Customer Reviews

What Should I Do with My Life?: The True Story of People Who Answered the Ultimate Question

5 star:		(68)
4 star:		(44)
3 star:		(28)
2 star:		(40)
1 star:		(54)

 

 

I've enjoyed some of Bronson's other books and articles, so when I took a sabbatical from work to travel and think about next steps, this book seemed like an ideal travel companion. After finishing about a third of the book and skimming portions of the rest, it was abandoned in a hotel room somewhere in South America, shaving valuable weight from my backpack.

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.

I usually read customer reviews before buying a book on Amazon. Today, I thought I would look at the reviews for a book I have already read to see if I agreed with the comments. I was so appalled by the most recent 20 reviews of this book that I felt compelled to write my first review. (I'm also going to be more than a little suspicious of customer reviews in the future!)

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.

I am upset at how much of a waste this book was ,nothing useful or insightful just unfinished stories of quick coffee cup meetings with people in flux.

This book was a terrible disappointment -- rather than thoughtfully exploring existential questions, Bronson supplants his subjects' stories with his own, constantly injecting his successful-millionaire-writer-who's-lost-his-way angst into anecdotes that might be insightful or instructive otherwise. Really, a waste of time.

Summary:
The book is supposed to be Bronson's findings after having interviewed hundreds of people about what they felt they should have done or did with their lives. But I didn't really find this to be the case. What it seemed like to me was more a strange mixture of Bronson summarizing the lives of some of the people he interviewed and then adding his opinions about their situations.

Add to this mix Bronson's self-adoration about being invited to a conference of business big whigs where he encouraged all of the CEOs present to make sure their employees liked their jobs (like that is going to happen) and Bronson's ideas about childbirth and you have 'What Should I Do With My Life?'

Comments:
I absolutely hated this book. This is definitely one instance where I am glad I listened to the CD version instead of reading the actual book because it was abridged and shortened the misery. The problems with this book are so monumental I can't believe it was even published. Oh wait, yes I can, he's on the board of directors of a publishing company - he can probably get anything published, including this drivel.

My biggest criticism of the book is that Bronson is falling back on the idealized notion that everyone can do what they want. This is such a ridiculous notion that I can't even believe people are still claiming it's possible. Does Bronson really think that someone desperately wants to be a garbage collector? I know the job of my dreams is to clean toilets. Come on! If everyone can have the job of their dreams, who is going to do the menial work like cleaning his office while he vacations in the Caribbean? This notion is often proclaimed by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity (this is the first reason I came to believe Bronson was a subtle Republican propagandist). Social democrats, on the other hand, recognize it's impossible. Rather than encourage everyone to 'make it big', they try to help the little guy so he can at least eke out a bearable living.

My second biggest criticism is that there is absolutely no sense of organization to this book. This leads to a follow up criticism, which is that the thousands of other motivational books that say the exact same thing at least have an organization to them. Bronson's book doesn't present a coherent message and what can be understood of the message is no different from thousands of other books that just tell you to 'be whatever you want to be' (see criticism 1 above).

The longer I listened to this book, the more I questioned why Bronson was qualified to write this book. If I'm not mistaken, Bronson is a successful fiction writer who writes novels about the business world. Maybe in Bronson's mind writing fiction equates to expertise in psychology and career counseling, but not in my world. And even though Bronson claims to have interviewed hundreds of people, I was thoroughly convinced by his inability to organize his 'findings' that he has no idea how to do social-scientific research. Fiction writer does not equal expert.

I think what we have here is another case of someone getting a little fame from his novels and POOF! the fame goes to his head. Bronson seems to think he knows everything, or at least his opinion is important enough that everyone should hear it. Bronson goes so far in his pipe dream that he even begins giving advice about having children. What makes his advice even worse is that the advice he gives really just echoes Dr. Laura, which is the second indication that Bronson is a closet Republican propagandist.

Overall, I don't think anyone should be subjected to this incoherent claptrap. This is a poorly written book by a non-expert who is moonlighting as a Republican propagandist in between writing novels. I highly recommend any thinking person avoid this novel like you would an Al Qaeda training camp if you were George Bush, Jr. Absolutely terrible!!!

