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    That Other Side of My Brain
    That Other Side of My Brain
    That Other Side of My Brain
    Ebook120 pages53 minutes

    That Other Side of My Brain

    By Mike Varga

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    About this ebook

    As a successful businessman, I honed skills at observation, evaluation and analysis, as well as strategy and planning. I have of late been applying these skills along with a sense of art to better represent the world, human nature and myself through poetry, using that other side of my brain. I think you’ll enjoy the fun poems. You will react and feel the ones about the world and maybe see some of yourself in the poems about philosophy and myself.

    Robert Louis Stevenson said, “Wine is bottled poetry”—a beautiful thought. I hope you find that the poetry here goes great with a glass of wine ... Cheers!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherProminent Books, LLC
    Release dateJun 15, 2018
    ISBN9780463276907
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      Book preview

      That Other Side of My Brain - Mike Varga

      Prologue:

      That Other Side of My Brain

      I have been for a long time engaged in the business of business and the application of engineering, math, logic, and science, along with the art of psychology. The psychology was always geared to get people to follow, or to develop them into effective leaders, to build a brand, even a persona that becomes the vessel of one’s reputation. Reputation of course is built through layers of success, through painful-attimes deployment of integrity, and, above all, persistence. Persistence borne out of passion and an ability to abstract myself from situations to gain useful and truthful perspective were my strengths. Persistence, perspective, and curiosity were my friends in a journey through my business career.

      I have, as of late, found that passion, perspective and curiosity have found their way into my journey as a writer.

      There is an underlying cold logic in the psychology of business that I’ve applied over the years. It begins with a philosophy I had to execute relentlessly to achieve the long-term objectives. That philosophy included an honest appraisal of my strengths and weaknesses and the reality of situations—what I could control and could not, what I was capable of and what I was not. I felt that I must never fool myself. If I did, then there are no possible tools that could be used to improve, no way to succeed, and no way to deliver against my own expectations. Writing poetry and exposing myself in thought and soul is a natural extension of that philosophy with a creative twist. I like the use of rhythm and rhyme as a way to convey passion and enhance the feeling of words and to explore words and ideas with relentless curiosity. I’ve striven to deliver ideas creatively in the works I present herein.

      Certainly, there is creativity in the art of business. However, unless you really look for the nuances in business, you may miss the artistry. So here I use the right side of my brain, with a small dose of left side of my brain, to arrive at this compilation of poems. It took me a couple years to develop this content, and in that time I found my style changed some. These works are not organized chronologically, resulting in a mix of styles as you read.

      I have thought much about exposing my soul and my thoughts through these works, but I find that these are at best only still a glimpse of who I am. This may be more meaningful to me in the context of my life than other accomplishments, but quite possibly not in the eyes of others. I’m sure I can never fully succeed in exposing my soul and my mind as I had attempted. There’s always something that holds me back a little. Maybe it’s dark places or thoughts that should never find the light of day. Or maybe it’s simply ego that keeps one from fully exploring and exposing weaknesses or scars and vulnerabilities.

      When I first started writing, I didn’t really share very much with others. I had fear of criticism as well as exposure. At the same time, I really knew that to be true to my personal philosophy, I needed to be brave. I did learn from my business experience that only through risk-taking, lesson-learning and the sting of criticism can we really grow.

      Of course, a more worrisome outcome of my writing is that no one would really even notice. Ironic, to worry about exposing my soul and talent or lack thereof while at the same time realizing that few might actually read these works. In the first few poems I printed, I put the following lines on the first page to express this sentiment:

      Check my ego at the lion’s lair

      Exposing my soul without a care

      Little will the world later note

      What this writer here hath wrote

      I’ve written poetry about myself, about the world around me, the interaction between people, and then sometimes I wrote rhymes and thoughts just for the plain fun of it. I found when looking at my poems that most of them made me feel something when I wrote them, and still make me feel something when I read them, and I hope that you, the reader, find meaning and maybe feel something too. I choose poetry as an expression of thought because I have always admired those who can say something

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