Most books take quite a bit of time and too many long sentences to share a few worthwhile ideas. Good to the Core take a different approach. Short chapters unpack the impact of values that shape your life and offer practical steps for you, the reader, to identify your own core values.
Author John Blumberg suggests throughout the book that these personal values build value for the organizations where you spend your time, and I buy this assertion. I also track with Blumberg as he describes the process of identifying personal ideals that truly are core values. Yet what I appreciated the most was reading the descriptions of the values Blumberg has built his own life around.
Other parts of the book feel more like a pep talk or presentation (not surprising since Blumberg pays the bills as a professional speaker), but when he starts describing his own values I felt like I’d been invited backstage for a tour of a life lived intentionally. I share a number of Blumberg’s values, and others got me thinking. He lists optimism, adventure, and curiosity among his values and all three stimulated reflection.
In the midst of describing his own values he also made several observations I appreciated. At one point he describes his understanding of STEWARDSHIP as the idea that “there is something better to be left behind. Not devoured, but improved upon and let as your gift for others.” Nice.
Then in the section on ADVENTURE he notes: “While technology has, in itself, been an adventure, I am beginning to wonder if it has created a whole new level of demands that takes us to such a reactive state in life that there is no time to dream. No time to let life be truly an adventure…” I wonder the same thing… as I blog, wade through email, post to Facebook, update Twitter, upgrade the maps on my GPS, play poker on my Blackberry Bold, and battle viruses on all three computers that now take up desk space in our home. Time to dream? Who has time for that?
Blumberg isn’t trying to write a book that will be nominated for a Pulitzer. It is the wrong size and shape and it has too many pictures and funky fonts. It will look much more at home on the corner of a desk or in the book rack in the bathroom rather than tucked into the Library of Congress, but then I think that is the point. It was written not so much to be read but to be used to begin to think about what you truly want to define you. And this is time well spent… after you read… thinking, making notes, and boiling down what really is at your core.
And here is the irony… I’m posting my dilemma online… on my blog which is linked to my Twitter account which will in turn update my Facebook status.
