Five Stars: The Communication Secrets to Get from Good to Great

Recently I have been thinking of getting PMP certificate and wondering if the membership should come at the cost of Toastmasters, which i joined last year. The year before that I got curious about reading poetry aloud. I have veered from reading, creative writing to public speaking and leadership.

Personally for me, I inch to my goals by proximity, doing things which seem interesting then, not too clear about the future, but eventually it all falls in place. It’s the 1 degree rule but for veering off course, where you can change course totally without realizing 😊 I think I am getting the hang of contrarian thinking.

 

From a year or so ago, when I was feverishly following marketers in social media, I stashed away Carmine Gallo as a to read author. When I chanced upon the book, I knew it would be worth reading. Given that the book is about storytelling, emotions come into play when you are reading it. I was mindful of seeing how Gallo himself told the story of his book in the big picture.

“Five stars” by Carmine Gallo is about the importance of storytelling and communication skills in the face of AI. In that I came across Shonda Rhymes the year of saying yes, I have read of it before too but haven’t gone to the heart of it. At that point, another thing came to mind. Rejection therapy. A while ago I told a friend about rejection therapy from a Ted talk, where Jia Jiang shared What he learned from 100 days of rejection.

 

They are two things on the opposite side. Saying yes to everything even though you fear and trying everything even though you might hear only no. Changing your and other’s no to yes.

 

In the 5 stars book, there is a quote by DFW –

“In other words, a real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.”

 

which sums up the bulletpoints better of what is necessary to do anything good/great if you think in the opposite

Hardwork

Largesse

Strength

& Courage

Pitch Perfect

Bill Mcgowan
This book has a gazillion of techniques of how to get your message across in different settings. Scorcese principle, pasta-sauce reduction are good mnemonics for some of the ways.
" He is also a trusted advisor in the C-suites of tech companies like, Facebook, Spotify, AirBnB, Dropbox and Salesforce.com."
The above line was the line that lured me into the book. These are the hot companies of the day and public has interest in knowing about all they can about them.
With these names on the blurb, I was expecting specific techniques applied to the said companies. It must be a trade secret that the author does not want to divulge. Thats one disappointment with the book. Another is, with the sea of lessons, the book has too much general stuff that could have garnered weight with specific examples. I have just read  Scaling Up Excellence with a lifetime load of lessons, so my expectation is way too high.

PS: My neighbour saw me reading this book and said that its made into a movie. she thought I was reading Pitch Perfect.