A summary of things you should know about The Happiness of Pursuit according to Chris Guillebeau: Introduction In this episode Chris Guillebeau takes a deep dive into his book, TheRead More
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]]>In this episode Chris Guillebeau takes a deep dive into his book, The Happiness of Pursuit where he reveals how anyone can bring meaning into their life by undertaking a quest.
In his book, Guillebeau shares his journey around the world where he found ordinary people doing extraordinary things and reveals their secret motivations. The goal of the book is to challenge you to take control of your life and help you find what it is that makes your life count.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who not only want to make money doing things that they love, but want to make an ever-lasting difference throughout their lives.
Special note: In celebration of the 100th episode of The Entrepreneurs Library we are giving away free books. Lots of them! Listen for the special announcement inside the episode for more details.
It’s not primarily an “entrepreneurial” book. It’s something that’s much more about creating meaning and purpose in our lives. This book is much more about the meaning behind why I started a business and part of the reason was because I value freedom. I valued that freedom because it allowed me to do other things.
It’s probably easier to start at the beginning and read all the way through.
There is something greater out there and a calling for all of us and the more we take steps toward it, the easier it becomes. Don’t stop or ignore that calling.
In the beginning of the book I started with a story of me going to Guinea-Bissau in West Africa. After many obstacles and difficulty of getting there I begin to really ask myself why I am going through the trouble. It was then that I reminded myself that I am honoring this quest that I have chosen to go on and decided to finish it. I realized along the way that the greatest thing that came out of this adventure had nothing to do with be but rather from all the great people I met throughout the journey.
I begin talking about others who took on a quest and share their success stories. I talk about this guy who took on the four year MIT Computer Science Curriculum which is supposed to be one of the most difficult computer science curriculum and he did it in one year. I talk about why he did that and what he learned through that process. I also talk about a guy who walked across America and a guy who produced the world’s largest symphony. Throughout the book there are 50 stories that try to draw the reader in.
I organize the book around three sections. The first section is Beginnings. This section talks a little bit about my journey and about how people come to a quest. Each quest should involve challenge, difficulty and a possibility of failure. I talk about how a lot of people are discontented and that’s how they come to their quest.
The second section of the book is called Journey. In this section there are a lot more stories and it looks at the values that these people have. I not only tell the stories but also what we can learn from it and how we can apply it to our own lives. I tried to focus on what I call everyday adventure and showing how people can cultivate the value of adventure in their own lives even if they aren’t ready to do it just yet. I talk about how people do these quests, how much money it cost and how much time it takes. I try to help people strategically craft a quest for their life no matter who they are or what their situation is.
The last section is called destination and that is about arrivals. I talk about when I came to the end of my quest and what exactly that was like. Often that moment can be bitter sweet so I show the ready how to process that and give advice on what to do next.
In all three sections I am essentially trying to give the reader tools for how they apply this in their own life and their own pursuit. My goal in writing this book is for the reader to walk away and take action. I want inspiration combined with action.
“It’s better to be at the bottom of a ladder you want to climb than the top of one you don’t.” – Steven Kellogg
I am a writer, traveler and entrepreneur. I have spent the past 10 and ½ years on a personal quest to visit every country in the world. I also wrote a few other books which are The $100 Startup and The Art of Non-Conformity.
This was probably my most personal book yet. It took me a little bit longer to write than the other two. I came to this 10 and ½ year journey and as you might imagine that was such an incredible experience for me personally. And so when it came time to write about it I didn’t want to just write a travel memoir but I wanted to look at something deeper. The model that we used for The $100 Startup was essentially a case study model of looking at all kinds of people who have started a business without going in to debt and without going to business school. I really liked that model because we pulled out all these different examples and showed how people had done it very specifically. I use this same model for The Happiness of Pursuit, and I look at all kinds of people who have taken a quest and try to understand why they did it and learn about their obstacles along the way. The goal was not just to provide a bunch of stories the goal was to present this agenda to the reader. Ultimately the focus of the book is on the reader and why a venture can be a good value for our lives.
Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder
Wishcraft by Barbara Sher
Buy The Happiness of Pursuit by Chris Guillebeau on Amazon today
Visit ChrisGuillebeau.com to learn more about Chris and his books
Follow Chris Guillebeau on Twitter and Facebook
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: The Greatness Zone by Hal Elrod | Dream Year by Ben Arment | Vision to Reality by Honree Corder
Relevant advice and tips: 7 Signs That You Have What It Takes to Be An Entrepreneur | 5 Personal Qualities That Make Up A Lifestyle Entrepreneur
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Body of Work according to Pamela Slim Introduction In this episode Pamela Slim shares her book, Body of Work, where she givesRead More
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Body of Work according to Pamela Slim
In this episode Pamela Slim shares her book, Body of Work, where she gives you the tools to tie your story together in order to have a meaningful career.
