When I first picked up Wishcraft: How to Get What You Really Want, I wasn’t looking for a book on job searching. I wanted to see what the fuss was about, and I expected a book on how to meet your goals, or perhaps another volume on the power of positive thinking. Instead, what I found was a delightfully unique take on how to get everything you want out of life, including the career that suits you best.
Author Barbara Sher is not another “positive thinking” guru; far from it. Instead, Ms. Sher explores the complete journey from wistful wishing for your hearts desire, through the inevitable negative thinking that must be confronted, through the process of developing a plan and getting started. Rather than a sunshiny book about thinking happy thoughts, Ms. Sher presents a challenging and thoughtful book about the sometimes hard, sometimes frightening work of struggling to reach for what you really desire.
The book opens with a thorough discussion about how we define ourselves, our wishes and our goals, including exercises to help you decide what you’d most like to do with your life. When applied to a career search, this approach is one of the best I’ve seen to help readers figure out what they’d really like to do, and start them on a path to designing a career that will allow them to do it.
Next, the book explores the process of creating a plan to reach a goal, including brainstorming, determining the best options to explore, solving potential problems, and creating a flow chart of the necessary steps to take in order to reach the desired result. This process would be especially helpful for job seekers who know they want a new job—but the job they want seems out of their reach and they aren’t sure how to get there.
One of the finest parts of Wishcraft is the focus on how to use a network properly, and it is the best and most thorough discussion I have ever seen on this topic. In short, while many job seeking books will tell you to ask members of your network to let you know about jobs, show your resume to the right people, and help you establish useful contacts, Wishcraft takes networking to a higher level, utilizing your network at a much earlier stage in the planning process. Wishcraft lays out a plan to create “barn-raising” meetings, with the purpose of bringing together people who can help each other not only using each other’s connections, but also to make use of each other’s knowledge and skills in brainstorming the entire process to help you achieve your goal. For a job seeker, this could include not only the obvious resume-passing uses of a network, but also making use of people’s unique talents and knowledge to plan the best possible job search from beginning to end, using unconventional methods that may be better suited to the particular job that the job seeker wants.
Finally, Wishcraft deals with the obvious fears that will creep up from time to time, and methods for dealing with them, including using your network to keep you on track and on schedule.
If I had to find fault with this book, I’d say that I was a bit disappointed in how much the author recommends that the reader complain about problems that may occur in the goal-seeking process. Although I think that an “all-positive” attitude is unrealistic, and we all need to complain sometimes, I’m not sure there’s great benefit in excessive kvetching, either. However, for job-seekers who are tired of hearing the dusty advice that they must stay positive all the time in order to find a job, the method Ms. Sher advocates—that readers allow themselves their negativity as much as they would like, as long as they keep working toward their goal—may seem a refreshing change of pace.
Overall, I greatly enjoyed Wishcraft: How to Get What You Really Want, and I believe that it is a unique and enjoyable read for anyone who wants to squeeze more out of life, including job seekers who want to go after their dream job. Wishcraft provides a thorough and well-thought-out procedure for developing and using a network, creating a game plan, and keeping yourself accountable until you have what you’re seeking.
If you’d like to check out this book at Amazon, you can find it here: Wishcraft: How to Get What You Really Want
