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Title: What Should I Do with My Life? by PO BRONSON ISBN: 0-375-50749-3 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 24 December, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.13 (222 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Flawed but important
Comment: Questioning his own life, author Po Bronson set out to learn how others made tough career decisions -- and lived with them.
He says he talked to nine hundred people, seventy or so in detail, and he includes the stories of fifty or so career-changers in his book.
Bronson does not offer a systematic study or a self-help book. That's important to get out of the way. As other reviewers have observed, you won't find plans or guidance for your own career move.
Instead, Bronson offers a jumble of anecdotes, unsystematic and uneven -- just the sort of stories I hear every day as a career coach. People seek new adventures. They weigh the cost (and there always is a cost). Sometimes they decide the cost is too high and they back down. Sometimes they leap and experience disappointment. And sometimes they leap and find themselves soaring.
Career-changers are hungry for guidance. Bronson's interviewees often sought his approval -- and his advice. He insists that he's not a career counselor but they asked anyway. This quest for help is typical during any life transition and underscores the need to be cautious about seeking help from whoever happens to show up.
And of course this overlap of roles can be viewed as a flaw in the book. Bronson admits lapsing from the journalist role. He gets so involved with his interviewees that the story becomes a quest, a journey-across-the-country story rather than an analysis of career choices. Bronson includes his own story, told in pieces throughout the book. This feature seemed to interrupt the flow: if the author tells his own story, we should be led to anticipate autobiography.
Despite these flaws, Bronson comes up with some sound insights into career change. He observes that people avoid change because of the accompanying loss of identity. They hang back "because they don't want to be the kind of person who abandons friends and takes up with a new crowd," precisely what you have to do following a life transition.
And he follows up with a warning of solitude that also accompanies any life change. "Get used to being alone," he advises, yet many people fear being alone more than they fear being stuck in a job they hate.
WHAT SHOULD I DO WITH MY LIFE offers questions, not answers. It's like attending a giant networking event. You have to sort through the stories on your own.
Despite these flaws, I will recommend this book to my clients and to other career coaches. Career change, like any change, is messy. You rarely get to move in a straight line and you always experience pain and loss. And every move is a roll of the dice: a coach can help, but there are no guarantees.
Each story in this book is unique and your own will be too. You, the career changer, must put together your own mosaic and find pattern and meaning on your own.
Rating: 4
Summary: People who take chances
Comment: For anyone who wakes up in the morning thinking "I really don't want to go to work today", this book is for you. Even if this book doesn't give you the jazz to quit and find something better to do with the majority of your waking hours, and it's not meant to, it's nice to know that out there, there are people who have done that and for the most part have succeeded.
It seems that some of the worse reviews had to do with a misunderstanding of the purpose of this book. The title is a little misleading if you know nothing else about the book. Also, if you're searching on Amazon for self help books regarding career or life choices, this title probably will pop up. I don't think those are the categories this book should be placed into. It's hard to know exactly how to classify this book. Maybe there should be a category called "Anecdotes"? Anyway, I very much enjoyed reading the short narratives of people who seemed to have been in the same state of mind that I'm in now and had the courage to alter their lives completely and accept the consequences come what may. I didn't have to agree with them, I didn't have to support them, I didn't even have to be interested in them. The great thing about this book is that each of the people's stories stand alone. Po Bronson's writing style maintained my interest and didn't make me question why I should care or what's the relevance. He gave enough background so I wouldn't be lost but not so much history on each person as to make me feel bored (I'm not much into reading biographies). The introduction was good to set the tone of the book. The final feeling I had after finishing the book was that sometimes it takes taking a chance and giving up all of my preconceptions of what it means to be an adult and what I thought I would be doing with my life to make me enjoy my life and my waking hours again. But, don't take my word (or interpretation) for it. Ultimately, I think the purpose of this book is meant to make the reader think and interpret it for their own lives. I hope many people do read it and get something positive out of it.
Rating: 5
Summary: An extraordinary book for those who are searching...
Comment: Why give this book 5 stars? Because the message you receive is worth the read. There are some flaws, but not in the bottom line. On a lark, I picked this book up to see how this psychologist was going to answer such a huge question with their "12 steps to love, riches, and happiness", thinking of how sad it is to see people trivialize a question like Bronson's into a bumper-sticker philosophy. What a surprise NOT to find a psychologist with an agenda, but a writer with pluck that addresses a monstrous question.
I have reservations about the term, "research", and as other reviewers have done, noted that much of the author's own life was used for example, or intruded on the telling of another's tale in the book - but in the end, I didn't feel that it lessened the bottom line of the book's missive. It will not give you answers, just tell you how others have faced this question and handled the results. Bronson's reflections on their stories and organization of the "lessons learned" were in my opinion apt and insightful. He is an intelligent author, and is deliberate in his conclusions.
The value I received was that it gave me different ways of approaching the question that most career guidance books and programs fail to reach. I am in a transition in my life, and have been giving serious time and energy to what I want in my life. You can find answers in many places, but I have not found anything that has given me as much genuine counsel as this book has. It's cliché to say all the answers are inside yourself - and in the end they are - but seeing how others brought their answers out, can help you with yours. Notice that I said in my first paragraph that it is the message you receive, not the message Bronson is sending. If you're looking for what you should do with your life, this book is extraordinarily valuable.
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Title: Second Acts : Creating the Life You Really Want, Building the Career You Truly Desire by Stephen M. Pollan, Mark Levine ISBN: 0060514876 Publisher: HarperResource Pub. Date: 24 December, 2002 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: I Don't Know What I Want, but I Know It's Not This: A Step-By-Step Guide to Finding Gratifying Work by Julie Jansen ISBN: 0142002488 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: February, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The First $20 Million is Always the Hardest: A Novel by Po Bronson ISBN: 0380816245 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 30 May, 2000 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career by Herminia Ibarra ISBN: 1578517788 Publisher: Harvard Business School Press Pub. Date: 03 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
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Title: I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was : How to Discover What You Really Want and How to Get It by Barbara Sher ISBN: 0440505003 Publisher: DTP Pub. Date: 05 August, 1995 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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