Maybe you’ve started working for somebody else – a company or organization. Maybe you’ve started your own thing. In either case I think you’ll find much that will be of use to you in this book. (And given that I’ve done both I feel I’m suitably qualified to be your guide.)

If you have never started your own business, don’t discount the chapters that appear to be targeted at the entrepreneur or business owner. Greater minds than mine have pointed out how the era of a job for life is long over – that ship has sailed. More and more, organizations are encouraging their employees to think like entrepreneurs. Get closer to the customer. Take risks. Be passionate about projects. How else can I add value? What value do I add? Why do I deserve a salary rise? And so on.

What I’ve done is to rack my brains and come up with (what’s turned out to be) 24 subjects about which I wish I’d known more when I started working. Thus, the book has 24 chapters in alphabetical order.

The book is intended to be quick and easy to read, punchy and concise. The chapters are all pretty short. I take as my starting point that you’re like the rest of us – that you’ve got far more to do than you’ll ever have time to do it. So you don’t want to spend too much time messing around with this book.

While you can certainly read it from cover to cover – and would get benefit from doing that – my sense is that the most effective way to use the book would be to dip into it. You’re asked to attend a meeting, for example, so you check the chapter on meetings. You’re asked to take on a new project but before you start calling meetings, sending out emails, banging stuff into your computer, hiring people, making Gantt charts in Microsoft Project and so on, you take a few minutes out to read the chapter on projects.

I would pretty much guarantee that the time you spend on this book would be repaid several or even many times over by time you wouldn’t waste as a result. Not a bad deal, eh?

Each chapter is short and focused on a very specific subject. The main body of each chapter talks about the issues associated with that subject. The book is very much a how-to book so it then goes on to tell you how to deal with these issues. In other words, it identifies some specific actions that you can take straight away in order to learn the lesson of the chapter.

Littered throughout the book are extracts from carefully selected commencement speeches – where the great and the good give advice to graduating university students. In commencement speeches, the speaker recounts past experiences and tries to crystallize the lessons they learned from these. Essentially, these lessons, which they are now passing on to people about to go into the workplace, are the things they wish they’d known when they started working.

So these commencement speeches fitted in very nicely with the concept of the book. While I found some of these speeches to be of questionable quality, there were also some truly great ones there. So I’ve taken the best of these and spread them throughout the book. I’ve also drawn on some of the wisdom of the great and good throughout history – from Roman times to the present day.

So will this book change your life? Well, surely the change needs to come from within. But it should certainly inspire and support change.

Is it free from fluffiness and cod-philosophy? Yes – we’ve tried to ensure that it is.

Does it contain useful, actionable insight? For sure – it is common sense, hopefully elucidated with uncommon clarity.

Does it allow dip-in-dip-out reading, for that quick refresher/morale boost at those times your commitment to change is wavering? It certainly does. It’s written in manageable chunks, which we hope you will find enjoyable to read.

And so without further ado, let’s launch into it.