Knowing how to be a leader – and using that skill from time to time – opens doors for you no matter what you’re doing in life. It helps your career. It helps your social standing. It creates a positive reputation for you, one that often precedes you. It can even help your family life and personal friendships. In short, leadership can be truly rewarding.

The problem with leadership, though, is that the vast majority of people don’t know how to actually be a leader. For a small number of us, leadership comes easy – a natural extension of who we are. For the rest, though, it’s not obvious at all. We’re held back by our own seeming desire for simplicity (though, sometimes, it’s simpler to lead) and our own lack of self-confidence or sense that we’re not leaders at all.

A long time ago, I was forced into a leadership position on a project that I felt completely unprepared for. A very kind friend in a high place mailed me a copy of this book – Warren Bennis’s On Becoming a Leader – and encouraged me to give it a read. The ideas in this book helped me to step up and actually make the most of the situation as it was handed to me and, since then, I’ve recommended it to several others (as I did in a recent Reader Mailbag, actually).

What makes this book so compelling? Let’s dig in and take a look.

Mastering the Context
Every situation in which one is called to be a leader has some sort of context. The people involved are part of the context, as are the specifics of the situation. Quite often, leaders become too tied to the context of the situation and, as a result, come up with pretty poor leadership decisions. Bennis offers several good and bad examples of how leadership can be destroyed by context. For me, the most potent example was the presidency of George W. Bush – in the context of his political ideology and of the disaster of 9/11, he made choices that were perhaps not the best leadership choices for the United States (I don’t think anyone would argue, whether they be liberal or conservative, that mistakes were made during the Bush years). A positive example of stepping outside of context is Norman Lear – the creator of the seminal sitcom All in the Family. He took the context – sitcoms of the 1960s – and looked not at a situation full of rules, but instead a situation where many of the rules could be broken. That’s what a leader does – he finds ways to break away some of the context, opening up new areas for success. (Incidentally, I think this is why great leaders also have a big dash of creativity.)

Understanding the Basics
Here, Bennis identifies a pretty large handful of traits one will find in a leader: a guiding vision, passion, self-knowledge, candor, maturity, trust, curiosity, and daring. Bennis argues that most of these traits are not ones people are simply born with – they’re usually self-made by a person who pushes themselves and wants to excel at leading others. He goes on to distinguish that there’s a big difference between merely being a manager and being a leader – in fact, he argues that, quite often, an MBA makes a person a good manager but a pretty poor leader. A manager manages and maintains the status quo – a leader leads people somewhere great.

Knowing Yourself
In order to lead, you must know yourself intimately. You have to know what you’re truly capable of and what you must ask others to help you with. Without such intimate self-knowledge, you can never effectively lead because you’re incapable of understanding how to select people to fill the roles you most need filled. Bennis points towards four key lessons one must learn in terms of knowing oneself:

You are your own best teacher. Pay attention to the things that work for you and don’t work for you. Don’t listen to what everyone else says – try things for yourself and see if they fly.

Accept responsibility. Blame no one. If something goes wrong under your watch, it’s your fault, period. Don’t blame others for it – step up and take responsibility. Yes, you can make moves to make sure that this doesn’t happen again, but the failure is your responsibility if you’re the leader.

You can learn anything you want to learn. Knowledge can be acquired by anyone if they’re persistent. Don’t use ignorance as a crutch. Instead, accept that you are ignorant about some things and step up to educate yourself.

True understanding comes from reflecting on your experience. Look back at what you’ve accomplished and try to figure out how you accomplished it. Similarly, look back on your failures and determine what you did wrong to cause that bad result.

Knowing the World
Almost all of the worthwhile learning that people do comes outside the classroom. It comes from losing yourself in an experience, reading books because you want to read them, trying new things because you want to try them, and reflecting on all of this stuff, adding it to your tool belt. People who choose not to do this are actively choosing not to be leaders – they’re happy being managers.

Read a book. Travel. Meet new people. Build a friendship. Find a mentor. Mess something up. You learn from these things, not from rote memorization in a classroom.

Operating on Instinct
Every decision we make in life is based on incomplete information. At some point, we have to decide that it’s good enough and go ahead with whatever decision we have at hand. Our ability to still make good decisions even with incomplete information relies on instinct – a sense of what the right decision is that comes from inside. Often, that voice inside of us is built out of a lot of learning about the world, a lot of experience of both success and failure. Learning trains our instincts so that we can make better decisions with less information.

A leader, in the end, is a person others rely on to make the difficult decisions and set the direction for everyone. A well-honed instinct is key to being that kind of leader, and a good leader relies on and trusts that voice inside of himself.

Deploying Yourself: Strike Hard, Try Everything
Every single one of us fails in life. The difference between leaders and others is whether or not they pick themselves up and try again. Do you face your fears? Do you again try the things you failed at in the past, or do you avoid them like the plague? If you try something and it goes badly, do you avoid it in the future or do you relish the challenge of improving in that area?

To put it simply, a leader does not back down from a challenge. They don’t allow fear to control what they do. Instead, if something is scary or deeply challenging, it’s something they focus even harder on achieving.

One particular quote at the end of this chapter really struck me.

The means of expression are the steps to leadership:

1. Reflection leading to resolution.
2. Resolution leading to perspective.
3. Perspective leading to point of view.
4. Point of view leading to tests and measures.
5. Tests and measures leading to desire.
6. Desire leading to mastery.
7. Mastery leading to strategic thinking.
8. Strategic thinking leading to full self-expression.
9. The synthesis of full self-expression = leadership.

In other words, it all begins with reflecting on your successes and failures and building from there.

Moving Through Chaos
It’s often thought that leaders don’t have the same crises that we do. We think they don’t have to deal with office politics, layoffs, demotions, fighting for promotions, and so on. We think they view the world as a set of chess pieces to play with as they wish, that “strategic vision” means playing games with people.

In truth, most leaders had to overcome a great deal of career adversity to get where they’re at today. The only difference is that, at every opportunity, they took the opportunity to try to grow as a person and improve their instincts instead of complaining and commiserating about their hard luck. A trial by fire can either burn you or forge you – leaders are forged.

Getting People on Your Side
The key to getting people on your side is to be trustworthy and to constantly show that their trust is well-founded. Bennis identifies four key elements of such trust.

1. Constancy. You stay the course for the people that rely on you. When problems come, you handle them, but through it all, you maintain a steady direction and don’t descend into chaotic behavior.

2. Congruity. If you say something, you mean it, and it shows in your actions. If you expect something of your followers, you expect it of yourself first and you follow through with it.

3. Reliability. When it really counts, you’re there for the people who need you.

4. Integrity. When you make a promise or a commitment to someone else, you follow through with it.

Organization Can Help – or Hinder
There are times in which the group you’re intending to lead simply will not be led. If the people involved don’t care or they have a completely different direction in mind than the one you’re providing or the bureaucracy in the system is so intense that no amount of bushwhacking will clear it, no leadership can help the situation.

Instead, a leader should attempt to learn from this situation. What can be done to end the situation as painlessly as possible? What can be done to avoid such situations in the future? Every failure is a lesson.

Is On Becoming a Leader Worth Reading?
On Becoming a Leader pretty much delivers what the title promises. It’s the best discussion I’ve ever read on things a person can tangibly do to improve their leadership skills. If you’re interested in improving them, this one’s pretty much a must-read.

The question comes down to whether or not you personally find it valuable to work on your leadership skills. My perspective is that most lives have avenues that can be improved through leadership – it helps you build better relationships with others in the workplace, in the community, and in one’s family if they’re able to step up and be a leader when the situation calls for it.

The Simple Dollar has reviewed hundreds of personal finance, personal growth, and career books. Please check out the full list of Simple Dollar book reviews, alphabetized for your convenience.

When I worked at my previous job, I always felt like the things I was doing were vitally important to the success of the project. In one way, this was good – it kept me focused on making sure that things wouldn’t fail. Yet it created several additional problems.

For one, I was often really stressed out. I felt hugely responsible for everything that went on, even for things that I couldn’t actually control. Eventually, I became quite proficient at solving the technical crises that others were responsible for, often because they were completely oblivious to the disasters.

At the same time, I became afraid to push myself to try new things. Since I felt so strongly responsible for everything, I became deeply afraid of change. I already felt the stress of managing all of the things that were already in place – the idea of changing things or adding new things stressed me even more. As a result, I would often subtly resist such changes.

On top of that, the birth of my children caused my priorities to change, adding further stress. A big part of my job involved traveling to meetings and conferences and other such things. After my children were born, the travel responsibilities gradually went from an enjoyable part of the job to a burden. Instead of going out on the town with colleagues, I’d spend the evening calling home to see what my kids were up to and would often feel as though I was missing them grow up.

The real message underlining all of this? I was so caught up in how important my job was that it was stressing me out, affecting my personal life, and keeping me from innovating and taking chances at work. That’s a terrible mix for success.

Looking back, a much more appropriate perspective would have been to realize what my role was – to develop data interfaces – and do that to the best of my ability, ignoring the other things that were going on. If the database went down… well, I shouldn’t have seen it as my responsibility. Instead, my responsibility should have been to simply push the envelope and find new and clever ways to get people the data they needed. It wasn’t “important” work – it was creative work, work that should have been purely fun.

What did I learn from this experience? The moment you begin to think of your job as “important,” you become more stressed and less innovative in your career. Your health and energy fail you due to the stress. Your job becomes less enjoyable because you’re focused on maintaining the status quo instead of doing the best job you can. In the end, you simply become less vital than you were before you began to see your job – and yourself – as “important.”

This is an issue I see popping up even now with my writing career. When I begin to view what I do as “important,” I begin to be less effective. I write less interesting pieces that essentially just reiterate core points. It becomes dull – and I can feel that just as much as you, the reader, can.

Instead, I try to remind myself that what I do really isn’t all that important at all. When I feel that way, I tend to write more from the heart, no matter the consequences. I often get attacked when I do things this way because I’ll express things that are different than what’s “expected” of me, but it’s more enjoyable.

Here’s the truth: your job is likely nowhere near as important as you think it is. Sometimes, employers will try to convince you that you’re more important than you actually are because it’ll scare you into being a good worker – but it will, at the same time, prevent you from being a great one. In the end, most managers – who also think of themselves as more important than they actually are – prefer a workplace full of good workers who are afraid to step outside the box than an office full of a mix of great workers and bad ones who are constantly trying to innovate. After all, that same sense of inflated importance guides them, too.

Here are three things I often do to keep my sense of importance at appropriately low levels.

First, I imagine worst case scenarios in terms of the greater world. For me, that would probably be a lack of ability to continue updating The Simple Dollar. What would happen to the greater world? For the most part, very little. The Simple Dollar often adds a little “positive” to people’s lives on a regular basis, but if it went away, their lives would continue. They might find another web site that provides a similar boost – or they might not. Either way, it’s not a major crisis for the world if the worst case scenario happens.

Most jobs, if you peel them back to their true impact on the world, have very little real impact. Yes, there are a few captains of industry and top political leaders who really can affect a lot of lives. Outside of them, though, the worst case scenario of most jobs has little impact.

Second, I imagine the positive impact of just not worrying about it. That type of scenario frees me to try new things. If I realize that the worst case scenario really isn’t that bad, it becomes a lot easier to imagine best case scenarios for taking pretty significant risks. What if I write articles that are seriously outside the box on The Simple Dollar? I might chase away a reader or two, sure. But I also have the potential to grab the imagination and attention of a lot of people by doing that.

Again, the same holds true for most jobs. When you consider the absolute worst case result of a certain choice, then compare that to the potential positive results of making that same choice, you’ll often find you’re better off just letting go of the status quo and trying new things. Completely re-do your filing system. Do a presentation that completely bucks the rules of what typically goes on in your workplace. Write some interesting utility code that helps everyone by making some common tasks faster.

Finally, I try things that are way outside the norm. Sometimes I’ll end up using these things that I create. Other times I won’t. In either case, I usually find something worthwhile.

What really makes this stand out, though, is that it’s fun. Trying something completely new and different adds an element of fun to my work that simply isn’t there if I’m overly careful and just follow the status quo. That sense of fun keeps my work in the area of things in my life that make me happy instead of things in my life that drain me.

In the end, my advice is simple: let go of the sense of importance you have about your work. It’ll be the best career move you’ll ever make.

One final note: if you have your financial ducks in a row, it’s even easier. Paying off your debts helps your career because it reduces the importance of your job. Your need for a salary is much less if you have your ducks in a row, which in turn opens the door to greater success because you’re no longer tied to such a sense of importance.

Here are seven things we’ve found to be true about our marriage once one of us became self-employed.

“Keeping score” is dangerous. When one person shifts to a completely different lifestyle, the various dynamics of the marriage will shift. This is true of any major change – stay-at-home parenting, a major career shift, even a significant change in the hours worked.

Dynamics change (and I’m going to talk about some specifics below). Don’t “keep score” based on what the previously-established norms were. Instead, focus on figuring out the new norm and forget about the old ones, and talk about it carefully along the way.

The balance of household chores subtly shifts towards more chores for the self-employed spouse. Here’s an example from our own life. I’m about to start my day, so just before I begin, I’ll toss a load of laundry into the washing machine. Then, at lunchtime, I’ll go downstairs and toss the clothes in the dryer. During my afternoon break, I’ll fold those clothes and put them into the kids’ drawers. Still, after work is over, the remaining work is split 50-50.

It’s easy to say that such an arrangement is completely reasonable – after all, the self-employed partner has the time to do this, right? Well, on the other side of the coin, the partner working outside of the home is also taking breaks but not filling them with housework.

It’s unsurprising that, over a long period of time, the self-employed partner may feel some sense of … unbalance, while the partner working outside the home still feels the arrangement is 50-50. This can easily create hard feelings. The best way to handle it is to talk it out.

The social needs of both partners change. When both of us worked outside the home in fairly social environments, we had similar feelings about how much to socialize with others on evenings and weekends.

Then, when I began to work solo, my ideas in that area changed. During my work day, I interacted with others much less than I did before and thus, after work, my desire to socialize went up quite a lot. At the same time, Sarah’s desires remained unchanged.

Our solution has largely been that we invite people over a bit more often than we used to. On top of that, I’ve started to become more involved in community groups and organizations of all kinds, even taking on significant responsibility in one of them. This balance works out well for both of us.

When children are sick, the self-employed parent ends up being the nurturing one most of the time. As I write this, my son is currently watching a program on PBS (Caillou). He’s home sick for the day and I’m busy trying to get some work in.

While this means I’m rushed a little bit, I am the partner with the more flexible schedule, so when the children are sick, I’m almost always the one that steps in to take care of them. This, of course, means that my wife is less interrupted by such things at her work.

