Picked this book title Contagious, talks about viral marketing and word to mouth. If you have read Robert Cialdini: Influence and Daniel Kahneman: Thinking fast and slow, you can skip this book.
Summary of the book in 2 pages.
Contagious
struggle
We all go through a rough patch in our life. The time when we feel the world has transpired against us, nothing we do bear success. We have witnessed this with our favorite team or the batsman. Some say it is our luck to blame while others that time is not in our favor.
I have gone through that state often but with age, I have realized if our mindset is right sailing though it is easy.
Going by the history books we can see how major innovations happened after multiple failures. Not giving up was what resulted in grander success.
positioning
January I visited Blossoms, an old book store in Bangalore. I picked this 2nd handbook title: positioning, I enjoyed reading it.
Simple take away from the book: It is customer perception that defines the success of your product. What you perceive about your product has to match with your customers.
The book cites dozen-odd examples on the brand success of companies like coca-cola, IBM, Volkswagen et all.
As someone in marketing, I would strongly recommend reading this book.
measure
Should we measure our life in terms of relationship, contribution to the world?
We get evaluated at work or in seeking education. What about our life? What are the metrics one has to measure the meaningfulness of their life?
Is it the number of friends we make, how we treat our siblings, parents?
Is it how we shape life in better ways to people around us?
Or is it the wealth, glory or materialistic possession? What is the measure of our life? What makes us go to sleep in peace.
What are that measurable metrics which ensure we die happily?
leader
Leaders are also a human-like me and you. They are no gods and they are prone to committing mistakes as well.
Accepting a mistake and fixing it gets them more loved by their peers. In the end, an organization is a collection of many humans with unique persona and ways of seeing the world.
Tune
It is difficult to stay focused in this noisy world. Everyone has got advice for others.
In building a product what matters most is your customers, who have got pain. Focusing on such a tribe is the only way to succeed. Everything else is noise.
I remember my Hindi teacher repeating proverb: Elephant walk on its own tune.
negative
What makes us see things in the negative? Is it our life long conditioning or lizard brain? We give up easily and losing is the default assumption. How will we win without a positive mindset?
What would have happened to Cars, if Ford had followed on buddy owners? What would have been to the society if Martin Luther King Jr or Mahatma Gandhi had not taken a stand? Also what about the light bulbs if Edison had given up?
Persistence and radical self-belief is key to our life journey. If we will give up, who will be with us on the journey?
memory lane
Someday I get lost in the past. Papa shared a picture of mine with my grandma, I would have been 5-6 years old I am assuming. I have been thinking about my grandma, my village and the summer holidays.
I am not sure about others but I am lucky that a good part of my childhood had village life in it. Be it swimming in the village pond or bathing in boarding pump in paddy fields. I have had a share of it all.
Not to forget all the love from my grandma which meant favorite meals, money to buy sweets. Sometimes when parents would get mad at me[cos of not studying], I would go to the village and be with my grandma.
The summer holidays were 60 days long. Eating mangoes, sugarcane and guava were past times, few times we did get caught by Mali.
Fishing right outside my home during the rainy season as a result of monsoon floods. Our school would get closed for a few weeks.
These little memories are giving me goosebumps.
paint
Are we not painting our life every day with our unique paintbrush of thoughts, actions, and creativity?
We will fill our unique colors of joy, learning, and relationships with the paintbrush.
How can it be similar to the others?
lost
It is good to be lost. We have more opportunities to think, introspect and question ourselves and the decisions we have taken so far in our life.
Being lost is not a bad thing as we fire up more of our neurons and get in the zone of pushing more for seeking uncomfortable questions.
Most of us are just living, we are not asking hard questions with self. That is the reason we feel everything is sorted and we never get lost.