Why I started this site:

By the time I graduated from college in 2006, I had become rather unenthusiastic about my major, as I had with most of my education. I believe it was a reflection on the poor public school system in the U.S.—an antiquated institution that was crafted during the industrial era to brainwash train young people to gladly take their number and accept social norms. (Translation: I don’t think public school teaches kids any of the skills necessary for true greatness.)

I had gone through the motions. I was going to college because it’s just what you do. I chose a major that probably wasn’t best for me because I just had to finish in four years. Then I took a crappy staff job because it basically fell in my lap.

This all turned out to be very boring. Like many a poor sap, I ended up pushing paper, going to a lot of dumb meetings, and basically sitting around watching my life end one minute at a time.

I must have gotten lucky somehow, because it was at this point that I became interested in technology, startups, and entrepreneurship. I started watching Stanford lectures online, listening to podcasts, and I got this crazy idea in my head that it would be cool to get an MBA from one of these top business schools and start something big.

Meanwhile, I watched a lot of my good friends fall into the same trap I had fallen into: taking shitty jobs after college and buying into this myth that that’s all there is to it. 1) Get a career. 2) You’re not gonna like it, but just do it like everyone else and keep your mouth shut.

This ain’t no race. And I am certainly not a rat.

To fight off the apathy, I started a mastermind group with some friends where we discussed our careers, entrepreneurship ideas, and personal development. Sort of a Napoleon Hill/Tom Peters-inspired support group where we would encourage each other to kick asses.

I also started this blog, which had a huge impact on my life. That might sound nerdy, but yeah:

Starting a blog was a defining moment in my life.

Blogging gave me a good excuse to keep reading, keep learning, to talk about the current events, ideas and technologies that interested me. Blogging also gave me a means to reach out to interesting folks from all walks of life, ask questions, and make friends with people around the globe. People I never imagined would take a naive 22-year-old kid seriously.

It was when one of these new friends needed help—an amazing serial entrepreneur who I was incredibly lucky to call a mentor—that I started the next chapter of my life: working for myself.

Books like The 4 Hour Workweek and a few fantastic blogs convinced me that jobs are for suckers. I started doing freelance web development for small businesses on the side, and I quit my job shortly thereafter.

I’ve spent over a year-and-a-half learning to master the whole self-employment thing, and now I’ve set out on a year-long journey to live abroad and do remote consulting work via the web. It’s rarely easy and it’s not always fun—in fact I frequently want to pull my hair out—but I enjoy the freedom that freelancing and entrepreneurship have given me. And the philosophy that underpins my choices is that I make the rules. I’ll say that again:

This is my life. I make the rules.

This blog is all about breaking the traditional “rules” that we think apply to us. It’s about challenging assumptions. There is no such thing as a One-Size-Fits-All lifestyle. You don’t have to go to college, graduate within four years, take a desk job, stay close to home, get an MBA, climb the corporate ladder, or anything just because it’s what herd mentality tells you you’re supposed to do. The world is a complex and beautiful place with a wide spectrum of possibilities, and full of unpredictable opportunities. Your life is your masterpiece, and you are the painter.

A few other like-minded rule-breakers out there—folks like Chris Guillebeau, Tim Ferriss, John Bardos, Clay Collins, and Andrew Warner—are preaching similar nonconformity. Here at ThrillingHeroics.com I approach this philosophy from a career/lifestyle point-of-view, and you’ll find discussions on personal development, travel, productivity, personal finance, entrepreneurship, web marketing and collaboration, lifestyle design and more.

Optimize your Life, Rock your Career, and Make the World your Playground!

That’s my motto. My number one priority here is to encourage my peers—young professionals and entrepreneurs—as well as readers at any stage in their career, to strive for excellence and make a positive difference in the world by doing what they’re truly passionate about.

For over three years Thrilling Heroics has been my baby—my “pet project.” It is and always will be “the professional blog of Cody McKibben,” but it is also a community-centered project where I hope to encourage others to pursue an exciting, unorthodox lifestyle and career. I’ll try to highlight individuals who are breaking the rules and living their dream lifestyles. While this is my “personal” site, there are many ways you can join or support the community, like adding us on Facebook (see the About Page or the Sidebar for more), and I leave the door open for guest posts and other contributing writers in the future.

Is the idea of an unorthodox career—living passionately—exciting to you?

Well, I’m recruiting believers. Sign up here. Follow my journey and learn from my mistakes while I attempt to sidestep the traditional corporate world, concentrate on personal growth, travel around the world, and create my ideal lifestyle!

Can’t get enough heroics?? Follow me on Twitter.

Bob Glaza (One Reader At a Time) tagged me last week for the Media Diet meme, a discussion that’s been propagating across the web since last year about our media consumption habits, to share with others how we get our information. I tracked this particular thread as far back as James Gordon-Macintosh and a few others at Seventy Seven PR, but I know that Jeremiah Owyang was also talking about it months earlier.

