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Part I: Convincing you to invest in your Life Capital
 

Principle 1: Engaged strategic conversation
  1.1 What is a conversation?
  1.2 Opportunity loss from efficient but narrow or disengaged communication
  1.3 Good timing maximises engagement and opportunity
  1.4 Conversation has many rewards
  1.5 Conversation is vital for you and those around you
 

Principle 2: The impediments and disincentives to strategic conversation
  2.1 Choosing not to talk
  2.2 The underdeveloped and underutilised skill of conversation
  2.3 You need a compelling ‘Why?’ to really capitalise on your conversational skills
 

Principle 3: seeing the size of the rewards
  3.1 The compelling ‘Why?’, and lessons from the principles of wealth accumulation
  3.2 Receiving constructive performance feedback
  3.3 Virtuous and vicious circles
  3.4 Giving feedback
  3.5 Size matters

Part II: Empowering you to invest in your Life Capital

 

Principle 4: Stacking the odds of behavioural change
  4.1 The odds seem stacked against behavioural change
  4.2 Restacking the odds in your favour
  4.3 Stopping to ask ‘What of it?’
 

Principle 5: Your life is your responsibility
  5.1 It’s all about you and your preferences so it’s your responsibility
  5.2 Your personal mission, your rules, your values
  5.3 Your framework of mental models for building your Life Capital
  5.4 Your process
  5.5 Your stories
  5.6 Your labels and your language
  5.7 Your commitment and persistence
  5.8 Your learning strategy
  5.9 ‘Life-enriching conversations’ as your catalyst

Part III: The application of your Life Capital to your career

 

Principle 6: Understanding life assets and liabilities

  6.1 Opportunities for and from self-discovery
  6.2 Understanding career assets and liabilities enhances performance
  6.3 A major life or career asset is the ability to make good decisions
  6.4 The diminishing lives and real values of knowledge assets
  6.5 Life assets need to be refreshed, updated and nourished
 

Principle 7: A more satisfying life
  7.1 Buying a share in someone’s career income
  7.2 If your career were a stock, what kind of stock would it be?
  7.3 A world where annual income is the only measure
  7.4 Climbing the ranks in a world of inequality of income
  7.5 A far more satisfying world — where you choose your unit of measure and you’re building those units

Principle 8: Morphing assets and liabilities
  8.1 Asset or liability?
  8.2 Your greatest weakness may be the foundation of your career
  8.3 Your employer — career asset or liability?
  8.4 Born into a successful family business — asset or liability?
  8.5 The people you surround yourself with — assets or liabilities?
  8.6 Your generosity with your time, energy and attention — asset or liability?

Part IV: Opportunities

 

 Principle 9: Opportunity losses and blind spots
  9.1 Opportunity loss is often much greater than actual loss
  9.2 Comfort zones and some bad habits cause recurring opportunity loss
  9.3 Blind spots
  9.4 Minimising opportunity loss

 

 Principle 10: Elementary maths but big opportunities
  10.1 Use of your time
  10.2 Managing your energy and your attention to the moment
  10.3 The 80/20 rule
  10.4 Multiplicity
  10.5 Rates of change — differentials
  10.6 Growth curves
   
 

Principle 11: Manage your assets and your liabilities
  11.1 Seligman’s positive psychology
  11.2 Your Life Capital is a big A = B – C opportunity
  11.3 Turning your liabilities into assets or your problems into opportunities
  11.4 Strengths and weaknesses demand different approaches
  11.5 Rationing your energy
  11.6 High-impact changes that also demand high energy
  11.7 Reinventing yourself
     
 

Principle 12: Conversations and opportunities
  12.1 Leveraging conversations
  12.2 Leveraged conversations and job search
  12.3 Negotiating a new job in a new company
  12.4 Return on your investment
     
 

Principle 13: Free options
  13.1 Ideas options
  13.2 People options
  13.3 People options already on your team
  13.4 Self-awareness options
  13.5 Inspiration or motivation options
  13.6 The value of options
  13.7 The tradeability of options

Part V: Your relationships Principle
 

Principle 14: Networks and networking
  14.1 Family
  14.2 Social networks
  14.3 Business and professional networks
  14.4 Online networks
  14.5 Value of networks
  14.6 Networking
 

Principle 15: Conversations and relationships
  15.1 Knowing who and what you are
  15.2 First impressions
  15.3 Building and enhancing a relationship
  15.4 Redefining relationships
  15.5 Informed mutual champions
  15.6 Lessons in relationship-building from customer or client service
  15.7 Returns from investment in relationships

Part VI: Your learning

 

Principle 16: Learning methods and strategy
  16.1 Learning journeys
  16.2 The engagement gap
  16.3 Personal mastery and accessing the subconscious
  16.4 The 10-year rule and deliberate practice
  16.5 Learning methods
  16.6 Learning accelerators and inhibitors
  16.7 Learning to manage your health
 

Principle 17: Learning from success and failure

  17.1 An empowering perspective on success and failure
  17.2 Long-term success and failure
  17.3 Disciplines for learning from success and failure
 

Principle 18: Collaboration
  18.1 The characteristics of great groups
  18.2 Team learning — dialogue and discussion
  18.3 Team learning — individual and organisational defensiveness
  18.4 Team communication and learning
  18.5 Collaboration and cross-fertilisation in research, innovation and problem solving
  18.6 Building bridges between people

Part VII: Your decision-making
 

Principle 19: Big points
  19.1 Identifying the big points in life
  19.2 Decisions where all your eggs will be in one basket
 

Principle 20: Success maximisation
  20.1 One life-enriching conversation per month
  20.2 Maximising the big increments
  20.3 Focus on your plans
 

Principle 21: Minimise the negative impact of your failures

  21.1 Setting yourself up for good decisions
  21.2 Keeping an eye out for an emerging failure
  21.3 Minimising the downside of failure through resilience
  21.4 Above all, don’t dig a deeper hole
 

Principle 22: Making uncertainty work better for you

  22.1 Decisions where you have no idea of the probabilities of alternative outcomes
  22.2 Probability-based decision-making
  22.3 Assessments of risk
  22.4 Refinements in decision-making theory
  22.5 Game theory
  22.6 Returns for risk
  22.7 Making serendipity work for you
  22.8 The importance of ‘Yes’
 

Principle 23: Conversations, information and decision-making
  23.1 The wisdom of crowds
  23.2 Groupthink
  23.3 Scuttlebutt and your big decisions
  23.4 Accessing information and developing knowledge
  23.5 Objectivity, scepticism and the assessment of information
  23.6 The final test: tell the story and examine it through multiple lenses

Conclusion
Appendix A: Some life assets
Appendix B: Sizing of benefits from selected opportunities to invest in your Life Capital
Notes
Index