The Career Reboot in 21 Books

Imagine these two (paraphrased) research statistics being bookends on a young woman’s “bookshelf of life.”

The single biggest predictor of poverty among women is the birth of their first child.

Putting off having children for 10 years doubles a young woman’s lifetime earnings.

As the young woman winds her way through her life and career, she collects a few books.

She chews her way through Women Don’t Ask and gets mad. Resolving to break the cultural causal chain, she orders Ask for It,Getting to Yes, and The Power of a Positive No, and stymied by the double bind of her gender she gets a used, dog eared copy of Nice Women Don’t Get the Corner Office.

Late in her twenties she starts getting serious about her leadership potential and she reads Leadership Presence,The Prince,Primal Leadership,Drive, and Leadership and Self Deception.

Along the way she does all the required reading for her MBA, but through the beveled glass of the padlocked corner office she sees men in blue dress shirts with power ties playing carpet golf and high fiving each other. She decides not to jimmy the lock just yet and adds No Excuses to her iPad.

Out of the blue a new book appears on her shelf, Your Baby and Child, and on the heels of that one, she desperately adds a vertical pile, each one only half read, including Getting Things Done, 168 Hours, Balance is a Crock, Sleep is for the Weak, sells them all in a garage sale and replaces them with The Power of Now, The Giving Tree, and the Bhagavad Gita, all of which she reads aloud to the innocent sponge she carries in a sling.

On the way to work one day, she passes a newsstand and grabs a copy ofTweak It, Make What Matters to You Happen Every Day,Wife Goes On,and then takes a long overdue solo vacation to Sedona and falls asleep under the stars holding Dare to Dream.

When she wakes, still insatiably curious and determined, she puts pen to paper and recaptures the gems of her lifelong learning. She fills every page, but the last.