Don Maruska and Jay Perry’s Take Charge of Your Talent: Three Keys to Thriving in Your Career, Organization, and Life (2013) has plenty of tips for developing your skills and taking charge of your career. I’ve sketched the key points of the book below to make it easier to remember and share. Click on the image for a larger version that you can print if you want.

I liked the chapter on reflecting on your talents through a structured conversation with someone who can reflect back not only your words but also your feelings and hopes. Sometimes we don’t see the patterns in our thoughts until someone points it out to us. The questions are also good for personal reflection, and I’m looking forward to using them in my planning.

Sometimes people ask me to help them figure out what they want to do. Other books I’ve read about coaching tend to be pretty high-level, but this one gives concrete advice, including some notes anticipating potential responses or difficulties.

I also liked the chapters on creating tangible assets and sharing them with other people. That’s been a great learning- and career-booster for me, and I hope other people will try it out as well.

Among other things, the book also suggests listing at least one hundred resources (people, places, things, skills, …). Forced-length lists are great for creativity because you dig deeper than your surface answers, often coming across surprises. When you review your list, think about ways that you could make even better use of those resources. The book also suggests taking a look at your top 10 resources and working towards 100% use of them, which will be an interesting challenge. The third related exercise is to combine different resources so that you can break through obstacles or come up with interesting mash-ups – forced association, another great creativity technique. I like this reminder to apply creativity so that you can recognize and make the most of your resources, which allows you to MacGyver your way to growth.

Want the book? You can buy it from Amazon (affiliate link) or check out their website at .

Like this sketch? Check out sketchedbooks.com for more. Feel free to share – it’s under the Creative Commons Attribution License, like the rest of my blog.

Enjoy!

Do you talk about what you do and how you do it? Or do you start with why you do the things you do and why this matters? In Start With Why (2009), Simon Sinek writes about how great companies have a clear purpose and identity that inspires employees and earns customer loyalty. Here’s my sketch of the key points from the book so that they’re easier to review or share. Click on the image to view or download a high-resolution version that you can print.

What are my whys?

• Visual thinking
  • My selfish reason for visual thinking is because I want to be able to learn, think, and remember more effectively, so that I can live a better life.
  • My altruistic reason for sharing visual thinking is because there are lots of people who enjoy learning from drawings more than text or audio or video. I want to share how I’m learning, but more than that, I want to inspire people to take these techniques and use them for their own. From the resources I share, people can see that you don’t need to draw particularly well in order to use doodling as a way to explore the world or untangle your thoughts.
• Emacs
  • My selfish reason for Emacs is because I have fun tweaking my editing environment and doing so helps me work better. It tickles my brain. In addition, helping the Emacs community thrive contributes to the longevity of Emacs, which means it will keep growing, which means I probably won’t have to switch to some other tool in the future. (Planning-ahead Sacha plans ahead!)
  • My altruistic reason for Emacs is because I think something incredible happens when you take control of your tools, shaping them to fit your needs, expanding your imagination along the way. I want to help people become intermediate users and power users because I’m curious about what they’ll build for themselves and what they can share with other people. Also, the Emacs community has awesome people. =)
• Experimenting
  • My selfish reason for experimenting (lifestyle, semi-retirement, business, ideas, etc.) is so that I can figure out what works well for me.
  • My altruistic reason for sharing my experiments is to encourage other people to question their assumptions, look for ways to test their hypotheses, and gradually shape a life that fits them well. Come to think of it, it’s similar to why I like helping people personalize Emacs. If I can help people explore the possibilities in their life, we might come across interesting ideas along the way.

What are your whys? Why do you do what you do, and why does that matter?

So I was reading through J. B. Rainsberger's site because I liked his blog post on Productivity for the Depressed, which I mentioned in my post on learning slack. His about page had this nugget that made me stop and think. He wrote:

I have found over the years that many companies request training when they need coaching, and request coaching when they need training. Tim Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Work makes the distinction very well:

• training focuses on increasing capacity
• coaching focuses on reducing interference
• performance is capacity minus interference.

Reducing interference. Huh.

I've been curious about coaching. I haven't quite made the jump because I'm a cheapskate who's accustomed to introspection and who's flexible about motivation. I figured I might as well see how far I can get exploring on my own, yeah?

But I know there are times I get in my own way, and I know that I probably don't know even half of the times that happens. Interference.

So here's what W. Timothy Gallwey's The Inner Game of Work says:

I like this book. The author shares many examples of how paying attention to tiny details can help you learn more effectively, and how a coach's role isn't to provide answers but rather to help draw the student's awareness to the right things and encourage them to trust in their own learning process. The book is useful not only for individual change but also for group change.

