This is a speedy read on improving satisfaction in your work life. The author is a PhD from MIT and runs a successful blog too – facts that give one some confidence in the contents of the book before even picking it up.
The book begins with an example of a run-of-the-mill corporate person dreaming of finding his true passion in life; he eventually found courage to take the step to become a Zen monk and went on to live in the mountains. And there he lived happily ever after… until the realization dawned upon him. He breaks down one day realizing that he is the same person that he was during his nine-to-five day job.
It is here that the author introduces an unconventional idea of the ineffectiveness of the high importance we have learned to assign to the passion mindset – a belief in the existence of a true calling. He argues how the craftsmen mindset – of focusing on doing a task in the best possible way and getting extremely good at it as opposed to focusing on trying to find the right job - helps in giving a more rewarding career. The rest of the book then goes on to propound ways to find work that you truly love and rules – as he calls them – on how to get more autonomy/control in your occupational life and how to have a mission for your professional life. He says how deliberate practice is required to build upon career capital - expertise in rare and valuable skills in your field- and how that career capital can be used to buy autonomy and a mission. The ideas presented in the book are really useful and may trigger a change in your mindset.
However there is a weakness in the book: the examples of real life people that the author use to explain the application of these ideas and rules in real life fails to make a mark to the extent that the examples of life of those people sound force-fitted to the methods that he suggests in the book.
The overall value from the book is really high except that the same value could have been given in much lesser pages (in which case it might not have remained a book and would have become a lengthy blog-post) or by using more impressing examples.