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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:

How many bullets bearest?
The royal scar hast thou?
Angels, write 'Promoted'
On this soldier's brow!

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 ...

If you think this post is going to be all about my book, forget it. Instead, I want to tell you about my friend Roman Krznaric, who is blogging here next week. We're being published together, on the same day. And I can assure you that Roman's book, How to Find Fulfilling Work, is really something.

But Roman can tell you about that himself. I want to tell you about Roman.

When I first heard his name, I visited Roman's website and found some great writing there, like this story which seems to me to owe a debt to the late, great Studs Terkel. I also listened to things like Roman's talk on Outrospection. To be honest, I was a bit daunted, but since then we've done a number of events together. I've found that, as well as having lots of interesting ideas himself, Roman is great at sparking ideas out of others.

Recently, we met together at an art gallery in London. We talked about the books we've just published, and about our new projects. Roman gave me new ways to think about ...

I've been trying to make myself a better writer — and a better human being — as part of the growing Quantified Self movement.

When I was researching the mysterious process of how change happens for my book How to Change the World, I compared the broad, sweeping theories of political scientists such as Gene Sharp, the Boston-based advocate of nonviolent struggle, with the insights of the self-help industry. In both cases, change starts with observation — noticing what needs to change — followed by a clear declaration of that observation.

In the Quantified Self movement, substantially comprised of nerdy types, we use technology to get the measure of ourselves. Specifically, I use apps such as Lift, on my iPhone, enabling me to monitor progress by awarding myself a big green tick every time I complete one of the tasks that I want to turn into habit.

Lift offers various suggestions of habits you might like to consolidate, many of them already being actively pursued by other Lift users globally. When I joined up, I selected habits from a list of popular ones: drink more water (50,000+ participants). Easy ones: ...

Anthony Marra's debut novel is a marvel. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena describes, in astonishingly beautiful prose, five days in a rural village and bombed-out hospital in Chechnya during wartime. As the characters — including a doctor, a hunted child, a historian, and an informant — try to adapt and survive, their histories, connections, and desires are unveiled. Marra has created a breathtaking work of haunting, evocative fiction.

Ann Patchett calls A Constellation of Vital Phenomena "Simply spectacular....If this is where Anthony Marra begins his career, I can't imagine how far he will go," and Maile Meloy declares, "You will finish it transformed." We are proud to have chosen A Constellation of Vital Phenomena for Volume 39 of Indiespensable.

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Jill Owens: The first sentence of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena sets the tone immediately. "On the morning after the Feds burned down her house and took her father, Havaa woke from dreams of sea anemones." Was that always the way the book began?

Anthony Marra: No, actually. That was one of the final sentences I wrote. It had a different opening paragraph for the first five drafts of the ...

Recently, I was feeling stuck with a problem I couldn't resolve. So I asked Nelson Mandela for advice.

I don't need to tell you the details, because the advice was given in strict confidence. But I strongly recommend that if you too get stuck you try getting in touch with Nelson yourself.

And if Nelson can't help, ask somebody else. Oprah Winfrey, perhaps. Or Genghis Khan. Or Lord Byron. Anybody you like, really.

As should be obvious by now, you don't absolutely need to ask the real Nelson Mandela, because he may never get back to you . But you can ask the version of him who is available to you at any time, in your head. Or your own private version of Oprah, Genghis, or the author of Don Juan.

We all have heroes, though we might not use that word to describe the people we admire. Over time, they may change. (I no longer bow down, as I did when I was a boy, before the very idea of certain sportsmen.) In each case, we admire them for particular qualities — not for the entire, flawed person that they ...

When I first started writing, I'd ride my bike to work. I always had an office job and a gallery job, two or three or more part-time jobs piled up on top of each other. I still have a version of that. In the early evening, on the way home I'd swing by Powell's. I'd rather ride my bike in the dark than during a rush hour commute, and Powell's Books was a place to wait out the most traffic-filled hour and a half or so. I'd read, drink coffee, and almost every night it seemed there was an author reading, if I wanted to stick around.

Dropping by the constant stream of readings at Powell's in that casual way had a lot to do with making the possibility of being a writer real for me. There were writers around, all the time.

One memorable night I saw Joy Williams. Williams is the author of many books, including, State of Grace, which I'd just finished reading at the time. She's since written The Quick and the Dead, and Ill ...