In her book, Slim teaches you how to find the right connections for your accomplishments, sell your story, and continually reinvent and re-launch your personal brand. The goal of this book is to guide you through today’s complex career landscape to better understand the importance of the work you do.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who are struggling to understand their true passion while working multiple jobs and need a way to find fulfillment, joy, and inner peace.
On one hand it really is a different way of looking at work. I am the kind of coach were I feel fiercely passionate about not being totally prescriptive. I feel so strongly that people need to be designing a life and work situation that fits for them and their particular situation. I think it’s easy to be prescriptive sometimes and tell people what to do and I didn’t want to do that with this book and it’s what sets it apart.
I wrote it to have real stories of real people who are demonstrating the key skills that I talk about. I wanted to make it interesting to read, engaging and conceptually understandable which is why a lot of people tend to read it all the way through first to understand how the pieces fit together. It is a way of looking at the world of work that may not make too much sense if you jump in in the middle of it.
The heart of the book for me is to create and innovate. When we are able to clearly define what it is that we want to create that is the skill that will be the most important for you as an entrepreneur. It’s also very important to share your story.
The first chapter lays out the overall concept of Body of Work. My premise is that our body of work is everything that we create, contribute, affect and impact throughout the course of our lives.
Then we begin to dive in piece by piece at what you can examine in order to build the body of what is going to be personally meaningful and significant and also have a good impact in the world. The piece of that is defining your roots which are identifying your values, beliefs and the problems that you want to solve. We go through a process of the things that are going to drive your work forward.
The second piece is name your ingredients and this is where you go in to understanding specifically your skills, strengths and experiences.
From there we go in and explore different work modes.
That moves us in to create and innovate which is to me the heart and body of work. I think that we realize our potential and contribute the most when we are creating specific projects.
The next section is what I call Surf the Fear. If there is one thing I know over working 20 years with people around their work lives is that any kind of change and transition involves fear, doubt and uncertainty. I do not believe that we need to ignore or crush fear but rather learn to harness positive components of fear.
The next chapter is on collaborating and this is a skill that is so useful and important. It covers everything from collaborating with our market and it’s also about being very specific about how you are collaborating with people in order to strengthen yourself.
The next to the last session is on your definition of success. This is where I have seen many people fall into unhappiness which is where they are not conscious about what truly defines success for them in their life and business. This chapter focuses on how you can create a definition of success that really works for you and makes you happy while you are building it.
The final chapter is about sharing your story. Once you do have this very clear understanding about the work you want to do, your unique strengths, your purpose and why you are doing the work, you have a strong consistent story. One thing that I find with many entrepreneurs who have many interests is they have a hard time explaining exactly who they are and what they do. You need to figure out a way to take all of your diverse ingredients and offerings and communicate it in such a way that people can clearly understand what you do.
“But I say to you that when you work you fulfill a part of earth’s furthest dream assigned to you when that dream was born and in keeping yourself with labor you are in truth loving life. And to love life through labor is to be intimate with life’s inmost secret.” –Kahlil Gibran
I am a speaker, writer, business coach and a very happy mom. I have spent time in just about every work mode that you can possible imagine. I spent time as an employee, a nonprofit professional, volunteer executive director, a consultant and independent business coach. I find great joy and interest in figuring out how people express themselves through their work.
My inspiration came from the work that I was doing specifically for about nine years which was working with people who were in corporate jobs that wanted to leave and start a business. Operating in the startup phase for nine years I began to see specific gaps and things that were missing from the way of framework for understanding the new world of work.
Resonate by Nancy Duarte
Buy Body of Work by Pamela Slim on Amazon today
Visit PamelaSlim.com to learn more about Pamela and join her mailing list
Follow Pamela Slim on Twitter and Facebook
Download the full transcript here
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: Own Your Future by Paul B Brown | Dream Year by Ben Arment | Hello My Name is Awesome by Alexandra Watkins
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Dream Year according to Ben Arment Introduction In this episode Ben Arment shares his insights on turning your dreams into reality withRead More
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]]>In this episode Ben Arment shares his insights on turning your dreams into reality with his book Dream Year. Over the course of 11 chapters, Arment gives you a practical guide for defining your dream, creating a business model, and a financial plan so entrepreneurs like you can market, grow, and sustain your new idea as a business. This is not a book about pursuing a hobby, this book is about helping you turn your passion into something that can be monetized.