Again, this can sometimes feel unbalanced and, if left undiscussed, feel unfair. The instant one partner begins to feel things are out of balance, it should be discussed openly. Such things can easily fester.

The work of the self-employed partner can often bleed into time that used to be shared doing other things. Today, I’m spending much of my time with my son. I’ll make him snacks, make him lunch, put him down for a nap, and if he feels better this afternoon, I’ll play some games with him and work on writing the alphabet with him.

That means that, unexpectedly, I’ve lost most of a day’s worth of work at a time when I can’t really afford such leakage. So, this evening, I’ll need to make up for it. As a result, Sarah will find herself doing solo things. Thankfully, she doesn’t mind this – she’s an avid reader – but it does mean that we won’t be able to do something together, like play a board game.

It can become harder to discuss work. A few times a day, I’ll go do something completely unrelated to my work, simply because I need the mental break. I’ll read the rules for a board game. I’ll wash dishes. I’ll read a book for personal enjoyment. I’ll visit messageboards.

At first, when I told Sarah about this, she was fairly annoyed. “Why are you wasting time?” was her immediate response.

Here’s the thing, though. Most workplaces do offer breaks – and quite often, other break times are squeezed into work times. We gather around the water cooler and chat. We stop in another worker’s office or cubicle and see what’s going on. We go to meetings. In other words, most “real” workplaces have tons of time for mental breaks.

Since I’m self-employed, I don’t have nearly as many opportunities for those kinds of breaks, so I have to make my own. This usually involves things that would be seen as a time-waster in other environments. Again, this is something that’s worth discussing openly.

Here’s the most important thing to remember if you make this change. It offers a lot of benefits, but it changes countless dynamics within your relationship. The best way to deal with this is to talk about it. If one of you is bothered by how a dynamic is changing, say so. Don’t let it fester and grow and become something seriously problematic.

Good luck!

In the end, the decision was made to keep the one with flashes of brilliance. After all, in my mentor’s words, “followers are easily replaceable, leaders are not.”

Ever since that day, I’ve thought a lot about what makes a leader. The person with flashes of brilliance clearly wasn’t a leader in the traditional sense – he was at the bottom of the pecking order. Yet he clearly was a leader in the more important sense. Other people trusted him and often turned to him when they needed help. He also was able to step up his game when it was needed the most.

Thus, he became much more vital to the organization than the steady, quiet employee who kept to himself.

What does it mean to really be a leader? It doesn’t mean having a title – that’s often just the result of already being a leader. It means being the person people rely on in a tough situation. It means being the person that steps up when it’s needed. It means being the person that gets people going on the things they need to do. It means getting the things done that you need to get done as well.

A leader with strong skills to back it up is indispensable to any organization. Here are fifteen ways you can start to become a leader in your own organization and make yourself more valuable there – even if you’re a quiet person who’d prefer to just get his or her work done.

Speak up at meetings.
If you have a genuine concern or a good idea in a meeting, speak up and voice it. Why? Quite often, your very concern or idea is in the mind of a lot of others around the room, only they’re afraid to speak up. By speaking up, you’re essentially giving their thoughts a voice without that risk. You’re being a leader for that group of people with that idea.

I’ve found that time and time again, when I do this, people will come up to me afterwards and say, “Thanks for saying that!” Right there, our relationship is stronger and they now look to me a little more than they did before. In at least one case I can think of, it led to a surprisingly strong working relationship.

Cut out the negative talk.
Talking negatively about others behind their backs does very little to help you. You might get the quick rush of feeling good from the ability to make yourself feel superior to the other person, but over the long run, you’ll have a very negative reputation outside of your tightest associates. If you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say it – it will damage the amount that people trust you. Plus, do you think people are saying similar things about you behind your back? How do you think that affects your reputation? A good tactic is a simple one – don’t run away from negative talk and don’t repeat it at all, but don’t contribute to it. Just ignore it and see it for what it is – usually jealousy on some level.

Offer up some positive talk, instead.
My tactic is to usually be quiet when people are being disparaged, but speak up quite a bit when the conversation is more positive. Making positive statements about others (and doing it consistently) does nothing but improve your reputation. Keep it to the realistic things, though – don’t just blindly compliment people.

Volunteer for the tasks everyone’s afraid to volunteer for.
Whenever a major task comes up that bears some serious responsibility and others are afraid to step up, step up. As with speaking up, by doing so, you effectively become the leader of the people who are interested but are too timid to volunteer themselves. You can take these people and channel them into being a part of the project.

Look for people who are struggling – and ask them what’s wrong.
In a workplace where people meet regularly and collaborate on projects, it’s often quickly clear if certain people are struggling or having problems. Quite often, these people are left to flounder by others who are too “busy” to deal with it, but by spending some time to find out what the real problem is, you’re often throwing this person a life raft which, if they climb aboard, can make them eternally respectful and supportive of you. When people are in trouble, that’s the time to approach them, find out what’s wrong, and find out if you can help without greatly upsetting your own boat.

Directly compliment impressive work.
If someone does good work, tell them right to their face that it’s good work, preferably in front of others. Everyone loves recognition and compliments and usually retain positive feelings towards the people who give recognition and deserved compliments. That positive feeling can often be utilized later on when you’re in charge of a team they’re on.

Tell supervisors when their subordinates are doing well.
This is a more indirect – but often more effective – method of the idea above. If someone does outstanding work, contact their supervisor and tell them. Face to face is often good, but even an email works for this purpose. Tell their supervisor exactly what the person did to go above and beyond the usual standard. This often results in an improvement in the workplace status for that person and, quite often, they end up realizing who offered up such compliments and recommendations.

Be willing and enthusiastic about team-based work.
I used to be a workplace loner and avoid team-based work. Eventually, though, I learned that team-based work is the absolute best opportunity you ever have in the workplace to build strong relationships with the people around you. The more you participate in teams – and come through with your part of the puzzle while helping in little ways with the parts of others – the more others begin to see you as reliable and trustworthy.

When you’re part of a team, take charge of it – but don’t be dictatorial.
My approach is pretty simple. If I’m a part of a newly-formed team, I’ll step up immediately and brainstorm a plan, then send it to the others for consideration. Unless someone rips it to shreds, it usually more or less becomes the plan and I’m the de facto leader of the group. It’s for the same reason as above – you’re usually speaking for people who are too timid to speak up or offer a plan and they’re happy for you doing that if you’re not pushy about it. I would usually do something like send out a rough plan and say, “Here’s my idea for how we should tackle this. What do you all think?”

Make a point to remember – and celebrate – your coworker’s life milestones and accomplishments.
One person I used to work with had a calendar he kept with everyone’s birthday in it along with their favorite two items from the vending machine. On their birthday, he’d go up to the vending machine, pop in $2, get their favorite soda and favorite snack, affix a bow (that he’d brought along with him) to the can, then stop by their desk and put them there, saying “Happy birthday!” with a big grin. It was small, but it came across as incredibly thoughtful – unsurprisingly, he was very well liked within the group and was often listened to and respected whenever he had any ideas or plans to share. Also unsurprisingly, he’s doing very well in life now.

Take two minutes to recognize the milestones and highlights in other’s lives. Keep track of them if you can. Find little ways to make everyone smile. Do these things and you’ll always win.

If there’s a problem you can easily solve, solve it.
Don’t worry about the political connotations or anything like that. If someone comes to you with a problem that you can completely solve or help solve without too much effort, just solve it. The more problems you solve, the more people look to you as a problem solver and the more they listen to your advice and what you have to say.

Ask for help when you need it.
Sometimes, you’ll need help. Some people are afraid to show weakness and avoid asking for help unless it’s absolutely vital. That’s nonsensical and inefficient. If there are particular elements that others can do much easier than you can, ask them for help (unless, of course, it’s a lot of additional work for them). This is the flip side of the coin from helping others whenever you can – if you’ve consistently helped others, they’re likely to help you.

Suggest events that involve your coworkers.
Be the person that rounds up a group to eat lunch together. Be involved in the planning of office parties – and even be the ringleader. Plan parties for people who are leaving. That doesn’t mean you have to do all the footwork, but develop the plan yourself. People will see you as a person who takes charge – and such events are simple to pull together if you just take a few minutes to do it.

Offer useful, detailed feedback.
In a busy world, it’s easy to just go “Looks good!” when someone wants feedback on something. Instead, take ten minutes and try to come up with three things that could be improved with the document. Preface it with a compliment on how good the project already is, put the three suggestions down as clearly and positively as possible, and finish up by saying something along the lines of wanting to turn something very good into something truly great. If the feedback is really worthwhile, they’ll again see you as someone to turn to when the chips are down.

When asked for your opinion, be honest but don’t be cutting.
Your honest feedback is much more valuable than being positive – but even if things are bad, you don’t have to be hurtful. I usually make an effort to compliment where I can, but if there are serious problems with what I’ve seen, I say so. Not saying so hurts them (since they present a poor product) and then, by association, hurts you (since you told them this poor product was good when it wound up dumping egg on their face).

These small things, done every day, make you simultaneously indispensable in your workplace as well as a person people look to as a leader. Who do you think will have their name come up the next time promotions are discussed?

For the first time ever, I’m reviewing a book as a result of an impassioned plea from one specific reader.

Susan, however, is one special reader. She started reading The Simple Dollar in early November 2006, right as the site launched. Since then, I’ve heard from her almost monthly and have used her story for inspiration for several posts over the years. She’s always been encouraging, has offered lots of suggestions, and been incredibly generous a few times (including giving me quite a few credits on PaperBackSwap when I first started).

When she first started writing, Susan was chasing her MBA. When she received her degree, she struggled for quite a while finding a job, then finally found a good place to call home – or at least to start out.

Recently, Susan wrote to me, glowing about how her career was going so far. In that email, she said that reading Basic Black was one of the best things she ever did. An older worker had loaned her the copy and encouraged her to read it and absorb it, so over one long weekend, that’s what Susan did.

She practically begged me to review this book, saying it had a huge impact on her life and her career starting out as a young woman in the business world, and after all the support Susan has given me over the years, I couldn’t help but give Basic Black a read.

Basic BlackCosmopolitan, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, Harper’s Bazaar, and O. She was also involved in the incredibly successful launch of USA Today back in the 1980s. In short, she’s a great example of how a woman can succeed in business – and, at least in the case of Susan, Cathie’s a real role model and someone to look up to.

Does Basic Black offer any strong career advice or does it just faintly mimic other books already on the market? Let’s dig in.

Drive
If you want something, you have to be willing to go after it – or else someone else will pluck that ripe tomato right out of your hand.

Going after something is simple. It means taking care of every significant problem or conflict along the way. It means building lots of relationships with lots of people – get on the phone regularly! It means doing what it takes to come up with a tremendous end result for whatever projects are assigned to you.

It means being tireless and filling every moment you can with achieving your goal (without being unethical, of course). The best way to get ahead is to do the best you and build the most relationships for yourself, not by sabotaging or interfering with others (as that’s detrimental to the whole organization – and thus detrimental to you).

Risk
Many people are very risk-averse with their career. A small group of people are extremely risky with it, often taking enormous chances with themselves, their business, and their industry (hi, Lehman Brothers and Enron!).

The best solution is to be somewhere between the two. Be willing to take risks, but also spend some time carefully considering the downside to these risks. Don’t take risks that would severely damage the company unless you can control that outcome. Be willing to take risks that might set your career back a little, but not ones that can sink everything.

Calculated, moderate risk mixed with drive is a powerful medicine for career success.

People
The advice in this section neatly overlaps with the recent discussions on here about the book Never Eat Alone. To put it simply, you’re far better off giving what you know freely and accumulating connections that find you valuable than you are playing social games.

Instead, your goal should be to build valuable, long-standing relationships with people inside your organization as well as people outside your organization (both in the industry and in the community).

The more people you have a strong relationship with, the more strings you can pull when you actually need them to accomplish a project. You build those relationships by helping those people out when they need it – giving information, offering help, and so on.

Fear
Fear comes from intimidation – a person you don’t think you can handle or a situation you’re uncomfortable with. Quite often, the thing we fear just represents some other fear we have – our own mortality or our own failure.

In other words, most things in the outside world that we fear are instead just issues of self-confidence.

Whenever you’re put into a situation where you feel fear, think about what’s going on for a second. What are you really afraid of here? What’s the worst possible outcome? When you start thinking in those terms, fear begins to melt away. The worst thing that can happen is that the client walks out the door – and that’ll probably happen anyway – so why be afraid?

Power
Everyone has some degree of power just because of their presence. Others have earned more power over time because of their success or relationships.

However, one thing’s for certain: the more you use your power, the less powerful you are.

Power is not an infinite thing. Instead, it shouldn’t be used unless there’s a very good reason for it – and just getting your way is not a good reason. When you reserve your power for key moments, you become substantially more powerful. People pay attention and follow you because they know that you don’t exert your power unless it’s important.

Passion
Some people confuse passion and drive, but they’re different things. Drive makes sure you cover all your bases, while passion ensures that you enjoy the whole process.

Channeling your passions can be a real trick. It requires you to seek those things that you truly enjoy and find ways to channel that enjoyment into your work, creating things that no one else can create.

Drive fills your days. Passion fills your nights.

Attitude
Believing in a positive outcome of any situation is key to creating a positive outcome in any situation. If you go in the door under the belief that you’re going to fail, you probably are going to fail.

Make up your mind what result you want for the upcoming situation, then consider what you need to do to make that happen. Keep it front and center in your mind – the desired outcome of the event – and do everything you can to raise the overall tide of the room so that you can accomplish it.

After all, a rising tide lifts all boats, and if you bring a great positive perspective to a situation, it raises everyone’s boats.

Leadership
Leadership simply means being reliable. Whenever there’s a problem or a big decision, the leader is the person that everyone feels comfortable with making that decision or solving that problem. It’s not a title on a placard or anything else – it’s simply taking care of things.

Don’t worry about big long lists of traits that leaders provide. You make yourself a leader by solving problems and coming up with solutions to the big issues of the day. You are a leader when you help bring someone around and engage them in their work. You’re a leader when you volunteer for the tough tasks – and collect the input of others for that task.

You can be a leader every day, whether you have that title or not. The title will come if you’re a leader for long enough.

Is Basic Black Worth Reading?
For someone who is entering into a business career, particularly a young woman, Basic Black is loaded with strong advice and information, written from the perspective of someone who had to fight her way up to the top. In my writeup, I glossed over the specifics – over and over again throughout this book, Black does a great job of offering up very specific advice in the general areas covered, mixing anecdotes and straightforward suggestions in a very heady mix.

