: Sam Carpenter
: Work the System The Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less (Fifth Edition)
: Ballast Books
: 9781966786085
: Work the System
: 1
: CHF 10.70
:
: Management
: English
: 325
: kein Kopierschutz
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
A simple mindset tweak will change your life. It started with a midnight insight. After a fifteen-year nightmare of coping with his struggling business, Sam Carpenter discovered and then developed a simple methodology that quickly knocked his routine 80-hour workweek down to near zero while multiplying his net income by a factor of 100. Now, in 2025, here's his bestselling business book, updated yet again, showing how you, too-no matter your business or profession-can quickly break free to build the life you've always imagined. In this fifth edition of Work the System, Carpenter reveals the profound insight and exact uncomplicated, mechanical steps he took to turn his business-and life-around. Once you 'get' this new vision, success and serenity will come quickly. You will learn to:• make a simple perception adjustment that will change your life forever.• see your world as a logical collection of linear systems you can control.• manage the systems that produce results in your business and your life.• stop fire killing and become a fire-control specialist.• maximize profit and create passionate client loyalty.• develop enthusiastic long-term employees.• identify and prevent insidious 'errors of omissions.'• maximize your biological and mechanical 'prime time' so you are working at optimum efficiency.• design the life you want-and then create it in the real world! You can keep doing what you've always done and continue getting disappointing results. Or you can create the peace and freedom you've always wanted by transforming your business into a finely tuned machine.

Sam Carpenter has owned/operated Cetratel for over four decades. With a background in engineering, construction management, publishing, and journalism, he and his wife, Diana, have recently relocated from Bend, Oregon, to rural Kentucky. Sam's outside interested include mountaineering, rucking with their hounds, skiing, writing, property development, and travel. Work the System: The Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less was first published in 2008. His second book, The Systems Mindset: Managing the Machinery of Your Life was published in 2016 with the second edition to be released in summer of 2025. Sam is the founder and director of the nonprofit Kashmir Family Aid.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

It’s Just Mechanics

(2008)

I work the system, but not just one. I workall the systems in my world—professional, personal, financial, social, biological, and mechanical. You have your own systems. Do you see them? Do you manage them? It doesn’t matter whether you are an entrepreneur, CEO, employee, stay-at-home mom or dad, retiree, or student. Your life is composed of systems that are yours to manage—or not manage.

In the slang sense of the term, someone who works the system uses a bureaucratic loophole as an excuse to break rules in order to secure personal gain. But winning the life-game means following the rules, for if we don’t, any win is a ruse. Be assured that you will find nothing deceitful or unsavory in these pages. Nor does the work-the-system methodology have anything to do with esoteric theory, politics, or religion. It’s about common sense and simple mechanics.

I call it a workingman’s philosophy.

Life is serious business, and whether you know it or not—or whether you like it or not—your personal systems are the threads in the fabric of your existence. Together they add up toyou. And if you are like most people, you negotiate your days without seeing these processes as the singular entities they are, some working well for you, and some not so well.

In the complexity that is your world, what if you could distinctly see each of these systems? What if you could reach in and pluck one of these not-so-efficient processes out of that complexity, make it perfect, and then reinsert it? What if you could do this with every system that composes your life?

What if you could reengineer your existence piece by piece to make it exactly what you want it to be without having to count on luck, providence, blind faith, or someone else’s largesse?

The foundational thrust ofWork the System is not to educate you in the ten steps to peace and prosperity or to warn you of the five most common mistakes in seeking happiness and material success. The Method digs deeper than that,causing a modification in how you see the elements of your world. And when this quiet yet profound mechanical shift in life perception occurs—you will remember the exact moment you “get it”—the simple methodology will make irrefutable sense and you will never be the same.

I call this new way of seeing things thesystems mindset.

This book also provides a framework—yes, an easy-to-follow map—in which you can channel this new perspective to get precisely what you want out of your life.

THE TOUGH TIMES

Readers who have experienced tough times will “get” this book. Those in their early years who have so far cruised along relatively unscathed, may not. The tough times to which I refer include prolonged physical and/or mental crisis where one stands alone against the blackness: a nightmarish childhood, war, disabling injury or sickness, crime/incarceration, addiction, divorce (perhaps with an attending child-custody battle), personal or public betrayal, financial calamity, mental breakdown, or endless repetitious work that drains and demoralizes.

TWO APPROACHES

In the broad sense, there are two psychological approaches to finding a way to lead a full, positive existence. The first holds that the events of the past and the mindset we formed as a result of those events determine today’s happiness. In this view we are victims of unpleasant prior circumstance and have a chance at peace only if we face and then disarm the psychic monsters planted in our minds long ago. That’s the Freudian stance. Figuratively and/or literally, you could lie on a couch blathering away at a psychiatrist for the rest of your life and still see no improvement.

The second approach, the cognitive, maintains that the thoughts we feed ourselves today are what matter most, and the events of the past are just that—in the past—and gone forever unless we insist on swirling them back into the present moment.

The cognitive approach is more effectual than the Freudian approach because it’s simple and clean and fast, enabling one to steer the thought process rather than wallow helplessly in mental negativity from years gone by. Adherents believe that what one does today will determine tomorrow, and blaming the past or the world or someone else is a debilitating way to travel through this precious one-time event called life.

Old-school psychologists who see