Growing Rich Everyday... My Weblog

An occasional visit to Barnes and Noble is something that I often look for as one of my pastimes.
They sure have a winning marketing streak ! Anyone with even a faint passion for books can succumb to their strategy and walk out with a couple of books.
In addition to carving out a hole in my [read - husband's] pocket [;)], I often leave with a wishlist of books.
Come what may, I am determined to read the following books during 2008.

1. The World is Flat [Thomas Friedman] - currently reading.
2. Complications [ Atul Gawande]
3. Guns, Germs and Steel [Jared Diamond]
4. The Lord of the Rings [J.R.R. Tolkein]
5. Shantaram [Gregory David ROberts]
6. Blink [Malcolm Gladwell]
7. The Tipping Point [Malcolm Gladwell]

As 2007 comes to an end, I am more than just happy and content. It has been a very great year for me, quite eventful and quite productive - both personal and professional.

It was a year of parent visits - my in-laws visiting sometime between April and June and my dad visiting sometime later during the year, it was a year of travel and a year of some good goals.

A year of lotsa travel !!
Tapan and I decided to make the most of our vacations by traveling to quite a lot of places this year.

It started off with a trip to Sanibel-Captiva Islands just off the west coast of Florida, in January 2007.
In March 2007 , we visited California (San Francisco, Monterrey, Big Sur, Lake Tahoe and Sacramento).
In May 2007, we looped around the Grand Circle (Las Vegas, Grand Canyon - North and South Rims, Zion National Park, Bryce National Park).
In September 2007, we visited Atlanta and the Smoky Mountain National Park and in October 2007 it was a trip to New Jersey and New York.
Of course there were a couple of trips to Orlando's theme parks - SeaWorld, Epcot and Magic Kingdom.

A year of goals !!
Learning to swim was a major highlight for me this year especially so when it took more than 2 weeks for me to shed off my fear of water. It was a very determined effort although it would be frustrating at times, but it gave me a sense of accomplishing something above all fears and inhibitions.

Professionally it has been very very fulfilling and that kind of calmed the restless soul in me. I switched jobs in March and since then it has been no looking back. I love my job (it took almost 3 years and 3 job switches to find this one) and I look forward to achieving even more than I think I can with it.

And finally the most easy to do, but most difficult to achieve results ! It's none other than shedding off your pounds ! After a lot of persuasion by Tapan, I was finally convinced to exercise regularly and maintain a good fitness level. That included frequent jogging for a mile, Pranayaam, and of course working out at the gym pretty regularly. Albeit slow, the results were somewhat comforting - I lost about 5-6 pounds from September through December.

Finally we started to blog. I had been wanting to do this since quite some time, but never had the "Do it now" attitude to get it started. I now hope to be regular at blogging and grow it into a professional venture for 2008.

And there were quite many small goals too, but the above qualified to be the best of all.

A year of some good books !!
During the start of 2007, I happened to be a part of a book club. However that fizzled out during summer - [:(]. Some good books that I read during 2007 were Serving Crazy with Curry (author: Amulya Malladi), Memoirs of a Geisha (author: Arthur Golden), The Indians, This I Believe (Dan Gediman), The Secret (Rhonda Byrne) and The World is Flat (Thomas Friedman).

Definitely a rich 2007 [:)] With this I look forward to a great and richer New Year with new dreams, aspirations, books, goals and much more !!!!

[Title adapted from "Brave New World" - a very popular work of Aldous Huxley]

There is definitely an evolution in the way workplace and work are being perceived in the everything2.0 era, and the ideas of workplace and work will still evolve in the future. However in my opinion , I can describe this evolution to pertain to only the corporate lifestyle. It would not apply to professions like school teachers, physiotherapists, nurses, doctors or any profession where healing, nurturing the other person is the main crux of the job.

Professional bloggers like Penelope Trunk, Marci Alboher have their "current" careers revolving around the same concept. In short, they precisely articulate this new work-attitude wave, and are definitely a motivation to everyone who feel trapped in their current work lifestyle. And if that wasn't enough, they enrich us with quite many positive ideas about improving workplace productivity, time-management, self-promotion, negotiation skills, shifting careers etc.

I read Penelope Trunk's blog quite regularly, and I have just come across Marci Alboher's blog quite recently. I have always felt quite the same about some of the topics that they focus on. Here is a sample of just three of them.

1. Change should be made a constant factor in career life. I believe in working in several different roles throughout my entire span of work-life which can be easily be between 30 to 40 years. Apart from my current job as Software Engineer, I am much interested to be a Librarian, Market Research Analyst, Entrepreneur, School/College Teacher as of now. I feel it is the variety of the work we do that will make our lives more fulfilling rather than dedicating one's entire life just climbing the ladder all the way to the top in just one profession.

2. Job titles are just fancy vocab games that actually limit our potential from delivering work to the best of our capabilities. Also we really do not work in a confined manner as described by the job title. The more we deliver "out of the box" of our job title, the better are the chances of us growing faster.

3. "Work-from-home mom" is the new blend for women who want to raise their kids by themselves instead of sending them to day-care, want to have a job, do not want to quit and stay at home full-time. Basically they want to have it all. There is of course some kind of compromise for the highly career-minded woman, as work-from-home may pose to have some kind of set-back to her desire of rising to the top in a fast-paced manner. But at least something is better than nothing at all.

Of course there are many more such ideas that will continue to evolve and fill up this blog space.