My blogging has been a bit sparse lately because my wife and I are packing up to move to a new house we’re buying. If all goes well (and escrow closes on schedule), we’ll be moving next week. The new house is only a few miles from where we live now, so at least this move won’t be as far as our last one from L.A. to Vegas. I’ve had 11 different residences during the past 15 years, so hopefully this will be the last move for a while.

Next week I’ll be attending a seminar here in Vegas with some well-known speakers: Stephen Covey, Barbara De Angelis, Les Brown, Naomi Judd, Jack Canfield, and Mark Victor Hansen. It’s actually a chiropractic seminar, but there’s a whole track just on personal development, so I’m going for that — partly for the information and ideas and partly to see some very successful and experienced speakers in person.

Stephen Covey just released a new book in November called The 8th Habit, which my wife kindly gave me for Christmas. His 7 Habits of Highly Effective People sold about 15 million copies over the past 15 years… not bad at all. But supposedly he’d been working on getting The 8th Habit out the door for more than half of that time.

Although I haven’t read The 8th Habit yet, it looks like the essence of it is about finding your voice and helping others find their voice too. Since the time Steve Covey wrote his first book, there’s been a huge increase in the importance of knowledge workers. Covey points out that this shift away from service and manufacturing jobs means that it’s becoming increasing important that people find a way to express themselves through their work. So it appears the 8th habit is about self-expression.

This makes a lot of sense to me, and it points to a trend in my life as well. I’ve always enjoyed work that focused on self-expression. At one time that meant making games. Now it means writing and speaking. I think I’d feel very stunted with a career that didn’t give me a sufficient outlet for self-expression. And I think Covey is noticing the same thing — that knowledge workers perform best when their jobs contain an outlet for self-expression.