I’m a huge fan of Half Priced Books. I still say hi to the employees when I come through the door, but let me tell you I look immediately for just one thing. Those lovely purple background, yellow lettered signs that say CLEARANCE. My cheap old discount tree-book Heaven!
You know why I love it so much? I read a whole friggin’ lot! I hate to see what kind of bill I’d have if I bought everything I read retail. That’s scary to imagine. But slap a $1 sticker on it? Yes, please!
Well I decided to challenge myself for 2011. I committed to reading at least 200 books throughout the entire year. 200!!! Was I nuts or what?
I did it! And I did it right. I read 213 books in 2011 and it has proved to be the year of self-growth. I think I can actually feel the extra weight all of the new brain-wrinkles added to my head. I don’t mind at all.
Maybe this doesn’t sound like much of an accomplishment to you, maybe it sounds completely and unbelievably wacko. Either way, it was a huge goal and I knocked it out of the park. This post is part celebration and part sharing.
How this Can Help You
I’ll have a post in the near future sharing some hints and tips on how to read more quickly, find what you’re looking for, and save some money doing it. All in the name of self-improvement, of course!
Below is a list of all 213 books. I’ve separated them into categories as best I could. I also added my rating in parenthesis after the author’s name (on a scale of 1 to 5, 1
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I know I’ve talked about exercises being important, but I neglected to mention moving your butt, too. Sometimes it’s easy to think things are just fine as we’re changing our minds and passions.
But how much more could you do if you changed a little on the outside, too? What kind of benefits would trading 15 minutes of Facebook time over to physical exercise time do for you?
I recently started hopping back on the Gazelle for a little over 20 minutes a day. I was feeling pretty sluggish before. Sure, the doctor checkups all look good, but I was missing something. Missing a certain bounce in my step.
I was beginning to think I had to rely a bit too much on my morning cup of coffee. Oooh how I love thee.
Tony Little is my Hero
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I have this weird habit of putting big lists of things together in Excel spreadsheets. Okay, to be fair, this usually only happens when I’m on a boring telecom, need a break from some other task, or want to see how much stuff can flow out of my mind. But still – it happens.
Another weird thing about this funky habit of mine is I tend to keep these files forever. A bunch of old CD’s collect dust in one of those folding leather case things taking up closet space.
I decided to crack the case the other day and see what interesting things would pop out. I guess it’s like going through that old shoebox of nick-nacks you had as a kid – neat and nostalgic. Do people still use shoeboxes for stuff?
The Spreadsheet of DOOM!
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I like to keep in touch with my family. My mom and I have always been close and helping out is something I enjoy doing. No, not just talking about the latest and greatest in being good family. Sometimes I like to pick up a hammer and whack a good beam or two. All in the name of good fun.
I usually bring along an audiobook to help add some learning to this usually unconscious process of tearing things to shreds. But this time was a bit different. I brought the goodies to keep my ears full of lessons, but didn’t fire them up.
I noticed something while I ripped through the walls and mounds of nails that day. A little bookmark with a big message and it got me thinking. When you turn your mind to growing, you see growth in everything.
Beware the Wasted Waiting Room
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Your life can seem like a scavenger hunt. You roam around, picking up little clues here and there, all in hopes that a final picture will come together. Without directions, or any guidance above “be better, you,” the hunt seems more like a collector’s hobby.
I want to get you away from the hobby mindset. I want to make that hobby your life. I want to help turn your journey into the path that makes you freaking awesome. Yeah, I said freaking awesome and I’ll say it again. Freaking awesome. It’s just that important to me, and it will be to you, too.
Finding out what matters is a lot like figuring out what to look for in a scavenger hunt. As soon as you’re given a list of things to look for, they are a whole heck of a lot easier to find. But if you don’t have that list of things, you have no idea of what to go after. You’ll either give up or run around chasing other people who like they know where they’re going.
I’ve got a little practice time for you. Look around where ever you’re at right now. Do you see anything special? Look for a little while and really try to notice five things that catch your eye. Please, give this a shot real quick. About how long did it take you?
Now, let’s try this practice exercise with a little more focus. Look around your area again and find five red items. How long did that take you? I’m guessing a whole heck of a lot less time.
See, that’s why focus, and knowing what matters in your life, is so important. When you know what matters
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Confidence is a huge factor in getting things done. This is especially true when it comes to making your life better. Much like riding a bike, you won’t be confident in your ability to change until you give it a shot. And sometimes that means shooting a whole lot.
