Chris Guillebeau was in Milwaukee last night as part of his $100 Startup tour. The full room of people who traveled from as far as Chicago got exactly what they hoped for: Hearing Chris share some of the most interesting stories from the book, a discussion of idea navigation, free copies of his book, and personalized signing by Chris. What they also got was a great space, cupcakes, Milwaukee Beer, and pizza arranged by the great folks at Translator.

Appropriately enough, Translator is a company whose story would fit right into the $100 Startup. Like many people/companies profiled in Chris’ book, they learned that starting with an idea or plan can be helpful, but once you get going, things change, and you have to be open and creative enough to see where needs are, and how to apply your skills to fulfill those needs.

The great thing is, any of us can think about business in this way, whether we’re entrepreneurs, or not. But for some people, this might be the book that helps get them to take the step into the great unknown of doing their own thing.

So, what are you waiting for? Pick up a copy of Chris’ book and get started with your own venture today.

Thanks again to Chris for making the trip here, and Translator for providing the space for us all to come to!

AUSTIN KLEON
Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative
Wednesday, May 9th
12:00pm-2:00pm

Hosted by our friends at:
Translator
415 E Menomonee St, Milwaukee

Steal, you say? Well, while we’re not advocating criminal acts, we do want to invite you to a very interesting discussion with Austin Kleon, who talks about creativity, visual thinking, and being
an artist online. Some of you may have also seen him in The Wall
Street Journal, The Economist, PBS, at TEDx and SXSW, or heard him on NPR. Regardless, if you’re involved in creativity in
any way, this event will bring you insight into how to tap inspiration in more powerful ways.

The first 20 registrants will receive a FREE copy of Austin’s book.

There are two options for registration: Free, or with lunch ($12). Choose your path by CLICKING HERE.

Hope to see you there!

“DEAR BOSS,

I’m writing to let you know that your services are no longer required. Thanks for everything, but I’ll be doing things my own way now.“

Imagine that today is your final day of working for anyone other than yourself. What if—very soon, not in some distant, undefined future—you prepare for work by firing up a laptop in your home office, walking into
a storefront you’ve opened, phoning a client who trusts you for helpful advice, or otherwise doing what you want instead of what someone tells you to do?

All over the world, and in many different ways, thousands of people are doing exactly that. They are rewriting the rules of work, becoming their own bosses, and creating a new future.

Whether you have an idea you think could become a full time venture, or are an entrepreneur looking for fresh inspiration, join us as we welcome Chris Guillebeau on tour with his newest book, The $100 Startup! Chris will talk about ideas and research from the book and hold an open discussion about how everyone in the audience might make the leap into entrepreneurship. Details below…

CHRIS GUILLEBEAU
Monday, May 21
5:30 – 7:30pm
Presented by Translator and KnowledgeBlocks

Translator
415 E Menomonee St.
Milwaukee, WI

Admission is FREE but you must CLICK HERE TO REGISTER!

Chris Guillebeau is host of the World Domination Summit, an international gathering of creative people, and author of The Art of Non-Conformity. His main website, chrisguillebeau.com, is visited by more than 300,000 people per month.

Hope to see you there, Milwaukee!

You know this book is about Google the minute you lay your eyes on its cover. The title Search Inside Yourself showcased in the familiar font and primary colors of that online monolith.

And yet there is no mention of Google anywhere in the title. Instead, the subtitle reads, surprisingly: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace.) And the author’s name is not Eric Schmidt (though he has a blurb at the bottom) but Chade-Meng Tan.

So what is the connection? Chade-Meng Tan is Google’s Jolly Good Fellow. Yup, that’s his job title. And the description of that job is to “Enlighten minds, open hearts, create world peace.” After many years in engineering helping make Google’s search engine what it is, Meng (as he is called throughout the book) “currently serves with Google’s Talent Team.”

So is this a book about Google or self-development? Well, it’s kind of a hybrid. Meng explains: “This book is based on the Search Inside Yourself curriculum at Google.” But the goal of the curriculum, both for Google and for the reading public, is to share “methods for developing…an extraordinarily capable mind….”

