Masumiyet Müzesi, “Hayatımın en mutlu anıymış, bilmiyordum. Bilseydim, bu mutluluğu koruyabilir, her şey de bambaşka gelişebilir miydi?” cümlesiyle başlıyor. Hem çok kuvvetli, hem de hüzün dolu bir cümle. Güçlü yanı bir insanın bütün hayatını gözden geçirip en mutlu anını seçebilmesi fikri, üzücü yanı ise o anı yaşarken bunun farkında olmaması. Bu mutluluğu çok güzel tasvir ediyor Orhan Pamuk:

“Çok mutluydum. Ama bu, aklımın ölçerek anladığı bir mutluluk değil, tenimin yaşayarak tanıdığı ve daha sonra sıradan hayatın içinde, bir telefon açarken ensemde, acele acele merdivenleri çıkarken kuyruk sokumumda ya da dört hafta sonra nişanlanmayı kurduğum Sibel ile Taksim’de bir lokantada yemek seçerken göğsümün ucunda hissederek hatırladığım bir şeydi.”

It’s hard to ignore a book written by the COO of the company you work for, especially when you get a signed copy for free. Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg is a book about women in the workforce,  mixed with some lessons on careers and success in business. Here are my takeaways:

• When I don’t feel confident, one tactic I’ve learned is that it sometimes helps to fake it. After an hour of forced smiling, I often felt cheerful. One study found that when people assumed a high-power pose for just two minutes, their testosterone went up and their stress hormone levels went down.
• Opportunities are rarely offered, they’re seized.
• Success and likeability are positively correlated for men. A willingness to make an introduction or advocate for or promote someone depends upon having a positive feelings about that person. We want to work with people who are like us.
• Mark Zuckerberg told me that my desire to be liked by everyone would hold me back. He said that when you want to change things, you can’t please everyone. If you do please everyone, you aren’t making enough progress.
• As of 2010, the average american had eleven jobs from the ages of eighteen to forty-six.
• Eric Schmidt explained that only one criterion mattered when picking a job – fast growth. When companies grow quickly, there are more things to do than there are people to do them. “If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, you don’t ask what seat. You just get on.”
• The cost of stability is often diminished opportunities for growth. Where risks were great, the potential rewards are even greater.
• Leadership is about making others better as a result of your presence and making sure that impact lasts in your absence.

Reading this book for business lessons was like searching for a needle in a haystack.

Paul Arden’s book is on advertising and motivation. The presentation of this book is as important as the content. It’s optimized for sales: has a catchy title and cover, cheap price, is easy to carry around (small and thin). Content of the book is easy to read and easy to share: big fonts, lots of photos. Here are some highlights:

• Talent helps, but it won’t help you as far as ambition. Everybody wants to be good, but not many people are prepared to make the sacrifices it takes to be great.
• You must develop a complete disregard for where your abilities end. Try to do things that you’re incapable of.
• You will remember from school other students preventing you from seeing their answers by placing their arm around their exercise book or exam paper. Somehow the more you give away the more comes back to you.
• Don’t look for the next opportunity. The one you have in hand is the opportunity.
• If you show him [client] what you want and not what he wants, he’ll say that’s not what he asked for. If, however, you show him what he wants first, he is then relaxed and is prepared to look at what you want to sell him.
• How you perceive yourself is how others will see you. The more strikingly visual your presentation is, the more people will remember it.
• Observe that an organization’s reputation is usually built on one or two key accounts.

Overall, it was a quick motivational read.

