This blog is about the book "working out loud" by John Stepper. My first impression is that this book is maybe not for me. So far, I've always found book titles like “Quiet people sell differently” by Andreas Hoffmann more appealing to me. But since this book has been recommended to me several times, I naturally started reading it.
Loving Blog Writing
I have never been a big fan of social networks because I never really knew what content to create. In fact, I'm only reading the book because I'm now on the relevant social networks and getting used to blogs. I'm hoping a little bit that the book will make it easier for me to write blogs and generate content for social networks. It's been a while since I started reading the book and my relationship with blogs has changed all by itself. I'm slowly starting to appreciate them, even like them. I like it when I get feedback (of course I prefer positive feedback 😊).
And almost without noticing I'm suddenly in the middle of this book. It's about coming out with your own interests and goals in relation to other people. I don't think the term ‘loud’ really means ‘loud’ in a disruptive sense, but rather making your own activities ‘audible’ and ‘visible’.
The book
In the first few chapters, you accompany the author and several other people in their own search to improve their life situations. It's all about work. In a multi-faceted way and with many exercises and examples, you are introduced to the five principles that ‘Working-Out-Loud’ (WOL) stands for:
- purposeful discovery,
- relationships,
- generosity,
- visible work and
- growth-orientated thinking
Please apologize if the above listed terms are not precise, I read the German translation of the book. As you gradually learn to understand the principles better in terms of WOL, you are constantly being gently encouraged to get a Twitter account and a LinkedIn account, for example, and to feed them. Like a snail slowly putting out its feelers, we are encouraged to make contact with people who can help us achieve our goals. We are encouraged to organise our current activities ourselves and develop new opportunities by building our network. This is followed by exercise after exercise for the reader, each of which is accompanied by an indication of the time required. This is very helpful.
What I like are the little stories from real life:
My favourite story:
Chapter 16
"The father who asked his children every day at dinner to tell at least one thing they had learnt".
I will certainly adopt that idea. Of course, I can't and don't want to fully summarise the content of the book here, let alone reproduce it. It is a valuable book. But instead of giving any kind of review here, I have a confession to make: I am an absolute junkie of these kinds of books. I've devoured dozens, maybe even over a hundred of them. I love doing the exercises and understanding myself a little better or even new every time reading such books as "coaching books". What I'm saying is that I've read a lot of books that have similar core messages and similar goals. Therefore, many of the ideas and concepts of WOL seem familiar to me from other books, and I don't mean that in a negative way. I think the contribution of this book is to put profoundly positive insights around basic human principles, behaviours and more into a context of social media. And these media inevitably require us to become visible in order to utilise them. It's definitely worth reading this book. Oh yes, and it has definitely motivated me to write many more blogs.
Interesting Sources
