With the help of some wonderful, clever people, this is my first new Kindle books since "Thinking Through Refuse to Choose" came out over 2 years ago. And the sweet part is that it's a bestseller! It was right away - within 90 minutes of going up on amazon.com last night.
My warmest thanks to all who bought it so quickly! If you're not yet one of them, allow me to introduce you to a new Scanner Career book.
If you're someone with many talents and interests who loves to learn new things, who loves discovery and variety, and gets a big kick out of solving problems, then I bet you are probably also someone who get painfully bored working at a job where there's nothing left to learn.
That's bad. Because, first, you learn fast. Few jobs can keep up with you when it comes to providing new things to learn. And second, boredom to you isn't a slight discomfort, it's agony. It's like Kryptonite to Superman: deadly.
That creates a problem, because you need to eat and pay rent like everyone else, and finding the right career has probably been very discouraging.
This book is the beginning of a new effort on my part to change that.
I think I know you. In fact, I’m one of you. I call us ‘Scanners.’ Some people call us
Polymaths or Renaissance people, or TMA (Too Many Aptitudes) or just multi-talented. We're a big problem for career counselors because we have a hard time choosing one specialty, and we know it.
Way back in 1994 I first wrote about people like us in my NY Times bestseller, I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was. Chapter 6 was called 'I want so many things, I'm all over the map.' It was only one of many chapters, each one about a different problem, but when I looked at the letters from readers that started flooding in (and still haven't stopped) I noticed that the majority of them were about that chapter.
I got the hint. It took years of researching and running retreats and workshops, working with hundreds of people and interviewing hundreds more - even doing a 2-hour public TV pledge special called 'Refuse to Choose!' - but in 2005 my book about people like us came out: Refuse to Choose.
The first email I got on the day the book was on bookstore shelves said this (from memory, but it's unforgettable and I'm sure I've got it right): "Dear Barbara. I'm sitting in my car in the Barnes & Noble parking lot in [Los Angeles] reading your new book. I'm crying. I'm a guy. I don't cry."
(I'm not a guy so I started crying as soon as I read his words.)
"A huge burden just fell off my shoulders. I'm not broken! I'm just a different kind of thinker!" I got hundreds of emails like that. You can find a lot of them over on amazon.com right now. It's a good book. I'm proud of it and people love it.
So why did I want to write another book for people like us? Because, although I had dozens of career suggestions in Refuse to Choose, I knew there were a whole lot of great jobs out there in the big world that I hadn't yet heard about.
So I asked all the Scanners I know (many of them on the Scanner community made up of the facebook groups mentioned in the post before this one). "Hey!" I said. "Tell me! What was the best job you ever had?”
The response was fabulous! I asked more questions, got more information and could see that we need to get the word out to everyone! The stories were so unexpected. They’ll get your thinking out of a rut right away. And I decided to share them right away, in short, easy-to-read online books at very low cost (how's 99c?).
Last night we published the very first one. I think it will get your creative juices flowing and give you some great ideas. And if you have questions (like, how do I get a job like that?!) you can talk to the people who told me about them!
If you just need a bit of inspiration to find work that will be a joy for you, this is a great place to start!
"It's like carrying an Idea Party around on my Kindle!' said one fan.
I hope you buy the book, and if you enjoy what you read, I'd love you to go over to amazon and leave a brief but glowing review. It will make the contributors feel great. It will make everyone who helped get the book up and running great. And it would make the big smile on my face even bigger.
