Your Story Matters

The house is quiet. My husband and one daughter are sleeping. The other two spent the night at a friend’s house. I love these quiet moments. They are perfect for reflecting and reading.  And I just read an e-book that rocked my world a bit…in a good way. It’s the inspiring, focus producing ,  free e-book, What Matters Now.

This e-book, compiled by Seth Godin,  contains 70 authors each briefly sharing an idea for us to think about as we head into 2010. Some of the articles I only glanced at; others I read slowly.

Here’s a bit of what I gleaned:

• Page 5:  Be generous. Art can’t happen without someone who seeks to make a difference.
• Page 11: Ease up.
• Page 15: Vision, it’s the first casualty in hard times. It’s needed for hard times to improve.
• Page 40: Celebrate others.
• Page 42: “Say yes to adventure….journey with zeal.”
• Page 50: Ask, “What’s working and how can we do more of it?”
• Page 54: Cultivate your confidence.
• Page 64: Show don’t tell.
• Page 76: Say, “I’m sorry” and mean it.
• Page 77: Get some sleep.

And the two pages that resonated the most with me…

• Page 16: Commit. Care. Connect. Communicate. Expand capacity. The litmus test is this: “If you are truly enriching someone’s life, they will typically miss you in their past. They think their lives would have been better if they’d met you earlier.”
• Page 31: Tough-mindedness is “the ability to draw lines and boundaries within which we protect and preserve the mental and emotional space to do our work and to be true to our selves. Not to the point of insanity (we gotta keep a sense of humor about this stuff), but we also desperately need the ability to play real hardball with ourselves when we need it. Otherwise, we’ll all expire from shallowness.”

If you want to add some fresh insight & focus to your 2010,  go read, scan or inhale What Matters Now for yourself. You can read it below or download your own copy. What resonates with you?

Please share your thoughts. What clicks?