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  • Hanging out together

    Hanging out together

  • 14 writing tips that will make you a better writer

    14 writing tips that will make you a better writer

    I recently watched a video where Scott Adams, the creator of the comic strip, Dilbert, spoke about his tips to become a better writer.

    These tips apply to writing nonfiction such as blog posts and articles.

    Here are my takeaways from the video.

    1: Find the right topic.

    • Find a topic that makes you feel something, eg: makes you laugh or get you excited.
    • Find a topic that your audience finds familiar or understand.
    • Don’t write about something that only you would like.
    • Write for your audience NOT for yourself.
    • Imagine yourself writing for an invisible friend. It can be a real person in your life.

    2: First sentence should evoke curiosity.

    • Your first sentence is what helps your audience decide if they want to read the full article.
    • This is your chance to make a good first impression.
    • If you are up for it, make the first sentence provocative.

    3: Pace and lead the reader.

    • Match your audience and be like them in certain important aspects. This will make your audience comfortable with you.
    • Call out what your audience might be thinking and once you have their attention, give your solution.

    4: Use direct sentences.

    • The brain processes direct sentences faster and you don’t want your audience to get tired.
    • Of the format : The subject did something.
    • Eg: say “The boy hit the ball” instead of “The ball was hit by the boy”

    5: No jargons, adjectives, adverbs and cliches.

    • The reader subtracts all words that don’t mean anything to them. This includes adverbs, adjectives and jargons.
    • For eg: Tomorrow is very hot. When editing, if you leave out “very” and instead say “Tomorrow is hot”, its means the same to your reader. All they will remember after reading your article is that tomorrow will be hot.
    • His trick to avoid jargon, adjectives, and adverbs:

    When you are editing your article, imagine someone is offering you $100 for every word you take out that will keep the meaning the same.

    6: Brevity = brilliance.

    • Use fewer words to present the information.
    • People think you are brilliant when you speak in a simple language.

    7: Sixth-grade vocabulary.

    Avoid using big words. Keep the vocabulary simple.

    8: Get the musicality of the sentences right.

    • Certain words have hard sounds in them like K and T.
    • If you string together a sentence that has them in the wrong places. that would sound ugly.
    • Keep the hard sounds spaced out and in the right place.

    9: Avoid ugly words.

    • Such as moist talc.
    • This is more a matter of preference but where ever you have a choice, use the good words instead of words you think sound ugly.

    10: Consider associations.

    • Putting together two completely unrelated things together creates unpleasant images in the reader’s mind. You dont want your reader to make assumptions and judgments.
    • Eg: I like babies. I like automatic weapons. This creates an ugly picture in the reader’s mind between babies and automatic weapons.

    11: Visual language.

    • Use visual language where ever you can.
    • Our visual senses dominate every other sense. What we see overrides what we hear.
    • If you want to peruade the reader quickly, use visual cues.
    • His eg: instead of saying “Let’s beef up the border security by creating a solution for different parts of the territory” saying “lets build a wall”, creates a quick visual image in the readers mind.

    12: Violate a norm.

    • Make the reader a bit uncomfortable.
    • Dont try to please everyone in your writing.

    13: End on clever or provocative thought.

    Have a clear closing statement.

    14: Write everyday.

    This is the only way you will get better at it. Don’t wait to get inspired to write.

    Video: The Day You Became a Better Writer –Writing Tips from Dilbert Creator Scott Adams

  • Birds of a feather

    Birds of a feather

  • Pumpkin kisses, harvest wishes

    Pumpkin kisses, harvest wishes

  • Wet & wild

    Wet & wild

  • Bird by bird

    Bird by bird

    Book Author: Anne Lamott

    My thoughts and what I learned:

    This book is the ultimate truth about writing and writers’ lives sprinkled with life lessons.

    This book has been on my reading list for a long time. I even got it from the library once along with a bunch of other books but had to return it without reading as there was a hold on the book.

    It made me realize that writing is hard. It is hard work. It is isolated work. It is persistence and showing up day in and day out, battling your demons and self doubts every second of the way, fighting with your insecurities and boredom and shitty drafts.

