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

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

The Gypsies by Jan Yoors

A beautiful book about a beautiful people. Anyone tempted by the idea of escaping "civilized" society will be fascinated by the Rom people, as they get to pick and choose from the trappings of modernity in ways the rest of us simply cannot. The author, a Belgian, left his own society when he was just twelve and lived with a Rom clan for some ten years--astoundingly, with his parents' consent! This book is one of the rare first person accounts of a notoriously misunderstood culture. [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!] The Gypsies [1]  live by their wits, by their remarkable resourcefulness, by barter, and at times by petty theft. What they don't do is sit in traffic to drive to a job filing TPS reports all...
Read more

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 ...
Read more