Meng doesn’t shy away from making some steep guarantees:

You will find many things in this book that are very useful for you, and some things that may even surprise you. For example, you will learn how to calm your mind on demand. Your concentration and creativity will improve. You will perceive your mental and emotional processes with increasing clarity. You will discover that self-confidence is something that can arise naturally from in a trained mind. You will learn to uncover your ideal future and develop the optimism and resilience necessary to thrive.

To do all this, the Search Inside Yourself curriculum happens in three steps. The first two are:

1. Attention Training: The idea is to train attention to create a quality of mind that is calm and clear at the same time.

2. Self-knowledge and self-mastery: Use your trained attention to create high-resolution perception into your own cognitive and emotive processes.

These are both intriguing, but it is step three that really caught my attention:

3. Creating useful mental habits: Imagine whenever you meet anybody, your habitual, instinctive first thought is, I wish for this person to be happy.

This struck me like a bolt of lightning. I’m not kidding (and yes, I just used a really uninspired simile, but it’s what came to mind.) It is not that I wish ill of the people I meet; instead, when I meet someone else, I rarely think of them at all. Instead, I suppose I’m thinking about me. My “habitual, instinctive first thought is” something closer to “I hope I don’t say anything stupid,” or “Am I dressed well enough?” or even “Say something clever, for god’s sake, Sally.” I approach most meetings from this kind of defensive position, maybe because I’m much more comfortable meeting people via a keyboard and screen versus a smile and a handshake.

Now let’s revisit Meng’s words from above: “You will discover that self-confidence is something that can arise naturally from in a trained mind.”

Ok! I’m sold. Clearly this is something I can improve on. Let’s dig in.

The first few chapters attend to the basics. First, the value of emotional intelligence (there is also a foreward by Daniel Goleman so EQ/EI is an important aspect of this process), then, as any good yogi knows, the value of the breath, and third, the value of meditation’s resultant mindfulness–and how to hang on to that mindfulness even when you aren’t meditating.

Chapter Four is titled “All-Natural, Organic Self-Confidence.” Meng writes, “This chapter is about looking within ourselves. If the whole chapter can be encapsulated in a single word, that word is clarity. Deepening self-awareness is about developing clarity within oneself. There are two specific qualities we like to develop–resolution and vividness….” In the following paragraph he explains the value: “This combination will give us very useful high-fidelity information about our emotional life.” Developing this kind of awareness is a practice and doing body scans (for emotion) and journaling are part of the process. But to what end? To learn that “We are not our emotions.” Which helps us calm ourselves as we drive in rush hour traffic, as we talk with an irate customer, or, as we meet people for the first time and need not let the nervousness take over.

While the first section of chapters–a hundred pages or so–may focus on the individual and how each of us can fine-tune our minds and attain a greater level of self-awareness, the second half of the book hews more closely to traditional business book material in that it applies this new practice to such topics as, “Making Profits, Rowing Across Oceans, and Changing the World: The Art of Self-Motivation” and “Being Effective and Loved at the Same Time: Leadership and Social Skills.”

Meng closes Search Inside Yourself with “Three Easy Steps to World Peace,” in which he explains how the resolution to that eternal pursuit may indeed lie in meditation and the inner happiness that results from it.

Hence, in a serious way that is almost comical, the key active ingredient in the formula for world peace may be something as simple as meditation. It’s such a simple solution to such an intractable problem, it is almost absurd. Except it may actually work.

To that end, Meng started with himself, then developed the Search Inside Yourself curriculum (a name indeed meant to be humorous) at Google beginning in 2007, and is now ready to spread the good word. “It has become effective enough that we are now ready to “open source” it and make it accessible outside Google. This book is part of that effort.”

Search Inside Yourself will be on-sale April 24, 2012.

As I was writing this blog post, the Michael Jackson song, Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ (click on the link to be transported to 1987), popped into my head. Let me explain:

Being a business that sells business books can be kinda meta. By meta, I mean that the very product we sell informs how we promote and sell it, and our company. Around 800-CEO-READ these days, we are working on our new KnowledgeBlocks site which will launch May 1. We’re busy not only fine-tuning a product that we hope has value for all knowledge workers, but also strategizing on how we will get the word out and build some momentum. We’re like a lot of companies asking the following question: how do we become the loudest voice in a loud room without losing the subtleties that help us stand out in a crowd?