Everyone’s talking about information overload these days, so I figured I’d use this as an opportunity to share both 1) some of my personal interests, but also 2) how I filter through the vast amount of knowledge and media that’s available to us these days through the blogosphere and all the mainstream entertainment and news channels. Being a blogger, I like to follow a tremendous amount of information in this “Age of Conversation.” But, I like what Bob says: “Why NOT bite off more than you can chew?”

photo credit: drspam

Readables

When I was at my desk job, I used to read a few more newspapers and magazines (like the WSJ, Chronicle of Higher Education, Time, and BusinessWeek), but I pretty much entirely get my fix through the Internets these days! To be honest, I rarely watch the news or read the papers, let alone visit the sites of any mainstream media directly these days because there’s just too much information, and much of it I find too hyped (fearmonger much?) and unbalanced for my tastes. I do highly enjoy Wired.com, and I’ll pick up a copy of FastCompany now and then. But I concentrate mostly on niches that directly affect me, like the personal development and web design blogs, and I tend to hear all the most important headlines through friends, family, and social media anyway (Robert Scoble was covering the China quakes on Twitter before the USGS reported them).

I get a few Google Alerts sent directly to my email account for certain search terms, so that I get a daily summary and know immediately when someone on the web is talking about me, one of my sites, my business, or a couple of key interests of mine, for instance.

I use Google Reader almost daily to sift through nearly 70 blog subscriptions (and a few other RSS streams like freelancer job feeds). That means there are usually about 250-350 new articles in there daily. How do I keep up with all these? Well, firstly Google Reader makes it easy to organize your feeds into different folders, or categories, so I’ve got them organized by priority and into groups like “friends,” “business opportunities,” “blogging tips,” “web design,” and “personal development.” Some of the feeds I check every day, but others are marked for just occasional perusal when I’ve got the time. I generally browse through the titles in List View to dwindle the number down to just those that seem applicable or interesting to me (I probably read about 10-20% of the updates that come through my RSS reader).

Some of my most frequent reads are blogs like Problogger, Web Worker Daily, Life Beyond Code, Freelance Switch, Real Social Dynamics, Zen Habits, and blogs from the Brazen Careerist network. One big secret: probably 50% of the useful knowledge I share with my friends and blog readers comes from Lifehacker and Tim Ferris’ Experiments in Lifestyle Design Blog (from the author of The 4-Hour Workweek).

Aside from what’s in my feed reader, I find that the social web does a great job of “filtering” the most important/useful/sometimes completely silly news for me, so when I’ve got the time to wander, I frequent aggregators like PopUrls and Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop network. I’ve been using PopUrls as my landing page for the last several weeks to keep my finger on the pulse of the web, because it is customizable to your tastes (by source or category), and I like to track the most popular articles, recommended articles, and the top hits on del.icio.us, Digg, and StumbleUpon each day. Additionally, the extremely illustrious, bright folks I follow on Twitter are also a renewable resource for awesome content!

If you want to follow some of my favorites, please checkout my Google Shared Items page, or my del.icio.us bookmarks.

I do read a little bit “offline” too! I try to read about a book per month, but these mostly consist of business or personal development books. A few of my favorites have been The 4-Hour Workweek, Vagabonding, The BrandYou50, Now Discover Your Strengths, and Never Eat Alone. A nice, warm book is good for travel, or when I feel like pulling my eyes away from the computer screen for a bit and laying in my hammock outside. Right now I’m reading Blogging Heroes, which has interviews with 30 top bloggers from around the world. Stay tuned for a list of top-recommended books from me and my mentors soon.

Viewables

I do have cable at home, but the only show I’ve watched religiously for the last four years has been to tune in to “Lost” when I visit my folks each week (it’s been slow to answer all our burning questions, but it has the best character development of anything I’ve ever seen on the tube). I use TV more for the very occasional break from work—since I work from home, it’s fun to completely disengage for an hour or two and enjoy some pure entertainment once in a while. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are the only news/politics I can tolerate these days—faux news with plenty of comedy and satire mixed in for good measure (and Stephen Colbert has the biggest stones of anyone on television!). Otherwise, I’ll watch some pointless drivel on E! or MTV for an escape when the opportunity presents itself.

For trends in technology, entertainment, and design, I’ve enjoyed the inspiring TEDTalks for a long time, which you can subscribe to as video podcasts through iTunes.

And I do enjoy the occasional movie! (Looking forward to seeing Indiana Jones today!)

Audibles

Ah this is key: I pretty much have some sound going at all times! I listen to a tremendous amount of music. I live and breath music! (I even have a sleep playlist!) But I hate the radio (ever notice how ALL the stations go to ads at the same time!?), I always listen to iTunes at home and CDs in the car. I have a huge MP3 library, where a few of my favorites are Massive Attack, Thievery Corporation, and Kings of Convenience, but I also listen to a few great online radio stations that you can stream directly into your iTunes, like Soma FM’s Groove Salad and Beat Blender, Ibiza Sonica, and Ibiza Global Radio.

For good business and personal growth information, I highly recommend several podcasts: Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders, Escape from Cubicle Nation, iinnovate, and the FallingFruit.tv podcasts. Listening to podcasts on the iPod is a great way to leverage your time if you’ve got a long commute on the bus/train, or a plane trip somewhere, or if you’re just doing chores around the house.

When I was at this year’s Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, I was motivated to buy the first three albums I’ve bought in probably years: Dark Side of the Moon, Kraftwerk’s live Minimum-Maximum, and Portishead’s first CD in a decade, Third. All highly recommended (you can sample below with my fancy new Amazon widget).

