Front to back, Get A Life Not A Job is under 200 pages and a quick read.…. if that’s all you intend to do with it. If you use it as a work book for your career it could get all dog eared and soft, com­fort­able like a good friend. As it should.

Sun­day night..

How do you answer the ques­tion, how do you feel on Sun­day night? Do you dread Mon­day, the bore­dom or monot­ony of the work­week, dis­like things about your work­place or the peo­ple there, or are you over­whelmed by the work itself? If the slump is seri­ous maybe it’s time for a new act.… Maybe a mul­ti­ple career act.

Maybe it’s our cul­ture of stoic old world work ethic that still lingers and makes us think a suc­cess­ful career means one job till retire­ment, like my uncles who went from school to the auto­mo­bile indus­try in Detroit to retire­ment. I don’t remem­ber hear­ing about how much they loved their jobs, just how good the ben­e­fits and retire­ment plans were. Why do we feel the need to defer our happiness?

It that all there is? Work­ing for the future? Spend­ing 40 years — the prime of our life — try­ing to get ahead not lov­ing what we do? I started think­ing of celebri­ties and ath­letes with mul­ti­ple income streams. OK, maybe they aren’t in the chem­istry lab con­coct­ing the fra­grance them­selves or pro­fi­cient in auto cad, design­ing the next indoor grill between movie gigs and con­certs… But, how many of us are well known enough to be asked to endorse prod­ucts and be paid for it or have enough money to invest in a new ven­ture? Well, not many for sure, but the book puts down every excuse known to mankind for not doing what you love and mak­ing a career out of it. The book walks you through how to do it.

Paula Caligiuri, Ph. D., writes about invest­ing in your­self and ana­lyz­ing your options for simul­ta­ne­ous career acts and tak­ing steps toward career free­dom. She deftly points out that turn­ing a pas­sion into a career can­not be only a dream, it can be a real­ity.

I think it was the exam­ple of Mon­ica and her mul­ti­ple career acts that most res­onated with me, though there are plenty of real life exam­ples for inspi­ra­tion. Mon­ica was unful­filled by her career as an orga­ni­za­tion devel­op­ment spe­cial­ist when after 6 years she was laid off and turned her pas­sion for gar­den­ing into being a gar­den­ing coach and now com­bines that with a few days a week of man­age­ment coach­ing and some web­site devel­op­ment on the side.

Does that type of vari­ety intrigue you?

Hav­ing mul­ti­ple career acts based on what ful­fills you, your moti­va­tions and how you like to work is what Get A Life Not A Job is all about. Is it really achiev­able? I think that if you can live with the fact that Paula points out -

The best career acts require you to take some risks or make some invest­ments in yourself

The answer is yes…