What’s on your list? What’s holding you back from getting started? Are you worried about the time and effort it takes to acquire new skills—time you don’t have and effort you can’t spare? Research suggests it takes 10,000 hours to develop a new skill. In this nonstop world when will you ever find that much time and energy? To make matters worse, the early hours of prac­ticing something new are always the most frustrating. That’s why it’s difficult to learn how to speak a new language, play an instrument, hit a golf ball, or shoot great photos. It’s so much easier to watch TV or surf the web . . . In The First 20 Hours, Josh Kaufman offers a systematic approach to rapid skill acquisition— how to learn any new skill as quickly as possible. His method shows you how to deconstruct com­plex skills, maximize productive practice, and remove common learning barriers. By complet­ing just 20 hours of focused, deliberate practice you’ll go from knowing absolutely nothing to performing noticeably well. Kaufman personally field-tested the meth­ods in this book. You’ll have a front row seat as he develops a personal yoga practice, writes his own web-based computer programs, teaches himself to touch type on a nonstandard key­board, explores the oldest and most complex board game in history, picks up the ukulele, and learns how to windsurf. Here are a few of the sim­ple techniques he teaches:Define your target performance level: Fig­ure out what your desired level of skill looks like, what you’re trying to achieve, and what you’ll be able to do when you’re done. The more specific, the better.Deconstruct the skill: Most of the things we think of as skills are actually bundles of smaller subskills. If you break down the subcompo­nents, it’s easier to figure out which ones are most important and practice those first.Eliminate barriers to practice: Removing common distractions and unnecessary effort makes it much easier to sit down and focus on deliberate practice.Create fast feedback loops: Getting accu­rate, real-time information about how well you’re performing during practice makes it much easier to improve.Whether you want to paint a portrait, launch a start-up, fly an airplane, or juggle flaming chain­saws, The First 20 Hours will help you pick up the basics of any skill in record time . . . and have more fun along the way.

      The path to fulfillment, whether at work or at home, is almost never a straight line. Ask anyone who has achieved their biggest goals or who thrives in their relationships, and you’ll hear stories of many unexpected detours along the way. What separates those who rise to these challenges and those who get derailed? The answer is agility—emotional agility.Emotional agility is a four-step approach that allows us to navigate life’s twists and turns with self-acceptance, clear-sightedness, and an open mind. In her more than twenty years of research, Susan David has found that no matter how intelligent, resilient, or creative people are, when they ignore how situations or interactions make them feel, they miss opportunities to gain insight, getting hooked by thoughts, emotions, and habits that prevent them from reaching their full potential. Emotionally agile people experience the same stresses and setbacks as anyone else, but they know how to adapt, aligning their actions with their values and making small changes that lead to a life of growth.Drawing on her extensive professional research, her international consulting work, and her own experiences growing up in Apartheid-era South Africa and losing her father at a young age, David shows how anyone can become more emotionally agile and thrive in an uncertain world. Written with authority, wit, and empathy, Emotional Agility will help you live your most successful life, whoever you are and whatever you face. Take the FREE Emotional Agility Insights Quiz here: https://bitly.com/ea-quiz

    Now completely revised, this book is available for the first time in paperback. The Sales Bible has helped tens of thousands of salespeople all over the world reach their potential and close the big deal. Gitomer gives sales professionals the right answers to the toughest questions:How to make sales in any economic environment Twenty-five ways to get that most-elusive appointment Top-down selling How to fill the sales pipeline with prospects ready to buy How to use the right questions to make more sales in half the time This book is everything its title claims to be

