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• Articulate Executive: Orchestrating Effective Communication- HBR

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• The End of Advertising As We Know It - Sergio Zyman
• Copywriting - J. Jonathan Gabay
• Affect, Imagery, Conciousness - Silvan S. Tomkins
• The Marketing Imagination - Theodore Levitt

Recently Read

• Blink - Malcolm Gladwell
• Security Analysis - Graham & Dodd
• Intelligent Investor - Benjamin Graham
• The Rediscovered Benjamin Graham - Janet Lowe
• Goldman Sachs: the Culture of Success - Alfred A. Knopf
• The Panic of 1907 - Robert Bruner
• When Washington Shutdown Wall Street - Silber William
• The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien

Malcom Gladwell

To enjoy Blink you have to be a connoisseur of people.  Interest in them, and driven to know what drives them in routine moments.  Any man will state that he is rational, but speak with him and he will question his rationality.  Show him information, delve and you will find a series of instant decisions that have determined his life.

Blink tells of individuals who have harnessed these decisions by letting the mind work.  As a ball player trains, train the mind for the instant decision.  Once an instant arises, one can perform and later describe that instant definitely and accurately.  Having a mastered activity, one can accurately describe the tools: firm, “has pop”, fits into the seam—whatever the jargon for the tool, the master knows it.  Motions are as honed as the tools; they are efficient, they anticipate, they are strategic.  All these motions the master knows as tangible as the tool.

Gladwell, the author of Blink, spins the stories of individuals mastering the instant decisions others perform.  Psychologists, sales persons, and police rely on the signs of others minds to make decisions for health, money, and safety.
My closest activities to instant decisions are: teaching and skeet shooting.  Teaching hones your skills on others, and skeet shooting hones your skills on yourself.  To teach means you have to prep someone’s mind to learn, then you have to present, and then you summarize to give that individual a reason to retain.  All of this must be tempered by the individual’s present state which has been set over the course of his life.  Skeet shooting is an inwardly focused activity where you prepare yourself for the event, summon the event, and complete the event (hitting the clay target).  The culmination lasts less than a second.  The shooter must know himself, and know whether he has created the atmosphere to succeed in that moment.
Blink exploration of people opened the door to a passion of mine I’d slowly shut: people.  What drives them, why do they make the decisions they do, and who needs help.  The book is a good read.