So You Wanna Write A #Book, Eh?

"The creative writing homework tasks will boost your confidence. It will help you write further and turn you into an Author!"

Have you ever wondered how you should start to write your first book?

I wanted to write a book when I was younger but it didn’t materialise until many years later.

By the time I was 18 years old, I was more of a drama freak than a writer. I studied drama at school. I tried working with the theatre. I was young and loved watching plays. Going to the theatre was like a hobby for me and it still is today. I worked for a play publisher and became immersed with theatre productions. I read plays from new writers and decided I could write one myself so I did.

Eventually, I got married and then had my two sons. When my second son was just two years old and whilst I was reading a Danielle Steel novel, I realised I wanted to write fiction. But how was I going to start? I didn’t have the first clue how to start a novel. I had ideas but I couldn’t put them into words.

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WRITE A BOOK IN EIGHT DAYS

Key Life #Success Factor (#KLSF): "#READ" - 5 Hours Minimum Weekly

“In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time — none. Zero.”

Charlie Monger

5-Hour Rule: If you’re not spending 5 hours per week learning, you’re being irresponsible

Michael Simmons

Why did the busiest person in the world, former president Barack Obama, read an hour a day while in office?

Why has the best investor in history, Warren Buffett, invested 80% of his time in reading and thinking throughout his career?

Why has the world’s richest person, Bill Gates, read a book a week during his career? And why has he taken a yearly two-week reading vacation throughout his entire career?

Why do the world’s smartest and busiest people find one hour a day for deliberate learning (the 5-hour rule), while others make excuses about how busy they are?

What do they see that others don’t?

The answer is simple: Learning is the single best investment of our time that we can make. Or as Benjamin Franklin said, “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.”

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BECOME A LEARNING MACHINE

Take It #Easy; To Be #Creative

"If our minds are constantly processing information, we never get a chance to let our thoughts roam and our imagination drift."

By Emma Seppälä

Happiness research shows the biggest obstacle to creativity is being too busy

From Vincent Van Gogh on through Kanye West, the figure of the broody, tortured artist looms large in the popular imagination. But research suggests that the key to creativity has little to do with angst. In researching my book The Happiness Track, I found that the biggest breakthrough ideas often come from relaxation.

History shows that many famous inventors have come up with novel ideas while letting their minds wander. In 1881, for example, famed inventor Nikola Tesla had fallen seriously ill on a trip to Budapest. There, a college friend, Anthony Szigeti, took him on walks to help him recover. As they were watching the sunset on one of these walks, Tesla suddenly had an insight about rotating magnetic fields—which would in turn lead to the development of modern day’s alternating current electrical mechanism.

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CAUSE I GOTTA PEACEFUL EASY FEELING

#Overstressed? Try These 15 #Techniques

"Effective stress management techniques can offset the negative effects of stress in your life. Try these proven, fast, and reliable stress remedies."

15 Stress Management Techniques That Work Well … and Fast

You can’t avoid all stress, nor would you want to. A little stress is actually a good thing.

It temporarily boosts motivation and concentration, plus it helps keep your mental and physical resilience high. (1)

But when stress becomes chronic, it can leave you feeling overwhelmed, anxious, forgetful and exhausted.

And that can make you sick.

90% of all doctor visits are stress-related. (2)

Stress can make you unhappy, increasing your risk for anxiety and depression. (3)

There are many stress reduction techniques, but some, like counseling or biofeedback, require a long-term commitment and you might not feel the effects for weeks.

This article is a summary of 15 top stress management techniques that not only give immediate benefit, but also are so effective that making them a habit can reduce your stress levels permanently.

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SOME "FUNNY" IDEAS

Apply These Three Creative #Writing #Tips

 "individuals who practice creative writing challenge their emotional intelligence."

 

During high school, I was involved in many creative groups that my academic schedule no longer allows. For this reason, for the majority of my freshman year, my experiences at Bentley University had been dull. I found myself studying for six classes and working three jobs with no creative outlet. Fortunately, I spent this past summer producing creative escapes for me to carry through the rest of my undergraduate years and future endeavors.

The two outlets I was able to generate this past summer are Jefe Clothing, a streetwear clothing brand that I launched in September of 2018, and the practice of creative writing. For the purposes of this blog post, I will offer my top 3 tips for creative writing and explain how this routine enhances my college experience.

 

1) Avoid “Purple Prose”

 
Purple prose can be described as a style of writing with very flowery, unnecessary, or overly-descriptive language. Although this might read as an obvious tip, it is important to note that such prose varies from ample detail in a sizeable section of a paper to avoidable adjective or adverb usage.

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ANOTHER FIVE TOP TIPS

Simple Daily #Habit Boosts #Leadership

"Lead From Within: From quiet self-reflection will come even more effective action."

 By Lolly Daskal

A study conducted at Harvard Business School found that a daily 15-minute habit can increase your productivity and effectiveness. The daily habit is as simple as they come—making time every day for reflection will help boost your leadership.

There are at least three different ways you can practice daily self-reflection:

1. Shut everything out and sit down for a time of quiet contemplation.In my work as an executive leadership coach, I try to introduce some kind of meditation into each of my clients’ routines. I’ve seen the benefits of meditation firsthand: it can help you settle down after a long day, it can make you sharper and smarter, and it can counteract the information overload that’s become part of everyday life. When truly successful individuals begin to meditate, they become even more productive and creative leaders.

Research on mindfulness suggests that meditation sharpens skills like attention, memory and emotional intelligence. That’s a great return on an investment of just 15 minutes a day. And if you’re thinking you already have too much on your plate and don’t need yet another thing to do, rethink that proposition. After all, meditation is literally the act of doing nothing.

