To Read or Not To Read

My niece Gretchen is about to give birth to her first child. During her pregnancy, her husband Tony has been reading to their unborn baby. Currently, he’s working his way through Don Quixote.

In my family, this is considered normal.

Of all the things I’m thankful for, high on my list is that I was raised by readers. Since I was the eldest child and my father was faraway fighting a war, my mother read to me incessantly. Happily, I’m still being read to.

In the midst of her kindergarten year, Zoe called. When I answered the phone, I was greeted with an exuberant, “Grandma, I can read!”  Read she can and does. When I’m a guest in their house, I have the pleasure of Zoe reading to me every evening.

Of course, you can catch book passion any time in life. However, the sooner you get it, the more time you have to consume more titles.

Once caught, this fever doesn’t diminish. My sister Nancy, who has lived abroad her entire adult life, is relocating to Santa Barbara. She told me that the shipping company required that she count the books in her library.

“I discovered,” she said, with some amazement, “that I own 1,026 books.” Now I’m eager to do an inventory of my own since I have no idea how many books are in my library.

Since Nancy and I are both moving into new homes, finding the perfect spot for our books is a top priority. I keep thinking of Anna Quindlen’s observation, “I will be most happy if my children grow up to be the kind of people whose idea of decorating is to add more bookshelves.”

So while reading for pleasure is what often snares us to begin with, a desire to become our best selves often has us exploring new sections of the library and bookstore.

If you’re building a business, new titles and old can accelerate your success, connect you with ideas, resources and inspiration you’d never have encountered while walking down the street.

Here are five old favorites that are a pleasure to read and filled with useful insights for the Joyfully Jobless life:

Growing a Business by Paul Hawken

Making a Literary Life by Carolyn See

The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

Small is the New Big by Seth Godin

A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink

While some of these titles may be old friends already, I chose them because they all are worthy of more than one visit.

And if you aren’t a regular reader, make time every day to sample the creative thinkers, the life teachers, the pioneers who have wonderful things to teach us. If you don’t, you’ll be inflicting a needless handicap on yourself.

As the wise Jim Rohn used to say, “The only thing worse than not reading a book in the last 90 days, is not reading a book in the last 90 days and thinking it doesn’t matter. Skip a meal if you must, but don’t skip a book.”

Getting Rejected? You’re Not Alone

 It is often the last key in the bunch that opens the lock.

                                Stansifer

 

 

I am not the only one who loves  Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos.; classical music stations report that listener surveys always list them as a top favorite. Did you know that this perennial favorite began life as a huge failure? The Concertos were written as an audition for a commission Bach hoped to get with the city of Brandenburg, Germany. Amazingly, he lost the competition. No one seems to remember who the winner was.

 

Bach is not the only creative soul, of course, whose work met with rejection before success came along. Writer John Grisham sent his first novel to sixteen agents before one of them agreed to take him as a client. That agent submitted A Time to Kill to twenty-six publishers before one bought it, bringing out a meager 5,000 copies. Since that humble—and humbling— beginning, Grisham has topped the bestseller charts with every book he’s written and has millions of copies of his books in print around the world.

 

While history is full of stories of early defeat that turned into astonishing success later on, there is no record of all the good ideas that got put away in a drawer after encountering a first rejection.

 

I once had a student who had created a nifty product that she was certain would be snapped up by a huge travel company to give away as a gift to their clients. When they turned her down, she was furious. Her basement is filled with unsold inventory which she has never tried to market in other ways. She remains stuck in her early—and only—rejection. Her timid retreat is not unusual.

 

Sadly, this woman made the classic error of deciding in advance that acceptance could only come in one way. That’s a formula that is doomed. If the prospective client or lover or friend turns us down, we may lose sight of the fact that our true goal was to make a sale or have a romance or build a new relationship. We forget that our goal (and our self) is just fine. We simply made the mistake of picking a dancing partner that didn’t want to dance.

