Actionable Books

"This book is about creating and growing multimillion-dollar businesses, but it’s also a book about becoming a business genius.” Ready, Fire, Aim, page 32 It’s every entrepreneur’s dream: to not only start and build your business from the ground up, ...

 “Strategy is the craft of figuring out which purposes are both worth pursuing and capable of being accomplished.” Good Strategy Bad Strategy, page 66 Leadership encompasses many elements, but crafting a “good strategy” may very well be at the top o...

 “The mechanism that drives you to conceal your darkness is the same mechanism that has you hide your light.  What you’ve been hiding from can actually give you what you’ve been trying hard to achieve.” The Shadow Effect, page 92 In The Shadow Effect: Illuminating the Hidden Power of Your True Self, three perennial spiritual favorites pool their massive talents to help us transcend a crucial obstacle to happiness.  Such is the nature of “the shadow”, when we deny parts of ourselves.  Improperly understood or harnessed, it directs our lives in destructive ways. At first blush, this book seems a classic battle between inner good and bad as Debbie Ford, “Champion of the Darkness” contrasts “First Lady of the Light”, Marianne Williamson. Actually, this wise book delivers so much more.  Add to the mix ever-original introspection offered by preeminent Eastern philosophy teacher, Deepak Chopra, and you get a full-spectrum map of how to reconnect with your real self. Each bestselling author offers their unique perspective as we learn to make peace with ourselves and undertake the transformative journey to let go of what holds us back.  The end result is to gain the life we were meant to bask in. Golden Egg Embrace – Don't Deny – Your Shadow “To have a shadow is not to be flawed, but to be complete…You have only one self.  It is the real you.  It is beyond good and evil.” The Shadow Effect, pages 10 and 17 So, what is the shadow anyway? Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung defines it as the person we’d rather not be.  Robert Bly likens it to an invisible bag containing internal thoughts, emotions and impulses we find too shameful or distasteful to accept – a burdensome weight that eventually drags us into the dumps across decades. Shadow is our wounded interior.  For many, it’s too painful to confront.  Instead, we project our disowned attributes upon others.  We blame - make people wrong and label them as such.  As Debbie Ford succinctly points out, “You spot it, you got it.”   A false self gets constructed.  Tricked into believing we’re incapable and undeserving, we yearn for the perfect role and persona.  Ironically, this unproductive quest will leave us unfulfilled – even if we attain it – for the clear reason that we’re so much more than the narrow handful of qualities neatly befitting our ego ideal. Over time, our greatness and authenticity get hidden behind an impenetrable fortress – causing us to lose access to our fundamental core.  Tragically, when we locked up what we perceived as rejected traits, we unknowingly sealed away our most valuable gifts. GEM #1 Stop Projecting “Those we project on hold pieces of our unclaimed darkness as well as unclaimed pieces of our light.” The Shadow Effect, page 117 Had you ever considered that the moments we meet our disowned self are amongst the most raw and fertile periods of our earthly sojourn?  Paradoxical!  For sure, owning our projections is both a courageous and humbling experience. Yet, it’s so important to do just that.  Unresolved, self-sabotage will haunt us over and over – typically erupting with incredible power at precisely the verge of personal or professional breakthrough.  On the other hand, once we summon the strength to dive straight into the center of our shadow world, the split between light and darkness will be re-integrated. Where to start in this reclaiming process, though?  One effective source is to explore repetitive behavior patterns we’ve struggled with for years.  Often we trick ourselves into believing that our less than acceptable behavior is the problem, rather than searching for its root cause. To aid our interpretation, Chopra indicates through a comprehensive listing of attitudes a set of accompanying unconscious shadow feelings that cannot be faced.  For instance, superiority disguises the fear you’re a failure or that others would reject you if you they knew who you really were.  Arrogance masks bottled-up anger,

