14 Career Development Books That Will Help You Reach Your Goals

Do you need a hand? These fourteen career development books will show you how you can move your job goals in the right direction.

The Classics

People who get stuff done share at least seven common traits. In The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey, you’ll learn what the seven practices are and how you can acquire them.

Though ruling a nation might not be your career goal, you can glean a lot of wisdom from The Emperor’s Handbook, a translation of Meditations written by Marcus Aurelius, which includes some “unique features for contemporary readers.”

For Women

Sheryl Sandberg, former chief of staff for the United States Treasury Department and author of Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, has also held prominent positions at hugely successful companies such as Google and Facebook. If you like your advice to contain a combination of hard evidence, humor, and personal anecdotes, this is the career guide for you.

According to the Washington Post, #GIRLBOSS by Sophia Amoruso is “Lean In for misfits.” Sophia didn’t start her career with a Harvard education as Sheryl Sandberg did; instead, she worked her way up from petty thief to eBayer to . . . well, read the book and find out!

Every female leader has pearls of wisdom to share with her counterparts. Grace Bonney compiles the best of the best in her book In the Company of Women: Inspiration and Advice from over 100 Makers, Artists, and Entrepreneurs.

For Minorities

If you’re a minority looking to advance, there are some realities you’ll have to face. Good Is Not Enough: And Other Unwritten Rules for Minority Professionals by Keith R. Wyche gives practical advice for dealing with unique challenges in the workplace.

Authors Richard L. Zweigenhaft and G. William Domhoff examine the personal histories of talented modern forerunners in the world of business in The New CEOs: Women, African American, Latino, and Asian American Leaders of Fortune 500 Companies. What imitable factors lead to their success?

For People with Disabilities

Employment Options: The Ultimate Resource for Job Seekers with Disabilities and other Challenges includes interactive worksheets so readers can assess their strengths and weaknesses. After all, according to author Paula Reuben Viellet, you have to know who you are now before you develop a plan for improvement.

For Recent Graduates

If you’re a new graduate, you probably have lots of dreams, but you may not know how to realize them. In So Good They Can’t Ignore You, professor Cal Newport tells you why you shouldn’t follow your passion . . . and what you should follow instead.

Those who land a job after college may be wondering, “Now what?” Emily Bennington and Skip Lineberg demystify the process of climbing the corporate ladder in Effective Immediately: How to Fit In, Stand Out, and Move Up at Your First Real Job.

For Science and Math-Lovers

An algorithm is a set of rules a computer follows to solve a problem or equation. Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths explores what your life would be like if used the same rigorous standards for challenges and decisions.

In Sleep Smarter: 21 Essential Strategies to Sleep Your Way to a Better Body, Better Health, and Bigger Success, athlete-turned-author Shawn Stevenson answers this question: Can sleeping differently affect your career development? Try a fourteen-day sleep makeover before you make up your mind about the link between sleep and success!

For Everyone

Martin Seligman, the author of Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being, shares a lifetime of psychological research along with absorbing stories and “flashes of brilliance,” says fellow psychologist and author Sonja Lyubomirsky. If you enjoyed his previous books Learned Optimism and Authentic Happiness, you won’t want to miss his new offering.

What were you born to do? You may find out if you read Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool. Their findings from studying virtuosos in diverse fields will change everything you think you know about innate skill.

Which book on this list interests you the most? Here’s a goal you can accomplish today: Acquire a copy! The sooner you start reading, the sooner you can use the expert advice to reach your career goals.

5 Ways League of Legends Helps You Communicate Better Under Pressure

You are battling toward the nexus in a 5v5-ranked game late on a Wednesday night. You have to work the next day and know you are not going to get enough sleep. But fear not! Your dedication to League of Legends is helping more than just your online rep. It’s helping you to be a better team player by teaching you these five valuable lessons in communicating under pressure.