 

I once heard a sales trainer declare, “You gotta learn to love rejection!” I think he overstated his case. Few of us are so hardy that we can love being turned down. There’s a big difference between those who accept rejection as part of the success process and those who avoid it at all costs. Despite all the evidence that rejection is a universal theme in every success story, fear of rejection seems to be a powerful deterrent for many who will do almost anything to avoid the discomfort of being rejected. As it turns out, life’s grandest prizes are rejecting them.

 

The next time that fear of rejection stops you from tackling a dreaded task, remind yourself that the anticipation of rejection is almost always worse than the reality of it. All of us have known those agonizing times spent before we proposed marriage, made a sales presentation or gave a talk. Yet on those occasions when our worst fears were realized, the experience wasn’t nearly as horrible as imagining it had been.

 

While I still don’t love rejection, I have a clearer perspective on it since encountering some profound advice from writer Barbara Kingsolver. Although it’s aimed at writers, it’s equally appropriate to anyone going after a dream. Kingsolver says, “Don’t consider your returned manuscript rejected. Consider that you’ve addressed it, ‘To the editor who can appreciate my work,’ and it simply came back stamped, ‘Not at this address.’ Just keep looking for the right address.”

 

You might want to memorize that.

Sharing the Obvious

 

During her freshman year in college, I got a call from my distraught daughter. She’d just heard from her bank and discovered she had an enormous overdraft fee. “Do you keep a balance in your checkbook?” I asked.

 

“What’s that?” she shot back. 

 

“Oh, dear,” I said, “something else I forgot to teach you.”

 

It’s a common mistake to assume that everyone else knows the same things we do. It’s not just our children that are missing useful information, however. Chances are you know all sorts of things that would be helpful to others, but it doesn’t occur to you to share what seems ordinary. I’ve always thought that the real genius of Martha Stewart is her assumption that everyday living things are not common knowledge. 

 

Sometimes we also need to be reminded of things we already know, but are neglecting. I thought of that recently when I was bemoaning the disappearance of independent adult ed programs around the country. For years, these folks were my favorite business partners and I held my seminars almost exclusively with them. It was a perfect match: they were small businessowners sharing ideas and information in their communities at a reasonable price. 

 

As the Internet became a convenient go-to source, enrollments in these programs began to go down. Printing costs for their catalogs continued to go up. Eventually, many owners decided the time had passed to run their operations and they closed up shop.

 

I’m not sure it had to happen, but I think we who were involved all failed to remind people of something most of them already knew. That huge advantage that adult ed had over the Internet is this: something happens in a roomful of other people exploring the same subject that goes beyond simply getting information. That’s a dynamic that can’t exist any other way. 

 

We must not assume that no matter how good our product or service is that it will market itself. We must not assume that everyone already knows how great our offerings are. And as entrepreneurs, we must not assume that what we learned about careers will translate into our joyfully jobless journey.

 

In his blog post, The Hierarchy of Success, Seth Godin points out that we almost never talk about the most essential things. He writes, “As far as I’m concerned, the most important of all, the top of the hierarchy is attitude. Why are you doing this at all? What’s your bias in dealing with people and problems?”

 

Obvious, isn’t it?

 

 

Would Winning the Lottery Make a Difference?

On the morning of August 25, 1997, the big story on the morning news shows was the Powerball lottery drawing happening that evening. For the first time ever, a lottery jackpot had reached the $300,000,000 mark. Lines were forming outside convenience stores, people were planning a lavish future. A mathematician assured the Today Show interviewer that someone would absolutely win based on the finite combination of numbers..

Although I’m not a lottery player most of the time, I decided that if I didn’t buy a ticket or two I’d miss the excitement when the drawing rolled around that evening. I purchased five tickets, I recall, and didn’t give it further thought until the big moment. 

Sitting in front of my television, I laid out the tickets and began checking them as the numbers were called. One of my tickets matched the first number drawn. Then the second, the third, the fourth, and the fifth. Then the Powerball number was called and it wasn’t a match for me. I thought I was going to throw up. 

Several minutes later, I called my friend John, a regular lottery player, to share my trauma. He commiserated with me and then cheerfully pointed out that I had won $5000. Moments earlier, I had lost $300,000,000. Now $5000 felt like a huge windfall.

The next day I drove to the Minnesota Lottery office and claimed my prize. I was giddy.