Unfortunately, the target audience for this book is pretty narrow. It really applies mostly to people starting out in the business world. Although many pieces of the advice apply elsewhere, readers outside of this situation are better served reading other books on personal growth and career development.

Unfortunately, as soon as I told anyone about my goals, they’d almost always tell me the same thing. “You’ll never get a good job with an English degree.” “A math degree? The only way you’ll get good work with that is with a Ph. D.”

And I believed them. Instead of paying attention to my natural interests, I started focusing instead on which majors offered high paying jobs and, from there, I picked a major in the hard sciences that seemed to interest me the most. It was a compromise.

Flash forward to thirteen years later and what do you have? I’m not using that degree in the hard sciences. Instead, I took a pay cut to become a writer – the job I wanted to have from the start.

Too many people focus on salary as the sole definition of a good job. I’ll be the last to argue that it’s not good to have a healthy income. A great income opens many doors if used properly – savings for the future, a higher standard of living, and so on.

But what good is that higher standard of living and savings for the future if you’re living a significant chunk of your adult life in a state of unhappiness.

A friend of mine – let’s call him Dale – had a factory job a few years ago. The job didn’t pay particularly well, but it was a solid hourly wage, somewhere in the $13 range. Dale didn’t love the work, but he enjoyed it. He was one of the most competent workers there and enjoyed a lot of cameraderie from the people he worked with and some respect from the foremen because he did his job well. He got his choice of shifts and overtime options because of his status there.

Then, suddenly, an opportunity of sorts opened up for Dale. He could take a $30,000 a year job with solid benefits – but he would be the low man on the totem pole there. Plus, the work was fairly dangerous and psychologically wearing.

Choosing between the two wasn’t an easy decision, but Dale chose the higher-paying but less-enjoyable job.

After about a year of it, it’s pretty obvious that even with the substantial increase in income, Dale is less happy. He now works a shift that keeps him from seeing his kids in the evening. He’s gained a bit of weight and seems to spend most of his spare time involved in escapist activities – for example, he’ll often spend hours upon hours just riding around on his motorcyle or his ATV. He sleeps quite a bit more, too. In conversation, he just simply doesn’t seem nearly as happy as he used to.

Yes, his salary went up substantially, but was it really worth it? I think few people would argue that it was.

Given my own experience – as well as Dale’s, and the many readers who have written to me along similar lines – I’d argue that salary is of only secondary importance when finding a “good” job for you. I’d argue the following factors are at least as important – if not more important.

The work itself If I’m going to spend eight hours (at least) per weekday engaged in an activity, one’s personal happiness is going to hinge significantly on how personally enjoyable the work is. Does the work fulfill you – or does it drain your soul? Do you end your work day (most of the time) happy and alert, or do you go home empty and exhausted? Do you find yourself happily thinking about your work on occasion during your free time – or does thinking about it make your stomach turn? One side of this coin connects to a happy life – the other connects to a much less happy one. How high of a price is stress worth?

Flexibility of time The more flexible the hours, the better. Are you worried about getting fired if you attend your daughter’s dance recital? Are you constantly yanked away from family events by your digital leash… excuse me, cell phone? Are you constantly missing quality time with the people you care about because of your work? That has a very real cost – and it’s a very steep one. Every time you miss something important with your family, it’s an opportunity that never comes back and it’s a trust that can never be recovered.

Peers Are you respected by your coworkers? Do you have a good relationship with them? Or is the workplace filled with constant mistrust, intrigue, and gamesmanship? Again, it’s all about the stress – what kind of price can you put on a stressful environment?

In the end, ask yourself this simple question: how much sustained misery is an extra dollar worth to you? For me, such misery isn’t worth it, particularly when you consider the multitude of methods a person can use to shave their spending without really altering their lifestyle.

I’d rather live frugal without a miserable job than have a few nicer things and spend all of my time loathing my work. Something tells me that when people step back and take a serious look at their lives, many people will feel the same way.

Over the past several months, I’ve reviewed a lot of books about entrepreneurship, building relationships with others, and climbing the career ladder. All of these techniques have one thing in common: they require you to stand up for yourself and be assertive. This is a point that often comes up in the comments for such book reviews and other articles about moving forward in your career or dealing with workplace problems. Either people aren’t assertive enough, they’re ridiculously over-aggressive (which creates conflict), or they switch between the two extremes (passive-aggressiveness).

All three of these elements usually result from a lack of a naturally-developed sense of appropriate assertiveness. Appropriate self-confidence, the ability to express your ideas, the ability to accept criticism without it destroying you personally, the ability to say “no” without guilt, and the ability to stand up for yourself all revolve around being appropriately assertive and, frankly, many people simply don’t have it.

For most of my life, I wasn’t assertive enough at work (I’m usually assertive enough in my personal life, but even there, I’m not always assertive enough). I was scared to death to speak in public. I’d often allow others to walk all over me, often ending in disastrous work situations. I was usually willing to state my ideas, but I would usually fold immediately in the face of criticism of those ideas.

The Assertiveness Workbook by Dr. Randy Paterson takes on the spectrum of assertiveness problems and strives to point people towards an appropriate, mentally healthy level of assertiveness in their lives. Having that appropriate level allows a person to easily stand up for themselves, their ideas, and their goals, enabling them to climb the career ladder and build what they want for themselves. Let’s dig in.

1. What Is Assertiveness?
Assertiveness is largely the realization that you are in control of what you will or will not do, but not in control of what others will or will not do. Passive people tend to not recognize the control of what they themselves do, while aggressive people tend to try to control what everyone does (and passive-aggressive folks alternate between the two in often-confusing ways). Assertiveness simply means sticking up for yourself – your time, your energy, your money, your work, and your ideas. Assertiveness strikes a happy balance between passiveness and aggressiveness, enabling you to control your own destiny without treading on others.

2. Overcoming the Stress Barrier
Stress often pushes us, revealing the nature we fall back on. Do we run away (the passive response)? Do we attack the source of the stress (the aggressive response)? Do we gossip and offer indirect attacks (the passive-aggressive response)? None of these are good solutions to stress. Instead, the best solution is to simply minimize the stress so that we don’t slip into our default biological “flight or fight” response – instead, we deal with it rationally, using a cool head, and often wind up choosing the best solution for the problem (usually, the assertive one). You can minimize your stress by eating well, getting adequate sleep, minimizing your caffeine intake, getting exercise, and trying to live a balanced life that mixes work, personal, and leisure time. You can also utilize quick stress responses that are outside the “fight or flight” dichotomy, like stopping and breathing deeply a few times.

3. Overcoming the Social Barrier
If you attempt to be assertive instead of your normal response to stress (whether it be passive, aggressive, or passive-aggressive), the people around you might not react positively – not because assertiveness is bad, but because they’ve come to expect that you’re passive or aggressive. They might be confused as to how you’re acting and it might make the relationship worse in the short term. In a nutshell, bear with it. Instead of caving and resorting back to your previous behaviors, keep acting assertive. Things may get worse before they get better, but they will get better – for you and for the people around you. Relationship strain is natural and should be expected, but in the end, assertiveness will make you more valuable, not less, and will build stronger relationships. Be patient.

4. Overcoming the Belief Barrier
Many people build up a set of beliefs that reinforce their natural responses. Naturally passive people, for example, believe that assertiveness is selfishness and passivity is the way to be loved and valued – neither of which is actually true. Similarly, naturally aggressive people believe that full honesty is always the best policy and that if they’re not aggressive nothing will happen – neither of which is actually true. Paterson works through a ton of such beliefs in this chapter, evaluating why they’re not generally true and offering techniques for eliminating them from your life.

5. Reality Check
You are in charge of your own behavior, others are in charge of their behavior. That’s really the key point of this entire book. You can’t really control the choices of others, but you can control your own choices. Sure, you can use aggression to strongly influence other’s choices, but there’s a huge cost there – resentment happens whether you see it or not. Similarly, if you’re passive and let others dictate your choices, you become their doormat.

6. On the Launchpad: Preparing for Change
Assertiveness is what you do, not who you are. You may naturally be a passive person, but you can choose to act in ways that are assertive. You may naturally be aggressive, but you can choose to scale back on the aggression towards others. Instead, focus on what you’re doing when you interact with others. Stand up for how you spend your time and energy – and let others make their own choices. You’re going to make some mistakes along the way – that’s fine, just keep trying to find that sweet spot of assertiveness. One great technique is to minimize your communications – focus on making your messages as slim as possible, only communicating the bare assertive essentials.

7. Becoming Visible: Nonverbal Behavior
This chapter comes straight out of How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. It offers a very long checklist of nonverbal behaviors for you to work on to make your presence felt in a room without dominating others aggressively. Integrating these individual behaviors can be difficult, so Paterson encourages people to practice each behavior for a week, focusing intently on that behavior, until it starts to become at least a little natural. I find that, for me, it takes more than a week of such focus for it to become a natural behavior.

8. Being Present: Giving Your Opinion
Passive people tend to not give their opinion at all, while aggressive people tend to state their opinion in such a way to make it clear that other opinions are wrong – neither one is cool. Instead, focus on actively expressing your opinion, but frame it well. State it from your perspective: “My take is…” or “I enjoyed it…” Don’t criticize other’s views – it’s quite likely that other reasonable people will have their own take that differs from yours. This works in almost any conversation and, when prefaced that way, is almost always welcome. If anyone attacks you for stating what you think – if you make it clear that it’s just your take – they are the ones who will come off as aggressive and rude, not you.

9. Taking the Good: Receiving Positive Feedback
Many people find it hard to accept compliments. They view it as unbalancing the situation and either should be ignored, devalued, or met with a reciprocal compliment. If you feel this way, the best thing you can do is let it go. Accept a compliment with a polite “Thank you” and move on with life, accepting the complement as a positive. Of course, sometimes compliments are given with an ulterior motive, but you cannot honestly know what the motives of others are. Instead, respond positively to the comment in the now and allow other actions and statements to reveal the other person’s true character.

10. Giving Helpful Positive Feedback
The best way to give good positive feedback is to avoid all ulterior motives. Never give a false compliment, nor a backhanded one. You should also try to compliment things that have already happened, like complimenting someone on a lovely dinner after the dinner. Avoid compliments where you’re trying to use the compliment to get something, like complimenting someone on their car when you need it for a ride. The best positive feedback is honest positive feedback that only serves to tell someone else what they’re doing well from your perspective. Anything beyond that begins to spoil the soup.

11. Taking the Valuable: Receiving Negative Feedback
What about negative feedback? Again, if someone offers you negative feedback, your best bet is to always hold back. Accept what they’re saying. Your only response should be for clarification or to explain without offering excuses. Don’t try to change their mind or argue with them – it won’t work and creates more of a scene. Later, reflect on what they’ve said and draw your own conclusions. Quite often, particularly from people with aggression issues, the negative feedback has little to do with you but instead has to do with their own hangups. Careful reflection will reveal whether the feedback is something you need to work on or something to ignore.

12. Constructive, Not Critical: Giving Corrective Feedback
How do you give negative feedback? This is very hard for passive people to do, but there are a few principles that can make negative feedback really helpful. First of all, state what you observed so that they understand the specific element you’re coming from. “Joe, you walked in at 9:15 and the store opens at 9.” Then, make it clear what about that action or statement is problematic. “Being late means that there’s no one to man the register, so others have to take up your slack.” Follow that with a suggestion on how to correct it or move towards some sort of solution. “Let’s go have a talk about why you’re regularly late.” That framework will create corrective feedback that works instead of just tossing off negative feelings.

13. The Assertive “No”
If you cannot say no to someone or something, you’re not in charge of your life. Learning how to say no doesn’t mean you’ve decided to ignore the needs and wants everyone around you. Instead, it’s merely a realization that your needs come first in your life. There are several strategies for saying “no” that really work. First, decide what you’re going to say before you even speak – if you don’t know yet, then don’t answer. Second, if you’re going to say no, be strong about it. Don’t try to soften the “no” or else aggressive folks will see it as practically a “yes.” Don’t apologize and don’t make excuses for the “no” unless you’re actually changing your statement from an earlier promise. Also, many aggressive people will continually keep asking if they want something – if you’ve decided to say “no,” keep saying it and don’t reword it (which is a cue that you’re starting to waffle).

14. Making Requests Without Controlling Others
Another part of balancing assertiveness well without falling into passivity or aggressiveness is to make requests that are clear but aren’t controlling. Paterson breaks such requests into four parts: describe, express, specify, and outcome. Describe simply means to describe the situation as you perceive it to be right now. Express means explaining how you feel about this situation – stick with “I” statements. Specify means identifying clearly (but briefly) what you’d like the other person to do to change the situation. Outcome expresses the results you hope to see if they fulfill the request. Surprisingly, it’s quite easy to condense these four pieces down into a total of just a few sentences, but they’re all needed to make a clear and fair request of others.

15. Countdown to Confrontation
Sometimes, confrontations are unavoidable, particularly when someone is demanding more than is realistic or socially unacceptable. Confrontations are occasionally part of appropriate assertiveness, as long as you prepare for that confrontation in a rational fashion. First, state the issue to yourself and make sure you understand why this is an unresolved problem. Next, figure out the symbolic value – at the core, why is this a problem? Is it a realistic conclusion (”he makes sexist comments and demands ridiculous things of me, so the problem is that he’s sexist”) or unrealistic (”he leaves the toilet seat up so he doesn’t love me”)? Next, figure out what you want to come out of the confrontation – do you want a behavioral change or do you want a person to reflect and make a personal change within themselves? Ask yourself if it’s really you that needs to change, and make sure you’re picking a worthwhile battle here. Then, choose an appropriate place and time and make sure you’re safe during this confrontation (as some aggressive people tend to not react well in such situations).

16. Constructive Confrontation
The biggest key is to focus on relaxing during this. If things get intense, emotions tend to take over and no resolution to the problem can happen. Try to keep your voice even and don’t show off obvious signs of agitation – if you feel that way, take a time out. Focus on making it clear how the problem is negatively affecting you. Don’t focus on “winning” but on making your concerns heard. Don’t bring up old history, either – let sleeping dogs lie and focus on the issue at hand. Avoid absolute statements like “You always…” as they’re usually wrong and send the discussion down a bad path; instead, say that something happens “… more often than I’m comfortable with.” Try to find solutions that are based on common ground, recognizing that both sides have needs. Don’t get angry and if there are periods of silence, just wait them out. Doing these things will make confrontations much more palatable and likely to achieve a result you want and less likely to result in ongoing problems.