1 You’re ready to fill the gaps

If your team gets thrown a lot of projects each day at work, you have to quickly prioritize your tasks and assess how your team’s skills align. When you understand each other’s strengths and abilities, new challenges are easier for your team to tackle. In League of Legends, you get matched with random players in solo queue. You then have a couple of minutes to pull an all-star team together. In real life, as in League of Legends, you often have to work with what you are given. You don’t always get your first pick in a project, nor are all people easy to get along with. So you have to figure out how to help fill the gaps on your team without sacrificing your skills.

2 You know how to align your objectives

Getting ready for a team fight? Attack Baron? Clear enemy jungle? Kill Teemo? In the Summoner’s Rift, you are constantly aligning your team around the most immediate and impactful objectives. If one teammate is missing or not on board, it could cost you the fight or, worse, the game. In a fast-paced work environment, your team needs to work together effectively. Playing League of Legends has taught you to understand what your objective is and to be clear about what it will take to complete it.

3 You understand that flaming gets you nowhere

You are working late on a project that’s due tomorrow. Your colleague realizes he made a mistake that will keep you in the office longer. Option 1: ignite a pillar of flaming anger in your conference room with a snarky “GG noob,” dividing your team and setting yourself up for an even longer night. Option 2: take the mistake into account and refocus your team around the objective. If LoL has taught you anything, it’s that not sweating the small stuff under pressure can make the difference between victory or defeat.

4 You speak your team’s language

If you are trying to get out of the Bronze league, you have to know what it means to build an adc, stack mr, and go backdoor. Knowing the lingo saves time and makes you sound competent. In the office, you might Slack your colleague, “Hey Chad, what’s the ROI on the FB account for tomorrow’s Q1 meeting?” Just as in online gaming, every company has a list of acronyms they use around the office daily. Being able to speak that common language helps everyone get on the same page quickly.

5 You know when to stop beating a dead Warrick

Not all of your projects are going to be a success. You fail, and you learn. However, it’s important to know when to call it. League players understand that if a team has lost their top, mid, and bottom lane on the Rift, defeat is predictable and it’s time to call “gg.” You can beat your head against the wall and drag your team with you, hoping for something to change, or you can take your losses and analyze them so you know what to do differently in the next match.

You might not benefit from putting “Diamond League Player” on your résumé, but you can be confident that League has taught you l33t team communication skills you can apply IRL. So, when you’re on your third cup of coffee and your boss asks you why you’re so tired, tell her that you stayed up late working on effective communication strategies. Or . . . maybe not. Just grab that caffeinated beverage and buckle up for the day!

Our GrammoWrimo Group Novel Is for Sale on Amazon!

When everything is about to change, the air becomes still. The sky turns a nondescript color of gray and people throw themselves into normalcy with a sense of purpose usually reserved for special occasions. They’ll walk through town and wave brightly to familiar faces, laugh a little too loudly, and buy a loaf of bread for dinner. All the while, they’ll readjust protective amulets and spend an extra minute in front of a household lararium, understanding that their reality will soon shift ever-so-slightly from its axis and life will never be the same again. They feel it in the air, and so do I. — Excerpt from Frozen by Fire: A GrammoWriMo Group Novel about the Ancient City of Pompeii

During November 2014, Grammarly gathered nearly 500 writers from 54 countries to write a group novel together online as part of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). We called our effort GrammoWriMo, and as of last week, our novel is finally published!

GrammoWriMo was crowdsourced from the beginning, starting with a poll sent out to participants to let them vote on the theme for our novel. From a short list of historical events, our participants chose the destruction of the ancient city of Pompeii by the eruption of the volcano Mt. Vesuvius.

Next, it was time to get our writers organized. In order to make the project manageable for such a massive group, we came up with 20 story ideas, or vignettes, around the theme of the destruction of Pompeii. A group of writers was assigned to each vignette and given the chance to brainstorm around their topic.