    It is a deeply reported and researched, honest and often hilarious journey from feeling that, as one character in the book said, time is like a "rabid lunatic" running naked and screaming as your life flies past you, to understanding the historical and cultural roots of the overwhelm, how worrying about all there is to do and the pressure of feeling like we're never have enough time to do it all, or do it well, is "contaminating" our experience of time, how time pressure and stress is resculpting our brains and shaping our workplaces, our relationships and squeezing the space that the Greeks said was the point of living a Good Life: that elusive moment of peace called leisure.Author Brigid Schulte, an award-winning journalist for the Washington Post - and harried mother of two - began the journey quite by accident, after a time-use researcher insisted that she, like all American women, had 30 hours of leisure each week. Stunned, she accepted his challenge to keep a time diary and began a journey that would take her from the depths of what she described as the Time Confetti of her days to a conference in Paris with time researchers from around the world, to North Dakota, of all places, where academics are studying the modern love affair with busyness, to Yale, where neuroscientists are finding that feeling overwhelmed is actually shrinking our brains, to exploring new lawsuits uncovering unconscious bias in the workplace, why the US has no real family policy, and where states and cities are filling the federal vacuum.She spent time with mothers drawn to increasingly super intensive parenting standards, and mothers seeking to pull away from it. And she visited the walnut farm of the world's most eminent motherhood researcher, an evolutionary anthropologist, to ask, are mothers just "naturally" meant to be the primary parent? The answer will surprise you.Along the way, she was driven by two questions, Why are things the way they are? and, How can they be better? She found real world bright spots of innovative workplaces, couples seeking to shift and share the division of labor at home and work more equitably and traveled to Denmark, the happiest country on earth, where fathers - and mothers - have more pure leisure time than parents in other industrial countries. She devoured research about the science of play, why it's what makes us human, and the feminist leisure research that explains why it's so hard for women to allow themselves to. The answers she found are illuminating, perplexing and ultimately hopeful. The book both outlines the structural and policy changes needed - already underway in small pockets - and mines the latest human performance and motivation science to show the way out of the overwhelm and toward a state that time use researchers call ... Time Serenity.

    Bosses, colleagues, customers—but also family, friends, and in-laws—they all have “suggestions” for our performance, parenting, or appearance. We know that feedback is essential for healthy relationships and professional development—but we dread it and often dismiss it.That’s because receiving feedback sits at the junction of two conflicting human desires. We do want to learn and grow. And we also want to be accepted just as we are right now. Thanks for the Feedback is the first book to address this tension head on. It explains why getting feedback is so crucial yet so challenging, and offers a powerful framework to help us take on life’s blizzard of off-hand comments, annual evaluations, and unsolicited advice with curiosity and grace.The business world spends billions of dollars and millions of hours each year teaching people how to give feedback more effectively. Stone and Heen argue that we’ve got it backwards and show us why the smart money is on educating receivers— in the workplace and in personal relationships as well.Coauthors of the international bestseller Difficult Conversations, Stone and Heen have spent the last ten years working with businesses, nonprofits, governments, and families to determine what helps us learn and what gets in our way. With humor and clarity, they blend the latest insights from neuroscience and psychology with practical, hard-headed advice. The book is destined to become a classic in the world of leadership, organizational behavior, and education.

    "Making Sense of People" provides the scientific frameworks and tools we need to improve our intuition, and assess people more consciously, systematically, and effectively. Leading neuroscientist Samuel H. Barondes explains the research behind each standard personality category: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness. He shows readers how to use these traits and assessments to do a better job of deciding who they'll enjoy spending time with, whom to trust, and whom to keep at a distance. Barondes explains: What neuroscience and psychological research can tell us about how personality types develop and cohere.The intertwined roles of genes, nurture, and education in personality development.How to recognize troublesome personality patterns such as narcissism, sociopathy, and paranoia.How much a child's behavior predicts their adult personality, and how personality stabilizes in young adulthood.How to assess integrity, fairness, wisdom, and other traits related to morality.What genetic testing may (or may not) teach us about personality in the future.General strategies for getting along with people, with specific tactics for special circumstances. Kirkus Reviews A succinct look at personality psychology. As a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the University of California, Barondes ("Molecules and Mental Illness," 2007, etc.) has spent years studying human behavior, and this book reflects his systematic, scientific approach for personality assessment. The average person isn't likely to have time to research a difficult boss or potential love interest, but the author supplements intuition with a useful cornerstone for gauging human behavior: a table of the "Big Five" personality traits, among them Extraversion vs. Introversion and Agreeableness vs. Antagonism. To learn how to apply the Big Five, Barondes supplies a link for a professional online personality test, in addition to a basic introduction of troubling personality patterns e.g., narcissism and compulsiveness. While genetics may play a heavy hand in influencing personality, Barondes writes, it's awareness of a person's background, character and life story that is paramount in unearthing reasons for adult behavior. Readers might like to see the author weave more everyday examples into the text his exercise in fostering compassion by imagining an adult as a 10-year-old child is a gem but there is plenty here to ponder. Those looking for traditional "self-help" advice won't find it here, but this book clearly lays the groundwork for deeper human interaction and better life relationships."

    Now in book form for the first time, their simple method will teach you how to use basic design tools to create a life that will work for you.Using real-life stories and proven techniques like reframing, prototyping and mind-mapping, you will learn how to build your way forwards, step-by-positive-step, to a life that’s better by a design of your own making.Because a well-designed life means a life well-lived.

