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Designing Your New Work Life: How to Thrive and Change and Find Happiness-and new Freedom- at Work

By Bill Burnett and Dave Evans

I totally “get” these guys and love the way articulate how to make your next move in your career. Sometimes it is leaving but they recognize that sometimes it is a matter of redesigning your current job too.

Their advice is solid in that you have to prototype your next move and learn as much as you can about yourself, what you are looking for, and what is out there. You have to take “action” and then be “open to discovering things by accident” which is my philosophy of embracing “intentional serendipity.“

I also love their advice on reframing your situation. I feel like career coaches do this all the time with our student and clients. We help them take another perspective and give them hope.

This book is filled with perspective, hope, and solid advice in how to make your next move.

By Andrew Carroll

This was my bedside book for the past couple of months because the chapters are brief and independent of each other. So in the evening I would read a chapter on some lost or forgotten piece of American history and sleep peacefully…most of the time.

The author takes us to places that most people drive by and don’t know about the significant historical events. He starts with President Lincoln’s son Robert Todd being saved by a man when a train nearly crushed him. Turns out the man that saved him was the brother to John Wilkes Booth. Holy crap! What are the odds of that??

Well that was just the beginning of this book. Stories included the man who created a number of vaccines that ultimately have saved millions of lives (you’ve never heard of him, neither did it), and several organizations that placed orphans and indigent children in rural towns scattered throughout the mid-west. Often immigrants children who didn’t really want to go.

There are stories about forgotten graves and much more. I enjoyed this book and a lesson in all the small (and sometimes not so small) historical facts get lost unless someone tells us the story.

By Ronald C. White

Being from Maine and my interest in history, I knew about Joshua Chamberlain who fought at Gettysburg with the 20th Maine regiment and defended Little Round Top so famously. He was depicted in Ken Burns documentary of the Civil War and also in Shaara’s Killer Angels book.

This author dug deeper into the life of Joshua Chamberlain from his upbringing in a religious family which gave insight to his values, to his time at Bowdoin College as a student, later as a professor, and after the war as the President of Bowdoin.

He also served as the governor of Maine for 4 years when the terms were 1 year. Chamberlain lived a full life and had many decisions to make along his career path, which nearly led him to be a minister having completed a few years of the Bangor Theological School. His passion was learning new things but he also was gifted at reading people which served him well in war as well as the rest of his life.