NOBODY CARES ABOUT YOUR CAREER

A former sports media CEO delivers a salty, bracing welcome to the world of work for the aspirationally minded.

Nobody cares about your career, indeed. “People may think you’re crazy and have no idea what the fuck you’re doing, and that’s okay,” writes Badan, the former CEO of Barstool Sports, but you should still work out a game plan. The author is forgiving of those who take time to figure it out. As she writes at the beginning of this book, which is as useful to young career-makers as Madeline Pendleton’s I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-­Shirt, she’s bounced around in jobs that may not have immediately fit in a logical resume-building trajectory. The difference is, when you wander into work that you’re not exactly right for on the face of it, find a way to make yourself right for it, leveraging your strengths, learning constantly, and being adaptable. Some of Badan’s advice comes secondhand: She borrows from the time-honored military slogan “embrace the suck,” cops the “hope is not a strategy” business mantra, and shoehorns the Emily Post–ish reminder to write thank-you notes into the middle of a job-seeking pep talk. But there’s plenty of good stuff, including, yes, the reminder that you’re indeed responsible for your own career and therefore must “own your shit,” that work is “the tuition you also get paid for,” and that most limitations are self-imposed and thus candidates for being swept aside. Above all, she gladly makes room for the lessons to be learned from failure: “My goal is to show you that you can be yourself and be successful, that you can fuck up and it will be okay.”

A refreshingly foul-mouthed, smart guide to making it in the business world.