Review: Real Success Without a Job by Ernie Zelinski

There are three types of "quit your job and do something else" books I've read in my lifetime:

• Those that help you find what you would love to do and then develop a plan for getting you there. Unfortunately, these books are few and far between.

• Those that get you all hyped up, make you excited about quitting, but offer very little practical advice. These may get you excited about changing your job, but they have little lasting impact.

• Those that try and get you all hyped up but can't even do that. They turn into a complain-fest on how bad your current job is and why you should quit it -- but really don't make a solid point of it. And they certainly don't give you any concrete ideas on how to make the shift.

Unfortunately, Real Success Without a Real Job: There Is No Life Like It! by Ernie Zelinski falls into the third group. Here's what the book promises on its back cover:

This revolutionary book is for those millions of organizationally averse people who would like to break free of corporate life so that they have complete control over their lives. Throughout the book you will read about several ordinary individuals who have attained extraordinary success without a real job. International best-selling author Ernie Zelinski also uses experiences from his own life to show how the powerful success principles on the pages within can help you joyfully avoid the shackles of the corporate world for the rest of your life.

Sounds good, huh? But it doesn't deliver. I found it to be one of those complain-fests noted above. Over and over it told me how bad my job was and why I should leave (and what a loser I was for not leaving), but it never really made it any farther than that. I kept waiting for the punch line, but it never came. Almost 230 pages later and all I felt like was that I'd wasted a bunch of time reading this book.

That said, the "how" to get a new job is supposedly not what this book is about (though it implies that in the paragraph above). It's more of a philosophical discussion (or supposed to be) of the "your job stinks" issue. I just didn't get it, though -- and I wanted the "how," BTW.

I hate to give it such a bad review -- the author was so great to deal with -- but readers here trust me to give my honest opinion, and that's what I'm doing. Maybe it's just me -- maybe everyone else will love it -- but it just didn't do anything for me.

The Free Money Finance rating for Real Success Without a Real Job: There Is No Life Like It! by Ernie Zelinski (based on my 0 thru 10 rating system) is: 3 Stars.

Comments

I think _Your Money Or Your Life_ is a practical guide, if a little dated with respect to the financial points. It falls into category #1 for me... too bad we won't reach FI for quite a few more years.

[Skott]

The next time I see my unemployed drifter of a cousin I'm going to explain to him that he is "organizationally averse". I'm writing that one down.