How to Get It, How to Keep It, How to Get It Back if You Lose It!

Author: Marshall Goldsmith with Mark Reiter

Overall I must say that I was disappointed with this book as it didn’t seem to excite me, spark any new ideas or even capture my attention well with ways to build what the author’s topic is all about, your mojo.  You mojo is described that inner spirit or drive we have to do what we do best starting from the inside and expressing that outward.  I think this is because I actually really love the concept of mojo and internal motivation that drives us to excel, unfortunately, this book just didn’t draw me in at all to that.  It is however, still a good book that outlines many of the important factors that are necessary to build mojo and maintain it so for someone without an already high level of inner drive, I think the book would be far more useful.

This was the first of Goldsmith’s books I’ve read using audio version and Goldsmith read this one for the recording himself, which personally I felt was a disaster.  His tone and continuous pausing and repetitive upward tones at the end of every single sentence was incredibly distracting and it would never listen to another book he’s read directly because of this.  His reading style kills the flow completely for me and his repetitive pitch change never seems to match the content he is ready, so I found it was actually quite hard to listen to, and that is very rare for me since I mostly listen to audio books and love them since I’m an audible learner!

What Mojo Offers

Mojo offers a very straight forward easy to digest set of tools and questions to discover your mojo. Having your mojo is described as having work that simultaneously makes you happy and has meaning to you.  Marshall explores a number of effects of mojo and negative mojo or nojo as he names it and he explores the sources of one’s identity.  These are:

• remembered identity
• reflected identity
• programmed identity
• created identity

I found this useful yet at the same time, rather simplified and I was not convinced of how it was actually useful through application, it was simply information and I never connected with the point of it.  There is a useful mojo scorecard and tips throughout to examine your activities and to measure the level of mojo you experience.  It can certainly help to draw you to discover what activities affect your mojo so is quite useful.

More insight is given through a series of stories and questions that Marshall uses to explore your mojo further.  I thought these were a bit disconnected and not really supporting what I was hoping to get from the book as far as experiencing mojo and putting it to work for you more often.  There were many tips but I never got the sense that I really had a clear idea since even Marshall says repeatedly that mojo is all internal and has to come from within.  After hearing that a number of times, I wonder why he wrote the book then?

Also, there are lots of good pieces of information and stories about mojo and many tips on how to discover it.  There is an excellent section on maintaining your mojo and being consistent with yourself and others to ensure nothing prevents your mojo and he explores 10 reason you can quickly lose your mojo which are particularly useful to avoid.  He covers through repeated example a concept of ‘change it’ or ‘change you’ which is really saying that you must decide to change something about your situation to move towards more mojo or you have to change yourself to have different motivators or expectations.  And finally in the book, mojo is explored by using a technique of framing it and naming it.  If you recognize bad habits that kill mojo and give them a name to remind you of that, you can use that name yourself or teach others to use that name to help point that behavior out when it occurs and snap you out of a situation killing mojo.  This is a useful tip and I have always liked the idea of framing associations around behaviors and actions so this one is particularly useful to me.

So overall, this is a decent book and explores many areas of mojo, that anyone who is interested in a lot of self analysis and reflection can benefit from.  I had a number of reason listed above why I rated this lower.  I’d definitely recommend the printed version over the narrated one by Marshall himself and if you haven’t read his other book, ‘What Got You Here, Won’t Get You There‘ I would definitely say you should start with it, as it is a better book all around and similarly helps you to assess yourself and discover your limiting actions prevent your best work.

Posted by Mike King under Book Reviews | 4 Comments »

A Leadership Fable About Restoring Sanity To The Most Important Organization In Your Life

Author: Patrick Lencioni

Lencioni is one of my favorite business authors and his fables make his message interesting to read as a story and easy to learn from.  This fable resonated for me since it looks to apply business skills and strategy to your home life, which I’m often finding myself striving to do anyway.  This book is based on the premise that even successful  business people with well structured knowledge and strategy business practice typically lack the application of any such strategy or even goals for managing their own families.  As a result, we have frantic families with nothing more than organized chaos and no clear direction or strategy for being operated.  This story explores that from the point of view of a stay at home mom, Theresa, of one of these successful business strategists.

