Normally on Memorial Day weekend, you’ll find me haunting my usual cove on Percy Priest Lake here in Nashville, but this year was different. This year, I was aboard a much larger boat listening to SQL Cruise Alaska’s guest speaker, Buck Woody [blog|twitter] entertain and enlighten us with the first of his three part series: Three C’s for the High Seas: Career, Communication, and Cloud.
During this session, Buck taught us that once you develop a goal, you need to translate that goal into steps, and then find a method to make yourself accountable for measuring those steps, simply because what gets measured gets done.
Additionally, Buck cited lack of knowledge as being one of the road blocks to successfully achieving our goals. To overcome this obstacle, Buck suggested we all add a reading list to our action plans. By reading, we can easily fill the knowledge gaps that we know exist, and also identify the ones of which we may not be aware. He further challenged us to make ourselves accountable by sharing the reading list in a blog post and then posting a monthly book review.
I have to admit that I feel really uncomfortable when I have to describe my goals, either professional or personal. It’s not like I am completely directionless, it’s just that the destination is pretty fuzzy for me. So, my goal over the next twelve months is to make a conscious effort to define my destination. Many of the books I have chosen reflect that process. A few I’ve been asked to read by others, and some I’ve chosen because they fill specific knowledge gaps. The books are listed in no particular reading order.
- The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
- What Are Your Goals: Powerful Questions to Discover What You Want Out of Life
- Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation
- Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are
- The Alchemist: A Fable About Following Your Dream
- Never Let Go: A Philosophy of Lifting, Living, and Learning
- One Person/Multiple Careers: An New Model for Work/Life Success
- Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When the Stakes are High
- What to Say When You’re Dying on the Platform
- Sin and Syntax: How to Create Wickedly Effective Prose
- Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2008: T-SQL Querying
- Refactoring Databases: Evolutionary Database Design
Fantastic writeup – and great list! We’ll be watching to see what you learn.