A number of hotly anticipated career-related books have come out this year.
These titles provide some great tips for people just entering the workforce, for people considering a career change, for those looking to update their skills. There are even tips for managers who want to help their employees achieve more and be happier at work.
What skills will you need in the future to succeed at work? Check out Stretch: How to Future-proof Yourself for Tomorrow’s Workplace by Karie Willyerd and Barbara Mistic for help in developing a plan for professional development. The authors summarize their extensive research and present five practices to avoid becoming obsolete. They suggest we need to cultivate curiosity and avoid “self-limiting thinking;” welcome feedback as valuable information that we can use to grow; build diverse networks made up of people of different ages, genders, power and influence; that we be greedy about experiences to help us grow; and that we learn to “bounce forward” and not just bounce back from setbacks.
Charles Duhigg claims the key to productivity and success isn’t “simply working more and sweating harder.” In his new book Smarter, Faster, Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business, he says the key is “making certain choices in certain ways,” and he backs up this claim by summarizing a large number of studies and the extensive interviews he did with extraordinarily productive people. Duhigg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, wraps his research on how to be more productive in entertaining and engaging anecdotes, and he gives readers the tools they can use to be more productive wrapped up in great stories to help motivate them.
In Grit: the Power of Passion and Perseverance, psychology professor Angela Duckworth argues that the key to success is a combination of passion and perseverance in the pursuit of a long-term goal. Duckworth says her research over the past decade or so has demonstrated that “grit” can predict success more reliably than talent or IQ, and that anyone can learn to be “gritty.” She outlines the four “psychological assets” that gritty people have developed: interest, which she defines as “intrinsically enjoying what you do;” practice, or “the daily discipline of trying to do things better than we did yesterday;” purpose, or “the conviction that your work matters,” that it is “integrally connected to the well-being of others;” and hope, which she says is “the expectation that our efforts can improve our future.”
Chris Guillebeau’s goal is to help you win the “career lottery” and find work that pays well, gives you joy, and is psychologically rewarding. He provides a guide on how to do this in his new book Born for This: How to Find the Work You were Meant to Do. Guillebeau said we need to use the ups and downs of our careers to learn to find the job where joy (what you like to do) and money (what sustains you) and flow (what you are good at) intersect. He provides exercises, anecdotes and practical advice on how to make it as a freelancer or entrepreneur, or how to make a more traditional office job better.
Managers looking to help their employees develop their skills might want to look at a new book by Michael Bungay Stanier called The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More and Change the Way you Lead Forever. Stanier believes coaching is simple and that it can be done in 10 minutes or less. He says that by using the mechanisms of building and embedding new habits, you can build a habit of daily, informal coaching. He provides questions to ask when coaching for performance and exercises to help set positive actions. The central message of his books is: “Talk less and ask more. Your advice isn’t as good as you think it is.”
You can find all these books and more career advice at your local library.
--A Good Read is a column by Tri-City librarians that is published on Wednesdays. Michael DeKoven is deputy director of Port Moody Public Library.
