Journal blank books, writing prompts, etc. are not in our usual repertoire but sometimes fate hands you a good thing you don’t expect. Sheila Allee’s “All are Free to Write” is one of those. It is a vast improvement over the typical products in the “low-content” genre, and might even be considered a collection of very short stories. Its 52 stories are set up as a prompt for writing something once a week for a year, but unlike most such products, the prompts are not one-line quotes from famous people or motivational meme sentences. Instead, each section is carefully crafted to provide a vignette from the author’s experience and by the end of the year you will know her as well as you anyone but your real lifelong friends (and probably better than many of those, because we don’t share all our secrets, do we?) The book is still useful even if you are not into journaling, because you can certainly use the thought for the week to prompt you on something you are involved with. For instance, the first piece of giving yourself permission to do something other than the daily routine spurred a business blog post on the need for companies to make investments in “sharpening the saw” if they wanted to stay competitive in a fast-moving world.
Category Archives: Self-help
Crack the Code by Renting Your Underwear
Before even discussing the book’s contents, you’ll need to understand what the title is (and isn’t!) about. In fact, you’re not likely to find this book by the usual search terms!
- Despite the terms “emotional” and “underwear”, this is not another in the series of bodice-ripper romances by one Jay S. Wilder.
- “Renting your underwear” comes from a speech saying you will need to do things that make you recoil – such as wearing rented underwear – to achieve significant goals
So let’s get to what it is. It is a business-inspirational book intended to get you to put away all the distracting (and expensive) reasons why you will not take action now to start doing what you know you ought to do. It is a quick read, at 125 pages, although you’ll probably do well to skim first to see what is in it and then come back through to pick up on the detailed advice.
It has two critical messages:
- All that conspicuous spending buys you very little in long-term satisfaction and cost you the capital you need for the things that are really important, whether it is investing in a business, taking the dream trip, etc. Get rid of excess stuff now and stop buying it in the future.
- If your ambitions are to do something other than what you are doing, then doing nothing because it’s just easier that way will not get you any closer to your goal
The book spends a fair amount of time discussing specific actions you can take to stop avoiding what you need to do and to keep yourself focused on the important goals. There are also links to some supporting resources such as workbooks ot help you implement some of the ideas. If you’re sitting around thinking “there has to be more to life than this” or “is this how I am supposed to spend the rest of my life?”, then this is the book for you. It will also help if you’ve already had that thought and have established some vague goals for improving your situation but you’re still wondering why nothing seems to be getting better: the odds are that you’re avoiding the harder steps that are needed to get up on that path.
Even if you’re not having such pangs, reading the book should cause you to at least question whether you have really defined any goals, or whether you are just comfortably drifting along … to where? One thing the book can’t do is to help you define what your goals might be, and that might be the hardest task of all.
The one area where I didn’t go along with the flow of the book is its constant assertions that you do need to make drastic changes. There are many people who are in fact quite fat and happy (not to say dumb, not at all) and will be very content to keep drifting on the path of least resistance. But they’re not likely to be reading a book about how to do anything about it, so the book isn’t meant for them anyway.