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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What are you doing, Dad?” he asked.

“I’m working,” I told him.

“Why?” he asked.

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

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

“Well, that’s my job,” I told him.

“Why?” he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Most important, what’s the right balance?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just step back and ask yourself these three things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good luck.

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

[...]

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

I know exactly what he’s talking about.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good luck.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.