"The things that cause a nonprofit organization's success are often the very same things we couldn't stand about the for-profit world when we worked there."  The Mission Myth, page 25 How can you tell the difference between a good organization and a great one? The answer is in The Mission Myth: Building Nonprofit Momentum through Better Business by Deirdre Maloney. What exactly is the Mission Myth? It's the myth that heart alone will fulfill a nonprofit's mission. Success is coupled with hard work, determination, leadership, and most of all, what Deirdre calls the 4 M's: Money, Marketing, Management, and Measurement. What makes Deirdre's insight unique is that she's been through the corporate world too before making her way towards executive director of the Colorado AIDS Project. She has learned from mistakes and synthesized the myriad lessons. She now runs her own company which helps nonprofits run more smoothly through better business. While written primarily for leaders in the nonprofit sector, one of the biggest revelations she shares is that the assumed rift between nonprofit and for-profit is mostly illusive. When it comes to serving your clients and running a great organization, despite what the bottom line is, there's still a need to have organizational systems, good communication, and fiscal responsibility, so that operations can run effectively and efficiently. These are the ongoing traits that will empower everyone to thrive and accomplish a lot. Sometimes the greatest lessons shared between great businesses and nonprofits are the way they handle the 4 M's. Golden Egg Leadership Is Always Required "It may be the mission that drives you. But it's the business that drives you to success."  The Mission Myth, page 25 Leadership is a pre-requisite before the 4 M's can be diagnosed and addressed with honesty. When ex-corporate refugees strive for the nonprofit sector out of pure altruism, there's a belief that you will leave all the lethargy behind. Surprisingly, that same tension of office politics, bureaucracy, and inevitable responsibility with resources (money, staff, etc.) can still emerge within the confines of a nonprofit. It still takes skill to soothe conflict and ultimately transcend pain points into strengths. Despite whether you're a nonprofit or for-profit, it'll still take a great leader and a great team to set milestones and execute the steps to get there; manage outcomes and results; own failures and learn from them; acknowledge the need for growth; clearly communicate the mission and its values; empower staff, clients, and stakeholders; manage money wisely; and balance passion with grounded business savvy. How an organization endures in these areas is what distinguishes an organization that merely does good, versus an organization that does good well. Mission and business leadership shouldn't be considered separate, or sacrificed over the other. They're not mutually exclusive. In fact, they belong together. On the flip side, this same advice can resonate for business leaders, too: For doing business (or anything) well, you must not forget the passion for what you do in the first place, and this can be the passion for your craft, your industry, or even the love of helping your customers or clients. Have you ever witnessed a business that conducts "business as usual?" Where the mission statement taped to their office walls seems lifeless and phony? GEM #1 Relationships Still Matter "Providing good customer service means you won't just get customers involved in your organization one time; it means they'll come back." The Mission Myth, page 116 Every handshake, phone call, compliment, and thanks, will have an effect on our clients and communities. Deirdre begins the lesson simply: When people join your organization for the first time, it's most likely because of the mission. But what keeps them coming back? When you give people sincere thanks,