Is The Assertiveness Workbook Worth Reading?
To put it simply, if everyone in the workplace actually used the ideas in The Assertiveness Workbook, the workplace would be a wonderful place to be. You’d have a good idea where others stand and people wouldn’t commit to unrealistic things. Confrontations would be handled without disaster and people with good ideas would be unafraid to express them but wouldn’t use them as weapons, either.

Naturally, the first step you can always make in creating such a workplace is to do it yourself – be assertive, not aggressive or passive or (worst of all) passive-aggressive. If you find that you fall into one of the other areas, The Assertiveness Workbook can be really useful in helping you assert yourself without trampling all over others.

One final note: this is closer to a “book” than a typical “workbook.” Though there are a few blanks to fill in throughout the book, most of the suggested thought exercises are better done in another notebook, not in this workbook itself.

Every day, we’re faced with lots of choices. Good choices lead us down that path towards financial success, safety, and happiness. On the other hand, poor choices lead us to financial instability, uncertainty, and fear.

Many lists like these show you actions you can take to move down the path to success. However, I’ve learned time and time again that life’s best lessons are taught by the things you do that lead to failure. And I’ve failed with my finances, many times. I’ve nearly gone bankrupt. I’ve switched not only jobs, but whole careers.

And I’ve learned that these eleven things are sure-fire ways to fail.

Mail It In
It’s so easy to simply take it easy. Instead of really pushing ourselves to do something tremendous at work or in life, we have a tendency to kick back, get the minimum done that we need to get done, and move on to the next thing.

Here’s the thing, though. The more often you just do the minimum and mail it in, the more others come to expect this of you. They’ll start choosing others for key tasks. They’ll start spending time with people who want to do a great job.

And soon you’ll find that the people who just do the minimum are the first ones cut loose when times are tough.

Every time you can step up and carry through a task – even a very simple one – to a high level of success, you take a step in the right direction. Do it regularly, and others begin to notice. Do it consistently and others begin to value you.

Avoid Thinking About Tomorrow’s Goals
You go to work. You come home. You take care of the stuff that needs to be done. And then you enjoy your free time.

It’s really easy to get into this routine – it’s convenient, it keeps your head above water, and it’s flexible.

But what it fails to do is help you build towards anything more in your life. Where do you want to be in five years? If you’re not bothering to think about it, you’re going to be in the same place you are right now in five years – or in a worse place.

Why? The people out there who are setting goals are the ones getting ahead of you. They’re planning for the future and taking actions every day to get there. If you’re not even thinking about the future – and what you want from it – those goal-setters are walking right by you.

Complain
Yes, life is hard. Everyone else has all the advantages. People play dirty and they take away the spoils that are rightfully yours.

Yet, every minute you spend complaining about it and stewing about it is another minute lost. Those lost minutes are being used by other people to get ahead.

While you complain, someone else is polishing up a presentation that will make them look great. While you complain, someone else is starting a side business. While you complain, someone else is getting their work done with just a bit more polish.

Yes, there’s a big role in life for constructive critique – it helps everyone. Complaining is not constructive critique. Constructive critique is done directly to someone else with the desired end goal of improving their work or their situation. Complaining has no goal other than allowing you to vent your negativity.

Even worse, the people who listen to your complaints get the impression that you’re a complainer – a person who doesn’t produce solutions, but instead complains about those who do. Over time, they’ll migrate away from you, from the negative to the positive.

Buy Unnecessary Stuff
It’s quite easy to decide that an individual unnecessary purchase is worthwhile – and even required. A $5 cup of coffee isn’t going to break you. A new DVD won’t, either, nor will a new paperback. So why not buy?

Each purchase you make, though, is like a drop in a bucket. One or two won’t make your struggle any more difficult, but over time, those drops start to add up. That bucket gets heavier. Before you know it, that bucket is holding you down – it’s so heavy that it’s no longer possible to make any sort of speedy forward progress.

But that doesn’t change the situation today, does it? By all means, buy something you don’t need. Put another drop in that bucket. You can carry it. For now.

Just remember, each time you make the choice not to add a drop to that bucket, you make your journey just a little bit easier. Make those choices again and again and again and you won’t be weighted down like everyone else. You’ll be free.

Spend Lots of Time Idling
When I’m done with my workday, the last thing I want to do is dig into another major project. I want to kick back and mentally relax. I want to zone out for a while and do something completely trivial. Sometimes, I find that I can burn the whole evening that way.

Every time I do that, though, I end up realizing in the long run that it’s a mistake. I look down at my flabby stomach and ask myself why I didn’t exercise more. Wait, it’s because I was idling. I look at a house-cleaning backlog and berate myself for not keeping up with it.

Every moment you spend idling is a moment where you’re letting some aspect of your life slip away.

That’s not to say idle time isn’t worthwhile – it is. We all need rest sometimes, mental and physical downtime. Where the problem comes in is when you’re resting physically when you have plenty of energy or you’re resting mentally when you’ve got plenty of concentration available to you.

What if you’re worn out mentally but not physically? Do a physical task that doesn’t require much thought, like cleaning or exercising. What if you’re worn out physically but not mentally? Do a sedentary task.

Save your leisure time for things you deeply personally enjoy. And when you’re both mentally and physically tired, take a nap.

Hire Someone Instead of Doing It Yourself
Mowing the yard is hard work – I’ll hire someone to do it. I’ll hire a housekeeper so I have more time. I don’t want to get my yard ready for the spring, so I’ll hire a lawn-care outfit. My toilet doesn’t work, so I’ll just call a plumber.

Such choices are often easily justified in that they save time or that they take care of a task you don’t know how to do. These arguments would be worthwhile if you actually utilized the time for something productive or you were incapable of learning.

First, the time factor. If you’re truly doing something more productive with your time while someone else is mowing the yard, that’s probably a worthwhile expense. But rarely is that the case. Quite often, it’s just a matter of shuffling time around and what you actually gain is more idle time. Why not get out there with a push mower, get some exercise, and get your yard mowed?

What about the knowledge factor? Usually, when you pay someone to do something you don’t know how to do, it’s really expensive and it doesn’t save you much time, either. So why not try to teach yourself how to do it? There are tons of resources online to help you with almost any household activity you might want to try – and most of them are quite a bit easier than you think.

Not only do you save money by doing it yourself, you usually learn something useful in the process. Perhaps later you’ll be able to share that skill with others, becoming a more useful friend.

On the other hand, why not just throw cash at the problem?

Shop Without a List or a Purpose
You’re on your way home from work and you remember you need milk, so you stop at the grocery store to pick it up. While you’re in there, you remember another thing or two you need, and before you know it, you’re wandering out with $50 worth of food.

Your friends want to go do something and you wind up at a store for entertainment’s sake. Before you know it, you’re back home with three or four bags with items in them. What happened?

Every time you enter a store without a list or a very specific purpose, you run the risk of being unduly influenced by marketing and peer pressure. You look around at the items on the shelves, often arranged to put attractive things right at your eye level. You wander without purpose, taking in that information. If you’re with friends, you’re often engaged in discussion about how it would be nice to have these items. Thus, unsurprisingly, you often walk out with stuff you really didn’t need.

A much better plan is to never enter a store without a very specific plan. Know exactly what you’re going to buy before you go in the door. At the grocery store, that probably means preparing a list in advance. In other situations, that means willpower – deciding before you ever go in that you’re not going to buy anything at all, no matter what.

Use the Plastic
Hand in hand with shopping without a purpose is the temptation of using credit or debit cards to aid and abet poorly-considered purchases.

For most people, plastic means you don’t have to have the cash to buy the item. They don’t even have to think about whether they have the cash to buy the item. They can just swipe and walk out with the item.

This is the big reason why it makes sense to go cash-only, at least until you have the willpower to not use the plastic for any unnecessary purchases. Without that strong willpower, it’s so incredibly easy to just swipe the plastic that it’s no wonder people get in deep financial trouble.

As with many other things on this list, it’s a “drop in the bucket” factor. Doing it once isn’t a big deal – nor is doing it twice. But with each little decision, you fill up that bucket more and more, and carrying that bucket becomes harder and harder.

So, each time you make a strong choice here, you keep that bucket lighter. You make it easier to make progress. And you get to your destination quicker.

Put Off Important Tasks
I really need to get signed up for that 401(k) plan. I should get an automatic savings plan in place. You know, I really ought to get an emergency fund set up.

All of these tasks fall into the category of being “important but not urgent.” That means they’re things that should be done, but since they don’t have to be done immediately, they’re easy to put off.

And so many of us do. We put off these important things that need to be done. Often, we replace them with idleness or with tasks that are urgent but not important (like answering telemarketing phone calls).

The only problem is that the more we do this replacement, the further we fall behind. We miss out on building up our emergency fund and our retirement because we kept putting it off. We miss out on some stock market growth. We actually have an emergency, but don’t have enough money to simply take care of it.

Every day we choose to delay those “important but not urgent” tasks – exercise, financial tasks, and so on – the further we slip behind. Every day we choose to take ahold of at least one of these tasks, the further ahead we get. We make that choice every single day.

Give In to Habits and Addictions
Caffeine. Cigarettes. Alcohol. Drugs. Shopping. Television. World of Warcraft. All of these things can easily be addictions in people’s lives. They consume their time. They consume their money. They consume their motivation.

In the end, they become shackles, holding us back from progress.

The more addictions you can break free from, the more time you have and the more money you have. Getting through the transition to an addiction-free life can be really difficult, but as long as you’re held back by an addiction, you have a constant money and time leak in your life. The need to fix coffee every morning. The need to buy cigarettes all the time. The need to re-stock the liquor cabinet. The need to meet up with your guild every night. Time is money, and addiction eats them both.

Every day, you have a choice to make a change and walk away. Do you continue the habit – or do you make a change?

Surround Yourself with Unhelpful People
In the end, we’re often a reflection of the people around us. It’s been shown time and time again that our salary is often equal to the average salary of our five closest friends. Why? If we surround ourselves with people with negative behavior, our own behaviors become negative. If we surround ourselves with people with positive behavior, our own behaviors become positive.

What are the people around you like? Are they striving to get themselves in a good financial state? Are they helpful and supportive to you? Are they positive about the world around them? Do they listen to you? Do they encourage you to think of the world in a different way?

Or perhaps they just always talk about the same old stuff. Do they complain a lot? Do they spend most of their time in escapist behavior? Do you feel like you can’t ask them for real help? Do they just reinforce what you already think?

Take a strong look at the people around you – the ones you spend your time with – and ask yourself if they’re helping you to grow as a person – or if they’re holding you in place.

Several months ago, I wandered upon Pamela Slim’s excellent blog, Escape from Cubicle Nation. In a nutshell, the blog covers the transition from working in a cubicle (i.e., a traditional job) to self-employment – and all of the issues in between.

Slim packaged up many of the best ideas into a guide to this transition, also titled Escape from Cubicle Nation. And, since I enjoyed the blog so much, I picked up the book, looking forward to reading what Slim had to say, especially since this is a journey I’ve gone through over the last couple of years.

Here’s the entire thing in a nutshell: if you’re thinking of quitting your office job and doing something on your own, this is your handbook. It’s thorough, detailed, and heavy on the applicable ideas. Let’s dig in.

I Have a Fancy Title, Steady Paycheck, and Good Benefits. Why Am I So Miserable?
Many jobs involve sacrificing one’s core values – you might not necessarily be doing work that you dislike or object to, but the work isn’t in line with what you want out of life. Many jobs are also filled with trifling details that are simply not fulfilling. Work also often involves jumping through hoops for a boss – a process that isn’t clear on how it helps you (or helps anyone). Adding these factors together, it’s not entirely surprising that people are unhappy with their work, even if it’s a “good” job.

If It Is So Bad, Then Why Am I Afraid to Leave?
Slim points toward status, routine, and recognition as big factors, but I think an even bigger factor is a fear of the financial unknown. Many, many people are out there living paycheck to paycheck, deeply fearing the idea that the job might go away. I know that this was my biggest roadblock against taking the leap into being a self-employed writer – I was afraid that the steady money would go away. Security was my biggest fear and it held me in place for a long time.

Detox from Corporate Life
Slim offers six steps that can help a person “detox” from corporate life – in other words, the steps a person should take to reduce and eliminate some of the mental holds that their job puts on their mind. Clear your plate of as many tasks as you can (leaving you some breathing space in your day). Start writing down and tracking your ideas. Get creative and expose yourself to new ideas.

What’s Really Involved in Moving from Employee to Entrepreneur?
This chapter outlines a step-by-step process for making that leap. It’s not a be-all end-all guide, but instead it just outlines a framework that the rest of the book fills in in detail. I think her framework might be too specific – what I’ve found is that often people try out lots of different things, something takes off, and they hop onto the rocket ship. Thus, it’s often useful to look at some of the prep as generally useful – like getting your finances in order – but some of the others are a bit more specific than might be necessary. Instead, just try to seek out your own rocket ship – and the way to do that is to follow your passions.

What Are All the Ways to Be Self-Employed?
It’s really impossible to make such a list, so what Slim does instead is to break it down into a big handful of different factors worth considering. What will you do? Why will you do it? Who will consume it? How will they pay? Who will you do it with? Those factors are very different in different self-employment and entrepreneurship positions.

How Do I Choose a Good Business Idea?
After that chapter, a person’s mind might be loaded down with ideas. How do you choose the right one? Slim argues that a person benefits from figuring out their sweet spot – the point where your talents (what you’re genetically encoded to do), your passions (what you love to do), and what’s marketable (what people will pay you to do) intersect. You can even do it by making a list for each of these three categories and figure out where they overlap. Once you start getting a vague sense of where you’re going, start doing research. What’s possible in that area?

Recruit Your Tribe
The next step to success is to surround yourself with the right people – peers who are doing similar things and mentors who have already found success. Slim addresses how to do this in detail, encouraging you largely to just go where the conversation is, join in, and listen. People are already out there talking about your area and it’s worth your while to start participating, building relationships, and growing.

Rethink Your Life: Options for Scaling Back, Downsizing, and Relocating
What? Frugality? Minimizing your stuff? That’s for losers, right? Actually, frugality is for winners. It’s much, much easier to take a challenging leap if you’ve got a healthy bank account and don’t have a pile of bills coming in every week. If you want to give self-employment a try, minimize. Save some money. Get rid of as many bills as you can. Learn how to live a little leaner. It’s really a choice: do what makes you happy all the time or have stuff that makes you happy during the hours you’re not working.

Do I Really Have to Do a Business Plan?
Many people look at a business plan as some sort of dry, formal step – a pointless document that doesn’t really help anyone and is best avoided. In truth, a business plan’s purpose is simply to guide you through the thought process of making sure all of your bases are covered. Have you thought about your customers? Have you thought about likely what-ifs? A business plan is just a way to push you to think about these vital questions. So, don’t worry about the formality of your document at the end – but think a lot about the questions involved.