The family of Theresa and husband, Jude, is introduced showing all the classic signs of family overload with the Jude having a busy work life and some travel away form home while the 3 kids in the family consume enormous effort with all their programs, volunteering and sports they are involved in which of course, create a hectic daily schedule.   As day to day life seems to get in the way of what Theresa and Jude wish their family to be like, an argument erupts and Jude makes the statement, “if my clients ran their companies the way we run this family, they’d be out of business.”  This sets Theresa off on a mission to discover what really is it then that Jude’s strategy consulting firm gives clients and she looks to apply that to their own family.  She discovers and applies a set of questions from the strategy consulting to the family model and uses these to shape a new found purpose, control and direction for her family.  This is all shaped into 3 big questions.

Question #1: What makes your family unique?

This section looks at core values that really define your family to be unique.  Not just any values you want or aspire to, but actual core values that clearly define your family.  The book through both the story and through the model outline at the end give many examples of how to then turn this into a short paragraph that defines the family, its purpose and the values that it adheres to in accomplishing its purpose.

Question #2: What is your family’s top priority rallying cry right now?

Evey family has an area to work on, solve or stress to relief at any time and this section is to define that focus area and get the family working together to make that rallying call happen.  This could be anything from spending more quality time together, to finishing a renovation to getting a kid to college.  Whatever it is, the family should be focused to achieve it and working together consistently to make it happen.  It can also be used to align short term decision making with what is priority for the family, especially when a new activity or event could get in the way of that rallying cry!

Question #3: How are we going to talk about and use the answers to these questions?

This last question is a way to plan the family strategy and make commitments around them.  Setting up some kind of review of progress, communication towards the goals on a regular basis and fixed times to talk or share important events and decisions as they come up.  This should include how to talk about areas as parents as well as with any children in the family or extended family that are directly involved.  Planning the communication strategy to answer questions about priorities and if the family is making progress towards those only helps to bring the family together to achieve the rallying cry.
So, there is lots to learn from all of Lencioni’s books and this book is no exception.  It’s an engaging story that teaches the ideas well and the examples and struggles are easy to relate to and apply in your own life and family. I definitely recommend it!

Posted by Mike King under Book Reviews | 7 Comments »

Maximize Your Free Time to Create New Wealth & Purpose

Author: Robert Pagliarini

It is a total joy to share books with my readers and especially books that I learn a lot from or that I can really connect with.  The book “The Other 8 Hours” does both of those things for me and so it is my pleasure to tell you how great this book it.  Robert contacted me to offer me a free copy with hope that I would review here at LearnThis.  I was excited by the description and title yet apprehensive when I don’t have it recommended by many people since it is a new book just out.  Long story short, I loved the book and will definitely recommend it as one of my favorites.

The Creative Spirit

The book explores personal development by specifically focusing on what you do with the 8 hours or so every day that you are not working or sleeping.  It focuses you and inspires you to make that time available to become a Cre8tor, a person with a drive to create new opportunities, that generate more wealth and purpose and happiness in your life.  The book has 4 main sections in it:

• Get a Clue
• Get More Time
• Get More Money
• Get a Life

All of these sections have chapters to explore each statement and there is actually quite a lot of depth to each topic.  Pagliarini covers everything from examining the life leeches that exist around us taking away from the available time that COULD be ours to a fantastic set of resources with each chapter that can kick start any Crea8tor channel you want to pursue.  There are strong messages in each of these four areas and I’m fortunately enough to have experienced many of these in my own life so have explored and even executed many of the challenges put forward.  I certainly have not however, collected such a strong, consistent and enjoyable text to read from all these lessons and clearly Pagliarini has down much in his own life to experience these as well AND he has done an immense amount of research to back things up with statistics.

Another aspect that is unique in this book that I really enjoyed are there being many 1 page short stories and examples of people who have taken these techniques and put them into action, each showing the major benefits to be had as a result.  I found the stories to be quite enjoyable clips to read and put much of what is written into real life context that is easy to relate with.

