Skip to main content

What Should I Do With My Life? by Po Bronson

Po Bronson's What Should I Do with My Life? is a difficult to describe book. Calling it a book about careers would be an oversimplification. But yet it's partly that. Calling it a life-coaching book also oversimplifies, but it's partly that too.

It's unlike anything I've ever read, and yet it inspired me and--encouraged me--like few books ever have.

Bronson, who traveled all over the country seeking out subjects for this book, builds his story around several dozen people who struggle with "the question." There's almost every sort of person here: old, young, smart, dumb, confident, insecure, emotional, analytical, rich, poor, failures, successes. Bronson paints by anecdote, choosing everyday people, and the result is an insightful and textured portrait of how people go about figuring out what to do with their lives.

Some of Bronson's subjects can't figure out their passions. Some of them know exactly what their passions are, but they feel too fearful or too undeserving to reach for them. And some were absolutely certain of their passions--until they pursued them and found out their passions weren't what they thought they'd be. Bronson is unflinching, candid and honest about each person's path, and when you read these various short tales of how people grapple with their lives, you'll learn the right questions to ask to help you grapple with your own life.

Finally, the most inspiring and encouraging thing about What Should I Do With My Life? is the book's fundamental truth: You are not alone in struggling with this critically important question. Almost everyone finds that the answer isn't always what we think it is.

Highly, highly recommended.



Reading List for What Should I Do with My Life?
NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman
Bombardiers by Po Bronson
The First $20 Million is Always the Hardest by Po Bronson
The Nudist on the Late Shift: And Other True Tales of Silicon Valley by Po Bronson
The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama

More Posts

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Huckleberry Finn is really two books: a good one and a bad one. The good one, the first fifteen or sixteen chapters, is engaging, original and beautiful. The second book, the bad one, is hackneyed, inorganic, farcical, and in places nearly unreadable.  It feels like the overall work was written by two different people, which in fact it more or less was: the Mark Twain of 1876, fresh off the tremendous success of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and the Mark Twain of seven years later, cramped with financial stress and writer's block. Thus the back two-thirds of the book feels more like a collection of vaguely related short stories than a coherent novel, with random characters entering and exiting the stage to resuscitate an increasingly cadaverous plot. Twain is even forced to wedge Tom Sawyer back into the story late in the book, thanks to one of American literature's least plausible coincidences. It brings to mind Virginia Woolf's famously condescending remark about the no...

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

Fun, engaging novel about a very intelligent--and very naughty--boy. If we're lucky, we will all have a little bit of Tom Sawyer in us: we all misbehave, we all show off, we all counted the interminable minutes until recess, and we all have our little schemes and connivances. Nobody remembers the boys who behave themselves all the time. There's some subtlety to Twain's writing too at times: we see a good example in Chapter 6, when Tom is late to school. [1] You have to read with fairly close attention to note that Tom sees an empty seat, the only empty seat, next to Becky Thatcher on the girls' side of the classroom. He was thinking several steps ahead, and this was exactly why he spontaneously admits to his teacher, loudly, that his tardiness was due to talking to the town's black sheep, Huck Finn. He did it because he knew the teacher would put him on the girls' side of the schoolroom, right next to Becky! [A quick affiliate link to Amazon for those readers...

Inflation: The Problems It Creates and the Policies It Requires by Arthur M. Okun, Henry H. Fowler, and Milton Gilbert

This book is a transcription of a lecture series on inflation given at New York University back in 1969 by speakers Arthur Okun, Henry Fowler and Milton Gilbert. These three men, all important "experts" in their day on managing the economy, and all speaking with great confidence in the correctness of their policy prescriptions, had no idea how wrong they would be--about everything. As a result, this book indirectly teaches humility, and it once again teaches how incredibly useful it is to read books outside of the time period in which they were written. Each speaker holds forth on various orthodox economic ideas of that era: presumed trade-offs between inflation and unemployment, how to "fine-tune" the economy, and (most hilariously) the critical importance of gold as the foundation of the international monetary system.  Today, we can look back on these confidently-given speeches with rich irony, knowing that in less than a year, the 1970s would dunk on all three sp...