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Customize It
Paperback
303 pages
ISBN 9780061339202 Published July 2008
Harper Perennial
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Posted Oct. 14, 2010 11:31 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
Despite being primarily a business bookseller, we recommend and sell a lot of self-help books. But because the phrase “self-help” has been getting a bad rap since the self-help-happy 1980s, we often call this category “personal development.” No matter how you parse it, business is about the people who do the work to help a business thrive, so self-help books that encourage increased productivity or innovative problem-solving are a natural fit. Classic self-help books like Flow or The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People make people better, so these kinds of books in turn make work better.
In You Already Know How to be Great, Alan Fine has written a book that offers help in every area of your life, from work to home to sports. He comes from a sport coaching background and some of his supporting stories revolve around his coaching experience on the tennis court and the golf links.
Fine’s argument is that our current behavior, when we have a problem, is to gather more information about how to fix it, using an “outside-in” approach, rather than relying on that which we already have inside us. To help you visualize this idea, he has created an image of a wheel with Focus (paying attention), Fire (energy and passion), and Faith (believe in yourself) inside. This wheel is surrounded by Knowledge. Fine believes these are the four things that will ensure your success—no super powers required. After all, as his title states, you already know how to be great, so “the problem is not so much about knowledge acquisition as it is about knowledge execution.”
The key component to improving execution is G.R.O.W.: Goal is what we want to do; Reality is the circumstances we are currently dealing with; Options are how we can move; and Way Forward is what actions we need to take. In any change/performance improvement system, these four steps will sharpen your execution—from the inside out.
With many references and call out boxes to other business books, You Already Know How to Be Great is a very good self-help book that you can use to improve every aspect of your existence.
Jack Covert Selects - Mojo
Posted Feb. 12, 2010 6:08 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
There are people on this planet who are scary smart, people who look at the world differently and help us see our own lives in a clearer light. Seth Godin is one. Marshall Goldsmith, a highly sought-after speaker and executive coach, is another. Goldsmith has written many books, but What Got You Here, Won’t Get You There from 2007 was a stand-out.
Mojo is Goldsmith’s latest work. While mojo is a ubiquitous word, here Goldsmith defines it as “that positive spirit towards what we are doing now that starts from the inside and radiates to the outside.” The way he refers to mojo reminds me a bit of Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Except “flow” is a strictly internal, “in the zone” state of being, while Goldsmith’s mojo moment is “the moment when we do something that’s purposeful, powerful, and positive and the rest of the world recognizes it.” Like Csikszentmihalyi. Goldsmith believes mojo is something that can be learned and continuously achieved once we have the right tools.
Goldsmith believes that your ability to get your mojo going is impacted by four factors: identity, who you think you are; achievement, what have you done; reputation, what others think of you; and acceptance, knowing what you can change (and letting go of the rest). I found Goldsmith’s approach to identity enlightening because many of the business books we sell focus on ways to change your behavior in order to change your circumstance. Goldsmith asserts that if you don’t first change how you think of yourself, any behavioral changes will feel false and fail to last. And his section on acceptance is a particularly hard, but imperative lesson. How many of us have given up on a friendship due to some small grievance instead of, as Goldsmith encourages, valuing what a friend gives us in total despite their sometimes-inconveniencing quirks?
Goldsmith is an interesting kind of storyteller. He doesn’t tell stories that are highly detailed with visual or emotional descriptions. But, at the same time, with casual language and a singular intuitiveness about people, Goldsmith’s stories about how people lose and gain their mojo keeps you turning pages like the best kind of novel.
