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.

Choosing a career path is a major decision. Discovering your talents and natural abilities is a top priority for college students. What type of work are you passionate about? Many college students simply aren’t sure what type of career to choose. These students might find some guidance in a top-notch career advice book, several of which are discussed below.

What Color is Your Parachute? – This has been the world’s best selling job-hunting book for over three decades – more than 10 million copies have been sold. Will the author Richard N. Bolles help you discover which career is best for you? He might! The book helps you identify your passions.

What Color is Your Parachute?

After you choose the right career, check out Bolles’ great advice for getting a job. The author provides tips for finding your dream job without depending on ads, agencies, or online job postings.

College Majors Handbook with Real Career Paths and Payoffs: The Actual Jobs, Earnings, and Trends for Graduates of 60 College Majors – This practical guide, written by Neeta P. Fogg, is a great resource when making career choices. The book is based on a U.S. Census Bureau study of 150,000 college graduates. It provides extensive information about careers available to students with different majors. It shows the specific jobs actually obtained by graduates holding various degrees. You’ll learn which interests and abilities are best suited to each major. The book also covers job responsibilities and salaries

College Majors Handbook with Real Career Paths and Payoffs: The Actual Jobs, Earnings, and Trends for Graduates of 60 College Majors

The Pathfinder: How to Choose or Change Your Career for a Lifetime of Satisfaction and Success – The book’s author, Nicholas Lore, is a well-respected authority in this field. The book received high praise from a large number of readers. Be prepared to do some work; the book includes exercises and “things to do.” The exercises push you to think long and hard about your career options.

The Pathfinder: How to Choose or Change Your Career For a Lifetime of Satisfaction and Success

This book is one of the best at helping you accurately assess your strengths, talents, and natural skills. It’s an excellent resource to help you evaluate your life and your objectives. The book places an emphasis on finding a career that will lead to a lifetime of satisfaction and success. Yes, there is more to a job than money!

Have No Career Fear: a College Grad’s Guide to Snagging Work, Blazing a Career Path and Reaching Job Nirvana – This handy book is filled with advice from recent college graduates and professionals. Hilarious puns and jokes spice up the book and make for an enjoyable read. The book’s numerous tips help you find the right career while teaching you how to be more inventive, aggressive, and persistent when looking for a job.

Have No Career Fear : A College Grad's Guide to Snagging Work, Blazing a Career Path, and Reaching Job Nirvana

How to Get Any Job with Any College Major: A New look at Career Launch – This book challenges you to evaluate your values, beliefs, and skills. Hopefully you like a challenge! The author Donald Asher argues against the notion that only brainy graduates with specialized majors obtain high paying, visible jobs. He makes the assertion that liberal arts majors can also snag lucrative and fulfilling jobs.

The book teaches college graduate how to promote their skills and advises them about the skills that are most valued by employers. Asher teaches recent college graduates how to convince influential people to help them establish their careers. The book also provides detailed instructions such as how to make contact and get interviews.

Another great book, entitled Conversations: Find your niche! was reviewed last year on this blog. Check out that review here.

Obviously, choosing a career path is a major decision. These great career help books can help you make the right choice. It is certainly worth the time and effort to check them out.

This was a guest post written by Len Dreifort

Len Dreifort writes about jobs in nursing, as well as jobs in several other career fields, for Work Coach Cafe.

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.

This is a guest post written by Bob Hartzell
 
Bob Hartzell went to college before book shopping was an option and is still in debt as a result.  He currently writes for Master Degree Online.com and other alternative education options at the graduate level. He recently highlighted the top online masters in education schools & prograsm according to US News & World Report.
 
When I was an English major I went through the agonizing process that millions of other students have experienced and that spawned this website: I went down to the college bookstore and emptied my checking account buying books that were purely and simply an investment in a college degree.  Most of them were a challenge to read, some of them were altogether too dense with paragraphs that landed like lead on my delicate undergraduate brain.  Granted those that I got through contributed substantially to my education; they were on the whole a necessary labor and productive in their purpose when I bothered to invest the time they required.
 
But they changed my perspective on books and book buying radically.  Every quarter (I got to buy text books three times a year) I was offended by the textbook price scam that continues today, and every quarter I was saddled with scholarly works that made English seem like a recently acquired language.  The books I bought for my major were mostly historical works and I was in most cases years away from truly appreciating them as classics.  So the very thing that drove me to declare a literary major became a burden – reading.
 
If 800 pound textbooks have become part of your college experience it might help to not lose sight of the fact that books come in all intellectual shapes, sizes and flavors.  Google the word “books” and Amazon is in your face.  Amazon does not own the book space.  If you once read for pleasure and would like some entertaining reading on talented work, start with a visit to the venerable New York Times.
 
1.      The book page in the newspaper still publishes quality reviews and their staff has remarkable range.   The NYT Sunday Review of Books, which is a multimedia extravaganza devoted to the printed word.  Podcasts, reviews, criticism – and an assortment of soapboxes for commentary relevant and obscure.  But the Sunday Review has a much wider range of entertainment than overwrought criticism, it’s a great place to learn about the up-and-comers, and about what the authors that are both famous AND good have been up to lately.
 
2.      If you’re a little more inclined to browse through a reading resource that is not as engaged with literary prestige, the Barnes & Noble Review does a good job of sorting through new works and offering articles about literary activities across the globe.  There’s a lot of history to be found there as well, about writers and about their topics – historical or imaginary.  Like every brick-and-mortar outlet for products in the dead-tree media, they’re hanging on with fingernails.  But for the moment their review pages offer some quality viewing about entertaining reading.
 
3.      The New York Times book section is a separate cauldron of critics from the New York Times Review of Books, a biweekly publication that was founded independently of the newspaper and before long assumed a lofty position in the pantheon of Meaningful Book Reviews.  For all of its importance it’s still a good resource for new highlights in the bookshelves along with a hefty dose of political and cultural commentary.  Click on “current issue” to get to the book reviews, which is where you’ll find the fiction that is identified as such.
 
4.      The Atlantic Monthly, now the Atlantic, offers an assortment of discussions about printed works in their culture section.  These reviews tend to be about books that focus on current events and other Matters of Import rather than literary efforts.  If international affairs capture your interest this resource can inform you about a broad range of published works that you’ll never see on the display shelves at the local bookstore.   A little esoteric perhaps, but like every other dustbin you can often find something different.  And if your printed environment is composed of mandatory texts, different is good.

In an effort to escape from the ever present bad news that seems to be the cornerstone of our current civilization I have spent much time recently watching old movies, and reading good books.

The desire that I feel to escape to a “happier time” is understandable, after all, we are living in an unstable world, where no one knows what the next shoe that will drop will be. Oddly enough, instead of turning to fantasy or other such genres I find greater comfort in books that mimic reality, reading about the extremes of what could be possible, but thankfully what has not yet occurred.

One such book is “Death Wave” by Stephen Kahn. This book provides an excellent analysis into much of what is currently happening in our world – in terms of the financial crisis.

From the book cover:

“In the midst of a financial crisis one man must save the world with the aid of a maniacal serial killer, his dead hamster, and a homeless bum named “Troll”.

Stewart is a young man trying to keep it together during the worst financial crisis since the great depression. The corrupt politics and corporate scandals…”

If you want to read more about this book, or listen to free excerpts from the audio book, please go to http://www.kafilmworks.com/deathwave/contents