Reading the right material at the right time can send you on a journey of self-exploration and understanding that can open your mind to new possibilities and change your perspective. The benefits of such reading are tangible and real.

You need to read. In keeping with our principle of effectiveness, you need to read the right things that will help you accomplish your objective. To be effective, you must have a goal so that you can reach a result that meets or exceeds that goal. Setting a goal requires that you know what it is that you need to accomplish.

The unpleasant truth is that what we need to accomplish is not merely learning the tricks of a trade. In order to become more successful at life and in our careers, we must improve who we are. That means that a lot of the reading we will be doing will be self-improvement books - not books on how to write an excellent resume.

Own Your Current Situation and Be Proactive

Your current work situation is a projection that you have created through a series of choices you have made combined with the forces of entropy and serendipity.

You have chosen your current job. You applied for it, you were hired, and you stay where you sit. You have made three choices that have resulted in you sitting or standing where you are during your work hours: the choice to apply, the choice to take the job, and the choice to not leave that you make every day. Unless you understand that your situation is the product of your choices, you cannot even begin to improve your situation by reading books about business.

You must accept, before you go any farther, that you are ultimately responsible for your situation. If you cannot accept this, and you are convinced that you are the victim of circumstances beyond your control, that the environment outside of you controls everything that you do, and that you are helpless and hopeless in the face of it, stop reading now, because nothing you read will help you.

In order to change your situation, you cannot change those around you or the company you work for. Nor is it efficient or effective to sit around waiting for something to change in the environment while you passively suffer and years pass. The most powerful forecasting model that exists is the immediate past. Whatever happened last year will most likely happen again this year. As a result, passive behavior is rarely rewarded by entropy, as your situation will deteriorate into chaos if you just sit there, and serendipity, which requires you take action to have a happy circumstance occur.

Being proactive is your only hope, and proactive behavior is rooted in the belief that we are each responsible for our situations.

Books You Are Looking For

There are two basic sorts of book on the shelves of bookstores for you to read and begin changing your life around so that you are happier at work.

• Books on self-improvement
• Books on management

The two kinds of book differ from one another dramatically, and it is important to approach both sorts of book.

Books on self improvement focus on principles and beliefs from which your behaviors are projected. These books, like this article, offer insight and wisdom into the very nature of what makes a human being successful and happy in life.

Good books about management are often based in the principles found in self-help books if not self-help books themselves. The funny thing about looking for books on management is that the good ones all contain advice to the manager on how to improve their own activities at work. There is actually very little content on the shelves that covers specific, manager-only skills and activities.

Lots of people quit their job and find another one - only to discover, as a good friend of mine is fond of saying, “The grass is also brown on the other side.” If we change our circumstances without changing anything about ourselves, we ultimately find ourselves repeating our bad experiences over and over again. That’s because we make the world around us what it is with our beliefs and perspectives.

Great Sources for Books

Do you walk into book stores and pile up a shopping basket with your hardback selections and then pay full price for them? You fool!

Check the prices on Amazon.com instead. You’ll find plenty of these books available used for less money than the shipping costs. I purchased Caplow’s excellent work for literally $1.00 and $3.00 shipping.

But there is an even better way to find books on the cheap. Try your local Goodwill store. When people finish reading business books, they often hand them in for a tax write-off to a local store. You could do what I did and get a copy of most of Drucker’s works sitting right there on the shelf for $.075 each.

The Temptation of Hard Skills

I have worked with technologists for many years. When given the choice of meeting new people, learning to socialize, or learning a new technology, they will pick the technology almost every time. And yet there is little evidence that learning a new technology will help improve our situations at work. Yes, it’s nice to have a hard skill to fall back on, but learning another programming language or configuration tool will not get you promoted, nor will it help you succeed in your current job when you already have plenty of skills.

Hard skills are tempting because they are easy. Learning a hard skill does not require us to work on ourselves, to learn our strengths and weaknesses, to find out unhappy truths that we might be in the wrong role, or to reach out to others. Learning hard skills does not require any emotional vulnerability.

But hard skills are more expensive. Go ahead and pass on that book about learning how to successfully work with different personality types and pick up another book on Java. You will end up spending more money and time over the long-term with less payout in terms of improving your current situation.

The secret to a better work experience is not in fixing your resume, although the skill of making a good resume is certainly a skill with real benefits. The secret is to fix yourself. The books I recommend you begin with focus on improving not just your skills, but your beliefs and therefore your behaviors.