The good news is, I like Tess Vigeland. She’s very likable and easy to read.

But my praise stops there.

The subtitle gives much of the problem away: “leaving a job - WITH NO PLAN B”.

I read this closely, because I have leapt a few times myself, and I am in a business (network marketing) where people often dream of “leaping” into full time. In my training, it’s supremely unethical to encourage leaping “with no plan B”.

Tess brought many stories of leapers. To my count, only one was unmarried, and he reported terrible hardship in the leap, and no success.

This book should really have been subtitled “feelings you might encounter when married people leave their job with no plan B”.

It’s a tremendous advantage to have another income to balance the sacrifices involved in a career change. That’s why I feel this book is only applicable to married people. The journey described in this book is simply not applicable to single people, or people below the middle class.

To my knowledge, every example in this book involved people in the upper middle class. These are people looking to “leap” from one decent career to another - mountain peak to mountain peak.

Many people, like myself, were looking to “leap” from a box to a hill. It is a completely different formula. And though the feelings Tess described will probably apply to all leapers, the scant actual advice she offers is hardly relevant.

In fact, this book falls far short of the second part of the subtitle - “to find the career and life you really want”. Tess assures us that she has not, at the time of writing, found “something better” than the career she left. I would actually blame the LACK of a plan “B” for this outcome.

Nonetheless, this fact illuminates what is to me a hidden purpose behind this work. I can picture Tess getting the idea - since I don’t know what I actually want to do, I’ll write a book about how I feel! This formula has led to many half-qualified, essentially useless, self indulgent books.

Further, it is beyond me why any small self help book like this would be printed in hard cover. The work itself just seems to be a cash grab by both writer and publisher.

There is one sentence in this book about social media offering new possibilities for careers. To me, the book should be thrown out and that one sentence written on the bathroom mirror.

This author neglected what is to me the major part of the answer for most people looking to leap. Since this book neglects the greatest opportunities of our time (online hustle), it bypasses an opportunity to actually provide a roadmap. “Crushing it!” By Gary Vaynerchuk is to me what this book could have been.

Crushing it! Actually provides useful information and case studies- from ALL walks of life. I can’t be a fan of “no plan”, because I’ve done that and suffered for it. I am a raving fan of the side-hustle that Gary promotes, and that is a much, much smarter plan of leaping than the “wing it” nonsense of this book.

Read Crushing it! Instead.