Okay, I know it has a pretty rude title, but it’s a VERY good book! Reading it certainly lit a low fire me butt when I read it.
And in my humble opinion, the best proof of the effectiveness of a self-help book is the exchange it actually leads to one’s life. It’s one thing to read self-help books; it is quite another to implement the advice offered. Reading is passive; the change is active.
I’m not quite sure why the book Shut up, stop whining and get a lifeby Larry Winget resonated so strongly with me when it did, but whatever the reason, the author’s frankness seemed to have … dislodged something in my psyche.
Perhaps when one is ready to hear the truth, however uncomfortable it may be, one is more open to hearing it from a stranger than from a loved one?
In any case, reading this line in Larry’s book hit me to the core:
“The problem is never lack of time. The problem is poorly defined priorities.”
– Larry Winget
Lack of time, I finally realize, is simply an excuse.
Here’s another gem:
“From what you think, what you talk about and what you do something is what comes out.”
– Larry Winget
Yes of course. But here’s the thing: when I stopped and really thought about it, I realized that when it came to an issue that supposedly mattered to me a lot, like climate change, I had to admit that I had been very strong on ‘thinking about’ and the “talking about” part of the equation, but the “doing something” part, not so much.
And here is a nugget that speaks to the higher purpose of our lives:
“People who understand that their purpose is service to others live lives of abundance. Those who don’t just live their lives.”
– Larry Winget
I took nine pages of notes while reading Shut up, stop whining and get a life. This, in itself, is nothing new to me. Doing something constructive with those notes is what I needed to improve.
“When you stop letting things slide and start taking advantage of every moment, incredible things happen. The small things are the most important thing. Everyone gets the big things. Very few take care of the little things.”
– Larry Winget
I am a chronic note taker. I love writing things. I have neat piles of scrap paper stored in various strategic locations around my house, so that whenever an idea comes to mind (which is frighteningly often), for example a blog topic, I can quickly jot it down. so you don’t. forget. Then I keep it in its respective folder and go on with my day.
Now the astute reader may recognize a small problem brewing with this system. Yes, it’s true: I have enough brilliant ideas scrawled on scraps of paper to sink a battleship. I have a filing system that is so elaborate that the White House would be impressed.
Idea generation and record keeping are not a problem; Getting my ideas to market in a timely manner is what costs me.
I tend to spend so much time on the important things, which are my most important writing projects, like books, scripts, and play scripts, that I have missed countless opportunities to write and post smaller informational blogs that will help me get there. audience I want to eventually reach with my biggest projects.
Although this is due to a variety of excuses (ignorance, lousy time management, disorganization, procrastination, poor prioritization, etc.) in the end, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that I identify the problem and find a way to correct it.
So I did exactly that by accepting Larry’s suggestion to start taking better care of the little things at work, which for me meant spending time writing short, useful blogs on all sorts of different topics, and posting and submitting them. throught social media.
What a concept!
Of course, Larry was right: amazing things started to happen. I started reaching out to many more readers and forming strategic partnerships with like-minded people.
“The problem is never that we do not know, it is always that we do not DO what we already know.”
– Larry Winget
If I didn’t think I’d ever use the hundreds of blog ideas that I so diligently wrote on slips of paper, I highly doubt that I would have written them down in the first place. He just didn’t know how to start using them … And rightly so. Because I can’t write fifty blogs in a week, to make a dent in the stack. But I can write one or two.
That’s what I love about a book like Shut Up, Stop Whining, and Get a Life – it’s full of suggestions that we already know to be true; we may need a friendly reminder to kick the pants … when the time is right for us to really hear the message.
In closing, one of my favorite bits of wisdom from the book was this:
“Do what you say you are going to do, when you said you were going to do it, the way you said you were going to do it. There are no excuses.”
– Larry Winget
I’ve thought about this a lot and I guess it all comes down to being impeccable with our word … living up to our promises. Sometimes this is difficult to do because circumstances change and unexpected things happen. But I do believe that if we can live to do our best to fulfill the commitments we have made, both to ourselves and to others, it really helps to have a life of integrity.
