What I learned by reading 50 books in a year…

I have been developing mobile apps since 2002. Every few years the whole ecosystem changes and I find myself again at the cross roads. In first few years the focus was on developing mobile apps using J2ME and publishing them on telecom operator portals. Now the focus is on getting users from the App Store and Google Play store. Earlier competition was from 100 apps and now the competition is from more than 2 millions apps! So learning new things has become a survival issue for me.

Learning new things is not new for me. I have been coding since class 7th. Inspite of being ahead of friends in the areas of coding and astronomy in school I pursued a degree in accountancy. I gained India’s premier degree in accountancy (CA) from Institute of Chartered Accountants of India in 2003. I even audited companies which had million of dollars of revenue and were listed on stock exchange.

So I always had a capacity to read but unfortunately read just a few books a year. Some how I got hooked to read more than 50 books between 1 Feb 2015 and 31st Jan 2016. Increasing globalisation is increasing competitive pressures and no longer can you just focus on just your local competitors. You need to learn a lot to understand the art, science and commerce behind your industry. I am competing with developers from Vietnam while also simultaneously competing with big companies like Twitter and Facebook from US.

I was always thirsty for knowledge but somehow my thirst for knowledge was not being fulfilled by Google, YouTube or meetups. I even visited San Francisco and attended events in 2015 to learn about my industry. All these sources could not quench my thirst for getting world class knowledge about my industry and globalised world in general.

Books provided the mentor which I was looking for. I learned a lot. Some of the broad themes and some important topics were:

• Startups and Entrepreneurship : The Lean Startup, Business Model Canvas, Value Proposition Canvas, Lean Canvas, art of managing great companies, remote working etc
• Visual Thinking : Visual grammar, Visual Alphabet, Doodling, Visual Presentations, Games for team collaboration, power of visual story telling
• UX and Design : Getting people hooked to apps, Micro-interactions, Design thinking, design of graphics, design of animation, game design, power of pattern language
• Business of Apps : Analytics and Marketing
• Agile Development :Scrum, Kanban and Extreme Programming
• Brain Power : Art of teaching children, art of organising things in mind, creativity techniques, focus on simplicity
• Coding : Game programming patterns, Fuzzy Logic, Apple’s GamePlayKit and other APIs
• Economics : The rise of money and credit

For a complete list of 50 books read by me, visit this list. I did read a few more outside of this list. My eyes get tired after reading in artificial light indoors after some time, otherwise I would have read even more books. So a dose of sun light was also a gift of reading books because otherwise I generally stay indoors. All these books combined contain more than 16,000 pages but I read only around 12,000 of them. I generally skipped things which looked boring to me.

Books enabled me to learn about things in depth. Blogs and videos are generally not very in-depth in content. Books allowed me to get immersed in the topic for long duration of time. They made me more positive and gave me confidence to succeed in a globalised world. My power of understanding and analysis improved dramatically. Flexibility of my mind improved a lot. I for the first time got a feeling that I now have the tools to win in this cut throat competition. I also felt younger. I was also able to understand the philosophy of my faith?—?Jainism better. I was able to associate ancient Hindu philosophy with western thought. I was able to analyse things from various view points.

Instead of running on the tread mill of modern stressful life I found my self roaming in the company of great authors and wisemen. After reading a few books I learned that books are a very big stress reliever and great entertainment. Thus I became even more motivated to read books.

The key takeaways were knowledge, positive energy, clarity of thought and pleasure of reading.