What truly matters for attracting opportunities is your reputation. Your connections, friends, coworkers, and customers who know the type of work you do.

So many young people obsess over making a good looking resume—they go for impressive sounding internships and seek out volunteer experience. This might help with getting through gatekeepers in big companies. But what is a much stronger use of time and energy is building your reputation.

Doing great work, no matter what you do, and then sharing it. Talking to your customers, sharing on social media about what you love about your work, and impressesing your coworkers by kicking ass at your job.

Check out the new episode of Forward Tilt now on iTunes, YouTube, direct download and all major podcast platforms.

In This Episode:

• No one has ever been hired for their resume
• Why so many jobs go to people who know people at the company
• Doing your current job exceptionally well is the best way to find new opportunities
• Talking about what you love about your job
• Build your reputation, don’t worry about your resume

For a free copy of Forward Tilt: An Almanac for Personal Growth go to discoverpraxis.com/forwardtilt

One of the most valuable and least heralded skills is email mastery.

The subtle art of email jiu-jitsu has powers hard to exaggerate.  Most people suck at email.

There are so many valuable email skills: How to reduce an exchange to the fewest possible back and forths, how to make a single, clear, compelling ask, how to convey proper tone, how to nudge, create urgency, yet not push away.  How to email people busier than you and less busy; more connected than you and less; people you want to do a favor for and those you want to do favors for you.  How to revive and email thread.  How to exit an email thread.  How to start a conversation and how to end one.  How to make and respond to email intros.  Emailing when you hold the cards and when you don’t.  Hammering down next steps when multiple parties continue to exchange without getting to an action item. Complaint emails, praise emails, inquiring emails, encouraging emails, fire-under-the-ass emails, etc. etc.

These are some of the most important abilities in any kind of business.

They can’t be taught.

You can practice them, and you can be shown and included in examples from email masters.

But it begins with taking email seriously.  Until I see otherwise, email is far and away the most important medium in the professional world.  Everything else pales in comparison, and lacks the versatility and power.

Get good at email.

I’m stuck in a low-grade hotel in Corbin, KY.  The coffee tastes like burnt water.  But it’s free.  So is the surprisingly fast WiFi.

Corbin, I discovered from a roadside sign, is the home of “Colonel” Harlan Sanders and his famous fried chicken.  The town makes quite a celebration of the fact.

I love it.

How cool is it that a guy born in 1890 who built a restaurant chain that sells one of the humblest foods imaginable is honored like royalty?  Don’t get me wrong, he was a total baller.  He was the closest free-markets get to royalty; someone who created tons of wealth by making other people happy.

Most honorifics are reserved for pompous, often murderous asshole politicians.  I don’t know anything about the Colonel’s personality or integrity as a man, but I know he sold a ton of tasty, cheap chicken.  I prefer monuments to that over anything any politician ever did, every day of the week.

Oh, and I found this to add icing to the Americana cake…apparently someone in real life dressed up like the Colonel and pretended to beat up someone who dressed up like a chicken…and people paid to watch it.

It’s enough to give you chills.

via GIPHY

*Double bonus!

I flipped on the hotel TV, and after finally figuring out how to exit the hotel promo channel, stumbled upon the classic film, “The Waterboy”, right at the scene when Adam Sandler’s character screeches like a wild pig and tackles a professor that he calls “Colonel Sanders”.  Coincidence, or fate?

Yesterday, I published a list of some books that have provided useful mental models.

It was a huge mistake.

I edited it at least six times after publishing, and felt stress ever since, even waking up at night thinking of titles I forgot, or knowing there are still more I forgot that I forgot.

It feels wrong and inaccurate an unfair to post an incomplete list. But a complete list is not possible.

I’m done trying to document all the great books. I’ll just reference them individually when they come to mind.

The Inner Game of Tennis

The Act of creation

‘Till We Have Faces

Finite and Infinite Games

Breaking Smart Season 1

The Great Divorce

Paradise Lost

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Human Action

The Gervais Principle

That Which is Seen and That Which is Unseen

The Optimistic Child

Punished by Reward

Dumbing us Down

A Timeless Way of Building

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Free to Learn

How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World

Flatland

Zero to One

The Scapegoat

The Hard Thing About Hard Things

The Future and Its Enemies

A Conflict of Visions

Theory and History

Abundance

The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Principles of Economics

A Renegade History of The U.S.

Beyond Politics

The Not So Wild, Wild West

The Fourth Dimension

A Secret History of the World

The Myth of a Christian Nation

That Hideous Strength

The Book of the Dun Cow

Siddhartha

The Ultimate Resource

The Most Dangerous Superstition

Crisis & Leviathan

The Divine Conspiracy

Outwitting the Devil

All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

That is an incredibly optimistic statement.

The sophomoric reading is that you are a bad person who should feel bad.  There is little optimism there.  To better appreciate what this statement can do for you, consider it in light of another Biblical statement,

Have I not said ye are Gods?

You fall short of your own potential.  In other words, “All have sinned” is an acknowledgement of the simple fact that you are not who you want to be and who you are capable of being.  The optimism is the possibility nested in this statement; that improvement toward your divine potential is possible.

It needn’t be read religiously if that distracts you.  Your own divinity can mean simply your ideal version of yourself; the best you can imagine being and desire to become.

If you have godlike potential and want to move toward the ideal form of the person you want to be, you must begin by acknowledging you are not there.  Progress requires discontentment with your current condition.  Then you can move to the optimism that says, “Which is precisely why I am constantly taking action to move towards what I am not yet.”  To see the possibility of your future potential requires accepting your current distance from it.

In Christian language, this is the process of salvation.  You could call it self-improvement, enlightenment, or progress if you like.

The first instinct is to think “Ye are Gods” is the optimistic statement, but it’s not.

It forces you to confront the reality of your own lack of divinity.  The fact that you can imagine a self better than who you currently are reveals inescapably that you are not yet Godlike.  “Ye are Gods” by itself can cause cynicism or depression: either the statement is a delusional sham because I can see I’m not Godlike, or I’m a sham for my failure to be so.

Hope is found in first owning the fact that you fall short of your potential and desire.  This leads to the discontentment necessary to drive action and the optimism that action can move you closer.

Create value for your customers before they’re your customers.

Create value for your customers when they are your customers.

Create value for your customers after they are your customers.

Who are your customers? Anyone with whom you want to exchange anything.

What if you have no identifiable customers?

You are your first and last customer. Create value for yourself every day.

This week on Office Hours, we talk about the power of daily challenges and answer four listener questions:

When I’m driving, I sometimes imagine individuals from various points in human history riding with me as we listen to the radio. I think about the songs, lyrics, even ads, and consider what kind of conversations and reactions they would generate from a person from medieval England or turn of the century America.

What would Bach think of The Black Keys? What would a farmer or slave in the new world think of modern blues and folk? What would a chariot driver think of going 70 on the highway?

I’ve played this mental game as long as I can remember. Sometimes it gets so exciting I feel genuine pain that I can’t transport someone from the past to experience the present.

Moved from one house to the next in the same neighborhood. Night and day difference. Never underestimate the importance of the direction light comes into the house.