What Po Bronson Got Right That the Career Industry Still Gets Wrong

Two decades after What Should I Do With My Life?, Po Bronson's findings still cut against the modern career industry — the epiphany is a myth, credentials are a disguise, and a calling is grown, not found.

Po Bronson published What Should I Do With My Life? in 2002, and the book has aged in a strange direction. The career industry that has grown up around it in the two decades since has become louder, slicker, and more confident, and almost none of that confidence has come any closer to answering the question in his title. If anything the gap between what the industry tells young people and what Bronson reported from hundreds of real interviews has widened, and the widening is worth paying attention to because it explains why so many capable twenty-somethings feel that something is quietly wrong with their lives even when the resume on paper looks fine. Bronson's method was simple in a way that very few career writers have ever attempted since. He went and spoke to hundreds of people who had