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Our Favorite Books in 2017
Last year, we published an article about our team’s favorite books of 2016. Everyone seemed to enjoy it (including a couple of the authors), so we decided to create another roundup to close out 2017.
Some of us found this rather difficult — for writers, choosing a favorite book is like choosing a favorite child. But alas, we had a deadline and a two-book limit.
So here is a list of books that made our lives a little better this year.
Why You Should Write for the Trash
“I’ve never had so much fun and freedom drawing! I’m going to keep a trash can next to my easel from now on.” The effusive young woman seated across from me was a far cry from the frustrated ball of nerves I had encountered a week before.
The trash can wins every time.
To Find Your Writing Voice, Accept Your Changing Self
What sets you apart from the fellow writer at Starbucks who is also nursing a cup of joe for six hours in the name of free wi-fi?
Your hustle, industry connections, bylines in fancy places, or superior Moleskine notebook, you might think. Sure, all those things factor into the grand scheme of the #writinglife, but there’s one important piece that you might forget to include: your voice.
Like DNA, your writing voice makes the words you’ve click-clacked out at two in the morning or scribbled into a notebook on a bumpy bus ride connect specifically to you. With any luck, it resonates with your desired audience, brings them to your website, or makes them start buying your books, and BAM! — you become a thought leader, successful businesswoman, or published author.
How to Choose Your Entrepreneurial Influencers and Harness the Impressionable Brain
If you’re a human being (which, if you’re reading this, I assume you are), I’m sure you’re well aware that we as human beings are social and impressionable creatures. No matter who you are — introverted and extroverted alike — we all need human connection to learn, grow, and excel in life, as well as in our chosen fields.
Granted, there will always be lone wolves who prefer to opt for solitude, believing that people only distract them from achieving their goals and their other pursuits in life.
All the same, our ability to communicate through language, gestures, and facial expressions, our simple ability to navigate the world — going to the loo, doing push-ups, using money to buy things — is reliant on the impressionable nature of the human brain, and our social interactions to date. Even someone who is self-taught likely became so not only through tinkering on their lonesome, but perhaps also through observing someone else, reading books, watching instructional videos, or — my personal favorite — asking Google.
These are all learning platforms — resources for the inquiring mind to plumb — and they are all products of humankind. I want to talk about the often untapped resource of influencers or, more romantically, heroes, in the entrepreneurial realm.