    I always thought writers are born with it. That they sit at their desk and the words come pouring out their fingers. And in one go they have it all out in the right order and with the right intensity. That when they sit down to write they know except what they are doing. Boy was I wrong!

    I now realize how hard it is to write a book and the writer’s life dealing with rejections from the editor after you have spent quite a bit of time writing and the number of revisions you have to go through. Getting rejected and feeling like shit and then wallowing in self-pity and anger for a while and then getting up and doing it all over again.  Only this time treating the plot differently and meticulously.  And finally getting it all right and getting it published to finally become a best-seller.

    That writing is not going to belt you financial security and your articles might never be published. Writing might not open doors for you. But write anyway.  Because it makes you come alive and makes you feel better.

    It was quite eye-opening to read about how the author dealt with rejections by giving space to the book with a little sunshine, and a little fresh air. How she rented a home in Petaluma to get over the grief and fear that overlapped her after the rejection from the editor. How she treated her plot by analyzing the manuscript, laying it all on the floor, and examining each section, reordering the sections and scenes. Scribbling in what she thought was missing and finally restacking all the pages in the new order and working on the next draft.

    This book made me wonder if I should have been a writer.  Because I did spend a lot of my childhood alone as an only child. According to the author young people who grew up like me often become writers or criminals. And although I love crime thrillers, I definitely don’t intend to be a criminal.

    There were so many instances where I could relate to the author. Like her, I always thought there was something noble and mysterious about writing. That there was something magical about people who can articulate their thoughts well and can get into others’ minds.

    There were a few sections that I skipped (plot, scenes, dialogues, character, etc) because it was about writing fiction books that I had no interest in.

    I scanned the last section too as it was primarily about finding help along the way if you are writing a book. But here are a few tips I picked up.

    • Find a writing group or create one.
    • Get someone to read the first draft.

    A few quotable quotes from the book that caught my attention:

    • Do it every day for a while. And make a commitment to finishing things.
    • Good writing Is about telling the truth.
    • Becoming a better writer will make you become a better reader.
    • If you sit long enough to write, something will happen.

    On getting started with writing:

    • Start with your childhood and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can.
    • Start with your kindergarten. Write every detail. What did you wear? Who were you jealous about. Your teachers. Classmates. Vacations. Families.  Big events. Holidays. How you dressed. How everyone else in the family dressed.  Write about the food your family ate. Write about the grownups. Your parents. Siblings. Neighbors.  Relatives.
    • Write short assignments. What you can see through a one-inch picture frame.
    • Everyone starts with a shitty first draft and that is how they get to the good second draft and terrific third draft.  Start by getting anything on paper.  In the next draft, you try to fix it up and say what you are wanting to say accurately.
    • Writing the first draft is like watching a Polaroid develop. You can’t know exactly what the picture is going to look like until it has finished developing.  You couldn’t have had any way of knowing what this piece of work would look like when you first started.
    • Write about your moral point of view. A moral position is a passionate caring inside you. Write about the things that are most important to you. A moral position begins inside the heart and grows from there.

    What writing really is:

    • Writing is learning to pay attention to and communicate what’s going on. Writing is seeing people suffer and finding meaning in it. Your job as a writer is to present clearly your viewpoint. Your job is to see people as they are. And for this, you have to know who you are in the most compassionate sense. You have to look at everything with respect and oneness.  You have to look at everything with awe and reverence
    • If you are a writer or want to be a writer this is how you spend your days-listening, observing, storing things away, and making your isolation pay off.
    • Dying people can teach us a lot. Often the attributes that define them drop away like the skills, the shape, the hair.  And it turns out that the packaging is really not what that person has been all along.  Without the package, another sort of beauty shines thru. This is how real life works and this is what good writing allows us to notice. You can see the underlying essence only when you strip away the busyness and surprising connections will appear.
    • To be a good writer you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care. A writer always tries to be a part of the solution to understand a little about life and to pass this on. They give great insights into what’s true and what helps.