Other Resources

I hope you’ve enjoyed learning about some of my interests, and about how I filter through the static. That’s it for me, but here are a few recent posts from other great writers in the blogosphere that might give you a few tips on dealing with information overload and productivity in this high-bandwidth media world we live in.

• Chris Brogan, a huge voice in the blog community, shares his tips for processing information effectively and turning out awesome content in How I Do It
• Maki shares how to get through too much information in too little time on DoshDosh with Managing Information Flow: How Prioritization Will Improve Your Work and Learning Efficiency
• Leo does an Exclusive Interview with Stephen Covey on His Morning Routine, Blogs, Technology, GTD and The Secret at Zen Habits

I’m gonna tag Ryan Healy, Ronnie Nurss, Meg Roberts, Erik Folgate, Jamie Harrop, Susan Johnston, and Holly Hoffman, my fellow bloggers in the Gen-Y conversation, to participate in the Media Diet meme! Anyone else who’s got 2 cents to throw in can jump on board too!

Thrilling Heroics in 2007

2007 was a fantastic year for the blog. The site became an early participant in the Washington Post Blogroll program. And many things are still in development for the road ahead, but TH has recently been accepted as one of the first handful of Gen-Y career blogs to join the upcoming Brazen Careerist blog network, which should be a great opportunity. Over the course of the year, I also had the chance to interview several interesting individuals to get their perspective on leadership and success, so that Gen-Y readers can learn from their experience!

Thrilling Heroics has seen a lot of change this year as my personal interests and pursuits have evolved. The discussion is geared more toward personal and career development now than it was at the birth of this blog in 2006, but the central mission is the same: TH is a career-oriented resource aimed at college students and young professionals, with a strong focus on leadership, personal development, productivity, personal finance, entrepreneurship, and “lifestyle design,” with the purpose of inspiring and empowering readers to pursue their wildest dreams! In 2008, you can plan to see some further changes around here in content and design, and you will probably see a few guest writers. Click here to learn more about plans for ‘08.

I also have to thank the readers, of course! Thank you for returning week after week. Thank you for your kind words of encouragement, for your patience with me as my direction and obligations change, and for sharing your thoughts on the discussions that take place here. Your comments and your supportive emails keep me going, and they keep the dialogue here interesting! In the next year, I hope to build more community here for you young readers, so please help us to grow the community by sharing the URL with your family, friends, and colleagues. Also, if you are a regular visitor, consider subscribing to the RSS feed to make life easier on yourself. Get posts delivered to your email inbox only when there is fresh new content, so that you don’t waste time visiting the site when there’s nothing new!

Best Posts of 2007

There were 102 posts this year, with over 6,800 unique visitors to the site. We made it onto Tom Peters’ homepage, Yahoo! Finance, and Consumerist.com, among others! This could not have been possible without you, the reader. Thank you! Here are the blog posts that caused the most buzz around the blogosphere this year and inspired the best conversions. Please take a moment to look back at the best of 2007:

Top 10 Most Popular Posts in 2007

1. Learn To Build A Brand That Shouts Distinction, Commitment, and Passion
2. Interview with David Anderson, Founder and CEO of Green Options
3. How To Use Your Peers For Fun And Profit!
4. Karen Seeh, Corporate Sustainability Strategist, Talks About Social Enterprise and How to Break In
5. Global Marketing, Six Sigma, and The Donald: An Interview with 23-Year-Old Personal Branding Expert Daniel Schawbel
6. Six Simple Money Tips to Get You Back on the Financial Track
7. Warren Buffett on Doing What You Love
8. Interview with David Anderson of Palo Alto Investors
9. 17 Ways to Think Your Way to Wealth!
10. Bright Young Minds: An Interview with Duff McDuffee of Falling Fruit TV

2007 Women & Business Interview Series with IWillTeachYouToBeRich.com

• Interview with Michelle Goodman, Author of The Anti 9-to-5 Guide
• Interview with Julie Jansen, Career Coach and Motivational Speaker
• Interview with Alexandra Levit, Author of They Don’t Teach Corporate In College
• Interview with Anya Kamenetz, Author of Generation Debt
• Interview with Pam Slim of Escape From Cubicle Nation

A Few More Notable Posts

• It’s Time for Some Thrilling Heroics: Commit to Pursuing Your Wildest Dreams with Me in 2008!
• The #1 Skill You Need to Succeed at Anything: Learn to Build Relationships
• 10 Great Ways to Distinguish Yourself from One of Silicon Valley’s Top Entrepreneurs
• The Need for Corporate Partnerships
• Keep Your Brand Current
• I Have A Dream…

Happy Holidays!

