no comments | be the first to comment!It’s hard to look at extremely optimistic titles in this terrible economic time, when we’re struggling with the balance between taking personal responsibility and coming to terms with how many things are really out of our control no matter how painful their effects can be.
While the world economy moves slowly to its new -and hopefully - more useful path, an awful lot of people are also rethinking how they’re going to live. People put their dreams and their lives on hold so they could earn promotions, show their loyalty, send their kids to school, save for retirement and live in great homes; only to suffer the loss of what they’ve worked so hard for.
And now they’re looking at whatever part of their lives ended up in shambles and asking themselves what they really want, often at a time when the question of what they can get hangs urgently in the foreground.
This book, by Southern California author BJ Gallagher, is a useful tool to have as people re-invent themselves. Her own life - a self-described late bloomer - serves up lessons alongside a menu of other people’s experiences and good advice for what to focus on.
For people who’ve lost their place in the working world - whether it was a lay-off, a family relocation or other circumstance, Gallagher looks at how to start with the best parts and useful skills of what they’ve already done and build it into a next career, as an employee or an entrepreneur.
For people ready to walk away from a career where they’ve burned out or have lost interest, or when they’ve succeeded and become bored, Gallagher lays out a road map for breaking the change into manageable steps between where they are now and where they want to go.
Education plays a big role in changing what we do, and Gallagher tells the stories of people who’ve learned to fly, learned to teach and how they’ve made learning work for them. But she also asks the critical questions in deciding whether or not more school actually helps. Are you doing this for yourself or to prove something to someone else? Do you need the credentials to make the change?
Each chapter, including those that suggest it’s never too late to make a happy marriage, become a jock, make enough money or express creativity, ends with a set of useful pointers. Some are gagging with New Age clichés, but others make an awful lot of sense.
It’s only at the end of the book that Gallagher reveals that she wrote the book for herself on the eve of a birthday with zero involved. Hopelessness, an old friend to all of us, suggested that it was too late for her to do the things she hadn’t - find love, wealth and fitness.
So she talked to her friends and gathered the stories of their remarkable growth into the people they wanted to be, that they accomplished well after 40 - including a couple who took up hiking in their 60s. And she shared the notebook with us to remind us that we didn’t stop being capable of the extraordinary even if our lives have become more ordinary than we’d planned.
Read more:http://www.sdnn.com/sandiego/2009-08-19/news/book-report-it’s-never-too-late-to-be-what-you-might-have-been#ixzz0OgDS2vS9
No comments:
Post a Comment