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Jeff Bezos' Best Advice

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#Bertrand Russell - The Thinkers', #Thinker

"it is possible to see that it is for his great contributions to 

philosophy that he will be remembered and honoured by 

future generations."

Bertrand Russell

Introduction

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM FRS ( 18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, writer, social critic, political activist, and Nobel laureate.  At various points in his life, Russell considered himself a liberal, a socialist and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had "never been any of these things, in any profound sense". Russell was born in Monmouthshire into one of the most prominent aristocratic families in the United Kingdom.

In the early 20th century, Russell led the British "revolt against idealism".He is considered one of the founders of analytic philosophy along with his predecessor Gottlob Frege, colleague G. E. Moore and protégé Ludwig Wittgenstein. He is widely held to be one of the 20th century's premier logicians. With A. N. Whitehead he wrote Principia Mathematica, an attempt to create a logical basis for mathematics. His philosophical essay "On Denoting" has been considered a "paradigm of philosophy". His work has had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science (see type theory and type system) and philosophy, especially the philosophy of language, epistemology and metaphysics.

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THOUGHTS ON RELIGION

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Ways #AI Can Drive #Innovation?

"AI will definitely facilitate and expedite human creativity, but as long as humans continue to train and learn, it likely won’t obviate human innovation any time soon."

Three Ways Artificial Intelligence Can Drive Human Innovation

Micha Breakstone

Co-Founder of Chorus.ai. Broad experience designing natural language processing and machine learning systems.

Over the past few years, businesses across many industries have been increasingly relying on artificial intelligence to deliver business value. According to Forbes, Gartner estimated that artificial intelligence (AI) will contribute $3.9 trillion in business value by 2022. But where does that value come from? A press release from PwC argues that a major component of the value it creates will come from increased worker productivity. To be precise, the release says that AI will drive over $15 trillion in global GDP gains in the next 10 years or so and that half of those gains will come from increased worker productivity. An interesting question to ask is whether AI can improve more than just worker productivity -- specifically, can AI deliver value by enhancing human innovation?

A thought-provoking article on the World Economic Forum website discusses the notion of augmented intelligence (as opposed to artificial intelligence), whereby machines augment human intelligence rather than replacing them. While the article argues that AI can make humans smarter, I believe the examples presented (AI assisting doctors with detection of early-onset diabetic eye disease and AI assisting analysts with better fraud detection in banking systems) are limited in that they augment human detection capabilities rather than enhancing human creativity and innovation. 

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AI'S POSSIBLE IMPACT ON FUTURE INNOVATIONS

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Eight Traits of #Successful Optimizers

“Encourage continual learning and the pollination of new ideas. Lead by example.”

By: Alex Birkett

Conversion optimization isn’t necessarily something you can major in during college, so how can you tell who will be a world-class optimizer and who will just be..meh?

While there are many universal traits that define a good hire – proactivity, strong work ethic, critical thinking, attention to detail, and so on – there are some specific and unique traits that help optimizers flourish.

From talking to the most prominent conversion optimizers in the industry, we honed in on some of these specific traits. Of course, after talking to enough people, there was a huge variety of traits that came up. We narrowed it down as far as we could, and sent a survey out asking optimizers – those that have worked with and hired many other optimizers – to rank traits in importance. Here are the results:

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AN INTERVIEW WITH ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

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Key Life #Success Factors (#KLSF); Learn, Learn, #Learn...

“The more I learn, the more I learn how little I know.” Socrates

If Socrates Was A Life Long Learner In A Digital Age

The intellectual roots of the critical thinking needed to be a successful lifelong learner can be traced back 2,500 years ago to the quotes, the teachings and the vision of Socrates of ancient Greece. When Socrates said the “unexamined life is not worth living”, he was creating what has come to be famously known as the Socratic principle of questioning (National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking, 2019). Socratic questioning is a mode of questioning that deeply examines the strength of a definition, justification or logic of a claim, theory, line of reasoning or stance. Lifelong learners seek to examine the claims and theories within their disciplines’ body of knowledge before accepting them as worthy of belief.

Whilst a Harvard University Extension School and an Arizona State University Osher Lifelong Learning Institute lifelong eLearner and eProfessor, I embody the Socratic principle of the unexamined life is not worth living, because I realize that a multitude of unexamined lives can add up to an unjust and an extremely dangerous world. This type of critical thinking, dialogical instruction, and advancement of knowledge is integral to all levels of education. Socrates determined that while learning new information, we are challenging our current understanding. He discovered that by applying this method of probing questioning to theories of people in power, they could not rationally justify their claim to knowledge just because they held positions of authority. By questioning and examining life, Socrates established that persons could hold high position yet still be deeply confused, have self-contradictory beliefs and inadequate evidence to their rhetoric (National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking, 2019). I view this philosophy as the beginning of empirical research.

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STANFORD: SCIENCE OF LEARNING 

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Seven Great Inspiring #TEDTalks to Make YOU #Smarter

"TED Talks get us thinking in a way that is completely unfamiliar to our minds."

7  TED Talks That Will Make You a Smarter, More Enlightened Marketer

Oct 10, 2018

Brian G Peters

I recently stumbled across a TED Talk by Simon Sinek on How Great Leaders Inspire Action and it suddenly dawned on me why TED Talks are so powerful.

Sure, they have a lot of great information. And they’re super inspiring. But those aren’t the only reasons why.

TED Talks get us thinking in a way that is completely unfamiliar to our minds.

They challenge our views of the world. They open up passage ways into places we didn’t even know existed. They leave us with a fresh perspective on what’s possible and even push us to change the way we go out our lives.

Sometimes that’s all we need as marketers.

Here are 7 TED Talks that will make you a smarter, more enlightened marketer.

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"CAN'T STOP LEARNING"

Founder TED Talks -  Richard Saul Werman

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