After some intense goal-setting, I set several resolutions for myself in 2007. I told myself, “This is going to be a good year,” and it has been. Nobody has perfect follow-through, but because I got clear on what I wanted to do with my time and focused my energy towards those ends, I achieved 8 out of 10 major goals this year:

1. I stepped up my exercise routine. Unfortunately I didn’t cultivate the running habit, but I did start cycling with friends and at my peak, I’ve been exercising about three times per week.
2. I registered three web domains. One for my personal homepage, one for the Thrilling Heroics blog and community, and one for my web design services, which I have been too busy with referral business to develop a website for!
3. I read 11 personal development book books. A vast improvement over the average of two books per year that I have read in years past, and this number excludes fiction and pleasure reading. My top recommendations include Tom Peters’ The Brand You50, Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, Penelope Trunk’s awesome guidebook, Brazen Careerist, and of course Tim Ferriss’ life-changing book The 4-Hour Workweek. I’m also right in the middle of Vagabonding, an incredible guide to extended world travel (perfectly suited for my trip to Spain).
4. I started working as a freelancer! I have not incorporated a full-fledged business yet, and I haven’t donated to 1% for the Planet yet, but I have been doing web design for the last four months and am working solely for myself now.
5. I kicked ass at reflecting at the end of each week and planning goals for the next week! I co-founded Career MasterMinds, to meet each week with other students and young professionals and share our accomplishments and goals for the week ahead. It has been a very rewarding experience, knowing that the support system we have all worked to set up has helped a few of our members find new jobs and has helped all of us focus our energy and our direction.
6. I donated about $300 to charity this year, in particular to the Save Darfur Coalition.
7. I became a better networker and public speaker by synergizing with my peers, e-networking via my blog and LinkedIn, and by participating on the leadership team of a new Toastmasters chapter at Sac State.
8. I purchased carbon offsets for my car through TerraPass.

What major goals did you accomplish this year? What notable improvements did you make in 2007? Or what important lessons have you learned that you can apply to your future personal development? Please share!

And start thinking about those New Year’s Resolutions! While resolutions are somewhat cliche, the New Year does offer a great opportunity to set some personal milestones and objectives. Get clear on what you want to do in 2008, and focus your mental energy and your time toward achieving those goals, and you’ll have a more productive year! So next week, we’ll do some goal-setting exercises and I’ll share my 2008 resolutions as an example.

Everyone has had difficulty with goal-setting – it’s a rough part of life. A lot of people try to do too many things at once, or they simply have a huge, ambitious goal that is too much for one person to accomplish alone – and eventually you experience burnout. As creatures of habit, it is frequently difficult for us to make the necessary changes on our own, and we give up on our biggest dreams and desires and slink back into regular behavior. It’s easier. But deep down inside you know you can do better. You undermine your self-worth when you constantly give up on what you want to achieve most.

But don’t beat yourself up! As Leo Babauta of Zen Habits recently said, when it comes to forming new habits, “It’s not a lack of discipline, it’s a lack of motivation. The most powerful motivators are logging your habit and public pressure.” Now as a budding entrepreneur, trying desperately to start my own web design and consulting company, I know how hard it can be to stay motivated! School and traditional workplaces train us SO well to depend on our superiors to tell us what to do, how to prioritize, and when to get it done. But when you go to work for yourself, or you go off into the world to accomplish some personal goal of your own, no one is telling you what to do, and often times no one is setting hard deadlines for you! It’s a new skill you have to learn to do these things yourself.

So today I’m writing to advocate that if you want to achieve those big dreams (and we ALL have them…maybe you want to go meet Al Gore and help stop global warming…or be the next CEO at Apple…or start your own business…or write a book!…or simply lose 20 pounds) – I encourage you to set up a strong accountability structure for yourself. I created a group with my peers about 10 months ago that we call Career MasterMinds, to provide a place to talk about our career and personal development goals. Every week, about six to eight of us meet at a local coffee shop and share about our weekly goals and accomplishments. This support structure is based on proven techniques that many highly successful individuals have used to achieve great things, and it provides a perfect opportunity each week to log your progress and participate in a friendly yet professional environment for public accountability.

Now many businesspeople, world leaders, and other successful individuals have set up similar accountability groups for themselves. In the book Think And Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill discussed MasterMind groups, where individuals coordinate their knowledge and effort for the attainment of a common purpose, and how these groups could multiply an individual’s brain power and continually motivate positive emotions. Andrew Carnegie, Charles Schwab and others used the principles of the MasterMind group to become hugely successful businessmen and philanthropists. Benjamin Franklin had a similar group centuries earlier that he called a Junto. Tom Peters, one of the most respected experts on business management practices, best-selling author of In Search of Excellence and Re-Imagine!, also proposes similar support groups for wage slaves tired of “Dilbert nation,” calling them a great “place to discuss your fears…your hopes…and your plans with work and non-work colleagues.”

Besides the proven success of such systems, peer accountability groups are an intuitive win because they also give you an important chance to review your progress each week and brainstorm your next actions. You can meet with your colleagues as frequently as you choose, but for me, meeting once per week has proven to be the most effective accountability tool in meeting my day-to-day goals. I recommend that you keep a binder just for your goals, and in preparing to meet with your peer group you set aside a predefined time to reflect on your achievements each week and then spend some critical thinking time about what your most important tasks (MITs) should be for the next week. Which 3 or 5 things that you can accomplish in the next seven days are most instrumental in getting closer to the lifestyle and achievements you desire? Write them down, and be sure they are specific and measurable. You can reference this list throughout the week to provide guidance each day. As you track your progress, checking off those three most-important tasks each day, it will give you the motivation to keep pressing for your desired outcome.

