On Born for This

I began this as a skeptic — it seemed to be attempting too much without the depth to pull it off — but I’m glad I kept reading, because Chris Guillebeau really comes through in the second half.

At the center is his simple but genuinely useful claim that an ideal career combines love, money, and “flow”: the work has to bring you joy, has to pay, and has to challenge you enough that you lose track of time. Easier said than done, of course, especially given the near-constant trade-off between enjoyable work and well-paid work — the best jobs are hyper-competitive. To his credit, Guillebeau spends real time on how a reader might build work outside any existing workplace, and side hustles get a lot of attention. In principle I’m against turning everything into a side hustle, the way so much current messaging urges, but they do have a place for people who need fulfillment beyond a full-time job. That they’re so necessary is itself a symptom of a larger breakdown in how work is structured — a gap between meaning and need, or income and need. Still, one has to be pragmatic; it’s very hard to change the world just by talking about it.

More helpful was his discussion of inventing roles for yourself, doing them, and drawing your own income. I’d long thought of “building your own business” in organizational, concrete terms — opening a restaurant, making a product — and held it in stark contrast to “freelancing,” which is how creative industries, and to a lesser extent consulting, mostly run now. Guillebeau helped me reframe the boundary between freelancing and starting a business. Because of the book, I was able to think hard about ideas I have and to begin putting some into effect, and that alone makes it valuable. There’s something here most readers will find resonates with them; what that something is will be subjective, but it will be useful all the same.