Chris Guillebeau

Demonstrates how to enjoy greater career success and personal fulfillment by finding one's life calling, with recommendations beyond the entrepreneurial sphere to outline an actionable method for rendering one's passions profitable. --Publisher's description.

How to Find the Work You Were Meant to Do

Born for This

Vittorio Bonzi

I approached this book with mixed feelings: I was looking for some advice in a pragmatical way and at the same time, I was a bit afraid of getting a bunch of positive thinking, magical voluntarism and such - here are my prejudices about Americans, I guess. What I found is kind of a mixed bag, but decisively leaning towards the good.

On the one hand, maybe it's bitterness and cynicism from my part, but I'm fairly skeptical about the incoming revolution, the freedom that comes from the new ways of working etc. They don't simply look like something available for so many people, and besides, freelancing and cutting out one's own job (which is what the book is about for the most part) is being more a necessity than everything else: in the USA already 37% of the labor force is freelancing (I checked the data, and I got quite surprised by how already advanced the phenomenon is), and that is due to a massive job crisis. Maybe it's a brand new land of opportunities, but it's a land of issues as well, destined to leave a trail of corpses along the way. The book seems just too enthusiastic to me in this regard.

On the other hand, it's more pragmatic (in the best of meanings) and grounded than it may seem at a first glance: the concept of balancing joy, money and flow is explored thoroughly not just for making things work, but also to be ready to discard those that won't, as well as the idea to pursue a specific ambition no matter the circumstances. Also, the chance of failure, even a high one, is taken into account in several suggestions, and sounded advice is given for facing it. It's also very realistical in what people do wrong when looking for a job (e.g. that spreading your CV throughout any sort of jobs is ineffectual is simply true, and the ideas of cutting out a job description to reduce dispertion and cultivating relationships look like good advice).

Yet, it's not to be considered a cookbook for jobs: the advice is inevitably generic, and made more of directions than instruction. Besides, a book that pretended to be more than this would be untrustworthy to me. Overall a good read.

Born for This How to Find the Work You Were Meant to Do

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