Discover magazines and still have tons left.

As I’ve mentioned in the past I tend to speed read. Some articles in this magazine I still can do that, but others take time to get through. I also have other magazines that tend to be more pertinent to things I do, such as PC World, HealthLeaders, and a couple others. All of that and the time I spend on my computer and consulting in general doesn’t leave much time for such an indepth magazine any longer.

Why am I writing about this? Two reasons actually. The first is because I love the magazine and I would recommend it to anyone that has a love for science in general.

The second is because there’s a lesson here. Sometimes we have to let go of things we love when they’re counter productive to the rest of our lives. A magazine subscription might seem like a minor thing to some, but 16 years is still 16 years. In the past I’ve talked about the need to declutter one’s life sometimes to push forward. It’s hard to declutter when you’re still bringing new clutter into the house, even if it’s pretty or somewhat functional. It can be harder to give that up for something better, which, in my case, will be time devoted to other things. And if I really need a fix I’ll just see what they’re offering online.

What have you tried to give up lately to push forward? Go ahead, share.
 

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How To Deal With Stupid Clowns – The Review

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Oct 28, 2011

Wow! I just got through reading and enjoying the latest ebook from our friend John Garrett of Hypertransitory.com called How To Deal With Stupid Clowns. He didn’t ask me to review it, but shared a copy with me, and man, after reading it how could I not review it? Great follow up to yesterday’s more serious post by me, that’s for sure.

Let’s get this stuff out of the way first. The link above is to his post/advertisement for it, and if you enjoy that then you’ll love the ebook because it’s all that and more. Half the book is, well, comics, and very funny stuff. The other half is his take on the stupid clowns most of us meet in life, and he hits them on the head. I laughed, then I shook my head because I knew some of these people; still do. It’s a short book, about 80 pages, but reads much faster because of the comics. Some might balk at the $10 price (only $7 if you sign up for his newsletter), but after looking at it I can say that it’s worth it for the artwork alone.

It’s basically a mixture of comic book and life lessons, and the lesson you need to take away from this book is to pick well the people you listen to, let affect your life, and basically let into your life. Don’t let anyone mess with your dream, your job, your life, or anything else if you know they don’t have your best interest at heart. Many people have their own agenda, and if it’s a bad one they’ll take you down with them; that’s what I took from this ebook.

There’s plenty of satire, and one would imagine there would have to be. After all, calling out bad managers, hanger’s on, and generally anyone that’s a drag on your life as a ‘stupid clown’ takes guts. Drawing all sorts of clowns, and I usually hate clowns, is even funnier. And the way he inserts himself into the book, in a green sweater with the Charlie Brown zigzag, is classic. The funniest books are when people can laugh at themselves as well as make a point, and John’s done that here.

What are you waiting for? Click on the link, go take a look at his sales page, read the book and let’s talk about it. Don’t be a stupid clown! lol
 

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Always Like The First Time – A Book Review

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Jul 13, 2011

I don’t do a lot of book reviews on this site, though I’ve done a couple. I’m going to start sharing more of them because I’ve read a lot of books, and I know some of them will help folks that come to this blog. Some are just enjoyable as well. This book I’m highlighting today is a bit of both.

A disclaimer up front. The author of this book, Kathryn Pape, is one of my web clients. I also helped edit this book before she sent it to the publishers. I mentioned her in February when I wrote a post about some new blogs I wanted to share that I’d helped to create. Still, this is an unbiased opinion of the book; that’s just how I roll.

I have to admit that I wasn’t sure what I was going to be reading when I started out. Kathryn talks mainly about color therapy, something I’ve learned more about since I manage her site and actually created the page, but something I didn’t really know as much about when I started helping with the book; it’s not a brand new book by the way.

I thoroughly enjoyed the book as I was going through it, even though it was also sad. Kathryn tells the story about going through both the treatments and eventual passing of her 3-year old son from cancer, and how she came up with her beliefs in color and how they could make people feel better both mentally and physically.

She talks about how we all have the choice of feeling better and being positive or negative in our lives based on how we view the word “like” and when we decide to “like”; no, this has nothing to do with Facebook. lol In general, she talks about these 5 principles, in order in the book as:

This isn’t a long book to read, and after she sent the book to the publishers I got a regular copy of it as well. I think a few people could benefit from this book as it’s a feel good book handling a tough issue. You can buy it from me by clicking on the image above, which should take you to the Barnes & Noble page, or you can visit her site, see what she’s about, and buy it from her products page instead.

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4-Hour Work Week – Lifestyle Review

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Mar 26, 2011

I know what you’re thinking; two things in fact. One, didn’t you just see this picture a couple of days ago? Yes, you did. And two, if this is a post talking about a book then why not call it a book review instead of a life review? Hey, it’s me, so I have to do something a little bit different. After all, my buddy Marelisa just wrote on it as well, giving it a much different take than just a book review as well.

You know, one of the things about speed reading is that, when you’re doing it kind of for pleasure, you tend to stick with stuff that you’re specifically looking for and thus you’re normally happy with what you’re reading. If one is speed reading something they don’t like it won’t stick, and thus it becomes harder to speed read. I actually read half of 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss at Barnes & Noble many months ago and was really enthusiastic in what I’d read. The concept of finding ways to reduce one’s workload and stress load were very appealing to me. And I understood some of the concepts that could get me there. It was enough to get me to buy the book and read it more thoroughly.

