I thought this book was, overall, very sweet and optimistic. It has the funny fortune of looking like a hustle-culture book and being very against hustle culture. It is a book to dispel the workaholic in us who works for the wrong reasons. Like carefully confronting someone who is about to marry for money and not love, this book is a moment of realignment for anyone who has worked too hard and done whatever it takes to get ahead for the wrong reasons.
And wow, this author has a very personal reason for writing a book like this. I don’t think anyone on the planet could have written this book for a better reason.
At one point about 2/3rds of the way through the book, the author Marcus Buckingham talks about going through a divorce. He says something along the lines of: "… A year later, my ex was involved in a scandal that got nationwide attention..."
Not one to waste time, or, because I can’t suffer hardly any kind of suspense, I put down the book for a moment and googled Marcus Buckingham and ‘scandal’, and his ex was one of those women who was involved in the College Entrance Cheating scandal, where his ex-wife paid to have a person take an SAT test for his 18 year old son. (Marcus Buckingham claims he and his son both didn't know about these actions at all at the time.)
For this reason the last half of the book is the most interesting, and as a reader I could see why Buckingham wrote the book. If as a culture we are doing whatever it takes, cheating, bribing, to get our kids into schools, why are we doing this? The end of the book is about how schools, GPAs, SAT/ACT, have leeched not just personalities out of kids, but have taken away kids' abilities to find work that they love. Instead, most of us around here just try to make it through various biased systems, and some very wealthy people don't even let their kids try to get in to Ivy Leagues on their own.
In the end, this book was a lot more meaningful than I thought it would be, I thought it would be just sort of another "How to run better meetings" kind of thing, but it turned out to have this incredible personal story where this guy left a marriage on some sort of strange intuition, and then his ex did this desperate, dishonest thing for their kids. Overall this book is a wakeup call, a sane person in your life giving you a bit of a shake out of hustle routine and saying “What are you doing??”
I’m not sure if there are tons of solutions for desperation, overwork, and get-aheadism offered by Buckingham in this book, but it’s a start. I’m glad it was written. Even if Buckingham seems like a shocked bystander to what happened to his own family in the College Cheating Scandal, he comes out of the experience with a book and a gentle message. What I got from this book most of all was this message: Winning at your career, at school, at life itself is not worth it if you never loved the game enough to play fair.