Career Renegade: How to Make a Great Living Doing What You Love [Paperback]

Jonathan Fields (Author)

Book Description

Release date: January 13, 2009

There’s a revolution brewing across the nation--a movement that’s changing lives and revealing little known paths to passion and prosperity.

It’s about building a great living around what you love to do most. Once you’ve been touched by it, you’ll never be the same. This book is your way in, your admission ticket to the world of the career renegade.

Jonathan Fields, mega-firm lawyer turned successful lifestyle entrepreneur, blogger and writer shows you how to turn your passion–whether it’s cooking or copy-writing, teaching or playing video games–into a better payday and a richly satisfying life.

* Discover the 7 career renegade paths to prosperity
* Tap technology to turn a seemingly moneyless passion into a goldmine
* Rapidly test and tune your idea for free, from the comfort of your couch
* Establish yourself as an authority in a new field with little or no investment
* Cultivate the mission-driven, action-oriented career renegade mindset
* Rally others to your cause, and convince them you’re not nuts

Join the movement now…and take back your livelihood and life!

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

For all the corporate drones who feel drained and devalued by their jobs and long to pursue their passions, Fields, a high-powered attorney turned successful entrepreneur, offers a motivational and practical guide to starting your own business. The author tells his own story of corporate disillusionment and physical deterioration (capped by a stress-exacerbated heart attack, which he interpreted as his body literally rejecting his career) to a new life as a fitness entrepreneur. Fields moves beyond self-help rhetoric to proffer helpful, no-nonsense steps for aspiring business owners, acknowledging that career renegades must not only identify their own secret passion but must also translate it into a profitable and sustainable enterprise. In addition to sharing inspirational career renegade cases studies, such as Liv's Story, in which a frustrated artist discovers a profitable niche decorating custom cakes, Fields provides pragmatic strategies for creating a realistic business plan, exploiting technology and employing affordable guerilla marketing. While the author does not spend much time addressing the financial risks, chances of failure or enormous commitment of personal energy and resources involved in entrepreneurship, he does provide an engaging firsthand look at the rewards in doing what you love for a living. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Renegade in the title is appropriate, especially if readers are searching for a traditional career guide, which this is not. Instead, former high-powered New York City lawyer turned serial entrepreneur Fields leans heavily on the 75 percent of employees who are dissatisfied with their jobs. The first part involves discovering one’s secret passion, via a few exercises. What makes the journey with this author worthwhile are his sections on determining the exact work path (yes, via research on the Internet) and on developing a business. The references and ideas will inspire; he also interviews quite a few renewed careerists, whether it’s the tale of the young mother who started the Young Rembrandts franchise or an artist who found her passion in creating edible art through her family-owned Rivera Bakehouse. Part 3 zeroes in on honing online knowledge and creating an authority figure, via such social networks as MySpace or through blogging and word of mouth. --Barbara Jacobs

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Crown Business; 1St Edition edition (January 13, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0767927419
• ISBN-13: 978-0767927413
• Product Dimensions: 5.3 x 0.8 x 7.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (62 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #70,071 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

53 of 58 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Great information, wealth of wisdom January 16, 2009

By John Chancellor TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

There are three major benefits that you will gain from reading this book.

First it will serve as a motivation to all who want to give up the rut we all call a job and move out on their own.

The second benefit is really a step by step guide about how to move out on your own. Not only does Jonathan tell you how, he gives links to hundreds of resources to help you accomplish what you want.

The third valuable benefit is the wisdom that Jonathan shares from his own experiences.

The third benefit is perhaps the most valuable. Under the wisdom he shares, there are two very valuable lessons - either of them worth the price of the book.

The first lesson is how to deal with fear. Here Jonathan gives some extremely good advice. Fear is probably the number one reason most people do not achieve their dreams. His advice is to explore and quantify the fear. Ask what are the consequences of failure, what is the worst case scenario, and examine the results. Often this will put fear in perspective. Then let go of the fear. Do this only once and let go.

Then you need to explore and quantify inaction. What are the results of doing nothing? If "staying the course is going to create a miserable future", that should be an unacceptable alternative. Once you explore and quantify inaction, let go. Again do this only once. What you focus on expands. So only examine the fear and inaction once and then move on.

