Too Small to Ignore will encourage you to turn your good, loving intentions into strategic actions and empower you to help change the world–and the future–forever, one child at a time. The time has come for a major paradigm shift: Children are too important and too intensely loved by God to be left behind or left to chance. Children belong to all of us and we are compelled to intervene on their behalf. We must invest in children all across the world. In Too Small to Ignore, Dr. Stafford issues an urgent call for change. His adventures as a boy raised in a West African village provide an often-humorous and always-captivating backdrop to his profound and inspiring challenges. Wess lived the reality of “it takes a village to raise a child” and calls us to “be that loving village for children everywhere.”
In an unorthodox approach, Georgetown University professor Cal Newport debunks the long-held belief that "follow your passion" is good advice, and sets out on a quest to discover the reality of how people end up loving their careers. Not only are pre-existing passions rare and have little to do with how most people end up loving their work, but a focus on passion over skill can be dangerous, leading to anxiety and chronic job hopping. Spending time with organic farmers, venture capitalists, screenwriters, freelance computer programmers, and others who admitted to deriving great satisfaction from their work, Newport uncovers the strategies they used and the pitfalls they avoided in developing their compelling careers. Cal reveals that matching your job to a pre-existing passion does not matter. Passion comes after you put in the hard work to become excellent at something valuable, not before. In other words, what you do for a living is much less important than how you do it. With a title taken from the comedian Steve Martin, who once said his advice for aspiring entertainers was to "be so good they can't ignore you," Cal Newport's clearly written manifesto is mandatory reading for anyone fretting about what to do with their life, or frustrated by their current job situation and eager to find a fresh new way to take control of their livelihood. He provides an evidence-based blueprint for creating work you love, and will change the way you think about careers, happiness, and the crafting of a remarkable life.
Residents in Boston, Massachusetts are automatically reporting potholes and road hazards via their smartphones. Progressive Insurance tracks real-time customer driving patterns and uses that information to offer rates truly commensurate with individual safety. Google accurately predicts local flu outbreaks based upon thousands of user search queries. Amazon provides remarkably insightful, relevant, and timely product recommendations to its hundreds of millions of customers. Quantcast lets companies target precise audiences and key demographics throughout the Web. NASA runs contests via gamification site TopCoder, awarding prizes to those with the most innovative and cost-effective solutions to its problems. Explorys offers penetrating and previously unknown insights into healthcare behavior. How do these organizations and municipalities do it? Technology is certainly a big part, but in each case the answer lies deeper than that. Individuals at these organizations have realized that they don't have to be Nate Silver to reap massive benefits from today's new and emerging types of data. And each of these organizations has embraced Big Data, allowing them to make astute and otherwise impossible observations, actions, and predictions. It's time to start thinking big. In Too Big to Ignore, recognized technology expert and award-winning author Phil Simon explores an unassailably important trend: Big Data, the massive amounts, new types, and multifaceted sources of information streaming at us faster than ever. Never before have we seen data with the volume, velocity, and variety of today. Big Data is no temporary blip of fad. In fact, it is only going to intensify in the coming years, and its ramifications for the future of business are impossible to overstate. Too Big to Ignore explains why Big Data is a big deal. Simon provides commonsense, jargon-free advice for people and organizations looking to understand and leverage Big Data. Rife with case studies, examples, analysis, and quotes from real-world Big Data practitioners, the book is required reading for chief executives, company owners, industry leaders, and business professionals.