    When you don’t know what to do, in your writing:

    • When you don’t know what to do with your writing, get quiet and listen to that still small voice inside of you.  It will tell you what to do.
    • You get your confidence and intuition back by trusting yourself by being militantly on your side. You get your intuition back when you make space for it. When you stop the chattering of the rational mind.
    • Intuition will be blown by too much compulsion and manic attention but will burn quietly when watched with gentle concentration. If you stop trying to control your mind you’ll have intuitive hunches.
    • Take the attitude that what you are thinking and feeling is valuable stuff.

    On writing in December:

    December is traditionally a bad month for writing. It’s a month of Monday’s. Monday’s are not good writing days. One has had all the freedom on the weekend. So never start a large writing project on any Monday in December.  Why set yourself up for failure?

    About perfectionism:

    Messes are an artist’s true friend. We need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here and what we’re supposed to be writing.

    On radio station KFKD (imposter syndrome):

    The one that keeps rapping about self-loathing and all the mistakes you have done or will ever do. This station is on every single morning. So sit for a moment and say a small prayer – “Pls help me get out of the way”. Sometimes a ritual quiets the radio – like praying at an altar, sage smudging, candle lighting. Rituals are a good sign to your unconscious that it is time to kick in.

    On jealousy:

    Dying people teach you to pay attention and to forgive and not sweat on the small things. Jealousy is a secondary emotion. It is born out of feeling excluded and deprived.  It helps to heal your past.

    On having too many writers:

    Life is like a recycling center. Where all the concerns and dramas of humankind get recycled back and forth across the universe. But what you have to offer is your own sensibility, your own sense of humor, or insider pathos or meaning.

    From the last class:

    • Write about your childhood.
    • Write in a directly emotional way instead of being subtle.
    • Tell the truth as you understand it.
  • On writing well

    On writing well

    Book Author : William Zinsser

    I’ve always enjoyed writing as a hobby. Recently I’ve taken more interest in writing as I began working with the Documentation team at WordPress.

    This book is an excellent guide to understand the craft of good writing with practical tips and examples.

    It gives a better insight into how you can approach the writing process, what tone and mood to consider before you start to write and if the material leads to unexpected directions, to let it follow the course and make style adjustments to the work as needed.

    I learned that whether it be sports, science, business, corporate, it’s important to connect with the human in the reader and make your content relatable.

    I also learned about punctuations and how and when to use them or not.

    A few quotable quotes from the book that caught my attention:

    • The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components.
    • Rewriting is the essence of writing.
    • Clear thinking becomes clear writing.
    • Examine every word you write.
    • Believe in your own identity and your own opinions. Sell yourself.
    • When you write, ask- what do I want to convey. After you’ve written, check- am I conveying what I intended to.
    • Write in the first person.
    • Write for yourself.
    • Add specific details.
    • Write for an audience of one.
    • Consider the sound and rhythm of the words. Eg. serene and tranquil.
    • Read what you write aloud before publishing.
    • Alter the length of your sentences.
    • Unity is the anchor of good writing. Unity in pronouns. Unity in the tense.  Unity in the tone and mood.
    • Decide what single point you want to leave in the reader’s mind.
    • Look for ways to convey your information in narrative ways.
    • When you read add brackets to words that are superfluous.
    • Conduct interviews. Nonfiction writing becomes more alive in proportion to the number of quotes you can weave into them.
    • Always pepper in the human element to the story.
    • If you write for yourself, you’ll reach the people you want to write for.
    • Make sure every component in your memoir is doing useful work.
    • Writing is thinking on paper.
    • A simple style of writing is the result of hard work and hard thinking.
    • Be yourself when you write.
    • Humor is the best tool for making an important point. It is a secret weapon for nonfiction writers.
    • Don’t alter your voice to fit your subject. Develop one voice the readers will recognize when they hear it on the page.
    • One way to generate confidence in writing is to write about subjects that interest you and you care about.  Write about people you respect. Writers have to jump-start themselves at the moment of performance no less than actors and musicians and painters.  Push the boundaries of the subject. Bring some part of your own life to it.