Get More Time

The tips on getting more time are absolutely timeless and powerful.  There is so much in here that I agree with as a productivity lover it was simply fun to read, yet there was also much to learn from even with the countless hours I’ve put into this area already myself. One example of this is termed “boosting” and used to describe taking on a second job or side job that is so mindless or easy that you can use it to actually study or work on other things while getting paid.  It gives two benefits, some extra income to use for creative channels or to catch up on debts as well as to further yourself in new knowledge areas, business plans or others such needed Cre8tor work that is difficult to make time for.  While I don’t plan on taking on any second mindless jobs myself, I will certainly use and share this concept again, some people come to mind to me for this right now.

He includes what I can easily say is the best 18 pages I’ve ever read on the powers that grip us in life and suck our time away from us.  Everything from TV watching or being disorganized to doing more than is necessary.  There are 24 items lists in this section with the typical common behavior and then a short straightforward solution that anyone can use to tackle that problem.  If you take nothing else out of this book, take this, as you will find yourself creating more time and increase your productivity, which obviously I’m a big fan of doing!

Get More Money

This section of the book is brilliant and clearly the main content as it covers in superb clarity 10 separate suggested channels or areas to follow as a cre8tor that can bring in new wealth and opportunities to make a better life for yourself.  The examples of course continue throughout and each of these channels are outlined with many ideas on what they might look like, how you can start, a typically process map for executing it and then a great set of resources to get started in each one.  This is absolutely packed with great content and again, easily makes the book worth buying just for these chapters alone.

Get More Life

Finally after touching on all the great aspects and opportunities, Pagliarini covers what many critics want to see.  What makes all this difficult is life.  Life gets in the way and needs to be managed better to even dare take on few work in our other 8 hours.  This section helps here and has many compressed lessons on productivity, habits, goal setting and other great techniques to manage all this and actually get it all done.

Conclusions

There are a few sections scattered through the book that talk about purpose and legacy and what you can do that is bigger than yourself but I must say this was the only thing I was a bit disapointed in.  Everything I thought was quite finance centric and the overall read of the book to me was about making more money.  That is an overall message though, not the only one.  So much is covered this is likely just a personal feeling.  I am really quite impressed by this book and am certainly going to check out more from Pagliarini as certainly has a best seller here if I had to make any guesses.  It’s a fantastic book that I encourage anyone to read.  It truly applies to to anyone with even the slightest desire to get a little more out of life or to change your current circumstances.  I still have many references and websites to check out from several chapters that will keep be coming back to it for the next little while.  I know each of you will enjoy it as well.

Note: I always avoid reading other’s reviews once I start a book as I know that lets me write the most objective review I can.  I’m happy to see that after writing this, I just checked out the reviews for it on amazon is its getting 5 stars across the board as well.  So, go check that out the reviews if you need to see more or to buy the book.  Also, check out the book website at TheOther8Hours.com.

Posted by Mike King under Book Reviews | 4 Comments »

Author: Susan Stamm

Overall, I found this to be a very good book and there are many things I really enjoyed about it.  It’s fairly short and easy to read as the 42 rules are separated into 42 chapters and the whole concept of employee engagement is one which is very deer to me and an invaluable tool when it comes to leadership.  The book presents 42 easy to digest rules covering a good variety of topics. There are items that need you to focus on yourself and skills in order to perform well in your team then there are many more showing how you need to put your attention towards your team if you plan to engage them more in their work and for better performance.

I like how Stamm put specific actions you could put into place for each of the rules in order to get started and if you were to tackle each of those, this book would be a sure recipe for great engagement, and ultimately, great management as a result.  I know that management is an area that often gets looked upon poorly as a result of so many bad managers spreading those impressions, but Stamm breaks that with good advice and solid recommendations.  Everything covered is useful for being a better manager but it’s certainly not limited to managers. Many of the rules are things that any employee can do or at least strive to learn for a future role.

