I’ve been reading Fan to Pro, and I’m going to post my thoughts even though I’m not finished. This isn’t a book you just read through, it’s a book you work through. The book offers a series of exercises designed to give you new insights into your abilities, experience and values, and many ways to brainstorm potential careers. I really think it’s worth the cover price just for the exercise on page 53. If that doesn’t give you a whole new set of options and opportunities, you didn’t do the exercise.

This is important stuff for anybody to think through, because confidence comes from having options and just seeing how many exist calms the fearful lizard brain and puts you in the right mindset, literally, to try new things.

And let’s face it, all of us are going to have to reinvent and recombine and recreate ourselves and our professional lives as we go forward, because we live in such an age of change. The jobs we’re all doing ten years from now might not exist today. Look back on where your career started; chances are, your industry has changed drastically since then. It’s good to have tools like this book to help us find the opportunities change brings and figure out how and why we’re uniquely qualified to succeed in new directions.

Fan to Pro is a great guide to mining your overlooked or undervalued past to revitalize your present and future. You can get it in print or ebook, but either way don’t forget to keep your own paper and pen handy so you can get the most out of it.

Edited to add: I forgot to mention this, but this is terrific stuff for the writer who isn’t sure where their material is or who needs to take a new publishing tack. Bob Mayer blogged recently about how he used similar methods to figure out what he should be writing about. Makes me realize how much of my own material I’ve been ignoring.