I'd predict that 99 percent of the small talk in the staff elevator at my library involves the following question and its answers:
"Are you reading anything good?"
Most recently I asked this of a woman holding The Poisonwood Bible, which I adored.
"Yes!" she said, waving the book in front of me. "I'm almost done. This book has changed my life."
Hearing that a book changed someone's life is one of my greatest pleasures. I can't think of a better compliment an author could hear. Unfortunately, my follow-up question doesn't always yield a satisfying answer:
"How?" I said. Meaning, how did it change your life?
"Because it was amazing!" she said.
This is a pretty typical response, and I know I do it sometimes as well.
"Because it was just so good!"
"It was incredible!"
"I loved it!"
These are all great to hear, but none of them indicate any clues about how a life might have been changed, not that anyone owes me an explanation if I ask. Still, "This changed my life!" is pretty high praise and shouldn't be interchangeable with "This book is ...
When The School of Life launched its new practical philosophy book series, we celebrated with an event in London where each of the six authors — amongst them philosopher Alain de Botton — did a 15-minute talk distilling the most important and inspirational ideas from his or her book. We did our very best to live up to the promo poster, which promised the audience "An Evening of Fast and Furious Enlightenment."
Below you will find the video of my own talk on How to Find Fulfilling Work. In it I discuss five essential insights on the art of finding a job that is big enough for your spirit:
Confusion is perfectly normal
Beware of personality tests
Be a wide achiever, not a high achiever
Find where your values and talents meet
Act first, reflect later
As you'll see, in the middle I managed to get a thousand people talking in pairs about this question:
Imagine three parallel universes. In each you have a year to try any kind of work you want. What three jobs would you be excited to try?
Note: Rachel Roellke Coddington and Jolby will present their book at Powell's Books at Cedar Hills Crossing on Wednesday, May 15, at 7:00 p.m.
Greetings, adventurers! As you travel the evergreen roadways of the Pacific Northwest, you may find yourself in contact with many intriguing monsters. Let our book, Monsters under Bridges, be a guide as you explore the bridges of the region in your travels (or in your mind!). From Vancouver, Washington, to the beaches of Oregon, these monsters deserve your attention — and love. Why? Let's find out.
5. Monsters aren't all... you know, monsters.
We've been trained to identify monsters as a negative part of the world. They are typically a beast or creature causing significant discomfort to humans. The word "monster" itself brings into the mind images of gnashing teeth, rippling muscle-bound fur, and Charlize Theron with no makeup. Some more modern tales — Shrek, Sesame Street, and, of course, Monsters, Inc. — shed a more accurate light onto the world of monsters and what they do for humans. Your first task as a monster lover is to shake off those chains of generational prejudice and ...
How are you supposed to discover your ideal job? The standard method is to fill out lots of questionnaires about your strengths and weaknesses, take some psychometric tests, and spend hours researching various professions. Well, here's an alternative. It's an exercise called The Personal Job Advertisement, which I devised for the courses on career change I teach at The School of Life in London.
The concept behind this task is the opposite of the standard career search: imagine that newspapers didn't advertise jobs but rather advertised people who were looking for jobs .
You do it in two steps. First, write a half-page job advertisement that tells the world who you are and what you care about in life. Put down your talents (e.g., you speak Mongolian, can play the bass guitar), your passions (e.g., ikebana, scuba diving), and the core values and causes you believe in (e.g., wildlife preservation, women's rights). Include your personal qualities (e.g., you are quick-witted, impatient, lacking self-confidence). And record anything else that is important to you — a minimum salary or the desire to work overseas. Make sure you don't include any particular ...
Chefs don't have time to write. While I was working on Smoke and Pickles, I was running a restaurant — a daily regimen of testing recipes, arguing with purveyors, and greeting guests that left little time for introspection. I wrote nights mostly, battling fatigue and the impending noise of sunrise. During the day, I gravitated to tasks so deeply ingrained in the muscle-memory of my hands that I could let my brain focus on my book . The most Zen-like of these tasks was clarifying butter.
As a young chef in New York, I worked for a French guy who insisted I make clarified butter from scratch every morning. As a result, I find few things in life as peaceful as the steady, repetitive motion of that task. I can do it for hours, a hundred pounds' worth, all the while organizing an essay in my head, oblivious to the passing of time. Toward the end of writing my book, I felt like I couldn't finish a chapter without clarifying butter. It resulted in a book I'm proud of — and more clarified butter than even my restaurants could ...
