[.ca] How To Find The Work You Love New Edition (ISBN 0142196290)

Great quote book, not-so-great career advice:
Boldt strings together quotes and cliches with the dexterity of a high school debate team captain. It's like he's sleeping with a copy of Bartlett's Quotations under his pillow. But as anyone who's listened to a high school debate knows, "proof by quotation" does not make for a compelling argument. It's actually pretty tiring to read. You keep waiting for the wisdom, the enlightening bits, the heart of the book. It never comes. If you want career advice, or are seeking your life's calling, you'd be better off reading Po Bronson, Barbara Sher, Richard Bolles, Marsha Sinetar, Nancy Anderson, or heck, even Dr. Phil! Or better yet, get a good career counselor, coach, or therapist to help you face to face, step by step. Save yourself the effort on this one...

This is a great book!:
I love How to Find the Work You Love! This book contains within it everything you need to know about creating meaningful work. I have given it to so many people as gifts, I stopped counting! Everyone I have given it to enjoys it as much as I do, and has benefited by its wisdom and human-hearted approach to creating the work you love. Even if you are not looking at a career change read this book. It is life changing!

Positives and Negatives:
Positives: 1. Easy to read and offers trivial but entertaining quotes from famous people. 2. A feel good book, inspires you to be more giving to the outside world (i.e. choose a career that fulfills by doing something meaningful to you and valuable to others in a self enriching way). 3. Gives you something to think about as far as your choices in life (i.e. touching upon reasons you chose your career and how your career may be affecting your health/self-esteem/stress/anger). Negatives: 1. Depending on your personal outlook you may find this book useful if you have been looking for additional support in your dream to become a teacher and quit your job as a corporate lawyer. On the other hand you may think the brainwashing is totally unrealistic (you need to pay your bills) and the book a waste of time. It really depends on you. 2. The exercises in the book are minimally useful. 3. If you are doing some soul searching maybe it would be more useful to look at your other specific problems (if you have any) like anger, stress, health and choose a more appropriate self-help book. For example, Harriet Lerner has a great book on anger.

An underwhelming exercise rife with unrelenting clichés:
Boldt's examination of the world is through a narrow rose-colored scope of naiveté. Utterly trivial and trite advice meant for people who didn't already realize that work is more than just a function of life. Loving the work you do will obviously make your life infinitely more fulfilling but to disregard every other external factor in choosing a job is impractical at best. People are able to love and take interest in more than one area of study. And although work and love are not mutually exclusive, it's more than likely that they won't align perfectly-after all, that's why work is called work. One can say that I sure like-even love-to sleep, but no one's going to pay me for sleeping. Quotes are more effective when used sparingly, but Boldt actually manages to string a hundred or so of them together into a drone of Oprah-esque derivative commentaries. In the last lines of Boldt's book, he even makes a stab at marketing his other books so that you can understand this book "in more detail." Incredulous and shameful! A 2-hour book not worth the 2-hour read. Truly uninspiring!

A spiritually validating read:
Unfortunately, there's really only one way to know if you're going to like something or not and that's to try it. What's one person's treasure is another person's "waste". This isn't a book along the lines of "What Color Is Your Parachute". It's not a "step by step" guide per se, though it has some excersizes to help you explore what has meaning for you. For me, this was a book of validation. I wish more than anything, that I could just resign myself to "any old job" and be satisfied - life would be so much easier that way... but when you spend 1/3 of your life at work and part of the other 2/3's perparing for work (commuting, preparing meals, trying to psyche yourself up to make it through another day) I think it's really important to find more meaning in what you do for a living than "payday". If you spend a lot of time dreaming of the day you can finally retire and you feel like you're wasting your life doing work that has absolutely no meaning for you (or worse, goes against your grain) and if the money isn't enough to compensate for what you spend so much of your day doing and you feel strongly that "there's got to be more to work than this" this book will validate your feelings beautifully and give you inspiration. But if you're a "realist" ("work's not supposed to be fun - that's why they call it work") you may be disappointed. It's ironic to me that people complained about the quotes - because I like them - but then I like quotes: "Blessed is he who has found his work. Let him ask no other blessing" (Thomas Carlyle); "Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist" (Emerson); "The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat" (Lily Tomlin); "If you are going to let the fear of poverty govern your life...your reward will be that you will eat but you will not live" (George Bernard Shaw); "My employer uses twenty six years of my life for every year I get to keep. And what do I get in return...for my life?" (Michael Ventura). If these quotes resonate with you, I think chances are good the book will resonate with you. If you think they're nonsense then you might not want to read this one. You might prefer something like Po Bronson's "What Should I Do With My Life?" - which I personally found depressing - but I think it might appeal to the "realists" (note: it's title is deceiving. It's not a book about how to figure out what to do with your life - rather, it's an abbreviated chronicle of other people's lives who've struggled with this question - many of whom continue the struggle).