Nicholas Lore

The Pathfinder is one of the better career books out there, and I used to recommend it until I figured out that 99% of all career planning is bulls**t. People and industries change too fast nowadays to plan anything useful beyond a couple of years, and that's a good thing. Career planning, if done right, is taking an extra step of doing something you were already going to do. If done wrong, it's nothing more than stalling.

Want to find a job you'll love? Here's my 3-step plan: (1) Throw away show more that career book. (2) Try as many new activities as you can, and over time this will inevitably lead to meeting new people and learning about even more opportunities. The key is to do more doing, and less thinking about doing. (3) Rinse and repeat. Do more of the things you love and less of the things you don't. show less

The book is extremely effective in asking you the right questions on every step of career discovery! It was an invaluable tool for me over the last several months.

I am hesitant to recommend it to friends though because it uses some antiquated and derogatory depictions of aboriginal peoples throughout -- simply to illustrate certain points. Haven't we abused their identities and lives enough by now? It's lazy writing and disrespects readers' intelligence.

Skip everything in the first part of the book. Skip to section 3. Reading the first part made me regret spending money on this book. The authors spend half the time hyping the importance of a satisfying career, and a quarter of the time advertising their company. The first test didn't help me at all. It was a list of nice things... I just said yes to everything and they were all "duhs". I'm now in a frame of reference where I consider the exercises to be poorly designed. There should be show more yeses and nos. forms of questions should be varied to reduce type of bias. etc etc.

Many of these exercises could be found online from blogs. It's nice to have them in a single location, but I personally find the format a bit irritating. Perhaps it's just the organization that bothers me. show less

Worth reading as it offers you advice and self-tests for helping you decide the right career path to follow.