Something you’ll keep seeing in self-help books, and not surprisingly the Bible, is the idea that you must fall down to get back up again. You’ve got to be shown that you aren’t able to do everything perfectly the first time through. A trial by fire is needed to ignite your life.
By working on your strengths, you will build your confidence. By learning how to grow your leadership abilities, you will make yourself a better parent, spouse, worker, and giver. By learning about better communication skills, you’ll be able to express yourself without fear. By living life with more knowledge and practice you will demolish the fear of the unknown.
What is confidence? Thinking you can do something, whether or not you have proof. Be the supplier of your own inner fuel. Work up your internal motivation and forge it into the confidence to get things done. Work on your strengths here and let that fear walk away. You don’t need it anymore.
We All Need Helping in Getting Things Done
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Commitment. Is this a scary word or what? It is both scary and very important. It’s something you’ll have to do to see any kind of change out of the things you’re interested in. Not just involvement – commitment. Let me throw a fable at you real quick.
A Pig and a Chicken are walking down the road.
The Chicken says, “Hey Pig, I was thinking we should open a restaurant!”
Pig replies, “Hm, maybe, what would we call it?”
The Chicken responds, “How about ‘BACON-N-EGGS’?”
The Pig thinks for a moment and says, “No thanks. I’d be committed, but you’d only be involved.”
Commitment. It’s about being all-in. Resolving yourself to seeing something through. That doesn’t mean you have to get the high-score, it just means you want to try.
A big help in seeing commitments through is realizing that it’s not a matter of failing or succeeding. You will always succeed – it’s just a matter of quality and time to get there. The next time you get knocked down, remember this. You didn’t fail, you just got less quality and are taking a very long time to do it. You can still make it right, if you want to.
A win is just a high quality, on-time finish. Aim for high quality and on-time, but don’t worry too much about the lesser quality, slightly-late stuff. You can still get it. Maybe it’s just time to bring out the goal-laser. Bring out the big guns when you need them.
Get ready to write yourself a note, right now, and put it up on your desk. Grab your pen (a blue felt-tip or a sharpie is a great idea), a post-it note or index card, and write this on
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Goals and goal setting – is there a topic more beat to death? I know I’ve done a post or few, and still see them popping up daily. I’ll spare you another go round, but I have something very important to point out.
You’ve probably run across a bunch of articles, books, and advice along the lines of:
- Make a gigantic to-do list and categorize by ABC/123
- Get a folder for each day and keep at it
- Make sure your goals are SMART
- Take your SMART goals further and make them RED-E
- Forget goals; don’t make goals – just live life
- What’s a goal?
I think I missed a few hundred or so. The point – there are many different tools to tackling goals. None are wrong by themselves.
You wouldn’t take a hammer to a screw, right? How about a butter knife to a steak? How about a pencil to sign your Will? You have to pick the right tool for the right job.
Think of each goal setting method as a different tool. The “forget goals – just live” approach is probably best for your vacations and fun stuff. A single, prioritized to-do list is great for home chores and duties. The SMART & RED-E approach is a laser for the extra difficult goals.
Using the SMART & RED-E method on a daily chore would drive you bonkers. It would also be equally silly to throw your life passion journey to the “oh, who knows” way.
See all of the goal methods as valid, but situational. Pick your tool for the right job. It’ll take some trial and error on your part, but it’s a heck of a lot better than
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Back in my college years, I remember spending a lot of time trying to find the right place to study. I tried the food-court and that was a big mistake. I tried the grass in the reflecting pool area and all I got were ant bites. I even tried the library only to find out they turned into hang-out zones. Whatever happened to the librarian passing around heavy shushes?
I slowly started to notice what did work and what didn’t. I realized I needed quiet, lots of space, adequate lighting, and a warm temperature (75 to 85 degrees Fahrenheit to be particular). I could get work done in any situation, but that optimal setting seemed to kick my efforts up a notch. Efforts to super-charge the experience.
Learning with the Brain in Mind
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Ready to go on an adventure? Grab your snacks, your drinks, your walking shoes, and let’s go. You’re in the middle of a thick forest and you have what you have – everything you need, for sure. Except for your destination.
There are some situations where no amount of preparation can get you over all humps. You can work on those things that you are best at, but there’s something along the way that puts a cap on your progress. You can’t go camping for a very long time without previous experience.
Do a simple internet search on strengths and you’ll find a whole lot of the same thing: “focus on your strengths and ignore your weaknesses.” A lot of the advice says to not waste your time on stuff you suck at because – well, you suck at it.
But guess what? What if your biggest weakness is holding you back from growing your best strengths? What if that one big weakness is the weak link in your success chain?
