Power of Reading Part 2 - Contagious, Brings Out Positive Curiosity and Leads to Useful Insights

Reading is a great habit and a very useful one leading to tremendous results. This was already covered during the previous article ( https://steemit.com/personaldevelopment/@michoco911/the-power-of-reading )

What wasn’t mentioned though was the fact that reading habits are contagious. You start by reading a book, learning something new and having that feeling to share that experience and knowledge with others.

It is always advantageous to be present in a workspace with colleagues who enjoy reading where you have at least 2 or 3 books delivered by the international courier to the office each month and where colleagues exchange books and also offer books as gifts from time to time. This creates an environment that is encouraging for more reading and more ideas sharing.

Three weeks back during a friends gathering and while exchanging details about ongoing activities, I didn’t hesitate to share with them my new reading habit. I was very happy to be contacted again few days later by some of them who showed interest in reading wealth management books and needed a recommendation.

Never be reluctant to drive those conversations with your friends. We always recommend to our friends the best experiences, whether a great restaurant that we have visited or a great movie we’ve seen or a fancy resort or night club. We feel as if we are doing them a favor and it is good to do that. The same should be applied to books. Recommend one to a friend and why not get it for him to encourage him reading it, knowing that the information included can be beneficial to him as it was beneficial for you.

Human beings have a positive curiosity by nature. While driving your 8 years old son to his gymnastics class and you take the book “Getting To Yes, Negotiating agreements without giving in” with you knowing that you have to spend an hour waiting for him. He sees the book and asks, “What does this book teaches Dad?” which initiates a whole discussion about how he should deal with his younger brother and sister during conflicts and how he should try to find some shared interests as part of the solution without forcing things on them so that he can end up reaching a win-win agreement with less tears. It wasn’t that easy at the beginning but after using several examples and continuing the conversation later on at home, he grasped the basics at least. If he wasn’t exposed to that book in the first place, this discussion wouldn’t have happened. Surround your loved ones with positive subjects and hobbies and they will end up wanting to know more about them.

Everybody likes to be knowledgeable. That’s a fact whether you are young or old. It gives you more confidence and makes you look smarter. It allows you to open different conversations with different people with minimal effort. The only issue is that few people are willing to spend the required amount of time and put the needed effort during their life to get that level of knowledge in the first place.

Reading gives you as well insights. Reading the book “The 4th Industrial revolution” explains the latest technologies that are just starting out but that will be spreading quickly in the coming 10 or 15 years and will be shaping how the world will actually look like and how they will be impacting the whole mankind. Whether it’s about driver-less cars or artificial intelligence or delivery through the use of drones or digital currency with Bitcoin or smart cities and neuro-technologies this will allow you to open up better discussions with your children and family members and allow them to have more imagination and a wider scope of vision when they understand that these technologies will make things different in the future.

Received a comment on my first post from a colleague who asked me to add the book list that I have read during the past twelve months. Therefore, I will leave you with some notes from those books while hoping that they will inspire you to grab a book from the nearest bookstore and start your reading journey and share it with others.

Talk Like TED: The 9 public speaking secrets of the world’s top minds

• If you can’t inspire anyone else with your ideas, it won’t matter how great those ideas are. Ideas are only as good as the actions that follow the communication of those ideas.
• Master the art of storytelling. Brain scans reveal that stories stimulate and engage the human brain helping the speaker connect with the audience and making it much more likely that the audience will agree with the speaker’s point of view.
• Ideas are the currency of the twenty first century and stories facilitate the exchange of that currency. Stories illustrate, illuminate and inspire.

Direct from Dell – by Michael Dell

• Our success is due, in part, to not just our ability but a willingness to look at things differently.
• Seeing and seizing opportunities are skills that can be applied universally, if you have the curiosity and commitment.
• Believe in what you’re doing. If you’ve got an idea that’s really powerful, you’ve just got to ignore the people who tell you it won’t work and hire people who embrace your vision.
• Communicating is one of the most important tools in recovering from mistakes. When you tell someone “Look, we’ve got a problem. Here’s what it is, here’s why it happened and here’s how we are going to fix it”, you diffuse the fear of the unknown and focus on the solution.
• You need to engender a sense of personal investment in all your employees, which comes down to three things: Responsibility, Accountability, and shared success.
• To stay competitive, you should constantly question everything you do. Even if something seems to be working, it can always be improved.