As with any book on engagement, I expect to see that it is about people, relationships and working on behaviors in those relationships, as that is what employee engagement is all about.  I am happy to say this book easily meets that expectation and in fact, I was quite happy to see the D.I.S.C. profile used to outline behavioral tools for the 4 quadrants of that model.  The one thing that I did not enjoy as much about this book is that it was hard to read because the rules were so individual.  They book could be read 2 pages at a time which is great for someone well distracted but I found the disconnected rules to be distracting on their own when I sat down to read though a number of pages.  I’d love to hear more on each subject and have the author ties the rules together more, as many are related but not presented that way in this short book.

Overall, it’s an excellent short book and one to be very useful if you don’t know much about employee engagement. I definitely recommend it. So whether you are interested in the book itself, this I recommend even more! The website covering the book’s content and reference site is excellent!  There are brief outlines for each of the 42 rules and there are templates available for excersizes on each of the rules.  This is an incredable resource on the subject so please do check it out and explore more about what this book and website have to offer!

Team Approach – 42 Rules Resources

42 Rules – Templates

Posted by Mike King under Book Reviews | 1 Comment »

Ancient Principles for Lasting Greatness

Author: Michael Holmes

I received a copy of this book from Michael Holmes and he has been wonderful to read from and briefly interact with on twitter.  You can find him @MichaelGHolmes or at his website for the book at http://raisetheeup.com/.  The book is quite a short read and easy to read and it covers the subject of greatness from a Christian perspective very well.  For that, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and it is very accurate both from the research aspect and evidence used to outline each area and I think he covers the subject thoroughly.

Greatness is first explored and a number of stories are used to demonstrate what is meant by greatness (both qualitative and quantitative) as well as obedience.

Principles are then explored and how they differ from practices.  I loved the points in instinctive morals but unfortunately, I have to say there were a number of paragraphs and examples that I just couldn’t make any sense of in this area.  Examples of sin being a principle completely lost me and no matter how many times I read it, these parts just completely confused me.  The wording used and how Holmes includes quotes to complete his thoughts I find is very distracting and unnecessary.  Personally, I felt that quotes were used far to much which made the author’s point difficult to follow.  I’m not sure exactly why I felt this way and I had the same feelings reading Rick Warren’s book, The Purpose Driven Life a few years ago.  It must be a personal preference as millions of people love Warren’s book and obviously the quotes used didn’t keep others away.  The same is likely true with this book.  I’d like to hear an authors point be made from their own words more strongly and then provide some reference or context to back it up, instead of forming paragraphs, arguments and starting new thoughts with quotes from references.

So one thing I really liked are the 3 criteria to identify a principle over a practice:

1. Immutable – simply meaning that it cannot change, its lasting
2. Consequential – principles will consistently bring about consequences (whether they are rewards or downfall)
3. Universal – simply that apply for all wide range and are not specific to certain person or situation.

Next, Holmes covers isolation, desire and character as three critical areas impacted by greatness.  These sections were great and presented with short examples and references as is done throughout the book.

Finally, Homes explores 5 laws: vision, the extra mile, persistence, stewardship and service.  While I love these topics and attach much value to each especially in the personal development studies and writing I do, I didn’t seem to find the same value in these chapters from the book.  I think there is so much covered in such short sections (many are just one page) these laws all felt to be presented in a very disjointed manor.  Again, I felt some of the quotes to distract me from the message even though many supported the argument well.  It simple left the writing to very difficult to read, as the content doesn’t flow and certainly doesn’t segway nicely between the topics.

So, overall I did enjoy the book and I’m sure any Christian would gain much from it and find pieces that really mean something to them.  I think that people who are not very familiar with the characters and stories from the Bible will not understand many of the references and there is little explanation behind each to support it.  If you are looking to deepen your understanding of greatness and to look at principles and your character as it relates to greatness, then this book will definitely give you a great study guide with good examples and references to deepen your research on.  Each chapter even has ending questions to ask yourself or a study group questions about each topic and they would be very helpful in using this book in a group for discussion and review.

