First of all, the email subject title is on purpose, in case you wonder…
Second, if you ever experience 20 hours of flight travel, you’ll agree that it is very tiring and boring when you got nothing to do but sleeping along the way. In order to counter such fatigue and boredom from ever happening, I decided to buy some books at the airport bookstore. The thing about buying a book in a place where people are trapped and can’t get out is that even the store provides great books and many are intriguing to be bought, yet the price are premiums, so I decided to buy two of them at a reasonable price, and buy the rest later at online bookstore in Indonesia one I get back.
The first book is titled “Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff” by Richard Carlson, it looked going to give me a great insight on higher level perspective since it is quite thick and all words with no picture (typical book of my favorite), and the other is “It Is Not How Good You Are, It Is How Good You Want To Be” by Paul Arden, which was placed at a not too strategic shelf, dusty and not fully sealed, thus the content is more likely a scrapbook rather than a textbook, so then I was presuming it is going to be a light reading, just in case I get bored with the first one.
As planned, from Changi to Narita, I opened the first book and start reading, it is a good book, but a bit out of my expectation, because by reading the review on its back paper, people would assume that this book is about how to see a bigger picture and higher altitude in making decision. I was partially wrong, and so probably those who bought the similar title have similar opinion. Despite of the unexpected, I kind of like it, it teaches us to be more patient, compassionate, and being nice to others to bring us the inner peace. I would recommend this book for whoever wants to be more effective in handling any stressful situation, how to listen attentively, and how to respond to others (it’s a stress management book, by the way).
I have to admit Carlson book is well written and so easy to read, It was just two hours to finish such a book. However I am now filling half of my book shelves with that particular kind of books, adding up another will be overwhelming. And turns out, Arden’s book is the one that steal my heart, its simplicity is its greatest sophistication. It is inspirational yet practical, the once scrapbook that I was thought to be overpriced now seems to be a great investment. His ideas are original, against the mainstream, provocative, unusual, odd, tend to be a bit harsh but absolutely true, dead true I would say. And it is so clicking to what we do in our daily life as consultants. I think I will share you some of his thoughts during my training days’ spare time. Or, better yet, you can buy his tiny book for SGD 126.90 (How much is it in IDR?).
Those two books gave me additional lesson other than reading; on not to judge the book by its cover (this time is in a literal way) J, in search of the expectation beyond the appearance is something that we do every day, every minute and every second, every blink of an eye, and every moment that we share. Most of the time our expectations are wrong, but hey… being wrong is being right (So that’s what Arden says). We find lessons from our mistakes not from the other way around.
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