Harnessing Your North Star for True Success and Fulfillment Happiness. Meaning. Purpose. These are arguably the most important truths for a fulfilled life, yet we often struggle to define what these concepts really mean for ourselves. Where do you find happiness? How do you align your passion and financial needs? How do you weave them into your life’s meaning and purpose? In The Passion Gap, Philip Hsin shares his journey of defining values and determining the meaning of life. Through rigorous research and lived experiences, he shows you how to unlock lifelong prosperity and fulfillment by living according to your own identified values system. You will learn how to prioritize for yourself the sources of lasting happiness—God, Society, Family, and Self—and align them with all aspects of life to yield true meaning and purpose. Whether you’re searching for a meaningful career, seeking financial security through your passions, or just trying to create a balanced life, this is your chance to learn who you really are and infuse lasting happiness and prosperity into your life and those around you.
Discover ways to cultivate a thriving and passionate community of learners - in your classroom! In this book, educators and consultants Angela Maiers and Amy Sandvold show you how to spark and sustain your students' energy, excitement, and love of learning. This book presents ideas for planning and implementing a Clubhouse Classroom, where passion meets practice every day. In the Clubhouse Classroom, students learn new skills and explore their talents with the help of educators who are invigorated by the subjects they teach.
In his best-selling book, The Passion Plan, Richard Chang showed individuals how to discover their passion and turn it into personal and professional fulfillment. Now, in The Passion Plan at Work he shows how to bring passion into the workplace--and turn good companies into great ones. Adapting his seven-step model for individuals to an organizational perspective, Chang explains how passion can provide direction and improve performance at all levels of a company. Carefully leading readers through his do-it-yourself process, Chang provides specific guidelines for creating an action plan that galvanizes an organization around passion. Along the way he provides practical tools--questionnaires, worksheets, and checklists--to help assess an organization's Passion Profile and make passion a big part of your company's ongoing success.
Probing the ominous side of career advice to "follow your passion," this data-driven study explains how the passion principle fails us and perpetuates inequality by class, gender, and race; and it suggests how we can reconfigure our relationships to paid work. "Follow your passion" is a popular mantra for career decision-making in the United States. Passion-seeking seems like a promising path for avoiding the potential drudgery of a life of paid work, but this "passion principle"—seductive as it is—does not universally translate. The Trouble with Passion reveals the significant downside of the passion principle: the concept helps culturally legitimize and reproduce an exploited, overworked white-collar labor force and broadly serves to reinforce class, race, and gender segregation and inequality. Grounding her investigation in the paradoxical tensions between capitalism's demand for ideal workers and our cultural expectations for self-expression, sociologist Erin A. Cech draws on interviews that follow students from college into the workforce, surveys of US workers, and experimental data to explain why the passion principle is such an attractive, if deceptive, career decision-making mantra, particularly for the college educated. Passion-seeking presumes middle-class safety nets and springboards and penalizes first-generation and working-class young adults who seek passion without them. The ripple effects of this mantra undermine the promise of college as a tool for social and economic mobility. The passion principle also feeds into a culture of overwork, encouraging white-collar workers to tolerate precarious employment and gladly sacrifice time, money, and leisure for work they are passionate about. And potential employers covet, but won't compensate, passion among job applicants. This book asks, What does it take to center passion in career decisions? Who gets ahead and who gets left behind by passion-seeking? The Trouble with Passion calls for citizens, educators, college administrators, and industry leaders to reconsider how we think about good jobs and, by extension, good lives.
Imagine a classroom where passion-driven genius work is not extracurricular, but is a part of the routine. Students are invited and expected to collaborate to support each other's genius; to experiment with ideas, discover new possibilities and make epic things happen. Genius Hour is more than a program where students do fun projects together. Genius Hour is a nearly unprecedented opportunity for teachers to guide students in how to be effective learners and citizens, by helping them connect what they do in school to the broader community. It's our job to nurture our geniuses so they can change the world. Join us today to unlock a world of genuine curiosity and wonder.
