Ravi Subramanian’s Speech about the power of words | Personal Views

Usually, we do not present our views about speeches or lectures given by someone at somewhere, unless we find it is worth sharing with the readers. Commencement speeches are of course an exception, as they are the source of inspirational and motivational stuff, presented by someone who has achieved remarkable success. Remember the saying experience is the best teacher; the speaker at convocation ceremony usually shares his/her life experiences and provides a source of wisdom, and we talk about it.

Recently BlogAdda, a blogging community website, arranged an award ceremony to felicitate some nice blogs in their respective category. We congratulate the winners.

Ravi Subramanian, a banker by profession is an author by passion and we really liked his book Bankerupt. He was invited to speak about the power of the word. Here we represent our views regarding what he spoke and its context; and our thoughts about the same.

Remember, this is not the transcript of what he spoke.

Looking a bit nervous when started speaking he confirmed same. He was worried as to what should he speak to the bloggers regarding the power of words, as they usually are familiar with it. But the rush for earn a handsome amount of money through blog with less efforts – mindset made some such blogs appear on the Internet, and it is the fact. However, there are no short cuts for that, friends. And running a blog for money and for passion are two different things.

He shares an incident about a woman who was going through a bad time and obviously he didn’t name her for the reasons we understand. A motivational article at a blog, or a blog as a whole did the work of therapy and consultancy for her and she is now living a happy life.

It is nothing less than a great thing. If you can change only a few moments of someone’s life in positive manner, your life is worth of it. If a blogger is able to do it, he must be appreciated for the same.

We see that people have their own attitudes and they reflect in all his/her works. But when presenting the views one has to be as “human” as possible. We allenjoy freedom of expressing our views and reviews for anything or everything that comes our way, sure, but in a proper way.

I remember one article from long time ago. A man had a stick in his hand and was moving it dangerously in every direction around him. A person stopped him and asked, “why you are moving it in this way, you may hurt someone“. The man responded that, “I live in democracy, I have freedom to move my stick in anyway anywhere.” The other man told him that, “of course you have freedom, but it ends when the boundary of my body starts“. So one has to be careful when performing any action. Your action must not result into destroying any other entity or part of it in anyway. If it is an accident, or your actions are wrongly accused for something and they were not meant to (do harm), that is an exceptional case.

We mention this because of an incident Ravi shared about the reviews of his book. The question is not whether the review was positive or negative. You may not like the work (the book in this example), you expressed your opinion, that is fine. But the way the review was written should be rather in a positive way.

This is very important, and we quite agree with Ravi’s views here. He talked about monetizing blogs and how it affects the content. For the professional bloggers, for whom the blog is one of the main ways to earn, it is not possible to not-moneytize it. Though a line can be drawn about article/review standards. Most of the bloggers have their “terms and conditions” mentioned and those who do not have, they should.

We are often provided ARC (Advanced Reader’s copy) to review a book. We have mentioned it clearly that if the content is not found worthy we may write that or even may not write an article about the same. Now this is something we stick to. In a few cases it has happened that we couldn’t write an entirely positive review, or even refused to review the stuff which didn’t match the standards we have thought for our blog. The authors in question may find it disappointing. But we also did not write negative articles against any of them. Each of us think our creation is really nice, and we have tried giving our best. Getting a negative comment and absorbing is not easy for anyone. But that is how it is.

So yes, it is tough to write an article where you have an affiliate link of the product to purchase, but you are not recommending a purchase in the article because in your opinion, it is not that worth; but it is not impossible also. And it builds credibility for sure. No one likes to read paid reviews. Once they themselves went through the product after positive review and they found the product is not worth it, it affects the credibility of the reviewer.

Anyway if you remember Ravi’s words “I am the CEO of my Book”, you can think the same about your blog and article. If we represent our vision with positive but unbiased words it will bring credibility to us.

A blogger has to create his brand and earn his fame, till then he/she cannot earn money enough through the blog. And unless he/she is not famous, no newspaper/magazine will let him write columns for them and pay for the same. Neither is there are chance of your book published and being bestseller overnight. So what to do? Well, follow your dreams of being an independent worker, but with wisdom. Keep other ways to earn open. Be it a job or business. Remember, Ravi himself wrote an article that you cannot earn enough for living from writing unless and until you became a bestseller author, and he himself is still – a banker by profession.

Again, these are our thoughts and views about his speech. What are yours? Let us know via comments below.