Category Recommended Books

How to read books OR You should just read more books!

Wuffles Leave a comment

Hello fuzzbutts!

Happy to have you here tonight because up next is a topic I hold as something that everyone should be doing more of: Reading!

I don’t have time for books, you think to yourself, probably muttering a swear as you read this article.

I disagree! If you spend time in the car listening to endless commercials on the radio or if you enjoy some downtime listening to something in your headphones, you have time to read a book. The trick is finding audio versions!

I’ve stated before that I love listening to books. I tend to be terrible about sitting down and reading. Even worse, if I hate the book, I sit there hating the book and finding it even more difficult to sit down and get through it. I mean, I can’t possible put it down and get another book. I HAVE to finish this terrible book.

Please keep in mind that bad books don’t have to be finished. You should be enjoying your reading experience. If the book is bad, just cut it off and toss it away. You don’t have to try to power through it. If you can read 3 good books in the time it takes you to read 1 bad book, that’s nothing to feel guilty about! Make sure you’re having fun with what you’re reading. Doing that, you’ll be able to do much more.

So WHY should you read more books? Whatever you’re reading, you can benefit from it. If it’s non-fiction, you’re learning something whether it’s straight facts or, in the case of a biography, what led to that person being a success or failure including their personality. If you’re reading fiction, you’re reading about the various moral choices a character may undergo and the worlds those authors created can stimulate your creativity. You will benefit by opening yourself up to new knowledge and experience.

I hope this helps you understand the How and the Why of you should be reading more books and take the time to pick up something you like!

Good luck Fuzzbutts!

Book Club: Dollars and Sense

Wuffles Leave a comment

Hello fuzzbutts!

I enjoy listening to so many books and I just finished one that was great and I wanted to recommend to you.

So this one is called Dollars and Sense: How We Misthink Money and How to Spend Smarter. It discusses the various ways we think about money and how absurd we can be when faced with situations.

One example is how people will watch a locksmith for twenty minutes struggle to unlock their door, breaking tools along the way, and then happily pay 80 dollars plus whatever fee to replace the tools. On the other hand, if that locksmith were able to deftly open the door in less than a minute, 80 dollars suddenly sounds like a rip-off. “You’re absurd. It took you two seconds to open that door and you want 80 dollars?”

It also goes into things like how the owner of an item values it for more than a buyer would (I know people who do this routinely and sometimes I do it too). The way language can focus our brains and steer us into a certain direction. Would you like a 20% fat burger or an 80% beef burger? How about the way the convenience and instant expectations we’ve developed as a society has affected our spending habits? Sunk cost fallacies.

The book does use pretty fascinating research and the humorous tone was delightful to listen to. It does give practical advice for a lot of the information it gives and, for some of it, just becoming aware of my own thinking will be useful in the future. Given the state of furries and finances, I think this book would be a great read to help the fandom.

Enjoy, fuzzbutts!

Book Recommendation: The 12-Week Year

Wuffles Leave a comment

Hello fuzzbutts!

I wanted to drop another book on you all! I’ll summarize the gist of it and you can decide if it’s worth looking into for more details! I think it’s actually very useful and I’ve been trying to incorporate it into my life.

So it’s the start of the year (or end of another) and you come up with big goals for the year. Tons of things you want to improve or get done. You then live your life and realize it’s late October and you’ve done next to nothing. Suddenly there’s no time to get it all finished and you feel guilty for not taking steps toward your dreams. You push it off for next year and fall into the same trap.

The problem with goals for the year is that you have a whole year to do them. You lose a sense of urgency when it comes to working on them and so it falls to the wayside as you try to keep up with life.  You beat yourself up over it and regret the entire year because of how little you accomplished of the things that truly matter to you.

The idea of the 12-week year is to set your goals for every 3 months. I’ve discussed ideas like this before but this book really boils it down. By setting yourself up for 3 months, you can still set substantial goals for yourself. It’s also short-term enough that it’ll stay in your mind that you need to work on it (Write them on a white board to help!).

I just barely covered the main point of the book and book contains a lot of details and ways to think about this. So go read The 12 Week Year !

Good luck fuzzbutts!

Book Recommendation- 24 Hours to the Perfect Interview

Wuffles Leave a comment

Hi fuzzbutts!

Working hard at the new jobbo! It’s been fun so far and the training process is intense. Even then, they’re suggesting people don’t typically “get comfortable” until 3 months after they start. I intend on doing it within 2 months. Aaaaanyway, once I had the interview scheduled for the job, I had received a book recommendation from my pal Tabykat to study before the interview.

It’s a short book called 24 Hours to the Perfect Interview. It’s almost 200 pages. Before you panic and say you can’t read that many pages so fast, I’m just saying you should get it the moment you know you’re looking for a job or a promotion and review the stuff. Plus a lot of the pages are a decent skim or show tables, etc, so it’s not as onerous as it sounds.  It covers a lot of things an experienced professional things should already know but it also gives fascinating details and things to try.

Since I was feeling so desperate for this particular job (the lab was beautiful, it’s an industry I want to work in, I heard nothing but good things from people there), I did the extra work. Good news is that it worked! So what especially seemed to help? I’ll just go over what I wouldn’t usually do but I did it after reading and I feel like it helped.

Research the status of the company- how are the financials. Any good news from the company? Any new deals or partnerships? I had a chance to talk about this to the director who interviewed me and they were impressed with the level of detail I knew (even though it was about 10 minutes worth of googling). I also seemed to blow somebody’s mind when I mentioned how I liked the company’s recent growth spike.

Letters after the interview- I thought this was kind of a hokey idea. I had a rapid fire interview (different pairs of people for 30 minutes over a few hours). Between pairs, I’d jot down notes regarding each person about something we discussed. After the interview was all over, I wrote thank-you notes and mailed them to the company for each individual person, mentioning said item from the interview. Once I got my foot in the door, almost everyone mentioned it and seemed to appreciate the gesture. Considering all these people were part of the decision to hire me, it felt like a good move.

There’s a ton of other stuff in there that I think most people miss, especially those early in their career development. I just wanted to recommend the book in general because I feel like it helped me. I wasn’t sure when I bought it for my kindle, planning on returning it if I didn’t get enough out of it (since I paid full price when it’s dirt cheap for a physical copy) but I liked it enough that I felt it was worth the sticker price.

Good luck fuzzbutts!