book 37 – f**k it Do What You Love
A confession: I am a few blog posts behind. A recovery plan: I am going to sit here, give myself a timeline of 30 mins per entry, and just get them done! This is a terrific lesson on managing procrastination that I first learned from Oliver Burkeman’s book, and read about once again in f**k it in a sub-chapter called “set unrealistic deadlines”. The theory is that we can get a lot more done that we think we can, if we just focus on doing it as quickly as possible.
So here we are. f**k it in 30 minutes (actually I only have about 20 minutes left). I enjoyed this book, but it’s possibly because I am exactly in this head space right now. I don’t like what I’m doing (or possibly where I’m doing it, or who I’d doing it for) and I need inspiration for change. The book is quite specific, walking you through how to figure out what you love, and how to make money actually doing it. Honestly, it seems fine for someone who doesn’t have many financial responsibilities such as mortgages and children and university tuition and planning for retirement but it strikes me as a little impractical for the rest of us who do. However, without actually taking the time to answer the questions or complete the exercises, I finished the book with a new plan for my life. It’s not exactly the radical approach of dropping everything I currently do and starting over as a quantum physicist, but it IS taking what I am good at and like doing and finding a way to do these things on my own terms.
So maybe the book provides just enough inspiration to start thinking about your life differently. And certainly, if you have the means/comfort/desire to go “all in”, then it seems to provide a very detailed and helpful roadmap for figuring out how to do what you love and earn a living doing it.
My criticism of this book seems to be common to all “self help” books, which is simply that they seem to run on in the last few chapters and either become repetitive (got to fill those 250 pages!), or lose focus (wait, here are 10 other things that I want to include but they just didn’t seem to fit in any other chapter). f**k it seems to be of the “lose focus” variety, suddenly trying to provide too much detail too quickly on ways to make a living doing what you love. It seems like the final chapter is the whole point of the book, but it’s a sharp contrast from the earlier chapters of taking the time to really figure out what it is that you love in the first place. I think it would have worked better as a series of focused appendices, or even a website supplement.
Still, I have a plan that I am very happy with, and I believe significant credit goes to this book for helping me get there.
Rating: Buy it if you are even the least bit unhappy with what you are doing. It might not change your life, but it might inspire you to at least spend more time doing things you love.
