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.

This guest post was submitted by William Rohde.

William is a foreign affairs professional, specializing in foreign policy analysis, U.S. politics, writing, client relations, and communications. His research background and interests include Chinese foreign & security policy, U.S. national security policy, U.S.-Chinese Relations, defense issues, governance, and South Asia.
If you wish to contact William, please leave a comment and we will forward your thoughts to him.

Max Brooks’s book, World War Z is an excellent read for all of you zombie lovers out there. The book portrays (is about) humanity’s struggle against a zombie plague ( -virus) that brings mankind to the brink of annihilation and back again. Max Brooks does an extraordinary job of framing humanity’s fragility, limitations, resourcefulness and greatness in his oral history of civilizations fight for survival against overwhelming odds. His unique narrative style provides a wonderful individualistic perspective on how the Zombie War impacted different parts of the world culturally and in a religious sense.

The chronicle of the Zombie War in World War Z takes you from New Dachang in the United Federation of China, where the epidemiological trail began with the twelve year old patient zero, to floating cities of refugees that dotted the world’s oceans, to the initial feeble attempts by the major world powers to combat the rising and walking dead, to the development of the Redeker Plan that offered humanities best hope for survival, to the west-of-the-Rockies redoubt that helped turned the tide in North America and paved way for plausible recovery.

Max Brooks’s portrayal of what happens to the different governments and societies around the world as they struggle to overcome the zombie plague outbreak highlights the strengths and weaknesses of nation’s global health systems across the globe.

In addition to being an excellent story about zombies, the book World War Z has been taken a step further by Brooks and can be utilized by global health policy planners as an excellent scenario of how a pandemic might impact the different nations of the world and the types of policy solutions/actions that would be needed to contain such a pandemic. From a global health standpoint the book also highlights the current strengths and weaknesses in emergency response faced by many governments across the globe in handling health emergency such as a global pandemic. The incorporation of workable policy solutions (e.g. Redeker Plan and U.S Reconstruction Plan) that could be realistically used today to contain a pandemic makes the story that more practical and connects the reader to the plausibility of the events that take place.
Have you read this book? What did you think about it? Please submit your thoughts as a comment.

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.

The following book review was submitted to me by one of my friends from Twitter, Lisa R. (@Lisalr1)

Buy  Wurthering Heights at the lowest price by clicking on this link.

“Set in the 18th century against the backdrop of the wild and rugged Yorkshire moors, Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte is the story of unbridled passion, longing and revenge. The story begins when Mr. Lockwood, tenant of an old mansion Thrushcross Grange goes across the windy moors to meet his weird, reticent and brooding landlord Heathcliffe, master of another mansion Wuthering Heights. He is forced to spend the night in Heights because of a thunderstorm and is put up in a room which once belonged to a young Catherine Earnshaw. The night turns out to be wild and stormy. Adding a touch of eeriness is the figure of a young woman whose plaintive wails of ”let me in” sets the story in motion.

Heathcliffe, actually of gypsy descent, was raised in the Heights where he was brought by the master of the house Earnshaw from one of his trips to faraway places. Heathcliffe befriends and falls in love with the wild and passionate Catherine Earnshaw who returns Heathcliffe’s silent and brooding love. Their star-crossed love coupled with the intense hatred of Cathy’s brother forms the core of the book.
How Heathcliffe loses Cathy and his agonizing longing for the only woman he could ever love is the haunting motif of the novel.”