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.

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.