Book Review: Making a Living Without a Job: Winning Ways for Creating Work That You Love, by Barbara J. Winter
This is a book published in the pre-Internet days in 1993. I checked it out from the library to see if it had any golden nuggets of wisdom that could be applied to today's job seekers. Ironically, it has a chapter on "Becoming Joyfully Jobless". Well, a lot of people are jobless these days but not too many are joyful about it.
It has one cool quote by Aristotle, "Where Your talents and the world's needs cross, there lies your vocation." Other than that, the book seemed kind of scattered. It had few suggestions on actual jobs people could do, but more on how to brainstorm how to create your perfect job, more along the lines of "What Color is Your Parachute." Most of the kinds of jobs she lists in the book seemed like a lot of work for low pay pay, and the author herself talks about so many different jobs it is kind of scary.
In contrast, in The Millionaire Next Door books, many of the millionaires are self employed but they have a single traditional business they own and manage, like a dry cleaning business or a janitorial service. They aren't just sitting around thinking about a classes they could teach here and there, tour groups they could charge for, or seasonal jobs they could get in their area of interest. In the Making a Living Book, Ms. Winter also discusses the importance of having multiple streams of income. Again to contrast with TMND books, the best way to have a safety net on income is to have one business with many clients, and then to save and invest the profits from the business. Having income from 5 different jobs seems like a bad idea, since each one is likely to be part time and low paying, and it is especially unrealistic in today's job market when people are lucky to have even one job.
To sum things up, the title is catchy but it isn't the kind of book that stands the test of time. It isn't really worth reading for today's job seekers.
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