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Make Your Job Work For You Oct 28, 2008
Vanderkam shows that what you do doesn't have to be a grind. It's a great resource for people who are ready to step off the corporate treadmill and get on with their lives.
Highly Recommended! Aug 23, 2008
Vanderkam's book is insightful, well-researched and, most importantly inspiring. It is filled with compelling case studies and tips that motivated me to explore a new career path. I have since hopped from the grid, am working from home and doing what I love!
Insightful, practical, well-written Feb 11, 2008
Grindhopping provides a look at living life outside the box. The decision to take the veer off society's typical path is a difficult one, and Vanderkam offers assurance that, provided you're willing to put in unfettered enthusiasm and hard work, this path can be a wildly successful one. She also outlines the practical, nitty-gritty details on how to make this lifestyle choice work.
Grindhopping strikes a chord. May 14, 2007
Vanderkam offers practical advice for jumping out of the world of the 9-to-5, bosses, and the low and middle rungs of the corporate ladder. The title of the first chapter illustrates the author's straightforward tone and approach for the rest of the book: "Always Be Your Own Boss: No compromises, no excuses". She offers compelling reasons to take this path and practical advice for getting there (e.g. how to find reasonable health insurance, how to keep expenses down, and how to maintain multiple projects in the "Craig's List Economy" to keep the money coming in). Vanderkam draws on her personal experience as a freelance writer as well as a number of case studies of "Grindhoppers" who have found success or are on their way. She also addresses the downsides and risks of striking out on your own head-on and offers sound and empathetic advice for dealing with these. But she also confronts the downsides and risks of staying in the grind to your long term career success and satisfaction.
As with other career/entrepreneur books, Vanderkam stresses the importance of planning, goal setting, saving money, and, of course, networking. Yet, she delivers her advice and personal experiences in a way that feels somehow more authentic than with other books I've read. For example, in the networking chapter, she talks about her own tendencies towards shyness and how she overcomes and works around these. She opens up her own life and experiences to the reader just enough and in a way that is not self-indulgent. She succeeds in striking the right balance between focusing on her case studies and her own trials, tribulations, and successes in the world outside of the grind. Her writing is honest, and at times refreshingly quirky. (Check out the section on hunting mastodon and you'll see what I'm talking about.) Highly recommended.
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
Tired of killing time in your cubicle? This book's for you! May 11, 2007
Why is it that so many career books--unique among how-to books--advise you to settle for less? Diet books don't tell you to settle for being overweight; relationship books don't tell you to settle for dysfunctional partnerships; cookbooks don't tell you to settle for takeout. Yet career books often tell you that the only way to get ahead is to settle for putting in time that feels more like doing time. If you're not the kind of person who can ignore how much cubicle slavery feels like any other kind of slavery, then these kinds of self-help books are no help to you--and no wonder. As Grindhopping makes clear, the days of slow and steady wins the corporate race are long gone. So even if that is your comfort zone, you'd do well to read this book instead of all the others premised on a corporate model that's all but extinct. Grindhopping actually examines those statistics that are always cited to discourage free-lancers and entrepreneurs and exposes how they're skewed. But this is not some unrealistic fantasy book for impractical dreamers. Grindhopping covers common pitfalls first-time entrepreneurs fall into--often by blindly following that same outdated corporate model. It also addresses the very real concerns that keep so many chained to their cubicles: student loans, credit-card debt, health insurance, risk management. But unlike career books that only acknowledge the risks of putting your dreams into action, Grindhopping lays out the just-as-real risks of putting your dreams permanently on hold. In a rapidly changing world, survival of the fittest means survival of the most flexible, and this book practices what it preaches, providing real-life examples from every field imaginable of how the shortest distance from here to your goals isn't necessarily straight up the corporate ladder. Grindhopping refuses to ignore the question: If sitting at a desk all day, every day, putting in face time isn't the most efficient way to get the experience and contacts you need to achieve your goals, then what are you still doing there? Instead this book offers concrete strategies for networking, project juggling, delivering results, and learning what you need to know outside of school. Nor does it advise an all-or-nothing mentality: if hopping out of the corporate grind for a while enables you to gain more quickly the experience and contacts you'll need to hop back in later at a higher level, then more power to you. Conversely, if you need a steady stream of cash to pay off debt or need to learn about a particular industry, then a temporary stint in the daily grind may be to your advantage. The main thing is not to let temporary steps along the path to your goals turn into permanent dead-ends, but to weigh risks and make decisions based on whether or not each move you make brings you closer in some way to where you ultimately want to go. Instead of telling you to abandon your dreams, Grindhopping tells you how to make them a reality.
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