Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder

Join Sophie and enter a world of philosophy. You will be joining the philosophy's teacher, Alberto Knox on this ride. Sophie's World will open up your mind to many things that you never thought about before. You won't be learning these in most schools unless if you are in a philosophy school.

You are bound to learn everything you need to know about philosophy in one journey. Sophie is the main character in this story, along with Alberto Knox. Occasionally her mother, her best friend and her pets make appearances in the story. Her father is a captain of an oil tanker and therefore, rarely stays at home.

In this book, you will get to learn about medieval philosophy, meet Socrates, Plato and many more. Often you will be asked questions in this book to stimulate your philosophy thinking. Just how many of us are interested in philosophy if not because of this book. At least I know, I won't be interested if I didn't read this book at all.

You have to read this book to believe it. You will meet Hermes, Alberto's dog. It is also the delivery dog as it delivers the many packages to Sophie. The first two questions you will have to answer would be "who are you?" and "where does the world come from?".

This is the book for general. After all normal people like us will never thought about learning philosophy. Philosophy is seen as a boring topic. The truth is you will like philosophy once you have read this book. Enjoy it.

Writing - 2 Simple Steps to Stay Focused

Writing is never an easy task if you have many distractions around you. The only way you can write is to learn how to turn off all those distractions around you before you start writing. What are the distractions around you? Look around. What are you doing right now? Who is around you when you work? Is there a child or a pet that needs your attention? What other things that you need to do?

The truth is there are way too many distractions. Even if you don't have a kid or a pet, you might be surprised to learn that there are many distractions that will stop you from finishing your work. Social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Friendster, Tagged and YouTube are examples of distractions especially when you work using the internet, which most of us do. Emails would be the next, since there might be a new email coming in every minute - if you are one of the busy social networkers.

How do you get rid of these distractions? Simple. You just need to shut them off. Even better, you can shut off the browsers and just open up whatever applications you use for work. Since we are talking about writing, you will need a word processor, obviously.

Apart from social networks, some applications can be a distraction too. For example, Winamp or Windows Media Player. I am sure you know what these applications do and which is also why you need to minimise using them while working.

Just close the applications and keep your hands to yourself from opening them again. Sometimes, it is difficult to do but this is the discipline you need if you want to get things done on time. Would you want to have someone chasing your work all the time? No. So, get started.

Writing Ten Articles a Day

It is not easy to be a writer. It is not easy to write articles. However, there are so many people who aim to be a writer. Why? It is simply because they want to work at home while earning a handsome income. However, this is not going to happen unless you have the writing skills and the ideas to write about. Still, don't give up just yet.

You can practice writing if you are not good at writing so that you can learn to write better. Yes, practice makes perfect. Everyone knows this. However, you have to make it work for you. Try to write ten articles a day, five days a week. This is an exercise for you to be in tune with writing.

How you can write ten articles a day?

It is easy. You just need to follow these steps.

1. Gather all your writing ideas. Yes, you need to have ideas before you can write. Choose your topic wisely, research about it and gather as many information as you can.
2. Work on your articles one at a time. Don't rush into all ten articles at one time.
3. Take your time to write the articles. You cannot set a time to write an article since some of the articles might take a longer time to write than the others.
4. Once you have written your articles, it is time to check for spelling errors and grammar mistakes. If you are not good at writing, you are bound to make mistakes. Use the grammar and spell checker to help you out. You will get to learn something.
5. Once you have checked through the articles, it is time to polish the articles. You can read the articles again and edit any part that you feel should not be there at all. Editing is helpful as you are reading your own work again and again. You are bound to get better at writing and reading thanks to this exercise.