I spend a lot of time at the beginning of the book showing people how their passion or their ideas are rooted in their past. I don’t know many business books that start that early on in an entrepreneur’s journey but I really do believe that the greatest ideas come from experiences when we were children.
I don’t want dreamers, makers or entrepreneur’s to believe that you have to be special in order to work for yourself or launch your own business. I think what Dream Year will do is it will demystify dreaming and it will break down the process of bringing a great idea to life in to very actionable, practical steps.
The first chapter is called Daring to Dream and it is dealing with all of the issues that keep people away from pursuing their ideas. It talks about fear, risks and all of the things that frighten people about pursuing an idea.
The next chapter is called Defining the Dream and that is really about looking back at your history and realizing your dream didn’t just start now but it’s something you can trace back to your childhood.
The third chapter is called Your Idea Model and I call it that because not everybody wants to start a business. It’s helping people understand that the world is too full of ideas, what you need is a new idea model. It’s basically taking an idea that other people might be familiar with but flipping it on its head. When you create a new expression of that idea or new offering, it removes the competition, it reinvents the industry and it offers a really unique experience to the world.
Chapter four is called Your Financial Model and this is the backbone of the book. This is not a book about pursuing a hobby, this book is about helping you turn your passion in to something that can be monetized. I have this expression that goes a great idea is a spreadsheet with skin on, and that is really about helping people understand what the financial model of it will be long before it launches. The goal is to make a profit and to make sure that the effort you put in to it is worth it financially.
Chapter five is called Executing the Dream and it’s the notion that every dreamer, every entrepreneur is made up of two people. You got ordinary you and you also got CEO you. Most of us go through life living as ordinary you. We have bosses who tell us what to do or we have teachers in school that guide our learning and there really has to come a moment in our life when we decide that we’re going to take the reins. We have got to turn ourselves in to someone more capable in order to achieve our goals.
Chapter six is called The Big Ask and it is all about rain making. It’s about the idea that revenue is important to bringing your dream to life and the only way that is ever going to happen is if you get in to the business of making asks of people.
Chapter seven is called Branding the Dream. Branding the Dream is about crafting what you are offering to the world is. Not just what the idea is but how it will engage with the world and what kind of experience will you give your customers. It’s not just the logo, it’s not just the website, it’s how you answer the phone and it’s the total user experience. Steve Jobs once said that branding is not just your logo, it is customer service.
Chapter eight is called Building your Platform and it’s the fact that if you have a great idea, it doesn’t really matter if no one is aware of it. It’s important that we as entrepreneur’s, we as dreamers, build a platform of people while we are also constructing our business.
Chapter nine is called Marketing the Dream. Marketing is about creating demand for the dream, sales is about trying to convince people to buy something that they don’t really want. We talk about how you create demand for your dream, how you frame it in such a way so that people really want it. The goal of this chapter is to help people craft a property that excites people and builds demand for what you do.
Chapter ten is called Growing the Business. It’s about building the business and for a lot of people to get their business to work, they have to continue to adjust it, adapt it and change it.
The final chapter is called Sustaining the Dream and it’s about encouraging the entrepreneur to not quit. I think some of the most successful businesses in history have been those who have suffered early failures and they just didn’t quit. This chapter is where I feel like my gifts as a writer shine.
“From 30 thousand feet creating looks like art, from ground level it’s a to-do list.” – Ben Arment
“If it doesn’t work out quite the way you want it, you can always get another job, you can always rebuild your savings, you can get your dignity back but you can never recover what you never tried at all.” – Ben Arment
I am the founder of an organization called Dream Year and we coach people in pursuing their passions and helping them turn them in to businesses.
Years ago I was blogging and actively logging my experiences, starting businesses and launching projects and I began getting a lot of e-mails from people asking how I did it. I found myself answering all of their questions in the exact same way and realized after a year of this that there was a need for someone to lay out what it looks like to bring a business to life. I began coaching people for about 4 or 5 years and all of my writing, e-mails and research yielded this beautiful book. It’s the combination of nearly five year of work and I am excited for people to read it.
