World Book Day - Keeping Literature Alive in the Digital Age

It was World Book Day earlier this month, with schools up and down the country holding themed events and children dressing up as their favourite character from a book.

World Book Day is proof that traditional literature still has a place in the hearts and minds of children, and hopefully will for many more years to come!

It’s crucial that we maintain this sense of importance and we must work hard to keep written literature in our lives, and particularly for children, as screens become the go-to for many parents, and are increasingly encouraged in the school setting.

Moreover, books hold so much joy and learning potential. There is a world of imagination, fantasy, fact and fiction to be endlessly explored… and young minds to nurture and nourish with information and ideas.

I’m very much in favour of technology and embrace digital developments fully. I could talk for hours about the benefits of combining technology with the more traditional aspects of life. But I’m also an author and I have many stories to tell... from my days in Rhodesia as a youngster, dodging bullets and petrol bombs, to my time heading up Telecity and the tumultuous period when we merged with Redbus.

These are big enough stories to tell in themselves, but they resonante further with the opportunity to explain my life circumstances at the time - whether that was living in a squat and making ends meet by restoring old pianos, or years down the line when I had my senior management team swim with sharks to conquer their fears of the changing business!  Putting these stories together in the books I have written allows me to share the valuable lessons I have learnt in life.

So with a few bank holidays coming up, and hopefully a bit of downtime, I encourage you to put pen to paper and share a story - whether it’s autobiographical or pure fantasy. It’s an incredibly rewarding process and can be very cathartic.

My second novel, Live. Love. Work. Prosper., combines my passion for storytelling with my passion for technology. The book is about integrating work and life. This is a new approach to your business and personal life which blows the idea of “work/life balance” out of the water. It’s simply not possible to balance the two, they need to be allowed to integrate with each other.

I manage work/life integration with clever use of technology and efficient use of time. To connect with this, my book combines the written word with technology in the form of QR codes at each chapter break. Scanning these codes will take you to exclusive video content, further enriching your reading experience. So keep your smartphone close by while reading and you can satisfy both your literary and technological needs as you read!

I’d love to read your stories so please do share, there is so much we can teach each other through our personal experiences. And I’d be keen to hear what you think of my written work, Forget Strategy and Live Love Work Prosper are both available to purchase on Amazon. Feel free to leave a review!