Live for a Living
How to Create Your Career Journey to Work Happier, Not Harder
The inspiring business guide Live for a Living combines research and experience into its holistic advice for lifelong career management.
With advice for taking charge of one’s career in uncertain times, Paula Caligiuri and Andy Palmer’s holistic career guide Live for a Living is grounded in contemporary job market realities.
Part instructional, part workbook, the book’s structure is systematic. It addresses career goals, career planning, and generating career momentum in turn. Within each section, the book constructs the foundations of career development, covering topics like thinking about one’s career and caring for oneself in the midst of work.
In covering career discernment, the book tells people to look to become “awash with intrinsic reward from the activity in which they are engaged,” listing signs like “a sense of sublime pleasure” and “losing all sense of time, feeling lost in the moment.” And in covering professional development, its advice includes “Volunteer for tasks that will give you exposure and help you build … knowledge” and “Seek a mentor who has already ‘made it’ in your ideal career act.” Practical exercises—as with a chart that asks the audience to rate the personal importance of factors like recognition, autonomy, purpose, and meaning in their work, and to ask themselves whether those needs are being met in their personal and professional lives—and references to online resources further support this individualized work.
Aiming to prompt personal reflection that leads to positive change, the book has a dynamic style: it presents serious information in a digestible format, complementing its claims with a variety of real-life examples, exercises, questionnaires, and social media prompts. It’s calibrated for multiple learning styles as a result. And its layout amplifies its clarity, with bullet-point lists, clear subtitles, and text boxes all used to highlight different sections and exercises.
Rooted in substantial experience, the book includes elements of psychology and sociology into its deep and authoritative advice. However, its real-life examples are somewhat limited: most come from the technology and science industries and, of the examples given, only one comes from the arts and only one addresses neurodiversity. A standardized family life, lack of disabilities, middle-class social status, and access to higher education are somewhat presumed when it comes to applying the book’s principles to everyday realities. Still, the book’s general positivity and encouraging advice go a long way toward defying outdated career models.
The inspiring business guide Live for a Living combines research and experience into its holistic advice for lifelong career management.
Reviewed by
Sarah Frideswide
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
