Skip to main content

The Renaissance Soul by Margaret Lobenstine

The Renaissance Soul: Life Design for People with Too Many Passions to Pick Just One by Margaret Lobenstine is a book for those of us out there who believe a traditional, focused and specialized career isn't always the best route to a passionate and successful life. 

Lobenstine borrows and updates the term Renaissance Man into the more gender-neutral term Renaissance Soul: someone with too many interests to be tied down to only one career or only one job. She systematically identifies and conquers the common doubts that Renaissance Souls have about their own careers (Why can't I stick to just one thing? What do I say when somebody asks me what I do for a living? and so forth) and she breaks down the common excuses and societal pressures (What do I do about money? If I keep changing jobs, people will think I'm a flake or a failure! etc.) that often drive Renaissance Souls to live in an unhappily focused career that simply doesn't suit them. If you have this type of personality and if you've suffered from these doubts, you will find this book mind-opening and highly useful. 

Note that this is not an airplane read or a beach read. You'll want to sit down with a notebook and a pen and let this book really help you through the steps of choosing and organizing your life around your various passions, determining what choices and sacrifices you'll have to make to go after those passions, and most importantly, how to make the money and income side of the equation work for you rather than against you as you reach for those passions. 

It's been a while since I've read a book that was this encouraging and this useful. It's written in a cheery, readable tone, yet it's book is surprisingly dense with good advice, practical suggestions and useful exercises to help you identify and pursue your various interests. After you've finished this 300-page book, you'll have a much better understanding of your own nature and how to make the best use of it in a world that, quite frankly, holds back many Renaissance Souls from achieving their dreams. 

Reading this book was like having half a dozen sessions with an expert life coach. I can't recommend it highly enough. 

Reading List for The Renaissance Soul
Note: The reason I create these reading lists is simply to scale off of something I already do for myself. Truly useful books always give suggestions for further reading--just in case the reader wishes to pursue any of the book's themes or subjects in greater depth. This is my absolute favorite way to find still more good books to read. Readers, if I can give you ideas for interesting and inspiring books, and save you the trouble of painstakingly copying down the titles and authors yourself, it's all the better for both of us! 

Lobenstine quotes from dozens of books throughout the text of The Renaissance Soul, and she gives a well-organized list of suggested books for further reading at the end of her book. The titles below sounded the most interesting to me (although admittedly there are so many good books in this list that it will be a long while before I get to them all). As always, I would be grateful for any additional title suggestions from readers--you can leave a comment here or reach me at dan1529[at]yahoo[dot]com. 

3) The Soul Of A New Machine by Tracy Kidder 
Labels:

More Posts

Kroll on Futures Trading Strategy by Stanley Kroll

A simple and direct book, written in plain language, but the ideas here are the result of years of thought, practice and genuine mastery.  In fact, to a novice (or even intermediate) investor, some of author Stanley Kroll's trading advice may appear obvious, even tautological. I recommend instead to read them as koans: ruminate and chew them over, think of analogous situations you've been in yourself, and then think of ways to apply the idea. See for example, when the author discusses how long he holds a "long-term" position, he says, "You hold a position for as long as the market continues going your way." A novice investor would see this as inane; the advanced investor sees it for the wisdom it is, and knows he needs the reminder. [A quick  affiliate link to readers to the book here . You can support my work here by buying all your Amazon products via any affiliate link from this site, or my sister site  Casual Kitchen . Thank you!] The author counsels rea...
Read more

Generative Energy: Restoring the Wholeness of Life by Ray Peat

A disorganized book by a highly-censored medical iconoclast. Despite its sloppiness, it will still send you down a lot of good rabbit holes. I don't recommend a labored, close reading of this book: just use it as an introduction to Ray Peat's dissident health and physiology ideas. In certain ways, we can think of Ray Peat, along with Robert Mendelsohn and Ivan Illich , as direct ancestors of the courageous COVID-era medical dissidents: doctors like Peter McCullough, Mary Talley Bowden, Pierre Kory, Kirk and Kimberly Milhoan, Paul Marik, Meryl Nass and Peter Gotszche, among others, who bravely spoke out against foolish lockdowns, hospital protocols, government mandates and the use of risky (but of course highly lucrative) therapeutics like Remdesivir--and were censored, suspended or fired for it. [1] As a general rule: in any knowledge domain you should always know who the dissident thinkers are. They are usually the ones who were right all along. [2] [A quick  affiliate link ...
Read more

Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter

A wonderful, beautiful work. Ask me about it, and I'll start nattering at you about sphex wasps, fugues, isomorphisms and "jumping out of the system." And my voice will trail off and you'll see me get a faraway look in my eyes. It's actually quite difficult to describe what this book is about--at least, impossible to describe in a few short sentences. [1] But there are so many ways to read Godel, Escher, Bach , and such a wide range of ideas and insights one can get out of it, that it becomes a different book for every reader. And let me confess, if you haven't read GEB  yet, I am jealous of you. [A quick  affiliate link to Amazon  for those readers who would like to support my work here: if you purchase your Amazon products via any affiliate link from this site, or from my sister site  Casual Kitchen , I will receive a small affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you!] First of all this book can be understood on many levels. You can read it a...
Read more