You, Inc is one of those books that is full of short little life lessons. These are often some of my favorite types of books as you don’t need to sit down and commit hours upon hours to get a lesson out of it. I’ve learned a TON from this book.
The lessons are powerful strategies for building a better career and life.
I’d like to share a few of the most important lessons that I received from this book.
The first lesson that I learned from this is a section called “Jack of a Dozen Trades”
The speaking industry features hundreds of characters, but eventually you end up running into a dozen Jacks. Jack’s are the people who have EVERYTHING as their specialty. I used to consider myself a Jack of all Trades. I mean, hell I’m an Entrepreneur, I need to be awesome at everything!!!! WRONG!
When you ask these people what their specialty is….team-building? Change? Creativity and Innovation? Leadership? Sales? Their response….ALL FIVE!!! Plus motivation, marketing and four other topics.
Sure this seems like its awesome, you are great at everything. But, when someone is trying to think of a speaker for a team-building event will Jack’s name even come up? Probably not because you already forgot that he considers himself an expert at that as well as the other 102003040 things. By trying to mark himself as an expert at many subjects, he ends up losing out and is not an expert on any subject at all.
DON’T BE THE JACK OF ALL TRADES! Specialize in something.. it is more fun/profitable!
The next great lesson I received
People buy you with their eyes a while back I wrote up a whole blog post on that. It’s short and sweet. The biggest thing about being considered an expert is how people view you. You need to portray a professional image if that is what you want to be known as.
another great section was on How to Give an Excellent Thirty-Minute Speech
It starts off with….
Speak for twenty-two minutes…. Time is so valuable for people if you can learn to get the information across in less time, people will be happier and take the message better.
Why Speeches must be short is also included in this…. People have less time and have learned that they can get valuable information in minutes. Television has also conditioned them to every 12minutes commercials come on. This creates about a 10-15 minute window of opportunity for us to take advantage of. You want to keep your message short! People will remember it and it will be more effective!
You can pick this book up from Amazon if you’d like, I’d recommend having it on your shelf to pick up and get a few bits of information out of each day.
Personal rating for this book: [rating:4]