And so it is that we looked toward two recent books from McGraw-Hill for guidance:

Scott Goodson’s Uprising: How to Build a Brand–and Change the World–By Sparking Cultural Movements

Uprising first tells us to stop marketing. Well, at least, stop marketing in the usual way. Goodson is the founder of StrawberryFrog which calls itself a “cultural movement” agency. A cultural movement can be started by creating something authentic that compels people to share their fandom rather than creating a product only to be sold to one customer at a time. It’s the perfect message for a population used to posting status updates with every single one of there 728 friends, or pinning up a picture of whatever sparks their creativity. Creating a cultural movement can be challenging, however, because it’s all about giving up control over the messaging, and instead, letting the messaging evolve, or be shaped, from the outside. Your responsibility is to give them a great product or service, and then all the tools to easily share it.

Mark Schaefer’s Return On Influence: The Revolutionary Power of Klout, Social Scoring, and Influence Marketing

Return on Influence has a different tone, or maybe orientation, than Uprising because it puts more of the action or networking into your own hands. Or, should I say, into the hands of “the most influential bloggers, tweeters, and YouTube celebrities to build product awareness, brand buzz, and new sales. Organizations are now using these “Citizen Influencers” as economical and efficient external marketers to help the company influence the conversation. Schaefer acquaints us with Klout, a tool “to quantify your level of online influence” (think Justin Bieber) created by Joe Fernandez in 2008 and how to up your Klout score. If it is true, as Schaefer says, that “[o]n Twitter, no one can hear you scream…” then Klout drives attention not just by talking but by placing value on compensation (Who wants a free product to review on your blog today?) and conversation.

It is tough these days to figure out just where to spend your marketing time and attention when you’ve put your soul and your company’s money into a product or service. There are a multitude of avenues to go down and it seems tweeting and pinning and sharing will only get you so far. These two books will not only show you what to do to get your message out, but then what to do to sustain and grow the momentum.

Listen to just about any interview with top-flight athletes, and you’ll hear them say, regarding the motivation it takes to stay so focused, so intensely committed to their daily training, some version of: “It’s not the results; it’s the process.” Loving the process gets the figure skater to the cold rink at 5am before she has to get to school by 8am. Loving the process gets the star baseball player through his rehab assignment back down at Triple-A. Loving the process has the 100m sprinter at the gym and on the track working the small stuff every day for the chance to compete for a mere 10 seconds in the Olympic Games.

Loving the process is all about withstanding repetitiveness, surviving disappointment, taking the small steps that can lead to big accomplishments. Athletes, musicians, experts of any ilk are devoted to their practice. For those of us who get up every morning not to train for a marathon but to tackle a day at our desks with a long list of to-dos and some long-term goals (often someone else’s) to reach, loving the process is certainly something desirable if not easily attained. After all, whether you own your own business or you’re a desk jockey working for a large firm, you realize that most days require focus and discipline in the face of, well, a whole lot of monotony.

Thomas M. Sterner’s The Practicing Mind: Developing Focus and Discipline in Your Life (April 2012, New World Library) will help you “master any skill or challenge by learning to love the process.” While The Practicing Mind isn’t technically a business book, and might find itself shelved in the self-help section of any bookstore, Sterner is less interested in meditation than he is on sussing out how we learn and how to avoid the trap of giving up when we fail.

First, Sterner goes a little meta on us. “[W]e miss the point that the ability to develop any skill as swiftly as possible, with the least amount of effort, and even to experience inner peace and joy in the process, is in fact a skill itself, and one that requires constant practice to become an effortless part of who we are.”

Practice (verb) the practice (noun) of staying present so that “you are always where you want to be and where you should be.” This is the way to stay engaged and never preoccupied or discouraged by the end result. This is a difficult concept for many, especially those of us who were taught the value of visualization exercises or even the value of New Year’s resolutions. How, we wonder, do we get anywhere if we are only paying attention to where we are at this moment? Isn’t that sort of unambitious? Sterner says no. “This doesn’t mean that you must lose touch with what you are aiming for. You continue to use the final goal as a rudder to steer your practice session, but not as an indicator of how you are doing.” Sterner’s ecclectic vitae itself seems the best evidence that he is a man who practices what he preaches and is not short of accomplishments. “With deliberate and repeated effort, progress is inevitable,” assures Sterner.