" the best businesses are sellable, and smart businesspeople believe that you should build a company to be sold even if you have no intention of cashing out or stepping back anytime soon." Bo Burlingham, forward from Built to Sell, page viii I almost didn’t read Built to Sell.  Sure, I’d heard great things, but since I have no intention of selling my business anytime soon, I thought, “There’s definitely more relevant books for me to read out there, right?” I was mistaken.  I don’t care if you’re actively trying to sell your business, or simply have a dream of one day starting your own business; if you’re ever planning on being an entrepreneur, I highly recommend you read John Warrillow’s Built to Sell.  Because here’s the logic – Certain over-priced dot-coms and fire-sales aside, people typically want to buy healthy companies.  Cash flow positive companies.  Companies that can run without their founder.  Companies that can be scaled and grown.  And, if you’re an entrepreneur, isn’t that exactly the type of company you’d like to be running? Even if you have no intention to sell?  Yup, me too. So, since we’re on the same page – wanting to build scalable, cash generating businesses that can survive without our involvement on every little thing – you’re going to want to pay attention here.  Warrillow says some stuff that goes against the very fibre of my “customer-centric” being… but he’s right. Golden Egg Don't generalize; specialize "If you focus on doing one thing well and hire specialists in that area, the quality of your work will improve and you will stand out among your competitors." Built to Sell, page 17 There’s nothing wrong with being a consultant.  Or a freelancer for that matter.  Both of them can make a decent living listening intently to the needs of their clients and then creating custom solutions to address those needs.  They make customers very happy that way.  But they’re not building businesses. Built to Sell is a story – a story about a fictional business owner named Alex Stapleton who runs a small design agency (The Stapleton Agency).  The agency does everything their clients want, from websites and Search Engine Optimization to posters and radio commercials.  As a small shop, they have a small staff, and as the small staff is required to know how to do everything, Alex Stapleton leads a team of generalists. 20 years ago this would have been less of a problem.  Hemmed in by geography, most clients in need of a design agency would go to the one in town.  And it was good, in those days, if you could address their varied needs.  That’s changed. As we’ve discussed so many times before, we’re now competing on a global landscape, no matter how large or small we are.  As such, we need to be the very best in order to stand out.  If we’re not the best, we’re competing on price (and we’re going to get killed).  How do you get to be the best, especially when you’re the little guy?  You go niche.  Specific. Absolutely brilliant at one thing.  For Alex Stapleton and his team, that one thing was designing logos.  It really doesn’t matter what it is you choose to specialize in, so long as there’s a demand for it and you can work towards doing it with excellence, consistently.  Which leads us to our first GEM… GEM # 1 Develop your process. "Ted's Tip #3:  Owning a process makes it easier to pitch and puts you in control.  Be clear about what you're selling, and potential customers will be more likely to buy your product." Built to Sell, page 23 I like the fact that Warrillow used a design agency as the business example in his story.  Can you think of a more “creative”, unstructured, un-process-driven environment than a creative agency?  And yet, create a process is exactly what Alex does. (FYI, the “Ted” in “Ted’s Tip #3” refers to the Yoda-like mentor in Built to Sell; the gentleman who guides Alex through the process of structuring the business to sell) When you develop a process,

"While we all hope to choose recreation we enjoy, most have forgotten that once upon a time, we made the same proactive choices about work." You Don't Want a Job, page 38 Author, blogger, website designer, American nomad and frequent Actionable guest writer, Joel D Canfield has designed a truly unique life for himself.  Travelling North America with his family for the last two years, Joel creates an income by designing websites, writing and selling books, and doing the occasional spot of coaching.  In his most recent book You Don't Want a Job, Joel is on a mission to convince you that the age of the job is dead... and that what's taken its place is a glorious world of freedom. Early in You Don't Want a Job, Joel makes an important point of which I want to make sure we're all aware.  "Self employed doesn't always mean entrepreneur" (page 5).  Self employment is the all-encompassing bucket into which we pour entrepreneurship, small business owners, freelancing and "portfolio employees".  Some distinctions: Entrepreneurs are people who build businesses; entities that can eventually operate without their involvement. Small Business Owners run businesses - with staff, overhead, etc. - but the business relies upon their ongoing involvement. Freelancers have a particular skill or set of skills that they "sell" on a project by project basis. Portfolio Employees maintain long term contracts/relationships with multiple clients.  In many ways they act as employees would, with ongoing responsibilities, they just do it for multiple companies at once. None of these four - entrepreneurs, small business owners, freelancers or portfolio managers - ultimately rely on a single boss, a single client, to determine if they deserve a raise, or what projects they should be working on.  It's the freedom of choice that unifies these self-employed individuals. Golden Egg Choice, Choice Everywhere "Let me be emphatic: when you are the boss, the owner, the final stop for the buck, every single thing you do is a choice. - You choose what tasks you perform. - You choose the techniques to perform them. - You choose when you do them. - You choose who you do them for, and with." You Don't Want a Job, page 40 In his brilliant book, Drive, best-selling author Dan Pink talks about the "4 T's" of internal motivation, and the important role having autonomy over them plays in motivating employees in the 21st century.  Those 4 T's are:  Task, Technique, Time and Team.  Basically, Dan says that the more control an individual has over these four components of work, the happier and more motivated they will be to complete that work with excellence. When you're self-employed (and this includes all four classifications outlined in the intro), you have absolute control over these four aspects of virtually everything you do.  Which is to say that in many cases you actually get to make the call on what you do, how you do it, when and with whom.  And in the case where you're engaged in activities where someone else is calling the shots on some/all of these aspects, you still have the freedom to choose whether you actually engage in the project at all. Sometimes sacrificing control over a certain area makes sense, simply because you really want to be a part of a particular project.  Clients will impose deadlines that force an all-nighter.  Clients will insist you work with a certain strategic partner or internal staff member.  But as a self-employed individual, you truly have the final say on whether you work on something or not. Let's explore some of the ramifications of that power. GEM # 1 With Great Power... "The tasks you choose to perform, the product or service you create, must provide something people want and are willing to pay for.  Otherwise, you have a hobby, not a business." You Don't Want a Job, page 43 "With great power comes great responsibility."  --Uncle  Ben, Spiderman

