#teachingisfun

Today’s topic from the Bloganuary (blogging challenge from WordPress) is, Has a book changed your life?

Every day, at 14:00 (Kyiv time), WordPress sends us topics to write about. I immediately knew what I would write about. Yet, it is 21:02, and I still haven’t written my text. I took some more time to think (and work a bit). I am a queen of overthinking. ha-ha

In my opinion, all books I read changed my life. I have takeaways from every single book. Even when I give up reading a book. When I give up reading a book, I remind myself that life is too short to waste my time on crap.

One of the most influential books I’ve read is 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People by Susan Weinschenk.

It was 2020. I enrolled in MA in Applied Neuroscience, Neuropsychology, and Neurological Therapy (as my 3rd education). I did my MA at a Spanish university. I wanted to learn more about our brains and use that knowledge to implement in teaching and marketing.

I don’t remember how I found this book. But I do remember reading it quickly since it is well written.

I bought it on Play Books. I love this app as it allows me to highlight in different colors and easily access my notes in different colors. For example, I use orange when I want to highlight a good idea, green – well said, blue – news words. The whole book was full of highlighted stuff!

“100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People” helped me to understand how people see, read, think, remember, feel, decide, focus their attention, what motivates people, etc. There are 100 short chapters based on research studies. Moreover, there is a list of used sources, and you can read full research studies (I looked them up on google scholar).

I used lots of knowledge from this book when creating this website. By the way, I have a blog post, “7 Things to Do Before Launching Your Website or Blog,” inspired by this book.

I am going to re-read this book again. Sometimes I re-read books, find a new information and even get new ideas.

I think this book is useful no matter what you do (I mean professionally).

Has a book changed your life?