    Every aircraft is equipped with an almost indestructible black box. When there is an accident, the box is opened, the data is analyzed, and the reason for the accident excavated. This ensures that procedures are adapted so that the same mistake doesn’t happen again. With this method, the industry has created an astonishing safety record.For pilots working in a safety-critical industry, getting it wrong can have deadly consequences. But most of us have a relationship with failure that impedes progress, halts innovation, and damages our lives. We don’t acknowledge it or learn from it —though we often think we do.Moving from anthropology to psychology and from history to complexity theory, Matthew Syed explains why even when we think we have 20/20 hindsight, our vision’s still fuzzy. He offers a radical new idea: that the most important determinant of success in any field, whether sports, business, or life, is an acknowledgment of failure and a willingness to engage with it. This is how we learn, progress and excel. This approach explains everything from biological evolution and the efficiency of markets to the success of the Mercedes F1 team and the mindset of David Beckham.Using a cornucopia of interviews, gripping stories, and sharp-edged science, Syed explores the intimate relationship between failure and success, and shows why we need to transport black box thinking into our own lives. If we wish to unleash our potential, we must diagnose and break free of our failures. Part manifesto for change, part intellectual adventure, this groundbreaking book reveals how to do both.

    written with style and wit.' Mishal Husain Most books about public speaking don’t tell you what to do when you open your mouth and nothing comes out. And they don’t tell you how to get over the anxiety about performance that most people naturally have. They don’t tell you what to do in the moments when you are made, as a woman, to feel small. They don’t tell you how to own the room. This book does. From the way Michelle Obama projects ‘happy high status’, and the power of J.K.Rowling’s understated speaking style, to Virginia Woolf’s leisurely pacing and Oprah Winfrey’s mastery of inner conviction, what is it that our heroines do to make us sit up and listen - really listen - to their every word? And how can you achieve that impact in your own life? Here’s how.

    It's Tuesday morning and on his drive into the office, Bill gets a call from the CEO. The company's new IT initiative, code named Phoenix Project, is critical to the future of Parts Unlimited, but the project is massively over budget and very late. The CEO wants Bill to report directly to him and fix the mess in ninety days or else Bill's entire department will be outsourced. With the help of a prospective board member and his mysterious philosophy of The Three Ways, Bill starts to see that IT work has more in common with manufacturing plant work than he ever imagined. With the clock ticking, Bill must organize work flow streamline interdepartmental communications, and effectively serve the other business functions at Parts Unlimited. In a fast-paced and entertaining style, three luminaries of the DevOps movement deliver a story that anyone who works in IT will recognize. Readers will not only learn how to improve their own IT organizations, they'll never view IT the same way again.

    Not as a freelancer who only gets paid on a per piece basis, and not as an entrepreneurial start-up that wants to scale as soon as possible, but as a small business that is deliberately committed to staying that way. By staying small, one can have freedom to pursue more meaningful pleasures in life, and avoid the headaches that result from dealing with employees, long meetings, or worrying about expansion. Company of One introduces this unique business strategy and explains how to make it work for you, including how to generate cash flow on an ongoing basis. Paul Jarvis left the corporate world when he realized that working in a high-pressure, high profile world was not his idea of success. Instead, he now works for himself out of his home on a small, lush island off of Vancouver, and lives a much more rewarding and productive life. He no longer has to contend with an environment that constantly demands more productivity, more output, and more growth.   In Company of One, Jarvis explains how you can find the right pathway to do the same, including planning how to set up your shop, determining your desired revenues, dealing with unexpected crises, keeping your key clients happy, and of course, doing all of this on your own.

    The worst managers undermine inner work life, often unwittingly.As Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer explain in The Progress Principle, seemingly mundane workday events can make or break employees’ inner work lives. But it’s forward momentum in meaningful work—progress—that creates the best inner work lives. Through rigorous analysis of nearly 12,000 diary entries provided by 238 employees in 7 companies, the authors explain how managers can foster progress and enhance inner work life every day.The book shows how to remove obstacles to progress, including meaningless tasks and toxic relationships. It also explains how to activate two forces that enable progress: (1) catalysts—events that directly facilitate project work, such as clear goals and autonomy—and (2) nourishers—interpersonal events that uplift workers, including encouragement and demonstrations of respect and collegiality.Brimming with honest examples from the companies studied, The Progress Principle equips aspiring and seasoned leaders alike with the insights they need to maximize their people’s performance.

