Ready for some siteseeing? Good — tis the season of premiering web sites. (Cue drum roll …)

A few weeks ago my Go-Giver coauthor Bob Burg and I rolled out our new Go-Giver Award site. In just another week or so, we’ll be unveiling our new web site for Go-Givers Sell More (which hits bookstores and booksites on February 18).

And slipped in between here, we just launched another new site: The Go-Giver Scrapbook.

(… Cue sounds of champagne corks popping …)

The idea behind this new site is to provide a place to highlight stories about how people have used the Five Laws of Stratospheric Success to make made a difference in their relationships, family, business, organization, and life in general.

People, for example, like you.

I hope you’ll take a few moments to check out the site — and, if you have a story to tell, consider telling it.

Why? Because it’s fun — and also because your story will inspire hundreds, perhaps thousands of others to gain new and creative ideas for how they can make a fulfilling and productive shift in their lives, too.

To submit your story, just click on the Your Story button at the top of the site.

Hope you enjoy the siteseeing!

Still a few weeks away from the Big Launch, I thought it might be fun to slip in a sneak peek of what’s actually in the new book.

Go-Givers Sell More is not a parable or actual sequel to the first book. (We are writing a true sequel, but that’s still a year off.) Instead, it is more like a Go-Giver Companion: a collection of short essay-like chapters about applying the Go-Giver principles to real-world situations (especially in the context of sales and selling), punctuated by several dozen real-life stories of people we know who live these principles.

It is divided into (this come as no surprise!) five sections. Here are the chapter titles:

Part I. The Law of Value
1. Create Value
2. MacGuffin
3. Giving
4. Money
5. The Paradox
6. Your Economy

Part II. The Law of Compensation
7. Touch Lives
8. People
9. Rapport
10. Skills
11. Curiosity
12. Maturity

Part III. The Law of Influence
13. Build Networks
14. Fuzzy Influence
15. The Perfect “Pitch”
16. Great Questions
17. Follow-Through
18. Your Serve
19. Posture
20. The Competition

Part IV. The Law of Authenticity
21. Be Real
22. Present
23. Undersell
24. Listen
25. Objections
26. The “Close”
27. Silence

Part V. The Law of Receptivity
28. Stay Open
29. Left Field
30. Crisis
31. Trust

You’re probably wondering either a) what a “MacGuffin” is, or b) what it has to do with sales (hint: it started with Hitchcock, and it’s about your product). Or c), what “fuzzy influence” is supposed to mean, or d) why there is a whole chapter on “silence,” and another on “left field,” and one on “crisis” … or e) all of the above.

Stay tuned — we will answer these questions (and many more) soon: the Big Launch is just 24 days away!

When I was a kid, there was a boy I knew in the class two grades above me (he was two years older). I knew him because we were both faculty kids: his dad was the music teacher, and my mom taught fifth grade, as well as some music and theater. Actually, she had been one of his first music teachers, when he was just five, and I was three.

Today, he’s famous. He is, in fact, one of the finest cellists in the world.

When I was a teenager, I studied cello with him for a few years. Since Mstislav Rostropvich left the earth a few years ago, there is no cellist living I would rather hear. I listen to his playing every day while I write. His name is David Finckel.

Happily, David has made quite a few recordings, both as part of the multiple-Grammy-winning Emerson Quartet, and also as a duo with his wife Wu Han, the phenomenal pianist.

He is also a wonderful teacher, and has a series of online lessons, a delight to watch even if you don’t play the cello. (He calls these little videos “Cello Talks,” and he uploads them from all over the world—it’s worth watching them just to see the locations!)

David recently wrote an open letter to students of their chamber music program, most of it devoted to technical issues — but I was especially taken with a passage near the end, “The Visual Element: Messaging,” and thought I ought to share this excerpt with you.

As you read it, consider this: you may not be a performing chamber musician, but does what he’s saying apply to anything you do in your life? I’ll bet your answer is yes.

“From the moment we walk on stage, the audience is watching our every move and following our lead. They will simply feel the way we look. If we look bored, they will feel bored. If we look terrified, they will be anxious too. If we look happy, they will be happy. This part is simple, but many, many performers do not realize it. Just see for yourself at the next concert you attend….

“Musicians are not actors, nor are we trained to be, yet, what we do is remarkably like what actors do. We are given a script which we must prepare and interpret, and we must truly live in each moment of the musical narrative. If an actor loses focus, or breaks character, we know it right away. We cannot allow ourselves that mistake, and while it is what we do with our sound that is central to our art, we should not allow our work to be compromised by distracting or misleading visual habits on stage.

