Often books have a cool title and grab your attention, but then once you read the book it disappoints. Well have no fear with Mojo, as it is filled with…well Mojo!! In life we may often feel we have lost our edge or that we may be stuck. How do we get “it” back and once back, how do we keep it? In his follow-up to the New York Times bestseller What Got You Here Won't Get You There, executive coach Marshall Goldsmith lays out the ways that we can get and keep our Mojo.
What is Mojo? Mojo is the moment when we do something that's purposeful, powerful, and positive and the rest of the world recognizes it. This book is about the moment—and how we can create it in our lives, maintain it, and recapture it when we need it.
The book offers an easy set of tools and questions to discover your Mojo. Marshall explores a number of effects of Mojo and negative Mojo or “Nojo” as he calls it. He explains that our professional and personal Mojo is impacted by four key factors:
- Identity - Who do you think you are?
- Achievement - What have you done lately?
- Reputation - Who do other people think you are—and what have you done lately?
- Acceptance - What can you change—and when do you need to just "let it go?"
According to Dr. Marshall, Mojo means “that positive spirit toward what we are doing now that starts from the inside and radiates to the outside.” Marshall did extensive research about “Mojo”. During his research he realized that people who are happy at work are happy at home too. It seems there is a correlation between happiness at home and happiness at work. Dr. Marshall says, “Happiness and meaning to life differs from person to person.” Success comes from within not outside. He provides tools for making your life more meaningful.
The final section of the book has a practical toolkit which is divided into 14 sections:
- Establish criteria that matter to you.
- Find out where you’re “living.”
- Be the optimist in the room.
- Take away one thing.
- Rebuild one brick at a time.
- Live your mission in the small moments too.
- Swim in the blue water.
- When to stay, when to go.
- Hello, goodbye.
- Adopt a metrics system.
- Reduce this number.
- Influence up as well as down.
- Name it, Frame it, Claim it.
- Give your friends a lifetime pass.
Mr. Goldsmith does a very nice job providing stories, examples and practical advice to help the reader gain an edge. In my opinion Mojo is a lot about having passion for what you do. In order to be successful you need passion and Mojo! This is another in a long line of great books that I suggest.
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Thanks for sharing about this book. I'm looking forward to checking it out. I've also found in my work that the one thing that stands between a person and their mojo is their negative patterns. These function like filters and blinders, limiting the view of possibilties and opportunities. Sometimes a person needs to weed their garden of the negative before the roots of the positive can take hold.
Posted by: Dana Lightman, Ph.D. | December 23, 2010 at 12:30 PM