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Book Review: Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success

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Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success
by Dan Schwabel
# ISBN-10: 1427798206
# ISBN-13: 978-1427798206

PRO: A snappy, positive, clever book on personal branding that makes it exciting and interesting, explains its importance, and has a lot of good advice.  Helps anyone get going into personal branding in the internet age.

CONS: An erratic writing style.  Depth of information varies erratically.  Its pitch to Gen Y may turn off Gen Xers who would benefit.  Some questionable social conclusions.

SUMMARY: Me 2.0 is an excellent guide to personal branding in the internet age – what it is, how to do it, why to do it, and its impact.  A must-buy for serious professionals.

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Extend Your Life Lessons

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When Jason Alba of JibberJobber.com hurt his calf, it made him think over how similarly he'd taken care of himself and his career (and not in a good way).

This is an excellent example of extending life lessons, and it's one relevant to one's career – and of course, one's life. I often preach leading an integrated life, and this is a good example.

We're going to encounter many lessons in our life – but it's all too easy to think they only teach us something about a specialized area of our life. Instead, I find it useful to try and apply any lessons we learn to the whole of my life, and see what we can learn.

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Turning Books Into Action

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I advise people to always be reading books, including career books.  One of the problems however is we can read so much that our latest reading falls out of our mind as soon as we finish it and pick up a new one.  So here a few tips for what I use to turn what I learn in a book to action.

1) If a book has exercises you can do while reading them?  Do them.  This lets you get as much out of the book as possible and keeps it in your mind fast.

2) If a book has exercises you can't do until you're done, do them IMMEDIATELY or very shortly after finishing the book.  Keep the book with you if possible for a reminder.

3) Review the book after completion to make sure you integrate the lessons.

4) Keep notes while reading for things to do after you read the book.

5) After you finish the book (or during) write up an action plan to put what you read into action.  Include what you truly need, don't include everything unless you feel you have to or the book works best if you do all exercises.

Reading and getting the most out of a book is a matter of active engagement.  A plan to get the most out of a book makes sure you are engaged.

– Steven Savage