There is definitely a valuable and practical framework here for making career assessments and ultimately finding career happiness (or at least not hating what you do for a living) but there isn't too much with respect to what one should actually be doing to be successful within this framework. Given that the author is an academic that went to elite schools in the US (ex: MIT), many of his examples and anecdotes are related to other people who are in academic fields and also went to elite US universities. I was a bit alienated by this.
The book also seems aimed at young people who are currently in post-secondary education, not someone like myself who is beyond mid-career and is not an academic with a clear specialty. I wish that Newport would write a book related to this one for people who are not academic superstars and did not graduate from places like MIT or Stanford and who also work in "real" businesses / government bureaucracies. This would be of more practical use to me and would be less of a turn-off - this book does have an elitist overtone that is hard to take at times. For example, in the Introduction, Newport relays the following story:
"To complicate matters, my research specialty hadn't proven to be all that popular in recent years. The last two students to graduate from the group where I wrote my dissertation both ended up in professorships in Asia, while the last two postdocs to pass through the group ended up in Lugano, Switzerland, and Winnipeg, Canada, respectively."
Boo hoo! Asia, Switzerland, Canada. My goodness, this sounds rough. I especially take exception to the inference that Winnipeg would be just dreadful. Oh my, so cold. So remote. I live on the Canadian prairies and have family in Winnipeg and, I can assure you, it is not the shithole that is implied in this book. Is it Boston? Is it London? No. But, the city has two universities, one a major research university (University of Manitoba) and the other a primarily undergraduate teaching university (University of Winnipeg). My, what a career letdown it must be for academics graduating from elite institutions to have to settle for researching and teaching at such "red brick" schools! But I digress...
I rate this book highly because I think that it does spill some much needed cold water on the "follow your passion" hypothesis that has created a lot of damage in how people plan their careers today. I believe that the framework that Newport outlines can be useful. I would like to see it applied though to examples of people in the business world or government, who did not start out as academics that attended elite universities.
Four out of five stars.
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