Every Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal finance book or other book of interest to Simple Dollar readers.

The entire argument of Seth Godin’s book Linchpin is that there are no longer any great jobs where someone tells you what to do. That’s not to say there aren’t great jobs out there – there are many – but they now require the ability to basically blaze your own path, creating things and building connections that are indispensable to those around you. That person, in Godin’s terminology, is a linchpin.

I think, to a degree, this general argument is spot on. We live in a globalized world where most jobs can be shipped anywhere, from Mexico to Indonesia. Jobs in which people are merely following instructions all day are among the easiest to ship and the few that remain in America aren’t going to be strongly financially rewarding. Success comes from making yourself essential to the operation – and simply following orders, even if you do it well, keeps you firmly in the “replaceable cog” camp.

How do you stand out? What kinds of choices can you make to turn yourself into someone indispensable? Let’s dig in and see what the book has to say.

The New World of Work
Most jobs where you simply follow instructions and do a faceless job demean the real value you provide. They’re faceless jobs, but you’re not a faceless person. You’re not merely a cog in the machine of capitalism – but your job might be. The biggest difference between a follow-the-instructions job and a linchpin is that a linchpin creates his or her own value, whereas an instruction follower doesn’t add any value beyond a specified task that’s completed. A linchpin works in ways that improves those around him or her, while an instruction-follower simply follows the tasks at hand. I like to think of it this way: what’s the difference between a mediocre administrative assistant and the best administrative assistant you can imagine? That’s roughly the difference between a person who is a linchpin and a person who is not.

Thinking About Your Choice
The choice that’s on your plate is simple: do you keep merely following instructions and counting the days until Friday or do you look for ways to make yourself transcend those roles and become a linchpin? This is an urgent question, because a global marketplace makes the instruction-follower role more dispensable than ever. Some people are content to fill the role of instruction-follower – and that’s fine. However, the career opportunities for such people are simply shrinking – that’s a fact of life.

Indoctrination: How We Got Here
Most of what we learn in school serves one purpose – to make you an effective person at filling an instruction-follower job. Schools do not encourage creative thinking (which is an invaluable part of being a linchpin) – instead, they encourage lots of rote memorization and repetitive tasks which are scored on standardized tests. It’s a pretty neat trick to make school funding tied to these standardized tests, isn’t it?

Becoming the Linchpin
Every workplace has a few people that are simply indispensable. They take very challenging situations and make them work. They seem to solve tons and tons of problems. They’re the ones everyone goes to when there are crises. Those people are the indispensable ones – if you’re not one of them, you’re a lot more dispensable than they are. The question really is whether or not you’re willing to work to become one of those indispensable folks.

Is It Possible to Do Hard Work in a Cubicle?
Being a linchpin means a lot of hard work. The biggest part of it is being willing to give all of what you have to doing a great job. This does not mean just filling your hours with whatever task you’re assigned. It means bringing all of your passion, your ideas, and your creativity to the table whenever you work. It means taking on the hard problems that might scare you a little bit (or more than a little bit).

The Resistance
Our brains typically work in resistance to those kinds of tasks – we’re biologically wired to look out purely for number one. We avoid risk. We avoid anything that might be perceived as a threat. We avoid generosity. However, all of these things – risk, taking on threats, generosity – are key parts of being a linchpin. We have to work hard to overcome these resistances in order to become something greater.

The Powerful Culture of Gifts
Giving of yourself to others opens countless doors. Our brains often expect immediate reciprocity – if we give something, we want something in return and soon. The world rarely works that way. Our generosity – going above and beyond the expectations of others – builds a strong reputation for us, one that secures our work and builds positive relationships and interactions for us in ways we often never directly see. Quid pro quos rarely work – but building a strong reputation for great work and generosity certainly does.

There Is No Map
How do you do this? Unfortunately, there is no road map – and that’s a big part of the difficulty of it. You have to seek out the challenges in your own situation and take them on head first. You have to seek ways to up the quality of whatever it is you’re doing. In other words, you have to go off the instruction sheet – and that’s the real challenge.

Making the Choice
Linchpin value is created by what you choose to do, not by what you’re born with. Anyone can become a linchpin – it’s not an inborn trait, it’s a sequence of choices to step beyond the instructions and do things that improve everyone around you. It’s a scary choice, but it’s still a choice, one that offers a lot of rewards if you’re willing to take the leap.

