Career Renegade: How to Make a Great Living Doing What You Love [Paperback]

There are three major benefits that you will gain from reading this book.

First it will serve as a motivation to all who want to give up the rut we all call a job and move out on their own.

The second benefit is really a step by step guide about how to move out on your own. Not only does Jonathan tell you how, he gives links to hundreds of resources to help you accomplish what you want.

The third valuable benefit is the wisdom that Jonathan shares from his own experiences.

The third benefit is perhaps the most valuable. Under the wisdom he shares, there are two very valuable lessons - either of them worth the price of the book.

The first lesson is how to deal with fear. Here Jonathan gives some extremely good advice. Fear is probably the number one reason most people do not achieve their dreams. His advice is to explore and quantify the fear. Ask what are the consequences of failure, what is the worst case scenario, and examine the results. Often this will put fear in perspective. Then let go of the fear. Do this only once and let go.

Then you need to explore and quantify inaction. What are the results of doing nothing? If "staying the course is going to create a miserable future", that should be an unacceptable alternative. Once you explore and quantify inaction, let go. Again do this only once. What you focus on expands. So only examine the fear and inaction once and then move on.

Then the important part is to stimulate success daily. Again, what we focus on expands. So stimulate success daily. You do this by being clear about what you want, believing you can achieve it and taking focused action.

The other huge lesson is how, when and why to involve others family/friends/mentors in your mission

The last lesson is probably the best advice in the entire book. There is no one person, guru, mentor who can give you the magic formula or set of directions that will work for you. In the final analysis, "no one can stand in your shoes. No one else can take action but you."

Take responsibility for your own life.

Ask yourself this question, "Will this career choice let me spend the greatest amount of time absorbed in the activities and relationships that make me come alive while earning the living I need to live?"

The book is well written and easy to read. If you really wish to change your life, to take charge and put your future in your own hands, this is a great place to start.

Amazon shoved this book under my nose in their recommendations, so I checked it out. On one hand, it's an "advice" book (red flag) and its page here is full of very suspicious-looking five-star reviews (another red flag). Otoh, the title sounds catchy, so I -- no, no, I didn't buy it -- I checked it out in our library (hehe).

I could barely finish it: it's hard to follow (because it's poorly written -- cogency is lacking: his thought jumps around a lot w/o easy-to-follow logical progression, at times descending into gibberish), and then it's just a lot of fluff -- his advice amounts to a lot of obvious things that would occur to anyone who'd invest a quarter hour into considering one's options (with traditional skippages in narrative over moments that look magical when not detailed, making you wonder who populates the skid row if everything is so doable).

It is also very cliched: every paragraph contains "value-laden", "remarkability", or "passion-based" this and that; horrible English and very bad style that is reminiscent of this late-night TV guy in black suit and with huge teeth who was big about fifteen-twenty years ago and whose name I forget. Usage errors. I mean, a lot of this book reads like a first draft by a not particularly literary man. Of course, the author has a website, and is some sort of self-proclaimed "career expert".

But in general, the most of this book is very superficial advice on how to use "social media" in order to inflate yourself into some sort of "expert" or "maven" (I'm sure you noticed that 99% of "social-media" content is horse manure energetically churned by self-proclaimed experts out to shove something down your throat that you don't need -- and advice on how to join the ranks of these hacks is not what I was looking for).

A lack of a standard bibliography section and an index do not improve matters either (every non-fiction, informational book should have those). Otoh, the books he quotes tend to be fluff as well (Godin, Rath, Gladwell and similar self-serving beschmutzers of the noosphere), so perhaps not much is lost. It's probably a cabal: they tend to promote one another's books; probably an unstated "scratch-my-back" obligation among the members of the crowd.

Bottom line: As time-wasting twaddle this book gets one star from me -- there's no reason for it to exist. Not recommended.

Added later: I find myself going back to this book for the sakes of the large number of website links in it. Since I am obviously extracting _some_ value out of this book, I'm bumping up the rating to two and a half stars. If I have to borrow it again from the library, maybe I'll simply buy a copy if I can find one cheap. Bottomline: not a good book, but as a catalogue of links it may be useful -- to some, perhaps, maybe.

If you've ever wondered how you can turn your passion into a business, this book is probably the best place to look for answers. The author, who left a career in law years ago to pursue his dreams as an entrepreneur, describes in great detail seven often overlooked ways to make money doing what you love.

He starts by explaining how each particular strategy can work for you, and follows through with real life examples and a list of resources for you to dig deeper on your own. Then, he continues to guide us through the process of marketing our dream, the basics of Internet marketing, and how to use blogs and social media to make our mark in the world and gain influence.

Perhaps the passage of the book that I liked the most is when the author talks about conventional wisdom, and how it gets in the way of identifying opportunity. Learning to defy conventional wisdom (or what others may call "thinking out of the box") is the best way to discover niches that nobody is addressing and that you can turn into a business.

With that frame of mind and the practical tips in this book, you shouldn't have any problem finding work that is at the same time lucrative and fulfilling.