“After a while, it’s natural to think that in order to be the best you have to be better than others. Many people define success by being in the top 1%, when in reality it’s about living in your top 1%.” Living In Your Top 1%, page 7-8 Therein lies the overarching theme of Alissa Finerman’s inspiring first book, Living In Your Top 1%. There is so much emphasis today on competition with others, but Finerman argues that competing with yourself should be your top priority. Finerman, a former professional tennis player turned Wall Street professional turned life coach/speaker, knows this all too well. She left cutthroat Wall Street and moved to sunny Los Angeles to become an accredited coach, transforming not only her own life, but the lives of countless others. It was there that she finally began living a more authentic life, and making more of her dreams a reality. “What is it that makes some people reach high than others who are equipped with the same resources?” she asks at the beginning of the book. “The idea of living in your top 1% evolved from this question” (page 4). One of the ingredients is goal setting, and this is the focus of our summary. Golden Egg Ditch the All or Nothing Mentality “Choose your first step wisely because if it’s not easily achievable, it could significantly derail your best efforts. First steps should help you build confidence and make you feel like you are a little closer to your goal.” Living In Your Top 1%, page 97 If you’re actually serious about your achieving your goals, ditch the all or nothing mentality. Finerman points out that it’s been proven that when you take on too much, you’re more inclined to give up. Do you ever notice that in the first week of January, the gym is always packed? But as the month goes on, the line for the elliptical machine grows shorter, and those new faces all but disappear until it’s just the regulars left. That’s because those people with the New Year’s Resolutions bit off more than they could chew rather than ease into a new routine. Instead of hitting the gym maybe twice a week, they went full throttle, 5 days a week at 5.30 in the morning before a long day at the office. Tired, cranky, and with sore muscles, they’re burnt out as quickly as they began and quit. This is analogous to all goals, not just fitness related, and resonated with me because it’s something that I’ve struggled with, whether it’s blogging or trying a gluten free diet. Start with small, manageable steps. In fact, that’s how Alissa Finerman wrote this book. “I started this book with the small step of writing one hour each day” (page 103). Once you start seeing progress, you will feel inspired to continue, bringing you that much closer to achieving the end result. The following two GEMs will help you stay on track with your goals, and ensure that they don’t end up like those resolutions you might have made at the beginning of the year. GEM # 1 Prioritize Your Goals “Setting priorities will help you stay accountable and reduce your stress levels. This will help you lay out the best path to living in your top 1%.” Living In Your Top 1%, page 89 We all have goals in our life that we want to bring to fruition. Maybe it’s to buy a home, switching to a gluten free diet, or take a long desired trip. We may jot them down on paper, or keep them tucked away in the back of our mind. But while buying a home and eliminating gluten from your diet could be more pressing goals, that dream trip to Egypt to see the pyramids might be something to do down the line. It’s all about prioritizing what is important to you in your life at this very moment. And different people prioritize goals differently. For instance, buying a house is more important for a growing family of three in the suburbs than it is for a 20-something single career girl in the city. That’s why it’s crucial to write down your goals and then organize them. Go through your list and rank them by tiers.

