A refreshingly foul-mouthed, smart guide to making it in the business world.
A former sports media CEO delivers a salty, bracing welcome to the world of work for the aspirationally minded.
Nobody cares about your career, indeed. “People may think you’re crazy and have no idea what the fuck you’re doing, and that’s okay,” writes Badan, the former CEO of Barstool Sports, but you should still work out a game plan. The author is forgiving of those who take time to figure it out. As she writes at the beginning of this book, which is as useful to young career-makers as Madeline Pendleton’s I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt, she’s bounced around in jobs that may not have immediately fit in a logical resume-building trajectory. The difference is, when you wander into work that you’re not exactly right for on the face of it, find a way to make yourself right for it, leveraging your strengths, learning constantly, and being adaptable. Some of Badan’s advice comes secondhand: She borrows from the time-honored military slogan “embrace the suck,” cops the “hope is not a strategy” business mantra, and shoehorns the Emily Post–ish reminder to write thank-you notes into the middle of a job-seeking pep talk. But there’s plenty of good stuff, including, yes, the reminder that you’re indeed responsible for your own career and therefore must “own your shit,” that work is “the tuition you also get paid for,” and that most limitations are self-imposed and thus candidates for being swept aside. Above all, she gladly makes room for the lessons to be learned from failure: “My goal is to show you that you can be yourself and be successful, that you can fuck up and it will be okay.”
A refreshingly foul-mouthed, smart guide to making it in the business world.Pub Date: June 11, 2024
ISBN: 9781250320582
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
Perhaps not magic but appealing nonetheless.
Want to get ahead in business? Consult a dictionary.
By Wharton School professor Berger’s account, much of the art of persuasion lies in the art of choosing the right word. Want to jump ahead of others waiting in line to use a photocopy machine, even if they’re grizzled New Yorkers? Throw a because into the equation (“Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine, because I’m in a rush?”), and you’re likely to get your way. Want someone to do your copying for you? Then change your verbs to nouns: not “Can you help me?” but “Can you be a helper?” As Berger notes, there’s a subtle psychological shift at play when a person becomes not a mere instrument in helping but instead acquires an identity as a helper. It’s the little things, one supposes, and the author offers some interesting strategies that eager readers will want to try out. Instead of alienating a listener with the omniscient should, as in “You should do this,” try could instead: “Well, you could…” induces all concerned “to recognize that there might be other possibilities.” Berger’s counsel that one should use abstractions contradicts his admonition to use concrete language, and it doesn’t help matters to say that each is appropriate to a particular situation, while grammarians will wince at his suggestion that a nerve-calming exercise to “try talking to yourself in the third person (‘You can do it!’)” in fact invokes the second person. Still, there are plenty of useful insights, particularly for students of advertising and public speaking. It’s intriguing to note that appeals to God are less effective in securing a loan than a simple affirmative such as “I pay all bills…on time”), and it’s helpful to keep in mind that “the right words used at the right time can have immense power.”
Perhaps not magic but appealing nonetheless.Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780063204935
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper Business
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
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