During the month of November, writers contributed to their vignettes using Penflip, an online collaborative writing platform. In addition to the 20 vignettes, we also solicited submissions for our GrammoWriMo short story contest.

Once the writing period was complete, we ran contests to come up with the title and cover design for our novel. We took the submitted text from our contributors and ran it through Grammarly’s automated proofreader, then had a human proofreader read over the text for historical accuracy and consistency.

After months of hard work, our novel is now available for sale as an eBook on Amazon! 100% of the price of the book ($.99) will be donated to a literacy-focused charity. Frozen by Fire is a collection of short stories that centers around the destruction of the ancient city of Pompeii by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. The novel features various perspectives on the event—ranging from the viewpoints of everyday citizens, to the experience of an archeologist uncovering the city years later, to a literal bird’s-eye view of Pompeii—creating a dynamic portrait of what it might have been like back on that fateful day in the doomed city.

Click here to purchase our group novel on Amazon!

Monday Motivation Hack: Avoid Negativity

Mondays induce negativity like no other day. After all, weekends are straight-up awesome. If we’re lucky, we get to sleep in, enjoy a breakfast that’s not rushed, and maybe savor a cup of coffee while laughing at YouTube videos of dogs failing at being dogs. Sometimes, we have exciting activities planned. Sometimes we get to enjoy leisure time. And sure, sometimes we work. But let’s not talk about that here, deal?

After a couple of days away from your responsibilities, Monday can come crashing in like a wrecking ball. Cue Miley Cyrus. Or this hedgehog.

via GIPHY

Yeah. Let’s go with the hedgehog.

When negativity threatens to wreck your Monday and make you less productive, try a few subtle things to help you make a major change in your attitude.

3 Quick Ways to Avoid Negativity at Work

1 Practice gratitude.

When we take time out to recognize all the good things happening in our day-to-day lives, we can’t help but become more positive, which makes us happier overall. It’s impossible to be both grateful and negative at the same time. And being grateful has surprising physical and mental health benefits.

Try keeping a gratitude journal. Take some time out of each week to reflect on the things you’re grateful for, and consider what your life might be like without them. If you’re struggling to get started, take a look at these tips from Robert Emmons, a leading expert and author of several studies on the science of gratitude.

2 Distract or combat.

The science of cognitive behavioral therapy brings us some cool ways to turn negativity around. When a negative thought enters your head, your first line of defense is to distract yourself from it. Listen to a song that makes you happy, hug a friend or family member, anything that will give your mood a boost.

If your negative emotion is still trying to get the best of you, put up a fight. Talk back to it and don’t be afraid to give it some serious attitude. Let’s say you trip getting off the elevator and drop your coffee, spilling it everywhere. Your mind may be inclined to think, I’m such an idiot! Why am I always so clumsy? Now, pretend your brain is a bully that just said the same thing about your friend (who happens to be exactly like you.) Hey, people trip sometimes. That doesn’t make them clumsy, let alone always clumsy.

3 Try a little mindfulness.

Have you ever noticed something about negative thinking? It always seems to involve either ruminating about things in the past (I really messed up by forgetting about that important meeting last week.) or catastrophizing about the future (Now everyone’s going to think I’m a total slacker.) Draw your mind away from all that by practicing a little mindfulness.

Start by noticing what’s happening around you. Notice the in and out of your breathing. Feel the air moving around you. Take in the smells. If you’re walking, pay attention to your gait and how your feet strike the pavement. If you’re typing, feel your fingers on the keyboard and listen to the sounds you make pressing the keys. It may seem simple, but mindfulness is powerful. It gets our heads out of the past and future and into the present moment.

It’s not as difficult as it may seem to start the week on a positive note. Just a small shift in your behaviors and habits will make a world of difference.