The Culture of Connection
In order to succeed as a linchpin, you have to build a lot of connections with the people around you. Indispensable work is work that’s connected to the work that others do. You build on their work and they thrive on the work you’ve done. A big part of this is personality and attitude and a big first step is to recognize that negativity towards others will never, ever get you to being a linchpin. Positive relationships are the ones upon which you can build great things.

The Seven Abilities of the Linchpin
Here are the seven abilities, in a nutshell, from page 218:

1. Providing a unique interface between members of the organization
2. Delivering unique creativity
3. Managing a situation or organization of great complexity
4. Leading customers
5. Inspiring staff
6. Providing deep domain knowledge
7. Possessing a unique talent

Linchpins provide at least one of the things on this list and often provide more than one. It’s key to remember that these things are there to provide value to the people around you and make their work better, because in doing so you make yourself indispensable.

When It Doesn’t Work
If you’re trying to be a linchpin and it isn’t working, blind persistence is usually not the way to go. The value of a linchpin isn’t in repeating things that aren’t clicking or working. Instead, they constantly seek out new approaches and ideas and try them, instead. No one has a 100% success rate with their endeavors and ideas, but it is the successful ones that provide so much that they more than make up for the failed attempts.

Is Linchpin Worth Reading?
If I were to hand a recent graduate or a twentysomething a book on modern careers and how to succed in them today, I’m pretty sure that Linchpin would be the first book that I would grab.

The ideas in this book are reflected in virtually every workplace I’ve ever been a part of, from entry-level work to highly technical work. The people that stepped up to help others and solve problems were the ones that were indispensable, while the others merely hoped to hold onto their jobs. I also noticed that the people who stepped up to the challenge tended to be a lot more positive about their job, whereas the people who were dispensable were negative about their job and the people around them.

There are a lot of great ideas about the modern workplace in this book. If you’re struggling in your career, Linchpin is probably well worth a read.

A few days ago, my four year old son came into my office when I was finishing up an article for The Simple Dollar.

“What are you doing, Dad?” he asked.

“I’m working,” I told him.

“Why?” he asked.

“Well, I have to work so that we can make money, and we use that money to pay for our house and for our food and our clothes,” I told him.

He thought about that for a minute. “But why do you work on your computer?” he asked.

“Well, that’s my job,” I told him.

“Why?” he asked.

“I enjoy writing. It’s something that I like to do and I’m lucky enough to make money when I do it,” I told him.

He stood there for a moment. “But sometimes you don’t like it,” he said.

“Yes, that’s true. Sometimes I get frustrated with it. But if it were always easy, everyone would do it,” I said.

“Why don’t you make money doing something you like better?” he asked.

“Well, there is no job in the world that doesn’t sometimes frustrate the person doing it, Joe,” I told him. “No one always likes what they’re doing.”

“But why do you work when you don’t like it?” he asked me. “You should go do something else when you don’t like it.”

“It’s not that easy, bud,” I told him. But I did go and play with him after that.

Still, our conversation stuck in my mind for quite a while. I jotted down most of it in my notes a bit later in the day to think about some more.

Joe brought up a few really good points along the way. Why do we work? What are the reasons we choose to do the things we do? Why do we sometimes choose frustration and unhappiness along the way when it comes to that work?

Most important, what’s the right balance?

Why Work?
The easy answer, of course, is to make money. But that’s far, far from the only answer.

Think back to that classic high school guidance counselor question: “What would you do with your time if you had ten million dollars?” Once you got the rest and relaxation out of your system, of course.

For me, the answer is an easy one. I’d write fiction. I’d write lots of fiction. I’m usually happiest when I’m creating a character and breathing life into him or her, then carrying that character through some event in life. I’d try hard to get it published, too. (What I do now is a reasonable substitute for that, but it’s not a perfect substitute.)

Everyone will have a different answer to that question. My oldest brother, for example, would love to make hunting videos. He loves hunting deeply and is all about sharing it with others. My niece would be a photographer. She loves capturing moments on film. My father would cry himself to sleep with joy if he could run an outdoorsman’s lodge. The list goes on and on.

What Keeps Us From Doing That?
The need for money, to put it simply.

For most of us, money simply doesn’t grow on trees. We need a certain amount of money to pay for housing, for food on the table, for electricity and heating, for clothing, and so on.

