The Adventures of Johnny Bunko:
The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need
Daniel H. Pink, Art by Rob Ten Pas (amazon.com link)
Read in 2014 and reviewed/reread 2018.
Fun cartoon-animated career and life-lesson guidebook. In the grand scheme of things, a more general life book would be Zen in the Art of Archery or similar, but this was still enjoyable and relevant. Six lessons:
- There is no plan.
- Doing something for instrumental vs. fundamental reasons; the latter being because we think this will lead to something else, or for a fundamental reason, that we think it’s inherently valuable.
- Think strengths, not weaknesses.
- Martin Seligman and Marcus Buckingam’s “research has found that the key to success is to steer around your weaknesses and focus on your strengths. “ Agreed, in a sense. No reason for us to avoid challenging ourselves, learning, and improving our weaknesses, but – especially professionally – we should focus on what we’re already good at.
- It’s not about you.
- Life is always about serving and helping others, bringing out the best everywhere around us. True even if we take several years to develop ourselves or vacation.
- Persistence trumps talent.
- And intrinsic motivation, rather than external motivation (for external rewards), develops persistence, which leads to our success.
- Make excellent mistakes.
- Think big, etc.
- Leave an imprint.
- Improve our companies, communities, families, groups, etc. Leave a positive imprint, a good impact, leave things better than we found them…