This is a must-read for the vast majority of people feeling trapped in the career treadmill!
Loved it! An insightful book that helped me see the world beyond deadlines and the 9-5.
Alice Bennett, AEB Reviews
Do you feel like what you're doing is not really meant for you?
Would you rather be doing something else entirely but don't know where to start?In our lives, we don't ask ourselves enough questions.
Along the way, you may lose track of who you really are.
You mistake your identity for your job.
Deep down, however, you know you were not meant to be living like this.
Daniel Voigt Godoy is an Amazon best-selling author. His technical books are used as textbooks in universities in the United States and Spain, and his papers have won four consecutive awards (2012-2015) at the prestigious National Treasury Award.
After years of trying out different jobs but never being satisfied, Daniel found the courage to strike out on his own. He believes you can find the best next step for yourself through introspection.
He wrote You're Not Your Job to help you ask yourself lots and lots of questions to get where you want to be.
It is the book he wishes his past self had at his disposal. Hopefully it can be useful to you on your own journey!
I started asking myself 'What am I doing?' a few years ago when I was about 43 years old. It felt like some sort of midlife crisis at first. My wife and I had moved to another country five years before, and I wasn't quite happy with my life there. It never felt like 'home', I never belonged there. Objectively speaking, my career was going well and I was making good money. But I didn't care about the job I had, I was going through the motions. It felt off, and it was making me feel anxious about the future. I lost my mom to cancer when she was 47 years old. In my mind, that could be my fate too. What if I only had four more years? Am I wasting the time I have left?
From the chapter Your Journey
Sometimes you dream about leading a very different life.
You've been saving money to one day, finally, live the life you want.
You tell yourself, time and again:
"I just need to stick a little longer, and then I will leave this behind me."
But you never do.
Take the first step to create the life you want.
The First Step
"Switching careers is a big decision, and an easy one to put off, especially if it feels like it's too late for you. You're Not Your Job helps you face the tough questions you need to ask yourself about your own professional journey, regardless of what you decide to do next."
"This book is tiny but it's packed with wisdom. If more people read it, useless and stupid jobs will remain vacant forever and the world would be a better place. This books advocates to just drop those jobs, and start doing something that is 'not a job' (ie, you actually care about it!).
The book is peppered with questions that you must face sooner rather than later: What is money? What is time? Why do we exchange one for the other? How does their relationship changing as we age? The appendix has a very interesting format of collecting all questions from the chapters.
As a motivational book, it shines. It's perfect if you thought you were leaving your jobs but somehow, years later, you are still doing it and feeling miserable. Highly recommended."
"In this new era of employment, newspapers are full of buzzwords like flexibility, remote work, digitalization, and work-life balance. Yet, the significant changes in labor have left us without the tools to manage our relationship with work, which can be toxic or just not fulfilling enough in many cases.
As someone who had to follow his own journey to find a job that doesn't look like a job, I find the author's questions particularly meaningful and reflective."
At age 21, you have roughly 60 years of life ahead of you, so time looks cheap. What is one measly year if you have 60 more to spend? It's almost three times as much as you have lived. Or six times more than the time passed since you became a teenager. That's a lot! You're very rich in time, but not so rich in money. So you trade one for the other, it makes sense, right?
Many people only reevaluate their choices when the price they have been paying for them rears its ugly head. It doesn't have to be that way, though. You don't need to wait for disaster to strike to choose a different path, even if you're already halfway through your current path.
Taking a new, unknown path, especially when you've been treading for so long on a well-known path, is very hard. Not only do you have to overcome your fear of the 'unknown unknowns' and trust your future self to handle them effectively, but you also have to challenge your current self's identity. How do you define yourself? Who are you?
From the chapters Time and Conformity
The Questions are designed to help you find the best next step for yourself through introspection.
Here you can freely download both appendix A, the list of "Ask Yourself" questions, and appendix B, the list of questions from the "Transformation" chapter.
Print them out and write your answers or fill out the PDF forms, and keep them for later reference.
Get "The Questions"Be it in an airport or a coworking space, I take the opportunity to do some guerrilla gifting: I place some free copies of my book so people can discover it on their own while charging their phones or having a cup of coffee :-)
If you're one of the people who happened to collect one of my gifts — or if you read it in the coworking's library — I'd love to hear from you!
Feel free to reach out on LinkedIn or X (Twitter)!
Daniel Voigt Godoy is a husband, a brother, and a son. In the last 25 years, he had many jobs — developer, data scientist, teacher, writer — but he's none of them. He is an avid learner and he has a curious and restless mind.
At age 46, he was finally able to switch gears. It took him several years and lots and lots of questions to figure out what was the right path for him. Now, he's finally at peace and happy with who he is while living his life the best he can.
Learn more about Daniel or join his mailing list here to get updates.
