The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. Persistence trumps talent.
    • And intrinsic motivation, rather than external motivation (for external rewards), develops persistence, which leads to our success.
  5. Make excellent mistakes.
    • Think big, etc.
  6. Leave an imprint.
    • Improve our companies, communities, families, groups, etc. Leave a positive imprint, a good impact, leave things better than we found them…