The Alchemist by Paul Coelho
The E-myth Revisited by Michael Gerber
Buy Dream Year by Ben Arment on Amazon today
Visit DreamYear.net to learn more about Ben’s company and his book
Follow Ben Arment on Twitter
Download the full transcript here
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland | Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success by Shane Snow | Own Your Future by Paul Brown
Relevant advice and tips: 5 Important Things That Every Entrepreneur Needs To Know About Starting a New Business
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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]]>Latest Books For Entrepreneurs in August 2014 The Entrepreneurs Library presents the latest books for entrepreneurs in August 2014. These books are brand new to the market and the authorsRead More
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]]>Latest Books For Entrepreneurs in August 2014
The Entrepreneurs Library presents the latest books for entrepreneurs in August 2014. These books are brand new to the market and the authors are in line to share their insights with me. Stay tuned this month for the release of the interviews with these great books and the authors.
The Art of Shouting Quietly: A Guide to Self-Promotion for Introverts and Other Quiet Souls by Pete Mosley
The Art Of Shouting Quietly is about helping people name the beasts that hold them back – and to systematically engage with and overcome them.
This book illustrates how this can be done – with insights into what the blocks actually are, how to take responsibility for them, and how to stop blaming others for your own lack of progress. Every reader, I’m sure, will find something in the content that they will relate strongly to in respect of the obstacles and challenges in their own life.
With a solid foundation beneath it, however, confidence becomes significantly harder to rock and easier to recover when it is shaken. These foundations have many components – many more than I list here – but here are the most important ones.
Learn more about Pete Mosley | Buy The Art of Shouting Quietly on Amazon
The Creative Problem Solver: 12 Smart Tools To Solve Any Business Challenge by Ian Atkinson
Every business faces problems, and yours is no exception. Using proven, innovative techniques from some major players in the business world, this is the go-to book for every professional who wants to find better answers to their business challenges.
With its 12 simple yet powerful tools, The Creative Problem Solver will arm you with all the skills you need to not only conquer your business conundrums, but to take your thinking to an inspiring new level so you can create exciting, game-changing outcomes from the problems you face.
Each problem-solving tool is practical, effective and clearly explained so you can quickly see it will help you to:
“Hugely practical, gives you powerful new ways to think… a godsend for cracking business challenges.” — Dean Lamble, Managing Director, SunLife
Learn more about Ian Atkinson | Buy The Creative Problem Solver on Amazon
Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares
The number one traction mistake founders and employees make is not dedicating as much time to developing traction as they do developing product. This shortsighted approach has startups eventually trying random tactics — some ads, a blog post or two — in an unstructured way that will most likely fail.
We developed our traction framework called Bullseye with the help of the founders behind several of the biggest companies and organizations in the world like Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Alexis Ohanian (Reddit), Paul English (Kayak.com) and Alex Pachikov (Evernote). We interviewed over forty successful founders and researched countless more traction stories — pulling out the repeatable tactics and strategies they used to get traction.
Learn more about Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares | Buy Traction on Amazon
Dream Year by Ben Arment
What if someone could guide you, step-by-step, as you identify, plan, and launch your dream career—in just one year. That’s what Ben Arment does in his transformative coaching class, which has helped hundreds of people reinvent their lives to enjoy greater enthusiasm and fulfillment while also making a living.
Now he’s sharing his best insights, advice, and inspiring true stories in Dream Year. You’ll find out how people just like you are discovering (or rediscovering) what they were truly born to do, then following a proven process to make it real. And you’ll meet men and women such as . . .
There’s no dream too big to be beyond the power of the Dream Year process.
“The employee mind-set is disappearing like the factories where it was born. We’ll all expire if we wait for some force outside ourselves—business or government—to bring us jobs or teach us who we are or how we ought to live. Ben Arment’s Dream Year is a powerful launching pad for that mental reboot. Start here.” —Steven Pressfield, author of The War of Art, Do the Work, and The Legend of Bagger Vance
Learn more about Ben Arment | Buy Dream Year on Amazon
The New Entrepreneurz: Changing the Way You Play Life by Ronen Gafni and Simcha Gluck
The New Entrepreneurz provides a game-changing game-based approach to molding your mind and developing a fresh entrepreneurial mentality that focuses on working smart & on collaborative winning.
Advocating not for simple change, but for total transformation, this revolutionary resource provides a powerful platform to shift the paradigm for all those interested in running a smart purpose driven business.
The book offers:
Ronen Gafni and Simcha Gluck take you on the adventures of The New Entrepreneurz through sharing their own unique story of FreshBiz. From the sleepless night that Ronen first conceived of the game-changing board game to the now international company impacting tens of thousands around the globe.
Learn more about Ronen Gafni and Simcha Gluck | Buy The New Entrepreneurz on Amazon
What are you reading this month? Feel free to comment below or engage with me on Facebook and Twitter.
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