6 Good Guidebooks for the Joyfully Jobless Journey

A great personal library is one of the best investments you can make—providing you read and learn from the contents of the books that line your shelves. Here are half a dozen that are loaded with advice, information and inspiration.

Good Business by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi take the principles from his bestselling book Flow and examines how creative thinking and values are being integrated into businesses large and small.

Small is the New Big by Seth Godin gathers blog posts from this prolific innovative thinker. It’s a delightful hodgepodge of good ideas plus plenty of real life examples of small business doing things in creative ways.

The Big Moo, edited by Seth Godin, is a collection of essays by thirty top creative entrepreneurial thinkers. A perfect book to carry and read in waiting rooms or airports.

Reality Check by Guy Kawasaki. Loads of good ideas on a wide range of entrepreneurial subjects including innovating, communicating and doing good.

Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins by Annette Simmons make a convincing case for learning to communicate through story and then shows you how.

The Small Business Bible by Steven D. Strauss is the reference book to keep close at hand. It will answer questions you didn’t even know you had.

A Few of the Books I Loved This year

This is the time when I traditionally pick my favorite title of the year. Looking back on 2008 (and my sagging bookshelves) I see that I had many new favorites in the past months. This is just a sampling of books that stayed with me long after I finished reading them.

It was only a few weeks ago that I discovered  Geri Larkin, but I think of her as an old friend. I’m equally wild about her Plant Seed, Pull Weed and The Chocolate Cake Sutra. Both are wise collections of life lessons from an author who obviously pays attention.

Another book that didn’t get nearly the attention it deserved is Thomas Moore’s A Life at Work which is a thoughtful exploration of the importance of discovering your right livelihood.

Getting a Grip by France Moore Lappe is another special title from the visionary author of Diet for a Small Planet. This one’s a call to action using the power of creativity to solve global problems.

Since I also spent a fair amount of time reading books about storytelling, I found one real standout: Annette Simmons’ Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins.  It’s a wonderful handbook on using story in business.

Not surprisingly, my list of favorites includes some fine personal storytelling. A book I couldn’t stop thinking about is Rafe Esquith’s Teach Like Your Hair’s on Fire, which isn’t just a book for teachers. It’s a passionate account of the power of learning.  You’ll wish every child you care about could spend a year in Esquith’s classroom.

Although the competition was stiff, there was one book, which I read early in the year, that beat out all others for first place on my list. That book is Bill Strickland’s  Make the Impossible Possible. Strickland’s personal journey is an inspiration—and so are the ideas that he shares.  

He eloquently tells how a chance encounter with an artist put him on a new path in his teens. Especially fascinating to me is his commitment to merging art and commerce and using both to change lives in dramatic ways. This may be one of the best stories ever showing how commitment to a vision can be the start of something extraordinary. 

When President Obama begins inviting innovators to the White House, I hope Bill Strickland gets a regular invitation.

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves. ~ E.M. Forster