“Creativity is not just something you think about – it is something you do.” inGenius, page 16  Seems sort of counter-intuitive – a book to teach you how to be more creative.  Isn’t that the point of creativity? To be unbound and not stifled by rules and procedures, to allow ones’ mind to become free and open, taking in and applying all the possibilities?  That’s true – but how do you get to that "free and open" state?  How does your mind open to that potential, that whole “outside-the-box” thinking and creatively solve problems without applying logic or structure or boundaries?  It’s this that Tina Seelig teaches us in her new book, inGenius: A Crash Course on Creativity; that the secret to creativity is learning how to stretch your mind.  A follow-up to her widely read (and ActionableBooks reviewed), What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20, in inGenius, Seelig introduces us to some of the things she teaches her students in the Stanford Technology Ventures Program at Stanford University and the theory and discipline behind creativity. Golden Egg We are Responsible For Inventing the Future “Creativity can be enhanced by honing your ability to observe and learn, by connecting and combining ideas, by reframing problems, and by moving beyond the first right answers.” inGenius, page 201 Seelig has created a new model to help explain creativity and innovation.  It’s called the Innovation Engine and it looks like this:   Like most things, creativity is the sum of its parts and Seelig uses her model to explain how all the factors work together to enhance creativity.  The Innovation Engine is explained this way: “Your knowledge provides the fuel for your imagination. Your imagination is the catalyst for the transformation of knowledge into new ideas. Your attitude is a spark that sets the Innovation Engine in motion. Resources are all the assets in your community. Habitats are your local environments, including your home, school or office. Culture is the collective beliefs, values and behaviours in your community.” inGenius, page 15 Basically, what Seelig explains in clear, concise language is that in the inside of the Innovation Engine are the parts of you that enhance creativity. It’s up to you to apply the thoughts, mind-set and creative thinking to the factors on the outside of the Innovation Engine – factors outside your control but those that have influence over your everyday interactions.  By focusing on the factors you can control, you can learn how every moment provides an opportunity to creatively respond in any situation.   GEM#1 Situational Creativity “The space told a powerful story, and each team dutifully placed itself inside that narrative.” inGenius, page 96 Like many in the ActionableBooks community, I’m a self-employed entrepreneur.  One of the hardest lessons I had to learn when I quit my corporate job and moved to my home office was what environment, or habitat, I felt most productive in.  Was I full of motivation and creative energy sitting on my couch with my laptop or at my desk in the office upstairs?  Did sitting on the back deck with music in the background distract or focus my attention?  Turns out, the best place for me to work was the island in my kitchen – close enough to the fridge for a snack when I wanted, in a wide open space where I didn’t feel constricted by four walls but still at a workspace where I had to sit up and pay attention.  Habitat makes a lot of difference when it comes to creativity and innovation, a powerful thought Seelig proved by accident during a simulation game in her class.  She’d broken the class into two groups where they had to complete jigsaw puzzles in the shortest amount of time.  One group was on the side of the room where there were small tables but no chairs and the other group worked with chairs but no tables.  Each group completed the same puzzles but in completely different ways. No matter how often participants go through this activity,