The second major benefit of a peer group besides having a written record of your progress is having the support and accountability of others. Answering to someone else is absolutely key in achieving those difficult goals. Knowing that someone else will hold you accountable gives you the added fuel not to let them down. And they’ll also share in celebrating your achievements each week! The most rewarding trend we have found with our group is that each week we continue to learn new things about each other – common interests we share, projects and tasks we can help each other achieve together, or maybe someone has a contact they can connect you with to help attain your goals quicker. Our members have connected each other with key contacts on several occasions…I connected one of my peers with the VP of Engineering at a company he wanted to interview with (it just happened to be where my step-mother worked!)…one student was plugged in to the Sacramento Housing & Redevelopment Agency to share his brilliant foreclosure research…and so on. Not only will your peers give you support and accountability, but they will also help you out a TON by sharing their knowledge, networks, and resources with you.

Nobody can achieve great things alone, but together we can help each other find great opportunity. When you network closely with your peers, and get to know the things that they are interested in and passionate about, you learn what sort of people and opportunities you can connect them with. And if you do this in a spirit of collaboration and teamwork, they will do the same thing for you. As Zig Ziglar said, “You can get everything in life you want, if you’ll just help enough other people get what they want.” You know deep down inside, we all wanted to be great, noteworthy people when we were kids – cowboys and astronauts! Well don’t give up the dream. Many respected and celebrated individuals throughout history have relied on their peers for motivation to become the great, noteworthy people they were! A formal group will give you a structure to track your written goals and progress, and it will provide a synergistic group dynamic where you can share your successes and challenges with others. So talk with your friends each week about your goals, start your own MasterMind group, or use a similar club as your accountability group! Just remember that to achieve great things, many heads are better than one.

Resources:

• Evan Carmichael’s Mastermind Group Resources blog
• Think And Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
• How to Create and Run a MasterMind group at Passion for Business.com

I LOVE Peters’ writing style. Very motivational, awesome design…. The book is what he calls a “50 List” of actionable steps you can take to build your personal brand. Your personal brand is your “packaging,” your “product” you offer…your reputation, what you are known for.

Peters speaks powerfully to the “Dilbert nation” of cubicle slaves and employees about establishing themselves as Free Agents, with a more vendor-like approach to your jobs and projects. He talks about the loss of job security, the monotony of office work, etc. Tom believes we will see a transformation within the next ten years–the “INESCAPABLE WHITE COLLAR REVOLUTION” as he calls it–and we have to be ready to adapt. This is an INVALUABLE read if you are interested in entrepreneurship, a side business, or just being damned excellent at what you do. It is geared mostly toward a business crowd, and those in management, but he is fond of lists and bullet points and BrandYou50 is a non-traditional book full of actionable items that are applicable for almost anyone who wants to stand out.

Brand You is about breaking bonds and creating unmistakable value-added “products” (projects!) for identifiable “customers.” The products/projects become “braggables.” The customers become Clients/Co-conspirators-for-Cool/Raving Fans/Word-of-Mouth Cheerleading References.

It took me some time, but I wanted to go through the book a second time to put together my own “take-aways.” It’s a shortened version, but what I came up with is basically a cheat sheet that boils it down from 200 pages to eleven. You’re welcome to take a look at the BrandYou50 cheat sheet if you think you might be interested in the book.

Let me know if you guys get any value out of this, or what changes Peters’ work has inspired you to make in your life. Please share in the comments…

Well, Tom is getting to be quite the old-timer. (Sorry, Tom.)

Penelope Trunk is his engaging, competent, young replacement. ‘Nuff said there. The Work Revolution Peters talks about is already transforming the office…and Penelope Trunk walks the walk. Penelope’s new book Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success picks up where Tom left off. The name not only describes Trunk’s bold approach to work, but it delivers on its promise to key readers in to the important ingredients in a recipe for delicious career success!

Big corporations hardly employ people long enough to stick around and climb the corporate ladder anymore. Instead, they hire strong individuals who lend their values and skills to the completion of the specific short-term goals at hand, and then move on to the next gig. Even when they’re called employees, these workers are really “consultants,” and Trunk says you better catch up because consulting will be the new norm. Businesses like and encourage consulting because it cuts salary costs; workers like it because it means more flexibility.

The fact is, job security is an artifact of another generation long past. In the workplace, generations X and Y must have a project focus rather than a job focus. There is no longer such thing as long-term loyalty to company brands–employees must have their own, personal brands (!) which they bring to the table for each project they work on.

This means you get to have more say in what you do. Younger people in the workforce are looking for work that they’re truly passionate about–not just a nine to five that will pay the bills. We want meaning, we want to learn marketable skills we can take with us to the next project, we want work-life balance, and we’re willing to trade a little purchasing power to have time at home to raise a family when the time comes! (Yes, even us guys want this!)

What does all of this mean? Penelope Trunk says it means the end of the stay-at-home parent, the end of the glass ceiling, the end of gender-based pay disparity. It makes office hierarchy irrelevant. Promotions are irrelevant. For young professionals wrestling with a boomer-dominated work world, Brazen Careerist is Trunk’s comprehensive manual for career success!

