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

How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World by Harry Browne

This book is a praxis: a set of real-world practices for navigating reality as it is, rather than how we wish it to be. The language is clear and direct, and the book aggregates into a highly robust and coherent work of practical, livable philosophy. Author Harry Browne developed this philosophy over the course of many years, and it's inspiring to hear him talk about his mistakes, his refinements in thinking over time, and the surprising and often liberating benefits that came his way as he followed his own practices. This author eats his own cooking, and the result is a generous gift to readers. This does not mean you'll agree with everything the author writes! In fact, Browne encourages readers to disagree with him as we sort out  our specific values, rules and boundaries. He wants volitional readers, not readers looking to be told what to think and do. We'll come back to this idea. [A quick  affiliate link to Amazon  for those readers who would like to support my wor...

Deflation and Liberty by Jorg Guido Hulsmann

In the modern centralized monetary system, all values are inverted. Debt masquerades as money, the system imposes structural inflation and monetary debasement on everyone, and GDP "growth" is increasingly an economic illusion because of that inflation and debasement. Nearly everyone gets fooled into thinking their wages, home values and stock portfolios are "rising"--and this is yet another illusion thanks to the steady debasement of the money. In such a system, anyone living off wage income, who isn't (yet) an asset owner, gets squeezed a little tighter every year. And this is the primary reason we have a so-called K-shaped economy, where asset owners do well, while those living off their labor value don't. It all comes from steady, deliberate monetary debasement. Our author believes this is immoral, and he's right. He believes that the institution behind our monetary system (the US Federal Reserve) is immoral, and he's right. Further, he believes ...

The Art of War in the Middle Ages by Charles Oman

A wonderful, information-dense book surveying the evolution of warfare across the Middle Ages, and a glorious starting point for readers to contextualize an enormous amount of European history. There's a great deal of historical knowledge here that author Charles Oman assumes in his readers.  And so the very act of reading this book (and looking up the author's near-constant historical references) equates to a semester or two--at least--of upper-level undergrad European history. Read this book and spend some time looking things up. Then read several more books like this [1].  Pretty soon, enough osmosis happens such that the various battles and historical figures this author mentions casually will be things you start mentioning casually: Cannae, Adrianople, Brunanburh, Hastings, Robert Guiscard, Durazzo, Tours, Crecy, Agincourt, Arnold von Winkelried, Albrecht von Wallenstein, and so on. (This will be an inner monologue of course, because we all know how much every...