    Some writing rules to keep in mind:

    • Avoid active verbs which need an appended preposition. Eg: the president stepped down. Instead say: The president resigned.
    • Use precise verbs.
    • Avoid adverbs.
    • Remove prepositions added to verbs, adverbs added to verbs.
    • Remove adjective that states the obvious. Eg: the radio blared loudly.
    • Avoid adjectives. If using make sure they convey important meaning.
    • Prune out the little qualifiers like a lot. Sort of. Rather. Quite. Very. Too. A little. Kind of. In a sense. Dozens more. It’s like you are hedging your prose with timidities. Be bold and confident.
    • Make short sentences.
    • Don’t use exclamation points unless you want to achieve a certain effect.
    • Dash is used when you want to amplify or justify the second part of the sentence what you said in the first part.
    • Colon is used when you want to have a brief pause and then begin an itemized list. Eg: the items she needed were on the list: potatoes, bananas, apples.
    • When you shift the mood of the sentences, use the mood changers – but, nevertheless, yet, however,  still, instead, meanwhile, therefore, now, later, today.
    • Use contractions to make the writing less stiff and robotic.
    • Use “That” unless it makes your writing ambiguous. Eg: the shoes that are in the closet.  The shoes, which are in the closet ( needs a comma before which ).
    • Instead of nouns that express a concept, use verbs that tell what somebody did. Eg. The common reaction is incredulous laughter. =>Most people laughed in disbelief.
    • Keep paragraphs short. Each paragraph should have its own integrity of content and structure.
    • On sexism– Don’t use constructions that can mean only men can be a certain role such as farmer, sailor, cop, firefighter. Instead of occupations having a male and feminine form make them gender-neutral. Eg: Instead of actors and actresses, say, performers.
    • Don’t use plural nouns because they weaken the writing because they are less specific. So writer or reader instead of writers or readers.
    • General nouns instead of specific nouns. Eg: Families instead of wives and children.

    On writing:

    • The most important sentence in an article is the first sentence.
    • The last sentence of each paragraph is the springboard to the next paragraph
    • The lead grabs the reader with a provocative idea. Continue with each para to hold the reader.
    • As you write keep asking the question – what do my readers want to know next. And write para after para based on that. Let the paragraphs flow from one to the next so the readers won’t skim the story.  Remember that you are taking the reader on your trip with the story.

    On interviewing people for nonfiction:

    1. Take a pen and paper.
    2. Do homework on the person before going.
    3. Make a list of possible questions.

    On writing about a place:

    1. What made this place different from what everyone else said.
    2. What can you tell that’s not been said before.
    3. What can you tell that the reader doesn’t know already.

    On science and technology writing:

    1. Use your own experience to connect the reader to some mechanism that also touches his life.
    2. Weave a scientific story around someone else.
    3. Help readers understand unfamiliar facts by relating to sights they are familiar with.
    4. Reduce the abstract principle to an image they can visualize.
    5. Write like a person, not a scientist.
    6. Readers identify with people not abstractions like profitability.
    7. Use short words that paints a vivid picture of everyday life.
    8. Use active verbs. Don’t use concept nouns.
    9. Take the coldness out of a technical process by relating to an experience we are all familiar with.

    On interviewing someone for an article:

    Remember you are a generalist trying to make his work public. He is the expert in his field.  You prod him to clarify statements that are so obvious to him that he assumes they are obvious to everyone else. Don’t be afraid to ask dumb questions.  If the expert thinks you are dumb that’s his problem.

    Some questions to dig deep- why not? What else?

  • Your best friends are your diamonds

    Your best friends are your diamonds

  • The choice

    The choice

    Book Author: Edit Edgar

    My thoughts and what I learned:

    This book is her memoir and is made of three parts- one part about her trauma, one part about how her body reacts to the trauma. And lastly how she deals with her patients and through them understands her own emotions and heals herself on the path to helping her patients.

    I read this book when we were going through the 2020 Pandemic. I could very well relate the time we are living in, to the time the author was living in. The Olympics were canceled in 1944 due to the war, just like the Japan Olympics was canceled due to the pandemic. The Jewish kids taking classes on the radio to avoid bullying and harassment in school, just like our kids were taking their classes on Zoom.

