UD grad’s ‘World Changer’s Handbook’ applies entrepreneurial thinking to the everyday

Last September, still a student at the University of Delaware, Zachary Jones decided to start a personal project related to what he’d learned in UD’s Horn Program in Entrepreneurship. Every day from September to December, he’d blog about making the world better by starting with yourself. Much of the advice took common business practices of entrepreneurs and applied them to life in general.
“I was president of the entrepreneur club and was teaching entrepreneurship for two years,” said Jones. “I’d read dozens of books, listened to hundreds of hours of podcasts, all the TED talks, lots and lots of content. The blog became a distillation of all of that.”
Eventually, the blog became the basis for a book, The World Changer’s Handbook: A Young Person’s Guide to Creating an Impactful Life.

To start with, the blog,zcjones.com, is less than a year old, with its first anniversary coming up next month. The book was finished in May and published, via Amazon’s Create Space, in June. And it wasn’t just a bunch of blog posts copy-and-pasted — he worked with Anne Maynard of Command+Z Content, an experienced editor based in Texas, to polish it up and make it flow.
“There was a lot of transformation,” he says of the biggest challenge he faced in publishing the book. “It took more time to edit than to write the original content.”
The response so far has been positive. “I’ve had people tell me they wrote their first blog post after reading it, they were so inspired,” Jones said.
“Sometimes, you have to start small,” he said. “Make a small impact, gain momentum, and scale up from there.”
Jones still blogs daily on zcjones.com, still focused on empowering readers to make changes that can make their lives better. And, in addition to teaching, he holds interactive workshops (not lectures), with topics such as “Idea Generation,” “Creative Confidence” and, of course, “World Changing 101.” For more information about the workshops or to schedule one for your group, see the blog’s Workshops page.