books

Have you ever given a little extra push when preparing and had it pay off?

Lots of successful people talk about working hard. Most of them talk about working smart, too. Yet I’m sure you know someone who is a hard worker, or someone who comes up with lots of fantastic solutions, and neither seems to ever get ahead even though they want to. How do we work hard and smart AND get ahead?

The key is not in the hard, or the smart - it’s in why you’re doing what you do.

I want to make it clear that you do need to work hard and smart if you want to get ahead. There is no way around those two. Keep that in mind.

Take working hard and smart and add a why. I’m talking about a purpose here, not some mere goal. People who have purpose get more accomplished, as in things they want to do, for two reasons.Read more

I started reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five over the weekend, and the cover baffles me.

To be specific, it’s the tagline across the top. It reads, “Best selling author of Timequake” in white capital letters. I’m no Vonnegut buff, so I had to look up Timequake to see it was his last novel. At this point I flip open the cover of Slaughterhouse to see the list of other Vonnegut novels and realize there’s no Timequake. What? I then look at the title atop the page, which states it’s a list of Vonnegut books published by Dell. Timequake was not published by Dell.Read more

If there is one book I wish I could have read in 2004, when I graduated from college, it’s Ramit Sethi’s recently published I Will Teach You To Be Rich. Boy would I have screwed up a lot less if I had his advice then.

Of course, like most people my age I fully expect to start a fantastic business which will make me filthy stinkin’ rich by my 40’s. Money will be flowing from my pockets. Now, if I expect that scenario, why would I recommend a book on money management if I’m going to be filthy stinkin’ rich in 15 years?

Because it may not happen.

Or if you believe the experts, the odds are stacked against me. Big time.

I have a soon-to-be wife to think about, and the children we’re going to have are going to depend on me. If I want to do everything I can for them and myself financially, then I should have a plan. Sethi’s book gave me some excellent insight into further developing my plan.Read more

I am itching for a challenge after finishing Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and reading Godin’s The Dip start to finish (it’s 80 pages) earlier today.

Both books are about concepts, or phenomena, and are easy reads. I put them in the same category as books like Rich Dad Poor Dad and Who Moved My Cheese?: slices of philosophy, the kind successful people adhere to, tossed to the reader like a slow-pitch softball. In essence they are fluff, long essays stretched into best-selling books.

Why should you care? Because there’s a lot more to being successful or great at anything than understanding a few simple concepts. You have to dig deeper than these books if you want to understand something.Read more