    “Even when Edith’s family heard the Hungarian nazis were rounding up Nazi men for the labor camps, Edith felt her father will be ok.”

    Don’t we all do that? As we go through the second wave of the pandemic and talk about an impending third wave of the delta variant, we think we are safe and others will be affected. We make ourselves invisible to the harm. We plan trips like this is not going to affect us at all. Like it happens to others.

    I got chills reading about how the family was awaked in the middle of the night and forced to pack up and leave their home, how terrifying it must be to have soldiers with guns shouting at you and stomping their boots hard and kicking your family to the floor. I also found it horrifying how her mom was gassed, her last minutes before she died, and what her one choice led to that.

    Holocaust is a result of hate- one man’s hate for the Jews. After all these years, are we over with this hate? With George Floyd and the capital riots, are we still any further from this? In spite of all the advances that have happened since the Holocaust, are we still living in a sea of new hate?

    It caught my attention that even back then, America was the hardest country to get in. I suddenly felt very proud to be here and for all the sacrifices my parents made to send me here.

    I learned that sometimes kindness exists even in the midst of all the turmoil, like the kindness shown by a stranger who mails the letter dropped by Edith’s mom on the street, to her sister in Budapest.

    Quotes from the book that caught my attention:

    • People don’t come to me. They are sent to me.
    • Sometimes our pain pushes us. Sometimes our hope pulls us.
    • The little upsets in our life are emblematic of the larger losses. The insignificant worries are representative of greater pain.
    • We make the world safe in our minds.
    • Our relationship is like a bridge we can cross from the present worries to future joys.
    • No one can take away from you what you’ve put in your mind.
    • We have a choice – to pay attention to what we have lost or to pay attention to what we have left. The choice to be lost in the darkness, to become the darkness. Or not.
    • We can choose what sorrow teaches us. To be bitter or to hold on to the childlike part of us the lively and curious part the part that is innocent.
    • Home isn’t a place anymore. It’s a feeling.
    • Don’t spoil your spirit. Set the strings vibrating with your needs.
    • When you can’t go in through the door, go in through the window.
    • Move like a person who has a plan.
    • To be passive is to let others decide for you.  To be aggressive is to decide for others. To be assertive is to decide for yourself. And to trust that there is enough. That you really are enough.
    • Maybe moving forward meant circling back.
    • Would it be about replaying the horrors they are seeing or savoring being alive? Would it be fear and pity and agony or figuring out the mystery of her body’s anatomy and that of a man? Of thinking of GOD and the life of Eric and the future that will be living together.
    • Always use your beautiful things. You never know when they will be gone.
    • Food is love.
    • We can’t choose to vanish the dark. But we can choose to kindle the light.
    • Our beliefs determine our feeling. Which in turn influences our behavior. To change our behavior we must change our feelings and to change our feelings we must change our thoughts.
    • We won’t always get what we want. That’s part of being human. The problem is when we attach the failures to our self-worth.
    • To be free is to live in the present.
    • The only place we can exercise our freedom of choice is in the present.
    • Love comes out as the answer in the end.
    • Only I can do what I can do the way I can do it.
    • You have to face what’s inside of you.
    • If I am really going to improve my life. It is me that has to change.
    • Face daily life with a sense of discovery.
    • Enrich the present.
    • Let the past be a springboard that helps you reach the life you want now.
    • Feelings aren’t fatal.  Suppressing the feelings only makes it harder to let them go. Expression is the opposite of depression.
    • When you have something to prove you are not free.
    • When we grieve we don’t just grieve for what happened.  We grieve for what didn’t happen.
    • Anger is never the most important emotion.  It’s always the very outer edge, the exposed top layer of a much deeper feeling. The real feeling that’s disguised as the mask of anger is usually fear. You can’t feel alive and fearful at the same time.
    • We can’t erase the pain. But we are free to accept who we are and move on.
    • We are a bridge between all that is and all that will be.
    • We can’t hang under someone else’s umbrella and complain that we are getting wet.
    • Being a victim is when you keep the focus outside yourself, when you look outside yourself for someone to blame for your present circumstances.
    • We are always in the process of becoming.
    • Stress is the body’s response to the demand for change. Our automatic response is to fight or flee. A third option is to flow.
    • By the time I get my degrees, I will be fifty. You will be fifty anyway.