Most of the things we dream about doing do not earn much money, especially at first. An unpublished fiction writer is going to not earn much at all for quite a while as they keep throwing short stories and novellas and novels at the wall until (hopefully) something sticks. You can’t make hunting videos and sell them without buyers and a reputation. You can’t open a restaurant or a lodge without a tremendous amount of capital that will take quite a while to recoup.

Those two things run head to head. So we compromise. We find a job that’s tolerable that earns us some money – something within our ethical boundaries (a hitman, for example, is outside of most people’s ethical boundaries) and our skill set (not everyone can be a doctor, for example). We settle in. We get used to it. And those things that we dream about doing become just that – dreams.

Bridging That Gap
This brings us back to that key question – why work? Ideally, shouldn’t we work in order to make our lives more enjoyable? And, since we fill quite a lot of our waking hours with our work, shouldn’t a big part of our work’s effort go towards making that work time more enjoyable?

Five years ago, the thought of writing for a living was firmly in the “dream” camp for me. Rather than working to make my whole life better, I worked solely to make my life outside of work better.

That was a huge mistake. When I stepped back and looked at the big picture, I realized how much of my time I was devoting to a job that wasn’t the peak of my personal happiness. I enjoyed it, but it was keeping me from things that I enjoyed more, like my children (especially when I traveled) and time devoted to writing.

Given that my work took up about fifty hours a week of actual work time and commuting time – and often took up much more than that during crunch times, emergencies, and travel – and would often fill my thoughts when I wasn’t at work – I was devoting the vast majority of my waking hours to something that was (far) less enjoyable than what I dreamed of doing.

Fixing that problem is one of the most worthwhile goals there is for your extra money.

If you stuff your hours full of one thing, but find yourself wishing you were spending all of those hours each week doing something else, you absolutely should devote every spare resource you can to (1) getting yourself out of debt and on a very stable financial playing field and (2) putting the pieces in place so you can live that dream.

That means going without some things – and the things you choose to go without really depends on how urgently you want to change your life. If you want to reach it any time soon, you may have to make some radical changes.

Just step back and ask yourself these three things.

First, how many hours do you devote to your work each week, including your commute, any trips you have to take, and time outside of work thinking about your job? What portion of your waking hours is that?

Second, what would your life be like if you could fill those hours doing something you truly loved doing?

Finally, how many of those material trappings in your life are really worth forcing you to trade away all of those hours each week?

You might just find that a completely different game plan is the one that works for you.

Think big. Do you need that large of a house or that large of an apartment? Do you need that car? Keep going down the scale. Do you need to eat out? Do you need that cable bill? And include the hundreds of small things, too. Do you need name-brand paper towels – or paper towels at all?

And when you think about how you want some of these things, compare them to the majority of waking hours in your life that you devote to doing things that you don’t want to do.

When you start thinking that way – and moving in that direction – big elements of your life start to shift. The simple question of “why work?” changes in nature when you start making those kinds of choices.

And, yes, a big reason why I’ve chosen the career that I have is to show my children very clearly that you can do whatever you want in life. If you want to do a certain thing, you certainly can make it happen.

One issue that I hear about from readers on an almost daily basis is the issue of how to find work opportunities for all sorts of specific needs. A stay-at-home mom wants to pick up a few hours here and there. A retiree is getting stir crazy and wants to find some work for idle hands to do while earning a few dollars. Here’s an interesting solution to that very problem.

With the dawning of 2010 comes the once-per-decade United States Census – and with it comes the need for hundreds of thousands of part-time workers to help with local census results. Bob writes in:

In the Simple Dollar you have often told people to find a second job to help dig out from debt. I thought you might be able to write about the positions available from the US Census Bureau. In my area, Suffolk Cty Long Island NY, the hourly rate is $18/hr!!!

I was intrigued, so I called up Jane, an old friend of mine who has worked with the census in the past. I asked her a number of questions about what exactly this opportunity might entail for people who are looking for work right now (and with a 10% unemployment rate, that’s a lot of people). Here’s the key parts of the information I found.

Who can work for the Census Office? Pretty much everyone can find a job working for the census. The US Census website offers a a thorough guide for job seekers, including specific information for full time workers, retirees, and students and recent graduates. Since most of the work is clerical, they’re usually fairly flexible with schedules, which means it might work well for a stay-at-home parent who wants to pick up some hours here and there, for example.

