Career
Know Your Value and Avoid Overwork
This post was originally published on my restaurant blog in 2021 (as I used to run a group of restaurants for 14 years until 2020) and I thought it would be a valuable coaching lesson for anybody in business so am cross-posting it here. One of the greatest challenges – as a restaurateur – is the prospect of overwork. It’s a business where it’s accepted that you work round-the-clock, seven-days-per-week and consider this normal. While this may be a reality for many (and I’ve been there, clocking 80+ hour weeks), it doesn’t HAVE to be a reality. Any business can be designed and built to run well so that it…
10 Tips for Effective Time Management
My time management posts always seem to be popular, so I thought I’d refresh and post some more tips for effective time management. If you want to go deeper on some of these areas, remember to check out my earlier posts (links below). Have you ever thought to yourself that there aren’t enough hours in the day, or felt overwhelmed at the tasks facing you? If you have, this article can help you! Clarify your goals and strategy Be very clear about your aims and ambitions, both short and long term. Write them down. Once you know what you really want to achieve (and why) it’s easier to make decisions…
Your Stand is Your Brand
Outstanding and pivotal. This book applies as equally to personal development as it does to business since Your Stand is routed in your own identity. I found it to be ‘the missing link’ in my personal journey and Patrick’s 5P Expansion Sequence is one which is easy to understand yet requires focused effort by the individual (or business team) to truly dig deep and understand your inner workings and then apply conscious choice to embrace your truth, instead of unconscious choice and operate with your conditioned choices which are often in conflict and, ultimately, lead to your lack of success in any or all areas of your life. The book…
The Buddha and the Badass: The Secret Spiritual Art of Succeeding at Work
The Buddha and The Badass Audiobook Review Ken Wilber popularized the importance of worldviews in his work on integral theory. You can simplify his work and determine that most people will fall in one of the four following worldview categories. Depending on your worldviews certain aspects of this book will appeal to you and others might affront you. You could be a rationalist. In which case you’ll love the business ideas in this book but scoff when I speak of the magic of the mind, intuition, or listening to your soul. You could be a traditionalist. In which case you’ll love anything that reminds you of your spiritual beliefs but…
WTF?! (Willing to Fail)
Short and to the point. This reads more like a list of required attributes that the author learned by going from college to a successful entrepreneur over the course of his journey so far. The shopping list of skills and qualities appear in other business and spiritual books along with explanations of why they work or how to apply them, but Brian just lays them out and advises you embrace them. Topics include recruitment, culture, the law of attraction, ego, mindset, values, and more all with his occasional failures and missteps documented along the way as signposts to success. The early chapters chart Brian’s younger years with a few lessons…
Platform (The Art and Science of Personal Branding)
Platform is a book about personal branding and how Cynthia created her own platform to represent herself across the social channels, how she ‘growth hacked’ her profiles to connect to the right people, and the strategies she employed (which you can use too) to accurately position and define how she wanted to be seen online. The book contains a number of easily actionable ‘quick-wins’ in the early stages then delves deeper into game theory and the need to consider the algorithms the social media platforms use when connecting with others; which Cynthia calls the invisible third-party in the connection. The book also contains a lot of other interesting information outside…
eSCAPE: The 4 Stages of Becoming A Successful Entrepreneur
I came across this book in Dan Lok’s forum as it was being recommended there. It’s essentially a manual for being an entrepreneur, breaking down each of the key areas you need to gain skills in – Self, Catapult, Authority and People – into further sub-categories such as time, money, struggle, paradigms, accountability and focus. This is ideally used in parallel with the free assessment you can take at lurn.com which assesses each of the sub-categories and gives you a score of how likely you are to be an entrepreneur, thus providing you with a template showing where you need to put in more effort if you want success. The…
Mentors: How to Help and Be Helped
Russell Brand has a way of writing things in a way that sounds like it is something you’d expect at a Poetry Slam. It is insightful and visual, poignant and eloquent, humorous and heartfelt. Not like Chewbacca in a taxi. You get the idea? However, most of this book is the journey through Russell’s life and the key people who have and still do influence and help him on the path to being a better person. It’s another book in my canon of ‘success’ stories and what it takes to be better at being human. Russell takes us through his addiction, his showbiz life, and parenthood, plus all the cracks…
Business is Personal
I have known of Penny since the days when Ecademy was formed but never really knew her story, until now. Her book takes you through this journey, her (ad)ventures with Ecademy et al, and provides a heartfelt insight into the emotional journey many entrepreneurs face. You feel a connection to both Penny’s story as well as your own and realise you aren’t as ‘alone’ as you may feel as a business owner and that there are resources out there to help you on this journey. Penny also mentions several of these in the book, as well as links to them on her website. The book does not provide any forensic…
High-Performance Habits: How Extraordinary People Become That Way
Excellent work that puts performance into context based on research performed on thousands of high performers over many years. This book distils the key actions you should review and take if you want to be a high(er) achiever. If you have read any of the founders of personal development (like Napoleon Hill, Dale Carnegie, et al) you will recognise some of the same principles, but this updates the ‘founding fathers’ and delves deeper into specific actions you should take and do. A great template which should be studied and applied. I have worked through the book in audio format and it highlighted areas I needed to work on. It added…