I recommend you read this primer early on, and keep it with you at ALL TIMES throughout your career as a quick-reference guide! Whatever you’re facing–resumes, interviews, the grad school question, starting your own business, your first management position–consult the index (Thank you, Penelope! That’s one thing too many biz books are missing!) and take her advice. Some of her most notable peices of wisdom:

• Relish the Path from Starter Job to Dream Job. Starting out, most of us have no idea what we really want in life! Trunk says that young professionals’ primary task is to figure out who they are and what they want. As she describes, the trick is to spend equal parts time discovering your goals as attaining them, and it’s alright to explore. “The good news is that this is what most people are doing in their twenties: wandering. Taking trips to Thailand, changing jobs every year, volunteering for unpaid work while living at their parents’ house, and starting businesses that fail. All these options are, surprisingly, right on track for making a good decision about what to do with yourself in adult life,” she says.
• Hunting for a Job Is Not a Task, It’s a Lifestyle. So get used to it. Research shows that Gen-X-ers and Y-ers will typically hold eight jobs before age 32! Career instability and holes in your work history are the new norm. And besides, you should always be on the lookout for what will make you happy–don’t settle if you’re in a job that’s a poor fit. “Concentrate your energy on finding the right manager as opposed to the right position. There is no reason to be limited by the job description–you can always pick up extra work that increases your experience and exposure. But a checked-out manager can limit you. So seek managers who will look out for you in the company and make sure you get on good projects … and develop new skills.”
• First-Time Managers Do Not Need to Suck. When you find yourself in a position to lead, don’t make the mistake of focusing on tasks. Your job is to work with people–to coach them. They’ll make sure the tasks get taken care of, as long as you coach them right. “…Show the people you manage how to see themselves differently so that they are able to produce at a higher level than they ever imagined. For one person, this will mean you need to teach organization skills. For another person, you will help her discover what she loves to do and then set her up doing it for you. Each person wants something, and you need to find out what that is. Then help them get it.”
• Authenticity Is the Buzzword of the New Millennium. Don’t be ashamed of your mistakes–be yourself. Many of the world’s most successful individuals have innumerable failures on their record, and like they say, if you wanna make a tasty office omelet you gotta break some eggs. The Harvard Business Review says that authenticity is what defines great leaders–so be real, be vulnerable, be sincerely passionate about your cause if you want others to give a damn. Trunk says to practice telling stories–”…If we get practice being our true self while telling a story, authenticity will come more naturally when talking about something more difficult.”
• You Only Need $40,000 a Year to Be Happy. Research is showing more and more that there is a limit to how much happiness money can buy (gasp!). That means many of us are chasing the wrong incentives! “The first $40,000 makes a big difference in a person’s level of happiness. Happiness is dependent on being able to meet basic needs for food, shelter, and clothing. After meeting those needs you have to turn to something other than consumerism, because additional money has negligible impact on how happy you are. Your level of happiness is instead largely dependent on your outlook.”

Penelope offers direction on dealing with office politics and improving your likability (pages 88 & 90), some controversial (but excellent!) thoughts on how to use an incident of sexual harassment to boost your career (121 & 125), and advice on some alternate incentives to seek instead of a promotion (hint: training and valuable experiences, 166).

Trunk gives her readers insightful, unconventional tips on how to build great, fulfilling careers for themselves. She’s got plenty of attention-grabbing ideas, and she relates interesting stories about her diverse career experience (among other things, she’s worked in technology AND journalism, started three of her own companies AND taken international corporations public, gone through bankruptcy, and played professional volleyball!).

Bravo, Penelope! If you’re a young professional in your 20s or 30s, you NEED this first book from up-and-coming career rockstar Penelope Trunk! Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success comes out May 25, and you can pre-order it on Amazon. Penelope is also a columnist for Yahoo! Finance and the Boston Globe, and I’d highly recommend you become a regular reader of her Brazen Careerist blog.

1. Keep exercising and stay fit. I have to conquer my asthma problem, keep running in the evenings at home, and I would like to start a new habit of taking a morning walk at work.
2. Register a dot com domain for myself and the blog. But, this means I need to find a friend who can help me design a professional homepage and possibly redesign the blog with significantly less than $1ooo.
3. Read at least one book a month that will help me realize my dreams. Since Christmas came, I’ve already got my books for the next 8 months:
   • Tom Peters’ The Brand You50
   • Rajesh Setty’s Beyond Code: Learn to Distinguish Yourself in 9 Simple Steps
   • Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People
   • Richard Farson and Ralph Keyes’ The Innovation Paradox: The Success of Failure, The Failure of Success
   • James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds
   • Jay Abraham’s Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got
   • Keith Ferrazzi’s Never Eat Alone
   • Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s Freakonomics
4. Start a new business, and donate one percent of sales revenue to improve the environment through 1% for the Planet (started by the founder of Patagonia).
5. Reflect on my past week and plan my upcoming week. I also need to use my calendar better and want to look into using an online calendar that will sync with my Apple iCal (anyone have any tips?).
6. Start making a regular donation to the Save Darfur Coalition, a charity that sends aid to the victims of genocide in Sudan and lobbies on their behalf. This is a cause I have become very passionate about in the last year or so, and in addition to donating, I have pledged to get commitment this year from at least five friends to sign the easy online petition to the President and the new UN Secretary-General to strengthen the African Union forces in Darfur, to send a UN peace force, and to increase aid to Sudan (please follow that link if you’d like to help petition the UN to send more help—it is an easy 2-minute process).
7. Attend networking events and become a better public speaker through a club such as Toastmasters International.
8. Purchase carbon offsets for my Pontiac through a company like TerraPass.
9. Join GreenDimes, the service that keeps you off junk mail lists for 10 cents a day, and plants a tree for you each month!
10. Teach myself French again with language podcasts or CDs.

What are YOUR New Years resolutions? Please share in the comments!