What exactly does a census worker do? Census workers in local communities have the job of making sure people are actually filling out their 2010 census forms accurately and in a timely fashion. This means that workers will have to do things like locate residences, explain what the census is all about and why we fill out the forms, help people fill out their forms, record the answers that people give, and make sure that those forms are filed correctly. Other workers have more clerical tasks: organizing submitted forms, mailing them, and so forth. Here’s an example test covering the types of skills you would need to have.

Jane gave the strong impression that most people are given a list of names and addresses and are tasked to help the people on that list to fill out their census forms. This means finding where they live, stopping by, talking with them, helping them fill out the forms, then returning the completed forms to the census office.

How good is the pay? It varies a lot throughout the country, but the pay is surprisingly good for part-time work. In Iowa, for example, workers usually start at around $12 per hour. Here’s an interactive map to help you find what pay would be like in your state.

On top of that, you’re reimbursed at a very nice rate for any miles you put on your personal vehicle doing census work – driving to homes and the like.

Why are you writing about this on The Simple Dollar? People need work. With “official” unemployment at 10% and real unemployment approaching 20% in some areas, a lot of people are hurting. On top of that, there are many people out there struggling to make ends meet with their full time jobs. For both of these groups, census work is something that they can probably handle without additional training, plus it’s flexible work that pays pretty well.

There are a lot of poor paying jobs floating around out there. On top of that, there are even more scams identifying ways for people to make money that don’t really work. Census work is one of the few legitimate part time work opportunities that actually works for almost everyone – it’s something I myself would do if I needed some extra income.

How can I get started? The first step is to contact your local census office. Here’s a full list of them – just find the one closest to you and give them a call.

During the entire “Trimming the Average Budget” series, the focus has been on spending less money. It’s a walkthrough of every significant financial element of an average American family’s life – and a look at how they can spend less in each of those areas.

Saving money is a powerful tool, but it’s equally important to recognize that increasing your income is at least as powerful as saving money – and putting the two in tandem is particularly powerful.

There are many, many ways to increase your income. Most of them boil down to the following:

Earning more at your current job. Simply asking your boss for a raise increases your income in surprising ways. Even if you work hourly for 40 hours a week, a simple quarter per hour raise earns you $520 more per year.

Getting a new, better job in your career path. This can come in the form of a promotion at your current job or a new job at a different location. Either way, you’re often earning more (sometimes a lot more), but there’s often more responsibility (and more work) in exchange for that pay.

Starting over with a new, more lucrative career. At first, this often means a dip in earnings (it certainly did for me). However, it often means a job that you’re more passionate about and, over time, you can really jack up your earnings by riding that train of passion.

Getting a second job. To put it simply, this means trading more of your time for more money, but often not at as good of a rate as your main job. This is a great way to boost your income over a short time, but it’s hard to sustain without serious burnout.

Starting a side business. Many people (myself included) engage their free time and their passions by starting a side business to profit from the things they’re interested in.

Whatever path you choose will help you earn more. However, all of these paths have several key skills in common – skills everyone can work on to improve their earning potential. Here are a few of these skills that will help you to earn more no matter what you’re doing – and a few simple ways to work on them.

Communication skills The ability to effectively communicate your ideas, your thoughts, and key information to others is essential in almost any career path – even ones that seem quite solitary.

How can I improve my communication skills? Read more. That’s the first step. After that, write more. Plop yourself down with a book that interests you, then when you’re done, send an email to a friend about it. Another effective way is to teach someone else a skill you already have, as it forces you to communicate very carefully.

Organization skills Over the last few decades, the economy has really transformed into an information economy, in which the flow of ideas and data is incredibly powerful. The more skill you have in organizing all of that data that comes your way, the better worker you will be no matter what your specific job is.

How can I improve my organization skills? Get control over your own information. Maintain an organized calendar for yourself that has all the relevant information right there. Start a personal filing system for all of your important documents. Organize your picture collection in such a fashion that you can find any picture you want quickly and easily.

Politeness and presentability Rudeness and crassness might fly with the gang and it might get a giggle out of a coworker, but it won’t ever do you any favors over the long term. Why? Much of the economy is a service economy, and even big pieces of the economy that aren’t centered around service involve interacting with customers and associates. The better you interact with them, the better off you are.

