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What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful by Marshall Goldsmith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Key takeaways: appreciate friends and family, improve your focus, be a better listener, and follow your dreams.
“The best time to change is now.”
What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, by Marshall Goldsmith, is a book about successful professionals hitting a ceiling, not due to limited talents, but due to lack of soft-skill development, including focusing, listening, and just not making the effort to improve. This five-cd audio-book goes through many case studies about successful clients that the author has worked with and ends with ways that the reader can improve chances for success beyond current levels.
Mr. Goldsmith talked about how successful people become complacent in their development, believing that their good qualities have gotten them to their place at present so they must be on the right track to go on to greater things in the same fashion. The pitfall is that people at that level of success may come to believe that they only possess good qualities and are hard-pressed to find interaction habits that they should improve because they have never been a success blocker previously. The best thing about this book is practical advice given on how to become a better listener by challenging the reader to observe his or her own communication style for patterns, such as often saying “yes, but” when being offered solicited suggestions or advice by others.
The only gripe I have about the book was a technical issue because I imported these CDs into iTunes to hear them. Unfortunately none of the cds were properly titled so each CD was imported as track 1, track 2, etc., meaning I had to manually select the correct next chapter after each one ended skipping the four down each time, lest I get an out-of-order listening experience. It loses one rating star for that. I would recommend (the book version) to anyone who wants to improve their interpersonal habits and become better at communication.
A Mad Notepad 
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