Define the Spirit of Your Brand
What are you going to do to stand out from the pack? What’s different about your business, particularly in a field full of competitors? That’s a difficult question for a lot of people. You cannot find success by just copying something that’s already successful. At most, you’ll be mediocre. What did I do different to build The Simple Dollar? I decided not to be snarky or wholly fact-based, but instead to be earnest, something that wasn’t really done in a blog form too much at that point.

Test Often and Fail Fast: The Art of Prototypes and Samples
Once you have your idea in place, try it. Don’t spend lots of time making it perfect before trying it. Instead, throw it out there, share it, get some feedback, and use it to improve. That’s what I’m doing with my podcast. The first few episodes weren’t all that good, but if I hadn’t shared them anyway, the later episodes wouldn’t have improved at all. I wouldn’t have had a good idea of what was wrong.

Look Your Finances in the Eye
What about the money? It’s all about the money, in the end. You need to get a real grip on your financial state – and that means real numbers. Know what you owe. Know what your bills are. Know what you bring in now. Then plan ahead – get rid of those debts as soon as you can, minimize your bills, improve your credit rating, and build a big fat emergency fund. This is all personal finance 101, but it’s worthwhile stuff.

How to Shop for Benefits
The biggest fear when it comes to self-employment for many folks is health insurance. What will I do without employer health insurance? Slim covers options for people in the United States here, but in the end, this area changes so much that you should do your own research. I think the real solution over the long run will probably be a national health care plan – if this is easily accessible and actually decent, people will sign up in droves and take the leap, I think.

Dealing with Your Friends and Family
Many people find a lot of resistance in their lives if they suggest making a major change in their career. Why? In the end, most people resist change in their lives, and your major career change is often a change in the lives of people around you – a change they’ll resist. I was lucky when I made my change that I had a lot of supportive people around me who knew I’d dreamed of spending more time with my kids and writing for a living for a long time, but this isn’t always true of everyone. What can you do? Listen to their concerns, but realize that many of the doubts expressed are actually their own doubts, not yours. Accompany those doubts with a well-thought-out business plan that analyzes those doubts and ensures that you’ll survive them.

Line Your Ducks in a Row
For Slim, this means getting appropriate support around you. A lawyer you trust. An accountant. Possibly a virtual assistant to help with the flood of emails and contacts you’ll get. You’ll face a lot of problems, and having support around you for the less important things lets you focus on the most important things – like how to overcome the problems that are set out in front of you.

When Is It Time to Leave?
Escape from Cubicle Nation winds down by asking the big question: when is it time to make the leap? Sure, there are logistical issues – do you have the money? Do you have the connections in place? Is the business plan ready to go? Have you already started (and is it successful)? But a big part of it comes from inside as well. It’s a major leap – are you mentally ready for it?

Is Escape from Cubicle Nation Worth Reading?
If you’re working in a typical job (employed by someone else) and have ever thought of going it alone or starting a small business, Escape from Cubicle Nation is an essential read. Slim goes through the factors worth considering in great detail, outlining the things that need to be considered and the things that need to be put in place.

My only complaint – and this is a minor one – is that the topics felt a little bit out of order. This is something I’ve been struggling with while writing my own book lately – are the topics really in the best order? I even sat down and tried to figure out how I would change it, but without blowing most of the chapters to bits and reconstructing them out of pieces, I don’t know what I would change. I think the problem is that Slim tackles so many ideas in the book – but is that really a problem?

Look at your own life. If this book matches the journey you’re on, it’s a must read.

You write all the time about just helping people and that it will somehow help you. I don’t see it. I understand how it’s beneficial to help someone who can obviously help you, but what benefit is there for helping others beyond the idea that it’s the right thing to do?

Before I get started, I will say that I believe the biggest reason to help out others when you can is because it’s, in essence, the right thing to do. I’m a huge believer in the “golden rule” – do unto others as you would have them do unto you. If I have the ability to easily help someone, I pretty much always will.

Recently, I’ve been rereading pieces of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, and a particular quote stood out to me: “[B]y directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain; and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it.”

In other words, if you can do something that produces a great deal for the time invested, you should do it, even if it’s not directly beneficial to you.

Here’s an example of what I mean. I live next door to a single mother who has two young daughters living at home. Quite often in the evenings – as you can imagine – she’s got a lot on her plate. She needs to get a good meal on the table for her daughters, clean the house, get bills paid, and so on.

A lot of evenings, that means that her daughters are out in the backyard playing while she’s in the house finishing things up.

Since my wife and I are often out there, it takes little to no effort on our part to keep an eye on what those girls are doing and offer a helping hand if they need it. My wife helped one of them remove a splinter. We’ve invited them into our yard countless times to play in the sprinkler.

Now, if I’m looking strictly at my own self-interest, I wouldn’t do this. It’s an insurance risk to deal with that splinter or to have those kids in our yard. I could just not acknowledge them at all and there’d likely be no problem whatsoever.

However, by paying attention – when it really doesn’t take a whole lot of effort on our part – we’ve built a very good relationship with our neighbors. I’ve borrowed items from her regularly and we’ve helped each other with all sorts of other little tasks, no questions asked. This has saved me from buying tools and other items many times.

I invest very little time in an evening keeping an eye out for those two girls – I’m out in the yard anyway with my own kids. But by doing so – taking that little sliver of time here and there – I’ve built a very nice neighborly relationship, one that’s produced measurable financial value.

Here’s another example, perhaps one that’s more tangible. About three years ago, I did some free web consultation for a small nonprofit organization I believe in. I set them up with a custom installation of Wordpress and several other tools so they could add and manage content really easily. In all, it took me about twenty hours of work, spread out over about a month.

What did I get directly out of it? Not much. I did learn a lot about designing a blog, which I later applied to The Simple Dollar, but that was about all.

So why bother? Well, that nonprofit survived – and thrived. A few members of the original team left to form a small startup company. After a while, they decided that they wanted to create a site that was well-designed and easy to update, but this time they could pay nicely for it.

Want to guess who they contacted?

I didn’t take the arrangement. However, they agreed to hire a person that I recommended. I was able to pass on several thousand dollars’ worth of work to another person, who now, in his words, “owes me more than [he] can ever say.”

So, for that web design I did three years ago, I now have a web designer friend who owes me a huge favor someday, a nonprofit with which I have a great relationship, a small army of individuals that I have a good relationship with, and a web startup that is still interested in hiring me as a consultant.

All of that came from just wanting to help out and offering the skills I had to something I believed in that needed those skills – in my spare time, of course.

In both of these cases, I could have focused my energy on something relatively trivial that was purely in my own interest. I could just play with my own kids in the backyard and ignore the neighbors. I could have decided not to help that nonprofit group and instead spent that time doing … something else (who actually knows what).

In each case, though, I just gave a bit of time and energy and talent without thinking at all about returns. Over the long run, though, that time and energy and talent has been paid back to me many times over.

Sure, you’ll always find yourself in situations where you’re never “paid back” for what you give. But even in those cases, I find a surprising result – there’s usually a positive payback, but it’s really indirect.

An example: several years ago, I found myself helping a number of researchers with what amounted to technical support. We were starting to roll out a new interface for a large data set and many researchers had a lot of questions about the interface. I devoted a lot of time to helping out many of these researchers – and many of them didn’t even give me a thank you.

What happened next was surprising. I attended a conference with some of those people where I figured I would more or less be hiding in the woodwork, but many, many people didn’t let that happen. I had interacted positively with enough people that my name had spread to many of the attendees as someone worth interacting with. For the entire three day conference, I was constantly talking to someone, meeting with someone, dining with someone, or sharing a drink with someone. By the end of it, I had more connections and job offers than I could possibly deal with (and even a surprising committee assignment or two).

All I had done was spend a little bit of time helping these people without anything in return. It was a gesture that I didn’t have to do – I could have just sent out some stock answers and called it good enough. But little five minute bursts of effort – spread out across a long period – paid enormous dividends.

Here’s the simple rule: if you can help someone out without disadvantaging yourself, do it. That means sharing ideas, making connections, and doing little tasks that don’t eat up tons of your time and energy. Don’t worry about the return – if you do it often enough and with enough quality and value, the return will take care of itself.

In fact, successful is an understatement in describing Netflix. Netflix was born in late 1997. Today, it has over ten million customers, brings in $2 billion in revenue a year, and has had their stock value go up 550% since the IPO. Not only that, they have one of the best customer service ratings of any retail corporation in America. They have a lot of happy customers, turn a healthy profit, and do it in some unorthodox ways.

After reading the presentation (and thoroughly enjoying it), what I found is that the presentation was actually loaded with ideas that people can port to their own life to fuel them to great personal, professional, and financial success.

I pulled out the basic framework of the show – the seven aspects of Netflix’s culture – and I’ve highlighted a few principles from each aspect that you can apply in your own life with great success.

Values Are What We Value
Your real values are represented by what you do, not what you say. You can talk big all you want about saving money or making changes in your life, but it’s just talk unless you do something. A resolution or a goal is worthless unless you’re willing to work for it.

Valuable traits include judgment, communication, impact, curiosity, innovation, courage, passion, honesty, and selflessness. What do these things all have in common? Many lead to trusting relationships with other people. And when you have those trusting relationships, they support you over and over again, in direct and indirect ways. Others lead you to discovering new things. New discoveries are where the value comes from in the modern economy. Coming up with useful ideas, implementing them to the extent that you can, and sharing those ideas with others will always increase your personal value.

Actions inconsistent with those values should always be questioned. Always question your own effort in those areas. Can you do better? Similarly, ask yourself if the people around you are also reflecting those values. If they’re not, they’re probably dragging you down and holding you back.

High Performance
Surround yourself with good people. Good people are those that exude good qualities (like the nine traits listed above) and push you to exude those same qualities. Hanging out with selfish people who aren’t curious will encourage you to be selfish and incurious, but hanging out with people who are unselfish and curious will inspire those traits in you.

Merely adequate isn’t good enough. Surrounding yourself with associates and friends who are “kinda okay” isn’t good enough, because they’ll make you “kinda okay.” Strive to surround yourself with people who show off many more good qualities than bad ones. Think about it this way: if a friend or business associate of yours said they were leaving town for good in two months, would you be greatly upset and want them to stay? If the answer is no, they’re holding you back, so why not just move on now?

Hard work is much less important than results. Trying and failing over and over might mean that you should try something else instead. Similarly, acting in ways that drive away and insult other people doesn’t help anyone at all.

Freedom and Responsibility
Be responsible for your own actions and your own mistakes. Being responsible for things means that you’re more valuable to others because that means you take pressure off of them. If you just take care of things, that means others can rely on you – and you’re more valuable to them. This is true in every aspect of life, personal and professional.

Making mistakes is part of getting better. Many people, when they start to see success, start getting more careful. They’re much more afraid to make mistakes. But without mistakes, you can’t get better. You pretty much slot yourself in at the level of success you’re at – you can never be anything more if you spend all your time just avoiding mistakes. This has been a hard one for me to learn and I’m finally really putting it to work by writing about new things and new angles on The Simple Dollar (and it seems that people are really responding to it).

Don’t marry yourself to routines. Routines are very helpful, but they can also be very damaging. A good routine can help you get lots of things done, but bad routines can cost you a lot of money and time. Even more dangerous are routines that start off good but become bad when you and your situation changes, like my coffee shop routine. Always question what you’re doing. Is this worthwhile?

Rapid recovery is always a great model. That means have a big, healthy cash emergency fund as well as a lot of transferable skills, such as communication skills and the values described above. If you have those things in place, it becomes much easier to recover rapidly from whatever happens to you.

Context, Not Control
Think about big, long term goals. Where do you want to be in five years? What would you like to be different in your life? Imagine what you’d like things to be like at that future point. Sketch out the details. Make it as real as possible – and think about it often.

Take those big long-term goals and make smaller goals out of them. Break down those big points into smaller bites. What can you do this week to take yourself closer to that goal? What kind of exercise and diet can you enjoy today to start building better health? Can I cut back on my spending this month to reach my financial goals? What do I need to do this week to get me into that MBA program?

Don’t let the little things get in the way. We all have tons of little things that need to get done in our lives and it’s easy to lose sight of the big goals and the steps you need to take to get there. Those things often don’t return immediate results. What’s important is to ask yourself whether the things you’re doing today will actually matter in five years. Will it build the kind of future you want?

Highly Aligned, Loosely Coupled
Choose activities that are helpful in multiple ways. Making better dietary choices is often both a money-saver and helps in the long term with your health. Getting more exercise makes you more productive and energetic in the short term and also helps with your health. Turning off the television exposes you to less advertising (direct and indirect) and frees up time for other activities. Working on transferable skills helps you professionally and personally, now and later. Doing things that are really synergistic in your life are always helpful.

Find friends that also engage in these activities. Find someone to walk with in the evenings. Find someone who’s interested in the same hobby you’re interested in. You can have very different lives, but you’re aligned in one aspect of your life. You can use that to push each other in unexpected ways towards greater success.

Associate with people slightly better than you. If you decide to find a workout buddy, find someone who is in a bit better shape than you (not Michael Phelps, but someone just a bit better). This pushes you to succeed but doesn’t overwhelm you by being completely outclassed.

Pay Top of Market
If a service is truly vital to you, don’t be afraid to support it. If a service is really invaluable to you – you use it every day and you want to keep using it every day – support that service. Sign up for their premium options. Tell your friends about the service. Fill out surveys if they send them your way (and be dead honest with any criticisms you have). Without support, valuable services go away, and if you rely on those services, you’re stuck out in the rain.

If you rely on equipment, make sure that equipment is reliable and efficient. Again, if you find yourself doing certain tasks every day, make sure that equipment is as reliable and efficient as you can make it. If you cook every day using the same pans, make sure those pans are the best you can get. If you work on a computer every day, make sure you’ve got a stable computer with plenty of memory and a big monitor and other peripherals and software that maximize your use. Don’t worry about the equipment in your home that you rarely use – you can go bargain-basement there, since you don’t rely on it. The things that should be quality are the things you really use, because you rely on them.

If someone is valuable to you, let them know. If you have a friend or family member that’s really important to you, don’t hesitate to let them know. Whenever those important people need help, stand up and help as much as you possibly can, without hesitation. Again, if those people are key in your life, you need to show them how valuable they are to you. It’ll do nothing but cement your relationship and make it much more sustainable.

Promotions and Development
Don’t be afraid to move on when you change. Over time, you grow and change as a person. Your passions change. Your interests change. Your skills and abilities change. Your personality changes. If your job doesn’t change, it won’t always be a great match for you. Don’t be afraid of that – be willing to look around for other options when you find yourself changing.

