Love Your Work and Success Will Follow


Book Description

Down-to-earth survival manual for today's unhappy, disillusioned worker.




Do What You Love


Book Description

The American claim that we should love and be passionate about our job may sound uplifting, or at least, harmless, but Do What You Love exposes the tangible damages such rhetoric has leveled upon contemporary society. Virtue and capital have always been twins in the capitalist, industrialized West. Our ideas of what the “virtues” of pursuing success in capitalism have changed dramatically over time. In the past, we believed that work undertaken with an ethos of industriousness promised financial stability and basic comfort and security for our families. Now, our working life is conflated with the pursuit of pleasure. Fantastically successful—and popular—entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs and Oprah Winfrey command us. “You’ve got to love what you do,” Jobs tells an audience of college grads about to enter the workforce, while Winfrey exhorts her audience to “live your best life.” The promises made to today’s workers seem so much larger and nobler than those of previous generations. Why settle for a 30-year fixed rate mortgage and a perfectly functional eight-year-old car when you can get rich becoming your “best” self and have a blast along the way? But workers today are doing more and more for less and less. This reality is frighteningly palpable in eroding paychecks and benefits, the rapid concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny few, and workers’ loss of control over their labor conditions. But where is the protest and anger from workers against a system that tells them to love their work and asks them to do it for less? While winner-take-all capitalism grows ever more ruthless, the rhetoric of passion for labor proliferates. In Do What You Love, Tokumitsu articulates and examines the sacrifices people make for a chance at loveable, self-actualizing, and, of course, wealth-generating work and the conditions facilitated by this pursuit. This book continues the conversation sparked by the author’s earlier Slate article and provides a devastating look at the state of modern America’s labor and workforce.




Spin Sucks


Book Description

Go beyond PR spin! Master better ways to communicate honestly and regain the trust of your customers and stakeholders with this book.




Move


Book Description

Move past the obstacles and implement your new strategy Move is your guide to mobilizing your whole organization to take your business forward. Whatever your needed transformation may be: a new initiative, a new market, a new product, your fresh strategy is up against a powerful foe: an organization's tendency to stay very busy and completely engaged what it's already doing. This book shows you how to cut through resistance and get your team engaged and proactively doing the new thing! Author Patty Azzarello draws on over twenty-five years of international business management experience to identify the chronic challenges that keep organizations from decisively executing strategy, and to give you a practical game plan for breaking through. Leaders tend to assume that stalls in execution are inevitable, unchanging parts of the workplace—but things can change. At the heart of every execution problem is the fact that there simply are not enough people doing what the business needs. This guide shows you how to get your entire organization on board—remove the fear, excuses, and hurdles—and uphold the new pursuit against distractions and dissent. No transformation can succeed without suitable engagement from the whole organization, but building engagement can be difficult, uncomfortable, and tentative. This book shows you how to get it done. Get your organization to embrace and personally commit to the new work Remove obstacles and passive aggressive attacks that block progress Defend new strategic initiatives against short term pressures to revert to "business as usual" Sustain momentum and the desire to move forward Make sure no one is ever asking, 'Are we still doing this?' Inertia isn't just a law of the universe, it's a law in the workplace that can be a major obstacle to making things happen. The great thing about inertia is that it cuts two ways: a body at rest remains at rest, but a body in motion remains in motion. People love to finish things. Move shows you how to make successful execution the new norm—starting today.




Unfollow Your Passion


Book Description

One of the Best Feel-Good Books of 2021 by The Washington Post A hilarious and honest not-quite-self-help book in the vein of Buy Yourself the F*cking Lilies and I Used to Have a Plan. Every person on the planet wants their life to mean something. The problem is that you’ve been told there’s only one way to find that meaning. In Unfollow Your Passion, Terri Trespicio—whose TEDx talk has more than six million views—questions everything you think you need: passion (fun, but fleeting), plans (flimsy at best), and a bucket list (eye roll), to name a few. Instead, she shows you how (and why) to flip society, culture, and the #patriarchy the bird so you can live life on your terms. Trespicio effortlessly guides you through her method of unhooking yourself from other people’s agendas, boning up on the skills to move you forward, and exploring your own creativity, memory, and intuition to unlock your unique path to meaning—while also confronting the challenges that stop you in your tracks, like boredom, loss, and fear. Unfollow Your Passion is a fresh and fearless “must-read for anyone looking for a more meaningful life” (Mel Robbins, author of The 5 Second Rule).




Do What You Love, Love What You Do


Book Description

***THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER*** It's time to turn your dreams into reality. You just need a mentor to guide the way. Holly Tucker MBE - co-founder of notonthehighstreet, and creator of Holly & Co - is on a mission to change business forever. Having inspired over 100,000 entrepreneurs and identified the keys to their success, in Do What You Love, Love What You Do, she now wants to help anyone build a business doing what they love, leading to a happier and more fulfilled life. Demystifying the grey world of business, whether you've yet to take your first steps or find yourself stuck in a business rut, this beautiful and vibrant book will allow your dreams to take flight. Holly looks back at her own story, sharing her biggest lessons and proven advice on creating and growing a business. From side hustle to full-time, from defeating your confidence gremlins to creating an empowered community, Holly reveals both the skills and the mindset any founder needs to help their business thrive. A book like no other, Do What You Love, Love What You Do also shines a light on the creative community, showcasing the brilliant and unique output of small businesses, inspiring you to join them in their success. There are now over 5 million small businesses in the UK - join the movement with the ultimate small business bible.




