A useful and thoughtful guide to laying the foundation of a fulfilling career.
Clear-eyed self-awareness, steadily honed expertise, sterling morals, and reliability are among the qualities necessary to succeed, according to Candamo’s self-help book.
In these pages, the author, an insurance company executive and entrepreneur, offers five key elements for career success. They include solving “the mystery of you,” or taking a searching inventory of one’s personality traits to formulate realistic goals, and becoming a “jack of all trades, master of one,” amassing job skills and experience and then mastering specific expertise once one’s career path becomes clearer. Candamo also recommends realizing that “outside is inside”—a poetic phrase that suggests that one must balance external pressures to conform with one’s moral core. Managers should follow a “balanced” management style, he says, by setting clear expectations, coaching employees, and treating everyone fairly, and one should confirm that “your word is your bond” by delivering on promises. Candamo offers practical advice on how to implement these precepts, such as cultivating self-awareness by making lists of strengths and weaknesses and then asking co-workers for feedback on their accuracy. He also notes that managers should beware of the “Ringelmann effect,” aka “social loafing,” in which hiring more employees to complete a task leads to employees working less hard. Candamo illustrates his ideas with anecdotes from his own eclectic career, which has included corporate management stints, ownership of a pet-management software startup, and leadership of a cigar manufacturer where he innovated by aging the product in charred whiskey barrels. Candamo’s limpid prose veers between crisp aphorisms (“Give people a license to hurt your feelings” when offering self-improvement feedback, he writes) and straightforward, homespun wisdom: “It wasn’t glamorous,” he recalls of his first job at Blockbuster Video in Florida after immigrating from Venezuela in 1998. "It was a minimum-wage job. But it was a job nonetheless, and I was grateful for it.” Candamo’s focus on systematic self-improvement, shrewd analysis of social relationships, and exhortations toward upright behavior will make his book applicable to many readers’ lives.
A useful and thoughtful guide to laying the foundation of a fulfilling career.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2023
ISBN: 9798989067817
Page Count: 259
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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