    Now, this venture capitalist turned executive coach shares his unusual yet highly effective blend of Buddhism, Jungian therapy, and entrepreneurial straight talk to help leaders overcome their own psychological traumas. Reboot is a journey of radical self-inquiry, helping you to reset your life by sorting through the emotional baggage that is holding you back professionally and, even more important, in your relationships.Jerry has taught CEOs and their top teams to realize their potential by using the raw material of their lives to find meaning, to build healthy interpersonal bonds, and to become more compassionate and bold leaders. In Reboot, he inspires everyone to hold themselves responsible for their choices and for the possibility of truly achieving their dreams.Work does not have to destroy us. Work can be the way in which we achieve our fullest self, Jerry firmly believes. What we need, sometimes, is a chance to reset our goals and to reconnect with our deepest selves and with each other. Reboot moves and empowers us to begin this journey.

     Do you work and live with people who are hard to convince? Who dismiss ideas before even thinking about them? Do you want to know how to influence people, without being manipulative? Want to find out how people get motivated, make decisions, to be more persuasive with everyone? Learn how to use the right words with the right people, and get through the “Communication Wall” Have you ever felt like you were talking to a wall? Well, that’s a very accurate description of what’s happening when 2 people are communicating! Everyone has a metaphorical “Communication Wall” around them to protect them from “bad people”. But in all of our walls, we have left some bricks out, to let the “good people” communicate with us. The problem in communication is not the wall, because the wall is standard equipment that everyone has. The problem comes from the holes where the bricks have been left out. The holes come in specific shapes, unique to each person. And if you want to communicate with that person, you need to use words, and behavior that fit exactly with the holes in the other person’s wall. Shelle Rose Charvet, best-selling author of Words That Change Minds shows you how to match your language to people around you (in your work, with your colleagues, your boss and your clients, and at home, with your partner, family and other relationships). Learn the persuasion psychology, spark interest and enthusiasm and get what you want. In Words That Change Minds you will: - Learn the influence science and practice. - Discover the ways people unconsciously get motivated, process information and make decisions. - Decode any communication problem and solve it. - Find out how to pry open mental space in even the most closed of minds. - Create rapport and credibility with anyone. - Avoid inadvertently saying or doing the wrong thing. - Get practical applications for sales, marketing, recruiting, negotiation, teaching, training, communication at work, conflict resolution. - Increase your impact in interpersonal communication, teamwork, and in mass communication. Words That Change Minds is based on the Language and Behavior Profile, (LAB Profile® for short) – a powerful tool that enables you to understand, predict and influence behavior by de-coding the language people use. You can directly influence people one-on-one, in groups and even in mass communication by customizing your language to match their subconscious Motivation Patterns. Increase your impact, improve relationships and reduce conflicts, by using the Words That Change Minds. The NEW 3rd edition of Words That Change Minds has more than 50% new material; examples, research, advanced applications, with 7 completely new chapters, including: 1. How to Complete a LAB Profile® 2. Conversational Coaching with the LAB Profile® 3. Understanding and Working with Combination Patterns 4. Solving Communication Problems 5. Influencing Strategies and Techniques 6. The LAB Profile® of Conflict 7. LAB Profile® Inventions and Tools, and more. Interested? Just scroll up and get your copy today! About the author: Shelle Rose Charvet is a bestselling author and the international expert on Influencing Language.

    Here, you'll learn why tailoring management styles to individual employees is so important; why knowing when to delegate, support, or direct is critical; how to identify the leadership style suited to a particular person; and how consistent use of the One Minute techniques will produce better management and enhanced motivation on all levels. This remarkable, easy-to-follow book is a priceless guide to creative, personalized leadership that elicits the best performance from your staff--and the best bottom line for any business.If your management motto is "everyone should be treated equally," Leadership and the One Minute Manager. will show you why this style not only hinders workplace efficiency, but also frustrates your staff. In clear, simple terms, Ken Blanchard, co-author of the enormously popular The One Minute Manager., coupled with business gurus Patricia and Drea Zigarmi, teach managers the art of Situational Leadership.. You'll learn why tailoring management styles to individual employees is so important; when to delegate, support, or direct; how to identify the leadership style suited to a particular person; and how consistent use of the One Minute techniques will produce better management and enhanced motivation on all levels. This remarkable, easy-to-follow book is a priceless guide to creative, personalized leadership that elicits the best performance from your staffand the best bottom line for any business.