What Should I Do With My Life?: The True Story of People Who Answered the Ultimate Question

What should I do with my life?

It’s a question many of us have wondered with frequency. Author Po Bronson was asking himself that very question when he decided to write this book – an inspiring exploration of how people transform their lives and a template for how we can answer this question for ourselves.

Po traveled the country in search of individuals who have struggled to find their calling, their true nature. People who made mistakes before getting it right. People of all ages and all professions — fascinating individuals trying to answer questions such as: Is a career supposed to feel like a destiny? How do I tell the difference between a curiosity and a passion? Should I make money first, to fund my dream? If I have a child, will my frustration over my work go away? Should I accept my lot, make peace with my ambition, and stop stressing out? Why do I feel guilty for thinking about this?

This audiobook is like listening in on an intimate conversation among people you care about and admire. There is wisdom and guidance in these stories of people who found meaningful answers by daring to be honest with themselves.

“We all have passions if we choose to see them,” Bronson writes. “Most of us don’t get epiphanies. We don’t get clarity. Our purpose doesn’t arrive neatly packaged as destiny. We only get a whisper. A blank, non-specific urge. That’s how it starts.”

With humor, empathy, and insight, Po Bronson probes the depths of people who learned how to hear the whisper, who overcame fear and confusion to find a larger truth about their lives. A meditation, a journey, and a triumph of storytelling, What Should I Do With My Life? is a life-changing audiobook.
In What Should I Do with My Life? Po Bronson manages to create a career book that is a page-turner. His 50 vivid profiles of people searching for “their soft spot–their true calling” will engage readers because Bronson is asking himself the same question. He explores his premise, that “nothing is braver than people facing up to their own identity,” as an anthropologist and autobiographer. He tackles thorny, nuanced issues about self-determination. Among them: paradoxes of money and meaning, authorship and destiny, brain candy and novelty versus soul food. Bronson’s stories, limited to professional people and complete with photos, are gems. They include a Los Angeles lawyer who became a priest, a Harvard MBA catfish farmer turned biotech executive, and a Silicon Valley real estate agent who opened a leather crafts factory in Costa Rica.

Bronson is a gifted intuitive writer, the bestselling author of The Nudist on the Late Shift, whose thoughtful, vulnerable voice emerges as the book’s greatest strength and challenge. He describes his subject’s lives along with the ways they annoy, puzzle, and worry him. He frets about meddling with his questions, yet once, memorably and appropriately, he offers a talented man a top post in his publishing company. While this creates the juiciness of his portraits, it also can make Bronson the book’s most memorable character and the only one whose story is not resolved. Even so, this remarkable career chronicle sets the gold standard for the worth of the examined life. –Barbara Mackoff
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