Seth Godin has published a new e-book about the values of the new internet age – what is valued by the people and what is needed for you to be and to have in order to be successful nowadays.

The book is entitled “What Matters Now?” and includes thoughts and ideas by the most popular authors and bloggers in the world like: Dan Pink, David Meerman Scott, Tom Peters, Gary Vaynerchuk, Guy Kawasaki, Gina Trapani, Hugh MacLeod, Penelope Trunk, Tim O’Reilly, Merlin Mann, Seth Godin and many others.

This is a great Christmas gift for all of us and it will help us clear our vision and our goals for the new year and all the years ahead. You can download it for free from here. Read it and enjoy it!

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I am a young entrepreneur (although I am not so young in age) and I am still working to find my own way into business. I still haven’t reached the success I am aiming at but there is one thing I have learned. If you want to be great in business you have to be a great person. And Rajesh teaches me that. In his blog posts and in his Twitter posts I can always find provocative thoughts that make me think about who I am, how I spend my time and what I give to the world.

When you start asking yourself such questions you inevitably will find your answers and this is exactly what will make you a better person and this is what will bring your undertakings to successful end.

Now Rajesh has collected 140 of his Twitter reflections and put them in a small book. It is called #ThinkTweet Book 1: Bite-sized lessons for a fast paced world. This is 100% pure, high-quality wisdom and although he said that you can read it in 15 minutes, I do not recommend reading it so fast. I recommend you to take some time to look at yourself and to think about every single sentence after you read it. Or, if you find it so addictive, read it once, then think about it, then read it once again. Because this is not a book that you will read once and throw away. This is a book that you need to have by yourself and read it every time you need courage, direction and spiritual support for the things you do.

Here are a few quotes I liked very much:

• Vividly imagining a fantasy won’t make it a reality. You still need to work to make it happen.
• If nobody is listening when you are talking, shouting won’t help.
• If you are “faking it” so that one day you can make it, you are missing the point. It’s the journey that counts.
• When you become somebody, it’s easy to forget those that were with you when you were nobody.
• The ultimate fantasy: To expect spectacular results from mediocre efforts.
• If you are NOT in the middle of something important, you might be in the middle of a mess.

Rajesh Setty’s writings really helped me change my life. His blog, his tweets, his books. If you find these quotes inspiring – go buy the #ThinkTweet book! The value you get from it is immeasurable! And, as you can see from the title, it is going to be a series of books so we are going to have more…

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What kind of person are you? Do you have dreams? Do you believe in them? Do you tell the truth? Are you persistent enough to accomplish your goals? These are the questions you should ask yourself if you decide to take on the path to success.

Phil Gerbyshak of Slacker Manager gives a great list of quotes from famous and successful people, which I find very inspiring and I decided to share with you those who touched me the most. He calls them “management quotes” but I think these are inspirational thoughts for life itself.

The first people had questions and they were free. The second people had answers, and they became enslaved.

Wind Eagle, American Indian Chief

The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear.

Herbert Agar

It is never too late to be who you might have been.

George Eliot

I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life.  The problem is that I can’t find anybody who can tell me what they want.

Mark Twain

For every failure, there’s an alternative course of action.  You just have to find it.  When you come to a roadblock, take a detour.

Mary Kay Ash

Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.

Thomas Edison

It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.

Harry S. Truman

I wish you all to reach the success you imagine!

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I am sure you will find something interesting and inspirational. Just make sure you have the time – it is really worth it!

Thanks, Kelly!

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I’ve always loved reading books and I have always found my inspiration there. It doesn’t matter if they were novels or non-fiction books – I’ve learned a lot from them and they’ve had a great impact on my way of thinking and on my entire life.

My fellow blogger Dimitar Nikolov has shared his top 10 list of life-changing books and has tagged me to do the same. The meme was started by Rayna Tzvetkova (in English) and I was so inspired by this idea that I created my own book store. It is the ultimate place where you can find the books I like and I highly recommend. There are not so many books there for now since I have read most of the books in my life in Bulgarian and they are not sold by Amazon but I am going to add there more titles regularly so please, visit it from time to time and take a look at the books listed there.

It is very difficult for me to select only 10 books because my life is constantly changing and there have been always books that have driven the change. At least the change in my mind. So I will share with you some titles and authors that have inspired me through time in different areas of my life.

Software development and Project management

I started my career as a software developer and at the time I thought I was pretty good at writing software. What was my surprise when my brother brought me Steve McConnell‘s books Code Complete and Rapid Development! It was a true revelation! After reading them I finally understood that software development is not writing code for fun but a real industry with its own business rules and if you want to be a true professional you have to know them and follow them.

The software industry is very indicative of the importance of the people who work there. There are still a lot of people who think that making software is technical work and they are very, very wrong. Making software is a very delicate business of making some people work together as a team. Thinking of them as of replaceable parts of a big machine brings Death March projects which are prectable failures. The software development world invented the word Peopleware, which is how you manage and motivate a team of creative people.

Business and Entrepreneurship

I worked as an employee for about 20 years. I have always dreamed to start my own business but I was always afraid to jump into the deep waters justifying myself that I didn’t have enough money, connections, partners, or ideas. At the end of my career I was a regional manager of an U.S. software development company in Bulgaria. Then the company bankrupted and we were all laid off. Then I realized that it was exactly the right moment to start working for myself.

Fortunately, I had some savings so I didn’t worry about the incomes at the beginning. But I was still afraid – I had no one around me to follow as example. Then I started reading books on starting up your own business, how to develop it and how to market it. Guy Kawasaki‘s books Rules For Revolutionaries and The Art of the Start are still like Bibles to me along with Seth Godin‘s The Bootstrapper’s Bible, Unleashing the Ideavirus, and The Dip.

