It's that time in Israel when every second day seems to be a holiday. As a result of this, aligned with rather light workloads, my company has decided to send everyone out on holiday. My last day of work was Tuesday, 17 September and my next day of work will be Sunday, 29 September.
What am I going to do with myself during this long period? Many Israelis have already left the country for a week's holiday somewhere abroad - the OP has gone to St Petersburg and Moscow for a week - but we're staying at home. I don't want to waste this time, so I wrote a list of things which I want to do (presented not necessarily in order of importance)
- Fix a few things in the OP's programs
- Read the material for my two doctoral courses
- Sequence and record a song for my Sandy Denny covers cd
- Read two books: "Quiet: the power of introverts in a world that can't stop talking" by Susan Cain, and "The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared" by Jonas Jonasson
- Watch some films on television
- Meet my daughter's fiance's family (yes, my daughter has decided to get married!)
I think that those are enough things, but I've already completed some items!
I started reading this book today and am enjoying it very much. In a sense, it isn't telling me anything that I don't know already: being an introvert who is given to self-introspection, I had worked out a great deal of Cain's insights by myself over the years. Yet still, it is a fascinating book to read, and I think that the changes that I have undergone in the past few years (MBA, work environment) allow me to understand the book in greater depth than I might have done ten or twenty years ago.
I started telling my wife (no introvert, she) about the book and its primary conclusion, that the world is run by extroverts: she who speaks the loudest at meetings gets her ideas accepted, even if they are not the best. My wife said that this very much describes a friend of hers, another member of the kibbutz, who seems to be more introverted than I and is disliked because of the side effects of this introversion. She immediately wanted to buy him the book, but it seems that at the moment it has yet to be translated into Hebrew (the book was published only last year). Whilst her friend understands English, he would no doubt find the prospect of reading a 330 page book in a foreign language daunting - in the same way that I baulk at reading books in Hebrew.
No comments:
Post a Comment