“My job at Honeywell International these days is to restore the discipline of execution to a company that had lost it.” Execution, page 1 So begins Execution, a crisp eye-opener of a book widely considered by many to be the best book written on a discipline that lies at very heart of success.  And rightly so, because this book is the intellectual fruit of a collaboration between two of the last century’s finest business minds – Ram Charan, the highly sought-after management consultant and theorist, and Larry Bossidy, the award-winning and seasoned executive, moulded by more than thirty years of high-powered leadership at General Electric and AlliedSignal, and nearly a decade more as Chairman and CEO of Honeywell International. Bossidy and Charan argue that the biggest pitfall facing businesses today is their inability to execute.  Far from being unable to attract the brightest minds, innovate consistently or shave costs to reach a new zenith of efficiency, the slow decline and death of a business is often due to its inability to create an environment that encourages, recognizes and rewards the discipline of execution – the ability to coordinate human effort and generate outstanding results continuously, consistently and efficiently. Golden Egg Real Leaders Get Dirty “Many people regard execution as detail work that’s beneath the dignity of a business leader. That’s wrong.  To the contrary, it’s a leader’s most important job.” Execution, page 1 Far from simply articulating a vision and parceling out work for subordinates to complete, the authors contend that it is a leader’s equal responsibility to both set direction and drive momentum in every aspect of their business – even if it takes them from formulating grand strategies to screwing in nuts and bolts, tweaking and fine-tuning operations designed to implement those very strategies. After all, only by serving in the trenches can you possibly begin to identify with, and understand the responsibilities of, the person you’re sending off to fight on your behalf. This was a lesson learnt and painstakingly implemented by Steve Jobs and Jamie Dimon.  These two very different men, both from two strikingly different backgrounds, eventually ended up learning the same lesson from the ground-up; Jobs as he was soldering motherboards in his garage alongside fellow members of the Homebrew Computer Club, Dimon as he and his mentor Sandy Weill spent days and nights poring over spreadsheets and calculating ratios to identify the companies that they would one day take over and combine to build Citigroup. Wading into a ditch to do the work you’d rather have someone else do is humbling, and establishes a frame of mind that is focused on implementing solutions, leaving no problem unsolved, and looking for ways to simplify and minimize open-ended processes.  All of these experiences are necessary components of the discipline of execution, and can be instrumental in the initial stages of setting up your new venture.  A willingness to shoulder undesirable work and lead by example is a quality that is often over-promoted by many leaders but rarely exhibited in public. GEM # 1 The Bedrock of Your Church “The three processes – people, strategy, and operations – remain the building blocks and heart of good execution. But as the economic, political, and business environments change, the ways in which they are carried out also change.” Execution, page 14 Here’s how it breaks down:  Whenever you’re bringing a group of people together, either to build a project team, staff a division or flesh out your executive branch, seek and hire only top talent.  Don’t settle for “next-best alternatives”, “good enough” solutions or people who can just “get the job done”. In your quest for talent, be unreasonable, be demanding, and insist on only bringing on people who have demonstrated their worth and value to your endeavour. Anyone else is going to dilute your team’s capabilities.

“Habits can be changed, if we understand how they work.” The Power of Habit, prologue XVII When you woke this morning, what was the first thing you did? What habits helped or hindered you? Now think about what habits help or hinder your organization ...

Every so often, life feels a bit hectic. It can seem like there are forces beyond us that control our actions and reactions, our thoughts, feelings, and emotions. We are controlled by our habits. If we weren’t, and we had to consciously do everythin...

