The Pathfinder: How to Choose or Change Your Career for a Lifetime of Satisfaction and Success

I have always felt that people who offer the best advice are those who are able to frame the right questions. Nicholas Lore has mastered this art. The Pathfinder enables the reader to discover his/her most hidden desires and provides a guide to identify a career that incorporates each of these desires.

Reading the Pathfinder (and completing ALL of the Inquiries) I was able to isolate the core elements of all my childhood dreams and identify a career that incorporated each of these elements. Within four months I was able to secure a my dream job. As a bonus, the career I chose provided me with a 40% pay raise (not to mention equity in the company).

I highly recommend this book to anybody who is tired of being controlled by their circumstances and truly seeks fulfillment from their work.


THIS IS ONE POWERFUL BOOK   March 7, 2000
 87 out of 90 found this review helpful

This is one of the best books I have ever read. It came highly recommended but I expected nothing more than a good guide to designing a new career. It is that and more. In the midst of working through it I discovered my assumption that I just needed to know more about what careers might fit me was scratching the surface. Under the surface was reality. I was living my entire life at a comfortable "equilibrium", not going for having an extraordinary life. This book not only helped me get off my duff in terms of deciding on a new career but also on fulfilling goals in nearly every other area of my life. Whereas before I felt like I was just going with the flow and taking what life gave me, now I feel like the man on the cover of "The Pathfinder" steering my own ship in directions of my own choosing. The author mixes just the right amount of practical career design steps with deep wisdom about human nature. This is a good book for you if you want to have a life you love and the part you want to deal with now is having a career you love. It is also funny, very well written and fun to read, except when you are working on the hard parts of figuring out what you will do. It might not be for you if want to take the easiest road to picking a career or just want to read anecdotes and theories. If you want to dig into deciding what to do with your life, this is one powerful book!


VERY disappointed with this book   June 5, 2003
 59 out of 70 found this review helpful

I ordered this book as well as a couple of others based on positive reviews. Simply put, the book is a disorganized jumble of exercises, projects, lists, quotations and observations. I sensed that the book might not live up to its hype right from the beginning, when the author began telling us all about himself. I have an open mind, but my time is valuable and I really don't give a hoot about how deep and meaningful his life has become. Intentionally or not, his exercises consistently seek to remind reminds us what a deep, introspective thinker he is. In a subtle way, it's all about him, NOT you.

The author, despite his philosophical leanings, can't seem to coherently and cogently express his own philosophy. Instead, he repeatedly nags us to take various inventories of ourselves and make decisions. We are also treated to a jumble of personality tests, but he doesn't put it all together, and there are way too may examples and sidebars for any of it to be useful. Furthermore, the section on games that people play reflects a view of human nature that I found bizarre and even disturbing. Ultimately, it was a dull, dreary and distracting tour rarely visited with any real insight or humor.

The book is full of rhetorical questions, exhortations, quotations and supposedly deep observations that lead us on a cosmological path to nowhere. Perhaps he is a better counselor than a writer, I don't know. What I do know is that somehwere between planning and execution, this book has gone horribly wrong. I wish that I didn't feel that way, because my impression is that Lore did work very hard on his manuscript. Unfotunately, the finished product is wordy, unwieldy, scatterbrained, boring and unhelpful. This could have ben a bigger a waste of time, but fortunately I realized it was going nowhere and decided to focus instead on doing some good by writing this review to warn others!

I will say that one of the books I ordered was everything that this book is not. That book is: I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was: How to Discover What You Really Want and How to Get It -- by Barbara Sher with Barbara Smith. That one is consise, practical, honest, straightforward and fun to read. I saw myself in several of the examples that were presented and gained real insight. Unlike The Pathfinder, Sher doesn't claim that her work will revolutionize your life, but in a quiet way, her book does far more good. Most importantly, it is a more compelling read and ultimately it is the author(s)' writing ability that should justify a strong review. Yes, I will need to learn and read more in order to facilitate my career search, but at this point I just wanted to say that I am literally dumbfounded how anyone could recommend The Pathfinder. It's beyond useless.


I was at work   April 21, 2004
 53 out of 60 found this review helpful

And I was telling myself that there must be something better than this. I was looking for a book that would act a personal coach, help me to identify both the mental and physical obstacles that keep me from finding work that engages more of who I am. I was looking at Amazon and clicking through the career counseling books when I came across "The Pathfinder." The description of the book and the customer comments made it sound like it would provide the interactive approach I was looking for.

Now that I've read it I can tell you that I found it useful but not transformational. The author would say that I wasn't ready for the transformation. That may be true but I still think the book could have been better. My biggest complaint is that the exercises consisted of making lists. This can be useful for some things but when its applied to everything, it feels redundant and simplistic. I also found the tone condescending and overly positive. I finished the book feeling like I'm not enough of a go-getter to have the career I want. I think that the right audience for the book is sales and marketing people who love networking and making lists! The sections on figuring out your personality type and networking seemed very superficial and cobbled together from other career advice books.

On the plus side, it deals with some of the mental and emotional obstacles that make change difficult. In particular, it identified the the fears that masquerade as "being realistic" as "yeah buts." These are all the negative responses to attempts to do something new. "I could go back to school, Yeah but, it would be too expensive." For me, these are the most powerful stumbling blocks and the book doesn't try to minimize their power or their role as keeping one from committing career suicide or going into massive debt. However, the book does give some useful suggestions for how to cope with them.

Ultimately, the book was helpful in making me realize that I'm engage in a lengthy process that can't be shortened by reading one book no matter how good it is. My advise to you and myself is that if you want to change your life, take a big risk. Its not enough to just read about doing it.


Tedious, long- winded, and hippie-dippy   February 10, 2006
 50 out of 62 found this review helpful

Could commendations of excellence from two U.S. Presidents be wrong? Well, I just couldn't wade through the muck. Heavy metaphor rotation and dewy-eyed spiritual platitudes are to be expected- after all, it's a self-help book- but the book could easily be 100 pages thinner without such reliance on them. The writing style is condescending and overly soothing, with such gems as "Now let's take a look at how creating a clear commitment separates your voice from that of Jiminy Lizard", and "Wait a minute now, I'm not going to let these Yeahbuts shoot down my dream". And I know they are hardly the point, but the illustrations are so bizarre they reminded me of religious tracts. I still can't shake the drawing of the Eskimo, and found the comparison of an "Inuit (Eskimo)" building an igloo to my building a satisfying career not only decidedly un-PC (odd for the generation the book is probably meant to appeal to- I get a heavy Boomer vibe), but a stretch, too. Preening quotes are sprinkled throughout the book, from Joseph Campbell, Ghandi, Kierkegaard, and Yoda. Sub-sections of chapters, called "Inquiries", have titles such as "Designing Your Workplace Ecosystem" and "What Game Will I Play?". But worst of all, the book consistently gave me the sense that the motherlode of critical information was just about to be revealed, but, wait, not yet; please read some more star-shine and cloud-glow first, and your dedication will be rewarded, we promise! This book left me itchy and bored. Filling a notebook with my innate talents and figuring out the difference between a mission and a purpose?... honestly, I didn't feel the love.