How can I improve my politeness and presentability? Clean up. Dress well. Bite your tongue. Speak slowly and choose your words with a bit more care. Encourage polite speech in every element of your life – if the gang you usually hang out with uses a lot of crude language and a thick accent, work hard to battle against that with your own speaking.

Handling criticism well I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen employees completely blow up when criticized about any aspect of their work performance. If you tend to fire back with insults or shouting or seething rage when you’re criticized, you’re not going to go anywhere. Remember, the vast majority of the time, criticism is issued in the workplace to improve the overall workplace, which you’re a part of. It’s not a vendetta against you – it’s someone trying to make things better.

How can I improve my ability to handle criticism? Don’t get angry. If you have nothing worthwhile to say in response, say nothing at all. Do not fire back with insults. Later, after you’ve had a chance to calm down, think about the criticism. Likely, there was a reason it was issued. Take some time to actually act on that criticism and attempt to improve yourself. The more you do this, the easier it becomes – and you’ll see improvements in how others treat you and the opportunities that come your way.

These ideas just scratch the surface, but they point to a big truth: improving yourself in constructive ways improves your earning potential. That’s a big part of the equation of financial success.

Carlos writes in:

I’ve been working at the same job for the last six years. I used to love it but lately I’ve started dreading going to work. I can’t really put my finger on a reason why, either. I’m considering quitting but I am very afraid to take that leap with the economy the way it is. Got any suggestions?

Once upon a time, I was in a similar situation. For me, it really boiled down to three factors, two of which had little to do with the job. First, I felt like my dream of being a writer was slipping away from me. Second, I felt like I wasn’t spending enough quality time with my children. Third, the aspects of my job that I loved (my great coworkers and the creative work) were often buried behind minutiae, maintenance, and paperwork.

Even in this situation, it took me more than a year to choose to walk away. Much like Carlos, I was very afraid to take that leap for financial and career security reasons.

That year was not miserable at all. In fact, when the time came where I could walk away, I found myself having a lot of last minute second thoughts because I actually liked my job so much. It was the non-job aspects that finally called me away.

Here are eight key things to try when you’re feeling professionally burnt out.

1. Reconnect with your core work.
You were hired to perform a certain task, right? Get back to that task, which is often the part of your job that you love the most. Take a break from all of the extra stuff – the paperwork, the committees, the office politics – and just focus on the work that you enjoy.

You might have to get a bit of buy-in from your boss on this, but most bosses will be receptive. After all, you’re requesting to focus on the task that they hired you for.

2. Plan for the next step.
If you were to quit, what would you do? Develop a detailed plan for doing this. On one level, it might just be escapism to help you deal with a rough patch. On another level, you might be putting together the blueprint for a powerful life goal for yourself.

Make the plan as detailed as possible, then start taking action on those little details. Actually moving forward on such a goal can bring it to life in a very powerful and life-affirming way.

3. Build new relationships.
If you’re feeling burnt out with the circle of people you work with (and office politics in general), reconsider the group you’re associating with. Look for new people in your office – and outside your office – to adopt into your inner professional circle.

New people offer new insights. They offer new opportunities and connections and ideas. More than anything, though, they offer new attitudes and new perspectives, which might be exactly what you need right now.

4. Share your gifts.
Open up a Twitter account. Start a blog. Link to interesting things that you’ve discovered. When you’re on Twitter, follow and converse with people in your field. On your blog, link to articles by people in your field that you find interesting.

Most importantly, share the things that you know. Over a long period of time, with consistent activity, a thoughtful blog becomes a powerful resume in and of itself. Never mind the fact that it’s also a potential way to earn some money, too.

5. Learn something new.
Jobs can sometimes become frustrating because you’re stuck in an intellectual loop, doing the same thing over and over again. Many jobs can change radically if you take the time to learn new ways of doing things.

Look for opportunities to expand your education. Take some classes. Read some books. Focus on learning some new techniques. They’ll breathe new life into your current job and open the door to better ones.

6. Talk with your supervisor.
This works particularly well if you’re a longstanding productive employee, because a supervisor will actually pay attention to what you have to say. If you’re chronically underproductive, this is a bad route to take.

Just have a meeting with your supervisor and lay your concerns on the table. Ask for some help in coming up with a plan to solve those concerns. Your supervisor may be able to handle some of them and offer solid advice on how to handle other aspects.