With such an accomplished list of entrepreneurial pursuits, I thought Rajesh would make the perfect contender for my second business interview. He has had many successes and failures, and has a lot of solid knowledge to share from that experience. I was fortunate enough to be able to meet with him in person on my recent trip to Silicon Valley, and he was kind enough to let me interview him by email.

Rajesh, you are a founder, president, chairman, author, and blogger. Please tell us about the many business projects you are currently involved with.

Cody, first of all thank you for inviting me for this interview. Now, to answer your question, currently I am involved in five different companies. I will go with the latest one first:

• iPolipo – I am one of the founders and serve as the executive chairman. We think that people want to spend more time “meeting” people rather than “scheduling those meetings” with them. We have a solution that will help in doing just that.
• Suggestica – I am one of the founders and serve as the president. We think that there is a non-information overload on the web. By bringing trusted content, we not only hope to save time and money, we truly want to bring joy into people’s lives.
• Compassites – This is a company in India and I serve on their board. Compassites is totally focused on helping entrepreneurs with their product development needs. Their claim to fame is that they can take an idea from concept to launch in record time.
• Foresight Plus – This is a management consulting firm where I partner with some select businesses and individuals to bring them an unfair and sustainable competitive advantage. I am no longer accepting new clients with this business for the near future.
• CIGNEX – I was one of the founders and served as the CEO for the first five years. While I am no longer operationally involved in the company, I help in some business development activities when appropriate.

I am involved in a few more projects but those are all in stealth mode. I am an entrepreneur at heart but I am also an author and a teacher. On the business side, I act as a catalyst to speed up multiple projects simultaneously. On the personal side, I love to help already high-performing people reach greater heights.

What sort of background do you come from? And what was your experience like living and working in different countries around the globe and finally coming to reside here in California?

I was born and brought up in Southern India. I come from a middle-class family. My father was a civil engineer working for the state government. That meant that we would move from one place to another place every few years. It seemed like a pain at that time but it taught us to adapt to new situations.

That family background helped me to adjust easily when I lived and worked in five different countries–India, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong and France. I am generally a happy person so I enjoyed living and working in all those countries. These experiences have helped me tremendously in the following ways:

• Increased my respect for diversity: Every country was different and we had to get used to the diversity. Now, it is more fun than a problem.
• Enhanced my ability to adapt: Each country was also different in terms of how we live and work and basically how to get things done.
• Expanded my network globally: Relationships in different countries help tremendously with globalization in full force.

Where did you get your formal education and what did you study?

I completed my Bachelor of Engineering at Mysore University in India, in Electronics and Communication. Of course, I didn’t use much of what I studied in my engineering at my work.

Do you have a word of advice for college students and other young people who would like to become successful leaders or entrepreneurs?

I think every college student should try to pursue a life of leadership. If you are a college student, you can learn that by taking some initiative to do what I call “filling in the blanks.” Wherever you are, you can always find something that everyone thinks someone else will take care of–blanks–and rather than thinking that someone else will take care of it, you can take the initiative to take care of it. If you make this a habit, you would have laid a good foundation to become a leader.

Are there any specific skill sets that don’t get taught in school that are invaluable in the business world? What do you recommend to get over those hurdles?

This question is very interesting to me. There are many skills that are not taught in schools, but if you don’t learn them you are at a serious competitive disadvantage. It will take me a while to list all of them, but here are a few for starters:

1. Building long-term relationships: Long-term relationships can be a huge competitive advantage just because of the sheer fact that it takes a long-time to build them. Everyone knows that, but the schools don’t teach it. You have to learn it on your own initiative.
2. Improving your likability: When I tell people that likable people have an easier time getting ahead, people usually agree. When I tell people that unlikeable people have a hard time getting things done, people agree to that too. However, when I ask them if they have done anything in the last one year to improve their likability factor, they look at me as if I am from a different world. Likability is a key skill and you have to learn it on your own.
3. Learning how to learn: Schools teach you stuff but rarely teach you the concept of “learning how to learn.” It is your responsibility to learn the best way to learn new things. Many of your current skills won’t help you to succeed in the future. So while you are delivering your current projects with your current skill sets, you have to also learn new skills. Unlike the times when you were a student, you have less time to learn a lot more. This means you have to learn how to learn.
4. Leveraging your time: Every one of us has only 24 hours, but successful people get more out of those 24 hours. How can you too get more out of your time? For starters, start designing your activities to yield multiple rewards. For example: you come across a very interesting service on the web, you can see who among your friends will be interested in it and why. Remember that even if only two people are interested, the reasons for their interest may be different. Your job is to send both of them a note explaining the relevance of that service to them. This is an example that you are caring for what they care about.
5. Building your personal brand: Every person has a personal brand, whether they like it or not. It is “who they are to the world.” So, you have a personal brand too. The real question therefore is: “Is your personal brand effective?” Like likability, personal brands provide a powerful shortcut to many things. It takes a while to build a powerful personal brand and it takes a lot of effort to maintain and grow it, but the rewards are long-term and sweet.

What values would you say have provided you with the greatest motivation to be continually successful? What do you care about most?

If I could pick one value, it would be the ability to touch the lives of people in a positive way. I like to have a magic touch–meaning when someone is already magical (high-performing), I would like to touch them!

