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Twelve and A Half Book
- Book Name: Twelve and A Half
- Authors: Gary Vaynerchuk
- Pages: 224
- Publish Date: 30 November 2021
- Language: English
- Genre: Self-Help Book
Book Review
Twelve and A Half Book by Gary Vaynerchuk. In this book, Gary Vaynerchuk discusses 13 emotional qualities or ingredients that are required for business success. Why is it called 12 and a half then?
I think it just makes the title a bit more interesting and intriguing. but Gary's reason is that he is weak with one of the 13 ingredients - kind candour - but he's improving so instead of giving himself zero points for kind candour,
He gives himself a half a point. and for the other 12 ingredients, he gives himself a point each. hence 12 and a half points. this book is for entrepreneurs, managers, interns - employees at all levels of an organization.
Overall I liked this book a lot. it is very different from garyvee's content on social media. it underlines the importance of EQ over IQ in business success. I used to teach leadership training classes for managers and our emotional intelligence class... in that class,
I used to share a quote which is: when it comes to business success, EQ eats IQ for breakfast. dang it, I'm hungry now!
So if you want to develop your EQ or your soft skills, which I believe are extremely important for your career whether you're working for someone or you have your own business, then this book is excellent for you.
So what are these 13 ingredients for business success?
some of them are qualities that are obvious like ambition, tenacity, conviction... but some of them are not that obvious. in fact, you may even think that they might prevent you from being successful in business.
for example, kindness, humility and patience. you may even think that patience is the opposite of ambition but Gary explains in this book how you can have both patience and ambition. some of the other ingredients are self-awareness, empathy, curiosity and so on.
part one of the book is Gary explaining these 13 ingredients and giving examples of them from his own life. it's pretty quick and easy to read and I enjoyed his stories. in part two he gives various hypothetical business scenarios or problems and suggests a couple of solutions to those problems and in those solutions, he advises which of the 13 ingredients can be used.
for example one of the scenarios is that you and Brandon started working for your company at the same time. out of the 10 people in your team, you two are the best and similar in terms of skillset, personality and drive.
however, the promotion goes to Brandon, not you. what do you do? Gary says to first of all deploy kindness. by starting your reaction by being happy for Brandon, you will feel lighter inside and once you're feeling light, the conversation that needs to happen with your boss becomes much easier.
if you go into your boss's office angry and aggressive, you have already set the foundations for an unfavourable outcome.
you can say something like this to your boss "first of all Brandon is amazing and I'm so pumped for his promotion. I respect the decision you made but I'd like to be educated on how you're thinking about this. what made you choose Brandon?
regardless of what the answer is, remember it's not a definitive statement about you. it is one person's subjective opinion.
the boss made a choice based on what they are able to "see". the boss will never have 100% context on what's happening.
so don't feel bad about yourself just because one person subjectively decided that Brandon is better than you at work. so this was one of the scenarios.
there are lots of other scenarios in the book, 35 of them which Gary goes through. for example leaving a job to start your own business, choosing a new job then there are some management-related problems, entrepreneurship problems and so on.
I would say that this is the kind of book that you keep with you and consult as and when you go through such situations it is not a read once and be done kind of a book. part 3 of the book has some exercises to help you develop the 13 emotional ingredients.
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THANK YOU SO MUCH
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