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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Browsing through the pages I found a post (not existing amymore) where there were links to seven free eboks in PDF format. I am a huge fan of reading and this is my preferred method of gaining information and I was very happy to find such amount of useful book in one place and for free!

These are great titles for people who try to start up a new business, who want to communicate better with the others, or who want to understand their inner selves. The books are:

• The Law of Attraction Explained by Ken MacLean
• Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
• The Confidence Booster by Anna Marie Stewart
• Money & Beliefs by Aine Belton
• The Basics of Manifestation by Ken MacLean
• Optimal Thinking (author unknown)
• I Create Millions by Christopher Westra

You can download all the books from this link (no email or other information required!)

Happy reading!

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I wish to myself and to all of you a happy and successful new year. It is gong to be a very important year of my life and I wish myself to be strong enough to stand the test and to reach the goals I set. I hope that the next year will be fruitful and rich for all of us.

Happy New Year!

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The great news is that we completed successfully the Software Project Management course together with NASD and we published a detailed report from there with a lot of pictures at the RammSoft’s site. I am very positive about the future and I believe that we will be able to establish a strong community of Software Project Management professionals in Bulgaria that would help us share our knowledge and experience and develop our expertise.

Keep watching!

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Unfortunately, it isn’t funny at all. My back is aching terribly and now I know the main reason for that – my bent working pose. So I did a little research and I am giving you some links to sites with very useful information about computer ergonomics and a lot of graphics and pictures.

Here they are:

• The Boston University self-help guide to computer workstation ergonomics
• Guide to Setting Up an Ergonomic Computer Station
• And a whole blog devoted to ergonomics – Ergoblog

I believe this information will be of great help to you. Don’t be careless to your heath – think about it!

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