Candid, refreshing advice for self-guided businesspeople.
A book of inspiration and practical tips for self-employed business owners that goes beyond the usual.
Shaw, a photographer, podcaster, speaker, coach, and consultant, has been self-employed for his entire career—from age 14 through midlife—and works with clients who are also self-employed. In this debut guide he introduces a “self-employment ecosystem” with the aim of providing everything necessary to create a sustainable business and lifestyle for oneself. An introductory section describes the paradox of self-employment: wanting to control one’s own destiny, while finding oneself in uncontrollable circumstances. It goes on to list symptoms of work-life imbalance and to present his ecosystem concept. The main text is organized into three parts: “Personal Development,” “Business Strategies,” and “Daily Habits.” Each offers the author’s personal experiences and client success stories as well as useful explanations and pithy, practical advice. The “Personal Development” section covers such topics as one’s mindset regarding money and how to deal with obstacles and limiting beliefs. Clear, memorable explanations abound; for example, he encourages readers to think of letting go of one thing to reach another as like Tarzan swinging from vine to vine. “Business Strategies” includes an explication of what the author calls “hug marketing,” pictured as a series of concentric circles. Shaw offers a novel, step-by-step way to conceptualize a website that’s refreshingly easy to grasp, explaining it as an emotional journey. The section also covers such elements as defining one’s niche and inspiring referrals. “Daily Habits” suggests ways to sustain growth, creativity, and work-life balance through various techniques and how to handle rejection and self-employment in midlife. The book’s tone is immediately relatable; self-employed people in creative fields will feel seen. Throughout, the author’s style is personal, candid, and conversational, sometimes reading like a pep talk tinged with self-deprecating humor. Several brief exercises and worksheets will help readers think through the author’s principles, and an additional workbook (not seen) is available on the author’s website. Overall, this book will be worthwhile for anyone running their own business or thinking of starting one.
Candid, refreshing advice for self-guided businesspeople.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-77458-004-2
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Page Two
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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