“By understanding your brain, you increase your capacity to change your brain.” Your Brain at Work, Page 96 Drawing upon interviews with thirty leading neuroscientists from all over the world and more than 300 research papers based on thousands of brain and psychological studies conducted in the last 25 years, Your Brain At Work is an extremely valuable resource that helps readers learn about how the human brain works. More importantly, David Rock focuses on creating and implementing practical strategies from these findings that will help you overcome distractions, become more focused, and work more effectively. With increasing distractions and information overload, this book is a must-read for the 21st century working professional. Written like a drama, Your Brain At Work follows two central characters (Emily is an executive for a company that runs large conferences and Paul is a freelance IT consultant) as they navigate through various challenges at work and home. Each scene begins with a description of how they handle a challenging situation, followed by related research about the brain that explains their behaviour. Finally, it ends with a “Take 2” that re-imagines the initial scenario with Emily and Paul behaving differently by putting what they’ve learned about the brain into action. Golden Egg The Myth of Multitasking “Despite thirty years of consistent findings about dual-task interference, many people still try to do several things at once. Workers of the world have been told to multitask for years.”  Your Brain at Work, page 36 Making decisions and solving problems relies heavily on a region of the brain called the prefrontal cortex. There are five main mental processes relevant to getting work done: understanding, decision-making, recalling, memorizing, and inhibiting. Each process involves manipulations of billions of neurological circuits, and here’s the key: one operation must finish before another can begin. When engaged in conscious activities, the brain works in a serial pattern: one thing after another. Hundreds of experiments demonstrate that when people do two cognitive tasks at once, their cognitive capacity can drop from that of a Harvard MBA to that of an eight-year-old. This phenomenon is referred to as “dual-task interference.” The myth of multi-tasking is that you are not really doing two cognitive tasks at the same time. Instead, you are switching attention between tasks very quickly, which drains essential brain energy and makes it even more difficult for you to accomplish either task. Rock describes several strategies that can help you work more effectively than the myth of multi-tasking, including: Prioritize Information & Decisions – A serious implication of the serial nature of the prefrontal cortex is the formation of bottlenecks. “A bottleneck is a series of unfinished connections that take up mental energy, forming a queue” (pg. 41). This means it’s important to make critical decisions first because they impact and cascade downwards to other decisions. For example, it doesn’t make sense to send wedding invites without first deciding on a date and venue; yet it’s possible to spend hours worrying about the little details such as paper texture and font. Mix Up Your Attention – If you have several things to do at once, decide how much time you are going to spend on each task and stick to those timelines. This is more effective than continuously flitting across several tasks. GEM # 1 Prioritize Prioritizing “Your best-quality thinking lasts for a limited time. The answer is not always just to ‘try harder.’” Your Brain at Work, page 9 The prefrontal cortex requires a lot of metabolic fuel and goes through it very quickly, much like a gas-guzzling SUV. This means that if you make a complex decision, your brain depletes significant fuel and making yet another complex decision becomes much more difficult. Think about the first thing you do on a Monday morning.

Everything we admire in the world, champion sports teams, spectacular entertainment, amazing business successes, and individual accomplishments are all because someone wanted to get better at something.  And the question for everyone else has always been, “How did they do that?” Jason Womack knows how to accomplish stuff.  And as a renowned workplace performance expert and executive coach, he knows how to help others act in ways that allow them to accomplish their own stuff.  In his seminal work, Your Best Just Got Better: Work Smarter, Think Bigger, Make More, Jason shares his overarching principles along with many specific tactics and exercises that get you started towards getting better, in whatever way you choose.  If you want to take action, this book is definitely actionable, because he gives you some kind of exercise or task to do in every chapter, in the hopes that you’ll pick something that resonates with you to help you get started.  And if you want to be an executive coach or workplace expert yourself, you might just be able to use this book as your secret weapon. Golden Egg Focus to Finish “Do as much as you can, with as much of your focus as you can, toward completion, in the next few minutes.” Your Best Just Got Better, page 187 Womack states that out of all the aspects of productivity and workplace performance he teaches in this book, “focus is the single most critical component to address when it comes to success.” And he does teach a lot of different concepts, including how to manage your time, your energy, improving your network, gathering feedback, and clarifying your purpose, among others.  But when he gets to the chapter on focus, you get the feeling that this is his secret sauce, his baby. He calls it, Directed Thinking, when you are focused on thinking toward what you want to be true.  This is beyond positive thinking, it’s more about “directing your focus forward, taking action, and making things happen.”  And that’s exactly what you’ll be able to do after acting on the concepts in this book. In a world of constant multi-tasking and increased demands on our time that we either place on ourselves, or is placed on us by others, we crave some kind of magical time and space where the rest of the world just stops, so we can focus on getting things done and catch up.  Well, we’re not going to find that magical place where we stop the world, but we can, in essence, block out the rest of the world mentally, as we focus on our most important tasks.  Our job is to create our own time and space, and not wait for the world to give us permission, because frankly, it doesn’t care. Staying focused on not only your everyday tasks, but on the direction of your life is the key to getting better. GEM # 1 Practice on the small things, so you can perform on the big ones. “Think about what you have to do, and do something you’re thinking about.” Your Best Just Got Better, page 209 Sure, we’ve heard ‘practice makes perfect’ all our lives, but Jason is going deeper.  He says that ‘practice makes comfortable.’  So think about all the things you’re comfortable doing, that means you’ve practiced them.  For instance, someone who has perfected the art of always being late to meetings has ‘practiced’ that behavior over and over until it has become a standard habit.  We can practice something whether it’s right or wrong. He says “the easiest way I know to get started doing things differently is to begin slowly, and practice with incredible intention and deliberate focus.” This equates practice to being more like an experiment.  In an experiment, you are just trying something and seeing how it works.  But you are focused on observing exactly what happens. Regardless of whether it does or doesn’t work, you’ve still learned something just by conducting the experiment and observing intently.  So by practicing a new way to act, you’re just seeing how it works for you.

