In our quest to pursue the most popular new year’s goals (all of which seem to fall into the buckets of Mind, Body, Soul and Pocket), today we’ll talk “Mind”, and 10-minute ways to advance our educations and jump-start our careers.
So why not start with an easy one — boosting our learning while in the car. If you don’t spend at least 10 minutes on your commute, please don’t tell me — I will be really depressed and very jealous. But if you are a captive audience in a car, or while you’re working out, or for a little while in the evening, you can get some great career advice and in-depth learning on a particular subject via audiobooks on CD and electronic audiobooks.
Here are a few places I found good info for business audiobooks…
* Local library: when I searched on “business audiobooks” at our library, 780 titles came up (I’m in Los Angeles and there are a lot of libraries in the system). The best part of all, it’s FREE! Even better than audiobooks on CD — e-audibooks available through the library. It’s 11pm and I just signed onto the library website, picked a title and downloaded it to my computer to listen to on my computer or ipod. I didn’t even have to go into the library to pick anything up! See if your library offers e-books.
* Audible.com has books in many business categories: Career skills, marketing, commerce and economy, personal finance and investing, leadership and sales; they have a plan now for $7.49/month and that includes one audiobook each month for three months
* Teach12.com is a site I’ve mentioned before — great courses from professors at Ivy League and other top universities
While these audiobooks won’t earn you an advanced degree or do the job search for you, they can give you added knowledge, skills and confidence.
My only tip would be to like the voice on your audiobook — some are like nails on a chalkboard and that’s just not worth it. Sometimes it sounds like they’re trying to put their Shakespearean-trained voices to a book about financial planning and it just does’t work. But if you like the voice and the subject, it’s a breeze — there’ve been times when I haven’t wanted the drive to end! And that’s saying something…
