Neha's Notebook

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath Blowing rainbow bubbles Watching a family movie with a bag of chips in hand A sketchbook filled with drawings of wax crayons A box of trinkets Camera containing printer… The world outside is filled with ideas…oodles and oodles of ideas. Ideas stem from great imagination and from infinite possibilities waiting to be explored. But how many of these ideas truly stick in our heads? How many of these really catch and grasp our attention? In this book, Made To Stick, the authors Chip Heath and Dan Heath explore what makes up a sticky idea and what are the main villians of a sticky idea. One of the main villians of a sticky idea is the Curse of Knowledge. To explain this, the authors take the example of ‘Tappers and Listeners’. During a research, some people were divided into two groups. The task of one group was to tap with their fingers some songs, and the task of the listener group was to identify thes...

Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy by Sadhguru What is destiny? What is the nature of human mind? What does it mean to respond to life? In this book, Sadhguru takes us into the detailed mechanism of how a human system is designed. From topics like responsibility to mystical dimensions of chakras and energy channels, he delves deep into the engineering of a well-designed human individual. With cutting insights and crisp pointers, he describes to the readers how to keep and maintain our individual human systems as well as sadhanas (tools) for meditation. In this review, I share 43 insights that I learned from reading the book. Read on, get inspired and enjoy! 1. If you can use it when you want and put it aside when you don’t, the mind can be a fantastic tool. 2. The only solution for all the ills that plague humanity is self-transformation. 3. Self-transformation is not incremental self-improvement. Self-transformation is achieved not by morals or ethics o...

Attitude is Everything change your attitude change your life! by Jeff Keller How many times do we witness it happen, that even though the situation outside is terribly negative, we look at it with a positive attitude and it gets only better, whereas sometimes even though the situation is totally positive, we look at it with a negative attitude, and it gets only worse? Well, this book Attitude Is Everything, as its name suggests, delves deep into the idea of attitude, what makes up a great attitude and what makes up for a terrible attitude, and how significant is one’s attitude in life… The book is divided into 12 chapters. In this review, I share 20 pointers I extracted from these chapters. So, let’s begin with these! #1 ATTITUDE = WINDOW TO THE WORLD The book mentions that, think of your attitude as a mental filter through which you experience the world. Your attitude is your window to the world. #2 EVERYONE STARTS WITH A CLEAN MENTAL WINDOW According to the book...

Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss Punctuated with hilarious examples, “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” is a quirky and witty book about punctuation. The book illustrates how meaning and punctuation are so closely related. It also mentions how a disorderly punctuation can pave havoc for a writer, from “satanic sprinkling of redundant apostrophes” to “peppering a paragraph with commas”. The book brings into view that people who care about punctuation are the best kind of people. The author Lynne Truss calls these people as the “sticklers” or the “7th sense people”. She writes, Proper punctuation is both the sign and cause of clear thinking. If it goes, the degree of intellectual impoverishment we face, is unimaginable. In this review, I share some of the pointers I marked from reading the book. So, let’s get started! Analogies for punctuation o Punctuation is like stitching – it is the basting that holds the fabric of language in shape o Punctuation marks are traf...

The War of Art by Steven Pressfield Everyone is an artist. Everyone has some or the other form of art to create, craft and contribute to the burgeoning functioning of the universe. But most of us are artists in disguise waiting for the glasshouses of our minds to crack open so that we can perceive fresh possibilities out of the things we sense and interpret. The War of Art by Steven Pressfield is a book on creativity, on writing, on what prevents and blocks us to express our true self, and how to take a leap by understanding what blocks us. Different people call this block by different names. In this book, the author calls this blocking element by the name of ‘Resistance’. The book is divided into three main parts. Part one deals with knowing the characteristics and tendencies of resistance. Part two deals with ways of combating resistance and part three deals with what lies beyond resistance. In this review, I share useful and functionl pointers from the book. So...

100 Ways to Improve Your Writing: Proven Professional Techniques for Writing With Style and Power by Gary Provost As the name suggests, this book by Mr. Gary Provost outlines 100 ways to improve writing. These 100 ways are divided into crisp eleven chapters. The book is a handy treasury of ideas, interesting examples and functional pointers that may turn out to be super-useful for anyone seeking refinement of their writing, and accelerate the momentum of their writing process. In this review, I share 46 pointers that I curated upon reading the book. For easy rememberance, I’ve divided the video into 3 parts – Quick Tips & Tricks, Lessons in the Craft of Writing & Common Errors and Mistakes To Avoid in Writing. Let’s breeze through these! QUICK TIPS & TRICKS #1 Get some reference books • Get some Reference Books such as a dictionary, encyclopedia and thesaurus. #2 Improve Your Spellings #3 Expand Your Vocabulary #4 Read • Read, and listen to what you re...

The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human by Jonathan Gottschall Most of us humans like stories. In fact, we love stories. But why and how do we seem to love them? For science, that may still be a puzzle. Nevertheless, our understanding of the human mind leads the way to the insight which streams in the backdrop while we’re immersed in a story and our mind is processing, forming connections, feeling emotions, rewiring neural pathways and churning information presented to us through the story. The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall takes us through an immersive wordscape that is peppered with oodles of metaphors, pointers, insights, and lessons, pertaining mostly, to the topic of storytelling. The book features an interesting embroidery woven together with the intricate threads of researches related to evolutionary psychology, neuroscience and various other sciences. Encapsulating several stories-within-stories and pop-modern terminology, the book ...

Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered by Austin Kleon In three words, SHOW YOUR WORK is a book that reveals to you, exciting ways to “show your work” and to put it out there into the world. Embellished with photographs and snippets of blackout poetry, the square paperback is a crisp guide offering tips and tricks that are not only interesting but quite practical & relevant to follow through. In this review, I am sharing nineteen clear-cut and key pointers from the book. Read on! #1 In order to be found, you have to be findable In simple words, be online. If you have a skill that you can share or teach, or if you have a work that you do, then put this skill or bits of your work out there for people to see. #2 Send out a Daily Dispatch Consistently post bits & pieces of your work. Share something small every day. Take it one day at a time, and it gradually compounds over months and years. Find the time to do this, each day, be...