The Self 1 / Self 2 distinction resonated with how I've been thinking about motivation. It reminds me a little of the driver (Self 1) / elephant (Self 2) metaphor used in Chip and Dan Heath's Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard. The answer to internal conflict isn't “try harder,” it's to understand better and give yourself the time and attention you need.

I'm paying closer attention to the skills I want to develop. I'm practising more deliberately and with more focus. And when my Self 1 pipes up with “Shouldn't you be doing something else instead?” or “Let's go find someone with all the answers who can tell us what to do!”, I tell it, “It's okay. Self 2's got this. We're learning how to learn, and everything is going to be okay.”

This still leaves me uncertain about getting an actual coach instead of asking myself questions from books. Since I can see big areas for improvement even on my own, I figure I'd go for the low-hanging fruit and keep going until I hit diminishing returns. Maybe someday. In the meantime, this book has given me a few things to think about.

If you're curious, you can check out more reviews of this book on Amazon: The Inner Game of Work: Focus, Learning, Pleasure, and Mobility (affiliate link)

Tom Morris' The Stoic Art of Living: Inner Resilience and Outer Results (2004) collects easy-to-read quotes from Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. The author glues the quotes together with commentary, providing context and suggestions for interpretation.

I like the author's quotes from ancient philosophers, as other translations can feel stuffy. It's a decent overview of interesting thoughts, and you can follow the ideas to their sources. The book can feel a little light, though. There's something about the succession of quotes and topics that makes me feel like I'm bobbing up and down on a surface.

For comparison, I feel that William Braxton Irvine's A Guide to the Good Life (2009) goes into greater depth for fewer concepts. Ryan Holiday's The Obstacle is the Way reads more like a modern self-help book inspired by Stoicism, without as many quotes as this book.

If you've read a lot about Stoicism (and especially from the three philosophers featured here), you probably won't find a lot of new ideas here. However, you might pick up some good phrasings and ways to think about those ideas. As Pierre Hadot wrote in Philosophy as a Way of Life: “Ancient philosophy was designed to be memorized, so that it could be ‘at hand' when we are confronted with tumultuous situations.” Maybe you'll find the quotes in this book easy to hang on to. Enjoy!

If you want, you can check out the books on Amazon:

• The Stoic Art of Living
• A Guide to the Good Life
• The Obstacle is the Way
• Philosophy as a Way of Life

I get a small commission if you buy the books through those links, but getting them from the library is totally okay too. =) Have fun!

Amy Hoy and Alex Hillman wrote, published, and launched Just Fucking Ship in 24 hours, using a Trello board and an outline to quickly whip up this short reminder to stop procrastinating and get something out the door. They're halfway through editing it and will post updates through Gumroad, so if you buy the book, you can watch it evolve.

I've sketched the key points of the book below to make it easier to remember and share. Click on the image to view or download a high-resolution version that you can print or reuse.

The principle I'm focusing on is #7: Start with atoms. I'm comfortable with making small pieces now: an outline, a blog post, a sketch. I'm working on getting better at assembling those pieces into molecules, and eventually I'll be able to turn those molecules into rocketships. Eventually. But in the meantime, I can push more things out there.

I've been sorting out my EPUB/MOBI workflow by putting stuff up on Gumroad, like the Emacs Chat transcript collection. (Incomplete, but that's what updates are for.) This will help me Ship More Stuff.

Today I noticed an opportunity for wordplay. The domain was available, so I jumped on it. Shipped.

It occurred to me that Sketched Book is a fun thing to call a visual book summary / sketchnote. So: http://sketchedbooks.com =)

— Sacha Chua (@sachac) December 12, 2014

Ship. Get your stuff out there, incomplete and in progress, because you'll learn more from the feedback than you will from stewing on it by yourself. And if it flops? Don't worry. You'll do another one, and another one, and another one, and you'll learn.

Want the e-book? You can buy it at Just Fucking Ship (Amy Hoy, Alex Hillman; 2004). You'll get a PDF and updates. (Amusingly, no physical shipping involved.)

Like this sketch? Check out sketchedbooks.com for more. For your convenience, this post can be found at sketchedbooks.com/jfs. Feel free to share – it's under the Creative Commons Attribution License, like the rest of my blog.

(Incidentally, I've quoted Amy Hoy before – see my post on Learning slack for another reflection on writing, productivity, and motivation.)

Mastery (by Robert Greene) is a book about discovering your calling, creating your own apprenticeship, and building mastery. It lists different strategies you can take, although the strategy names are often esoteric – you'll need to read the stories in order to figure out what they mean. Anyway, if you do make it through the book, here's a one-page summary to help you remember parts of it.

