Pick yourself/Choose yourself

Pick Yourself/Choose yourself

Seth has a great blog post ‘Pick yourself’ and taking responsibility, which I summarise as;

It’s never been easier to pick yourself to do anything you want (based on communications technology, changing economy, reduced barriers to entry and more) but that doesn’t mean you can do anything you want. It still means a lot of hard work, there’s no guarantee of success and you may fail, but as Seth says “The outcome is still in doubt, but it’s clear that waiting just doesn’t pay.

I agree with that statement and have started to do something about it, and have found a path that seems to work for me; James Altucher’s ‘Choose yourself’ (idea, lifestyle, mantra?) is something I’ve been working on for several months now and am moving into the phase of telling people about it – so more on that soon, but to say that my mind has been blown by the concepts, podcasts, blog posts and books I’ve been reading would not be an understatement and I’m looking forward to sharing that with people.

Both Seth and James argue that the world is changing extremely rapidly and that the old ways of doing things simply won’t work any more. Seth has written 18 books on the subject of marketing in the new world, reinventing yourself, making yourself a linchpin and more. When I was at Newcastle I bought many of his books to leave around the office and give to interested people, or people I thought might be interested – it’s arguable that it made a difference, but how would I know? 🙂 James takes somewhat of a different tack, his advice is more bite-size chunks (the ‘Ask Althucher‘ series of podcasts are usually less than 10 minutes long and are essential listening for me every day – highly recommended) and salted with some very heart-felt experiences from his own life. Much more on that later.

Finally, and just in time, there’s a MOOC course starting tomorrow, which has some real bearing on what I’ve just written; The Enterprise Shed: Making Ideas Happen that’s being run by some friends back in Newcastle; Katie Wray is the lead on the course and Suzanne Hardy has been kicking up a storm getting MOOCs ingrained into the local thinking. Interestingly, there is also some Tasmanian involvement in the course too, with Colin Jones listed as a mentor on the course. Should be fun!