Book Review: The Social Animal & The Checklist Manifesto

Hi, how are you doing? People are always asking me what I'm reading. Well, you know, I read four newspapers a day. I read about six books a week. I read dozens of magazines and newsletters and of course, stuff online. But right now I'm reading two books which are quite interesting. One is called the Social Animal by David Brooks and it's got incredible reviews. It's all about how we become successful and effective socially, starting off from limited backgrounds and the decisions we make and the steps we take and the ramifications of those steps throughout our lives, which is one of the things that I've been talking about for years and years and years, that successful people think about the long term consequences of what they're doing. And if you do, the long term consequences are going to be a lot better than if you don't. Now, the other book that I'm reading is quite interesting. It's called the Checklist Manifesto. And this is written by a doctor who worked in a hospital that had very high levels of mortality. And he went through and took over the hospital and found that everybody was operating the best they could. But there were no checklists like an airplane pilot's checklist. So what he did is he introduced checklists for every single position where people dealt with patients and their mortality rate. People dying in that hospital dropped 90% in just about six months. What I found in Life is the same thing, is you want to be successful, and this is why the book is so good. If you want to be successful, what you have to do is you have to prepare checklists for the things that you do over and over again and checklist for the very important thing, and then make sure that the lists are correct and proper sequence, and then follow your checklist. If you follow your checklist, you make fewer mistakes, you get more done, you get more done faster and you become more successful faster as well. So that's what I'm reading, the Social Animal and the Checklist Manifesto. Give them a try. Oh, by the way, before you leave, I noticed that from your comments, many of you are writing books and some of you are having writer's block. Some of you aren't progressing as fast as you want. And so I'd like to know from you, those of you who are writing books, what is it that you do to get up, get going, overcome writer's block to be a productive writer, Let me know so we can share it with other people.