Ten Books Everyone Should Read

This book will teach students that the traditional career model is neither the only one nor the best one. It's time to bring self-help into the classroom.

Ulysses it’s not.

But here’s the thing: students will actually read this one.

It helps that it’s a fixture on the global best-seller lists. But more importantly, it could be the most practical and in some ways inspiring book an undergraduate student reads in his or her four years (maybe because the 30-year-old author is not long out of school himself).

I'm talking about the phenomenon of Timothy Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek, which promises to help you “escape 9-5, live anywhere, and join the new rich.”

Putting new graduates on the path to escape from a work life they have not yet begun may not seem like a good idea at first, but there’s a bigger message in this book: that paying your bills and having a "career" aren't necessarily one and the same. That your work life and your life's work don't need to follow the model most of us have grown up with – you know, the one where you get a job, you work, you get promotions, and then you stop.

Although we know this career model is (I would add thankfully) increasingly outdated, we still stream and advise students as though this were the way that their work lives will be – and should be.

As someone who grew up with the mixed messages of "do what you love" and "get a profession" (the result of indulgent immigrant parents), by my third year of studying international relations in university, I felt desperate to find "the plan." And as many have done before and since, the temporary answer was found in four letters: LSAT. Except four years later, having left my hard-won Bay Street job, I was back where I had started, trying to find other models to build my career on. I wish I’d had Ferris’s book.

The form of Ferriss’s message is heavily self-promotional (and reminded this reader of a particularly exhausting date she once had); each chapter is full of fantastic stories involving motorcycle-racing in Europe, tango-dancing in Buenos Aires, Chinese wrestling and Andes skiing. But the book provides concrete examples of how to exercise all the options that technology, the flat world, and the creative classes are providing.

Even if most readers will never act on Ferriss’s suggestions, they will appreciate the reminder that never before have there been so options for them when it comes to both making a living and creating a life. Most importantly, the book emphasises that whatever they do in university and college, they shouldn't feel like they need to make life and career decisions from a place of fear.

Literature has shown us the danger of the life of quiet desperation. I would say it's time to bring some self-help into the classroom and campus.