Part of me is now wishing I hadn’t done that. The early concepts I got from the book are still valid, and yet I found myself not enjoying some other parts of the book as much, to the extent that at a certain point I started speed reading some of it again because I just wanted to get past extraneous stuff that I knew I didn’t care about.

First, let’s talk about what I liked in the book. I liked his concept of finding ways to free one’s time so they can do more of what they want to do, which in Ferriss’ case is travel. He set up many ways to get this done, from outsourcing some of the things he didn’t want to do to giving people working for him more power to make decisions for himself. What a life for someone with many interests.

I liked his talk about moving towards minimalism in many ways, including how he travels with luggage at less than 10 pounds; man, that would be sweet. I also enjoyed some of the “case studies” which he was able to include in this particular book because it’s updated and expanded with stories that weren’t available at the first printing, since obviously people hadn’t read his book yet.

And I liked him talking about not being available to everyone 24/7 and having some down time when you really need it. In relating some of this to my life, I rarely give out my cell number because I don’t want everyone being able to always reach me. If my phone rings in the car, I know it’s one of only 5 or 6 people. If I’m out of town, I might give it to a client I’m working with at the time, but I also know that once the assignment is over that’s one less person who’ll ever use that number again.

Now let’s talk about what I didn’t like about the book. I didn’t like that it concentrated so much on travel. Probably 20% of the book covers that topic, and that’s not the book I wanted to read. I thought that some of what I read was irresponsible. For instance, at one point he talks about how one of his plants ended up being closed while he was gone, yet he had fun doing this or that by being unable to be contacted. In other words, his fun was more important than all the jobs that were lost because he decided not to concentrate on an aspect of his business; that’s shameful and affected the lives of a lot of other people.

Tim Ferriss

I wasn’t crazy about the way he and some of his case study people outsourced certain things such that someone else took care of aspects of their personal lives and pulled them away from personal contact. For instance, he tells the story of giving an assignment to college students to reach 3 celebrities and get them to answer 3 questions within 24 hours. However, as a celebrity himself, he’d have never been available to be reached for any student that decided to reach out to him. Being in business and telling people to only check their email once a week for about an hour or their phones for the same amount of time kind of irks me. True, both can kill time, but if you’re in business you might just have to suck up some of that. Then again, he does have other people handling most of this stuff for him; how many of us could do that sort of thing as readily?

There’s also the advocating outsourcing everything at the cheapest price possible, which leads to him and others sending a lot of their business out of the country and really being kind of smug about it. Yeah, I’ll admit that one of the things that irks me a little bit is not using workers in one’s own country if the only difference in quality is price. That might be a minor sticking point, but it’s one I have so I thought I’d mention it.

To be fair on that last point, though, the concept of finding things one can outsource to someone else isn’t a bad one, even if it costs you a little bit of money. Something I absolutely hate is making cold calls of any form; I find reasons not to do it, preferring email or only wanting to talk to people from whom I know there’s already some kind of interest in what I have to talk to them about. Right now I’m contemplating hiring someone to handle a few hours of phone calls for me in one of my industries so I can work on something else. I already have an accountant that handles my bookkeeping and such, and I have a guy who cuts my grass, and let me just get one big contract and I’ll be outsourcing some other things that I not only don’t have time to do, but don’t want to do.

Where do I come down in the end? I think it’s a book many people still need to read because it does get one thinking about ways to make their lives simpler, even to possibly learn how to work it out with your employer so you can not only work from home, but potentially work while being mobile with the feeling that you’re actually sitting at home. True, I have some things I didn’t like, but overall this is a book that, if you’re looking to change your life in some fashion, you need to break down and read.

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Don’t Ask – Book Review

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Jan 10, 2011

I figured that since I’m pimping stuff today I might as well finally get around to talking about our friend Beverly Mahone’s new book Don’t Ask, And I Won’t Have To Lie. It comes with another subtitle as well, ’50 is the new 30 and other tall tales’.

At just under 80 pages the book is a very easy and entertaining read. Bev talks about her own “lie” and how it almost cost her life because she wasn’t telling her physician the whole story on how she felt and if she’d been taking care of herself. That started her exploring this concept of lying and the intricacies about it.

The strangest things she talks about are the lies we tend to tell ourselves when we should know better. Things like ‘I don’t smoke much’ or ‘I know I exercise a lot’ when we don’t necessarily do those things. I like to say how good I am often enough when it comes to eating patterns, yet when I was taking time to write down everything I put in my mouth I realized that I do have a tendency here and there to snack a bit here and there, which adds up over the course of a day.

The last quarter of the book consists of a liar’s daily survey you might think to do on yourself, which of course I didn’t do because I don’t want to know. lol It also consists of responses to a survey she conducted that yield some interesting responses here and there, answering questions such as “Your girlfriend’s husband makes some inappropriate comments to you while drinking at a party you’re all attending.” What do you do? Nope, I’m not revealing the answers; it’s on you to buy the book and read it.

Oh yeah, two things for clarification. One, the book is slanted more towards women than men, but there’s enough for men to go around. And two, yours truly is quoted in the book on page 43, where I said: “I have no problem with lies of omission, as I don’t believe everyone needs to know everything.” Ah fame; you’re right on the cusp of my grasp!

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