The task of saving the planet requires an extraordinary reckoning with ourselves- with our all-too-human reluctance to sacrifice immediate comfort for the sake of the future. We have turned our world into a space of doing just what pleases us, and the effects and impacts are already upon us. Despite alarming signals from every scientific report, we seem not to listen to the urgent call to action. Just in 2023 alone, global losses from climate disasters far exceed $100bn in eye-watering financial losses. Behind the dollar, figures lie millions of stories of human loss and suffering and the death and displacement of people around the world. Be it storms, floods, droughts, or heat waves, to name a few. Most of these impacts affect some of the world’s poorest countries and, more so, Africa. Despite all these, the urgency for climate action has not taken centre stage. We are divided. Though this was short-lived, it took a pandemic to unite us as a global community, but climate change and environmental crisis have not stopped for COVID-19. Instead, COVID exposed some hidden aspects that need to be understood to accelerate global solutions to global challenges, especially for Africa and the global south. Externalizing solutions is a non-starter. For the past 60 years, Africa has not fully weaned from externalizing solutions to its challenges. The COVID-19 emergency has offered us the latest shock therapy that “we cannot live on borrowed salt”. That “we cannot set sail on someone else’s star”. A stark reminder that this model of dependency is a failure. For example, we read multiple rounds of stimulus packages running into the trillions of US dollars extended by developed economies to bail out their countries. It is a blunt demonstration of the urgent need to change tact and embrace the approach of local solutions to contextual challenges because externalizing solutions has repeatedly proven to be a non-starter. Sadly, none of this surprised me. Over the past twelve years, I have spent my career working on the climate change nexus between science, policy, and action. I have been part of crunching the numbers, getting the science to the field to test the waters of environment and climate action solutions and engaging the continent’s populace where their livelihoods are destroyed, putting millions at risk. I have seen first-hand how the generally accepted narrative that environment and climate action are a social undertaking and primarily the government’s responsibility has led to a mindset of dependency and supply-drivenness instead of looking for opportunities. It has made the narrative of climate action an investment opportunity that unlocks opportunities for many a hard sell- hindering the full participation of some stakeholders who are reluctant to embrace a market-driven paradigm. I have seen institutional lethargy where the uptake of environment and climate action from an enterprise and income opportunities lens is a new narrative separate from the traditional approach of taking climate action from the social lens established in most institutions. Such new knowledge tends to face resistance from bureaucracies where new paradigms are shelved and opted for the traditional ones. To surmount this, I have found that we urgently need to address climate change, using a fresh perspective that engages the whole of society to accelerate action to curtail the already dangerous impacts we are suffering. And to work with early adopters within state and non-state actors to spearhead the task of convincing counterparts to pick up new innovative paradigms. We need a mindset change where the continent’s population, especially the youth, starts seeing themselves as solutions providers, not victims of circumstances. But just as “daylight follows a night”, COVID-19 has catalyzed the rise of some very critical lessons that we cannot afford to ignore from now and beyond if we are to take environmental and climate action holistically engaging the entirety of society. And these lessons arise from answering what I consider to be the most fundamental question of our time. And that is - how do we re-imagine, re-organize and re-design transformational environment and climate action solutions that involve us all as we reboot our mindsets? I used the operator “we” deliberately because these lessons are for each of us as individual citizens. And each of us has a role to play in answering this question if we are to embark on driving transformational climate action. To do this entirely, we need transformational thinking. The big question becomes whether we have transformed as a continent and people. Let’s face it: across the globe, almost universally, Africa is a continent that is synonymous with adversity. Today, over 60 years after most countries gained independence, the continent is still in a steep struggle to get the basics of socio-economic progress right. For example, over 257 million people on the continent still go to bed hungry every day. Over 12 million young people – the highest globally - need jobs every year amidst shrinking economies that are up to 20 times less