7. Build an emergency fund.
Sometimes, the pain of a job comes from a sense that you’re completely tied to it financially: that without the job, you can’t possibly survive financially. Take a hard look at how you spend money. How much of that spending is really necessary and life-fulfilling?

Learn some frugality. Cut down on your needless overspending. Start socking away some of your money. Build up a cushion – and don’t give into the temptation to spend it just as you start building it. Quite often, the long-term presence of a healthy emergency fund can make life seem a lot more tolerable.

8. Build an exit strategy.
If none of these tactics work, it might actually be time to leave – and leave soon. Polish up your resume and get in touch with the people you know in your field. Seek out that next position so that when you make the leap, you leap into someplace safe.

Good luck.

Yesterday, I read a really interesting article about career choices on Charlie Hoehn’s blog. A quick excerpt:

I haven’t really talked about this before, but I’ve failed more times than I can remember. I’ve tried starting up several businesses, tried patenting inventions, tried starting up online communities, tried building several websites, tried to win contests… and failed almost every single time. But I never chalked any of them up as failures in my head, because I learned so much in the process each time. So now, when I’ve finally reached a point where things seem to fall into place with far less effort, I can’t help but think about all those times where I didn’t succeed over the course of the last eight years. And I look back in fondness, because those lessons learned are the reason I’m here. None of this stuff happened over night — in a way, I’ve been working to reach this point since I was 15.

[...]

And therein lies the best career advice I could possibly dispense: just DO things. Chase after the things that interest you and make you happy. Stop acting like you have a set path, because you don’t. No one does. You shouldn’t be trying to check off the boxes of life; they aren’t real and they were created by other people, not you. There is no explicit path I’m following, and I’m not walking in anyone else’s footsteps. I’m making it up as I go.

I know exactly what he’s talking about.

In college, I worked for quite a long time in a plant pathology lab studying soybean diseases. I learned some things – including that the work wasn’t right for me. I eventually moved on to computer analysis of massive quantities of data. I learned quite a lot from that as well (including that I really loved the work, but I found it really stressful). From there, I did another complete 180 and became a writer. I did all of that before the age of 30. What does the next decade hold? I really, truly have no idea.

The key thing is this: I never stopped trying new things. I still don’t. In the last year, I’ve tried a podcast, video production (on an unrelated topic), and architecture of a community website in my spare time (what little I have of it). Each time, things work with varying degrees of success – sometimes it really clicks and other times it doesn’t at all. Either way, I learn something from it.

Many people are afraid to try new things like this. They look at their career as a set path. In five years, I’ll make partner. In ten years, I’ll be a GS-13. In fifteen years, I’ll be mayor.

Careers almost never work like that. Companies are downsized. The political landscape changes. Your interests evolve and change. You gain a spouse – or you lose one. You have kids. You have a health crisis. Something sweeps you off your feet and carries you along for the ride. An old friend calls out of the blue and offers you an awesome opportunity.

The only way to prepare yourself for such chaos is to constantly try new things in your spare time. Take a class. Try out a new hobby. Teach yourself a new skill. Meet a new group of people. Launch a project of some kind. Start a side business.

If it doesn’t work out, so what? You learned something. The learning is the most valuable thing of all. Because, when that right thing does come along, you’re more likely to succeed at it if you have a lot of life lessons under your belt. Life lessons generally come from failure, not from success.

What can you do today? That’s the real question, isn’t it? Try something new – something outside of the normal way you do things. Start a blog. Sign up for a class. Start a side business. Go to a group meeting that you’ve never been to before.

Where will you find the time? Log off the computer and turn off the television, for starters. For many people, those two things alone will free up a lot of time.

Good luck.

Every other Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal growth, personal productivity, or career book.

This is a book I wish I had my hands on about two years ago.

I was working at a job I liked, but I also felt that there were several directions in which I was unable to spread my wings. The work I was doing was slowly moving in a less creative direction over time. Plus, I wanted to spend a lot more time with my children and limit my work-related travel to perhaps one trip a year at most.

For me, “the leap” was into a freelance writing career and it seems to have worked out. The Leap, by Rick Smith, is a guide to this very kind of move. You’re in a job that’s stifling you in some way and you want to move in a different direction with your career and/or your life. What can you do without sacrificing the income you need?