    On uncertainty:

    • Every moment has a chance to be so much worse.
    • The uncertainty makes the moments stretch.
    • What if the unknown can make us curious instead of gut us with fear.
    • “Magda traded her thick warm winter coat for a flimsy one showing off plenty of her chest. She was choosing a better survival tool because feeling sexy gave her something more valuable than staying warm to live.”  What’s your survival tool during uncertainty?

    About surviving:

    • Survivors don’t ask “why me”, or “why did I live”.
    • Survivors ask “what now”.
    • Why now. What is today different from yesterday or tomorrow?
    • What is mine to do with the life I’ve been given?
    • To survive is to transcend your own needs and commit yourself to someone or something outside yourself. To survive we conjure an inner world, a haven even when we are awake. This awareness became a refuge that preserved a will to live.
    • Survival is a matter of interdependence. Survival isn’t possible alone.

    The healing process:

    1. Notice the feeling – Sad, mad, glad, scared.
    2. Accept that these feelings are my own.
    3. Check body’s response.
    4. Stay with the feeling until it passed.
    5. Response nor react.
    6. Vent like a teapot not like a pressure cooker.

    Some questions to ponder:

    1. What makes a person do one thing and not the other?
    2. What else were we unconsciously teaching our children about safety, values, and love?
    3. What feeling or belief am I holding on to?  Am I willing to let it go?
    4. If I die tomorrow will I die in peace?
    5. Within my own darkness had I found light?
    6. What do I want?
    7. What legacy do I want to pass on to my son? What will I leave in the world when I am gone?
    8. What do you want? Who wants it? What are you going to do about it?
    9. When are you taking action?
    10. Why am I doing now? Is it working?  Is it bringing me closer to my goals?
    11. How can I support you as you navigate this situation?
    12. Are you wearing a mask and pretending to be an American? Who are you at the core?
    13. What did life expect from you?
  • There is no planet B

    There is no planet B

  • The everything store

    The everything store

    Book Author: Brad Stone

    My thoughts and what I learned:

    • When I picked up this book, I expected a lot of business jargon and wasn’t quite sure I will get through the 350 pages. Brad narrated the stories in simple easy to read English. It was quite fascinating to read about the brainchild behind Amazon, the company to be one of the firsts to see the boundless promise of the internet and change the way we shop and read, while also vacuuming out several traditional brick and mortar businesses.
    • A lot of the online comforts we take for granted, we owe to Amazon and the future thinking of Jeff Bezos: Affiliate Marketing, Amazon Prime, AWS, 1 Click order, Kindle, Personalized recommendations based on algorithms.
    • I really had chills reading about how the company operated and what happens in the board meetings with Bezos, his rigorous standards, the way he micromanages and reacts harshly to efforts with very little praise. How they raised the bar in the industries, catering to the customers and ruthlessly competing with rivals, destroying big brands like Circuit City, Borders, Barnes And Nobles, and Best Buy.
    • Jeff initially thought of Relentless.com as the company name. (In fact, even now that domain gets redirected to Amazon’s home page!) Bezos looked through the dictionary starting at A and going through every word until he lit up when he came to Amazon. To him, Amazon meant the Earth’s largest bookstore.
    • The two key takeaways from Amazon about running a business are being customer focussed (or rather customer obsessed) and having long-term thinking.
    • Amazon started many projects -Pets.com, Gear.com, Wineshoppers.com Greenlight.com. All of these went down in flames during the dot.com bubble in 2000. They had a ton of failures with only a few big wins. But they never take defeat personally and consider mistakes as the first step in a series of important experiments.
    • Netscape went public the same year as Amazon with a stock price of $28 per share!
    • How Bezos was never deterred by short-term setbacks and always focussed on the long game. Instead of fighting to compete with Apple and iTunes, Bezos used the lessons from Apple and iTunes and applied them to something he was passionate about – books.
    • Instead of freaking out on what Apple has done to the lagging Amazon music business, Bezos decided to focus its efforts on getting ahead in the digital space for books and thrive as a bookseller in the digital age.
    • My favorite chapter was about Fiona, the code name for the e-reader they build called Kindle. Although I was never a fan of eBooks and always loved physical books, I loved reading about the thought and attention that went into creating the Kindle. About the designers studying the actual physics of reading-the physical aspects of the pastime, how readers turn the pages and hold books in their hand. and all the subconscious qualities that made it feel like you are reading a book. Bezos’s top objective was that the kindle had to get out of the way and disappear so they can enter the author’s world.