productive than competitors in today’s globalized economies. Up to 620 million people lack access to electricity. Bridging this gap using fossil-based power generators costs three to six times what grid consumers pay globally, a significant impediment to competitive enterprise on the continent. The number of people without access to clean cooking has been rising. Over 700,000 lives, most of them women and children, are lost prematurely every year because of indoor pollution exacerbated by unclean, clean cooking means across Africa. Given these challenges, I have seen through our work across the region that there is still a sense of obliviousness when it comes to ushering ourselves to do that, which can help solve a problem of this magnitude that is accelerating literally every challenge we can think of in Africa. The continent has not been spared of raging global emergencies to add to the above peculiar risks. From the COVID-19 global crisis to climate change, Africa has borne the brunt like the rest of the globe. Africa is the most vulnerable region to the changing climate. It is already heating twice as fast as the rest of the world. The implication is that the economic misery that is already at breaking point and plunging millions into suffering is guaranteed to hurt current generations further and utterly disenfranchise those yet to be born. If you are already worried about climate change and support climate action, then you are on the right path. The onus is on the present generation to draw the proverbial line in the sand and say never again. Just as the globe has come together and developed measures to respond to the COVID-19 emergency, including a vaccine in record time, Africa must urgently get together and put a stop to perennial disproportionate vulnerability. This calls for one thing – transformation. But a transformation that is undertaken on two dimensions- soft and hard. On the “hard transformation”, I am an environment and climate action expert and practitioner who has worked with ground actors. Increasingly, I spend more and more of my time explaining why it matters to engage the continent's most significant non-state actors constituencies- the youth and the informal sector. Why? Because after engaging the continent through our work on climate action solutions and the data we have generated, I’m convinced that the most strategic and vital direction is for Africa to leverage its areas of comparative economic advantage to drive climate action from an enterprising dimension. From the informal sector that currently engages up to 80% of the active population to the youth who form over 60% of the people, coupled with the continent’s inclusive, climate-derivative economic sectors – its agro-value chains and clean energy. The combination of these aspects urgently needs to be super-charged and turbo-charged to become the main thrust of competitive economic growth on the continent. It is the “brick-and-mortar” foundation of climate action entrepreneurship or what I called in short “ClimatePreneurship” that offers the continent the quickest route to achieving the much-needed global competitiveness that is simply irreplaceable. But the above is not possible without the “soft transformation”. So, what is soft transformation? According to wealth measures globally, a skilled person capable of turning challenges into enterprise opportunities is 4times the value of produced capital and 15 times the value of natural capital. A World Bank Analysis shows that spending just one additional year enhancing skills raises earnings by an average of 10% annually. This is higher than any alternative investment an individual could make. Buying a physical asset would give you 7.4%; a savings account would give you 4.7%; and a house 3.8%. Nothing beats enhancing your skills. This then means that the primary, sovereign capital that we need to mobilize in Africa and the world towards driving climate action from a socio-economic lens is one – human capital. How we can get people to invest in climate action implementation from an enterprise lens, leveraging on what is already accessible to them, is the new perspective we urgently need to bring into climate implementation in addition to the hard transformation. The continent urgently needs a “skills revolution” where every citizen and resident pre-occupies themselves with one duty – how to use their skills, talents, aptitudes, and ongoing work to turn the continent’s myriad of challenges into enterprise opportunities that touch many lives. Doing this calls for a change in narrative and attitude to reboot the mind where individual citizens see themselves as the sources of climate action solutions and make themselves valuable in devising these solutions that Africa needs, not always expecting that these solutions will come from elsewhere alone. Why are people not taking these actions and making themselves the solutions providers? The answer is that many have not been made to self-belief and see themselves as the drivers of solutions. The mainstream narrative for the past years has instead focused and peddled the wrong