Scott Kelby’s “The Digital Photography Book” seems to be the goto reference for those who purchase their first DSLR camera. Even though I don’t have a DSLR camera yet, I was interested in learning more about photography and how to take good photos. This book is organized by use cases: shooting flowers, shooting at weddings, shooting landscapes, shooting sport events and shooting people. It’s very easy to follow, the book consists of several one page tips for each section. Here’s what I learned from reading this book:

The Launch Pad is a book on YCombinator, a seed fund that is mass-producing new startups in Silicon Valley. The book walks us through different stages of the program: applications, interviews, prototype day, rehearsal day and demo day. It gives an insider perspective, featuring what several companies such as MongoHQ, Parse and Rap Genius have gone through during YC Summer 2011 batch. It contains the struggles of companies who had to pivot and come up with new ideas during the program. It’s also a good resource for learning about Paul Graham school of thought on startups. Here are some of the parts I liked:

Kaldıraç Etkisi, Ekim Nazım Kaya’nın girişimcilik üzerine düşüncelerini ve deneyimlerini paylaştığı, pek çok girişimcinin de kendi tecrübeleri ile katkıda bulunduğu crowd-sourced bir kitap. Başka bir açıdan bakarsak, bu kitap Ekim’in diğer girişimcilerle bağlantı kurmak, kendi kamuoyunu yaratmak ve Türk internet girişimciliğinin 1. liginde yer almak için yaptığı bir çalışma. Kitabın içeriğinin yanısıra, Ekim’in diğer yazarları projeye dahil etmek ve kitabı tanıtmak için yaptıklarından da alınacak çok ders var. Ekim Nazım Kaya’nın yazdıklarından aldığım bazı notlar şunlar:

Türkiye’nin internet tarihi ilgimi çektiği için Tamer Şahin’in Hacker’ın Aklı adlı kitabını okudum. Türkiye’de yargılanan ilk hacker olan Tamer Şahin’in gibi ben de ortaokul yıllarımda internet’e girmeye başladım. Önceleri IRC sunucularında chat yaparken, daha sonra internet üzerinden oyun oynamaya ve Counter-Strike üzerine web siteleri yapmaya başladım. Kitapta kendi hayatımdan parçalar buldum. Bana internetin vahşi batıya benzediği günleri hatırlattı. Dial-up ile bağlanıp IRC’ye girmeden önce 3 tane firewall yüklememiz gereken, Windows’un açıkları yüzünden nuke atıp mavi ekran çıkartılan, ssping atıp bilgisayar kilitlenen, trojan yükleyip format atılan yaramazlık günleri geldi aklıma. Kitabı okurken beraber çalışma şansına eriştiğim Umut Gökbayrak ile ilgili bir anıya denk geldim. Sohbetlerimiz sırasında Umut’un Tamer Şahin’i işe aldığını söylediğini hatırladım:

Crossing the Chasm is one of the classic books on marketing and selling technology products to mainstream customers. It was written in 1991 and revised in 1999, but it is still a valuable resource for understanding how technology products get adopted by customers.

The author starts by describing the characteristics of each type of consumer in the technology adoption life cycle: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. The main argument of this book is that technology adoption is not continuous and there are cracks in between each of these type of consumers’ adoption. Moreover, the major gap is the one that separates early adopters from early majority, which the author calls “chasm”. The book defines the strategy to cross the chasm and gives examples of companies who took this approach.

From Indie Game: The Movie:

The one major thing that made this possible is the rise of digital distribution. It used to be that retailers had a lot of power over every game creation company because that was the only avenue available to sell games and so nobody was willing to start distributing games digitally because Walmart would get upset at them and they wouldn’t take their products off the shelf and nothing would happen. But Valve changed that when they came up with Steam. They had no loyalties to retail and so they just did it. And then everybody said well, we have to compete with them, and there was this whole flood of XBox Live Arcade, Playstation Network and Wii Ware and it followed suit after that.

There are two different camps when it comes to startups: Bootstrapped, profitable businesses versus venture-funded companies with big ambitions.

The $100 Startup focuses on startups with low capital requirements that don’t require specialised skills to operate and have more than $50K in yearly profits. It’s a guide for potential entrepreneurs looking for personal freedom.

The author tries to get the reader into “I can do this too” mindset by sharing numerous successful lifestyle business stories. It walks you through each step of starting your lifestyle business, takes you from deciding on what to do to planning to launch, from tactics to increase profits to franchising your business.