Where’s the Weakest Link?
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It takes more than a few self-help, leadership, parenting, and entrepreneur books to see a pattern. But patterns do show when you get into the thick of it all. I’ve been through hundreds of these types of books just in the last few years. Let me tell you, the outline of the “Life Story” is really showing.
Think about your favorite movies for a bit. There are probably a few that just struck you as awesome – and maybe a bit too similar to each other for comfort. There are two important features here: quality and meaning.
- Quality: how much you enjoyed the movie or how “sticky” it was.
- Meaning: how much of a “chord” it struck with you.
Did you know there are only a handful of movie story-line plots to go by? Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath boil them down to 3 main types.
- Challenge: “David vs. Goliath” — the underdog, rags-to-riches, and sheer willpower wins story.
- Connection: “Good Samaritan” — developing relationships to bridge a gap (like race, class, social).
- Creativity: “MacGyver” — someone making a mental breakthrough.
That’s it. Sure, there are some flavors that you can add to those base ingredients, but the main stories are all the same. Look back at your favorite movies again. I bet you can fit each one into one of those three plot-types when you try.
Why is this important? Because it’s you noticing a pattern. You are noticing a structure, an archetype, a formula to get things done. Being able to notice these types of patterns gives you a very powerful way to look
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 Look to the sky. See any clouds? What do you think they’re made of? Air, condensation, dust, magic, and unicorns? Chances are you’ve never checked for yourself. You had to rely on the research of someone else. And you’re perfectly fine with that.
But what in the credibility arena did it for you? Was it the authority of the person that did the research? The number of degrees they held or letters behind their name? Or maybe since you didn’t have the time or resources to check, you decided to consider others’ work as the only realistic option?
Tools to Find – Tools to Try
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“When you wake up in the morning at a quarter to five
and you just can’t wait to come alive,
You brush your teeth ch ch ch ch, ch ch ch ch….”
– Raffi
Besides the occasional slow day, how often do you forget to brush your teeth? How about comb your hair? Take a shower? Eat breakfast? Put on your seatbelt? Mow your lawn? Check your bank account? Watch “So You Want to be the Next Big Thing #7″ on TV?
Not often, I bet. For whatever reason, you have built up a habit of doing these things. You’ve gone through the learning stage and are now at the “I don’t even have to think about it anymore” stage. That’s called “unconscious competence” by the way.
This is all part of the Learning Curve. A fancy little line that shows we start off with nothing, we meet difficulty, we start to learn, and eventually we’re awesome at it. ‘It’ is everything you’ve ever learned, or tried to learn, in your life.
Expect to Try, Not to Win
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You go through different stages in life. You start out wondering if someone is going to feed you on a regular basis. Then, you gain some words and start wondering how far you can go before someone tells you to shush. Shortly after, you’re zipping around in a car and there are no adults in sight. Then you move on and get a desk-job. Life happens.
All along these stages, your expectations change. You ask yourself different questions and live your life with different rules.
A psychologist named Erik Erikson extensively studied these stages and came up with a nice summary. His results detail the age ranges, the biggest troubles for each age, what main life questions are asked, and how society plays into it all. I threw a chart together to capture the gist of his work. Below is a small piece – here’s the full Erikson Psychosocial Development Chart.
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It was the summer of 1995 when I won the world championship weight-lifting challenge. Granted, I was in a middle-range weight class, but I did it none-the-less. And can you guess the best part of the whole thing? I didn’t work out a single day of my life prior to the competition. Yup, not even a pushup. No special diets, no rigorous training plans, no real planning what so ever.
Of course, that glorious win ended after my morning alarm went off.
It just isn’t possible. No one on this planet could get any accomplishment done without putting in some real effort. Some type of work or elbow grease to get the job done. You can’t just think you’re way into a job. No amount of wishing is going to solve all of your problems.
What am I talking about? Self-Growth Exercises. Practicing what you learn to make it ‘stick’ in your life.
There are exercises all over the web and self-help books that are meant to solidify what you learn. It’s important that you attempt the exercises you come across. Not everything will seem useful, but give them a shot with a childlike curiosity. See what comes out and what you can learn. It doesn’t matter if you win or lose, but that you learn along the way.
You may run across an exercise or two that don’t seem relevant because of some weird detail. It would be better for you to change that detail to something that makes sense than to not do the exercise at all. In other words, look for ways to make the work, work. Seek to learn and apply. Application is a key to bringing good work to life.
Remember to Take a Break, Too
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Here’s What I Trust & Use
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