I had my picture taken holding a gigantic check with my name on it. I promptly deposited the actual check into my sabbatical account. Less than two years later, I was  enjoying eight months of travel and discovery. Traveling first class would not have enriched the experience one bit.

I hadn’t thought about this little episode until a month or so ago when someone reminded me of it. “Do you ever think about how your life would be different if you had won all that money?” he asked. I told him that I hadn’t ever done that and couldn’t imagine that I’d be doing anything other than what I do now. He seemed skeptical.

Honestly, I hadn’t told him the truth. I had considered what winning that money meant and realized that had I become the recipient of this huge fortune, my time would have shifted to being a full-time money manager. But that wasn’t the worst part of it. How could I have maintained any credibility in helping folks become self-reliant and self-employed? I would have forfeited my platform.

One of my all-time favorite episodes of the Actor’s Studio is the one with Dustin Hoffman. At the end of the show, a student asks him what he would be doing if he wasn’t a movie actor. Hoffman teared up and gives a passionate answer (which I’m paraphrasing here.) He points out that his movie career, while bringing him fame and fortune, was a bit of a fluke. If that hadn’t happened, he says, he’d be teaching theater  in a college in the northwest or acting in community theater somewhere in the country. “I cannot not do this.”

It’s a sentiment echoed by Elizabeth Gilbert who points out that while the success of Eat, Pray, Love was thrilling, she would be equally devoted to writing had it not happened.

Could it be that it’s not about size, scale or success? Could it be–at least in the well-lived life–simply about the doing? You don’t need $300,000,000 for that.

On Being an Informed Source

Knowing that information exists that can answer almost any question is an enormous confidence builder— but that fact is frequently overlooked. While the helpless loser goes around whining, “But I don’t know how to do that,” the successful among us are busy seeking information that will show them how.  Then they get busy putting what they’ve uncovered to work for them. 

This fascination with information is also necessary for entrepreneurial success. “In times of change,” wrote Eric Hoffer, “learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.”

Whatever your business is about, one of the best ways to ensure success is to make a commitment to becoming an Informed Source. Here are some ways to do just that.

* Make learning a priority and schedule time for it.  While  just running a business can be a profound learning experience, we need other points of view, other bits of information in order to grow to our fullest potential. Make time for acquiring that knowledge by regular reading, attending seminars, meeting with other self-bossers who are farther down the road. 

* Learn from the best.  Jim Rohn is vocal in urging his audiences to seek learning from the best sources they can find. He says, “There are three ways one can go about learning from others: 1. Through published literature such as books and audio or video tapes. 2. By listening to the wisdom and folly of others. 3. Through observations of winners and losers. So become a good observer. “ 

The barriers that keep many people from learning from the best sources is that they either can’t discern good from not so good or they start comparing themselves to those who are more accomplished and miss the lessons they could learn. It’s far more effective to decide to find the best teachers you can and devour their experiences.

* Learn to edit.  Editing is the process of sifting through large amounts of material and taking out the bad, the so-so, the mediocre, the unimportant, and leaving in the best.  Learning to edit is also learning to discriminate, to prioritize, to evaluate. As an Informed Source, your audience depends on you to deliver only that information which is pertinent.  Incidentally, being a good editor doesn’t  just apply to information: it’s also a necessary skill for living your best life…or posting on Twitter.

* Be generous in sharing. Robert Allen earned his first fortune investing in real estate. He built a second empire sharing his successful system through seminars and books. Even if you have no interest in packaging information yourself, there are many ways to share what you know. For instance, one of the most popular guests on Minnesota Public Radio was Geek Squad founder Robert Stephens who frequently shared information on getting the most from your computer. That visibility (plus some fabulously creative marketing)  made him stand out from the crowd.

* Put it to work.  “Knowledge is power is only half a truth,” said Andrew Carnegie, “for knowledge is only potential power. It may become a power only when it is organized and expressed in terms of definite action.”  Yes, it’s fun to know things just for the sake of knowing them, but the truly brilliant users of information are always looking for ways to adapt what they’ve learned to their own situations. Doing your homework gives you confidence, but only if you use what you’ve learned.