The path to the best possible career starts with the Who Model. Stop doing what you love, and start working with great people in a great environment, with a bit of time flexibility. Watch your productivity, creativity, and wellbeing soar.

Navigating your professional life isn’t just a game of numbers and résumés, but emotions.

This book is the new model. It’s my philosophy on work. Everything I’ve learned to avoid and everything I try to do right each day. It was developed through error, experiment, and from the stories of many others. As a result, I have a career that serves my life, my values, my goals, and my family. One that I am prepared to change as I, the economy, and the world change. With this new model, you can get the same result. A career that serves your life, values, goals, and family.

The boomer career model is based upon the known. Fixed variables, stability, and a long-term plan that can be followed with confidence and little variation over decades. The modern career model is based upon the unknown. Multiple variables, volatility, and a flexible plan that needs to be able to grow and adapt.

Only focusing on what you love is a bad priority, and thinking you even know what that is and that nothing will change is a bad assumption. Eventually, you’ll hate your job, or it will disappear, or it won’t challenge you anymore, or a million other things! Following your dream job usually leads to being stuck in a miserable career, and with it, you sacrifice your health, family, and identity.

Importantly, nothing in this book is an advocacy for one type of career, industry, set of knowledge, or field of study. The practical methods in this book are not like a map with the journey and destination laid out, but like a set of tools, helping you to be a better architect of your professional life.

If you spend the next five years taking responsibility for the challenges or deficiencies in your career, rather than trying to change your employer, the economy, or some politician, you’ll win. You’ll learn more, gain more respect and trust, and stand out from your peers.

Assume your job will be gone in five years.

You will not stay in the same job, let alone the same industry, for your working life. Don’t simply wait to adapt… plan on it. Prepare for it. The sooner you completely abandon the boomer career model, the better. For you, your career, and everyone you work with.

If you’re looking for someone or something to blame, you’ll never run out of options, as there are infinite errors, inefficiencies, biases, and accidents to account for. It comes down to what you choose to do, rather than what you can prove, and if you choose bitterness, you don’t choose to grow, adapt, learn, or improve.