“I know for sure that none of these people graduated with a deliberate strategy to get divorced or lose touch with their children—much less to end up in jail. Yet this is the exact strategy that too many ended up implementing.” How Will You Measure Yo...

"Every significant choice we make in life carries with it some uncertainty." Thinking Fast and Slow, page 270 It would be difficult to exaggerate the influence and impact Daniel Kahneman has had on today's thinkers. His TED profile says, in part, "Widely regarded as the world's most influential living psychologist, Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel in Economics for his pioneering work in behavioral economics — exploring the irrational ways we make decisions about risk." The list of books which are a direct or nearly direct result of his writing would be enormous. Even a partial list of his literary children and grandchildren here at Actionable Books is impressive: Drive, Freakonomics, How We Decide, The Luck Factor, Now, Discover Your Strengths, Outliers, Predictably Irrational, Uncertainty, The War of Art, Who Moved My Cheese?, A Whole New Mind. Kahneman's work, alone or with longtime collaborator Amos Tversky, is foundational to our understanding of ourselves. Credited with creating behavioural economics, the science of why we don't make sense when we think about money, he won the Nobel Prize in 2002. The prize is not awarded posthumously, so Tversky is not officially listed as a recipient, yet Kahneman considers it a joint prize shared with his friend Amos. His love and admiration for his collaborator and friendis evident throughout the book. I suspect it prompted the book's premise, our Golden Egg. Golden Egg Actors Cannot See What is Obvious to Observers "The premise of this book is that it is easier to recognize other people's mistakes than our own." Thinking Fast and Slow, page 28 Though this weighty tome (500+ pages including appendices) is scientific in nature, Kahneman's thrust is pointedly human. A recurrent theme throughout is the immeasurable benefit of relationships. In a deep exploration of our fundamentally non-rational thinking, I was pleasantly surprised to be directed to friendship as, not just the primary source of happiness ("It is only a slight exaggeration to say that happiness is the experience of spending time with the people you love and who love you") but a useful tool for self-exploration and personal growth. Kahneman introduces two systems, the two ways we think, which he simply calls System 1 and System 2. They are, essentially, our unconscious emotional self (System 1) and our conscious logical self (System 2.) System 1 is automated and intuitive. When you see two objects, System 1 determines which is closer, which is larger, which is human and which is not. You don’t have to do anything, it just happens. System 1 reads the emotions on another person’s face. When you see “2 + 2” it says “4” without the effort of calculation. When you see the phrase “the capital of France” it blurts out “Paris” without being asked. It’s reading these words right now. System 2 is cognition with intent. When you see “17 x 32” System 1 tells you this is a math problem, and even indicates whether you can solve it easily or will need a pencil or a calculator. If so, System 2 will be doing the work. Finding the shortest route to Duluth or defining “abstruse” or filling out your tax forms: all System 2 tasks. System 1 is always on, always looking for other answers, busy as a bee. It is everything we do automatically, instinctively, unconsciously, effortlessly. Because it is unconscious and effortless, it constantly serves up answers, whether we’ve asked for them or not. It creates our prejudices. It lets us drive without paying constant attention to every detail. System 1 tells us the couch we’re buying will fit in our living room because it looks so small in the showroom. It tells us that going 5 miles per hour over the speed limit will make up the 5 minutes we’re late for work. System 2 is lazy. So lazy, in fact, that we are incapable of fully escaping our heuristic biases. Even Kahneman, who knows these things better than any of us, admits that though he knows the facts,