Book Review: WHat the Heck Should I do with My Life

Loved reading the book 'What The Hell Should I Do With My Life" by Ravi Venkatesan. Highly recommend it.

The book brings to bear some great perspectives on career and life, in an easy to understand manner.

Some of the key takeaways for me were

1. We live in fast changing and uncertain times. With the pace of changes accelerating, the traditional definition or ways of looking at job and careers needs to change. The future brings many challenges, but equally a number of different opportunities to seize.

2.The traditional 9-5 jobs, and the perceived job security that they offer, may fade away in favour of the passion economy. Instead of looking at career as a job, the view out forth is to look at career as a series of projects some of which maybe with the same organisation and some with different organisations.

3. Rather than focusing on a single thing to earn money and derive meaning for yourself, the future may have more of us looking a portfolio career where we do differently things (some in parallel & some sequentially).

4. With tech developments happening at a rapid pace, there is a need to have skills complimentary to what machines offer rather than competing skills. Some skills, he calls them meta skills, will become even more important in the workplace of the future are: Soft Skills, Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Learning Agility.

5. With the average life span increasing the traditional life model of learn then earn and then enjoy in retirement is getting replaced by learning, earning and enjoying all needing to happen in parallel though much longer career & life horizons.

6. The book encourages us to live an intentional life. Be it choosing where we live what we want to do, defining what success looks like, what to learn, etc. rather than getting drifted away with what come along. It shares a few tools and hacks to influence our mindset in this journey.