You're Too Smart for This
Beating the 100 Big Lies about Your First Job
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
Your first job isn't all it's cracked up to be . . . You just spent $100,000 on a college degree to make photocopies. And your manager probably isn’t even happy with them.
Life at the entry level isn't about what school you graduated from, or even who you know. It’s actually about paying dues and brownnosing and keeping your foot out of your mouth during meetings.
You're Too Smart For This explains everything your college professors didn't:
• Understand how college has no application to reality, or anybody living in it.
• Come to terms with doing gruntwork and smiling while being yelled at.
• Get straight with operating on a team - putting personal interests second, for once.
• Negotiate office politics, and recognize when to keep quiet (e.g., "the daytime").
• Earn the right promotion or transfer, instead of quitting and being poor again.
• Locate a balanced work life, not based on social sacrifice and being hostile.
You're Too Smart For This will help you get the hang of the working life soon enough. And even have some fun with it. Especially at happy hour.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ball's guide to the world after "four years of all-night keggers, random hook-ups, and drone-on professors" aspires to be a career guide for all recent college grads, but the author's narrow focus on "grunt" white-collar jobs and his pedestrian contrarian worldview together conspire to muffle the few rewarding tidbits Ball sneaked into this collection of pedantic conjecture. Ball's 100 lies range from the adroit ("Good Ideas Sell Themselves") to the irrelevant ("You'll find 'the One' in a Bar"), and his discourse on each is distinctive only in stereotypes, as in, "Most guys have their priorities dictated to them by their penis and their wallet," while women, the reader learns later in the same paragraph, are interested in "finding a husband and finding a shoe sale." A slick design encased in a small, portable sized book works in lots of quotations from ancient and modern sages, but even here, Ball can't contain his gauche gushing: "We do not remember days; we remember moments," for example, is followed by Ball's rejoinder, "For men, the hope is that the moment isn't too fast." The clever design may attract some readers, but the allegedly bubble-bursting content is as groundbreaking as a yellowed Dilbert clipping.
