YOUR GRASS IS GREENER

Public speaker and startup advisor Silver presents a book about finding stronger personal and professional motivation.

The title of this book draws on the old saying that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, which observes the tendency of people to long for someone else’s version of things they themselves have—a job, a house, a lawn, or what have you. In this book, Silver concentrates mostly on the world of work, insisting that the key to job satisfaction is not a change of material circumstances but a different attitude: “The secret to better work—and a more enjoyable life as a result—is to change how you’re working.” he writes. “Using the skills you already have to improve the work you already do.” Readers crushed by overwhelming working conditions may quibble with such sentiments, but the author focuses more generally on the centrality of work in one’s personal fulfillment. He asserts that the more someone enjoys their work, the better they are at it, and the resulting joy “spills into the rest of your life.” He puts forward strategies designed to make one’s labor less stressful by making it more efficient. For instance, he looks at improving workplace communication, citing estimates that miscommunication costs the U.S. economy more than $1 trillion per year and noting, in appealingly straightforward prose, that “miscommunicating just feels bad.” He draws on his own business experiences and provides fictionalized examples, all with the aim of encouraging readers to improve their job experiences by focusing on being “the best version of yourself.”

Silver sometimes uses clichés, such as “work smarter, not harder,” but he almost always does so to interrogate them or to explode them as he presents his own strategies for improving attitudes. His ideas can be disarmingly simple, such as to simply list the job aspects that one most enjoys about one’s work, and then compare that to a list of the things that occupy the most time during the week. He presents an abbreviated version of “The Greener Grass Playbook” in these pages, which breaks down many of the book’s methods into challenges and tactics; the full playbook and other resources are available as free downloads. The playbook’s section on “How to Eliminate Miscommunication,” for instance, includes tactics that draw on his concept of “brief back,” in which one person briefly and immediately recaps something told to them by another. Silver’s prose is clear and inviting, and his essential optimism runs through the book like a bright thread. He consistently reminds readers that they have the power to change how they feel about work—not their bosses or teammates. Again, readers who deal with unreasonable bosses, co-workers, workloads, and deadlines may find these thoughts to be more aspirational than practical. But Silver’s central idea—that people don’t “get” dream jobs, but “practice” them—has an appeal that will make pronouncements such as “the more you use skills you’re already great at, the better you’ll do and feel” feel uplifting.

An ebullient call to improve one’s life and work by improving one’s attitude.