Leap! By Ian Sanders
I’m not normally the kind of person to see an advert drop into my inbox and act upon it – well actually I guess I do act upon it by pressing the delete button! Just one time, I got an ad from Amazon for a book called Leap! Ditch Your Job, Start You Own Business & Set Yourself Free. Sounded very interesting as I was about to leave my last job, and reckoned it might seed a few new ideas.
Written by Ian Sanders, Leap is not a book that’ll tell you how to set up a new business or deal with finances and stuff. It deals with the mindset of jumping out of the rat race, and finding a different way of earning your money.
For somebody like me with a fairly short attention span, it’s a great book with very short chapters – maybe three or four pages maximum, but most are just a page or two long! Each short chapter picks out a particular aspect of being successful outside the 9-to-5 world. It doesn’t pull its punches and will not tell you that making loads of money is a breeze (see Chapter 9 Warning – Steep Incline Ahead). The book also gives loads of useful advice about the way to juggle things to make a success out of your new scrambled up world of work.
A particularly nice chapter in the politically correct world we live in is Chapter 10 Charge Them! It is about more than charging out your time. It reveals that knowledge and expertise in whatever area can have a marketable value and can be charged for accordingly, through either a fee or royalty. The point is: don’t undervalue yourself.
The section on Success has another very good point about the true value of time. Sanders urges that we ask ourselves:
“At some stage, whenever that may be, is this activity going to result in me sending an invoice to someone?”
He also urges that you get that tattooed on your arm! Maybe not, but it’s critical that you don’t get completely hung up on customer service at the expense of the bottom line. If your customer isn’t paying for your efforts then they aren’t really a customer, and you need to rectify the situation quickly before it affects cashflow.
I really enjoyed reading this book, as it is one of those that you can dip into, and flick past a few pages and see what catches your eye. It’s split into four sections: Attitude (your state of mind); Enterprise (you approach); Success (having the tricks and the tools); and Worklife (how to adjust to going plural).
Leap! by Ian Sanders (ArtSiren Score: 8/10).
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