In last week’s post I provided the final Table of Contents for the forthcoming book, and discussed how the TOC has changed since I initially envisioned it. (And I modified it quite a lot, as you will have read.)
This week I’ll go through it again, this time to give you a summary of each chapter so you can see what the main points of every chapter are and how it flows. I won’t provide all the links to past posts that I did last week, but you can seek them out there to read many of the main ideas, at least in its first-draft form.
Before starting, let me point out that today is effectively the last day to sign up as a paid subscriber and keep it through the end of the year in order to get a free signed copy when the book comes out! Thank you to those who have already signed up this month – and especially those who have already been paid subscribers, many from the very beginning.
So, here, writing directly to you, the reader, is what the book is all about and what you will learn when you (finally!) read it:
Getting into the Transformation Business
In Chapter 1 you will grasp the Progression of Economic Value and learn that guiding is the economic function of the fifth and final economic offering. Just as you extract commodities, make goods, deliver services, and stage experiences, you guide transformations. You will also learn that the key reason transformations create more economic value than any other offering is that they generate time well invested. Customers – properly called aspirants – invest their time in your transformations, under your guidance, that pays them dividends far into the future as they become a “new you”. Moreover, you are what you charge for, and so economically being in the transformation business means charging for the demonstrated outcomes your customers achieve.
What business are you really in?
Fostering Human Flourishing
In Chapter 2 you will learn the end purpose of guiding transformations: helping your aspirants flourish. Fostering human flourishing is the reason for being of any and all businesses; consciously or unconsciously that’s why customers buy from you, because they want to better their lives. By guiding customers across one or more spheres of transformation – health & wellbeing, wealth & prosperity, knowledge & wisdom, and purpose & meaning – you take them to higher and higher levels of flourishing, with profit the measure of how well your customers flourish from your economic offerings.
How can you help your customers in particular and humanity in general flourish?
Understanding Aspirants & Aspirations
Chapter 3 begins by making the point that all transformation is identity change – that aspirants desire to go from X to Y. You’ll discover who aspirants can be, whether individual people, organizations, businesses, or communities, and what catalyzes the need for transformation in their lives. You will also learn about the types of aspirations – that sometimes it is for wholesale metamorphosis, while at other times they may desire the cultivation to nurture some new aspect of identity, a refinement to gain some aspect they already have, or to attain a large-scale ambition.
How can you learn what your customers aspire to become?
Shifting from Experiences to Transformations
In Chapter 4, recognizing that transformations build atop experiences, you will learn how to go beyond merely memorable to highly meaningful, deeply transporting, and finally to truly transformative experiences. You can turn any experience into a transformative one through what I call encapsulation, the crux of transformation guiding, by surrounding each experience with three activities: preparation beforehand, reflection afterward, and integration on an ongoing basis.
How can you encapsulate your experiences to make them truly transformative?