Don’t be afraid to move on when the situation changes. Obviously, many jobs do change. Sometimes, they change with you in a positive direction. At other times, they change away from you. The work you do changes, moving from tasks you enjoy to tasks you loathe. The culture changes, with the people you valued moving on. Again, don’t be afraid of this – it’s a sign that you need to make a change, too.

Never shy back from taking on big challenges. We are often thrown big challenges, things that will push us far outside of our comfort zone into areas that we might not be comfortable at all with. They push our skills and abilities beyond the limit. Those aren’t things to be avoided – those are things to dive into, throwing everything you’ve got at them.

To put it simply, Netflix’s corporate model is a great model for success in life. It’s well worth trying them out, don’t you think?

Perhaps it’s just my perspective, but there seem to be a lot of books out there right now that seem to encourage people to make a radical change in their careers. I think these books all come from a general sense of dissatisfaction with the old style of career path, where you give your loyalty to an organization in exchange for some degree of safety. Today, obviously, the “safety” part of the bargain is gone, so where does the loyalty go? I think people begin to feel loyalty to themselves – a healthy response – but it can also easily foster a general unhappiness with the sacrifices expected of them by the old career model. You’re expected to be loyal to the organization, but you’re given nothing in return but a paycheck and a lot of stress about what tomorrow brings.

The solutions seem to go in a bunch of different directions. Perhaps adopting different attitudes and mores in the workplace is a way to go. Maybe hands-off entrepreneurship is the right thing to do. Maybe it’s hands-on entrepreneurship… or perhaps self-employment/microentrepreneurship.

It’s impossible to say what direction is right or wrong for a given person. Different paths suit different people well.

One avenue that I think is quite strong, though, is the path espoused in Jonathan Fields’ Career Renegade: make yourself into a personal brand that has a lot of inherent value. His argument is that by putting a lot of effort into making your name well-known to people in your field and associating it with a lot of usefulness and positive value, you’ll get your foot in the door in countless places and your career choices, whatever they might be, can be much easier.

Obviously, this takes a lot of work. Career Renegade focuses on how to make this possible. Let’s dig in.

What Makes You Come Alive?
Every career has people that somehow rise above the fray, creating some sort of niche for themselves where they can earn a healthy income no matter what their field is. This is fueled by passion, but it’s fueled by something else, too: they simply stand out from the crowd. How? Fields points out three key factors: experience, flow, and people.

Experience simply means that you’ve put in the hours to learn your craft. Diligent and deliberate practice have made you good at what you do, and a wide variety of situations have shown you countless ways to apply that practice.

Flow means that you can get yourself into a mindset where your full concentration is devoted to that work. You’re able to shut out external inputs in your life and can simply bury yourself deep in the area of your expertise. The maximum amount of your mind and your soul are engaged in it, opening the door to creating great things.

People means that others are aware of the work that you do. You’re not hidden from the world – in fact, you’re open to it. You make an effort to make it as easy as possible for them to discover the good things you do. You surround yourself by people that bring out the best in you, and you allow that “best in you” to shine as brightly as possible so that many can see it.

What Kind of Renegade Will You Be?
All of us have a pool of passions and skills and knowledge to draw upon in our lives. We’re passionate about some things and have well-practiced skills in other areas, as well as information worth sharing to others. The way to stand out is to find a unique or rarely-used combination of these skills, knowledge, and passions that others might find value in.

Fields shares examples of a passionate artist who was raised in a family of bakers. She took a skill she thought she’d never use again (baking), combined it with her passion for art, and began selling artistically-designed cupcakes. Another story involves a woman who was passionate about wines and had a natural skill for painting landscapes, so she combined the two, painting vineyards for display in wineries.

I combined passions for personal finance and writing, a skill for turning out decent writing at a high volume, and tossed in some experience with designing websites. The end result? The Simple Dollar.

There is no pre-set formula for this. You just need to start throwing things together.

How to Master Your Passion and Build a Worldwide Following
You’ve found this perfect unexplored niche and you’re seeing a bit of small success. Now what? Now’s the time to get the world’s attention.

The best way to do this is to go online and start talking up what you do. Make videos of your work, take pictures of your work, and share them. Make useful instructional videos. Start a blog. Join Twitter and talk about your passion. Share all of this material with your already-existing customers/fanbase and encourage them to talk, too.

If you’re actually putting some value out there, people will start to look. They’ll join in the conversation. They’ll see what you have to offer and they’ll become customers/clients/fans/job offers.

This takes a lot of work and a lot of dedicated patience, but it works.

Let the Revolution Begin
It’s a long, hard road to get to the point that Fields describes. How do you get from where you’re at now to that point?

Fields offers a ton of tactics to help with the transition. Three I liked:

Imagine the consequences of not trying. You stay where you are, stuck in place, in a job you hate, for the rest of your years. Your ship is not coming in. Why not seek something better?

Visualize your dream outcome very day. Keep the big dream in mind at all times. It’ll make all the little steps, stumbles, and challenges quite a bit easier.

Don’t do it alone. Find others that are attempting to transform their lives, too, and share experiences and ideas and leads. Doing it alone makes it very difficult in every dimension.

Is Career Renegade Worth Reading?
Career Renegade is a solid read if you’re willing to spend your spare hours building upon what you already have. To follow what Jonathan suggests, you’ll have to go through some painful years of a lot of work without much reward, but when you come out the other side, you’ll have built so much intrinsic value in yourself that doors will open for you.

In some ways, this is what I did, just without a guidebook. For years, I burnt every minute of my spare time writing and communicating with readers and communicating with other writers. Over time, I got my name out there and people kept coming to me. Eventually, I was able to make a shift and live life on my own terms – but the path to get there was hard.

If you want a new path but are afraid to just walk away from your career as it is now, give the ideas in Career Renegade a try. You might find the path you’re looking for.

In the process of researching these topics, I dug into a famous sociology paper, “The Strength of Weak Ties” by Mark Granovetter. In it, Granovetter argues that the stronger a relationship is, the more likely you are to have an overlapping set of relationships with that person.

Take your mother, for example: if you’re close to her, you likely have relationships with a huge number of people in common – relatives, hometown friends, and so on. Compare that to a guy you met at a conference a while back who works in a related field to yours – you might know two or three people in common, but your weak connection isn’t supported by much of an overlapping social network.

Granovetter’s argument seems obvious when you stop and think about it, but what’s even more interesting is that you can use your knowledge of it to build better relationships with people that you want to know better.

Why would you want to do this? Let’s say, for example, that you’re new in a particular field and you’re seeking a mentor to help guide you to success. Or, let’s say you’re tired of your current career and you’re thinking about switching to a new one, but you don’t know for sure what you might do next. Alternately, you might be thinking of moving and you’d like to find a community where you’ll already know some people when you arrive. Or it could be as simple as wanting to find new and interesting people to invite to your weekly backyard barbecue.

In each case, the more relationships you have in place, the more likely you are to be able to get your foot in the door where you want. You’re more likely to get value from those relationships, and you’re more likely to make their lives more valuable as well.

So what can you do about it? In a nutshell, build lots of weak connections and then strengthen the ones that are valuable to you. Let’s break it down.

Build Lots of Weak Connections
Many people immediately assume that to do this you must be the person at the meeting who shakes everyone’s hand and says nothing. I think that’s the worst way to do this.

Instead, the best way to build weak connections with lots of people is to go where there are a lot of interesting people and provide as much value as you can. Conventions and meetings related to your field of interest are great ways to start, as are community events and festivals.

Here’s what you do. Go to such meetings and get involved. Get over your stage fright and offer to present. Attend talks and presentations that are in your wheelhouse, pay attention, and ask questions that are interesting and potentially useful to others in the room.

During the downtimes, follow up on this by entering into conversations with the presenters and with others who are expressing interest in your particular areas. Swap ideas with them – then swap contact information with them. Schedule dinners with several people at once – group meals are always a great way to improve relationships.

What you’ll find when you’ve left is that you’ve swapped a lot of valuable information and ideas with a lot of people – and you have contact information for these people.

Now, follow up. Don’t let those weak connections die. Research these people online. Follow them on Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook. Drop them a line regularly just to see what they’re up to.

Even more important, whenever you hear of a need that you can easily fill, fill it. If someone’s looking for a job, send them any job leads you have. If someone needs some information, give it if you have it (and can do so without getting yourself into trouble).

Strengthen Valuable Connections
Eventually, you’ll begin to find that some of these relationships have more value than others – they’re closer to your own interests, provide lots of good ideas, and so forth. Focus on strengthening these relationships.

Invite such people to a barbecue at your own house – and invite several such people from different areas that you’ve built connections with over time. Doing this enables you to introduce lots of people to each other, helping them out, and further cementing your own relationships, while also learning a lot of new things due to the fresh mix of people.

What you’ll eventually find is that if you need help, having lots of “weak” connections that are fairly strong will come in handy. Remember above, where Granovetter argues that “weak” connections are simply ones where you don’t have many people in common? If you have a lot of those, you’re suddenly indirectly connected to a ton of people – and if you have a strong relationship with the person in common, you’re more likely to get the help you need, when you need it.

The more I investigate the power of social networks and how the internet makes it easier to maintain them, the more I’m beginning to believe that the relationship is the key source of value in the modern world.

I recently read a fantastic article by Paul Graham entitled Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule, in which Graham outlines that people who “make” things run by a much different work schedule than those who “manage” things. A key excerpt:

There are two types of schedule, which I’ll call the manager’s schedule and the maker’s schedule. The manager’s schedule is for bosses. It’s embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you’re doing every hour.

When you use time that way, it’s merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you’re done.

Most powerful people are on the manager’s schedule. It’s the schedule of command. But there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.

When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That’s no problem for someone on the manager’s schedule. There’s always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker’s schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.

After reading this and reflecting at length on many of the twists and turns my professional life has seen, I came to realize that the schedule is just one of many professional differences between managers and makers – and the most successful places where I’ve worked have found ways to make these differences work.

First, an aside: the terms “manager” and “maker” themselves deserve some reflection. I think the best way to look at it is this: does the person in question create something wholly new during their time or are they moving resources around? For example, a system administrator fits better in the “manager” category most of the time, while a programmer fits better in the “maker” category. A janitor would actually be a “manager,” while a brochure designer would be a “maker.” Got it?

Let’s walk through some of these, starting with Graham’s point.

Schedules and Multitasking
As Graham observed, makers often must focus on a single task. The challenge of creating something new requires full attention, often for extended periods, and without that full attention, it is incredibly difficult for a maker to do their job.

Managers, on the other hand, are inherent multitaskers, suited to deal with things as they come along. They solve problems as they come and simply focus on the next task that has to get done.

Unsurprisingly, these two butt heads, as Graham notes.

What’s the solution? I like the solution that worked well at one of my previous workplaces. All meetings were to be scheduled on Wednesdays, preferably first thing in the morning. We might have three or four meetings in there, but they were all lined up together so that there would be as little interference as possible with uninterrupted blocks.

Wednesday mornings usually involved one central “all hands” meeting, then several smaller meetings, often pretty informal, with specific groups. We all knew that this is what Wednesday mornings meant, so we planned around it – no seven hour tasks for Wednesdays.

Beyond that, there was a second simple rule: don’t interrupt someone if their door is closed. An open door meant that the person wasn’t bearing down on a problem and you could chat with them freely. A closed door meant “send me an email and don’t expect an immediate response.” This was a useful cue for the manager types and the maker types.

Problems to Be Solved
Managers often focused on problems of people and resources. How do we keep this system running? How do we resolve this personal conflict? Who do we hire for this position?

Makers often focused on creative problems. How do we write this piece of code? How do we make this experiment work? How do we model this phenomenon?

What’s the solution? In effect, it became clear that in the optimal workplace, the managers served the makers. If the managers were doing their jobs well, the makers would be focused on their problems without hindrances.

Another important step in this area is that when great products came from the makers, everyone got credit for it. The system administrator might not have any idea what the solution – or even the problem – was about, but by bringing his skills to bear in solving computer resource issues, he made it possible for that solution to occur and thus deserved some of the credit.

There was a strong culture enforced that you were looked down upon if you didn’t give plenty of credit where it was due.

Communication
Managers were often focused on tangibles: people, equipment, and products. Their communication often demonstrated that, as they would describe things entirely in the real world.

Makers were often focused on intangibles: ideas, theories, and potential solutions. Their communication often revolved around these areas, things that might mean very little to the managers.

What’s the solution? Everyone – managers and makers – had very clear and specific concrete goals in mind – the end products. Then, everything was discussed in terms of those products. The managers would think about what resources needed to be applied to get that product. The makers would focus on solving the creative problems that would need to be solved in order to produce the product.

Who would represent the work when talking to others? It depended heavily on the audience. At conferences of peers, it was often the makers who took the stage, as they could talk about the concepts quite well. When pitching the results for more funding, the managers would take the stage, as they were focused on the concrete elements of the results.

Networking
Obviously, makers tended to build good connections with other makers and managers tended to build good connections with other managers. That’s not to say that relationships didn’t bridge that gap, but the strongest connections were between makers and between managers, not crossing that gap.

Obviously, both styles of connections are really useful. Makers and managers can bounce ideas off their peers, but crossing that gap can provide really useful insights as well.

What’s the solution? In terms of conferences, makers went to meetings where makers congregated and managers went to meetings where managers congregated. Connecting with peers was the key here.

However, inside the office, there was often a point of having that manager/maker gap crossed. Managers and makers would often have lunch together. The head of the office might be seen having a dinner with a newly hired programmer, and a researcher grinding through an intense project might be eating with a system administrator. Many special projects would involve a maker and a manager working together, too.

What Can You Do?
So, how can you put these ideas to work where you are? I suggest five tactics for making your workplace more useful for everyone (which will not only improve your own standing, but help everyone get more done).

First, make an effort to schedule some big blocks of undisturbed time and make the schedule clear to everyone, even outsiders. Suggest this to everyone in your office. In effect, create some periods where, no matter what, people won’t be disturbed from their work (without an utter emergency). This gives makers time to settle in and managers time to focus on more introverted tasks (and meetings with other managers).

Second, try to bundle meeting times. See if you can find a certain day of the week that’s mostly devoted to meetings and other such interactions. This makes the uninterrupted blocks much easier for everyone to implement.

Third, offer comments that focus primarily on the end product. Don’t worry about what printer goes where (unless you’re the system administrator, in which case you should deal with it on your own) or what algorithm to use (unless you’re a programmer, in which case you should talk about it directly, programmer to programmer). Instead, when you’re meeting together with both managers and makers present, focus on just the product. It’s what you all have in common and it’s what you’re all focused on in the big scheme of things, so focus on that. Take the implementation details elsewhere.