From resisting our inclination to make judgments to detaching ourselves from destructive emotional reactions to recognizing and re-orienting some of our self-limiting habits, the advice in Thomas Sterner’s The Practicing Mind is immediately applicable and will lead to improved performance whether you are on the golf course, at the piano, or in the conference room.

On June 6-8 2012, Inc. Magazine will be hosting its Inc. Leadership Forum in Miami, Fl.

At Inc.’s Leadership Forum, you’ll learn about innovative approaches from award-winning companies and extraordinary entrepreneurs, the inspirational tools and processes they deploy to build teams and workplace environments that have a lasting impact on financial results and personal satisfaction. Marquee speakers present the newest leadership strategies for developing the best possible company culture, one that results in a loyal, motivated, inspired, and focused team.

There are some great authors and speakers sharing their knowledge and inspiration at the event, including William J. Bratton CBE, Kevin Cleary, Sally Hogshead, John Caplan, Josh Linkner and more.

For full details, agenda, and to register, visit the Inc. Leadership Forum site.

A special invitation for the 800-CEO-READ Community: $50.00 off Inc. Leadership Forum
(Promo Code for 800-CEO-READ: 800CEO) REGISTER NOW!

One of my favorite books from last year was Being Wrong by Kathryn Schulz. We gave away 20 copies of the book to share the wealth, and about it I wrote:

Can a doggedly-researched book that relays the historical lineage of error, attempts to uncover the truth beneath truth, and even discusses something as impenetrable as “The Optimistic Meta-Induction from the History of Everything,” be charming, accessible and eminently readable? Apparently so because Being Wrong by Kathryn Schulz is just that.

Many of us remain uncomfortable with being wrong, in admitting that no amount of mental gymnastics and/or life experience can prevent us from buying that lemon of a car, hiring the unqualified person, or adding yet another self-help book to our shelves to teach us how to stop making the same mistakes. But, “[e]ven if you can’t be brought to believe that error itself is a good thing,” Schulz says, “I hope to convince you by the end of this book that it is inseparably linked to other good things, things we definitely do not want to eliminate–like, say, our intelligence.” Your intelligence will certainly be fueled by reading this book and you may even recover some of your good-humor about the times you were…and the times you will be…wrong.

The reason I’m revisiting Kathryn Schulz and Being Wrong today is because Critical Mass, the blog of the National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors, just featured a Q&A with her that is chock full of insight. (The National Book Critics Circle awards will be announced tonight by the way.) Kathryn Schulz isn’t just the author of a really great book, she also “won the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, [and] she accepted a job as book editor at New York magazine.” Because so much of what we do here at 800-CEO-READ is about recommending the best business books to readers, and I’m about to take over as curator of our new KnowledgeBlocks service, I found Schulz’s thoughts on being a critic, in light of her research into “being wrong,” fascinating.

On being wrong as a critic:

I assume readers are smart enough to understand that criticism is a subjective exercise, but mostly because I believe we should be non-neutral about literature—should, in fact, be as passionate about it as possible. I do think, though, that critics are obliged to do the opposite of that old idiom: we do have to account for our taste—to explain with as much precision as possible why we respond to a book the way we do.

On her new job as book editor for New York Magazine:

One of the things that awes and delights me about literary culture is the sheer range of stuff out there—including really interesting, excellent work on obscure subjects, or by obscure authors—and part of what I hope to bring to this job is my own excitement about exploring that. It seems to me that one of the great things about covering books is that it’s among the least intellectually restrictive mandates imaginable.

On the effects of our multimedia culture on reading:

I will confess that there are cultural trends affecting the way we read and write that worry me. Above all, I fret about the many forces that diminish attention span and reward skimming and shallow reading. Those really do pain me, especially when I detect them in myself.

Hear more from Kathryn Schulz here in her TED talk “On Being Wrong” from March 2011.

