What Should I Do with My Life?: The True Story of People Who Answered the Ultimate Question [Mass Market Paperback]

The book is bloated, a thick catalog of stories of people who made career changes and choices of one sort or another. If reading an exhaustive collection of accounts of other people struggling with their life's missions will minimize the angst of doing the same yourself, then this is the book for you. I would have preferred a more coherent narrative that organizes the stories in some logical fashion. There are bits and pieces of valuable learnings to be found, but they're buried amidst some long, rambling narratives. Perhaps Bronson was too invested in the stories to cut any of them out, or perhaps he couldn't find any patterns and answers and simply put every story in there, hoping the reader would do the work of extracting the wisdom.

I recommend reading an article covering the same topic which Po wrote in the Jan 2003 issue of Fast Company. You should be able to find it archived on the web at their website. It was much more concise and enlightening than the book.

The author of this book tells you upfront (and over and over) that he is not going to answer the question in the title. He is not going to help you answer the question for yourself. You can't read this book expecting that result.

Instead, he describes the career choices of folks that he has interviewed. Some of the people make changes that work, some make changes that don't work, and some don't make changes at all. He isn't writing a novel; he doesn't describe every detail and he does not follow every story through to conclusion. He writes enough about a subject's career path to illustrate the point of the chapter.

Previous reviewers object that many of the subjects interviewed were wealthy or privileged. To me, this only shows they have missed the point. The book is extremely well structured. The themes of each story are so universal, anyone should be able to relate. For example, in one chapter, a woman intellectualizes her job change to the smallest detail, yet the point is that she can't know every variable until she actually tries the job. This idea should resonate with a reader regardless of whether the person interviewed was running a copymachine at Kinko's and decided working for a dry cleaner would be a better fit or the person was running a Fortune 500 company and decided owning a vineyard would make her happier. I don't think the particular details of the job choices should matter, unless the depth of your analysis is simply, "Well, this doesn't apply to me, because she had a nest egg saved up for a vineyard and I don't!" Similarly, the author is not advocating that you should do whatever makes you feel good without taking into any account your responsibilities and relationships, as suggested by another reviewer. I don't think the author would agree with that statement at all.

The author does a terrific job of analyzing the stories of several workers and using them to illustrate recurring concerns and challenges we encounter as we contemplate our career paths. I appreciated the author's honesty and candor. I read the book slowly, because I wanted to consider each chapter, but it was so well-written and easy to read, I could have read it in one sitting. I have read a LOT of self-help career books, none of them ultimately useful for anything more than cheerleading to "follow your dream" (which you had to already know somewhere deep down inside). This book does not try to be one of those. Still, it helped me to identify and consider a lot of the emotional issues that are wrapped up with finding a new career or being happy with the one I have.