As an entrepreneur and executive businessman, what experiences have left the most lasting impression or have been the most memorable in your work experience?

It is hard to single out any one experience during the last decade, Cody. However, every time I see a smile on one or more of our clients’ faces, I feel blessed that we were able to solve a problem for them or open up a significant opportunity with our products or services.

So, you’ve just unveiled your newest venture iPolipo just days ago. Please tell us all about it.

We launched iPolipo in the “controlled beta” mode on Monday, December 11. We hit 90% of our beta customer count by Friday of the same week. This was an overwhelmingly positive response for something that was built over the last one year.

iPolipo solves the everyday scheduling problem for business executives. It is common for two people to exchange multiple emails or voicemails to schedule one meeting. It is also frustrating to hold a particular slot on your calendar open waiting for a confirmation from the other party. iPolipo solves this problem by allowing people to share their free slots on the calendar effectively on the web.

And what motivated you to start writing? Tell us about some of your written work.

I started reading early. By the time I was nine, I must have read close to 700 books–mostly novels and other fiction. When I was nine, I had an idea–you can say a crazy idea–to write my own novel. At that age, you don’t have a lot of logic in your head. So I didn’t think much, but wrote a 200-page novel. My parents thought I was mentally ill, as it was odd for a 9-year old kid to write 200 pages of anything. But my craziness continued. I thought, “writing is the hard work; publishing should be easy.” I immediately took action and started searching for a publisher. Long story short, after more than a hundred rejections and four long years, I found a publisher to get my book published. After that there was no looking back, and I have thoroughly enjoyed writing since then.

I have so far got seven books published. Four novels, one collection of poems, one book on mathematics and my latest book Beyond Code (with a foreword by Tom Peters) is a management book that’s focus is to help people distinguish themselves to raise above the commodity crowd. I talk about 9 things that people can do to distinguish themselves. It is available in many major bookstores and almost all online bookstores like Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and 800-CEO-READ.

What kind of readers do you write your blog Life Beyond Code for?

My blog is targeted at knowledge workers, entrepreneurs and ambitious students who want to get something more out of their lives. It started off as an extension to the book, but has taken a life of its own. I write on topics that range from how to get more out of your life, the art of leverage, distinguishing yourself, leadership, entrepreneurship and some occasional mini sagas (a mini saga is a story in exactly 50 words).

How do you think web 2.0 technology is changing the way we do business? Is this a positive trend?

Web 2.0, Software as a Service, Open Source or any other thing in and within itself cannot make a significant change. What we do with them is what is causing the change. I just received a business plan to look at where the entrepreneur had explained the business model something like this: “We have a web 2.0 application delivered as a Software as a Service model in the healthcare vertical.” I was sad because the idea should not be to create a buzzword-laden business plan. The underlying magic is the power of the business model and the power of execution. Both idea and the team are important and then comes the “how” part where web 2.0, open source and SaaS models come into play. Sometimes people tend to put the cart before the horse because of all the hype surrounding these buzzwords.

Describe your vision of the future of business. How do you think things might change on an international level, and how might businesses anticipate those changes?

All I know is that the rate of change that is happening at a global level is mind-boggling. I think nobody can cope with this change all on their own. Everyone needs help and whoever realizes this early and builds powerful configurations that can withstand the change can survive and thrive. There aren’t any sure-fire ways or practices that can help any organization to guarantee success. What I tell people is to constantly build the capacity to:

• handle change
• relentlessly innovate
• read the markets
• anticipate mid to long-term needs and start planning to create offerings before someone else does
• execute better than the competition

Who do you think are 3 or 4 of the most authoritative experts in leadership, innovation, and business productivity currently, other than yourself?

Here are my current picks, in no particular order:

Leadership

• Barry Posner and Jim Kouzes
• Marshall Goldsmith
• Tom Peters
• John Maxwell

Innovation

• Gary Hamel
• Clayton Christensen
• Tom Kelley (IDEO)
• W. Chan Kim (Blue Ocean Strategy)

Productivity

• Stephen Covey
• Tim Sanders
• David Allen

What one life tip would you like to leave us with, Rajesh?

Focus on ROII. ROII stands for Return On Investment for an Interaction. Everyone is busy and running around to take care of many of their concerns.
People say time is money, but most people really don’t mean it or at least they don’t behave as if time was money. In fact, they do something that is shocking–they treat money as if they can never get it back, and they squander time as if they can easily refill it at a gas station or something like that. In reality, we all know that time lost is gone forever and money invested in the right things will yield multiple returns. Imagine for a second that you did subscribe to the “time is money” philosophy. This would mean that when someone interacts with you, they are investing their time and that means they are investing money in you. Like any business person, they are interested in getting the right return on their investment (in this case, this happens to be time) and it is your duty to provide that return for them.

If you don’t care about providing a decent ROII, you become a liability for that person. Worse, if someone else who is in the same role provides a better ROII for the same job, you have a serious competitive disadvantage.

I wish to thank Rajesh so much for giving me a few hours of his time and sharing his valuable thoughts and experiences! As is fitting, he is the king of ensuring he delivers the highest return-on-investment to everyone he interacts with!

Rajesh Setty currently lives in Silicon Valley with his wife Kavitha and their son Sumukh. You can learn more about him on his website Life Beyond Code, or from his book Beyond Code.