Before we get started, I found the advice in this book often paralleled my own experience, but in more than a few places, it dropped some insights that I didn’t think of or didn’t expect. In other words, I would have loved to have this book in my hand about two years ago.

1. “Great Work, You’re Fired”
Sometimes, when you think you’re in an incredibly secure position in a successful job with a great company, it’s all swept out from under you. You’re walloped with a new passion (like writing, for example). Your life context changes – you fall in love or you have children. The economy changes and your job is “downsized.” Your company’s CEO makes some really stupid moves and you’re “downsized.”

These types of changes happen more and more often and yet people are still often gobsmacked by them. Yet we all have the opportunity to turn lemons into lemonade. We just have to start now.

2. The Now Trap: Stuck in the Status Quo
One of the biggest traps we fall into in the workplace is the urgency of now. Most of the time, we’re chasing the things that need to be done immediately, but all of these little “putting out the fire” actions do nothing to actually establish a great career. We’re trapped by the moment in our jobs. Instead, it’s the less urgent things that tend to establish us: completing projects, improving ourselves, and so forth.

Sometimes we need to set aside the “now” and work on the truly important things that are a little less urgent. Commit to some projects or some educational opportunities. Don’t just worry about the “now” – devote some of your time to building your value for the future.

3. Breaking Away: The Three Rules
Smith proposes three “rules” for getting you from where you are to a position where your job doesn’t control your life or your career future. For the most part, these rules revolve around figuring out where your skills and passions overlap and maximizing that area, which he calls your “primary color.”

Of course, these three rules are discussed in detail over the following three chapters.

4. Primary Colors: Tapping the Energy Within
We each have a distinct set of strengths and weaknesses. We also each have areas we’re passionate about and areas we’re less passionate about. Quite often in life, we spend time trying to patch up our weaknesses and trying to improve ourselves in areas we’re not really passionate about. Smith argues that this is a giant mistake.

Instead, we should focus on the areas where our strengths and our passions overlap. So, for example, if we’re awful at public speaking but good at writing, and we’re passionate about fiction but don’t like science, we should avoid public speaking on science topics and instead focus on writing fiction.

5. What Is My Primary Color?
The trick, of course, is figuring out where our skills and passions lie. Smith refers to this as our “primary color.” In essence, this “primary color” is essentially a description of our core personality – what we’re naturally geared toward and skilled at.

Smith offers such an assessment for free at www.primarycolorassessment.com. I took the test myself and came up with 85% curiosity, 35% execution, and 33% leadership, which sounds about right. I prefer to come up with ideas, but will lead or be involved in execution if need be.

Is it useful? I think it is if you spend some time really contemplating the results and asking yourself how they match – or don’t match – what you’re doing.

6. Big, Selfless, and Simple: How Ideas Become Contagious
The most valuable thing in the modern workplace is the idea. People who come up with ideas, share those ideas, and are involved in implementing those ideas are the people who get ahead. Of course, without other people buying into those ideas, it’s very difficult to get your ideas heard and implemented – which means that you need to work on the “stickiness” of your ideas.

Most of this chapter lines up perfectly with the excellent book Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath (which I reviewed and loved a while back). In fact, I’d consider it reasonable to simply read the full book than read this chapter, since the ideas are similar and the general concepts are covered (in my opinion) in the book by the Heaths.

7. The Spark Sequence: Stacking the Deck
How can you know if this idea you think would match your passions and skills would actually work out? The best way to find out is by doing it – devoting as much of your time as possible to exploring that junction between your passions and your skills. Practice. Dive into opportunities. Back away from the optional things in your life that are less fulfilling and instead fill your hours with finding that crux between your passions and your skills.

One strong exercise that Smith suggests is simply writing down your idea, then making a list of five or ten questions that, if you knew the answer to them, would make your decisions about that idea much easier. Those questions then become your checklist – strive to answer as many as you can without giving up your current way of life.

8. Aristotle on a Lily Pad: A Perspective on Life-Work Design
Smith closes out the book by calling upon the philosophy of Aristotle to make a simple, yet central, point: the journey is what really matters. As you go along and figure out what you’re passionate about, you might have your eye on the destination, but the journey is where your true lessons will be learned. Your destination will likely change over and over again, but the lessons learned along your journey will stay with you.

Is The Leap Worth Reading?
The Leap is a very solid book for people who are struggling with finding the career they’re meant to have – a position I found myself in not too long ago. It’s incredibly straightforward, yet it provides plenty of food for thought and reflection.

