The Art of Finding the Perfect Book
March 28 2022
📕 The Art of Finding the Perfect Book
There is a thing about books. They can educate or teach us. They can entertain us. Books can help us unwind and escape to a magical place and books can transform our lives, but the problem is how to weed through all the hundreds of thousands of books to find the best ones.
Reading has always been fundamental in my life but as things become more digital and resources multiply, I do find it becoming increasingly challenging to weed through the junk. I keep my mind open to hear about recommendations from my co-workers, my Twitter community, YouTube and Podcasts that I listen to and of course all of you. Feel free to share your book recommendations with me at any time.
I recently completed work on my book reading system database using Airtable that helps me track the entire book reading journey from when I first heard about the book through completion of a published review.
In summary, this is what the system does:
Keep track of all the books that I want to read, where I heard about them and why I want to read them.
Tracks the progress on where I am with all books on a weekly basis.
Gives me a quick visual of the types of topics that I am reading and helps me maintain a balance. Reading too much about one topic can be dangerous as it can create reading burnout and a false sense of knowing everything.
Holds me accountable for taking effective notes and sharing those with my community.
Encourages me to experiment and find new ideas to read about.
I hope you have a system for your reading. If you are interested in getting a copy of my Airtable database just let me know and I will be happy to share it with you.
🎥The Latest on my YouTube Channel
I just completed my latest video on YouTube discussing How to find and READ books that are actually worth your time which actually inspired this weeks newsletter topic. You can view the full video here:
🏆What I am learning
🎓Harvard University’s CS50’s Introduction to Computer Science Course is coming along nicely. I am up to week three of the course and could not be happier with the content.
📊I also started with my Codecademy courses. I chose the Data Scientist learning path so I can make sure that I approach software programming from different angles. My multi-specialty approach of learning general computer programming, data science and blockchain technology is taking shape and should open up my eyes to a world of different options and possibilities.
🎬If you watched my video you will notice that I am stepping up my video making game. I subscribed to a new service to get copyright free music and sound effects. This can really impact the quality of videos that I am about to produce. I am still using Camtasia as my main editing tool, however, I did subscribe to the Adobe cloud suite of products and will be learning how to use those soon to give me a more comprehensive approach to video making.
📖What I am reading
📚I am still listening to Sing to Me by LA Reid on Audible. It has gotten me feeling nostalgic just as I thought it would. It’s been a while since I spent any time with music. I had some great times in the industry and I miss some of my friends and networks that I built there, but mostly I miss simply enjoying music. I have to start listening to it a little more frequently again.
🛠️Project Updates
⌨️Increasing my typing efficiency: I abandoned the typing tests on 1fastfingers.com to replace it with some hardcore practice on the touch-typing method. This new website that I found helps me practice typing in a way that forces you to memorize where the keys are on the keyboard, so you commit them to your muscle memory. It is a little frustrating because my 40 wpm dropped to 20 wpm when I first started as I no longer rely on my old typing habits. They say sometimes you must take one step back for two steps forward. Time will tell but I do feel good about my results. I realized my biggest challenge so far has been with the letter “S” as it is in a weird place on the keyboard and my finger does not want to cooperate with me.
🎥 Editing and Video Making: I enrolled the 14 Day Filmmaker course and have been taking notes in my Notion Dashboard. So far I have learned about different camera gear, focal lengths, Ideal image composition, camera angles and movement and I am only on Day 4. Over the next week I am excited about getting into the editing course that will help me start playing with Adobe Premier.
🚀Becoming a Blockchain Developer: I am still trucking along here. I found some new powerful courses that I am excited about and added them to my Becoming a Blockchain Developer Roadmap that I am working on. I hope it will become a great resource for others that are looking to get into the filed once I am completed with it.
❤️What I am loving
📺My wife and I started binge watching a new series on Netflix. It is called Young, Famous and African. It is another addition to the world of “reality TV’. It is a mixture of the “housewives” model crossed with the “love and Hip Hop” model. I like it mostly because it highlights successful Africans opens our eyes to the luxury world of South Africa which many of us may not even know exists. There is plenty of the usual “reality TV drama” of course with tensions between the characters and whirlwind romance twists. It is a must see if you like that type of thing. There is only 1 season available right now, but my guess is they will renew it for more seasons that will be available shortly.
📊Random Insights
Music. I have some random thoughts on music this week. I mentioned earlier that I have been feeling a little nostalgic listening to Sing to Me by LA Reid. It was written in 2016 just as the entire music industry started undergoing the current digital transformation. His experience spanned the golden years of music as I will call it as hip-hop and rap music transcended into the mainstream. I remember being an early adopter of rap music with Run DMC, The Fat Boys and LL Cool J. It was not cool for a white boy to listen to rap music back then. I was chastised for it during high school and often laughed at. It’s amazing to see how things have changed over the years. Rap music has created muti millionaires and has become a key part of our society.
Music was an outlet for me to express my creativity and uniqueness and my early adoption of the art form opened many exciting doors for me. I started my journey into entrepreneurship in high school by starting my own record label and eventually branched out into several other directions over the years. My last entrepreneurial endeavor in the music business was an attempt to start a music publishing company that would license music for commercial use. It was called Nothing Like This Music and we had a diverse roster of artists and producers willing to create music for us to license. This was in the early days of digital music. My project eventually died because of a lack of funding as life got the best of me and I had to focus on my family obligations.
I look at companies like Epidemic Sound and Artlist and wonder, was I on to something at that time? I just spent $300 for a one year subscription to Artlist. They are operating in the exact model that I was looking to adopt.
Was I too early of a visionary? Was I just a bad businessperson? Maybe I was just underfunded? Whatever the reason, I know that I was on the cutting edge of the industry at the time and I was there because of my willingness to learn and try new things. I continue that practice today. I am always looking to learn the latest technologies and be on the forefront of innovation. Maybe my learning journey into computer science and blockchain technology will bring me the next million dollar idea. What are you working on?