Fourth, keep the product in mind when you’re working, no matter what you’re doing. Almost everything you do has some connection to the end product. Keep that connection in mind – and make that connection clear to everyone. Even things like expense reports have a connection – they help compensation for trips or other activities go to the right place, and those trips and other activities helped the product. If there truly is no connection between your task and the end product, you should be asking why this is happening.

Finally, give lots of credit, always. The artist doesn’t accomplish much if the janitor doesn’t empty the trash. The janitor doesn’t have a job if the artist doesn’t produce. You need each other and you both deserve recognition for making the end product a reality. This doesn’t mean you thank every single person for every single thing, but you never lose by thanking contributors of all kinds whenever you’re talking about your work. The managers make life manageable for the makers and the makers make life for the managers.

Time and time again, I’ve seen that modern workplaces thrive when they do more of these things and waffle when they do less of these things, from my years working for a huge employer to my days working for myself at home. You win – and everyone wins – when everyone realizes they’re really working for the same things – a great product, recognition, and a fat paycheck.

Again, I was flooded with responses.

After spending some time digging through the pile of good suggestions, I picked out fifty of the best ones to share with you. To pick them out, I actually loaded them all into a spreadsheet, tried to filter out some obvious duplicates, and chose the ones that I thought were either really useful, worthwhile, or entertaining. A few of them break the ten word limit a bit, but all are very short, snappy, and valuable.

Enjoy!

moneyhighway: Attending extra training opportunities and taking part in pilot projects.
editorialiste: Work to live, don’t live to work
moneyreign: Work for yourself.
awesome_john: Make eye contact with everyone, and smile.
PracticalNerd: No matter what you do, be prepared to work. Hard.
ObliviousInvest: Whether you realize it or not, you’re self-employed.
phdbre: I only need 2. Work hard.
FiscalFizzle: Jobs are targeted expressions of our current passion or responsibility.
CColeman802: Pursue only what you really love — you’ll be more fulfilled.
acousticdryad: Diversifty income, never rely on one source that could disappear.
randifity: Show enthusiasm for learning because no career is stagnant.
mmcgreger: Don’t just chase the money. Find something you love.
notquitebetty: Trust your gut, and find a mentor.
robbfulks: Stay out of collections, and your boss’ wife.
vasthatlunch: Never be afraid to take a risk occasionally!
tonyblacknyc: Reputation is everything.
princewally: Stop whining and do your freaking job.
MattJabs: Take time to live life before deciding upon a career.
esehe5: Pick your battles carefully.
sugarbandit: Get to know people in your desired industry.
John_Parris: find another concept to be the recipient of your allegiance.
pksmith: let love lead you and never fear the unknown or perceived threat(s)
centsiblelife: Your work is not just about what you know, it’s about who you know.
pksmith: Stick with your own experience.
Matt_SF: Find your niche, become an expert, then diversify your strengths.
MichaelBRubin: You may be underpaid now, but someday you’ll be overpaid.
jillianlou: If it feels wrong it probably is – move on.
lisefrac: Develop yourself as your own best career asset.
MoneyMateKate: Take an acting class, HUGE for public speaking/presentation skills.
stevesuhr: Get to know everyone and tell them what you want.
msimonkey: Don’t do anything you’d be ashamed to tell mom about.
stephonee: Keep a work diary: what you did/what you liked
thisisbeth: Don’t be afraid of change.
soundzdj: Dress to impress or for success.
roryboy: Follow your heart. work hard. success will come.
fcn: Presence does not equal productivity. Stay on task, work efficiently.
ryrobes: Don’t follow the common script, define ‘career’ and ’success’ yourself.
ColletteCowan: Treat every day like it’s your first day at work.
YourWorkDone: Say what you will do, do what you said, then prove it.
RBotti: What would you do for free? Find a career there.
BudgetsAreSexy: Be nice to everyone, even if you have to fake it.
MaddenBible: Not Tomorrow or the next day, BUT Right NOW!
jane_meyer: If you work in an office: DO NOT wear t-shirts, faded, ripped jeans or flipflops.
lahondaknitter: Do what you love and you’ll never hate your job.
Coathalia: Watch what you say, compose yourself and be overwhelming honest.
myazngreenworld: Career and spending habits should be in sync.
The_Weakonomist: It’s not how many resumes you send out, it’s how many hands you shake.
jimseybert: Know what your strengths are and focus on them.
LouiseHornor: Your signature is your integrity. Never sign any false statements.
scottcolecfp: Be careful what you read.

Now, how about you? What’s the best career advice you can give in ten words or less? Leave yours in the comments!

I don’t see why I should spend fifteen minutes making a batch of homemade laundry detergent just to save a few bucks when I could spend that fifteen minutes building my career. Most “frugality tips” seem like a waste of time.

Let’s say you have a spare hour on a weekend afternoon. You could either utilize it doing things that save you money – like the aforementioned laundry detergent – or you could do something that improves your career – like touching base with clients, getting in touch with old coworkers, or building an online presence for yourself.

Obviously, if you have something where you can directly earn more after tax than you could by doing a frugal project, you should jump on board. If you have more work than you can handle and can bill $150 an hour for it, hiring a maid for $25 an hour makes sense to me.

But very few of us are in that situation – it’s not our reality. Instead, we’re hoping for that situation, and we believe that if we invest our time into career development, we can get there. And that’s true, over the long term, but how much of an impact does that one hour have on a many-year-long transformation.

It’s a “bird in the hand versus two in the bush” situation. The bird in the hand – frugality – earns you a known, relatively small amount. The two birds in the bush – career building – earns you an unknown but potentially larger amount.

Which way is better? I think there’s a different answer for each person, actually. For some people, the bird in the hand is better – if you have a career that isn’t helped by such networking, for example. For others, building your presence might be more valuable than a frugality task.

Some food for thought:

Focus on “bang for the buck” frugality. Installing a programmable thermostat takes about an hour and can save you about $200 a year (assuming you don’t work at home). This type of thing seems like a complete no-brainer. Do you really believe you’ll recoup several hundred dollars in an hour’s worth of networking or reading? A bird in the hand is always worth two in the bush.

Other “big bang” frugality tasks: air sealing your home, making a quadruple batch of a meal and freezing the extra three batches (saves time as much as money), making meal plans (halves your grocery bill for about ten minutes’ effort), selling your rarely-used car, and downgrading to smaller living quarters.

Know your hourly rates. I think this is a very powerful way to compare the value of different activities. How much financial return do you expect from an hour of networking and presence building? $20? $50? Spend some time thinking about that question. When you come to a conclusion, knock 20% off of that rate – taxes will eat that much – and use that number to compare it to frugal tasks.

So, for example, let’s say I’ve decided an hour of network building is worth $25 to my future income. I knock off 20% or so, kicking it down to $20. Then, if I know of a money-saving task that earns me more than $20 for that hour, I jump on it. I’ll install a programmable thermostat instead of writing a blog post, for example.

Look at other values. It may simply be that you enjoy building your career. The time spent building an online presence may bring you an intrinsic joy that money-saving tasks don’t bring.

If that’s the case, be honest with yourself about it. It’s not just about earning money, it’s about personal enjoyment, and you’re accepting that the return is less (or possibly nonexistent) because you enjoy doing it. That’s great, but it doesn’t mean that the frugal task has any less value.

Here’s an example. One of my cousins is a meticulous housekeeper, to the point of being obsessive. Yet she enjoys it. She’d far rather be doing that than engaging in other activities. Sure, it serves as great maintenance on her home, but it doesn’t put much financial value in her pocket. What it does do is make her feel good when she sees her sparkling clean house. She often chooses that for a Saturday afternoon instead of networking within her career.

On the other hand, you might enjoy that networking more – it provides more personal value for you. An afternoon spent building an online presence is more valuable to you than scrubbing every nook and cranny of your home. If that’s the case, go for it!

As long as you’re subscribing to the overall principle of spending less than you earn – and either way you choose, you’re not spending much money here – either choice is healthy because it expands on your existing non-financial values. Frugality or career-building both trump idleness.

Multitasking. If you’re still unsure, there’s nothing that says you can’t do both. Get a hands-free calling solution (a speakerphone or a headset) and do a mentally uninvolved frugality task while talking to a client or a contact. Make laundry detergent while touching base with someone. Make a quadruple batch of a meal and freeze the other three while chatting up a client.

I do this all the time. I’ll do laundry while writing a post. I’ll read emails while on a walk (seriously, on my handheld) – in fact, I’ve considered rigging up some kind of standing desk with a very slow treadmill under it. I’ll toss something up on Twitter while I’m grilling.

In the end, it’s all about value – and value means more than just dollars.

For a long time, I was one of the resentful folks. I had a hard time speaking up in group situations and I hated presenting. The first time I had to give a major presentation to a group and interact with them, I went to the bathroom repeatedly and threw up until I was dry heaving because I was so nervous and so unconfident.

What I’ve learned over time is that the person that appears confident is often not as confident as they appear. They just simply do a few things well. They walk in a way that appears confident. Their eyes seem alert. They stand tall. They have a faint appeal that you can’t quite put your finger on. You feel fine talking to them, but not to most people.

They’re not wired differently than you. They just do a few clever things.

Over time, I’ve figured out how to make many of those things quite natural for me – and most of the techniques I use are somewhat unusual. Here are ten of them. Each of them will help if you have problems with appearing confident, as I sometimes do.

1. Pick a spot.
When you first walk into a room, look around with your head completely level. Find a spot in the room that’s exactly at your eye level. It can be something on the wall, an object hanging from the ceiling, or something else. Pick something you’ll find visually interesting, if you can find anything. Once you’ve found your spot, remember it. Then, whenever you’re nervous, sweep your eyes to that spot.

What this does is it allows you to keep your nervous tic of staring at the floor or looking away from someone – something that can be very hard for an introvert to break – and redirect it in a bit of an optical illusion. By keeping your eyes up at eye level – which they will be if you look at that object – you appear to be looking at another person. That is a subtle cue of confidence – you’re looking for others, thus you must be socially accepted.

Obviously, you shouldn’t stare at the object, but knowing it’s there and looking at it from time to time when you’re nervous is a vast improvement over casting your eyes down, which signals a complete lack of confidence.

2. Improve your posture with duct tape.
Yes, duct tape. Masking tape or electrical tape or even Scotch tape will work, too. You’ll need a friend or a spouse with this.

Stand up as straight as you can, with your back vertical and your arms at your sides, relaxed. Then, have a friend take a strip of duct tape and run a three inch strip down your back. The top of it should be on the center of one of your shoulder blades and end three inches below it. Then, that person should put a second strip, starting at the center of your other shoulder blade and going straight down for three inches. Take a third strip and apply it horizontally, connecting the tops of the strips, then a fourth strip connecting the bottoms of the vertical strips. You should have a rectangle on your back, nearly square in shape.

Here’s the thing. As you go through your day, every time you attempt to slouch, that tape will tug at your skin, resisting a poor change in posture. It’s not painful (unless you have excessive hair back there), but it is enough of a physical reminder to cause you to naturally keep a good posture.

This works great before a big meeting, but it also works great for training by doing it every day for a few weeks. You’ll naturally exercise some muscles in your back, making them stronger, and allow other muscles to relax and slightly weaken. What will happen is that your muscles will begin to find that a position of good posture is the natural one and that’s how you’ll begin to sit and stand.

Good posture gives the appearance of confidence, and this is a great little way to create that appearance.

3. Carry a flask – whether you drink or not.
I was at a conference chatting with a really solid presenter from Oracle whose name I can’t recall right now – let’s call him “Jim.” After a really great presentation, I started chatting with Jim and discovered that we knew a few people in common, so after the chat, we agreed to go get a drink together.

On the way, we both needed to stop to use the restroom. When I was finished, I walked out to see Jim taking a big slug out of a flask he had pulled out of his front pocket. I jokingly said, “Whoa, cowboy! Getting an early start?” He smiled, swished the liquid around in his mouth for a minute, then spit out some blue stuff. He grinned and said, “Listerine.”

It was a trick of his. Whenever he was about to meet with some people, he’d head to the bathroom, take a slug out of his flask, swish it around for a bit, then spit it out. He’d follow it with a bit of water to get any bad taste out, then look in the mirror to make sure there wasn’t any food in his teeth.

Doing that simple routine made him feel better. He could be sure his breath didn’t smell at all, his mouth felt squeaky clean, and he was also confident there was no food on his face or in his teeth. All around, it really gave his confidence a bump.

Good advice. I actually started just keeping a travel bottle of Listerine with me, but this is a great use for a flask since they’re designed to fit well in a pocket.

4. Go for a thirty minute fast walk three times a week.
Walking improves your health. We all know it – and it’s absolutely true. Thirty minutes walking instead of watching a television show will help you lose weight, feel better, and all that.

But it has an extra confidence booster in it as well.

If you make an effort to walk as fast as you can on your walks, the speed of your natural, normal walk will increase, too. It’ll feel more natural for you to go faster, so you will. You’ll strengthen all the appropriate muscles and, soon, the way you walk across a room will look much more confident than before without any conscious effort on your part.

5. Memorize a person’s eye color with one extra adjective.
I have a hard time looking people in the eye. Mostly, it’s because my eyes sometimes have problems focusing well, especially in the evening, but there’s also an aspect of low confidence there, too.

I’ve found a solution that works well in both regards. It gives me a reason to look people in the eye on a regular basis (making me appear confident) but not too much (making me appear creepy).

All I do is this. When I first meet a person, I look into their eyes until I can describe their eye color with one noun and at least one descriptive adjective. Their eyes are “cloudy blue.” Their eyes are “mocha brown.” Once I’ve figured it out, I’m free to look away.

Then, if I can’t recall immediately their eye color, I know I should look back. In practice, this means that I tend to look at their eyes directly several times early on in our conversation, but not too much at one shot. Instead, I alternate it with the first trick, swiveling my eyes to an object at eye level in the room.

What does this do? It creates an impression that I’m interested in what they’re saying and also fully engaged in the larger event – very confident – when in truth I’m not confident at all.

6. Keep a chamomile tea bag in your wallet.
Chamomile tea is an effective natural relaxant. It is the single best natural way I’ve found to calm myself down in any situation that makes me nervous. If I feel awkward, I’ll just find some hot water, put it in a cup, dunk in a bag of chamomile tea, let it steep for a couple minutes, then drink it down. Calmness washes over me.