I’ve been reading a lot of career books lately and many of them overlap on a lot of themes: finding your passionas and strengths, focusing on things that build value for you over the long term, building you and not your organization (remembering that a better you will help your organization more). The Leap presents all of these ideas very cohesively and clearly.

It’s a book I wish I had in my hands two years ago.

Over the last few months, I’ve given a small pile of presentations related to The Simple Dollar, my upcoming book, and other topics. Along the way, I’ve learned several things about what constitutes a good presentation and what constitutes a failure. Here are the seven key things I’ve learned, which you can take away to make your own presentations better.

1. Lots of words on the screen is bad. If you have a lot of words on the screen, people stop paying attention to what you’re saying and start reading the words on the screen. I suppose this is fine if you don’t want people to pay any attention to you at all, but that’s usually the opposite of the effect you want.

I had this problem with my early presentations, where I loaded down slides with words. As I spoke and looked out over the crowd, I could see a large number of them quite obviously tuning me out and reading the words on the screen. Then, when they were finished and tried to tune back into what I was saying, they had lost the thread and many of them became bored.

Try to stick to at most ten words on the screen per slide.

2. Instead, choose pictures that complement what you want to say. Instead of thinking of the information your slides can present, think of how the slides can complement what you’re saying.

For example, if I mention my children in a presentation, I’ll often include a slide that’s just a large picture of my children at play. No words, no anything. It doesn’t detract at all from what I’m saying, it merely complements and illustrates it and brings my words to life.

When you make an outline of what you want to say, consider what sort of visual image will match each idea. Then, find an image that matches that idea and actually show that image to the crowd, bringing the idea to life in their mind much as it is in your own.

3. Speaking of outlines… never forget you’re telling a story. A presentation is storytelling, pure and simple. If you look at your presentation as simply a way to convey lots of information, you’re missing out on why you’re doing it.

For me, the story is obvious – I just tell my life story. I talk about my many mistakes and how I recovered from them. It’s largely a chronological story – and it’s a visual story because I use picture-heavy slides.

Sit down for a moment and ask yourself what the story you’re telling is. Where did you start? Where did you go with it? What’s really interesting along the way?

If you need to convey lots of information, have a handout. The purpose of a presentation is to stick your big message in their mind.

4. Have lots of slides. Since you don’t have many words on your slides, you don’t need to stick with each slide for a long time. Since the slides are picture heavy, they provide a great visual complement for your points. So, have a lot of slides.

On average for my more recent talks, I stay on a slide for about ten seconds. Yes, ten seconds on average. That’s six slides a minute or, in terms of pure slide count, 180 slides in a half an hour.

For me, this serves two purposes. One, each picture accents a point I’m making and carries the story I’m telling forward. Two, it also serves as a visual outline for me, as each slide points to just one very specific idea I want to convey. The pictures themselves clue me into what I want to talk about.

5. Make the audience laugh on occasion. I find the easiest way to do this is with the pictures, since I’m not great at telling jokes myself.

I simply just choose a picture with a humorous bent that matches my point – a picture of my children making a mess, a picture of a funny street sign, a picture of a burnt casserole (when I’m talking about cooking at home). These things make people laugh (or at least chuckle) because they point to simple failures we have in common.

Humor is one of the best ways to connect with someon. Use it.

6. Use the “peak-end rule.” People will usually just take away two or three memories of your presentation, and one of them is how you finish. Keep that in mind.

I usually save something big for the finish. Usually, it’s a very explicit challenge for my audience, something simple and memorable for them to do when they leave: “go home, right now, and start an automatic savings plan.”

What can you save for the finish that will help your audience remember what you spoke about?

7. It’s you. Whenever you stand up in front of a crowd and present, the audience is informing an impression of you. If you stammer and look down and hide behind the information on your slides, it won’t be a good impression.

Don’t give yourself crutches when you’re out there, because you will lean hard on those crutches and create the impression of someone who can’t walk on their own. Throw away the note cards. Throw away the pieces of paper.

Most important of all, practice, practice, practice. Go through your slides until you’re numb, then go through them again. You should be able to know exactly what’s coming next and be intimately familiar with the story you want to tell.

When you walk out there, it’s as easy as pie. Just tell your story. Your slides will accent them beautifully. And the crowd will love you.