IN response to the social media onslaught that accompanied ISIS’s physical advance on the ground, one person quipped that once wars began with artillery barrages, but now they commence with barrages of tweets.

Fittingly enough, he said this on Twitter itself. Providing real time, bite sized communication for millions, aiding (and sometimes subverting) activism and, more and more, becoming the news itself, Twitter is indeed a big deal. Tweets are reported, hashtags are adopted and selfies are sent worldwide.

Not bad for something that was created pretty much because it could be created, and this book is the story of one of the men who created it. His name is Biz Stone. It’s his bespectacled, slightly smirky, blue tinged half-face that stares out at you on the book’s cover, right next to the title. And it’s quite a title too: Things a Little Bird Told Me: Confessions of the Creative Mind. In case you missed the coloration and the little bird, a line under Biz Stone’s name identifies him as the co-founder of Twitter.

Terrifyingly, the introduction is titled ‘A Genius Entity’ and features a drawing of a business card, which reads “Biz Stone, Genius.” The first chapter causes even more alarm bells to go off. Its title is ‘How Hard Can It Be,’ above a line-drawn illustration of a box of odds and ends with the labels ‘Opportunity’ and ‘some assembly required.’ Oh dear Lord, am I reading a self-help book, and that too, one written by a self-obsessed egomaniac?

Skimming to the second chapter seems to confirm this. Here the title is ‘Every Day’s a New Day’ and the illustration is a windmill. This was obviously going to be painful and I was prepared to, if I ever finished the book, dislike this Biz fellow very much indeed. Except that by the end of the book I was not only impressed and quite fond of Mr Stone, I was also (shameful as it is for me to admit) inspired.

And of course, it made me feel quite jealous as well. After all, the book starts with Isaac ‘Biz’ Stone who, after getting impatient with the lack of success his tech startup was faced with, moved back into his mother’s basement, along with his girlfriend and “tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt.” Turned down after abjectly trying to rejoin the startup, Stone turns to blogging as an outlet. Here he isn’t a penniless geek, but Biz Stone, Genius; the founder and CEO of the entirely imaginary Genius Labs.

Right now, he’s not living the dream, but the stereotype. But here begins the winding, intuitive and near-accidental journey that leads him first to Google (no mean feat for a college dropout) past ups and downs to fame, fortune, Twitter and Time Magazine’s Most Influential People list.

And, if Biz is to be believed, getting there is just a question of attitude, of passion and of refusing to accept limitations on who you want to be. Here’s an example: “How many people … see that doctors or lawyers get paid a lot, and follow that route, only to discover they hate it?”

You’ll find a lot of passages like that in this book and, amazingly, they aren’t grating and don’t come across as pretentious or as ‘life coach’ babble. Throughout, Stone remains almost impossibly positive, incredibly creative and altogether likeable. And, as is rare in the biography (almost) of a member of a team that created a game-changing product, he doesn’t really put anyone down either.

Things a Little Bird Told Me is an easy read and, at 222 pages, a quick one. Here are lessons and anecdotes, challenges, crises and an overwhelming commitment to following one’s dreams.

Time and again, a reader with an inbuilt antipathy to too much ‘passion’ will be tempted to find chinks. But the problem is that Stone, even when he is offering advice, doesn’t come across as preachy. And when he’s listing his accomplishments he doesn’t seem self-aggrandising. He just seems like a genuinely cool guy who made his own opportunities, and then answered the knock.

I tried very hard to dislike this book, and I failed. Try it out, it just might inspire you.

The reviewer is a Dawn staffer

Things a Little Bird Told Me: Confessions of the Creative Mind

(MEMOIR)

By Biz Stone

Grand Central Publishing, US

ISBN 1455528714

240pp.