For the last century everyone from career advisers to nagging parents have been telling us that the best way to use our talents is to become a high achiever — an expert in a narrow field. But one of the surprising discoveries I made while writing my latest book, How to Find Fulfilling Work, is that there is mounting evidence that this is neither a likely route to job satisfaction nor smart thinking in our current era of job insecurity.
Is being a specialist really the most effective way to use our talents? Of course the world needs skilled surgeons, and we can gain personal satisfaction and a feeling of pride from exercising our expertise. Yet the cost of being a top specialist or high achiever may be that we forgo the benefits of being a generalist or "wide achiever," which are to nurture the many sides of who we are and to use our multiplicity of talents.
Few career counselors today would advise you to be a wide achiever: they remain obsessed by the ideal of the specialist. But if you had gone to a careers fair during ...
There are so many books, and there are so many good books.
And there are so many good books in particular during National Poetry Month, which we are energetically celebrating here at Powell's.
And then, even among those good books, there are the really good books. In that vein, and in case you haven't already been introduced, please allow me to raise the shining vision of the Portland-based small press Tavern Books. I have to be blunt: I'm utterly smitten. It's been a long time since I've run across a list of books that is as diverse as the voices that Tavern celebrates and in which each and every book is, on its very face, a work of art and a labor of love.
Thus far, most of Tavern's books are chapbooks, what many people think of as pamphlets. One may hesitate at the price, but I'm here to vouch for the quality of each gorgeous and collectible book and the work it contains.
Take, for example, Archeology by Native American poet Adrian C. Louis. Louis has long been one of my favorite poets, his rage and eloquence ...
I wanted to write another book. The previous two were regularly described as "fun" and "funny," but this one would be based around the ideas of Gene Sharp, the Boston-based academic once described as the "Clausewitz of non-violence." (Are you still with me? Hang in there for a second.)
Sharp's work inspired and underpinned the wave of peaceful revolutions that swept across Eastern and Central Europe in the late '80s. More recently, it helped to inspire the Arab Spring.
For a long time, I thought my book might be called 198 Ways to Bring Down a Dictator without Violence. But that wasn't to be.
I want to be very clear: I'm a huge fan of Sharp, whom I've had the privilege to meet. But I didn't get very far with my book idea. And perhaps that's because I don't personally want to bring down any dictators.
To say this is not to say that I think dictators are great or support them in any way. I know there are plenty out there, some of them real stinkers, but the truth is that they're far away from me and ...
When was the last time you changed your behavior because of something somebody said? Don't think too hard — it was probably only a few minutes ago.
The things we say, and the way we say them, have an enormous effect on the people around us. Through communication we can draw people's attention to things that need fixing — and, if we choose our words with care, we can even fix things just by talking.
I'm not talking only about Fixing Big Things — as when leaders of warring nations sit together to make peace or union leaders meet with bosses to find a workable compromise. I'm talking also about the tiny, everyday interactions that can transform the way we think about the world — our world, if not necessarily the whole world.
One of the most significant exchanges I've had this week was with a friend, Catherine Stagg-Macey, who was about to leave for a party celebrating the end of her current employment and the start of a new life running her own business. I offered my congratulations. And, because we happened to be talking on the day ...
No one would say that Round Three of Poetry Madness was easy. Yeats showed the invisible scars of battle when he surveyed the damage done in his quest for Round Four and cried out: "I sing what was lost and dread what was won."
Showing none of Yeats's turmoil, the indefatigable Emily Dickinson pushed a damp lock of hair behind her ear and — without even glancing at Sylvia Plath, who lay weeping in the corner — strode briskly into her spot in the Elite Eight, calling out to her trembling new opponent:
In the Living, Mary Oliver proved that she would fight A Thousand Mornings if it meant making it to the Championship round, thrashing Anne Carson in the process. Rita Dove bested Li-Young Lee, ensuring that, at least tonight, Lee would be Eating Alone.
On our home turf, Roethke informed fellow Pacific Northwest poet Mary Szybist that "death of the self in a long, tearless night" would be the only thing stopping him from facing off against Tess Gallagher in the next bout. Baudelaire voiced his desire to ...
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Seven Books That Actually Changed My Life
I'd predict that 99 percent of the small talk in the staff elevator at my library involves the following question and its answers: 