Top 5 Books on Copywriting

Words influence our thoughts, our decisions, and our actions. They have a palpable effect on our lives. You can accomplish anything by saying the right word to the right person at the right time. That’s the power of words. (And of good timing, but mostly of words.) No one is more acutely aware of this than copywriters—people who use words to persuade other people to do something, like buying a service or a product. But even copywriters can be influenced by words. In fact, if they want to be any good, they have to be. It’s just a matter of choosing the right words to be influenced by.

Tested Advertising Methods (Fifth Edition) by John Caples

“They laughed when I sat down at the piano—But when I started to play!” is often cited as one of the best advertising headlines of all time. It sat on the top of a very long ad for the U.S. School of Music, giving the readers precisely enough information to make them want to find out what happened when the protagonist started to play, and why the people were laughing in the first place. The headline was written in an era when long-form ads were printed regularly, long before sponsored content was invented, even before the first television ad was aired. The man who crafted it ninety years ago was John Caples, and he did it in his first year of working as a copywriter. Caples wrote many other great headlines, but to aspiring copywriters, his more important work is a book called “Tested Advertising Methods.” The reason it’s still one of the best books on copywriting is Caples’ willingness to go beyond simply teaching us how to write a killer headline. He also advocates a scientific approach to writing ad copy, constantly emphasizes testing, and always reminds the reader of the folly of resting on one’s laurels.

Mastering the Craft of Writing: How to Write With Clarity, Emphasis, and Style by Stephen Wilbers

Because copywriting is a form of writing, it goes without saying that copywriters need to know how to write with clarity. To be effective in their work, they need to know what to emphasize. And to write flawlessly, they need to know a whole lot about writing style. Exactly the things Stephen Wilbers wrote about in his book. They’re even mentioned in the book’s title. Wilbers’s approach in the book is to give us fifty-two techniques we can use to make our writing better. Among the topics he covers are eliminating wordiness, using strong verbs, structuring sentences and paragraphs correctly, using punctuation for effect, and dozens of other techniques that every writer should know.

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip and Dan Heath

This book is not about copywriting. However, if you rummage the Internet for lists of books about copywriting that professional copywriters would advise you to read, you’ll find Made to Stick on almost every one of them. The book, written by the Heath brothers in 2007, became an instant hit with people whose work has to do with communicating ideas and concepts. The Heaths’ book explores the world of ideas and concepts and dissects them to understand what makes an idea or a concept memorable and worthy. The writers boil it down to six traits, and if you read the book, you might learn how to make your own ideas stickier. And if that’s not important for copywriting, nothing is.

Persuasive Online Copywriting: How to Take Your Words to the Bank by Bryan Eisenberg, Jeffrey Eisenberg, and Lisa T. Davis

For all of its usefulness, the Internet is a hard place to survive, let alone thrive in. As any online marketer knows, the competition is tough, sometimes even dirty. Customers are always in danger of chasing after the next shiny thing that catches their eye, and keeping them on a website means keeping their attention fixed. You can achieve that with clever website design. But then what? Then, as the Eisenbergs and Davis point out in their book, the customers should take action. They should buy the product or subscribe to the newsletter—whatever it is you need them to do. With Persuasive Online Copywriting you can learn how to write effective copy that actually works online. The whole book is teeming with humor and wit, but its no-nonsense style drives the point that good copy is the copy that sells.

The Adweek Copywriting Handbook by Joseph Sugarman

Joseph Sugarman. The man who once lived in Germany as a CIA agent, later founded JS&A, and put pocket calculators, cordless phones, and digital watches on the map. A true legend of marketing and advertising, Sugarman is the author of what might be the definitive copywriter’s manual: The Adweek Copywriting Handbook. You can find all the sound advice on copywriting you ever needed to hear in Sugarman’s book. It reminds us that we need to know the customer to write good copy, but we also need to be experts in the products or services we’re trying to sell. It says we should write quickly, come to terms with lousy first drafts, and learn to polish them. It teaches us how to create compelling copy that people will want to read. The book is a real copywriting handbook, helpful to both novices and all the Peggy Olsons and Don Drapers out there.