An action-oriented guide to help anyone find their calling and achieve their goals, inspired by the author's popular blog post with the same title
The Career Manifesto presents an inspiring and refreshingly simple approach to finding your passion and purpose and then jumpstarting a dream career to achieve those, by asking three essential questions:
- What do you want your impact to be?
- What are the potential pathways that move you towards your purpose?
- How can you hold yourself accountable for your goals?
Award-winning CEO of XO Group and sought-after speaker, Michael Steib, draws on his own diverse work experience and career highlights as well as powerful anecdotes from other successful business leaders to offer expert guidance, field-tested advice, and interactive exercises that will help you answer these three key questions, envision a goal and then craft and execute a plan to achieve it. For young professionals, entrepreneurs, and creatives seeking more purpose and meaning in their work and lives, The Career Manifesto is the essential way to build--and follow through on--an effective plan to excel at whatever job, project or career goal you put your mind to.
Initial thoughts: I gained so much from reading The Career Manifesto. At first, I wasn't sure if this would be a book for me because 9 to 5 jobs don't appeal to me. Curiosity compelled me to listen to the audiobook anyway. I was pleasantly surprised that this books can be applied to so many different trajectories, whether you're employed, freelance, volunteer full-time or seek other ways to work and/or generate an income.
A lot of the information wasn't new to me but I appreciated how Mike Steib broke things down into actionable steps. For example, he talked about the importance of forming new habits in the pursuit of our goals, then went on to give examples on how we can immediately apply this to our lives.
Through The Career Manifesto, Steib also challenges readers to commit to an unusual path because "if you do what everyone else does, you'll get what everyone else gets." This, for me, was a timely reminder. Doing things differently can feel lonely at times but knowing our goals will keep us going.
Best of all, Steib's focus isn't merely on helping individuals achieve their career goals but to have a positive impact on others in the process. He re-calibrates beliefs such as money is not the root of all evil but that it's free of value; it's a tool that can help us get where we want to. What can be evil is if we exploit others in order to gain it. With that, he noted that "sales is helping to solve someone's problems by tailoring your solution to their needs." He explains under which circumstances we tend to sell (even if no money is involved), offered steps to improve our methods, and at which point it's time to move on and offer our solution to someone else).
