Even as someone who has committed to an academic biomedical path for the foreseeable future, who you might not expect to be within the book's intended audience, I found the material in this book to be quite useful. It is strongest in discussing how to develop mutually enriching relationships and how to tap into the resources of your network to help achieve your goals. This is unsurprising because Reid started one of the most robust online social networks, and Ben, as evidenced by his blog and connections, is a networking maven. So, I'd recommend it especially to people who want to improve in these areas. I'd also recommend it to people who are somewhat skeptical that networking matters, because this book might very well help convince you that it does.
Here are a few of the other particularly interesting themes:
1) In part of one chapter they discuss the idea of an internal review, wherein you tally up your hard assets (e.g., cash, holdings) as well as your soft assets (e.g., skills, experiences, and connections). For the soft assets, this involves the use of a sort of "Bayesian evidence", which means that you must not only consider the evidence that you are strong in an area but also the evidence that you are weak in it. Now, just like a company doesn't tell its competitors what its weak points are, you probably wouldn't want to tell a potential employer that you are weak in an area. But, it is useful to be honest with yourself about your relative strengths and weaknesses, because it can help you allocate your personal investments in more optimal ways. This is a topic in which their "think of your career like an entrepreneur thinks of his/her company" analogy has tremendous power.
2) The book devotes some time to arguing against the idea that you have a true self with one true passion, which you need to devote time and energy to "discovering". In reality we all have many selves, many possible selves, many possible passions, and many possible routes to achieve our aspirations. Ben and Reid tap into this framework in their explanation of the "almost ready, aim, fire, aim, fire" career strategy. They discuss how the most useful way to learn whether you like something is not to think about it but to simply try it, in as low cost of a way as possible. This reminded me of both Charlie Hoehn's "Recession Proof Graduate" and Cal Newport's "Career Craftsman Manifesto." The strategy espoused in this book relates to both of those strategies in a complementary way.
3) One thing that you will notice when reading the book is that it often references LinkedIn. (Just to be clear, this isn't *all* that common--using the wonderful Kindle search application and filtering out the times where Reid is discussing his own career, I count 24 such instances.) Some might see this as "propaganda", but I actually liked it and found it useful. There is a trade-off between being giving abstract advice, which could potentially be relevant for decades but is more difficult to know how to implement, and giving actionable advice, which has a shorter shelf-life but is easier to know how to employ. Much of the advice in this book is on the abstract side, but the references to LinkedIn (as well as to other contemporary tools like Twitter and Facebook) help ground the book's advice in today's real world.
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