Modern Business Books Are Just Filler

I have always loved reading business books and finding new ideas that I can put to use. Over the years I’ve read many different business books by many different authors and although a lot of the knowledge overlaps, most are packaged up and written in different ways to share new angles.

It seems like all modern business books, those released in the last two years, are nothing but a vomit of name drops of famous people and companies and how they do things. I’m sick of hearing about them. I know their stories, and I’m buying the book for your story.

This style must be selling well with the publishers, but I’m tired of the same content and all the filler.

Sending Email? Remind us who you are

I subscribe to a lot of newsletters and company marketing lists. I enjoy staying up to date through various mailing lists but a pattern I keep seeing is getting emails from companies that I don’t recognize.

Just today I received this one:

Happy New Year! We’re excited about 2019 here at {randomWordCompany}: there’s lots to do, and we have an incredible roadmap for the year ahead.

If they would have just reworded it to include their slogan or what they do I would have instantly remembered. For example:

Happy New Year! We’re excited about 2019 here at {randomWordCompany}, the best note taking app for your phone: there’s lots to do, and we have an incredible roadmap for the year ahead.

If you don’t email your subscribers often then use little things like this to help reinforce who you are. Think about reading a book series, every new book gives you little hints and reminders of what happened in the past to carry you forward. Your emails should do the same.

Signal v Noise moves to WordPress

Today Signal v Noise announced they have moved from Medium to WordPress and there main reasoning seems to be because of the change in how Medium is ran.

I personally tried out Medium back when they originally switched and had high hopes, Medium said they were going to work for the writers but more and more you could see the tide shifting between what they said and what they did. I left and haven’t looked back. Granted I might not be getting the visits running my own thing but it’s mine and I can do what I want and make it suit my needs.

I love this quote from their move:

Traditional blogs might have swung out of favor, as we all discovered the benefits of social media and aggregating platforms, but we think they’re about to swing back in style, as we all discover the real costs and problems brought by such centralization.

I’m hoping for a blogging resurgence and have been loving being a part of it. Now if I could just figure out how to get people commenting on the posts instead of replying on the social share. haha

Anyone Can Draw

Although I love drawing I am not very good at it, but I don’t let that stop me. The act of creating something, even something terrible, brings me joy so I keep doing it.

If you are like me, remembering that you can draw almost anything with a circle, a rectangle, and a triangle then it allows you to break down an object into it’s most basic form and recreate it. Thinking of it like this also allows you to draw objects super quick which is great for taking notes.

Shortcuts

Some people believe the only way to learn a skill is by the hard knocks of trial and error and spending hours stuck on frustrating problems that an expert just knows.

Granted this way of learning works and I know this from experience. That is the path I took into being a developer. Now that I’m older my time is much more valuable to me and I can’t spend countless hours learning a new skill.

Instead I try to find the shortcuts to get the results I want. As an example, I’ve been wanting to get better at creating drawings on the iPad. I found an app that will do everything under the sun, but just learning the app is daunting. My first step was to find a YouTube video helping get the basics and I found an engaging teacher who also had a course for sale. I picked it up for $10 and it goes through everything from the basics to the advanced. Everything I needed.

From spending the money and watching a dedicated course I’m already farther ahead than I would have been going alone. The next time you want to learn a new skill look for the shortcuts and figure out how to take advantage of them.

An Easy Way To Save

 

It’s always hard to bring down your standard of living but you need to do that in order to save more money. If that doesn’t sound appealing the next time you get a raise take the extra money and put it all in your retirement account or an emergency fund that you can’t easily access.

Your standard of living will remain the same and you’ll automatically save more.

Set your Terminal to Red for Production

Making mistakes in production is one thing that always scares me. This problem multiplies if you use a lot of terminal tabs but a quick and easy solution is to make production red so it’s immediately noticeable where you are logged into.

For the image above I’m using Termius on iOS which supports this and allows you to set it on a folder level and then any ssh connections under the group inherits the color.

It’s a really simple way to help distinguish which connection you are logged into and can be a life saver. This can done in other terminals too, just do a web search to find instructions for your app of choice.