Get your brain in motion
The manual “Be A Better Writer“, downloadable for free at Bookboon.com, includes tips that will help you improve your writing (and actually get your writing done faster and easier) no matter what type of writing you need to do.
Bookboon provides a collection of valuable free ebooks for professionals.
Randolph Frederick “Randy” Pausch (October 23, 1960 – July 25, 2008) was an American professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Pausch discovered he had pancreatic cancer in September 2006, and in August 2007 he was given a terminal diagnosis.
On September 18, 2007, he gave a lecture full of inspirational life lessons titled “The Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams“, which became popular on YouTube (watch the video of the “Last Lecture” here). He then co-authored a book called The Last Lecture on the same theme. According to the New York Times “As the video of his lecture spread across the Web and was translated into many languages, Dr. Pausch (…) became a deeply personal friend, wise, understanding and humorous, to many he never met”.
Here are a few suggestions from his lectures:
– We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand. If I do not seem as depressed or morose as I should be, I am sorry to disappoint you.
– The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out; the brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. The brick walls are there to stop the people who do not want it badly enough. They are there to stop the other people!
– Wait long enough and people will surprise and impress you. When you are angry at somebody, you just have not given them enough time. Just give them a little more time — and they will almost always impress you.
– Being successful does not make you manage your time well. Managing your time well makes you successful!
– Delegation: No one is an island. You can accomplish a lot more with help.
Read more quotations here.
Image source: http://bit.ly/PIeDHG – image by xjki (License CC BY-NC 2.0)
Posted by: Vincenzo Savina
This free e-book Thinking Skills by Eric Garner, downloadable at bookboon.com cover all kinds of thinking skills and will make you see that your brain is the most powerful organ you possess. It is the tool that, if used skillfully, can help you perform better in your job, better in your team and better in your organization. By developing your thinking skills to meet the needs of the modern world, you are guaranteed to succeed.
Most of us think that the history of science is undoubtedly important for the evolution of our society, but, at the same time, incredibly boring. Since scientists and mathematicians who made the history of science, and therefore of the human kind as a whole, are simply thought to be massive geniuses, it is hard to imagine how their stories could be applied in our everyday life. That was the purpose of Bill Bryson, who made it possible to gather the amazing tales of some of the most extraordinary inventions and discovers in our history, showing how ingenuity must be combined with other ingredients: surely passion and hard work, but also fate and even good luck.
The message of the book “A short story of nearly everything” is simple. There are not revolutionary men, but only revolutionary ideas. Success is the result of a complex equation in which ingenuity, curiosity and a favorable context are the main variables.
Image source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bill_bryson_a_short_history.jpg
The theme of Diplocalendar 2013 was inspired by Mark Twain’s quotation that: “The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them”.
Diplomats, like many other professionals, must read, understand, synthesise and make sense of newspapers, magazines, emails, official reports and so many other things related to their daily work. But there is so much else to read both for pleasure and to deepen our knowledge.
There is no specific selected book for the month of December, but a list of suggested readings for 2014. Consider them as our … Christmas present.
Many people now understand the role of personal hygiene in maintaining good health. Until the 19th Century this was not the case everywhere and life expectancy was considerably shorter due to contagious disease, plagues, contaminated food and water, etc.
While viruses and plagues continue to exist in real life, a similar situation arose in cyberspace in the form of malicious software.
The explosive growth in the adoption of electronic devices by the general population (computers in various forms, smartphones and tablets) is creating and environment where some measures of digital hygiene (such as maintaining strong passwords, carrying out backups, not becoming a victim to phishing, etc.) are needed to protect the devices and the data they contain as well as their owners.
Ed Gelbstein, in his last book published with Bookboon, describes in simple, non technical language a collection of good practices that can be considered as sensible good hygiene to adopt in cyberspace.
The book “Good digital Hygiene” is downloadable for free at Bookboon.com
Whether we speak of it as procrastination or writer’s block, the inability to move forward on a project affects many people.
According to Denny Coates, author of the blog Building Personal Strength, “the cure is simply to sit down and begin doing the work. Just start […] The ideas will simply begin to flow.”
For further reading, he readily suggests The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles, written by Steven Pressfield. It’s a brilliant self- help book about procrastination and its cure.
image source: http://goo.gl/3ZM1A
The theme of Diplocalendar 2013 was inspired by Mark Twain’s quotation that: “The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them”.
Diplomats, like many other professionals, must read, understand, synthesise and make sense of newspapers, magazines, emails, official reports and so many other things related to their daily work. But there is so much else to read both for pleasure and to deepen our knowledge.
One of the selected book suggested that supports professional development and is relevant to management in diplomacy is the classic C. Northcote Parkinson‘s Parkinson’s Law
The manual Excel 2010 Advanced, downloadable for free at Bookboon.com, concerns the spreadsheet software in the new Microsoft 2010 Office Suite. Excel allows you to store, manipulate and analyze data in organized workbooks for home and business tasks.
Bookboon provides a collection of valuable free ebooks for professionals.
Diplomats, like many other professionals, must read, understand, synthesise and make sense of newspapers, magazines, emails, official reports and so many other things related to their daily work. But there is so much else to read both for pleasure and to deepen our knowledge.
The selected book suggested for the month of September that supports professional development and is relevant to management in diplomacy is the classic J. Lynne and A. Jay‘s Yes Minister related to the famous BBC sitcom series
The theme of Diplocalendar 2013 was inspired by Mark Twain’s quotation that: “The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them”.
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