Pivot: A Book Review

For all of my book reviews, I will be using a rating system of 1 through 5, 1 for the worst, 5 for the best! I will be rating only books that can be found at no cost through your local library system and that are rated as some of the best career, financial, and self-help books in the 21st century. If you have any suggestions or questions, please feel free to leave them in the comments below!

Pivot (2016) by Jenny Blake

Rating: 2/5 Lattes

Pivot is a book that comes highly recommended for those wishing to make a career change in the near future, or to “Pivot” to doing something different such as entrepreneurship, freelancing, and more.

While the book does provide some good advice in regards to ensuring you have a nest egg saved up before making large life changes, does a thorough job of helping you plan both to make the change, and to prepare contingencies, it doesn’t really address people of a lower income bracket, or people with less desirable jobs.

All of her examples are of what one could traditionally call “white collar workers”. The author herself once worked at Google and used this company to build her connections and nest egg to pivot. She even launched her book prior to the one I am reviewing while working there making several times my own salary.

The author does offer a nod to the fact not everyone is in as advantageous or privileged a positon but, much to the detriment of the book and its applicability, offers no solutions to building a safety net, how to skill build when you do not have “advanced skills”, or what to do when your network can’t be leveraged because the people are as disadvantaged as you, etc.

The book does offer some good advice on self-analysis and building a career plan that anyone can use. It also offers good networking advice. The book does a great job of creating terminology that is easy to use and follow and provides a wonderful overview and planning system for big changes that don’t necessarily need to relate to career changes!

The chapter on “flipping failure” is by far the best, and I recommend reading it even if you aren’t interested in changing careers as it is a great resource on failure, regret, and how to bounce back from mistakes that you have made.

Overall Pivot has some great concepts for both career and life changes but does come from a perspective that ignores the realities of many people.