Then the important part is to stimulate success daily. Again, what we focus on expands. So stimulate success daily. You do this by being clear about what you want, believing you can achieve it and taking focused action.

The other huge lesson is how, when and why to involve others family/friends/mentors in your mission

The last lesson is probably the best advice in the entire book. There is no one person, guru, mentor who can give you the magic formula or set of directions that will work for you. In the final analysis, "no one can stand in your shoes. No one else can take action but you."

Take responsibility for your own life.

Ask yourself this question, "Will this career choice let me spend the greatest amount of time absorbed in the activities and relationships that make me come alive while earning the living I need to live?"

The book is well written and easy to read. If you really wish to change your life, to take charge and put your future in your own hands, this is a great place to start.

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars **1/2 - Poorly written fluff (a lot of potentially useful links though) December 3, 2011

By Ghost(Ghost(M))

Format:Paperback

Amazon shoved this book under my nose in their recommendations, so I checked it out. On one hand, it's an "advice" book (red flag) and its page here is full of very suspicious-looking five-star reviews (another red flag). Otoh, the title sounds catchy, so I -- no, no, I didn't buy it -- I checked it out in our library (hehe).

I could barely finish it: it's hard to follow (because it's poorly written -- cogency is lacking: his thought jumps around a lot w/o easy-to-follow logical progression, at times descending into gibberish), and then it's just a lot of fluff -- his advice amounts to a lot of obvious things that would occur to anyone who'd invest a quarter hour into considering one's options (with traditional skippages in narrative over moments that look magical when not detailed, making you wonder who populates the skid row if everything is so doable).

It is also very cliched: every paragraph contains "value-laden", "remarkability", or "passion-based" this and that; horrible English and very bad style that is reminiscent of this late-night TV guy in black suit and with huge teeth who was big about fifteen-twenty years ago and whose name I forget. Usage errors. I mean, a lot of this book reads like a first draft by a not particularly literary man. Of course, the author has a website, and is some sort of self-proclaimed "career expert".

But in general, the most of this book is very superficial advice on how to use "social media" in order to inflate yourself into some sort of "expert" or "maven" (I'm sure you noticed that 99% of "social-media" content is horse manure energetically churned by self-proclaimed experts out to shove something down your throat that you don't need -- and advice on how to join the ranks of these hacks is not what I was looking for).

A lack of a standard bibliography section and an index do not improve matters either (every non-fiction, informational book should have those). Otoh, the books he quotes tend to be fluff as well (Godin, Rath, Gladwell and similar self-serving beschmutzers of the noosphere), so perhaps not much is lost. It's probably a cabal: they tend to promote one another's books; probably an unstated "scratch-my-back" obligation among the members of the crowd.

Bottom line: As time-wasting twaddle this book gets one star from me -- there's no reason for it to exist. Not recommended.

Added later: I find myself going back to this book for the sakes of the large number of website links in it. Since I am obviously extracting _some_ value out of this book, I'm bumping up the rating to two and a half stars. If I have to borrow it again from the library, maybe I'll simply buy a copy if I can find one cheap. Bottomline: not a good book, but as a catalogue of links it may be useful -- to some, perhaps, maybe.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Practical, actionable advice from someone who has walked the walk January 16, 2009

By Mario Sanchez Carrion

Format:Paperback

If you've ever wondered how you can turn your passion into a business, this book is probably the best place to look for answers. The author, who left a career in law years ago to pursue his dreams as an entrepreneur, describes in great detail seven often overlooked ways to make money doing what you love.

He starts by explaining how each particular strategy can work for you, and follows through with real life examples and a list of resources for you to dig deeper on your own. Then, he continues to guide us through the process of marketing our dream, the basics of Internet marketing, and how to use blogs and social media to make our mark in the world and gain influence.

Perhaps the passage of the book that I liked the most is when the author talks about conventional wisdom, and how it gets in the way of identifying opportunity. Learning to defy conventional wisdom (or what others may call "thinking out of the box") is the best way to discover niches that nobody is addressing and that you can turn into a business.

With that frame of mind and the practical tips in this book, you shouldn't have any problem finding work that is at the same time lucrative and fulfilling.