“In comparison to opera and symphonic performances, there is not much to watch in chamber music. Very little else besides the natural interaction of the group, and the individual absorption of its members, is necessary or even appropriate for a performance of artistic integrity. But because the recipe is simple, one or two bad ingredients can easily ruin the dish.

“Often, players may feel the music deeply but somehow it doesn’t come across that way….

“Sometimes, as human beings, we fall short in the areas of sensitivity and communication — especially interpersonal communication in these days of text-messaging. We can always improve the way we say “thank you,” “I love you,” or simply, “this means a lot to me.” Often that means simply trying harder, doing it more sincerely or vehemently or exaggeratedly than we think is needed.

“The composers — many of them hundreds of years before our time — were trying to communicate exactly those kinds of personal thoughts through their music. It’s our responsibility to carry those messages, to interpret them with unmistakable accuracy and deliver them powerfully.”

“We can always improve the way we say Thank you, I love you or simply This means a lot to me” — well spoken, David!

And thanks for all the years, past and future, of silk-spun acoustic heaven.

Amazon has added a rather cool feature to their book listing format: an actual author’s web site, right there on the Amazon site. Here’s mine:

They are also (contrary to rumor) exceedingly responsive, at least in my experience: I found a few errors and omissions on my site, and let them know through the Author Feedback function — and they fixed them all lightning fast.

This is a company that is not resting on their laurels!

For two years now, we’ve been getting email and tweets and blogs (and all sorts of other odd-sounding words referring to new ways people communicate) telling us about people they knew who were genuine go-givers.

We’ve heard about parents and friends and bosses and coworkers and teachers and coaches and friends and lovers and lawyers and bankers and fitness trainers and insurance agents and siblings and customers and vendors and grandparents and inspiring people of all shapes, sizes, stripes and stations in life.

People love to tell other people about still other people who have meant something wonderful to them.

Last month, we created a kind of cool way to do that: an actual Go-Giver Award, which you can download, customize and present to those special someones in your life:

There is a link to the Award from the home page of the Go-Giver site — and you can also find it here:

www.theGoGiverAward.com

The moment the site was up, I went to the link, filled in my wife’s name, printed it out and gave it to her.

Who do you know in your life who deserves their very own Go-Giver Award?

P.S. Thanks to Thom Scott, Cesar Abueg and Kathy Zader for their ingenuity and creative effort on this one!

I just spent an hour as a guest on a conference call for Spencer Reynolds’s wonderful reading group, Book Readers Club.

Spencer has been leading this group, dubbed “Where Dedicated Learners Come Together Every Week,” for some five years now. Participants hail from all around the nation and meet on a live conference call once a week (though many catch the discussion later via podcast) to read and discuss their given book of choice.

This week was the final week of their reading of The Go-Giver, and they had invited me to join them. I did.

After reading a selection (we took turns; two members read Chapters 12 and 13; I got to read Chapter 14 and thus close the book!), we discussed the book for a good half hour. They asked all sorts of intriguing and excellent questions. The one that I did not have a good answer for was the very last:

“What is your favorite book?”

Geez. You’d think I’d know.

At first I gave a lame answer (“That’s like being asked to pick your favorite child, and I have four kids”), but then mentioned two that I love: A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving, and John Steinbeck’s great sweeping classic East of Eden. Then I followed that with another lame answer: “It keeps changing; I guess my answer would be different depending on what day you asked.”

After hanging up, I thought, Hey, that’s not true.

The books that have had the most impact on me are timeless, and they don’t change from day to day. I still remember the very first book I read on my own: Little Bear, by Maurice Sendak. The impact of that one will never go away. (I think I have modeled my life, more or less, after Little Bear’s.) The Narnia series and The Odyssey (as well as the Bible) I encountered as a child, and their impact has been huge and lasting. (No single book has had a more earth-shattering, life-changing impact on me than The Last Battle, the last of the Narnia books, which I read when I was ten.)

What is true is that the list keeps growing. I read East of Eden only recently (five or six years ago), and all of Neil Gaiman’s writings more recently still.

So, after some minutes of reflection, here is the Director’s Cut of my answer to that question: not one but ten favorites, the books that have had the most impact on me thus far, as a writer and as a person. These are listed chronologically, according to when I read them, longest-ago first.

It’s kind of a weird mix, but there you go.

The Last Battle, C. S. Lewis
The Bible
The Odyssey, Homer
The Tempest, William Shakespeare
Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, R. Buckminster Fuller
As a Man Thinketh, James Allen
Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill
A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving
East of Eden, John Steinbeck
Coraline, Neil Gaiman
Stardust, Neil Gaiman

What are your favorites?