There are other books on this topic that I like a little more. Cal Newport's So Good They Can't Ignore You is more approachable. Still, Mastery was a decent reminder of the value of apprenticeship, and the stories were interesting. I particularly liked the anecdote about Michael Faraday (as in Faraday's law and Faraday cages), who apparently used sketchnotes to network with Humphry Davy. Faraday took copious, well-organized notes of Davy's lectures, and gave them to him as a gift. That started a mentoring relationship, and Faraday became Davy's lab assistant and amanuensis. Some interesting details can be found at Science Shorts and Academia.edu . I think that picking up yet another historical role model for awesome note-taking made reading Mastery worth it for me. =)

I don't sketchnote every book I read or receive, but sometimes it's good to take some time to think about a book even if I don't agree with everything in it.

This sketch (like practically everything else on my blog) is available under the Creative Commons Attribution License, so feel free to download, share, remix or reuse it. =)

From the title (“Conscious” and “Millionaire,” oh dear), to the name-dropping of quantum physics as a way of justifying a “Law of Attraction,” to the membership site that will be $97/month ($9.97/month if you sign up early), this book clearly belongs to a genre of books I tend to avoid. Those kinds of books are great for a lot of people who need inspiration and push. I'm happy for them. Me, I prefer my business advice delivered with a different approach. But I agree with many things in this book, and I'm looking forward to going through the reflection exercises in depth.

I like how Conscious Millionaire focuses on building a business for profit and purpose. I've been thinking about this because of my experiment with semi-retirement. People want to pay me for things like sketchnotes, book notes, visual coaching, consulting, programming, writing, sharing, illustration… It would be easy to say yes, but that often distracts me from the things I want to explore. One way I compromise is through buying back all the time that I spend earning. My experiments with delegation are paying off. In many cases, these systems let me do more than I could do on my own. And in the rest of my discretionary time, I really like this casual, minimal-commitment, flow-based life. I work on whatever I want to whenever I want to, and I still get stuff done.

My expenses are covered by savings and investments, and I live generally unambitious sort of life. Or a differently-ambitious one, at least–I wanted freedom, so I got it. I actively avoid the hedonic treadmill of consumption. I'm not particularly interested in business for the sake of earning more. I am, however, interested in building systems for leverage so that I can make the world a little better. I think of building businesses as taking the kinds of results that people want from me and packaging the processes so that other people can benefit: customers, team members, other stakeholders, and so on. That would be worth spending time on.

So that's what I'm getting out of this book: thinking about building businesses like those would be like, visualizing larger scales, and moving towards those visions with conscious, focused actions.

Before I dig into those reflections, there's a section in here about people who don't charge enough for their services. I want to explore that a little further.

Unfortunately, some amazingly talented and good-hearted people erroneously think they should not charge when they use their passion, purpose, and strengths to help others. … It results from thinking or believing that it is wrong to charge money whenever your actions express your purpose.

I have no qualms about charging high rates for my consulting. For everything else–especially things that can scale up over years, like books–I like using a free/pay-what-you-want strategy. It always pleasantly boggles me when people happily pay $15 for something they could get for free. Don't worry, it's all part of my evil plan. Mwahahaha. It means ideas spread and tribes grow. I figure that if people like all the free awesomeness, we can harness that good karma for something. In the meantime, I'm learning a lot from people in the process of sharing, and I love the feeling of interacting based on abundance instead of transactions.

Besides, the bottleneck for my scaling up isn't time, or even money. If I earned a hundred times as much from online publishing, or scaled up my consulting to have a higher rate or more hours, what would change? I would probably delegate more so that I could help more people create opportunities for themselves. I can already do that with what I have. So I think the real bottleneck is understanding: learning more about what people need, learning more about what I want to share. You can't throw money at that bottleneck. You can only get through by paying attention.

And that, I guess, is why Conscious Millionare might be worth reading. It's peppered with lots of reflection topics and practical advice. If the community and the coaching takes off, that might be worthwhile as a way to compare notes with other people. Like all self-help books, you gotta get out and push. The one-page summary I put together (see the top of this post) might be handy for remembering key points, but you'll get even further if you do the work. I'm looking forward to starting with those three-year visualizations, and then we'll see where this goes from there. If you pick this up, tell me what you think too.

• Affiliate links (some commission): Conscious Millionaire, paperback – Kindle (seems to be $2.99 at the moment)
• Non-affiliate links: Conscious Millionaire, paperback – Kindle

Disclaimer: I received a review copy from the author, who is an actual millionaire from things that are not books about how to become a millionaire. He started with a trucking company, so that's a point in his favour.