Po Bronson spent a lot of time interviewing people around this country and around the world about their careers, their callings, their regrets and their dreams. All of this based on a single question: what do you want to do with your life? If you've ever asked yourself this question before, or if you're struggling with it now, you'll find it difficult to put this book down; you will be absorbed in its pages.

This is NOT some kind of new age inspirational, feel-good book! It's much better than that. It's honest, insightful and respectful of the reader's intelligence. While Bronson does add his own thoughts to many of the personal narratives, he doesn't attempt to tell you how to find your way through the forest or make the right moves in your life. Instead, he lets the tales of his interviewees stimulate your thinking and give your perspective based on their diverse experience. There's no sugar-coating here. Sometimes people pulling radical career or life changes pulled it off easily...more often, with great difficulty.

Even though Bronson says that he doesn't want to be responsible for changing people's lives with this book, it seems inevitable to me that he will have to assume some responsibility. For people who are tyring to answer the question posed by the book's title, the tales in this work will simply be too powerful to ignore. After reading it, don't be surprised if it causes you to make a significant change in your life.

Po Bronson is certainly a skillful writer, and I found myself breezing through this book within just a few days. However, at the end, I wondered who the author had in mind as a target market. For example, the first chapter is about a young man who has received a calling from the Dalai Lama. While this may be an interesting story in its own right, what does this situation have to do with the career struggles of the typical reader? What is a machine tool salesman or an accountant living in Dayton, Ohio, supposed to take away from this?

The people in this book don't seem to have too many day-to-day financial concerns. Only a few are parents. A significant number of them fall into the category of the educated elite. As a group, they are more interested in spiritual fulfillment projects than in financial success. (About half of them just walk away from a high-paying job to pursue a journey of self-exploration.)

While these sojourners have their place in the world, I don't think that these were the stories that the average reader was expecting. This book could have included a few such dreamy-eyed wanderers and succeeded. However, these should have been balanced by some more conventional success stories.

I wanted to read about the father of three who started his own business to provide a better future for his family. I wanted to read about the secretary who attended evening college for six years in order to achieve a more satisfying job and a better standard of living. Where were the people with more run-of-the-mill professional tracks?

And why couldn't Po have interviewed some of the millions of entrepreneurs who have started superficially mundane, but socially productive and financially rewarding small businesses? Why does everyone in this book have be focused on something like volunteer work, politics, or filmmaking?

While Bronson's selection of subjects is skewed, he does a good job of extracting insights from the material they give him. This would have been an excellent book with a more balanced selection of interviewees.

Gentle and insightful. Bronson is a clever guy with a sympathetic ear. He seems to tease wisdom out of his subjects' personal stories rather than making them fit into his own world view. Refreshing!

I was in an airport when I saw it; the question that has been on my mind for the past year, staring back at me from the cover of a book at the airport newstand. It was Po Bronson's book, "What Should I Do With My Life?" I thought about buying it, but didn't at the momement because I had a plane to catch. But I thought about it on the flight home, and downloaded the e-book to read on my PDA.

I actually like that it's not a self help book. I'm not naive enough to think that any one book can tell me what to do with my life, or how to find my purpose or calling. I did find it comforting to know that I'm not the only one struggling with this question, and I was grateful to hear how other people approached this question. I could see some of myself in them, and some of their stories in mine. Until this book, I was beginning to think of myself--a 35 year old gay dad--as a late bloomer. Now I think that I haven't bloomed yet, but I'm not late.

Bottom line, if you're looking for a book to give you the answers, this isn't it, and good luck finding it. But if you're looking for stories about how other people approached this question, I'd recommend this book.

If you are seeking your calling, you have plenty of company.

Our circumstances differ, but we all have the same questions. How do you find your calling, what road do you take? This collection of memoirs is not a self-help book-- you will not find an explicit roadmap to follow-- but you may well find comfort that many share your quest for direction. The range of people covered is fascinating-- the subjects include a Buddhist monk, a Harvard MBA turned catfish farmer, a social service worker, and a cake-maker, among many others. Bronson is sympathetic to his subjects, and includes his own profile in the book.

If you are looking for good company on your own life journey, this book is a worthy companion.