While the title is catchy, it may be a bit misleading. This book offers valuable insight into the world of taking chances. Bill Treasurer, the author, is a former high Diving stuntman and leadership consultant who has seen the need for people to learn how to conquer their fears and go for what it is in life they truly want. Bill explains that we live in a time when there are endless opportunities. The problem is that we are also influenced by what others are doing and thinking about these same opportunities. If someone has had a bad experience, it is broadcast on the web and this will cause someone else to forgo any attempt at that particular opportunity. What they don’t tell you is that it may not have been something they were particularly adept at.

Right Risk - 10 Powerful Principles for Taking Giant Leaps with Your Life

Right Risk – 10 Powerful Principles for Taking Giant Leaps with Your Life will teach you how to gather your courage and try, when everyone around you is telling you that you will fail. He shows you how to ask the important questions. More importantly, he shows you how to seek those answers from within. It is not that you have to jump off bridges or do anything remotely as serious as that. But Bill explains that you do have to be willing to live a little less cautiously if you want to be successful in the business climate of the day.

Risks are all around us. Taking the right risks at the right time and for the right reasons are the driving principles of this book. The ten driving principles are taken from the author’s real life experiences and will guide readers through the entire process. It begins with how to recognize and evaluate risks and obstacles. Next it guides you through a process designed to help you overcome any fears you might have, the right way. Each chapter concludes with probing questions designed to keep you thinking in the right direction.

The book closes with an emphasis on the importance of being your authentic self. Being honest with yourself is truly the only way to really overcome internal fears. Kidding yourself about their own strengths and weaknesses is what leads most people to take risks that they are not equipped to handle. Right Risk will help you find a lot of insights into your own psyche and this will help you overcome your aversion to taking risks. It gives great advice on how to approach the risks that come up in your business, personal and family life. Not only is it a great read, Right Risk is a great life resource.

When you see this book in the shelves, and you skim through it, you will be attracted to the caption at the back that says this book aims not to alarm you about the use of Internet, but it is also not intended to proclaim Internet as if to sing praises for its glory. Seeing how important the Internet is, I find no reason to antagonize today’s technology, but it is a good idea too to be aware of what these devices can do to us. “The Shallows: What The Internet is Doing to Our Brains” by Nicholas Carr gives a decently balanced view about the matter by tracing the history of books, reading, and technology. It also points out the developments including how maps and clocks were altered, our perspectives on the changes, and how our brains really are made of and how it works.

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

To think that the Internet can make us more attention deficit is far from original and only an axiom. One of Carr’s (the author) main problems in this information era is that it has made it hard for people, even those educated ones to just sit down and read a book the conventional way.

Carr’s major criticism that is quite obvious in the title of the book is that, as our knowledge gets broader and readily accessible, it gets shallower, too. It means we do not have time and patience to stay with just one idea for long to thoroughly evaluate it. We are too restless to move to the next website like Facebook, Tweet, blog post and so on.

Arguing with Carr’s arguments is hard, but finally, he cannot really provide a solution to the problem. There is not a real criticism if a solution can not be provided. We can not simply discard the Internet and never use it again, and many people will not be happy about that even if that is possible. For those people who despise it really, a total collapse of civilization and a giant step backwards to the early times would be their best hope. Of course, that is a possibility that most of us can consider inconceivable at this time.

Maybe, Carr, like most people, overrates the true value of conventional book learning. From another perspective, reading is a simulated activity that promotes a particularly left brained and Aristotelian point of view. We could just consider the Internet as a portion of giving tribute to the computer age and we romanticize it slightly.

The Shallows gives some good point regarding the Internet. If you are an affectionate reader, the best cure to Carr’s warnings is to keep reading and net surfing balanced, which means we should not rely solely on the net. You can also listen to books on tape, which is a more healthy way of letting your brain absorb information.

One thing is clear. The Internet is able to distract and waste our time if we don’t use it intelligently. This, of course, has to be kept in our minds and the benefits of it. At least, the Shallows remind us of what we may lose when we are online.

Political cartoon

This is a guest post written by, Daniel Nanavati

Daniel Nanavati is a writer living in Cornwall UK. His non-fiction work ‘A Brief History Of Lies’, published by Footsteps Press, is available on We Compare Books for the lowest possible price. ISBN 1449963277. A UK and European edition will be available at the end of May.

The skill of lying starts in most people by the time they are four, in a few of us by the time we are three, years old. The lies, and sometimes our ability in telling them, develops over childhood. Along with putting on ‘the face’ and their complexity. Psychologists call this ‘Machiavellian Intelligence’ and describe it as the ability in us to hold a world view, alter it to suit our agenda, hold in our minds the world view of others and skilfully sell them the altered world view. That takes a good deal of brain power.
The pre frontal cortex where all this carries on according to the rudimentary but interesting findings of a 2005 study, is also known to be the area of the brain that deals with ethical behaviour. So nature has given us an inbuilt bridle, if we choose to use it. The study was fascinating in showing that this area of the brain in psychological liars and autistic children were almost mirror images of each other. They chose autistic children because it is well known that they find it very hard to tell a lie even when told what to say.
The fact that we all ‘learn’ to lie but may all have different expertise in the area because of our brain tissue is a very new idea. It doesn’t do away with the ancient ideas of there being some acceptable lies (to help other people) but it does open up new areas for considerable human rights discussion. How far does this brain tissue matrix in the pre frontal cortex ‘help’ us lie? This has implications for the legal system, employment law and security agencies to name a few. I am sure right now if someone told you they wanted you to have an MRI scan to gauge your ‘likely ability to lie’ before they would employ you, you would hit the roof. But that day may be coming.
And when you think we use lies in every walk of life; that we live in a society where we expect to be lied to by politicians and lovers, business interests and journalists (in fact the very places we should demand only the truth) you may also to some extent welcome new advances and new knowledge.
But just to have a heightened ability to lie doesn’t mean we use it. 4% of us are practised liars according to the studies. The rest of us are habituated to the occasional lie, the social nicety, the self-deceit that gets us through the day. The truth isn’t so much out there, but in there somewhere!

Conversations by Joseph Twelves

A Problem Far Too Common
Conversations by Joseph Twelves

In middle school, you’re asked what do you want “to be when you grow up”. In high school, you meet with guidance counselors and take aptitude tests to try to figure out the “right fit” for you. In college, you are switching majors left and right trying to figure out what to get your degree in. And too often, you will find yourself stuck in a job that you hate just to pay the bills… purely a means to an end.
These are the scenarios that are far too common when, believe it or not, it IS possible to decide on a career and have it be the right match. The odds of ever working in your dream job are truly slim if you simply drift into whatever comes along. On the other hand, the odds of winding up doing exactly what you want approaches 100% if you combine a proven career decision method with the simple steps needed to find your passion.
Here are the three key tools found in Conversations: Find Your Niche! that can help:
1) A demonstrated research and decision-making procedure called the Find Your Niche Roadmap
2) Focused, in-depth interviews with 150 working professionals from the full spectrum of career fields about the nature of their jobs all in a fun, conversational format
3) Six special appendices offering you an invaluable collection of critical career information and hard to find resources that will save you months of research
This is the key information you need to understand the career landscape and make an informed decision. The vicious cycle of being unhappy in your job, not knowing what to do, but having to provide for yourself and your family is not a pleasant one. The key is to either prevent this from happening, or if you are already in this position, stop it now!
Join the conversation, find even more resources to help you on your journey, and make this problem far less common.