Small Is the New Big In this humorous, insistent book, Pastor Ed Gungor demonstrates that the world is changed most by ordinary people—the "small dogs" of the human race. Small dogs may not run the world, but neither can the world tune them out. If it weren’t for small dogs, the world might be a quieter place, but it would certainly be a needier one. With chapters like "Dare to Be Small," "Fight the Big-Dog Lie," and "The Bark of Faith," Gungor challenges the notion that earthly prominence, status, and power are essential to significance. Reminding us that small is the new big, he inspires us to fall in love with life—the everyday, normal kind—and shows us how to make an eternal difference. Living a Life That’s Hard to Ignore The thing about small, barking dogs is that they can’t be ignored. They may not be show-dog material or win outstanding awards, but through their persistence and insistence they make themselves known. Only a handful of people ever achieve notoriety and "greatness," but the energizing truth of One Small Barking Dog is that every single one of us can change the world. New York Times bestselling author Ed Gungor debunks the big-dog lie and clearly teaches "ordinary" people how to live out their faith in a way that not only changes the world we live in now but that affects lives for eternity. By the time you finish this book, you won’t be worried about being small. You’ll be ready to take on the world. You’ll know how to live a life that can’t be ignored. Whether you’ve just graduated from school or you’ve been at this life for many years, Ed Gungor’s concrete principles and simple life wisdom will show you new ways to make a big impact on your world.
Emma O'Donovan is eighteen, beautiful, and fearless. It's the beginning of summer in a quiet Irish town and tonight she and her friends have dressed to impress. Everyone is at the party, and all eyes are on Emma. The next morning Emma's parents discover her collapsed on the doorstop of their home, unconscious. She is disheveled, bleeding, and disoriented, looking as if she had been dumped there. To her distress, Emma can't remember what happened the night before. All she knows is that none of her friends will respond to her texts. At school, people turn away from her and whisper under their breath. Her mind may be a blank as far as the events of the previous evening, but someone has posted photos of it on Facebook under a fake account, "Easy Emma"--photos she will never be able to forget. As the photos go viral and a criminal investigation is launched, the community is thrown into tumult. The media descends, neighbors chose sides, and people from all over the world want to talk about her story. Everyone has something to say about Emma. Asking For It is a powerful story about the devastating effects of rape and public shaming, told through the awful experience of a young woman whose life is changed forever by an act of violence.
One chance at her big break. One charming cameraman standing in her way. Jackie Strauss is drowning in nautical-themed Christmas decorations. When her holiday-obsessed neighborhood is selected for a documentary, the DIY expert realizes she's in over her head as the cameras start rolling and she starts fumbling. But the variable most likely to result in her total failure falls solely on the broad, muscular shoulders of the charismatic cameraman who’s documenting her every move. The man she once had a fiery hot one-night stand with. Scott Davis uses work to avoid anything beyond a fling. Unfortunately, his strategy of quickly moving from one filming location to another leads him straight back to the one woman he never got over: Jackie Strauss. But he's only in town temporarily and getting involved with anyone in the documentary is strictly forbidden, so he keeps his camera up as a barrier and somehow resists the achingly strong desire to ravage Jackie under one of her perfectly placed mistletoes. With Scott’s next flight out already booked, can Jackie convince him their love is worth the risk of losing everything? *This spicy holiday rom-com has it all: an ornery cat, quirky neighbors who are like family, small-town holiday festivities, a ride-or-die bestie, multiple Richard Simmons mentions (because why not), and an HEA that's sure to melt hearts. It's a second in series but can be read as a stand-alone.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A stunning “portrait of the enduring grace of friendship” (NPR) about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. A masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century. NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE A Little Life follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition—as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged by addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held together by their devotion to the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by an unspeakable childhood trauma. A hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century, Hanya Yanagihara’s stunning novel is about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. Look for Hanya Yanagihara’s latest bestselling novel, To Paradise.
Winner of the 2014 Christian Book of the Year Award "I'M TOO BUSY!" We've all heard it. We've all said it. All too often, busyness gets the best of us. Just one look at our jam-packed schedules tells us how hard it can be to strike a well-reasoned balance between doing nothing and doing it all. That's why award-winning author and pastor Kevin DeYoung addresses the busyness problem head on in his newest book, Crazy Busy — and not with the typical arsenal of time management tips, but rather with the biblical tools we need to get to the source of the issue and pull the problem out by the roots. Highly practical and super short, Crazy Busy will help you put an end to "busyness as usual."
