How to Begin: Start Doing Something That Matters

“Piercingly frank, funny, gorgeous, vulnerable, and ultimately really damn helpful.” — Julie Lythcott-Haims, New York Times bestselling author of How to Raise an Adult

Unlock your greatness. Set a goal that matters to you—and to the world

With The Coaching Habit, Michael Bungay Stanier penned the bestselling coaching book of the century. With The Advice Trap, he showed you how to tame your Advice Monster. Now, he’s here to help you reclaim your ambition and motivation to become your best self, driven with purpose and meaning.

If you are ready to get unstuck, to figure out what you should do that matters, to unlock your best self, to take on a project that you know is yours—you need to know How to Begin.

This is your practical guide to finding the focus and courage to set a Worthy Goal: one that lights you up, compels you to grow, and serves a bigger game by being thrilling, important and daunting.

With humor, compassion, and laser-focused clarity, Bungay Stanier walks you through a tested process to:

- find and refine your Worthy Goal to meets three integral criteria;
- strengthen your Worthy Goal with three tests—and a single word that takes it from Good to Great;
- get clear on your commitment;
- build the resources to cross the threshold and begin;
- how to travel in small steps to ensure that you progress;
- find the four types of people you need to travel with—and the fifth you should consider;
- and a good deal more.

This book is for you if …

You’re at the start of your adult life, and you’re fired up to live a life of meaning and impact.

You’ve achieved things in your career, and it’s now time to “climb the second mountain” and think about legacy.

You’re unhappy with how the world is working right now, and you want to change your part of it for the better.

You’re a coach, and you want to support your clients to be great and do great things.

You’re ambitious, but feel you’ve never been given full permission to find and strive for a Worthy Goal.

It needs you to begin, and start doing something that matters.

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“Of particular appeal for those of us who instinctively recoil from self-help woo-woo and just want to get on with doing Great Work that leaves the world a bit better than we found it.” — Courtney Hohne, Chief Storyteller for Moonshots, X (formerly Google X)

“A friendly voice and a guiding hand” — Austin Kleon, New York Times bestselling author of Steal Like an Artist

“Piercingly frank, funny, gorgeous, vulnerable, and ultimately really damn helpful.” — Julie Lythcott-Haims, New York Times bestselling author of How to Raise an Adult

“Eminently practical, clever, delightful, and beautifully rendered––a non-fiction Where the Wild Things Are for adult dreamers and doers.” — Whitney Johnson, bestselling author of Smart Growth and Disrupt Yourself

“I loved this book, and that's coming from a gal who's never been big on goals.” — Liz Wiseman, New York Times bestselling author of Impact Players and Multipliers

“Powerful, magical and compelling. We don't need more time, we simply need to decide.” — Seth Godin, author, The Practice