Then he started a blog, wrote a book, and started speaking to groups and at conferences. Dave Ramsey hired him and then he wrote another book called Quitter.

The way I wrote that sounds like he did this all one lazy afternoon. It actually took him 12 years to be where he is today.

However, Quitter is one of my all time favorite books and Jon Acuff is one of my favorite authors.

So I’m excited to tell you about Jon’s new book Start.

I was fortunate to get an advanced copy of Start as part of the launch team for Jon’s new book.

Quitter was fantastic and Start is equally fantastic, but in a different way.

If Jon Acuff were Pearl Jam, Quitter would be his Ten and Start would be his Vs.

You probably only got that reference if you wore flannel and Dr. Martens at some point in your life from approximately 1991 through 1996.

The tagline for Start is Punch Fear in the Face, Escape Average & Do Work That Matters.

Jon uses his recent experiences, and his exposure to Dave Ramsey’s influence, to outline the stages of living an extraordinary life and making a meaningful contribution to the world.

Jon outlines five stages that every extraordinary life goes through:

1. Learning

2. Editing

3. Mastering

4. Harvesting

5. Guiding

Jon walks you through each of these stages and provides ways to master each stage on the way to extraordinary. Yet he does it through stories and funny illustrations that keep you glued to the pages to get to the end.

Something I appreciate is Jon’s willingness to share his failures and missteps along the way to his own excellence. He comes across as a very regular guy who has done some extraordinary things.

I also appreciate that he doesn’t come across as a know it all and confesses to still need to learn and be mentored.

Jon’s story of his meeting with Dave Ramsey about using Quitter as a title of his last book is worth the price of the book by itself.

“I was a nervous wreck. I think at some point I won’t be intimidated by Dave Ramsey anymore – probably around 2032 that will happen,” he says, adding, “So I marched up to [his] office, sweaty and a little throw-uppy.”

For readers to get the most out of Start I think there are three ways to best approach it:

As a mall kiosk. When you go to the mall and you want to figure out where you are in relation to the stores you want to visit you use a kiosk. Start can provide you with a way to determine where you are on your road to extraordinary right now.

As a map. After you determine where you are you can envision where you want to be with the five stages of excellence. You may be in Learning but you want to get to Mastering. Start will help you create your map to get there.

As a  motivator. Jon uses his funny stories to explain that the road to extraordinary is hard but it’s worth it. When you read the book you will want to be extraordinary.

I was honored to be part of the launch team for Start and I recommend the book to anyone who wants to do extraordinary things with their life.

Start comes out tomorrow but if you pre-order the book today you’ll get over $250 worth of free bonuses. Just click here for more information.

Question: Where are you on your road to excellence? What can you do to get to the next stage?

(Note: The links to books in this post are affiliate links)

Starting something new can be fun, exciting, scary, and downright hard to do.  Creating this blog was all of those things and I’m completely thrilled to get my first post out the door.  I tend to be a bit on the perfectionist side so I kept reminding myself that everything doesn’t have to be in place before starting.  Steve Jobs sold the first wood encased Apple computers out of his parents’ garage, Stephen Spielberg’s first movie was a 26 minute film entitled

In the spirit of starting new things I want to encourage you to start something new that will help you get the results you want in your career.  Whether that is updating your resume, taking a networking contact to lunch, or just smiling more at work go ahead and just start it.  It doesn’t have to be perfect and you don’t have to know where it will take you exactly, but sometimes you just have to make a move.  Three things to remember when starting something new:

1. Start small. If you’re miserable in your job and you want to do work that you enjoy, begin by taking a couple of hours a week to think and meditate about the times when you have felt fully alive.  When you were really firing on all cylinders and just fully enjoying yourself.  It could be work related or not.  Go ahead and jot down what you come up with and look for trends and patterns.  That will give you some insight as to what kind of work you might enjoy.

2. Expect success. What you expect to happen will most likely be what happens.  That whole self-fulfilling prophecy thing.  When you envision success its like it has already happened and your brain begins to believe that now you are just repeating something you’ve done before, which makes it easier to do.  When you ride a bike you will go wherever you look, and the same principle applies in your career as well.

3. Think of it as an experiment. Remember chemistry class?  If you were like me you probably never got it quite right when you mixed the green stuff with the blue stuff.  But that was the whole point.  It was an experiment and you just wanted to see what happened when you mixed the blue stuff with the green stuff.  Sometimes your career is like that too.  Sometimes you have to just see what smiling more at work does for you.  Sometimes you have to see what asking your cube mate about their sick pet does for your career. Just like in chemistry class you may get a bad reaction, but sometimes (most of the time) you will get something better than you expected.

So I invite you to join me as I start something new with this blog and I know the results will be better than I expected.  So here’s to starting something new…what are you going to start?