What is of such value in Schulz’s message is that people should embrace, and be forgiving, of all that makes us human. Make sure to watch the video above all the way to the end. Her last few lines are memorable, and important. But here is a gem from her talk that I think can dispel some of our frustrations about being wrong. If we were all right, all the time, then what would inspire us?

Our capacity to screw up it’s not some embarrassing defect in the human system. Something we can eradicate or overcome. It’s totally fundamental to who we are. Because unlike God, we don’t really know what’s going on out there. And unlike all the other animals, we are obsessed with trying to figure it out. To me, this obsession is the source and root of all of our productivity and creativity.

Every morning when I drop my 6-year-old son off for school, I remind him to put on his listening ears. It is quite adorable when he reaches a hand up to each ear and “clicks” them into place. Of course this ritual of ours is more about reminding him to follow directions given by his teacher than teaching him social attentiveness. And yet, it plants the seed that what other people say matters. It is the very beginning step in helping him become a good listener.

Listening is a big deal, at any age, but unfortunately you can’t just click on your listening ears in order to be good at it. Good listening takes practice. It takes self-awareness. It takes a book like Power Listening: Mastering the Most Critical Business Skill of Them All by Bernard T. Ferrari, available from Penguin Portfolio on March 1, to help you understand just how valuable listening skills are…or how detrimental it is to not refine yours.

What sets this book apart from other books on listening (of which there are plenty) is that Ferrari, a business consultant with a long history at McKinsey & Co and also as a health care provider, is interested in “listening for the purpose of arriving at a better business decision.”

Why is listening critical to business success? Ferrari makes his case:

Listening can well be the difference between profit and loss, between success and failure, between a long career and a short one. Listening is the only way to find out what you don’t know, and marks the path to making good decisions, arriving at the best ideas. If you aspire to be better at your job, no matter what it is, listening may be the most powerful tool at your disposal.

Of course this makes sense to all of us. And there is hardly a one of us who would readily admit that we are poor listeners! So it makes sense to jump into Ferrari’s book at Chapter 2, “What Kind of Listener Are You?” to help you determine your own starting point on this journey to become a better listener.

• The Opinionator has a “tendency to listen to others really only to determine whether or not his ideas conform to what the Opinionator already knows to be true”?
• “The Grouch is blocked by the certainty that your ideas are wrong.”
• “The Preambler’s windy lead-ins and questions are really stealth speeches, often designed to box his [conversation partner] in.”
• “The Perseverator may appear to be engaged in productive dialogue, but if you pay attention, you might notice that he’s not really advancing the conversation.”
• The Answer Man “is the person who starts spouting solutions before there is even a consensus about what the challenge might be, signaling that he is finished listening to your input in the conversation.”
• “The Pretender isn’t really interested in what you have to say.”

Even if you consider yourself to be a good listener (and Ferrari says you likely are…sometimes), you may see a number of these archetypes at play in your behavior depending on the situation. I know I can be quite the Answer (Wo)man when talking with my husband, while I picked up some bad Opinionator habits during my years in academia where opinions are highly encouraged that I use clumsily in social situations.

Ferrari sets a high bar in Chapter 4 with his version of the “80/20 rule,” a goal we can all work toward:

My guideline is that my conversation partner should be speaking 80 percent of the time, while I speak only 20 percent of the time….I can make my speaking time count by spending as much of it as possible posing questions, rather than holding forth with my opinions and observations.

What an incredible challenge it would be to just do that! And quite counter-intuitive for many of us in the workplace, Ferrari acknowledges.

I understand that people in leadership positions feel a certain pressure to steer or direct or control conversations within their organizations, but don’t be misled: Your choosing to listen more than speak does not mean you’ve ceded control of a conversation. Well-directed questioning and minimal but well-timed commentary can help people bring forward new facts, open their minds, think in new ways, and come up with better ideas.

By the end of Power Listening, you will better understand how to make the most of your 80/20 by learning how to challenge assumptions, focus on what you need to know, increase your tolerance for ambiguity, create an imaginary filing system for information, know when to stop the conversation and start acting, be a good listening influence. Ferrari’s handy concluding chapter “What to Do on Monday Morning” that turns theory into action steps.