Getting to Yes: Negotiating an agreement without giving in – by Roger Fischer

• Understanding the other side’s thinking is not simply a useful activity that will help you solve your problem. Their thinking is the problem.
• An apology may be one of the least costly and most rewarding investments you can make.
• Separating the people from the problem is critical. The basic approach is to deal with the people as human beings and with the problem on its merits.

Think and Grow Rich – by Napoleon Hill

• Opportunity has a sly habit of slipping in the back door and often comes disguised in the form of misfortune or temporary defeat. Perhaps this is why so many fail to recognize opportunity.
• One of the most common causes of failure is the habit of quitting when one is overtaken by temporary defeat. Failure is a trickster with a keen sense of irony and cunning. It takes great delight in tripping one up when success is almost within reach.
• No one is ever defeated until defeat has been accepted as a reality.
• Our only limitations are those we set up in our own minds.
• Ideas can be transmuted into cash through the power of definite purpose plus definite plans.

The richest man in Babylon – by George S Clason

• Wealth like a tree, grows from a tiny seed. The sooner you plant that seed, the sooner shall the tree grow.
• Opportunity is a haughty goddess who wastes no time with those who are unprepared.
• What each of us calls our “necessary expenses” will always grow to equal our incomes unless we protest to the contrary.
• Never confuse the necessary expenses with the desires.
• The soul of a free man looks at life as a series of problems to be solved.

The wealthy barber returns – by David Chilton

• Unless you marry into wealth or come from a well-to-do family, you’ll have to learn to spend less thank you make.
• “It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly” – Bertrand Russell
• Our possessions yield less pleasure each time we use them. Economists call this declining marginal utility. Psychologists call it habituation.
• “In a consumer-driven society, we act like slaves, prisoners of envy” – Ivan Illich
• People who are truly thankful for what they do have are less likely to focus on what they don’t have. That goes a long way toward controlling spending.

Millionaire Teacher: The nine rules of wealth you should have learned in school – by Andrew Hallam

• One of the surest ways to build wealth over a lifetime is to spend far less than you make and intelligently invest the difference.
• Too many people hurt their financial health by failing to differentiate between their “wants” and their “needs”.
• Your perceptions dictate your spending habits. Many people jeopardize their own pursuit of wealth or financial independence for the allusion of looking wealthy instead of being wealthy.
• If you teach your child to earn and save money, he will become a financial powerhouse. But if you simply give him money, rather than coaching him to earn it, then he may become financially weak.

Speak to Win: How to present with power in any situation – by Brian Tracy

• Before you speak, start with the end in mind. Determine what you want your talk to accomplish.
• Preparation is what separates mediocrity from greatness. Spend time developing your logic, planning your words and working towards your goal for your audience. And practice.
• The very best way to achieve a feeling is to act as if you already had that feeling.
• Use the lawyer’s method to prepare for a presentation. Lawyers learn to prepare the opponent’s case before they prepare their own. Prepare a list of objections or questions.

The New Conceptual Selling: The most effective and proven method for face to face sales planning – by Stephen Heiman

• People buy for their own reasons, not yours. You don’t have to sell them. They have thousands of reasons for wanting to buy. You just have to find out what they were and let them know there were specific ways you could help them with their specific needs and problems.
• Don’t oversell on expectations. Don’t overpromise so that you’re forced to underdeliver.
• Let your customers talk. Don’t assume you know what they are thinking.

The New strategic selling: The unique sales system proven successful by the world’s best companies – by Robert Miller

• It isn’t change in itself that causes stress or disorientation, but the uncertainty of not knowing how to react to it.
• In the complex sale, a good tactical plan is only as good as the strategy that led up to it. The objective of a good strategy, is to get yourself in the right place with the right people at the right time so that you can make the right tactical presentation.

See you in my next article. Meanwhile, Happy Reading.

Michael