Chris Guillebeau - Born for This: How to Find the Work You Were Meant to Do

A headline from the Onion proclaimed, Man Convinces Himself He Has the Job of His Dreams. The job, as you might expect from a satirical newspaper, is a soul-crushing and tedious one. Yet because the man sees no alternative, he decides he really likes it. Its wonderful that Im trapped here for the foreseeable future, he says.

The best satires relate to real life in some way. Many people really are stuck in soul-crushing jobs, with no escape route in sight. If you find yourself trapped for the foreseeable future, you have two obvious options: settle or make a trade-off.

In the first scenario, you accept that theres no way out, and you continue working the soul-crushing job that steals your joy. You spend a third of your life doing something you dont like, but you decide not to take any steps to change that situation. This first scenario is not actually that unusualplenty of people do this. They cant see any alternatives, so they disengage from work and try to find meaning and purpose elsewhere.

In the second scenario, you decide to live frugally, working a job that supports your basic needs without taking up all your time. You dont love your work, but thats okay, because you love other things. Or maybe the kind of work you love doesnt pay all that well, so you accept the sacrifice for what you receive in return.

Theres nothing fundamentally wrong with either choice, but neither is that exciting. What if you dont want to settle? What if you want to find the kind of work that you truly love and you dont want to eat ramen noodles every night? Why cant you have it all?

Happily, you can. As youll see throughout this book, some people manage to find this work. Theyve won the career lottery, and the results werent all determined by chance. Whether through their own brilliance or, more likely, as a result of trial and error, theyve found the work they were born to doand thats what makes all the difference.

This book will help you find that thing, too. If you dont want to choose between the two undesirable options, this book will show you a third way.

The book consists of two major sections. In the first section, youll master a series of lessons that will help you understand what you want and how to get it. In the second section, youll explore a menu of options designed to help you implement those lessons through a variety of strategies and tactics.

Everything youll learn in both sections is highly practical. Not everything will apply to you, but thats okayits a big book. Choose what excites you, and focus on what will bring you closer to your goals.

This book will also challenge many popular beliefs about the way we live and work. As youll see, some of these conventional assumptions about what a dream career should look like are misguided or simply wrong. Fortunately, theres a better way, a way that will lead you to the work you were born to do. This book will help you find it.