Personal Growth

The next step in my personal development was to realize that the most important thing in life is to open your heart, to accept and enjoy all the good things that happen to you, and to learn from the bad things because this is what makes your life worthwhile and makes you happy.

I came to realize that there is a tight relationship between the quality of your (spiritual) life and your wellfare. When I feel happy and my soul is free then my business goes better and I am getting richer. When I am angry with the world and I feel miserable then my customers run away from me. The book Beyond Code by Rajesh Setty is the perfect example of this statement and this is the reason why I put it in this category. Although intended for IT professionals, this book teaches us how to be better people and thus being more successful profesionals. And books like The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success by Deepak Chopra, Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey, and Personal Development for Smart People by Steve Pavlina really changed my life for better.

Novels

Of course, as a normal person, I read and find inspiration in novels as well as the non-fiction books. There are books which I can open at any time at any page and start reading them with great pleasure because they are full of life, love, forgivable sins, and a little mystery. Such books are Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

I will be glad if the following people join this meme and share their list of life-changing books: Rajesh Setty, Liz Strauss, Steve Pavlina, Dessy Boshnakova, Polly Kozarova, Craig Brown, Pawel Brodzinski,  Pavel Donchev, and Nikolay Yordanov.

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Alltop is a great place – this is a blog aggregator but its content is managed by editors and there you can find the best blogs in the (English-speaking) world divided in categories. For each blog you can see the last five posts and there is a little preview of each of those five posts.

There are great people in this world – they are masters, teachers, and leaders. And most of them have blogs where they share their knowledge, experience, and ideas with the others. Reading their blogs is priceless and reading from Alltop spares you a lot of time looking elsewhere.

Now Alltop offers us a new service – the ability to create your own page with all the blogs that you like and read regularly. This way all the people who are interested in you as a person will know what you are interested in. It is something like a blogroll but very, very rich and with a very high quality.

I liked the idea very much and I already made my page. It has a simple URL – my.alltop.com/MikeRamm – so come and visit it. I believe that you are going to like the blogs I read because the people who write them are really great.

Alltop is created by Guy Kawasaki – a man who I admire as my personal guru – and there you can also find his favorite blogs.

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I see I haven’t been writing in this blog for quite a long time. The last couple of months was too heavy for me. I had a lot of work to do but it is not what made me so tired. I am not afraid of work especially when I do it with passion. I started to do something I believed was useful and I had the qualities to make it so that gave me the strength to cope with the tasks I set to myself.

But at that same moment my faith was put to a test. Too many people appeared in the internet who started spitting on me and writing rubbish about me. I got so much hatred on myself so I started thinking whether the things I do make any sense. Why do people who you try to help throw stones upon you?

Recently I found a new inspiration in one of the great Seth Godin’s posts, which started to clear up my mind:

Persistence isn’t using the same tactics over and over. That’s just annoying.
Persistence is having the same goal over and over.

If the goal I set to myself is important to me, if I believe strongly in it, I have to pursue it steadily. If I chose an impassable way I may choose another one. What is important is never to forget where I am heading for and why.

Maybe this is the right way of thinking. Maybe I have chosen a wrong way and now I just have to find another one. Giving up before the obstacles is the easiest thing to do – I’ve done it many times. Finding your path towards a chosen goal and following it with persistence and strong will is much more difficult. And that’s what I have to do now.

I hope in the mean time not to lose my faith and my belief that what I do is right and makes sense because the faith is the only food for the persistence.

If I lose my faith I lose everything.

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There was an article in All About Agile blog, entitled 20 Qualities of an Agile Leader. Well, the title is a little misleading and the author clarifies later that all kind of teams need inspirational leadership and these are the 20 qualities of the inspirational leader:

1. Strong communication – storytelling and listening
2. Passion for learning and intense curiosity
3. Focus on developing people
4. Having fun and being very energized
   
5. Strong self-belief, coupled with humanity and humility
6. Committed to making a significant difference
7. Clarity of vision and ability to share it with others
8. Dogged determination and often relentlessness
9. Strong focus on priorities
10. Not afraid to show some vulnerability
11. Regular use of reflective periods to think and learn
12. Real passion and pride in what they do
13. Confidence and trust in their teams, giving them real empowerment
14. Respect for all (team members, temps, customers, suppliers and directors alike)
15. Clear standards of ethics and integrity; openness and honesty
16. Ability to drive, inspire and embrace change and continuous improvement
17. Positive attitude at all times and an innate ability to be diplomatic in any circumstances
18. Lateral thinking and ability to find innovative ideas and solutions to problems
19. Ability to inspire and motivate others
20. Willingness to take (calculated) risks

I find this list quite comprehensive. I marked the ones I find most important for me in blue. I find them the most important probably because I still need to improve these qualities in me. How about you? Do you agree with all the points? What are the most important ones for you? Do you have all these qualities?

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I was going to answer with a comment that he should implement only those features that he thinks will be valuable for the customer. If the customer has a problem and you are able to solve it with your product – they will be happy and they will buy it. It is not necessary to have many features if they are not useful for the customer and it is not possible to solve all their problems at once.

Luckily, Seth Godin posted another brilliant thought and I decided to cite it here because it fits very well to the topic and offers food for thinking upon the question “How to beat the competition?”.

Maybe the reason it seems that price is all your customers care about is…
… that you haven’t given them anything else to care about.

Thank you, Seth!

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