One Honest Indie

“Reject the tyranny of picked. Pick yourself.” ― Seth Godin, Poke the Box

My Book Review of ‘Ambition Monster’

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Hi. Today I’m reviewing Ambition Monster by Jennifer Romolini. I love that name, Romolini. That’s nice. I really like this book. It’s really interesting because there were so many places, so many things about her upbringing that reminded me of mine in certain respects, but very different, but similar in the sense of feeling like nobody was really minding the store, as far as my upbringing was concerned, it seemed like.

But I won’t dwell on that, but I will say reading this sort of made me think about, more about writing my own memoirs because of the things she said and talked about in here, and what I thought was striking was how different her response was to the situations that she faced. And I realized that it was a difference in her expectations in terms of what she wanted. She wanted all this, I don’t know, glory in publishing or something, and I was totally different.

 


I mean, my response to overtly sexist behavior was to shut it down. I can think of only one instance where that’s not true. It was during an interview, somebody made a remark that I could have called him out on in terms of making a cliche assumption about my husband who was a firefighter, and I just didn’t.

But it’s interesting. I would not put up with some of the stuff that she would put up with for sure, and I was just impressed by the fact that she was a mother trying to do all the things she was doing. But yeah, there comes a point where you say, I can only do so much, and the point where you finally just say, why can’t I just be happy? Why don’t I focus on that? What is it that will make me happy? Those things, this book will help you think about your assumptions.

I don’t know what your assumptions are about womanhood, but mine were different, I think, than many people’s or many people my age, I suppose, or older, because honestly, I’m not really a Baby Boomer when you come down to it. I don’t have some of the expectations about motherhood and being a woman that I hear in older women, older than myself.

So I don’t know. I don’t know. I feel like I’ve fallen in between, in some sort of gap between those generations—between X and Boomer. The Lost Generation? They came and went, right? They got lost. I don’t know. Anyway, having said that, I enjoyed this memoir and it did kind of inspire me to think about writing my own. So thank you, Jennifer Romolini. Nice work. Take care, and I’ll be seeing you.

You can get the ebook from these retailers.

You can also get it in print from my online bookstore and support indie bookstores.

You can find all my novels here.

My Book Review of ‘Range’

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Hi, I’m reading this right now, Range by David Epstein. And I got to tell you, there’s stuff in here that is just like so encouraging. It’s a book about the benefits of being a generalist. And I’m a generalist in many ways. So, yeah, this thing i was reading here that i really liked was about a woman who had started her professional career in her 50s and went on to become a big leader in the Girl Scouts.

 

 

“You have to carry a big basket to bring something home.” She repeats that phrase today, to mean that a mind kept wide open will take something from every new experience.

It is a natural philosophy for someone who was sixty when she attempted to turn down an interview for the job that became her calling. She had no long-term plan, only a plan to do what was interesting or needed at the moment. “I never envisioned” is her most popular preamble.

Hesselbein’s professional career, which started in her midfifties, was extraordinary. The meandering path, however, was not.

So this notion that you can just, you know, take a few steps, that everything can work out if you just follow a prescribed plan is ridiculous, because you never know what’s going to work. And part of.doing something, succeeding at something, is being willing to fail.

Because another point this book makes is that generalists have a tendency to switch interests. People who succeed early at something because that’s all they’ve ever focused on do not necessarily do well under changing conditions. Generalists, on the other hand, have a tendency to adapt better. And that’s another point made in here.

The nonfiction writer and filmmaker Sebastian Junger was twenty-nine and working as an arborist, harnessed in the upper canopy of a pine tree, when he tore open his leg with a chainsaw and got the idea to write about dangerous jobs. He was still limping two months later when a fishing vessel out of Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he lived, was lost at sea. Commercial fishing provided his topic; the result was The Perfect Storm. Junger stuck with the theme of dangerous jobs, and made the Oscar-nominated war documentary, Restrepo.

“That cut was the best thing that ever could have happened to me,” he told me. “It gave me this template for seeing my career. Virtually every good thing in my life I can trace back to a misfortune, so my feeling is you don’t know what’s good and what’s bad when things happen. You do not know. You have to wait to find out.”

So that really, I gotta say that resonated with me. Yeah, so, I mean, there are just so many wonderful points made in this book about being a generalist and how you don’t have a prescribed path for success. That’s what it comes down to. And the struggle is part of what makes you a success. That’s the thing. You need to struggle just enough to have a mind that is properly, I guess, devoted toward whatever it is you’re supposed to do. And it just works out sometimes. But it works out because you try things and you’re willing to possibly fail at them.

So… one of the things I want to say about this community I’d like to form is that this isn’t about getting a 12-step program. This is about dealing with things. This is about how do we advance ourselves. This is about asking questions of yourself, what it is you really want, what you have to offer, and what you would like from others. It should be a mutual thing, not just, “Gee, I’m just going to talk about the weather.” You can do that on Facebook or Twitter or some other place. Some other place where nobody cares how you’re doing and all they can do is look at their Amazon rank and go, “Oh look, I’m at number 10. Yay for me!”

Okay. Not to be too snarky about it, but really. And … “I have, oh, 10,000 followers now on Instagram!” Oh boy, my life is just a dream. Yeah, right.

Okay. That’s all I’m saying. So be seeing you. Take care. Adios for now. Be seeing you.

By the way, I might be making a film a lot sooner than I thought.

And it’s terrifying me.

Yeah. You just never know.

You can buy the ebook from this retailer.

You can also buy it in print from my online bookstore and support indie bookstores.

PS: A Lesson in Creativity and Capitalism in Two Zany YouTubers.

Course, not everyone is equally zany, eh? 🙂