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.

What’s Your Mantra?

The way to change your life, Elizabeth Gilbert told Oprah, is to, “Get a new mantra.” She wasn’t talking about mantras in the spiritual sense, but as a personal motto or phrase that inspires you or expresses something you believe in.

Many mantras begin with the words “I am” and are a powerful force for shaping our lives. If we’re unaware of the mantras we’re thinking and saying, we may miss the connection to what we’re becoming. 

I was reminded of this when I received an e-mail from a man I’d met seven or eight years ago, but hadn’t had much contact with recently. I wrote back asking for an update and received a mantra-filled reply. Here’s a sampling:

I am still trying to make the best of an employed life and I find that I am not that happy. I am trying to make it work for the steady paycheck and health insurance. I do not believe that I can match my current income and benefits on my own, and I need to support the family.  Yet, it takes so much out of me, I have no energy to start anything outside of it.  Each day, I force myself  to be on time, force myself to comply to the ongoing, overwhelming requirements made of me, and come home exhausted.

Compare that to the mantras in Angela O’Brien’s message:

My business is better than ever right now and I have no fears about layoffs. I work as a private math tutor and babysitter and had to adjust my ego because I can’t tell people I have some lofty position.  What I have is daily freedom, joy, and independence. 

 I am learning to live on a lot less money and it is fine.  My motto is “there is always more than one (or two) answers”.  I am no longer sacrificing my health in order to have what society has always told me I should have.  My boyfriend is an independent massage therapist and his business has never been better, either.  We keep saying, “Wow, there’s no recession for us!”  I don’t have a big retirement account and neither does he, but we feel so confident in our ability to take care of ourselves that it doesn’t matter!  Self-bossing is the best!

See the difference? Pretty hard not to see it, but it’s a bit trickier to hear our own mantras and see how they are impacting our lives. Start by listening to the mantras that you are using to create your life. Are they a reflection of your dreams or your fears? Either way, consider adopting a brand new 2009 mantra for yourself. 

That’s what Sue Hibbetts, SupportBuddy on Twitter, shared with us on Sunday. She wrote, “At Jubilee Church the minister said, ‘What if your dreams are closer than you think?’ Today, my mantra  is, ‘My dreams are closer than I think!’”

And don’t just write a mantra for yourself. Your business deserves them, too. In fact, Guy Kawasaki says, “Forget mission statements — they’re worthless; instead create a powerful mantra for yourself.”

So write those mantras and, if you’re feeling frisky, share them with the rest of us. Or if you’ve already seen the power of a mantra, tell us that story, too.

 

The problem with getting bigger is that getting bigger costs you. Not just in time and money, but in focus and standards and principles. Moving your way to the biggest part of the curve means appealing to an ever broader audience, becoming (by definition) more average. More, more, more is rarely the mantra of a successful person. ~ Seth Godin

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Join me at Follow Through Camp, May 15 & 16, and you’ll go home with a new mantra–and much, much more.

Thanksgiving Week Treasures

 

When my sisters and I used to spend time together, someone always went home with a new hair color. These days we’re more apt to be gathered around a computer, as we were on Thanksgiving showing Becky how to upload her photo on her new Facebook page.

I am appreciative and thankful that my siblings are curious adults who teach me all sorts of things. The day before Thanksgiving, my sister Margaret and I made a trip to Lowe’s, a place I find mildly intimidating. Going with Margaret is a different experience, however, since it’s more like visiting a museum. We had gone to buy some mundane safety treads for my bathtub. I left with a new light fixture for my kitchen which Margaret assured me I could install myself. “If you get stuck,” she said, “call and I’ll walk you through it.” We’ll see.

Because one of the things I am especially thankful for is the free enterprise system, it’s not surprising that I came across all sorts of stories that added to my joy during this holiday week. On my drive from Las Vegas to California, I always listen to an audiobook and I picked a good one, even though I knew nothing about it. Good Business by Mihaly Csikzentmahalyi takes a look at how visionary entrepreneurs create an environment that allows for flow, that optimal state of creativity that the author brought to our attention back in 1991 through his bestselling book Flow. He shares many ideas that an entrepreneur running a tiny business will find useful. And the quotes from Anita Roddick are profound.

Margaret, who had been a volunteer for the Obama campaign, told me a terrific story about Scott Jacobs, a 22-year-old local artist was was evicted from his house on Election Day. He took a half-finished painting of Obama that he’d been working on and set up his easel in front of Ben & Jerry’s, who were giving away free ice cream to anyone who had proof they’d voted. Jacobs attracted a lot of attention–and suddenly his life got much better before the day was over. You can read this great story at the Ventura County Star.

Entrepreneurial artists were already on my mind thanks to a piece in the NY Times called Transforming Art Into a More Lucrative Career Choice. Check it out.

Guy Kawasaki, another personal favorite, has an article called The Art of Bootstrapping that is worth a look. Actually, it’s worth printing out and rereading on a regular basis.

Finally, the latest issue of Newsweek has a Turning Point article by Carlos Mencia called Laughing in the Face of Change. It begins, “Right now, a lot of people are losing their jobs. They’re saying ‘Oh, my God, what am I gonna do?’ I’m here to tell you, this is your chance. Paint. Put out a rap album. Design a car. Do whatever you’ve always wanted to do….Why am I so confident about this? Because I had one of those turning points in my life: long before Comedy Central came calling, I used to be headed for a degree in engineering.” Read the rest of the story. It’s great.