https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/20/magazine/neil-young-streaming-music.html

Editor’s comments: It’s no secret to readers that I enjoy Erik Larson’s work. His unique blend of great research and near-fictional personalities creates a look at one year in England’s history while under siege from the German Luftwaffe.  Actual facts from 45,000 civilian deaths (5,500 children) during the blitz year are embroidered not just by Churchill’s fame but also his and his eccentric family’s peccadillos. 

We hear voices in solitude
we never hear in the hurry and turmoil of life;
we receive counsels and comforts
we get under no other condition. 

- Amelia E. Barr

Editor's note:  This is an airy book of fiction about a bookstore on a barge on the Seine in Paris whose owner sets sail one day after 20 years of habits borne of a lost love.  It is recreational reading to be sure with very lively, if somewhat far-fetched characters but by the end you realize it has a wonderful point to it all.  That point is expressed in the  favorite excerpt below which appears about mid-book.

Favorite Excerpt:  "Habit is a vain and treacherous goddess.  She lets nothing disrupt her rule.  She smothers one desire after another; the desire to travel, the desire for a better job or a new love.  She stops us from loving as we would like, because habit prevents us from asking ourselves whether we continue to enjoy doing what we do".

By Seth Godin

My worldview has been shaped by paradox.  Here are a few of my favorites.    
  

• You can’t sell when you’re talking 

And yet most salespeople “show up and throw up”.  One of my early mentors taught me that “if you spend 30 minutes with a prospect and they speak 27 of those minutes, they will think YOU are a genius”.   It stuck throughout my corporate and entrepreneurial career and I think it’s been life changing.  Great salespeople are great listeners and only speak at any length AFTER they fully understand the client’s issues.  Even then, they pause frequently to say, “did I get that right?”   

This concept goes double in personal relationships which I also see as the continuing process of “selling each other”.    I must “seek first to understand, less be understood”.  I find rich irony that great sales advice comes from the Bible.  

"Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty."