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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It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble.
It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

I find myself very often arguing with people who are so sure about the things they say and they never agree with me even when I bring hard proofs in front of their eyes.

Self-confidence is good. Shy people never succeed. But sometimes, if you are too confident in your skills or knowledge and you don’t bother to check the facts, you may really get into trouble.

Mark Twain said it perfectly well.

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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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His blog is devoted to project management and he has original ideas about how to manage people. I think he believes that we lack some thinking and understanding for the others and this is why I feel his blog so close to my blogs PM Stories and Stop and Think!. And probably this is the reason why I like his blog so much.

Read the interview here. You may find some food for thought.

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I watched recently on the TV the film Ambulance Girl where Kathy Bates‘ character said these remarkable words about fear:

Fear is like a hologram. It seems real, filled with substance. And then, when you go beyond it, you realize there is nothing there. It’s all an illusion.

I had many fears in my life (and I still have some) and words like these give me the strength to make the first steps towards my goals. I realized that there is only one thing that can help you overcome the fear – action. When you start doing what you want you become able to throw aside the chains of fear that were nailing you to the ground.

I think we need to recall such words more often when the fear of what might happen paralyzes our mind.

By the way, the film is very good. It is a drama-comedy about a couple who are afraid of change and their fear starts to ruin their relationship. Kathy Bates is my favorite American actress and in this film she is also the director.

Don’t forget – Fear is like a hologram…

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I’ve been silent for quite a long time but finally the good news is here – I put my own domain name – mikeramm.com – into a working state and I moved my blog Stop and Think to this address.

I took me long time to choose the new design and to adapt it to my needs, to move all important posts to here and to change all the URLs.

At the end you can see what I achieved. I like it. I hope you’ll like it too.

I won’t promise that I will write more often but I do promise that I will write here in English. I was only communicating with my Bulgarian readers recently but now I realized that I have some things to say to the world. So I am back.

There is a great new feature in the blog’s new design – Featured articles. You can see in the top right corner the most interesting articles that I have written and you will never miss them. I hope that they will be worth reading.

Your comments and criticism are highly appreciated. I believe that I will be able to gain your trust and provide you with something interesting and valuable.

Welcome back!

Mike

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