the art of non-conformity
A fan of Chris Guillebeau? Absolutely. When he posted a few weeks ago to see if he could get a few test readers for book version of The Art of Non-Conformity, I enthusiastically posted to the comments (along with, oh, 900+ other people) to see if I could get an advance copy for review. I posted:
“I’d like to participate because I enormously admire anyone who, as I put it, “claims their choices.” I think that the kind of work you do is this up-front, complete and total contradiction to the idea that our lives have limitations. I’m jazzed about supporting anyone who walks the world that way, excited about collaboration, and a reliable participant (aka, I don’t say I’ll do it and then not read it/do it/follow up/pimp it out/write about it/review it/speakup). Finally, I have been known to give people donuts (and or other baked, sugary confections of their choice) when we do something together. Who wouldn’t want that?”
I was totally psyched to receive AONC in the mail and have been enthusiastically reading it ever since.
At the top of the list of things that I appreciate about it? This is not a book that treats you like you’re stupid. Anyone who is interested in changing the game in their life already knows “how” to travel, or attempt to find more meaningful work. There are already a lot of books on this topic. What Chris spends time on in the early chapters are the things that really will swamp you if you endeavour to buck the system: fear.
For me, this book is about managing fear–and managing it in a completely hands-on, realistic, practical, get down into it, firm yet unwavering kind of way. Chris spends time anticipating the doubts that people will come up with, that friends and family will voice, the self-limiting beliefs of the world at large–and as someone who began working for myself in the past year, I quickly learned that the bulk of one’s energy when doing anything new can go in this direction.
“Intelligence is not a prerequisite, but determination is.” — Chris Guillebeau
But this is not “just” a book about managing fear. This, too, is a book about posing a challenge/invitation to think bigger, to not settle. There’s a good reason why Chris has a lot of supporters of his website work, and I’m glad that he’s now going to have something out in the print world, hailing its own ISBN.
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P.S. I just changed my RSS feed address–if you have been following this blog on an RSS feed, you’ll need to redirect it to: feed://feeds.feedburner.com/DailyCourage
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