Love and Work


Book Description

A Wall Street Journal bestseller World-renowned researcher and New York Times bestselling author Marcus Buckingham helps us discover where we're at our best—both at work and in life. You've long been told to "Do what you love." Sounds simple, but the real challenge is how to do this in a world not set up to help you. Most of us actually don't know the real truth of what we love—what engages us and makes us thrive—and our workplaces, jobs, schools, even our parents, are focused instead on making us conform. Sadly, no person or system is dedicated to discovering the crucial intersection between what you love to do and how you contribute it to others. In this eye-opening, uplifting book, Buckingham shows you how to break free from this conformity—how to decode your own loves, turn them into their most powerful expression, and do the same for those you lead and those you love. How can you use love to reveal your unique gifts? How can you pinpoint what makes you stand out from anyone else? How can you choose roles in which you'll excel? Love and Work unlocks answers to these questions and others, so you can: Choose the right role on the team. Describe yourself compellingly in job interviews. Mold your existing role so that it calls upon the very best of you. Position yourself as a leader in such a way that your followers quickly come to trust in you. Make lasting change for your team, your company, your family, or your students. Love, the most powerful of human emotions, the source of all creativity, collaboration, insight, and excellence, has been systematically drained from our lives—our work, teams, and classrooms. It's time we brought love back in. Love and Work shows you how.




So Good They Can't Ignore You


Book Description

In an unorthodox approach, Georgetown University professor Cal Newport debunks the long-held belief that "follow your passion" is good advice, and sets out on a quest to discover the reality of how people end up loving their careers. Not only are pre-existing passions rare and have little to do with how most people end up loving their work, but a focus on passion over skill can be dangerous, leading to anxiety and chronic job hopping. Spending time with organic farmers, venture capitalists, screenwriters, freelance computer programmers, and others who admitted to deriving great satisfaction from their work, Newport uncovers the strategies they used and the pitfalls they avoided in developing their compelling careers. Cal reveals that matching your job to a pre-existing passion does not matter. Passion comes after you put in the hard work to become excellent at something valuable, not before. In other words, what you do for a living is much less important than how you do it. With a title taken from the comedian Steve Martin, who once said his advice for aspiring entertainers was to "be so good they can't ignore you," Cal Newport's clearly written manifesto is mandatory reading for anyone fretting about what to do with their life, or frustrated by their current job situation and eager to find a fresh new way to take control of their livelihood. He provides an evidence-based blueprint for creating work you love, and will change the way you think about careers, happiness, and the crafting of a remarkable life.




Escape From Cubicle Nation


Book Description

Pamela Slim, a former corporate training manager, left her office job twelve years ago to go solo and has enjoyed every bit of it. In her groundbreaking book, based on her popular blog Escape from Cubicle Nation, Slim explores both the emotional issues of leaving the corporate world and the nuts and bolts of launching a business. Drawing on her own career, as well as stories from her coaching clients and blog readers, Slim will help readers weigh their options, and make a successful escape if they decide to go for it.




The Trouble with Passion


Book Description

Probing the ominous side of career advice to "follow your passion," this data-driven study explains how the passion principle fails us and perpetuates inequality by class, gender, and race; and it suggests how we can reconfigure our relationships to paid work. "Follow your passion" is a popular mantra for career decision-making in the United States. Passion-seeking seems like a promising path for avoiding the potential drudgery of a life of paid work, but this "passion principle"—seductive as it is—does not universally translate. The Trouble with Passion reveals the significant downside of the passion principle: the concept helps culturally legitimize and reproduce an exploited, overworked white-collar labor force and broadly serves to reinforce class, race, and gender segregation and inequality. Grounding her investigation in the paradoxical tensions between capitalism's demand for ideal workers and our cultural expectations for self-expression, sociologist Erin A. Cech draws on interviews that follow students from college into the workforce, surveys of US workers, and experimental data to explain why the passion principle is such an attractive, if deceptive, career decision-making mantra, particularly for the college educated. Passion-seeking presumes middle-class safety nets and springboards and penalizes first-generation and working-class young adults who seek passion without them. The ripple effects of this mantra undermine the promise of college as a tool for social and economic mobility. The passion principle also feeds into a culture of overwork, encouraging white-collar workers to tolerate precarious employment and gladly sacrifice time, money, and leisure for work they are passionate about. And potential employers covet, but won't compensate, passion among job applicants. This book asks, What does it take to center passion in career decisions? Who gets ahead and who gets left behind by passion-seeking? The Trouble with Passion calls for citizens, educators, college administrators, and industry leaders to reconsider how we think about good jobs and, by extension, good lives.