Find Your Perfect Retirement Job?

Perhaps, like many retirees and soon-to-be retired individuals, you are looking for the perfect retirement job.

Any new career book catches my eye given that I have written a career book myself (Career Success Without a Real Job).


So when I received a Google Alert saying, Ambitious advice book fails to succeed, I had to check it out.


The story was on Daily Trojan.com and was a review of a book called Find Your Perfect Job. (To me the perfect job is an unreal job and not a real job.)

The reviewer says:

Self-help books, truthfully, cannot do much to jumpstart a burgeoning career, besides take a $20 bill out of the buyer’s pocket. The very least the text can do is inspire the reader or at least share the author’s story to set a good example or warn against the pitfalls of the universe.

Find Your Perfect Job hardly does any of that. Smith instead reminisces about his own experiences and, in the end, narrows the perfect job to a career involving business, consulting or law. At some points, he does outline truly useful advice. It’s the kind of advice, however, that the Career Planning & Placement Center e-mails to students daily. It’s the kind of advice that can be found on an Internet forum. It’s even the kind of advice, one can say, that most semi-functional students have already heard and taken to heart.

Even if I have not read the book, I would tend to disagree with the reviewer, particularly with the statement: "Self-help books, truthfully, cannot do much to jumpstart a burgeoning career, . . " What a bunch of crap! It's like saying cookbooks won't do anything to help people cook a decent meal.

In fact, a person who read the book takes the reviewer to task with some of the things that she has said in the review.

Interestingly, Find Your Perfect Job now has 12 reviews on Amazon. They are all 5-star reviews except for one which is a 4-star review. This is darn good

It appears that the book reviewer can't recognize a valuable book.

"The best effect of any book," stated Thomas Carlyle, "is that it excites the reader to self-activity."

True enough. If a book even motivates one reader to alter his or her life, it already is a winner.

Of course, there will still be critics no matter how valuable a book is to many readers.

Most of these critics are, as Werner Erhard once said, "opposition looking for something to oppose."

These quotes about writing and writers apply:

Writing is a profession in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none.
— Jules Renard

Nobody ever committed suicide while reading a good book, but many have while trying to write one.
— Robert Byrne

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom, but they dare to go it alone.
— John Updike

There is probably no hell for authors in the next world - they suffer so much from critics and publishers in this.
— C. N. Bovee

Here are some more work quotes to help you find the perfect retirement job:

The one important thing I have learned over the years is the difference between taking one's work seriously and taking one's self seriously. The first is imperative and the second is disastrous. — Margot Fonteyn

More men are killed by overwork than the importance of the world justifies.
— Rudyard Kipling

Find a job you like and you add five days to every week.
— H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

Life is mostly froth and bubble.
Two things stand like stone:
Dodging duty at the double,
Retiring and leaving work alone.
— Unknown Wise Retiree