…and now for something similar but better!

Some exciting and slightly anxiety inducing news…

We have signed a contract with Alison Jones at Practical Inspiration Publishing for our second book!

Yes, we are sharing here, with you, first!

We will confess to have a maelstrom of widely different emotions about writing our second book. These are not small undertakings. You must commit to the task of designing, researching, writing, editing, and then ultimately publicizing the book.

So, how did we get here?

“This is amazing… apparently our thinking to do something outside the norm… it’s really resonating with quite a few people!”

When we wrote A Career Carol, it was born from a sense that there was a need for it. We often tell the story of our debate over breakfast about the young entrepreneurs we knew who were struggling with career questions. They simply didn’t resonate with the existing career advice literature. It was a combination of factors that seemed to turn them off: antiquated context, starchy verbose formats, academic theoretical content, and a somewhat condescending tone.

So, we decided that we would try to fill that gap. Produce something that we believed might better fit their needs.

Well, the feedback, incredible media interest, reviews, orders from schools and mentorship programs, along with the award recognition have validated that our instincts were right.

We were discussing this about a month ago, and Dr. Schuster, as he so often does, captured it beautifully in the above quote.

“We love the book, Shey Sinope’s story, and especially the pragmatic, constructive advice, but can you elaborate?”

We set ourselves the goal of making A Career Carol short. We also set the goal of trying to capture the eternal existential threats we face during our professional journeys. At the same time, we were also testing the concept that we had—the idea of writing something that was both entertaining and informative.

We consciously left space for two things: the story of Shey Sinope’s career journey to be expanded through his 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s, and the opportunity to delve more deeply into the big challenges we sketched in our first book.

And we seemed to have sparked an interest in both of these. Authors talk about finding an audience and, in our own modest way, it seems that’s what we and Shey Sinope have done. The fact is, there is an enthusiasm to read some more, along with a desire to hear more about how to navigate the big career challenges.

“Let’s write this first book and figure out (a) if we are any good at it, and (b) if it’s as rewarding as we hope it will be.”

In September 2022, one of us really did say this. You hear stories of people who profess to have no doubts, no anxieties about their talents. We like to think we look at things realistically, rationally, and pragmatically. We love to write and have written extensively, but never before a book. We believe we have a concept that will appeal to today’s audience, but we won’t know until we try. And neither of us knew the publishing business very well, so a learning curve was to be expected.

Fast forward to May 2024, and we can declare that (a) this project has been immensely rewarding. It’s not necessarily always fun, but the opportunity to challenge ourselves in this new arena and the people we have met along the way have been extraordinary. Moreover, the personal challenge we set ourselves to produce something we would both be proud of—well, that has been rewarding almost beyond words. Like any other challenge, from running a marathon to climbing Kilimanjaro, writing a good book has meant stretching ourselves and challenging ourselves in a very positive way.

So, watch this space…

We have to wrap this update up now because we are about to get on a call with Alison to review the Shey Sinope saga book 2 concept and outline.

We will update you here first when we know more about title, publication dates, and pre-sales.

Wish us luck!

April Highlights

The difficulty of writing this column is that if we confine our update to April, we can’t share that… we received more book award recognition!

Yes, not only did we win our first book award in April, but last week, the prestigious UK Business Book Awards selected A Career Carol as finalists for Short Business Book of the Year!

The winner will be announced at a dinner in September. Honestly, though, we are thrilled to be among the finalists.

April saw some more great media interest and coverage. One of the UK national newspapers, the Daily Star, carried an interview with us on the future of work in the context of AI. It was carried in their print version only, but we have clipped a copy on our website.

HWRK, an online magazine for teachers, published our article on how to help students transition from education to professional life.

Along similar lines, we were invited to write a series of articles for Sec-Ed, the leading website for UK secondary school teachers. We really enjoyed designing simulations and practical thought exercises to amplify our main points. We are particularly proud of the SCHOX simulation. Check it out if you have 5 mins.

We were invited to write for Big Think in April. It’s a very impressive US publication that focuses on demystifying complex concepts in science and business. We wrote a piece on motivation theory as it applies to work and, in particular, how we relate to good/bad work.

Books, books, books…

The Dr. Schuster Column

When the COVID lockdown ended in London, my first trip was not to a restaurant or barber—it was to my bookshop around the corner. I picked up a copy of Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse and spent an evening rereading one of my favourites over a glass of Argentinian Malbec. It was an invigorating return to normality.

I grew up with books and considered myself somewhat of a ‘bookworm.’ In this pre-internet era, books were the means to explore the worlds unknown—and the more I read, the more my thirst for knowledge and creative imagination grew.

Today’s youth often digest information in a wider variety of ways, such as podcasts, YouTube, Insta, TikTok, and many other online sources. However, I’ve found these mediums often don’t provide the full context of beginning, middle, and end that books typically offer. Books offer information in a context rather than soundbites.

In 2015, Mark Zuckerberg posted on Facebook that he set a goal to read one book every two weeks with an emphasis on learning about different cultures, beliefs, histories, and technologies. He said:

“Books allow you to fully explore a topic and immerse yourself in a deeper way than most media today.”

Fast forward to May 2024, and I was delighted to read an NYT article titled “An Old-Fashioned Library at the Heart of Tech Boom.” It gives me hope that Sam Altman, creator of ChatGPT, commissioned a library to be built as the architectural centrepiece of the OpenAI headquarters. It features books from Homer’s Iliad to David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity, one of Sam Altman’s favourites.

Who would have thought that he has deep respect for books and what they represent? He was famously quoted:

“My dining room and living room at home is inside a library—floor-to-ceiling books all the way round. There is something about sitting in the middle of knowledge on the shelves at vast scale that I find interesting.”

A feeling I can so relate to. When I first entered the Austrian National Library with 12 million books, an emotion of deep respect and better understanding of the significance of the written word as part of humans’ evolution overcame me.

AI will be trained with much of this knowledge and trained in the concepts of evolutionary thinking. However, it will take much longer than anyone anticipates for AI to become truly intelligent—but it will happen, at one point.

…Until then, and perhaps even regardless of AI’s rival capabilities, we will keep writing. There are many nuances and hidden rewards to conveying and receiving ideas, knowledge, imagination in the written word. In a world constantly evolving, progressing, and adapting, I believe that will remain a constant.