BOOK REVIEW: "The Leap"

The Leap: How 3 Simple Changes Can Propel Your Career from Good to Great
By Rick Smith
Copyright 2009
Penguin Group Publishing
Non-Fiction
3 Bookmarks

So I thought I might start the year by trying to give my career a little kick in the pants.  As you know, I work in real estate (shout out to ERA Shields Real Estate, woohoo!) and as I'm sure you also know, real estate has been mired in bad publicity and a bad economy for the past five years.  I wanted to try to get a better handle on sharing the positive side of real estate.  So I looked around for a few good books to help me do that.  The title of this one seemed promising so I picked it up.

I wasn't very far along into the book before I realized that this was just not quite what I was looking for.

The Leap is really more a collection of anecdotes about people who spend a lot of time doing what they HAVE TO do, and then magically find their passion and get to do what they WANT to do for the rest of their lives. 

The "3 Simple Changes" mentioned in the subtitle basically involve finding your passion, finding a big idea to promote your passion, and then executing the big idea.  Sounds simple enough, but the examples listed are so huge, it's overwhelming!  I didn't want a total change to my career, I just wanted to get better at what I'm already doing! 

So the positive things about the book: some of the stories are inspiring.  My favorite was about the gal that cut the feet off her pantyhose and invented Spanx (mostly because Spanx are easily one of the best inventions of the past 100 years--who knew a girl could look like that in a form-fitting dress after giving birth!)  Also, the shrimp fisherman who became the head of a research foundation after his son was diagnosed with a genetic illness.  That was pretty awesome. 

The Leap actually is a pretty good read, but was just a little too grand in scale for what I was really looking for.  Unfortunately, it just didn't seem all that practical, even though the author does try to really press the issue that these people didn't make these changes overnight.  For all of them, it was a process. 

So, this is a recommend if you're looking for some big changes in your life and want some inspiration to get there.  But not so much if you're more the baby-steps kind of person.