    Quotes from the book:

    • We don’t make money when we sell things. We make money when we help customers make a decision.
    • Have a backbone. Disagree and Commit. Leaders do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is made they commit wholly.

    Some fun stories:

    • Rufus-a Welsh Corgi who belonged to one of the first employees and was the first canine staffer. The company had to write Rufus in the lease when they moved office in the summer of 1996. It became the (then) startup’s first mascot. His paw tap on the keyboard was required to launch any new features and even now there is a building named after him.
    • Christopher Smith-the 23-year-old warehouse temp who was hired in the holiday season and worked for 8 months straight biking to office and back and whose car was towed after being covered with several parking tickets. The car was later auctioned.
    • A temp employee who clocked in and out at the right time of his shift but not logged in any actual work and made a makeshift bed and created a cozy den in the fulfillment center, furnishing it with items from the Amazon shelves.
    • When I read about the famous laugh of Jeff Bezo – a mystery that has never been solved, I had to google up to find out what the hell he was talking about and found a video of his. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZ_DyimkS54
    • I was quite surprised to read about Ted Jorgensen (Bezos’s biological dad) and how he never knew that his son is the world’s richest man until the author of the book paid him a visit to his bike store in Phoenix.
    • Amazon has dog biscuits in a bowl at the reception desk for employees who bring their dogs to the office which I thought was a strange perk in the company that made people pay for their parking.

    About Amazon Prime:

    How the company went from offering fast track shipping of the order to creating the speedy shipping club later named the Prime, deciding on the price for the club to $79 per year because it needed to be large enough to matter to consumers but small enough that they are willing to try.

    It really was about changing people’s minds so they stopped shopping elsewhere.

    Creating Prime was an act of faith with no concrete idea on how the program could affect the orders, going with his gut and experience. When friction was removed, customers spent more, motivating them to place bigger orders and shop in new categories.

    Although Prime was not an instant success, it has now turned customers into Amazon addicts and sowed the seeds for instant gratification.

    About the company working:

    Some cool features started at Amazon:

    • “Look Inside The Book” feature – an effort to match the experience of a physical bookstore by giving the customer a peek and letting them read the first few pages of the book.
    • Search Inside the Book feature, shipping the books to a contractor in the Philippines to be scanned. Writing software to convert the images into text that the search algorithm at Amazon can search and index.
    • Reinventing the Yellow pages with a project called the Block view that matched the street photos of stores and restaurants with their search listings in their new A search named A9 in an effort to compete with Google search. This was 2 years before Google announced Street View in their G Maps. Eventually it turned out to be a failure and was shut down.
    • Creating APIs so third parties can harvest data about its prices, products, and sales, and let other websites publish from the Amazon catalog and use the Amazon shopping cart and payment system. Have their first dev conference and invite outsiders who were trying to hack the Amazon systems. This later developed into the popular AWS providing the infrastructure for doing business online for big companies like Netflix, Pinterest and IG, and even small businesses.
  • Trust the magic of new beginnings

    Trust the magic of new beginnings

  • At home among the trees

    At home among the trees

  • Twice as nice

    Twice as nice

  • Brighter than the sun

    Brighter than the sun

  • Late bloomer

    Late bloomer

  • Eventually everything connects

    Eventually everything connects

  • Looking ahead to a bright new day

    Looking ahead to a bright new day