What scares you more?

I recently ran into Tim Ferriss's podcast on "When to Quit: Lessons from World-Class Entrepreneurs, Authors and more". There are several contributors to this podcast including my favourites Seth Godin and Debbie Millman. I was particularly fascinated by thought provoking insights by Debbie Millman. Recommend going through the same (from 37:12 to 45:20). 

I've noted a few points below:

Rejection is never final until you stop trying.

Why do you feel the need to give-up? Why do you feel you should settle for something else? What are you most afraid of? – Settling or hating what you do? If you think you are not capable of achieving your dream – is it because you are really not capable or are you afraid of putting your whole hearted effort and try.

What scares you more?

• Heart break or rejection?

• Resentment or rejection?

• Regret or rejection?

If you are doing what you think you should be doing rather than doing what you want with your whole heart, you are not persisting. You are resisting the truth about who and what you are. If you are doing something that makes your heart sing, never ever give-up. Remember its not a failure until you accept defeat.

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I cannot recommend enough Debbie Millman's work. Do listen to this episode, where Tim and Debbie discuss how to recover from rejection, how to overcome personal crises of faith, class exercises from her most impactful mentors, and much more.

25 Principles of Adult Behaviour

Chanced upon this gem by John Barlow. Difficult to follow all of them all of the time. Still worthwhile to go over it regularly and re-orient our compass where needed. Backstory on this here.

What RamP's Reading: Nov'19

Some more travel and long weekends give me an opportunity to keep my standard pace of 4 books a month.

      

Mindfullness: Connecting with the Real You: Like it or not, a large part of our thinking is wasteful be it guilt, fear, anxiety or stress. This drains our energy and hinders our decision-making. Mindfulness is an eye-opening take on how to stay in the moment. Not a reheated fix for our daily struggles, this book serves as a guide for intelligent readers and urban professionals to focus and practise mindfulness.

Stillness is the Key: All great leaders, thinkers, artists, athletes, and visionaries share one indelible quality. It enables them to conquer their tempers. To avoid distraction and discover great insights. To achieve happiness and do the right thing. Ryan Holiday calls it stillness--to be steady while the world spins around you. In this book, he outlines a path for achieving this ancient, but urgently necessary way of living. Drawing on a wide range of history's greatest thinkers, from Confucius to Seneca, Marcus Aurelius to Thich Nhat Hanh, John Stuart Mill to Nietzsche, he argues that stillness is not mere inactivity, but the doorway to self-mastery, discipline, and focus.

User Stories Applied: Thoroughly reviewed and eagerly anticipated by the agile community, User Stories Applied offers a requirements process that saves time, eliminates rework, and leads directly to better software. The best way to build software that meets users' needs is to begin with "user stories": simple, clear, brief descriptions of functionality that will be valuable to real users. In User Stories Applied, Mike Cohn provides you with a front-to-back blueprint for writing these user stories and weaving them into your development lifecycle.

Continuous Delivery: Getting software released to users is often a painful, risky, and time-consuming process. This groundbreaking new book sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. Through automation of the build, deployment, and testing process, and improved collaboration between developers, testers, and operations, delivery teams can get changes released in a matter of hours—sometimes even minutes–no matter what the size of a project or the complexity of its code base. Jez Humble and David Farley begin by presenting the foundations of a rapid, reliable, low-risk delivery process. Next, they introduce the “deployment pipeline,” an automated process for managing all changes, from check-in to release. Finally, they discuss the “ecosystem” needed to support continuous delivery, from infrastructure, data and configuration management to governance