narrative on problems for problems instead of solutions to problems. We must move from this knee-jerk style of a problem-for-problem narrative to solutions to problem conversations. This means the continent must reject the “pencil test” definition where contextual understanding does not spearhead the definition of the continent’s narrative, solutions, progress, predicament, and even existence. For example, sometime ten years ago, Africa was described in the mainstream in flowery terms as a “rising continent” – simply because of the so-called “natural resources boom” that is always fickle and transient. In a few short years, the continent became a “limping continent” when the resources “boom” became “bust”. This is a “pencil test”, a “moving target” definition, where the continent’s identity is erased and changed not based on contextual fundamentals but the convenience of everybody else but the over 1.4 billion citizens eking out a living under the hot sun. Changing this perspective is part of the urgently needed “soft transformation”. But how can we drive this by engaging the whole of society to transform for real? I’m asked this question nearly every time. The continent’s institutions must urgently embrace the need to give more chances to more people who know the importance of human capital. Take financial systems, for instance – the traditional model is always to extend credit based on an individual or entity’s physical assets and transaction records. This “safe bet” approach has proven its inability to foster real progress, as we already know over the many years it has been applied. But what do we do in a continent where up to 90% exist outside of formal banking systems? Transform. An estimated $300 billion in lending opportunities remain untapped in the continent’s vast informal sector that engages up to 80% of the continent’s working population, the majority being formally unbanked. Institutions must transform and consider “soft capital” as a basis for extending credit and tap into the intrinsic of developmental capital – human abilities. An individual’s track record in terms of passion for turning challenges into opportunities needs to be the new currency, not the nature of their “balance sheet” alone. We have developed an approach called the Innovative Volunteerism approach, an incubation approach and model of transformational development, leveraging people as the sovereign capital, unlocking a new breed of climate action entrepreneurs who were given a chance on nothing but their passion for solutions. It is essential to understand what is happening to the continent and use it as a strength to drive transformational environmental and climate action solutions. “ClimatePreneurship” is about looking beyond the turmoil of risks and focusing on selflessly devising solutions, using what is accessible to us. It is about retooling our skills, despite our educational and social background, with a clear goal in the mindset of turning climate change-induced challenges into opportunities. Here’s the good news already happening across Africa, where passions are turned into profits. Through Innovative Volunteerism, young people across Africa are retooling their skills and finding purpose in devising enterprises that deliver relatably accessible solutions to the climate crisis. They are delivering these solutions to their communities as their primary market. They continuously research, leveraging the online space as a repository of knowledge and valuable ideas to perfect these solutions continually. And in the process, they are creating income and socio-economic opportunities for themselves and entire communities. From clean cooking to clean energy-powered agro-value addition- these young people are combining the “soft” and “hard” aspects of transformation by leveraging their skills, talents, and passion for working symbiotically with informal sector actors and delivering climate action solutions. In this book, I want to show you how transformation is possible using what we already have now, not what we may hope to get. This is the transformation we urgently need in Africa. As you read on, may you be inspired to develop an eagle’s vision, the discipline of an ox, and understand your territory like a lion. And unlock wisdom to become a climate action solutions provider who leverages on ClimatePreneurship and make this inoculation against the perennial climate crisis a reality for all in Africa and the world. Because climate change connects to the things we all care about- the health of our families, the economic strength of our communities and the stability of Africa and our world. Fixing it isn’t only good for the planet; it is also good for all of us. The bottom line is this. To do something about climate action, you need to play your part with what you have, regardless of where you come from, how you look or your background. As someone who came from a very humble background devoid of opportunity or affluence like most Africans but who is penning this book today, I can tell you this is possible because I was once like you. Believe it! Have Faith and Act Now!
A REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK "A hands-on, real talk guide for navigating the hot-button issues that so many families struggle with."--Reese Witherspoon Tired, stressed, and in need of more help from your partner? Imagine running your household (and life!) in a new way... It started with the Sh*t I Do List. Tired of being the "shefault" parent responsible for all aspects of her busy household, Eve Rodsky counted up all the unpaid, invisible work she was doing for her family -- and then sent that list to her husband, asking for things to change. His response was... underwhelming. Rodsky realized that simply identifying the issue of unequal labor on the home front wasn't enough: She needed a solution to this universal problem. Her sanity, identity, career, and marriage depended on it. The result is Fair Play: a time- and anxiety-saving system that offers couples a completely new way to divvy up chores and responsibilities. Rodsky interviewed more than five hundred men and women from all walks of life to figure out what the invisible work in a family actually entails and how to get it all done efficiently. With four easy-to-follow rules, 100 household tasks, and a series of conversation starters for you and your partner, Fair Play helps you prioritize what's important to your family and who should take the lead on every chore from laundry to homework to dinner. "Winning" this game means rebalancing your home life, reigniting your relationship with your significant other, and reclaiming your Unicorn Space -- as in, the time to develop the skills and passions that keep you interested and interesting. Stop drowning in to-dos and lose some of that invisible workload that's pulling you down. Are you ready to try Fair Play? Let's deal you in.
Hacking Leadership is Mike Myatt's latest leadership book written for leaders at every level. Leadership isn't broken, but how it's currently being practiced certainly is. Everyone has blind spots. The purpose of Hacking Leadership is to equip leaders at every level with an actionable framework to identify blind spots and close leadership gaps. The bulk of the book is based on actionable, topical leadership and management hacks to bridge eleven gaps every business needs to cross in order to create a culture of leadership: leadership, purpose, future, mediocrity, culture, talent, knowledge, innovation, expectation, complexity, and failure. Each chapter: Gives readers specific techniques to identify, understand, and most importantly, implement individual, team and organizational leadership hacks. Addresses blind spots and leverage points most leaders and managers haven’t thought about, which left unaddressed, will adversely impact growth, development, and performance. All leaders have blind-spots (gaps), which often go undetected for years or decades, and sadly, even when identified the methods for dealing with them are outdated and ineffective – they need to be hacked. Showcases case studies from the author’s consulting practice, serving as a confidant with more than 150 public company CEOs. Some of those corporate clients include: AT&T, Bank of America, Deloitte, EMC, Humana, IBM, JP Morgan Chase, Merrill Lynch, PepsiCo, and other leading global brands. Hacking Leadership offers a fresh perspective that makes it easy for leaders to create a roadmap to identify, refine, develop, and achieve their leadership potential--and to create a more effective business that is financially solvent and professionally desirable.
In the new world of hybrid work and AI, one thing is clear: the war for talent is over—and talent won. With sparsely populated offices and people working from wherever they are, and with AI emerging everywhere in business and dominating headlines, our work lives have undergone a remarkable transformation, seemingly overnight. But the reality is that for years the ever-growing digital wave has been breaking down organizational boundaries and increasing the adoption of open innovation, including the use of crowdsourcing platforms as a talent solution. Now the imperative is clear: adapt to and leverage this new, digitally enabled world of "open talent"—or get left behind. In this eye-opening, essential guidebook, John Winsor and Jin Paik, with their work at the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard, show how the massive reset of the pandemic allowed talented workers everywhere to exit their jobs without leaving the workforce. Now many are freelancing for multiple companies or are starting small businesses, challenging hiring managers as never before amidst a transformed workforce. What's more, talent has more power than ever using platforms such as Freelancer.com, Fiverr, and Upwork, setting their own terms for work: what, where, when, and at what price. How can companies adapt? The key, the authors argue, is shifting to a more distributed idea and structure of collaborative work. The authors call this a networked organization, where talent is culled from both inside and outside the organization and viewed through a single lens—as a global ecosystem that can be tapped as needed. With rich stories, keen insights, and an abundance of practical advice, Winsor and Paik provide a new framework and operating model for transforming your organization into a talent-orchestrating, problem-solving machine.
THE UNCOMMON DREAM One of The Most Important Books You Will Read During Your Lifetime. It reveals the remarkable secrets that can cause the unspoken craving of your heart to come to pass. A step-by-step Mentorship Program for those who cannot live with Mediocrity / Focus / Mentors / Recovery / Passion. There Is No Other Book Like It Available Today.
