-
Developing your personal brand is the same thing as living and breathing your résumé every second that you’re working. Your latest tweet and comment on Facebook and most recent blog post? That’s your résumé now. That’s how you are going to announce to the world your ideas and opinions and the very things that make you unique.
– Gary Vaynerchuk on developing yourself by Crushing It! -
Passion With Crush It!
At first I wasn’t aware of who Gary Vaynerchuk was until one day the Tumblr Staff proudly announced that he had chosen the platform to power his site.
After a couple of weeks of following his story, watching his videos, appreciating his gained fame as the host of Wine Library TV and admiring his approach to personal branding and business, I then fully understood the “why” and “how” behind his much deserved success and popularity.
The moment I heard he had published a book, I could not have purchased it even faster than through the Kindle and I haven’t put it down since then. Crush It! is an inspirational/business type of read that guides you through the steps of what you can do if you have a passion for something and how to go about to monetize the heck out of it.
The real one ingredient you need is to identify that subject you obsessively care about, so that it functions as a catalyst to inspire you to move from doing something you’re probably doing now and absolutely hate. It’s about tackling that “someday” thought that we all have without ignoring our current responsibilities.
Regardless of the profession, the one common response you’ll get when asking someone who in our eyes are absolutely successful is that they have a passion for what they do. Sounds cliché but if every professional athlete, singer or chef has the same to say, it’s because the statement is accentuated with nothing but truth.
I can’t highly recommend this book enough and if you need a little nudge to convince how great it is, I suggest you give his Web 2.0 Expo talk a view. Until then, I leave you with this encouraging passage from the book:
Live your passion. What does that mean, anyway? It means that when you get up for work every morning, every single morning, you are pumped because you get to talk about or work with or do the thing that interests you the most in the world.
You don’t live for vacations because you don’t need a break from what you’re doing—working, playing, and relaxing are one and the same. You don’t even pay attention to how many hours you’re working because to you, it’s not really work. You’re making money, but you’d do whatever it is you’re doing for free.
Does this sound like you? Are you living, or just earning a living? You spend so much time at work, why waste it doing anything other than what you love most? Life is too short for that. You owe it to yourself to make a massive change for the better, and all you have to do is go online and start using the tools waiting for you there.
-
Beyond Borders: The Future of Bookselling →
Rachel Cooke on what online book retailers lack in comparison to a conventional brick and mortar bookstores that we’re use to -
Amazon does not set the synapses crackling the way the sight of a pristine shelf of books does: it does not surprise you, nor does it fuel book hunger. You click on what you came for, and then you leave. This, then, is where the independent store, with its carefully edited collection, comes in.
I’ve bragged enough about what a wonderful and practical piece of hardware the Kindle has been that it’s sickening at times but not at one point have I ever lost the fascination that exist in visiting a bookstore despite not ever actually buying a book.
For me it’s more about the experience than it is about what’s offered because at the end of the day, physical stores have fewer books, higher prices, and offer less valuable information than anywhere online. Come to think of it, if that’s the case, maybe it’s the adjacent Starbucks to the B&N that keeps me coming back more than anything.
I think the grounds by which some people still buy books in stores is either because they’re still fearful of purchasing anything online or they just want the book right away to indulge in. I fall in the category of people that roam the store examining books that draw their attention, they take notes of the author or title and subsequently make their purchase online or on the Kindle.
-
Dan Brown's "Lost Symbol" Selling Better on Kindle? →
Numbers rarely lie and Kindle nation noticed them early Wednesday morning when best-selling author Dan Brown’s latest novel, “The Lost Symbol,” has been apparently selling better on the Kindle than in hardcover on Amazon. Who says people don’t read anymore and the fact that some have selected the digital route, speaks volume about the current state of the e-book industry.
I’m already half way through the novel and I’ve never felt more satisfied in carrying around a device that eliminates the burden that comes with lugging around a 509 page hardcover book. I pre-ordered it the night before and woke up to it the following morning eager to nosedive into it. I don’t regret my Kindle purchase.
-
On Free
As soon as it became available, with just a simple keyboard shortcut, I logged onto the Kindle Store and downloaded Chris Anderson’s new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price, for free as it was promised from the author. If you don’t own a Kindle, Scribd has available a digital copy to download or if you prefer the modish touch of a book, then you’ll have to pony up $26.99 for the print edition.
I’m barely up to the second chapter so I wouldn’t dare consider this a formal review but more as a springboard to something else that falls along the same line of thought. But first, here’s Chris’s quick prologue to what the rest of the book focuses on and what to expect:
Therein lies the paradox of Free: People are making lots of money charging nothing. Not nothing for everything, but nothing for enough that we have essentially created an economy as big as a good-sized country around the price of $0.00. How did this happen and where is it going?
No question the free model that he talks about has had an phenomenal increase on the internet but one that I’ve been curious about lately pertains to iPhone apps. Like anyone else, I’ve downloaded a multitude of them and what’s made the indirect agreement between the developer and the consumer even sweeter is that they have distributed some for free and without ads that are poorly placed or have no relevancy. The only exception to this statement being this.
Of course this is an excellent marketing tool especially if a lite version of an app is obtainable but it functions more like a hook for the full paid version and it’s effortless to see the developer’s return on investment assuming they’ve provided a sufficient amount of perks that would make one upgrade. So my question is this. If there’s no ads in an app, if there’s no lite version available and if it’s free to begin with, where does Anderson’s thesis of “people making lots of money by charging nothing” come into play in this scenario?
The only response I came up with is that a free app is a great marketing tool as I mentioned before, so that in itself can add value to a developer’s work and showcase their ability to excel in the app development business and should subsequently reach out to new potential clients. Is this the case?
I think passion for a craft shouldn’t always be driven by the prospect of monetary gains but at some point I assume these creative geniuses would like to see their long hours materialize into something and as the inquisitive creature that I am, I have interest in knowing how it happens if it does.
