One of the best things about reading – and reading widely – is that you can effectively be mentored by people you’ve never met. As I wrote in my book, I had a slow start out of high school. It took me multiple attempts to get into university and, from there, to build the right skills and experience to be able to get a decent job and be helpful in the workplace. Learning from books is the key lesson in all of this, and the journey to building knowledge, removing ignorance, steady improvement and appreciating failure. From a long list […]

I can recall entering ‘no man’s land’ – that grey zone, in the words of one self-help guru, where you “you’re not really happy about your life, but you’re not unhappy enough to do anything about it.” It was right after running for political office and leaving every ounce of energy I had ‘on the field’. I remember rocking up to work, in the days following defeat, exhausted and struggling to keep up as the papers mounted, work challenges ensued and pressure grew. My buzz had largely gone. And I was now having to work hard with little energy and […]

For some, taking on a certified MBA offers decent self-investment – the networks, the skills and the credentials do, on average, provide a boost to earning and career climb. For others, however, it can be hard, literally, to justify the cost – 12 years to break even, according to info from The Personal MBA author Josh Kaufman. I finally decided, after leaving Kaufman’s book on the shelf for almost a decade, that it was time to flick it open and get stuck in. Here are some of the main points I learned on my personal MBA. Customers As someone who […]

“A raft is a good thing to have when you’re crossing a river,” notes American psychologist and author Meg Jay. “But when you get to the other side, put it down… Every problem was once a solution.” While not a perfect metaphor for mentoring, there’s something in this point about having the right help at the right time. My journey One of my first mentors – who matched with me as part of a formal mentoring programme at my then-place of work – offered great help when I was starting out in the commonwealth public service. He told me not to jump around from […]