Posted by Mike King under Book Reviews | 6 Comments »

I read a lot of books and I write a lot of book reviews here at LearnThis.ca.  Nearly all of them are focused on areas I have interests and about things I want to learn more about.  As well, many of you know about my Christian faith and foundation and while I had continually been explorer deeper into many areas of personal development through books, I’ve only just started to explore more books about Christianity and faith.  So, I decided to challenge myself and so I embarked on reading the greatest book of all time.  The number one best seller every year with nearly 6 billion sold overall through time.  That’s right, I decided to read the bible start to finish within 6 months.

Reading The Entire Bible

So I started by picking a few books (of which there are 66 by the way) from the old Testament.  I’ve read all the gospels and the first few books of the bible many times before but never consistently read through many of the inner books except story by story or bit by bit.  I decided to start part way through and wrap back to the old testament to finish it so I started with Ecclesiastes.  It’s a wonderful book and actually one of my favorites now.  So many words of wisdom and things to think about I could likely read it 100 times and not understand half of what is said in it.  This is the thing that amazed me the further and further I read.  I understood far more than I ever have in reading individual stories and chapters or bible books before, but at the same time, I realized there is so much more depth and wisdom that I just barely scratched the surface of what can be learned.  There are countless passages of wisdom and things to learn from that other books really just don’t compare any more for me.  One man’s book on a subject couldn’t possibly come close to the sheer volume of things to learn in the Bible.  This is not to say I’m going to stop reading other books or value them less as they have their place as well, it just really demonstrated to me that most of the content I really love learning about in personal development roots back to the Bible and especially to Jesus by example in so many ways.  I’ve always known that but never read it first hand over and over like I did reading through in the past 8 months.  I started reading in March and finished 8 months later in October which I’m quite happy about.  I read a number of other books in between as well, especially through the summer with more vacation time and time spent out at the lake.

So I want to explore as with any book I read, some of the things to learned.  In this case, I can only begin to mention the things I learned and really its more about the general methods that I learned from, not specific elements since there is just so much content to take in.  I know I will be reading this incredible book many times over after such a great experience this time.

“Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is – his good, pleasing and perfect will.” Romans 12:1–2

Learning from Heroes

Everyone loves heroes and there are no shortage of them in the Bible.  There are a significant number of them in fact and they have so much to teach through their actions.  Everything from great acts of faith, fantastic leadership, servant hood to acts of desperation from suffering, despair and heartache.  These heroes aren’t like your everyday Pixar movie heroes though, they’re real with real scenarios, struggles and in most cases quite an amazing journey.

One of my favorite heroes is Jeremiah.  The depth of his character, his integrity and emotion portrayed is simply wonderful.  Jeremiah faced delivering a message of despair to the people of Judah due to their lack of faith in God and distance the commands of the Lord.  Of course he was rejected by the people of the land and expressed deep emotion to the pain and hardship that was brought upon him, yet all the while, he obeyed every command from God.  He was imprisoned, beaten, tossed aside, hated and wanted dead by many who knew him.  His faith kept him alive despite the harsh emotions and laments he expressed in his time of solitude. Jeremiah’s strength showed by him being completely real and expressive about his emotions and relationships.  He expressed his disappointments, his questions, his burdens.  He was authentic.  Genuine.  We don’t live an honest life like Jeremiah did, we fake our feelings, we tell little white lies to hide our true feelings and expressions.  Why can’t we be genuine like Jeremiah while still holding onto a faith in God, a hope that cannot die regardless of the suffering and despair we come across on this short earth life?  We ought to learn from Jeremiah to remember God’s compassion, seek him and wait for his grace and love.  Anyone who can exult the Lord and follow God in spite of these great grievances heart ache is a hero if you ask me.

Click here if you want to listen to a 32 min sermon and story about Jeremiah.

I’ll finish up with Part 2 tomorrow looking specifically at how The Bible teaches through storytelling, makes you look at what really matters in life and then how this relates to personal development.

Posted by Mike King under Book Reviews | 17 Comments »