It really helps with appearing confident, too. I tend to get quite nervous during social events – and it shows. I talk too fast, look away, and generally hide from conversation. In short, I need to calm down. When I’m calm, my speech gets a bit slower, I’m less nervous around other people, and I’m more willing to engage others – all signs of confidence.

Chamomile is a natural calming agent that’s pretty much socially acceptable in any situation, so it’s a great “secret weapon” to have in your pocket.

7. “Hi, I’m Trent Hamm.” Period.
Whenever I would introduce myself to people, I often found myself saying things like, “Hi, I’m Trent Hamm and I work on this project and I wrote this document” or something to that effect. In my nervousness, I felt the need to include what amounted to a short resume with my name.

I believed at the time that it would do a good job of laying out who I was to people, but what it actually does is shows that you’re not confident already in who you are. If the other person doesn’t know who you are, they’ll either ask for information – or they’ll hold it in and believe they should know who you are. In either case, you seem more intriguing and in control.

So, next time you introduce yourself, stop with your name. At the very least, it opens the door to more conversation.

8. Hit Google News.
Whenever I enter a group, I usually stop and check the news to see if any major events have occurred really recently. This gives me something to break the ice with almost every time – I can simply use a major news event or a popular culture event to open with.

I usually read the top stories and see if there’s anything of strong general interest there. If it’s a slow news day, I’ll check the entertainment and sports news. In some groups, I’ll check other news sections, too – technology works well in some groups, and business and money news works well in other groups. If I see something interesting but I don’t understand a big piece of it, I take another few seconds and hit Wikipedia to give myself enough context that I’m not clueless.

Having a current event or two in my head gives me something to say when I’m standing there wondering what on earth I should be talking about. Quite often, the person who comes up with conversation topics is often the person who comes off as confident, as many other people are often standing around just as nervously.

9. Take five deep breaths.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed with a situation or you’re about to step out into a room where you have to start speaking very quickly, just pause for a moment and take five deep breaths.

The intake of a lot of oxygen does several little things to your biochemistry, all of which are helpful. It lowers blood pressure. It increases alertness. It reduces anxiety. In short, it’s a very simple thing that helps in almost any situation that makes you nervous.

I find that any time I know I’m going to be speaking soon, I do this. It always helps, without fail – I feel better right after doing it.

10. When in doubt, ask a question.
So, your breath smells good. Your posture is good. You naturally walk with confidence and introduce yourself with confidence. You do a bit of small talk with current events. Then….

The best thing you can possibly do is lead the conversation. The best way to do that is to simply ask a question and then listen to the response. Ask them what they do. Ask them about their biggest project. Ask them what they think of the meeting, or of the last speaker. Ask them what hotel they’re staying at and if they like it.

Then, listen to what they say. Almost always, you can follow up on something there. You can relate your own experience or thoughts. You can ask another question. You can dig into information that you actually want to know more about.

Line this up with the other techniques (the eye technique and good posture) and you’ll look confident no matter how you feel inside.

Good luck.

Without really paying attention, I picked up Daniel Pink’s book The Adventures of Johnny Bunko at the library. I just glanced at the cover, noting the subtitle (”The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need”) and that it was written by an author I like, and checked it out.

I got it home, opened it up, and found I was in for a surprise. The book is actually a manga – a short graphic novel drawn in the black-and-white Japanese style.

At first, I didn’t know what to think, but after reading it, I realize that this style was a brilliant choice. It takes the relatively mundane topic of careers and presents it in an entertaining and unusual fashion, one that’s particularly relevant to a younger audience (yes, I was a huge manga fan in my college days).

But is the advice worthwhile? Instead of destroying the rather fun plot of The Adventures of Johnny Bunko, I’m just going to delve a bit into the six big points the book presents for career management.

There Is No Plan
There’s a lot of talk out there about “career planning” – deciding in high school and college where you want to go with your life. In my opinion, most of that talk is bunk. By the time you get through your college career, the world will have changed. By the time you’re ten years into your professional career, the world will have drastically changed again.

You’re quite likely to find yourself, ten years from now, in a career path you couldn’t have possibly considered today. Five years ago, if you had told me I would be living as a personal finance writer, I would have laughed at you. But look what happened.

Don’t spend all your time planning out what you’ll be doing in your career in ten years. It’s hard to predict that. Instead, focus on the now and the skills and relationships you can build that will serve you no matter where your path leads you.

Think Strengths, Not Weaknesses
People hire based on strengths, not weaknesses. People become rich because of their strengths, not because they balanced out their weaknesses.

Everyone has a few natural talents and passions. The people that really succeed are the people that figure out those passions and talents and hone them while finding ways to minimize their weaknesses. This runs completely counter to the idea that if you have a glaring weakness, you need to work on it and improve it.

If you know you have a weakness, the best thing you can do is to find ways to have that weakness affect you as little as possible. Investing significant time in improving that weakness is a fool’s errand – it’s time that you’re not accentuating the positive.

It’s Not About You
The people who rise to the top are the people who offer value to others, not people who take the value of others and contribute nothing.

Are you useful to your organization? Are you useful to your peers? Are you useful to the community as a whole? If you are, you have value. If you’re not – if all you do is gobble up time and resources – you don’t have much value in your career.

Look at the things you do through this lens. Is this activity leading to some sort of value for the organization or for others or for yourself without taking as much value away? If it’s not, you’re treading on dangerous ground.

Persistence Trumps Talent
The person that tries and fails then gets back up and tries again is usually in a better place than the person who succeeds right off the bat. Why? They’ve picked up lots of little intrinsic skills along the way and they’ve learned that it’s okay to fail.

In other words, passion trumps talent. If you love something enough that you’re going to keep at it even after failing over and over again, you’re going to succeed over the long run. Each failure will teach you something, and that passion will keep you moving forward.

Talent alone won’t do that. Unless you’re truly the best in the world, eventually you will fail if you ride on nothing but talent – and you won’t have the skills or the drive to pick yourself up again.

Make Excellent Mistakes
If you’re going to make a mistake, make it in a way that shows off positive traits as well. In fact, this is often better than making no mistakes at all, because it makes you human.

Don’t be afraid to step up to the plate for fear of failure. Instead, throw everything you have at it and see what happens. Sure, you might fail – but if you’ve thrown your drive and talent at it, you’ll show some very positive things in the failure.

The person who succeeds is the person willing to take a risk and the person willing to fail.

Leave an Imprint
Your actions should always leave a mark on what you’re doing. If you’re working on something over a long period and your contributions can’t clearly be seen, what difference does it make if you were never there at all?

You make a mark by putting forth extra effort. You make a mark by adding your own angle to a project. You make a mark by standing up when everyone else is sitting down. You make a mark by loving what you do.

You don’t make a mark by just following along all the time.

Is The Adventures of Johnny Bunko Worth Reading?
The Adventures of Johnny Bunko is an absolutely brilliant graduation gift, in my opinion. It shares some big, powerful ideas about careers in a format that’s very readable and attractive to people who might not want to sit down and absorb a three hundred page career tome.

If you want depth, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko is probably not the best choice. It’s light, fun, and brings only a few big ideas to the table. To its credit, though, it explains those ideas in a very enjoyable way.

I intend on giving two copies of this away for graduation gifts in the next twelve months.

I’m going to suggest a challenge to you for today, one that might just be a revelation to you.

Your eight hour workday has 480 minutes in it. Spend every single one of those minutes doing something to make your work life easier. Let me walk you through it.

First, take care of the work you need to do today. There are likely some pressing matters around you that need to be dealt with and some projects you need to work on. This will take some portion of the day.

But, obviously, there will be some downtime in there – the time that you would ordinarily use to daydream, chat with others, click on links, and so on. Use that time differently today. Here’s how.

One, clean your workspace. Get rid of the junk sitting on your desk. Go through it and either file it or trash it, since that’s where most of it should be. Throw away any garbage you have lying around.

Two, think of your regular routine tasks at work and ask yourself how they could be done faster. Perhaps you have a really poor way of managing and handing in expense reports. Maybe (like me in the past), you have a really poor way of handling time sheets. Perhaps your days are interrupted by lots of meetings that aren’t beneficial.

Then develop ways to make these things more efficient. Find out if you can get some of those meetings rescheduled into a solid block of meetings instead of spread out throughout the day – or maybe try to get out of a few of them. Come up with your own efficient template for time sheets or expense reports that can shave a few minutes off the time – and share those templates.

Still got time? Look at your daily work. Are there any pieces of work you find yourself wasting time on again and again? Maybe you’re a technical writer and you use many of the same elements over and over again in your writing. Maybe you’re a programmer and you keep using some of the same elements in your code.

Spend some time creating a library for your own use. Make a clear framework for those documents you write all the time so you can easily just fill in blanks and change a few pieces instead of writing a ton again or heavily editing an old document. Add some new programming functions to a shared library that you can access yourself.

It should be easy to fill up every minute of a focused day with these tasks.

All of these things have one big central thing in common: they don’t help you right now at all, but they shave off minutes of work almost every day in the future. You can write faster. You can find things faster. You can program faster. You can get your expense reports turned in faster.

That shaved time gives you more time to devote to the things that will make you stand out. If you save fifteen minutes each day where you’re not searching around for things, filling out paperwork, hopping from meeting to meeting, or rewriting things you’ve already essentially written before, you now have fifteen more minutes each day to turn an average project into an impressive one, to build your relationships with other people on your field, or do something else to genuinely stand out.

And it’s those who stand out who get the raises, the promotions, and the opportunities.

You have 480 minutes. What are you going to do with them?

How do you do it? You write tons and tons of stuff for The Simple Dollar, your wife works a full time job, you seem to have tons of time available for your kids, you read quite a bit, and you also seem to have a somewhat active social life. How do you do it? Do you not sleep?

There are a handful of tricks to making this all work. I’ll outline several, but I’ll start with the big one.

The line between work and family is pretty blurry at our house.
As I’ve mentioned before, I set aside a block of time each day to spend with the kids – and my wife does the same. This block usually goes from about 5:30 in the evening until 8:30 in the evening, with the last half-hour or so involving one of us putting the kids to bed while the other one does something else.

Outside of that, the lines between work and family are really blurry at our home. We’ll engage in family activities and in the middle, I’ll yank out my pocket notebook and jot down some notes. I’ll read books for review for The Simple Dollar in the late evenings when my wife is enjoying a piece of meaty fiction. My wife (who is a teacher) will grade papers on the way to an activity while I’m driving, or I’ll gather notes while she’s driving. Sometimes she even helps out with background tasks for The Simple Dollar, brainstorming ideas, correcting posts, and even helping with writing tasks here and there.

It’s not uncommon for us to spend a rainy Saturday afternoon watching a movie in the family room. The kids will choose a Pixar movie we’ve seen a dozen times and my wife and I will fire up our laptops, hers to record some grades and mine to answer some emails.

It doesn’t feel intrusive – at least not to me – because I enjoy the work so much. I love to write. I love to communicate with readers (in fact, I love it so much that I often get behind simply because I want to respond to as many emails as I can). It just feels – most of the time – like just another enjoyable thing to do in my life.

During the school year, the kids do go to daycare, a decision we put a lot of thought into before we chose it. The biggest reason, actually, was for the kids themselves – there are cognitive benefits and health benefits to such attendance. That doesn’t mean that we dump them at the door and run – I often spend days with them, taking them to the Science Center of Iowa or to the library or to the park – but I do try to maximize the time they’re at daycare, doing tasks that they can’t participate in (my work) or would greatly hinder.

The end result of all of this is that my children get my undivided attention vastly more than they did when I was working a full time job. When I had work intruding on my life then, I was either out of the house or mentally distracted when I should have been spending time with them. Now, when they need me and something work-related is on my mind, I have the freedom to slam the door on work whenever I choose. Plus, because I enjoy my work, I also have the freedom to pick it up whenever time allows without hating how it’s interfering with what I want to do – it is what I want to do.

We own one television – and it’s rarely on.
In the last month, the television’s primary use has been twofold. It’s kept us up to date with local storm coverage (since we’ve had some awful weather as of late) and it’s provided the source of our “family movie night,” where all four of us (once a week or so) watch a movie together. Other than that, I think it’s been on roughly two hours (to watch True Blood).

That’s it. The only television we own is down in the basement, and we simply don’t go down there that often. We’re too busy doing other things that we enjoy – activities that often involve active interaction with our children (like drawing pictures or building a giant model railroad).

We do lots of household chores together as a family.
We cook meals together. We clean together. We work on art projects together. We wrap presents together. We do dishes together.

Virtually any task that the children can possibly participate in is done in a social fashion. Everyone gets more out of it if we work together. Sure, there might be minor setbacks when the children get involved, but they offer a lot of help, too. Even our twenty one month old daughter can scrape plates and put them in the dishwasher (seriously) and our three year old loves stirring cookie batter.

The more things like this that we do together as a family, the tighter we bond and the more real world skills our kids have. Doing things this way turns household chores into opportunities for family bonding – and often gets things done just as fast, if not faster.

Many of our friends are also parents.
If you’re friends with parents that have children of a similar age, they’re much more understanding about things like taking kids to the bathroom or washing their hands. They’re also much more likely to be helpful when you need a hand, and you have a lot of experiences and advice worth sharing.

Here’s a perfect example. My wife had four bridesmaids at our wedding – two of them were her sisters and the other two were long-time friends. Today, one of those friends has a son that’s literally one day younger than our own, while the other has a daughter in between the ages of our kids and an infant son. The children have become part of the social bonds tying them all together.

Thus, our roles as parents and as social creatures overlap.

We choose enriching things for our relaxation time.
So when do we relax? Almost every evening, my wife and I spend some time unwinding. That time, though, is often spent reading or playing a game that requires some thinking. Last night, we both read for an hour and a half, side by side, before bed. The night before that, we played Dominion over a bottle of wine.

In short, we make an effort to keep our minds “on” as much as possible during the day.

Turning my mind “off” is done in a very focused way.
Obviously, though, being “on” all the time isn’t the best thing, so I have what I think of as an extremely focused “off” time each day. I meditate/pray for about twenty minutes – I clear my mind and do a few very basic relaxation techniques. Often, if I do this later in the day, I find myself hugely mentally refreshed for the evening instead of burnt out after a lot of work.

I used to try to do something like this during my commute, but it never really worked well, so eventually I settled on meditating/praying right when I got home. It’s a late afternoon tradition for me that I’ve used ever since – and it makes a huge difference in my energy and alertness in the evenings.

Doing these things – blending work and parenting and play, meditating, socializing with other parents, and engaging in activities that are usually mentally enriching – has been invaluable for juggling all the roles we have without needing to shell out the cash to bring in extra help (like a housecleaner, for example).