Do Over: Rescue Monday, Reinvent Your Work, and Never Get Stuck
Written and Narrated By: Jon Acuff
Length: 6 hrs and 46 mins
Generally? I just like listening to Jon. But recently? Wow, just what I needed…!
The pandemic has turned out to be kinda sorta good for me. Getting past the turmoil, the mass suffering and death? Dude, I’ve rocked it! It’s like this: I was soooo terrified of going back to a residential school setting with masses of students cloistered within four cramped walls that, after 33 years of working there, I took my retirement, thinking I’d go back when/if a vaccine was developed.
This gave me ooooodles of time to, well, get to know myself. And? It turns out that I rediscovered what I loved in life, things I’d left by the wayside, and it gave me time to reeeeally think about what I’d like, nay: LOVE to do with my second half.
Enter: Jon Acuff’s Do Over where we discover that nothing in our work life is guaranteed, and sometimes a person has to change, or maybe is laid off, makes a career sidestep, is faced with opportunities, you name it: Change? Why not go for a Do Over. After all, when we were kids and messed up, we always shouted, I wanna Do Over! This is about getting that chance.
Jon (And no, seriously, I can TOTALLY call him Jon!) brings to us the CSA, Career Savings Account where we build up four resources that we can fall upon in times of change, opportunity. Relationships, Skills, Character, and Hustle. Got laid off? Fall back on Relationships, you’ll need them, and people in your life might cushion your fall, might provide you with leads. Yeh yeh yeh, one acquires them kinda sorta through networking (I haaaate networking! Ever been an Introvert at a Writer’s Convention? It sucks standing against the wall, feeling like you’re at the middle school dance, all alone!), but Jon is sympathetic to our knee jerk hatred of “networking” as he advises to start from the ground up. Make a list (And oh yeah, you’ll have to lay out a couple of bucks to purchase index cards to do some of the exercises here) of people you’ve worked with all through your many jobs and categorize them: Foes? Avoid! Casual relationships? You miiiiight be able to deepen those. Jon encourages us to be generous to those people, use our Skills to help THEM out, give THEM time and effort, speak for THEM. This is called throwing out a boomerang, as maaaybe they might just be able to help us when it all hits the fan somewhere down the road. But NO Expectations as that would make them transactions rather than generosity of spirit. He doesn’t say it, but really? Good karma!
Skills help when you’re struggling to find or stay in a new position. Character is absolutely a MUST, and Jon shows what to cultivate to stand out and be a decent human being (And okay, I readily admit that he does this via a reeeeally tortured metaphor about our Character being a vast Orchard where we yank out the Weeds of Narcissism and instead cultivate Trees of, say, Honesty, etc. No, really, he goes oooooon and ooooon about these Trees to Cultivate. If he didn’t sprinkle his personal anecdotes in there, I truly might have rolled my eyes at m’ dear Jon!). Hustle is necessary when you’re given opportunities, or when you need to find or keep that new Do Over going. This sounds pretty basic, but I assure you that Jon gives a concept and then takes it further, breaking it down and giving all chapters then coming back to sum things up at the end.
And along the way is his deLIGHTful delivery, his marvelous stories of not only his own successes but his many personal foibles and failings, plus stories of other people as they navigated their own upsets, reframed the dilemmas, and went on to pursue different avenues. The audiobook also has many little asides that aren’t in the print but which Jon shares, so really a Plus right there. It’s all pretty hilarious, and his outlook is soooo wry and comical—whaddas one expect from a goofball with hair like his, anyway? He goes down rabbit holes but then pops right back up and wraps it all together so that all makes sense. Huzzah! Love it!
I’ve been a trifle fearful that I’m choosing to sit out the coming delta variant phase of the pandemic, fearful that the classes I’ve signed up for, the avenues (TOTALLY a road less traveled!) I’m tottering down aren’t Right For Me, as tho’ any single step I take might spell DOOOOM!. But Jon has made me see these choices as Opportunities, as Learning Experiences, and I’m now feeling grateful and less apprehensive of the future. Give it your all, he counsels. No such thing as Permanent Failure, Choose to TRY.
So I’ll be trying my hand at new things in the coming months whilst I put aside what I’d done for 30+ years. And?
I’m gonna steal my Mom’s view: Old dog here? Verrrrry new tricks, and gosh dang it, if THAT’S not exciting and worth a try? I don’t know what is!
As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.